The Governess and the Demon Lover: The Return of a Fairy Tale

The Governess and the Demon Lover: The Return of a Fairy Tale by Mary Y. Hallab, Central Missouri State University A few years ago, I attempted to show that Henry James's ghost story The Turn of the Screw is, just as the author indicates in the preface, a reworking of the common folklore theme of children threatened or stolen away by fairies, elves, demons, or revenants. For James says that the story is "a fairy-tale pure and simple" and that the ghosts of Peter Quint and Miss Jessel are "not 'ghosts' at all, as we now know the ghost, but goblins, elves, imps, demons as loosely constructed as those of the old trials for witchcraft; if not, more pleasingly, fairies of the legendary order, wooing their victims forth to see them dance under the moon" (P xx). I noted that the tale includes a number of related motifs, also traditional, of the changeling, for example, and of the taboo, especially that associated with speaking or not speaking the names of fairies, the gods, or the dead (see HaUab). The source for this tale, an anecdote told to James by his friend E. A. Benson and recorded in his notebooks of 12 January 1895, accounts for some of these folklore elements. In it, young orphaned children are left in the care of wicked and depraved servants who corrupt them and fill them "full of evil, to a sinister degree." The servants die but return to lure the children to destruction. James concludes, "The story to be told—tolerably obviously—by an outside spectator, observer" (NB 179). However, this observer, the governess, whom many critics regard as the real center and subject of the tale, is not part of the original anecdote. Nor are the details of her background and character, her attraction to her employer and her sense of duty to him, the circumstances of her employment at BIy as weU as her fascination with the place and the children, the strange similarity between the master and the ghost of Peter Quint, or finally, the role of Mrs. Grose in her story. To explain these, critics have looked for sources in other works such as Jane Eyre and Fielding's Amelia. Recently, I came across two fairy tales that have clear parallels in James's story and that do, indeed, account for many of the story elements mentioned above. These are the stories of "The Adventure of Cherry of Zennor" and 'The Fairy Widower," both found in Robert Hunt's Popular Romances of the West of England, first published in 1865, and retold in Katherine Briggs' Encyclopedia of Fairies (1976). In "Cherry of Zennor," the heroine, a young girl from a poor family is flattered and praised by a handsome and charming gentleman into engaging to care for his motherless child. They set out on a long and tiring journey together, during which he is so kind that she becomes quite infatuated. Eventually, they come to a garden, more beautiful than anything Cherry has ever seen, where flowers of aU seasons blossom together and birds sing all around them. "She had heard granny tell of enchanted places," she thinks. "Could this be one of them?" (Hunt 123) Volume 8 104 Number 2 The Henry James Review Winter, 1987 They are greeted by a crafty-looking Uttle boy with brilliant eyes and "a singular look of age about him" (123). A cross and ugly old crone appears, Aunt Prudence, the late wife's grandmother, who regards Cherry as a fool and warns her against curiosity lest she see things she would not like. Cherry finds the house beautiful but strange, with long passages and a big locked room, into which the old woman, against the master's wishes, eventually takes Cherry. The room is full of statues or, Cherry believes, people turned to stone. In the middle of the room is a coffin that emits a groaning sound when Cherry polishes it. Although forbidden to wander freely in the "enchanted" parts of the house, Cherry is "dying with curiosity" (124). She has light duties, among which are to play with the child and to rub his eyes every day with...