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The governess is also suffering from a clearly defined "martyr complex." She is constantly reminding Mrs. Grose, and the reader, how courageous, good, and stable she is. She becomes more and more proud of her station and her "duty" to "protect the children." To avoid "total wreck" she clutches "the helm" and "to bear up at all" becomes "very grand and very dry," while "the aspect of others" shows "a confused reflexion of the crisis" (James 374). Her pride in being the only one to confront the ghosts seems quite unmistakable. Indeed, she informs the reader that "left to herself, she is quite remarkably firm" (Cranfill and Clark 109). She clings so tightly to her heroism, that whenever she sees a way for the children to escape, she eliminates it. After Miles begs repeatedly to be sent away to school, she still refuses (James 382). She gives no valid reason for this refusal, just that she doesn't want him to go. This is obviously because if Miles leaves for school, she will not be able to "rescue him" from her imagined haunts.

The governess' behavior toward the children on the whole has been erratic, moody, and surely very hard to live with. She resolves early in the novel never to let the children out of her sight. She is constantly watching, studying, analyzing. The children can obviously feel that something is not right, and they probably feel incredibly stifled and suffocated. This may account for one of the major arguments of the apparitionists, of Miles' nighttime excursion out to the lawn.

The governess wakes suddenly at one o'clock in the morning on one of the few nights she has slept at all, and sees Flora gazing out of the window. She also goes to look out and sees Miles gazing up at the house, and immediately assumes that he is looking at something over her head. Here she promptly draws another wild inference, "There was clearly another person above me-there was a person on the tower" (James 368). How she jumps to this wild conclusion we never discover, but we see her rush out onto the lawn to fetch Miles. She asks him what he was doing and he replies he has gone out "so that you might think me, for a change--bad" (James 369). There are several interpretations of this line, and many valid reasons for Miles to be outside.

The most obvious reason for Miles to have left the house in the middle of the night is curiosity. The governess is in the habit of constantly wandering the halls and grounds at night, silently, she thinks. However, since her wanderings have already woken Flora at least once, we may assume that she is not as silent as she believes. Perhaps she is constantly waking the children with her wandering. What could be more natural than for the children to wonder what on earth she does all night while she walks? So on the first night when the governess finally retires to bed early, Miles goes out to see for himself what is so interesting. This excursion could also be intended as an object lesson for the governess. The children will disturb her rest as she has so often disturbed theirs. Or perhaps the constant scrutiny became too much for Flora, so Miles agreed to distract the governess for a while so that Flora could have a few seconds free.

The Flying Porqupine