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.
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