How does Henry James Influence your perception of the governess in The Turn of The Screw?

The character of the governess is that she is very much a girl of the time, in this case the late nineteenth century. Her personality is very much a mixed up one, at least our modern understanding of her shows her this way. It would be foolish of us to interpret her as, ‘insane’, or ‘mad’, straight away as we have to understand that this story is over a hundred years old, yet it would be even more foolish to totally disregard the idea that she could be mad, and so we must try to understand if she is ‘mad’ or if that is just how women in those days acted however I do still think that very few strangled young boys. I personally do feel that she is mad and I think that Henry James is trying to explore the idea of madness in this novel.

The governess was brought up at a time and in a society, which had very strong beliefs about class, education and very importantly gender. The governess grew up in a quite large family; she was the youngest of seven sisters. Her family w...