Teachers and Governesses in Gothic Literature

Students aren’t the only ones who have to go back to school in the fall. This back-to-school season, I want to celebrate that most underappreciated of professions: teachers. In Gothic literature, we most often see a type of teacher who was present in many upper-class Victorian homes: the governess. 

A governess is a live-in private tutor who was given charge of the education of girls of any age, as well as younger boys, in wealthy European households during the nineteenth century. I’ve already briefly touched on how the boundary-defying qualities of the governess make her particularly suited to Gothic stories in my post on liminality. To expand on that idea, a governess was generally a young woman from an upper-class family that had fallen on hard times. She needed to be genteel, in order to properly teach her charges the skills and manners expected of proper young ladies. But her poverty and the fact that she had to work for a living in the employment of others contradicted the norms of her social class and the idealized form of femininity she was meant to impart to her female students. Neither equal to the household servants nor to the members of the family, the governess occupied a unique role in the home that moved between and existed outside of social class structures. In addition to this social ambiguity, the governess was often a vulnerable figure. She was a young woman alone, an outsider entering into an unfamiliar home and relying on powerful strangers for her food, shelter, and living. Governesses in Gothic novels also tend to be orphans or estranged from their family, with nowhere else to go if their position begins to feel unsafe or uncomfortable. Though a governess may be older and have more life experience than the prototypical Gothic protagonist of the naïf, she is similarly vulnerable and her liminal status makes her all the more prone to ending up in unusual circumstances. Below are just a few examples of works featuring teachers and governesses in Gothic literature:

Jane in Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë

The titular character of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847) is the quintessential governess of Gothic literature, and many later iterations draw on her example. Charlotte Brontë and her sisters all had first-hand experience working as governesses—one of the few options of employment open to them as the poor daughters of a curate. So, it is not surprising that governesses show up in many of the Brontë sisters’ works. Charlotte, especially, hated working as a governess, writing many letters to her sisters about the unruly children she had to wrangle and the constant disrespect she faced from her employers. This frustration with the role can be seen in the way she portrays the character Jane. Jane Eyre is orphaned at a young age and raised by an abusive aunt before being sent off to a boarding school for impoverished girls. After completing her education, Jane stays on at Lowood Institution for two more years as a teacher before boredom compels her to seek out a position as a governess, which she views as “at least a new servitude.” She is given charge of Adèle Varens, the young ward of the mysterious and brooding Mr. Rochester. Jane exhibits the social ambiguity of the governess by developing a strong friendship with the housekeeper of Thornfield Hall (the head of the household servants), while also slowly growing closer to the master of the house and occasionally being invited to socialize with his guests. On these occasions, however, Jane is mocked and looked down upon by these guests, especially by Blanche Ingram, who—upon first meeting Jane—tells stories of tormenting her own governess in childhood and speaks suggestively of the sexual immorality of such unattached young women and the disruption it can cause. The true danger, however, is to Jane. The skewed power difference between poor employee and wealthy employer makes her romantic relationship with Rochester challenging to navigate. And after Rochester nearly deceives Jane into committing bigamy, she realizes she cannot stay at Thornfield Hall without giving into him and compromising her own values. Lacking resources and anywhere else to go, however, Jane aimlessly sets out on foot and nearly dies on the moors. The novel’s happily ever after comes only after Jane inherits some wealth, thus freeing her from the role of governess and the need to work for a living so that she can meet Rochester on a more equal footing. 

Lucy in Villette by Charlotte Brontë

Jane Eyre isn’t the only one of Brontë’s novels to feature a teacher figure. The protagonist of her 1853 novel, Lucy Snowe, becomes an instructor at a girls’ boarding school in the fictional French-speaking city of Villette. Brontë once again drew from her own employment experiences, this time taking inspiration from the period she spent teaching at a school in Belgium. In Villette, Lucy, who speaks very little French, finds herself trying to make her way all alone in a foreign land. She secures a position as an English teacher at a boarding school run by the nosy and controlling Madame Beck. Lucy falls in love with a fellow teacher, Paul Emanuel, but their relationship faces repeated obstacles and Lucy comes to believe she is being haunted by Paul’s dead fiancée, a nun who was buried alive on the school’s grounds for breaking her vow of chastity. Unlike Jane, Lucy receives no windfall of riches and joyful reunion with her lover in the book’s final pages. Instead, the ending is left ambiguous but with a hint of tragedy. 

Sarah in “At Crighton Abbey” by Mary Elizabeth Braddon

This 1866 tale by master of the Golden Age ghost story Mary Elizabeth Braddon is an early example of governesses interacting with the supernatural. The story features a reversal of the usual governess premise: rather than beginning with the governess entering a strange new home, this tale opens with the narrator Sarah Crighton returning to the old family estate for a visit after working abroad as a governess for many years in strange and unfamiliar lands. Yet despite returning “home,” Sarah is still something of a stranger here. She is a poor relation, an impoverished cousin of the Crightons who reign at Crighton Abbey, and always aware of the difference in her social station. Though the mistress of the estate greets her warmly as one of the family and she has no young charges here to educate, Sarah can’t quite shake the in-between status of the governess. This liminality is perhaps what allows her to see other liminal beings: ghosts. One winter night just after Christmas, Sarah is woken from her sleep by the sound of a horn and sees a ghostly hunting party returning to the abandoned stables beneath her window. Using her ability to move between the worlds of the servants and the gentry, Sarah presses the housekeeper for information about the curse that is said to plague the young, unmarried men of the Crighton family and about the tragedy that struck a hunting party generations before. Then she warns one of the wealthy guests of the danger she believes her ghostly vision portends. Unfortunately, Sarah’s influence among the gentry is not strong enough for her warnings to be taken seriously, and she fails to prevent another family tragedy. 

The Narrator in The Turn of the Screw by Henry James

After Jane Eyre, the best-known governess in Gothic literature is the unnamed narrator of Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw (1898). This novella builds on the connection established in stories like “On Crighton Abbey” between governesses and the supernatural. The story begins when the narrator takes a job as governess to two orphaned children with an absentee uncle at a country home in Bly. Upon arriving, the governess immediately develops a close friendship with the housekeeper Mrs. Grose, but soon begins to grow uneasy when she notices the strange figures of a man and a woman who seem to appear and disappear throughout the house and the grounds. She comes to believe these figures are the ghosts of the deceased valet Peter Quint and her predecessor as governess Miss Jessel, and that they are trying to corrupt the children. Miss Jessel represents all that is dangerous and provocative about the governess’s liminal status. It is hinted that she was sexually immoral and engaged in an inappropriate relationship with Quint, a mere servant who would have been below her social status and was himself overly familiar with his betters. To the narrator’s eye, the shades of Quint and Jessel seem to be trying to impart their loose morals onto young Flora and Miles. But the narrator, too, is an outsider in this home and ought perhaps to be regarded with as much suspicion as Miss Jessel. Like Jane Eyre before her, she is in love with her employer, which apart from being inappropriate also clouds her judgment when it comes to communicating about her concerns for the children. The governess is the ultimate unreliable narrator, and by the end of the novella, it is unclear whether the ghosts she sees are real and dangerous or merely figments of her own deluded mind.

What other examples of governesses and teachers in Gothic literature can you think of? Let me know in the comments!