“I was a screen—I was to stand before them”

“I was a screen—I was to stand before them” names The Governess’s self-appointed role as both shield and witness: she believes that by placing herself between the children and the supernatural threat, she can protect them from what she sees. The image makes her devotion vivid, but also reveals how completely her sense of duty has become bound to her private interpretation of danger.

The Vow of Protection

The Governess forms this resolve while speaking with Mrs. Grose about the possibility that Peter Quint might appear to the children. She says that by offering herself as the sole subject of such an experience—accepting and confronting it—she could act as an expiatory victim and preserve the tranquility of those around her. She singles out the children as the ones she intends to fence about and save.

Her reasoning is intensely personal: the children, in her view, have no one but her, while she has them. Their shared isolation becomes the ground of a protective compact. The metaphor of the screen gives that compact a physical shape: she will stand in front; what she sees, they will see less.

From Suspense to “Proofs”

The screen image belongs to a turning point in The Governess’s account of her state of mind. She describes finding a kind of joy in the heroism she believes the situation demands, and in the chance to succeed where another young woman might have failed. She understands her work as defending children whose helplessness has become painfully explicit to her.

At first, that sense of mission leaves her watching them in “a stifled suspense” and “a disguised excitement.” She later says the suspense did not endure: it was displaced by what she calls “horrible proofs,” beginning when she felt she had truly taken hold of the situation. Thus the screen is not only a promise to protect the children; it is also part of the framework through which she interprets her perceptions as evidence and her vigilance as necessary service.

The Children Behind the Screen

The scene that follows places the metaphor beside an ordinary, carefully observed afternoon. Miles remains indoors on the red cushion of a deep window seat, reading; The Governess encourages him to continue. Flora goes out with her, and they stroll in the shade near the lake on an exceptionally warm day. The children’s ease with her—accompanying her without surrounding her, and amusing themselves without requiring her to direct them—contrasts with the danger she believes she must contain.

At the lake, Flora plays while their recent geography lessons supply the setting with an imaginative name: the Sea of Azof. This detail sharpens the distance between the children’s play and The Governess’s mounting vigilance. Her screen is meant to preserve their freedom and tranquility, yet it also places her between them and the world as she increasingly understands it: a world in which seeing more means that they should see less.