Summer

Summer is the governess’s season of welcome, imaginative freedom, and growing confidence at Bly—but also the calm interval against which the first uncanny appearance and the later autumnal desolation acquire their force. Its apparent promise of ease gradually becomes inseparable from the possibility that danger has been gathering unseen.

Arrival and First Impressions

The governess travels to Bly in late June after days of doubt about the position. The long, jolting coach journey ends at a stopping place where a carriage from the house is waiting. On a lovely afternoon, the summer landscape seems to offer her a friendly welcome, and her fortitude rises as the carriage turns into the avenue. The house’s broad, clear front, open windows, fresh curtains, lawn, bright flowers, and gravel drive replace the melancholy scene she had expected. Rooks circle above the treetops in the golden sky as she is received at the door by Mrs. Grose, holding Flora’s hand.

Her welcome is also social and imaginative: Bly appears larger and more generous than the narrow notion she had formed in Harley Street. Flora’s beauty and charm deepen the impression that the appointment is a fortunate one. The governess is given an impressive room, with a state bed, figured draperies, and long mirrors in which she can see herself from head to foot. The house and its comforts make her feel that she has received more than was promised, helping establish summer as a time of apparent ease and good fortune.

Freedom and Confidence

In retrospect, the governess describes her early weeks at Bly as a period in which she learned to be amused, and even amusing, and to stop thinking constantly about the future. The spacious grounds, summer music, and mystery of nature open up a sense of air and freedom that her earlier, constrained life had not offered. The children seem gentle, healthy, and happy; she imagines their future as a protected extension of the garden and park, as though they were little grandees sheltered from the roughness of the world.

The governess also takes pleasure in her private evening walk. Once the children have gone to bed, she has an hour alone in the grounds, watching the light fade while the last birds call from the old trees. She enjoys the beauty and dignity of the estate with an amused sense of possession, and feels tranquil, justified, and pleased that her discretion and good sense are fulfilling the employer’s wishes. She even imagines that her work may eventually be recognized as remarkable. In hindsight, however, she sees this confidence as part of her being off guard: consideration, freedom, and her own susceptibility to flattery have helped draw her into a situation whose difficulty she did not yet understand.

The First Sign of Change

During one of these evening walks, at the end of a long June day, the governess imagines that someone might appear on a path and look at her with approval. As she emerges from a plantation and sees the house, that imagined presence seems suddenly real: a man is standing high above the lawn on one of Bly’s two crenelated towers, the tower Flora had shown her on her first morning. The vision shocks her precisely because it appears to fulfill a private fancy. The scene marks a sharp turn within the season of confidence: the grounds that had offered solitude, beauty, and a sense of ownership now hold a presence that unsettles her.

Summer’s initial stillness is thus retrospectively recast as a pause before disturbance. The governess compares the change to the spring of a beast, suggesting that the peaceful interval had concealed a latent threat. The seasonal setting does not simply accompany the plot; it helps shape the contrast between the ease she believed she had found and the crisis that begins to intrude upon it.

Passing Season and Retrospective Meaning

After the governess’s early encounters, there is a stretch in which she sees nothing further, though she continues to anticipate the possible appearance of Peter Quint or Miss Jessel. The summer turns and goes; autumn falls upon Bly, the sky grows gray, garlands wither, and dead leaves scatter across the grounds. The governess likens the estate to a theater after the performance, strewn with crumpled playbills. Familiar conditions of air, sound, and silence repeatedly recall the circumstances in which she first saw Quint, but the expected figures do not appear and she remains outwardly unmolested.

That absence does not restore the earlier peace. The governess says her sensibility has deepened rather than declined, and that she would rather remain exposed to the worst than lose her capacity to see. She fears that her eyes might be sealed at the moment the children’s are most open; although she now seems unable to see anything, she cannot take comfort in that apparent reprieve because she remains convinced that the children possess a secret. In this way, the remembered summer becomes both the lost interval of apparent freedom and the season in which the narrative’s central uncertainty first takes shape: the governess’s perception, the children’s knowledge, and the meaning of what she has seen remain entangled.