I had gone into this expecting to be spooked, but I mostly got confused instead. The main narrator's propensity to jump to conclusions without any solid proof and instantly believing them as truths made me question her reliability. The writing certainly doesn't help—it's dense and convoluted, even sometimes in the dialogue. Multiple dependent clauses pile on top of one another with commas sprinkled every few words and breaking the train of thought.
Our narrator, a 20-year-old governess newly arrived at an English country home, sees ghosts and then makes wild conjectures about their supposed evil designs against the two orphaned children under her care. Aside from the apparitions, she also claims to experience moments with the children where they have supernatural visitors which she alone cannot see. She is convinced that during these moments of "pause of all life", the spirits are communicating some sort of diabolical messages to the children and thus corrupting their flawless personalities.
Are the ghosts real? Possibly. The narrator's descriptions of them, previous employees who lived and worked in the house before they died, matched the testimony of the housekeeper who knew these people during their lifetimes. But the rest of the governess' claims only seem like figments of her overexcited imagination—she is described at the beginning of the book as "a fluttered, anxious girl".
Perhaps her experience is partly due to nerves caused by the pressure of having to manage the children on her own, in her very first job, without consulting their guardian. The children's absent uncle, who the governess seems to have a crush on although they'd only met twice for interviews, mysteriously requires upon hiring her that she not contact him about anything and basically take the kids out of his hands. This could just be selfishness on the part of a rich bachelor not wanting to be encumbered by children or a telling clue about the kids' true characters.
That brings me to a second possible trigger behind the whole business, which is the stress of finding out that her darling little students, instead of being pure and innocent angels as she initially thought, are actually sly and mischievous. The older boy in particular is exceptionally intelligent and cunning and seems too mature for his age of 10. It's probably easier for the governess to blame otherworldly powers than consider that these children can be manipulative little brats. Thus my initial view was that, rather than the kids truly being corrupted by demonic forces, the whole ordeal is the product of the young woman's unstable mind.
(show spoiler)
After checking out reviews I discovered other interpretations of this classic work based on various literary theories (I actually didn't find the story that creepy until considering these other readings), including those that found in the book expressions of repressed sexuality during the Victorian era. But on the whole the story is simply too vague and ambiguous, especially with the narrator's tendency to pull assumptions out of thin air. In conclusion this seems to me more like psychological fiction masquerading as horror, and a very confusing one at that.
