Why the Governess Is the Scariest Person in Victorian Psycho

Winifred Notty has barely arrived at Ensor House before she tells us that everyone in it will be dead in three months. The Pounds family, meanwhile, expects her to teach Drusilla and Andrew French and keep them occupied. That difference in expectations is the source of much of the suspense in Virginia Feito’s Victorian Psycho. The person hired to look after the children already has a very different future in mind for the household.

A note for new readers: This article discusses the novel’s setup and individual scenes while leaving the Christmas morning outcome unspoiled.

The Pounds family pays her to get close

A governess has a curious place in a house like Ensor. Winifred is educated enough to teach the Pounds children and trusted enough to spend hours alone with them. She’s also an employee who is supposed to defer to their parents. The family needs her to know the children well, but has little reason to wonder what she makes of the adults.

Feito makes that arrangement frightening in an ordinary way. A French lesson gives Winifred a chance to see who expects praise and who is used to being corrected. A bedtime story gives her an audience and an excuse to say something unsettling. The closer she comes to doing her job well, the more she learns about the people who hired her. The Pounds family helps maintain the very intimacy that makes her dangerous.

A bloodied nightdress shows how well she reads the room

One of the best examples comes when the cook confronts Winifred with a bloody nightdress. Winifred suggests that the stain has an ordinary explanation involving menstruation. The cook points out that the blood is around the neckline. Winifred promptly pretends to faint.

The cook has already noticed the most important detail. Winifred’s performance makes it harder to keep asking about it. A fainting woman calls for a different response than a woman being questioned about blood on her clothes, and Winifred can switch the scene from one to the other in seconds. In her account to us, she’s pleased with herself for pulling it off. Feito reads the passage aloud in her NPR interview with Ayesha Rascoe.

Drusilla gives her someone worth paying attention to

Winifred initially dismisses Drusilla as a predictable rich teenager. Then she begins to see how little attention anyone pays to the girl’s inner life. As Feito explains in the NPR interview, Andrew stands to inherit, while his sister is expected to marry. Drusilla’s family can afford to give her an education without taking much interest in what she might want to learn.

That makes their relationship one of the book’s most unsettling ones. Being taken seriously can mean a great deal to someone whose future seems settled on her behalf. Winifred can recognize a frustration the adults overlook, and her attention can feel good for precisely that reason. Feito gives the governess a perceptiveness that would be admirable in a different person. Here it helps explain why someone might let her close.

Winifred makes the reader enjoy her company

Feito gives Winifred the kind of timing that can make you laugh when you should be worrying about the other people in the room. In one scene, Winifred finds a loose tooth in her mouth and can’t say whose it is. She caps the incident by blaming the port. The joke lands because the explanation is so ordinary and the thing it supposedly explains is so grotesque. For a second, you’re following her lead and treating the tooth as a social embarrassment.

That intimacy changes what a Gothic governess story can do. In Jane Eyre, Jane’s account helps us recognize injustices that people with more authority can dismiss. In Victorian Psycho, the governess’s account can also be sharp about her employers, and that sharpness makes her easier to side with. The uneasy part is how quickly agreement on one point can turn into sympathy on the next. Why the red-room matters in Jane Eyre

The Pounds family looks forward to Christmas. Winifred has been counting down to it since she arrived. After enough time in her company, the thought of what she has planned can sit uncomfortably close to the desire to hear her tell it.

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