anything other than a menial and an inferior: in her biography of Brontë, Elizabeth Gaskell records an incident in which the mother of one of Brontë's pupils, having overheard her child tell Brontë that he loved her, promptly exclaimed—in Brontë's presence, and in front of all the children—"Love the _governess_ , my dear!" At the same time, her intimate contact with the children of her employers places the governess in a position curiously different from that of the other servants—with whom she unquestionably belongs but from whom she is also separated by her functions in relation to bourgeois private life. Her status in the home is fundamentally contradictory, and in one of the key governess narratives, _The Turn of the Screw_ , Henry James defines these objective contradictionswhich is presented as being peculiarly and unnaturally difficult to find. He is rescued from it for the purposes of the film's astonishing last movement, the theme of which is the spoiling of the happy ending by the renaissance of a phallus who has been rendered completely redundant and who only serves to reawaken the archaic social and emotional conflicts which have been overcome in his absence. As Jerry Durrance, Paul Henreid's only real purpose in _Now, Voyager_ is to be the father of Tina and (as I will argue later) the agent of Charlotte's discovery that she does not actually want the romantic satisfactions with the interdiction of which, by her mother, she has previously identified her oppression. In both _The Old Maid_ and _The Great Lie,_