The Scariest Hauntings are From The Living

Peter Quint and the grooming of Miles in The Haunting of Bly Manor

(caution: here there be spoilers for the whole series)

Caption: a still image of Peter Quint, photo via Netflix Life

Like about 90% of the Internet, I spent the past two weeks obsessing over The Haunting of Bly Manor. It’s good, it’s gay, everybody should watch it. 

One of the aspects of the show that interested me most was the relationship between Peter Quint and Miles. Peter Quint is Henry Wingrave’s business associate/valet (at least I think he’s a valet, his actual job is unclear to my American, unaristocratic eyes), and Miles is the young heir who has just lost his parents. At first, their relationship seems wholesome—they bond over losing their fathers, and Quint gives Miles small gifts like a precious cigarette lighter. However, we soon realize that Peter has been grooming Miles. Peter sees in Miles a vulnerable young person, one who’s just lost his parents to a tragic accident and has been effectively abandoned by his uncle. He positions himself as a male role model who teaches him the truths about life, such as how to deal with women. He eventually isolates Miles from the rest of the house by encouraging him to lash out against other staff and to distance himself from Flora’s childishness (his sister is only two years younger than him). While some viewers have speculated if there was a sexual abuse component to their relationship, given Peter’s own childhood trauma and the implication that such a thing did occur in the original novella, I do not think the show meant to go down that route and I’m glad it didn’t. The effects of emotional abuse and manipulation are just as terrifying on their own without needing to back them up with other forms of abuse more widely accepted as “real.”

At one point, Miles goes away to school and commits a series of escalating, violent acts to get himself sent home. The show leaves it ambiguous if he was possessed by the spirit of Peter Quint at this point, but I think that it doesn’t matter. He’s already been groomed by Quint to “look for the right key,” to push for what he wants from other people without caring about their wellbeing or feelings. Whether the physical ghost of Peter Quint was possessing him to act that way isn’t important when he’s got Peter’s voice inside his head. Grooming, especially when you’re young, is a kind of mental possession. After such an insidious form of abuse, how are you supposed to know what thoughts are your own?

Here’s where I gleefully take the essay into hot take territory, Peter Quint’s actions parallel real life examples of grooming of young boys and men by misogynistic, far-right groups. The repeated refrain of finding people’s keys (according to Peter Quint’s speech to Miles, for most women their key is flowers) is reminiscent of modern day pick-up artists who promise to teach men different techniques for manipulating women into sleeping with them and are often a gateway to more violent misogynistic groups. Quint either forces Miles to act in a misogynistic way while possessing him or his influence leads Miles to do so on his own, for example when he spies on Dani while she is changing or creepily touches her. The distinction if he is possessed or not during those incidents isn’t important to me, what matters is that this impressionable child was led to violate women’s boundaries and disrespect the women around him by a role model he respected.  Quint’s misogyny and its effect on Miles is interesting because misogyny is often a gateway to the far right.

Of course, I’m not trying to argue that Peter Quint was some kind of proto Proud Boy bent on making Miles his tool for the fascist takeover of Britain, that would be silly. However, in the original novella, Peter Quint was representative of a radicalization of a different kind—the radicalization of the working class. Quint’s greatest sin was wanting to rise above his station. The first time the nameless narrator sees him, she explains that “he’s tall, active, erect...but never—no, never!—a gentleman!”. A great deal is made of the fact that he appears wearing smart clothing that are not his own (the governess immediately assumes that his clothing is not his despite knowing nothing about him when she sees him, later it turns out that he stole clothing from the nameless master). The biggest problem with his relationship with Miss Jessel was that he rose above his station in pursuing the governess from a better family. Peter Quint in The Turn of the Screw is an effective bogeyman not because of his actions (staring through the window is pretty low-level on the list of ghostly antics) but because of his unnatural class strivings that threaten the governess and others who think like her. 

The question of class is still a theme in the modern show, albeit differently. The Peter of The Haunting of Bly Manor is able to speak for himself more than the one in James’ novella, and he explicitly mentions his class motivations. He grew up poor and had to fight his way from a downtrodden, abusive home to rise in the world, so naturally he is sick of watching others like Henry bask in success they do not deserve. He wants to burn it all down in the name of the working class, and he wants to do it with Miss Jessel at his side.

Except—how much is his class-based motivation real, and how much is manufactured to make himself seem sympathetic and justify his actions to himself and Miss Jessel? The Peter Quint of the show displays absolutely no class solidarity. He has no qualms about leveraging his superior position as Henry’s valet to threaten to fire the others if they express disagreement with his actions. Peter Quint’s class consciousness only extends to himself because he sees himself as the only valid oppressed group.

This selfish interpretation of class is another parallel between Quint and lots of incel/pick-up artist/far-right groups. Some of these groups see themselves as oppressed because they are middle class white men and society has become “too woke,” which is of course preposterous but to them, a very real feeling. There are some outside observers that are more willing to accept this claim of oppression at face value. It’s become a common explanation that far-right groups are simply motivated by economic anxiety, even when they show up at their rallies with pick-up trucks that cost thousands of dollars and plot to kidnap the governor of Michigan with expensive firearms. This logic is extended to misogynistic subcultures as well. Jacobin recently published an article praising the documentary “TFW no GF” for exploring the role of economic anxiety in creating incels.  I did not watch the documentary, but several critics pointed out that Jacobin’s review is ridiculous because of the obvious fact that people do not just become violent misogynists because they are poor, and the review failed to mention that most of the production team have concerning ties to the far right, including the female director Jacobin praises. While I’m not negating the role that poverty has in radicalizing SOME people, the fact is millions of people are impoverished and downtrodden on this planet without becoming violent racists and misogynists. The simplistic explanation of class anxiety does not explain incels, red-pillers, pick up artists, or whatever flavor of radical misogynist we want to talk about. Likewise, class alone does not explain Peter Quint’s actions either despite his desperate attempts to use it as justification.

Hot take portion of the essay is over now, I promise.

The deft way The Haunting of Bly Manor portrayed the grooming of Miles made the last two episodes even more disappointing for me. The show was at its best and most terrifying when its ghosts were firmly rooted in real life. When the entities haunting our characters were not nameless ghosts but real manifestations of their own guilt and baggage. When the most terrifying thing in the mansion was not a mysterious being but a real man that had been friendly with the inhabitants, broken bread with them, put on a charming facade, then found ways to make all of their lives a miserable hell even after death.

And then it was all undone with the Lady of the Lake, the opposite of the deus ex machina (a ghost ex machina)? For seven episodes, the show built up Peter Quint as this malevolent being that is terrorizing the house even when he is not physically present, only to bait us into caring about this other character it barely mentioned before. Peter Quint literally dissolves into thin air.

I also would have liked the ending to focus more on the consequences for Flora and especially Miles, even though my gay heart appreciated the lesbian love montage. The trauma-based amnesia was a plot convenience hastily mentioned in a throwaway line that ultimately did the show a disservice. True ghosts do not go away with one exorcism or one heroic sacrifice by an au pair. I would have liked to see an episode that dealt more with the consequences of what everybody went through, especially the children. Even if the spirit of Peter Quint is gone now, his ideas would still live on in Miles, who idolized the man enough before his death to willingly accept possession afterwards. How does he unlearn those harmful ideas? How does he deal with the harm that he caused? How do the other characters reckon with that and care for him as he recovers? As any traumatized child knows, the fear and trauma live on long after the thing that goes bump in the night is gone.