George Horvat Ms. Barklow Monsters and Misfits 29 November, 2018
From The Cell to a Ghost: an Exploration of Isolation in Victorian Horror The brutalities that human beings commit against each other are ironically, a part of what separates us from animals. Throughout all of human history, human beings have enacted cruelties amongst each other as a form of punishment for an act that goes against societal norms. Not until the 20th century, people have been ostracized for having a child before marriage. In many cases, these individuals were often secluded from society and placed into a life of challenges. In the The Woman in Black, the author, Susan Hill, explores the cultural issues of isolation and revenge. This Victorian ghost story creates a sense of fear amongst individuals due to who the victims of the story are. Jennet Humfrye, the ghost of the story, seeks revenge against all of humanity by murdering innocent children of the parents who, in any way, associate themselves with her or her house. The Woman in Black, although primarily isolated within the town of Crythin Gifford, is capable of traveling throughout the world. She has the ability to be invisible to adults but real to all children and animals. If a child looks into her eyes, she gains control of their bodies and essentially finds cruel ways to kill them selves. To many, not much is more disturbing or horrific than young children killing them selves. In addition to that, she also acts as a lingering presence for society in the novel, as she cannot truly be stopped, the people in the novel have no choice but to live with the phantom, this creates an aura of continual suspense and madness as they never know when she may strike again. Finally, the wraith herself serves as a source of fear. The ghost is the ultimate outsider, representative of an absent presence, all-seeing and yet unable to partake of life in any meaningful way. Ghost stories are often used to exercise resentment over societal restrictions. In this particular case, with Jennet being bound to the Eel Marsh house, and segregated from her only son, is literally restricted from all walks of life and happiness, only because she did not meet societies expectations. She is bound to the house because she has a bastard child and conceived him without being married. In my adaptation, I want to stress upon the idea of isolation and it’s destructive nature on the human psyche. I find that forced isolation from society creates a mentally debilitating environment for the individual. Humans, being social creatures, can not function properly from extreme, extended periods of solitude. In the novel, the story revolves around the events that happen to Arthur Kipps. And, although Jennet’s disturbing story is mentioned, I want to pay special attention to her background and incorporate a sort of prequel scene in which the viewer can see her debilitating path into misery. I believe that this will instill feelings of dread in the viewer as they continue to watch. In a broader sense, I want to bring awareness to the cruel nature of humanity and how extreme punishments, especially in this fashion, cause more harm than good. This can often be applied to real life, in which many people as a form of punishment, have throughout all of human history, been constrained into cells of solitary confinement. I am a fan of the setting of the story, taking place in early 20th century England just before the Great War with a magnitude of connections to the Victorian era. However, I want to explore the idea of adapting the time period to the Great Depression. I feel as though it would be very interesting to adapt the original story quite a bit by turning the Woman in Black in black into a teenaged boy who is locked in his cellar as punishment for having a child early in his life which caused such a crisis for the family with their desperate financial situation. I want to adapt the origin story of the ghost while also retaining many of the original qualities of the novel such as the revenge plot of Jennet with her murderous rampage. With this taking place in 1930s America, I want Arthur Kipps to be a police officer who is sent to investigate the case of the missing boy 20 years later when it is reopened after new evidence emerges. I want to have the rest of the plot to remain the same. An important detail of the story is the figurative meaning of the name of the novel. The Woman in Black, as read, is literally a woman dressed in all black. The color of her dress is imperative to understanding the physiological and psychological state of the ghost. Her black dress is representative of the emptiness in her soul and dark nature of her actions with the literal appearance of a decaying body behind. With all these things, in the end, I want the audience to consider the real life effects of seclusion, punishment, and restraint on the individual as well as its impact on history.
Annotated Bibliography
“Maternal Rage in Susan Hill’s The Woman in Black” In Donna Cox’s analysis of the woman in black, she focuses on the aspect of maternal rage embedded within the ghost that causes the tragedies throughout the story. The Woman in Black is a tip-tilted text where the darkness of maternal rage and murderous horror at the centre of subject formation is depicted. The missing or dead mother of so many popular Victorian texts haunts these pages--she has become an avenging presence. The mechanics of maternal attachment, encountering the loss of the infant as object, loops back into infantile anger which is boundless and transgressive. The mother's loving gaze becomes the instrument of death. Her jealous rage that states, "he is mine, mine, he can never be yours" (100) is displaced onto the children of all those who look upon her. (3) The scopophilic investment in the sign first formulated in relation to the mother as Other is turned upon those who dare to signify while the mother is bereft. A robber mother. Here, Cox examines the issue of Jennet having her child taken from her. It is known that the natural connection to one’s child is one of the strongest and most powerful feelings in the world. With revenge being an important issue in the novel, here we can see and perhaps understand the origin of her rage. Having been separated from her child and forced to watch him grow up with another family not only instills intense feeling of depression and anger, but also jealousy.
“The Secret Meaning of Ghost Stories” In the BBC article, the secret meaning of ghost stories, Hephzibah Anderson discusses how female writers have often found the supernatural a way to challenge and condemn their role in society. Here, instead of directly focusing on Susan Hills novel, we can expand our understanding of the the woman in black by exploring the nature of ghost stories in general. Anderson, throughout the article, brings up many key points of ghost stories and how they have impacted society in which w can apply these concepts to the novel. She mentions the criticality of the Victorian era and why ghost stories are often associated with aspects of it. With the true beginning of women’s rights movements taking place in the 19th century, a multitude of papers were published or shared by women in which a phantom plays a key role in the story. Anderson suggests that ghost stories were a way for women of the time to express their resentment for social injustice. By understanding the ghost, she suggests, we as a society can better understand an individual’s struggles. She says, “These ghost women are often deeply sympathetic characters. What makes them terrifying is that death has enabled them to break free of social mores and fully unleash the anger that their living sisters must swallow. The ghosts become proto-feminist figures who – in death at least – cast off the traditional roles that society foists upon them, those of obedient wife, doting mother, dutiful daughter.”
“The Subversion off Expectation in The Woman in Black” Anderson Green, in contrast to the other articles, explores the literary allusions in Hill’s novel and how they actually make the story more horrific by subverting expectations. Such as Wilkie Collins's great sensation novel of 1860, The "Woman in White.” Green makes a quick comparison to suggest that the woman in black is a reversal and reflection of Collins’s story. While also inheriting a similar meaning. He says, Where the convolutions of Collins's complex plot, are destined to see the re-establishment of good, the stark simplicity of Hill's tale sinks inevitably and horrifically into personal tragedy, as befits, perhaps, the symbolic use the authors make of white and black in their respective titles. Both novels express the impairment of the mental state through seclusion and isolation from breaking societal norms. He also suggests that by creating this allusions to classic stories, such as those of M. R. James, and Charles Dickens, Hill creates an aura of familiarity within the reader which, as the story progresses, subverts expectations.
“The Woman in Black: Harry Potter and the Spooky Mansion.” Alternatively, time magazine provides an article of the 2012 film adaptation of the original novel, which respectfully parallels the story almost entirely. The article describes the brilliance of the cinematography, showing how in order to adapt a horror story into a film, one must create a chilling visual/audible performance. Providing a multitude of cinematic techniques, I could utilize these in my own film adaptation. For instance, “Cinematographer Tim Maurice-Jones paints the place in dark browns amid the sepulchral shadows; and though Arthur does much of his work in daylight hours, the clock always seems about to strike midnight. Even its startles are reassuring: nearly every shock comes a half-second before or after you expect it to.”
“Who is haunted by what in The Woman in Black?” Alan Jones provides an in depth analysis of the motifs in the novel and one particular detail that completely alters the story. and interestingly enough, their connection to the gothic era and Victorian England. Aside from the motifs, Jones primarily focuses on the fact that the novel can be read, in a sense, backwards, changing the story from a terrifying haunting to a compelling tale of coping with one’s struggles. He says, “Suddenly it strikes one that the novel can be read `in reverse', as it were. The ghost story may be just that, a story, which can be seen as exorcising Kipps's own personal demons--the guilt at the powerless surrender of wife and child to death, the feeling, despite the cosy security of his new `family', that he is a usurper. Seen this way round, the story is intriguing.” Interestingly enough, when read backwards, more closely relates to a true gothic tale. Perhaps I could adapt the story by taking aspects of both readings and transforming it into a ghost story with a protagonist who both has to deal with the literal demons and personal demons they poses.
"Ghosts: Appearances of the Dead and Cultural Transformation." Elisabeth Anne Leonard examines R. C. Finucane‘s Ghosts: Appearances of the Dead & Cultural Transformation, she creates an analysis of the cultural aspects of ghosts in horror from the time of homer to the 20th century. Finucane explains how ghosts are a manifestation of societies popular fear. For example, he states that in western culture, for thousands of years, ghosts never truly represented something evil until the time of the Protestants. They, having rejected the idea of purgatory, effectively turned ghosts from that of a spirit or holy being to something demonic. By the time of the Victorian era in which I am focusing most of my attention, ghosts often represented that of sin, being a product of something demonic. Ghosts really evolved from the Protestant idea. Applying this to the woman in black, we see how Jennet, an unwedded woman is the embodiment of sin as she conceived and had a bastard child. From here we can see how Susan Hill was hinting at the cultural issue in society of the inequity amongst men and women, how the female is sinful for having committed the same act as the man while he is never ostracized.
Works cited
Donna. "'I have no story to tell!': (1)." Intertexts, vol. 4, no. 1, 2000, p. 74+
Green, Andrew. "The subversion of expectation in the Woman in Black." The English Review, vol. 14, no. 3, 2004, p. 25+.
Alan. "Who is haunted by what in The Woman in Black? Alan Jones considers the multiple relations of Susan Hill's novel with its predecessors in the Gothic tradition."