essay on the woman in black

The Woman in Black

42 pages • 1 hour read

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Summary and Study Guide

The Woman in Black (1983) by Susan Hill follows the gothic literary tradition. Hill explores traditional horror tropes, such as abandoned estates and ghost hauntings, set in an unspecified time in England’s countryside. The horror novella focuses on the first-person point-of-view of Arthur Kipps as he reflects on a ghost haunting he experienced as a young man. Hill explores themes of loss and mourning, the impact of holding onto the past, and the clash between rationality and superstitious beliefs. The Woman in Black peers into the life of not only Kipps, but also the community in a small, countryside town.

The novel has been adapted into television, stage, and film productions, including the 2012 film of the same name starring Daniel Radcliffe.

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This guide uses the Vintage Books paperback edition published in 2011.

Content Warning: This novel contains themes of child loss.

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Plot Summary

While enjoying Christmas Eve with his family, Arthur Kipps’s stepchildren remind him of his past as they take turns telling ghost stories. Haunted by a memory, Kipps decides to write about his experience in a small town in the English countryside. However, he wishes for no one to read his story until after his death.

In his early twenties, Kipps works as a solicitor under his employer, Mr. Bentley. He is engaged to a woman named Stella and has plans to take on more responsibilities in his career. Being tasked to attend a funeral for one of their clients, Kipps leaves London to settle the estate of Mrs. Alice Drablow, hoping to prove he can take on more work from Mr. Bentley in his old age. Kipps heads to Crythin Gifford, where he will go to Mrs. Drablow’s estate, Eel Marsh House , to sort her personal and legal documents before the property is sold.

Kipps, who holds a strong distaste for the fog in London, is excited to head to the countryside. On the train ride, he meets Mr. Daily , a local from Crythin Gifford. Kipps learns the town is surrounded by its own fog that appears suddenly. As Kipps and Mr. Daily continue to talk, Mr. Daily does not reveal a lot of information about Mrs. Drablow and hardly comments on Kipps’s business in town. Upon arrival at the inn, Kipps learns the entire town tends to avoid the conversation about Eel Marsh House and Mrs. Drablow. The funeral is not expected to have many attendees, and Kipps discovers a mystery around the estate and its owner.

Kipps meets with the local solicitor, Mr. Jerome, who accompanies him to the funeral the next day. Mr. Jerome reveals that he will not be going to Eel Marsh House with Kipps, but he has arranged for Mr. Keckwick, a local man, to take Kipps to the estate. During the funeral, Kipps sees a woman dressed in black with a veil covering her face; Kipps recognizes her beauty but also thinks that the woman must have a disease due to her sickly appearance. When Kipps asks Mr. Jerome about this woman, Mr. Jerome panics and refuses to talk about it.

On the way to Eel Marsh House, Mr. Keckwick tells Kipps that he will be stuck at the estate until the tide goes back out that evening, since it is situated on an island. At the house, Kipps spends some time exploring the property and discovers an old family cemetery. He also sees the woman in black again, which causes him to panic and run into the house. Later on, he hears the sound of a horse and cart falling into the marsh and the screams of a young child. However, the fog is too thick to see anything outside. Kipps hides away in the house until Mr. Keckwick picks him up later that night.

Back at the inn, Kipps sees the woman in black in his nightmares and feels a sense of dread over returning to the estate. He talks to Mr. Daily about how to proceed with his job because he does not want to disappoint Mr. Bentley or his fiancée, Stella. Due to the large amount of documents Mrs. Drablow acquired, Kipps plans to stay the night at Eel Marsh House, so Mr. Daily loans him Spider, his dog, for company and protection. Over the next several days, Kipps discovers letters between Mrs. Drablow and Jennet Humfrye , her sister, over a young boy named Nathaniel.

During the days, the estate stays quiet, but, at night, Kipps wakes up frequently and is overwhelmed with fear. Kipps is awoken by Spider’s growling at a locked door, and Kipps hears, again, a child screaming. He also hears a rocking chair moving in the hidden room. The door spikes interest in Kipps, and he decides to go into the room, which ends up being a nursery.

One early morning, Spider and Kipps are outside when a whistle causes Spider to run out into the marsh. Spider starts to drown, and Kipps runs after him, pulling him out of the marsh just before they both become trapped. Kipps looks up at the house and sees the woman in black staring at him from the nursery. Kipps passes out for a few hours and wakes to find Mr. Daily already at the estate. Mr. Daily suggests that Kipps leave. They pack up his belongings and the documents he already sorted from Mrs. Drablow, and he finishes reading the letters between Mrs. Drablow and Jennet Humfrye.

Mrs. Drablow adopted Jennet’s son, Nathanial, despite Jennet’s unwillingness to give her son away. Jennet was overcome with grief and sadness, which worsened when Nathaniel died from drowning in the marsh due to an accident with a horse-drawn cart. Mr. Daily also reveals that the sighting of the woman in black—who is now known to be Jennet Humfrye—is followed by the death of one of the local children. Kipps worries if his experience with the woman has caused the death of another child. However, Mr. Daily tells him this has not happened.

After recovering from almost drowning in the marsh, Kipps goes back to London and marries Stella. They have a son, Joseph. One day, the family spends time outside, and Stella and Joseph ride around in a horse-drawn cart. Kipps notices the woman in black standing near his family, and, before he can get to them, his wife and son have a fatal crash.

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Not since young Hutter arrived at Orlok's castle in " Nosferatu " has a journey to a dreaded house been more fearsome than the one in "The Woman in Black." Both films (and all versions of "Dracula") begin with the local townspeople terrified of a residence and the legends surrounding it. In this case, a green, Victorian-era attorney named Arthur Kipps ( Daniel Radcliffe ) is visiting a haunted house in the north of England, which can be reached only by a single-track road on a long, narrow causeway that lies so low in a brackish sea that the waters lap its edges.

Arthur's mission is to search the decrepit gothic mansion for the papers of its late occupant. This woman is said to haunt the house in mourning for her dead child. Local legend has it that the ghost is responsible for the deaths of other local children, brought about in rage as her form of vengeance. No wonder, then, that the locals shun Arthur, refuse him room and board, and strongly suggest he take the next train back to town.

But Arthur must succeed because his job depends on it. His work at a firm of solicitors has been unsatisfactory, and he needs to support his son, Joseph ( Misha Handley ), because his wife died four years ago in childbirth. As in the Dracula legend, the carriage driver refuses to take him close to the mansion, but a stalwart resident named Daily ( Ciaran Hinds , he of the portentous face) drives him there in his new motorcar.

The house is a masterpiece of production design, crumbling, forlorn, filled with the faded and jumbled Victorian possessions of doomed lifetimes. It has a unique feature that audiences will not fail to remark upon: its own sound-effects crew. At every frightening moment, and there are many, the soundtrack paralyzes us with blasts of cacophonous noise. You wouldn't want to be in the theater next to this movie in a multiplex.

"The Woman in Black" is Daniel Radcliffe's first film since " Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2 " (2011). With a few other diversions, the "Potter" series kept him working steadily for a decade, during which he has grown taller and sprouted a crop of sideburns, but at 22, he still looks like a schoolboy — or a little young, anyway, to be the father of a 4-year-old. Nor does he have much gravitas. The film might have had more effect if his character had possessed more screen presence, but "The Woman in Black" depends mostly on the decor, location and supporting cast, some of them playing living people and some not.

The movie nevertheless is effective, because director James Watkins knows it isn't a character study. His haunted house is the star. The illnesses of local children provide ominous portents. Daily's wife ( Janet McTeer ) balances precariously on the edge of madness. And there is a most satisfactory scene at a railroad station that might have had Daniel Radcliffe wondering if he will ever, in his career, take a routine rail journey.

Roger Ebert

Roger Ebert was the film critic of the Chicago Sun-Times from 1967 until his death in 2013. In 1975, he won the Pulitzer Prize for distinguished criticism.

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Film credits.

The Woman in Black (2012)

Rated PG-13 for thematic material and violence/disturbing images

Daniel Radcliffe as Arthur Kipps

Ciaran Hinds as Daily

Janet McTeer as Mrs. Daily

Misha Handley as Joseph Kipps

Roger Allam as Mr. Bentley

Jane Goldman

Directed by

James Watkins

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Essay: Susan Hill – The Woman in Black (1983)

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Susan Hill’s novel The Woman in Black (1983) is a fundamental example of women’s Gothic Horror. It successfully employs well-known Gothic conventions and tropes that have already been embraced by fans of the genre such as loneliness, gloominess, vengeance, death, the afterlife, the smudging of reality and fantasy, the descent into madness. The novel being a popular ghost story proffers a social critique of motherhood and contemporary rhetoric surrounding the family. Hill highlights the uneven status given to women who are not even allowed to live their lives the way they wish to and even sets out to outline the one-sidedness of the relationship between the sexes. The woman is not allowed to live freely as an active member and it is the masculine decisions which are forced upon her. The female character in the novel is revealed as an unfortunate woman within gender hierarchy in which a pre- defined female role is enforced on her and which she later proposes to demolish. The Woman in Black could be interpreted from numerous critical perspectives: psychological, feminist, intertextual, generic, historical and biographical. The Hill’s novel mediates women’s apprehensions about motherhood and self- independence during the early 1980s. In Britain, it was the time when there were apparent negations between social and political discourses and the institution of the family was an ideological battlefield. In her short stories and novels Hill comes up against the questions of female sovereignty and individuality and makes them part of her preoccupation with a much wider and inclusive circle of sympathy. The Woman in Black is somewhere a personal outburst which unveils the sub-conscious anguish that Susan went through after her miscarriage. It concerns the mental trauma which a woman experiences when she is metaphorically caged in free world. As Juliet Mitchell (1984) argues, ‘We have to know where women are, why women have to write the novel, the story of their own domesticity, the story of their own seclusion within the home and the possibilities and impossibilities provided by that’. (The Improper Feminine, 4) Susan Hill unlike traditional Gothic appreciably reworks on the Gothic trope of feminine captivity within the household space. As Kate Ferguson Ellis argues in the book the Contested Castle: Gothic Novels and the Subversion of Domestic Ideology that the traditional Gothic novels attribute gendered spaces: Focusing on crumbling castles as sites of terror, and on homeless protagonists who wander the face of the earth, the Gothic, too, [that is, in addition to Milton’s presentation of expulsion from Eden] is preoccupied with the home. But it is a failed home that appears on its pages, the place from which some (usually ‘fallen’ men) are locked out, and others (usually ‘innocent’ women) are locked in. The story is set in a remote and secluded location, and is packed with lush portrayals of creepy settings such as a shabby graveyard, a sinister house, a fog-choked causeway; and it uses the narrative framing device of having Kipps disclose his story years after it has happened in aspirations that he might expel his gruesome and ghastly memories. A narrative form is used generally in Gothic stories or fables as it sanctions for the story to be filtered through an individual’s psyche, thus unlocking the door for the assimilation of objective and subjective realism. Susan’s technique adds an expressionistic element that further puts in the stress between natural rationalizations and supernatural. Gothic tales often employs a number of luminal frames for instance, when the string between sanity and madness is distorted or when a character is sceptical if he is alert or asleep and further vague the boundary between realism and desire. Susan’s novel The Woman in Black is even effectual on a thematic level as it concerns with ‘loss’ with which everyone can connect to. The intensity of the story can be enlightened by staring it through Julia Kristeva’s concept of the abjection. Using Kristeva’s The Powers of Horror, Jerrold Hogle asserts that ” the most multifarious, inconsistent and conflicted aspects of our beings are ‘thrown off’ onto seemingly repulsive monsters or ghosts that both conceal and reveal this ‘otherness’ from our preferred selves as existing very much within ourselves'( qtd in Margaret Atwood : Feminism and Fiction by Fiona Tolan, 138). Thus she delves deep into how horror is produced by an encounter with the abject, a theory which signifies something that must be ‘thrust aside’ ,’expelled’ or ‘thrown off’ so that human being can sustain an unified subjectivity. Kristeva asserts that the first encounter with the abject happens at birth which is a ideal state of primordial non- identity, to be in the condition of being half inside and half outside the mother or being half dead and half alive from the start and thus undecidably in motion between rationally contradictory state, including life and death. A child is a part of mother prior to his birth and must abject his mother once he is born in order to form a cohesive, objective identity as a human. In other words, the child must ‘abject’ the mother- discard or chuck out the primal connection to her, treat her as dangerous and suffocating- if she/he is to gain any sovereign subjectivity whatsoever. Even though we must seek to push the maternal figure away, we are also still drawn close to her. Thus, we get jammed in a vague situation that is a fundamental part of the human state. As Steven Bruhm remarks in his article on the contemporary Gothic that the threshold of child- parent bond should be taken care of and an attempt must be made to rid oneself of the dependent, in- between state of mother- connection in order to assert own autonomy: That thrown- off mother, at least in the child’s fantasy, continually lures and seduces the child back to the primary bond where she/he is completely taken care of; in response, the child must demonize and reject her in order ‘to constitute [it]self and [its] culture”’. We come then not to be mere victims of the last object ‘ the mother ‘ but active agents in the expulsion of that mother. We are creatures of conflicted desires, locked in an uncanny push-me-pull-you that propels us toward the very objects we fear and to fear the very objects toward which we are propelled. We must bond with our parents, but not too much; we must distance ourselves from our parents, but not too much. (qtd in Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction by Jerold E. Hogle, 266) The abject threatens us with vagueness and terrorizes the concepts upon which the identity of human being is built; but our affiliation with the maternal figure is not the lone condition that results in this haziness in our lives. Confronting or coming face to face with anything that drives us to doubt the borders that help us to coordinate and sort out our world bring about fright and terror. The abject offers both the feeling of repulsion and fascination as it epitomizes a violation of borders: me versus you, inside the body versus outside the body, life versus death. In her essay, the thing that Julia Kristeva portrays as the ‘utmost of abjection,’ for instance, is the corpse, because it compels us to face the borders of our own subsistence: ‘The corpse, seen without God and outside of science, is the utmost of abjection. It is death infecting life. Abject. It is something rejected from which one does not part, from which one does not protect oneself as from an object. Imaginary uncanniness and real threat, it beckons to us and ends up engulfing us. It is thus not lack of cleanliness or health that causes abjection but what disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules? -The in-between, the ambiguous, the composite. The inevitable fascination with the abject is the spirit of The Woman in Black’s popularity. The binaries of attraction-repulsion are powerfully at work in Hill’s novel as fascination would be aggravated because the Woman in black is seen as oddity or monstrous being, summoning the feeling that the grotesque is stimulating. Repulsion on the other hand is provoked because the woman in black, in one way or another, goes beyond her female role and enters in realm which is not suitable or apposite for her. So the woman in black is somewhere in amid situation as she intensely admits that she is a liminal figure whose facade generates psychological agony when she forces an encounter with something that lies at the border of understanding. Even though Kipps attempts to overlook or dessert the threat, he is still bond to believe and accept that something ominous gets stimulated by her appearance: I was trying to make light of something that we both knew was gravely serious, trying to dismiss as insignificant, and perhaps even nonexistent, something that affected us both as deeply as any other experience we had undergone in our lives, for it took us to the very edge of the horizon where life and death meet together. Additionally, Jennet and her ghost thrust under the category of being abject figures and their bodies show signs of ‘terrible wasting’ and ‘ravages of the flesh’ (Hill 1983:49). The breathing and ghostly Nathaniel’s mother is contaminated and repulsive and for that reason needs to be barred, or pressed to the margins. The dirt or the filth that clips to her feminine body makes her presence uncanny by defiling the so-called cultured and civilised society she inhibits. Being a spectre figure she is ghastly and dreadful and complies with the abject desires by causing the harm and bereavement to children. Kristeva’s theories of the abject not-I or Other contends that civilised society often fails to recognise and identify the uncivilised Other as part of itself. Her elucidation of abjection, as manifest in the maternal body (5), would imply a sombre reading of The Woman in Black. In the light of holocaust history, Kristeva’s theories entail that barbaric longings on a massive scale can no more be denied. The potentiality of similar barbaric behaviour in us creates a sense of terror at the appearances of the ghost of the woman in black. The Woman in Black is set mainly during the 1860s when patriarchal society treated women as a commodity and exposes hypocrisy of Victorians concerning the unmarried mother, and tactfully explores the quasi-Victorian morals propagated in the 1980s, during the first term of a Conservative right-wing government. There was a disparity between two main sets of society: men and women. The male sex was seen as one who governed and ruled society and in order to maintain their high position, they established a social code for women, who were clearly seen as the weaker gender and only had limited rights. Men provided for their families, protected them against the evils of daily life and had rights. During early 1980s all political ideas of larger or smaller authorities which alleged to define the family were paradoxical. It became increasingly litigious to see the society’s cultural assessment about what might comprise a family and which roles its members should perform. This argument further unavoidably affected the base of femininity and maternity as women since ages and even now is the primary caretakers for children. This debate and controversy about the nature of the family necessarily influenced foundations of femininity and maternity because women have been, and often still are, the principal carers for children. Women with illegitimate or illicit children were often sweated workers, servants or factory hands, with few resources to support a family on their own. These women in short were paralysed without any source to live a life of independence. These unmarried women thus had no prospect to nourish their children, so they had to choose between two evils; either execute the infant and carry on with their lives (possibly with a sense of remorse) or turn to prostitution in order to be able to sustain their family. Similarly in the novel The Woman in Black, Jennet Humfrye (the eponymous woman in black) is one such victim of patriarchal society. The legend of the woman in black states that in her youth she had a child out of wedlock and in an effort to cover it up she left the child with her sister and denied her maternity. Realizing she could no longer bear to be apart from her offspring, the woman demanded her maternal rights be reinstated. Barbara Creed brings into play Kristeva’s concept of the mother of the semiotic chora and takes it a step further in her essay “Horror and the Monstrous-Feminine: An Imaginary Abjection”. According to her, mother’s relationship to the child is never normal and is always awkward as she doesn’t consent him/her to get separated from her. She desires her offspring to validate her own subsistence and to maintain some kind of relation to the Symbolic, from which she has efficiently been excluded. It is her helplessness and negation to let the child go that makes her treacherous and the ‘bad’ mother as is deeply evident in the woman in black. She became rebellious without much botheration about society as it’s unlawful to have an illegitimate child. Her sister is a married woman and it will be good for both (the baby and the jennet) to live separately from one another. As illegitimacy can be traced to the holy bible as- ‘one of illegitimate birth shall not enter the assembly of the lord, even to the tenth generation; none of his descendants shall enter the assembly of the lord.'(Deuteronomy, 23:2) Illegitimate children had no inheritance rights and were second- class citizens. So no matter what they preferred, they ended up as a fallen woman. The attraction or charm that these women embrace for the Victorians poured in part from her deviation from the nineteenth-century view of ideal womanhood. The ‘angel of the house’ or the ideal Victorian woman was named or identified by her role within the house as the family performed as a haven or shelter for the conservation of conventional, ethical and sacred ideals. Female delinquency and transgression were defined mostly by how far a woman moved away or digressed from the Victorian impression of idealized womanhood and less by the misdeed perpetrated. Unfortunately, society pictured these women as fallen and as ethically and socially crooked, they were, in reality, sufferers of male dominion and seduction. The qualities allocated by Victorian culture to the ideal female were humbleness, virtuousness, purity, timidity, gentleness, self-sacrifice, submissive, tenderness, patience, modesty, passivity, endurance and altruism and men were correlated with public realm, with the wielding of power. The attributes associated with women were private and internal, their realm being the house and the family and conversely, men’s sphere included eccentricity, ego, hierarchy, ability, power, hegemony, production, responsibility, ambition and purpose. The middle-class Victorian woman was to have no aspiration other than to gratify others and care for her family. According to the Victorian ideal, Auerbach remarks: ”the only woman worthy of worship was to be a monument of selflessness, with no existence beyond the loving influence she exuded as daughter, wife, and mother” (qtd in Women and Evil by Nel Noddings, 80). The nineteenth century women inhabited a position of duality as she was either Magdalene or Madonna, ruined or pure, foreign or familiar. The fallen woman was described chiefly by her deviation from the ideal Victorian woman image who was passionless, virtuous, na??ve, innocent, docile and self-sacrificing within this cultural paradigm. On the contrary note, the woman who disregarded the idealized notion of womanhood, whether by sexual wrongdoing or illicit act, was perceived as abnormal and strange. She represented a disturbing anomaly that both repelled and fascinated the Victorians and it is this sense of repulsion and attraction which makes it an abject figure. The term fallen woman in Victorian culture pertains to those feminine identities who were prostitutes, unmarried women interested in sexual relations with men, preys to seduction, adulteresses, as well as antisocial or criminal lower-class women. Acton’s portrayal of women incorporates women as ‘Proper’ Feminine and ‘Improper’ Feminine. Acton structures ‘proper’, normal femininity as passionless and passive. A ‘modest’ woman, ‘as a general rule’seldom desires any sexual gratification for herself'[and] submits to her husband’s embraces’principally to gratify him'[and] for the desire of maternity’ (The ‘Improper Feminine’ by Lyn Pykett, 15-16 ). On the other hand, active and vigorous sexual feeling represents masculinity, or an abnormal ‘improper’ femininity. Women are either non-sexual, or they are pansexual, wicked, madwomen, or prostitutes. Thus Acton’s representation attributes the ‘proper’ feminine to be domestic ideal or angel in the house; the madona; the keeper of the domestic temple; innocence; asexuality; self abnegation; devotion to duty; lack of legal identity; victim and ‘improper feminine as demon or wild animal; a whore; a subversive threat to the family; threateningly sexual; pervaded by feeling; knowing; self- assertive; desiring and actively pleasure seeking; pursuing self- fulfilment and self- identity; independent; enslaver; and victimiser or predator. Moreover, the fallen woman was frequently portrayed in the iconography of the time as essentially ‘falling.’ In 1858 Augustus Egg, the renowned Victorian artist expounded his trilogy of the fallen woman in his paintings entitled: Misfortune, Prayer, and Despair at the Royal Academy in London. The three paintings epitomize the fallen woman, opening with a demonstration of the treacherous wife stretching out in a prone position at her husband’s feet in Misfortune. Next the offspring of the fallen woman are pleading for their lost mother in the painting Prayer. Finally, Egg portrays the fallen woman as looking at the river in the painting Despair. The exhibition included the following descriptive narrative: ‘August the 4th. Have just heard that B’has been dead more than a fortnight, so his poor children have now lost both parents. I hear she was seen on Friday last near the Strand, evidently without a place to lay her head. What a fall hers has been!’ (Woman and the Demon: The Life of a Victorian Myth by Nina Auerbach) Being considered as a moral threat she was isolated from society by stigmatization and was time and again physically secluded from the gaze of reputable society, most commonly through her death. The dishonour she suffered was centred essentially on how far her sexual behaviour departed from the ideal woman who was the model of morality, decency, innocence, timidity and altruism. Consequently, a female ideal was developed called ‘the angel of the house’. This ‘angel of the house’ was the ideal mother and wife and by and large hold the following qualities: passive, compliant, affectionate, generous, ignorant (both sexually and intellectually) and lacking of any opinion. She was the counterpart of ‘fallen woman’ as classically; fallen women were those who essentially by having premarital intercourse (mostly prostitutes) or by adultery literally fell into sin. Even if a fallen woman may have paralleled the same persona of the ideal woman of decent inner virtues of self- sacrifice, altruism and virtuousness she was still admonished on the basis of her lack of sexual purity. Female wrongdoings were perceived through the distorted lens of social tolerability. Woman under certain gender- based customs is expected to follow apposite behaviour, and when a woman diverged from that Victorian construction of the ideal woman, she was disgraced and detached from society. As female misconduct corresponded to a contagion, the antisocial or aberrant woman is eliminated from reputable society as a menace of unevenness to an otherwise balanced society. The society viewed these women as ‘fallen’ and as ethically and socially repellent while the Victorian analysis was that the fallen woman lacked shame and humility but in reality, they were, not sufferers only of male supremacy and seduction, but of a social system that dishonoured and snubbed them for their fall. Stereo-typical figures of women as ‘maternal, emotive, and peace-loving’ are complicated by the ‘monstrous’ woman competent of violence. Jennet Humfrye and her ghost may be interpreted as altered versions of the same woman (a conventional Gothic trope of the doppelganger) or as a pairing which questions the binary image of pure and ‘fallen’ women. Jennet, the eponymous woman in black, opposes the lot of the so-called fallen woman. In her corporeal or bodily form, she snubbed to yield to Victorian patriarchal values by making efforts to repossess her illegitimate child as Arthur asserts, ”girls in the Victorian England had, I knew, often been driven to murder or abandon their misconceived children’ (176). During her lifetime, Jennet snubs to be banished from ‘respectable’ society, often revisiting her sister’s home in an endeavour to retrieve her son. In spectral form, she has absolute autonomy of space and time to seize revenge and thus she repetitively inflicts suffering on families by causing the death of their children. She performs the role that is more often accredited to the wandering male Gothic central character. The woman in black is neither locked in nor locked out, but has the haunting power to ‘lock’ and unlock her son’s nursery in order to torture Kipps. Therefore, she might be deemed as a markedly transgressive Gothic ‘heroine’ as her excessive reprisal knows no compassion, and recognizes no boundaries of place and time. Her ghost is never at peace and the order doesn’t get reinstated even by the concluding pages. Thus, the novel being a popular ghost story questions postulations about women’s ‘natural’ submission and their unconditionally liberal replies to husbands, partners and children. The novel, The Woman in Black being shaped by the social ambience in which it was written promotes that mothers under acute stress or nervous tension have the ability and potential, like any other members of the family, for brutality to children and the novelistic portrayal of the fallen woman confirms her being condemned by society on the basis of her sexual behaviour, regardless of her character and values. The disgrace or dishonour she suffered was based chiefly on how far her sexual behaviour strayed from the ideal woman who was the archetype of uprightness, purity, innocence, simplicity, submissiveness, self-sacrifice and humbleness. The woman in black being a Jennet possessed all the inner qualities of the ideal woman, but her deviation from those set morals made her a fallen women or an abject figure as the novel portrays her as being judged on the basis of her sexual lapses, and she is eventually isolated from the society. Through its forceful rejection of either idealized or derogatory stereotypes of women, this novel belongs to the genre or a tradition of women’s radical Gothic horror. The novel reveals Jennet and the woman in black as different version of the same woman or the binary image of pure and ‘fallen’ woman. The woman in black at the end of the novel becomes the ruling figure, as a ghostly, furious virago. As illustrated by Kipps, her repeated and neurotic abduction of children is full of ‘malevolence and hatred and passionate bitterness’ and it replicates to a petrifying degree what was enforced on her in her earthly existence (158). The ghost in The Woman in Black is never at ease and is constantly in a revengeful state of mind. Even in the concluding pages she is still at large, having ranged without restraint across two centuries, uncontrolled by geographical restrictions and obsessed to bring misery to families persistently. As both Jennet Humfrye and her ghost challenge the double moral standards of Victorian England and the quasi- Victorian family values that promulgated during the early 1980s, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s analysis of binary presentations of the angelic and monstrous female and their interpretation of the primal Oedipal family is significant here. Karen Horney, a German psychoanalyst is of the view that how, instead of responding to each woman as a unique, complex, and for that reason potentially formidable being, men have divided the concept of Woman into pairs of stereotyped antitheses: saint/sinner, virgin/whore, nurturing mother/devouring stepmother, and angel/witch. In patriarchal culture only the helpless; passive rather than active, selfless rather than self- assertive, submissive rather than bold are the women who have been acceptable. Jennet, despite being descended from social grace, is also righteous and considerate, or ‘angelic’. The woman in black, being Jennet’s ghostly counterpart is monstrous, but, simultaneously, cannot be kept outside ‘civilised’ boundaries. As a ‘fallen’ woman, Jennet is expelled from the ‘paradise’ of close connection or bond with her baby son and is forced to go away from her native village. Coming back or re- emerging as woman in black, she bears a resemblance with the mythic figure of Adam’s first wife, Lilith, rather than Eve. Lilith, being faced with either self-effacement and ‘feminine’ stillness or demonization took vengeance against Adam by slaughtering babies. She preferred to be an evil or monster rather than being an Adam’s cipher and Hill’s presentation, for that reason, splits binary and polarised images of women. By the means of Gilbert and Gubar’s interpretation of the fall from Eden, The Woman in Black could be examined as a fundamental Gothic text which refuses to accept the feminine stereotypes by portraying the considerate, maternal temperament of women as blended with the traits which might be depicted as ‘demonic’, freakish, nasty, haggish or witchlike. The novel questions the suppositions about women’s ‘natural’ compliance and their unconditionally liberal reactions to husbands, partners and children. The larger component of abjection is often accustomed to describe marginalized sets and can thus be constricted down to women. Mainly, it is so-called grotesque woman who do not turns out well in meeting the hopes and anticipations of society. Kristeva associates the repression or restraint of the feminine to cruelty and in her essay In Power of Horror, Kristeva’s view on ‘defilement’ refers to that which is outside of the symbolic order and, as women are not part of the male symbolic order, they are linked with defilement. Further, the concept of the uncanny can also operate on these women; they are known or recognizable as they hold traces of women, but they are all together foreign or alien because their behaviour and manner of doing things is un-womanly. Me/not me, inside/outside become existential dichotomies for abjection to proliferate. Cultural exploitation of philosophies of the abject may question the limits of language through the attraction/repulsion of others. The danger or risk of the hyper- feminine becomes real. Leisha Jones observations on this: ‘To spit back the feminine in its adulterated state suggests that soft, wet, empathetic, small, gentle, loving, tentative, pliable, frivolous, flaky, and sweet smelling could kill you.'(Visual culture & Gender) Every human society has a concept of the monstrous-feminine and grotesque women have been an imperative element of literature, as Creed claims, ‘all human societies have a conception of the monstrous- feminine, of what it is about woman that is hocking, terrifying, horrific, abject’ (Horror and the monstrous-feminine: An imaginary abjection by BARBARA CREED) and it is rooted in maternal as abject, mother as the vital agent of castration and for that reason horrifying. These monsters are fabricated and it is primarily the patriarchal traditions and customs that created woman as monsters, as abject figures and still we refuse to acknowledge their genesis, that the strain of the birth of the monstrous woman is the patriarchy. Woman is sent back to that point of ghastly birth, away from the safe and secure space of women, and to the heterosexual marital bed and to the domain of the patriarchy where she is made and remade into a monster but rebuked for being so. ‘Probably no male human being is spared the terrifying shock of threatened castration at the sight of the female genitals’, Freud wrote in his paper, ‘Fetishism’ in 1927. Joseph Campbell, in his book, Primitive Mythology, noted that: . . . there is a motif occurring in certain primitive mythologies, as well as in modern surrealist painting and neurotic dream, which is known to folklore as ‘the toothed vagina” the vagina that castrates. And a counterpart, the other way, is the so-called ‘phallic mother’, a motif perfectly illustrated in the long fingers and nose of the witch. (Horror and the monstrous-feminine: An imaginary abjection by BARBARA CREED) Horror always includes a monstrous other whose existence precipitates a redrawing of the boundaries between human and monster, ego and abject (Monstrous Bodies: Femininity and Agency in Young Adult Horror Fiction by June Pulliam, 10). As Creed (67) assert: ‘Classical mythology also was populated with gendered monsters, many of which were female.’ In Homer’s Odyssey, he explains an encounter with some sirens that can be perceived as grotesque females; they were both hazardous and dazzling creatures who engaged themselves with the tempting of sailors departing by with their bewitching music. Their primary purpose was to bring about a shipwreck and eventually the death of the sailing crew. Further it includes the furies; the goddesses of pain and Circe; the malevolent sorceress who changed men into animals. Creed (67) further offers the case of Medusa: ‘The Medusa, with her ‘evil eye’, head of writhing serpents and lolling tongue, was queen of the pantheon of female monsters; men unfortunate enough to look at her were turned immediately to stone.’ These grotesque females have influenced beyond the classical period; even Dante made use of them in his ‘Inferno’. He portrayed harpies as one with the body of a bird and the head of a woman; living in the infernal wood. The term metaphorically refers to nasty or annoying women who were cruel, vicious and violent. They were personification of the destructive nature of wind who being the agents of punishment abducted and tortured people: Here the repellent Harpies make their nests, […] They have broad wings, a human neck and face, Clawed feet and swollen, feathered bellies; they caw Their lamentations in the eerie trees. (wikepedia) In the novel, Jennet Humfrye is shown as being so attached to her son that she couldn’t bear his separation. She felt so lonely and being an abject figure feels that she is an outsider to the mainstream, or what Kristeva calls a ‘deject’ or ‘ stray’ (8). By definition, she dwells in a zone of loss, absence and desire, since she has not resolved his primeval separation trauma. Undergoing abjection of the self she becomes powerless and incapable to identify with anything in the outside world and locates the site of meaninglessness and impossibility within itself. In Kristeva’s words, ‘There is nothing like the abjection of self to show that all abjection is in fact recognition of want on which any being, meaning language, or desire is founded’ (5). When allowed to visit the house with the condition that she must never tell the boy about herself Jennet’s love grew stronger for her son and she planned on escaping with him. And then, one day, the boy and his nanny were out riding with a pony and trap and there was an accident, and they both drowned. Jennet witnesses the whole thing (hatch, this is a horror story), wracked by grief and anger, died a slow death from wasting disease only to return in haunted, demented ghost form. The hate, remorse and need for revenge grew as she blamed her sister for her son’s death and even after her death her soul is agitated and people began to catch a glimpse of her ghostly appearances. Each time she is seen, something evil happens and a child dies, either by illness or in a terrible accident as the veiled spirit is claiming the town’s children one by one. As discussed above, Kristeva makes a distinction between two types of mothers; the first category is seen as the positive mother and the other being the abject mother. Accordingly, Jennet at first in the novel is an ideal woman, an ideal mother who instead of so many adversities and hardships was not willing to quit. She gave birth to her baby knowing that he was illegitimate. She stood as tall as an oak against all the odds of the society and thus emerges as an ideal woman. But after her son’s death she ultimately turns into ‘other’ being; a woman who is selfish, cruel and egocentric and who hates and blames everyone for his son’s death. Her soul even after her death is not at peace and when she ultimately becomes a ghost she starts taking her revenge from the society by killing other women’s children. Although Jennet does not gain anything from killing innocent children but still she does it, because her thirst for revenge is towering and took over her whole being both after his death and into eternity. She yearns to retaliate and avenge her dead child and even kills Arthur’s child and wife: ‘I had seen the ghost of Jennet Humfrye and she had her revenge’. Her brutal acts very much justifies that she is no more an ideal woman and has ultimately turned into a fallen woman, who is merciless, ruthless, selfish, brutal, monstrous, heartless and a killing machine. As one of the locals tells Kipps, ‘Whenever she is seen, a child dies’ and this was what everyone has to say about her. It becomes unbelievable that the woman who once struggled against every accusation of the society for her son is now taking away the lives of innocent children. Being a mother herself she has lost all the sense of motherhood and all her inhuman actions have made her an abject mother. According to Susan Hill, the tenaciousness of Humfrye’s hatred is part of what makes the novel so gripping: ‘A fictional ghost has to have a raison d’etre otherwise it is pointless and a pointless ghost is the stuff of all the boring stories about veiled ladies endlessly drifting through walls and headless horsemen’for no good reason, to no purpose. My ghost cannot let go of her grief or her desire for revenge, she has to go on extracting it” (GCSE English teacher posted on December 9, 2013 ‘Some quotes about the woman in black) Even when Kipps returns home, the woman takes her revenge upon him by causing the death of his young wife and infant son. Since then Kipps has remarried and has become stepfather to his new wife’s children, yet he has not been able to forget or disregard the past haunting events and tragedy caused by the woman in black. Jennet even after her death is not at peace and is not at the end of her war with the orthodox society; her being animate may not affect the lives of people around her as much as it does after her death. As Julia Kristeva’s asserts that ‘the corpse, seen without God and outside of science, is the utmost of abjection. It is death infecting life.’ It is something rejected from which one does not part, from which one does not protect oneself as from an object. She is not alien to this place and its people and everybody is afraid of her presence as she is still present at every corner of the town. Once discarded from her motherly rights over her son she considers everyone as her enemy. She is taking revenge from everybody who directly or indirectly is responsible for her miseries. The novel The Woman in Black is jam-packed with such incidents which undoubtedly depicts the transformation of an ideal mother into the fallen or abject mother, ‘Her face, in its extreme pallor, her eyes, sunken but unnaturally bright, were burning with the concentration of passionate emotion which was within her and which streamed from her’ (5.24). Her eyes are filled with fire of hatred and vengeance. When Arthur encounters a malevolent being that manifests in the form of an enigmatic spectral figure- the woman in black at the funeral of Mrs. Drablow, he presumes that she is just a woman who is in very ailing physical condition and felt a strange fear when he looked into her eyes which even haunted him in his dreams: [A]lthough I did not stare, even the swift glance I took of the woman showed me enough to recognize that she was suffering from some terrible wasting disease, for not only was she extremely pale, even more than a contrast with the blackness of her garments could account for, but the skin and, it seemed, only the thinnest layer of flesh was tautly stretched and strained across her bones, so that it gleamed with a curious, blue-white sheen, and her eyes seemed sunken back into her head. Even the so proudly rational Arthur has trouble keeping track of what’s what when he’s wandering around Eel Marsh House as the strange sounds emanate from a securely locked room; a door that Kipps has been unable to move is found standing open; an empty rocking chair strangely begins rocking. What bothers and agitates Kipps most, though, is that he is confident that some of the screams are those of a young children and as the strange events multiply, Kipps becomes obsessed with trying to unravel the story of Eel Marsh House and of the woman in black. Here he comprehends that there is a ghost chasing him and that he is always surrounded by a strange presence. At Eel Marsh House he is not alone, a dead one (Abject) is also living there: ‘But what was “real”? At that moment I began to doubt my own reality.'(154). The woman in black doesn’t just inflict psychological injury; she also muddled up all stuff. She is the victim of patriarchal society- a society which forced her to shun all the womanly attributes which were very much present in her. She is now a fallen woman, a ghost, who is there to haunt, to scare and to kill innocent people: ‘It was in a state of disarray as might have been caused by a gang of robbers, bent on mad, senseless destruction.’ (11.51). The vision or image of her dying son got to be violent stuff on her old psyche that she never forgave the Drablows for the death of her son, and she declared vengeance on them and on everyone who somewhere directly or indirectly responsible for her misfortune as it has disturbed her to such an extent that she crossed the womanly attribute and became un-womanly, ” From that day Jennet Humfrye began to go mad’ (11.111). But’we just have to point out’Arthur too watched his child dying in a horrible accident and managed not to go crazy. So what’s the difference? Even after his son’s and wife’s death Arthur never loses his senses. All he wanted was not to talk about the dead, because he had a horrible experience in past when he encountered an abject. It is basically because women were among the underprivileged oppressed section of society and thus according to Kristeva were more prone to be an abject. Jennet was also the victim of that very society which made her insane, ”Mad with grief and mad with anger and a desire for revenge’ (11.113). She wants everyone to suffer and endure the same and she did it by killing the innocent and blameless kids of the poor people. Being ‘Abject’ mother now, she wants that people should realise and become conscious of the pain which she felt at her son’s death. Her ruthless and unforgiving instinct was making things really horrible and miserable around her. She is not only furious or mad but flaming with the fire of revenge and nobody wants to discuss her or talk about her as they believe that she might be listening to their talks. She wants them to experience the same pain by watching their own children dying as once she herself saw the sad accident of her son. It’s not just betrayal that has made the woman in black the way she it, it’s in reality heartbreak. Sure, the accident was no one’s fault’but she’s desperate to blame anyone, and so she blames her entire community. Jennet gets no sympathy while she was alive, and thus reciprocates by showing no kindness to others when she comes back to haunt the town. To her that was not betrayal or something unreasonable in fact they’re just getting what they deserve. The woman in black wants to make someone, anyone pay for what she’s been through and she wants it so badly that it leaves a mark on the whole house. Moreover, that the intensity of her grief and distress together with her pent-up hatred and desire for revenge permeated the air all around. The reason behind her wickedness that led her to take away other women’s children is that she had lost her own. Her individual loss and bitterness can be understandable but not forgivable. The Woman in Black thus demonstrate in its own way how a complex concept like abjection can be used to describe behaviour and relationships between individuals. The theme is especially suitable to apply on the Victorian age. As already mentioned in the introduction, Victorian women were considered to be inferior to men, thus one could argue that, in the nineteenth century, the entire female sex was already abject. Improperness of men was often neglected, especially when it came to sexual behaviour, because society tended to turn a blind eye to the debauchery of the male population. Women were less fortunate; even the slightest error could seal their fate and turn them into fallen women, making them perfect subjects for abjection. The encounter with the abject is a familiar theme in all Gothic texts as they concern with those gruesome and ghastly moments in life when a character is psychologically tattered asunder. Through her proficient use of the concept of abjection, Hill stimulates the very best of the Gothic genre and provides readers a pleasing experience, one that has made The Woman in Black a long- lasting favourite. In conclusion, whilst exploiting popular Gothic tropes which in part explain its popularity, The Woman in Black is in dialogue with contemporary rhetoric about families. It explores social anxieties and apprehensions associated with hierarchies of authority in families, legal responsibility, the isolation of unmarried mothers and the rights of parents or those in loco parentis. Consequently, the novel contributes to new and less idealised perceptions about women and women as mothers. As Susanna Clap examines, ‘Like all really good ghost stories The Woman in Black is grounded not in horror but in human pain and loss.’ In this respect, Hill’s novel belongs to a tradition of women’s radical Gothic running from Ann Radcliffe and Mary Shelley, through the Bront??s and Charlotte Gilman Perkins, to Christina Stead, Sylvia Plath and Angela Carter.

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woman in black essay

Our GCSE Drama group went to see ‘The Woman In Black’ at the Fortune Theatre, London on the 24 th March 2009. The play is written by Stephen Mallatratt and the performance was put on by PW Productions. It is set in the early 20 th century, on the eerie marshes of the east coast.

The main concept that the audience have to immediately realise, is that ‘The Woman In Black’ is a play within a play, so there are only two actors: Arthur Kipps, played by Andrew Jarvis and a young actor who is not given a name, played by Timothy Watson.

As the play begins, the audience learn that Mr Kipps is a troubled, old man who has had to deal with a terrifying experience which he cannot forget. He believes that if he can tell his family the story, it will be laid to rest. Mr Kipps hires a small, forgotten theatre in which to tell his story, as well as a young actor to help him in how to tell it.

However, it soon becomes clear that Mr Kipps has never acted before, so in order to tell the story, the young actor and Mr Kipps switch roles. Mr Kipps uses multirole to play all the different characters he has met. This is essential because he is the one that has actually met them, so can portray their behaviour accurately. Multirole is a method created by Bertolt Brecht which enables the actor to detach themselves from the play and the character. It is important in The Woman In Black, because it is a constant reminder of the use of metatheatre. Multirole turns the play from a dull recital to an incredible, chilling performance, because the audience can see what each character looks like, how they react and how they feel.

Key Moments

There were several key moments in the play:

Meeting each of the characters, are all key moments in the play because as the young Mr Kipps mentioned that he was visiting due to the death of Alice Drablow, there was an immediate change in all of the locals’ behaviour. It was a sharp contrast from being friendly and welcoming, to becoming hesitant, twitchy and distant. This created tension because the audience, along with Mr Kipps, do not understand the sudden unwelcome behaviour.
The funeral of Alice Drablow is essential, for the Woman in Black appears for the first time. She walks out of the audience, which is scary and unexpected so it makes the audience jump. There was very good energy and interaction between Jerome and Mr Kipps which made Jerome’s terror of the Woman believable. It also built up more tension when we discover that it was only Mr Kipps who could see her.
The play includes many traditional haunted elements to make the story more ghostly, such as Alice Drablow’s home, Eel Marsh House. It is old, isolated and situated on a cliff so it fulfilled the audience’s expectation. The outline of the house was projected onto the gauze, and the fact that Arthur Kipps did not go straight into the house, increased suspense.

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These key moments build up to the climax of the play, where Kipps is alone in the house. He can hear strange, sinister noises but has no idea where they are coming from. He returns to a door which previously, he could not open yet he is curious of what is behind it. The fact that he keeps returning to the door but nothing happens creates an anti-climax because the audience know there must be something behind it, but they do not know what. However, when he tries again the door swings open violently. This was very shocking for the audience, many of who reacted with screams. This scene definitely had the most suspense, for the audience were on the edge of their seats, waiting for the Woman in Black to jump out at any moment.
Young Actor, also plays: the Young Mr Kipps
Arthur Kipps, also plays: Tomes, the solicitor’s clerk,

Bentley, the solicitor,

Samuel Dailey, a local businessman,

Pub landlord,

Jerome, a local man,

Keckwick, pony and trap driver.

Alice Drablow, the deceased woman
Jennet Humfrye, Alice’s sister and the Woman In Black
Nathaniel Humfrye, Jennet’s son, who was adopted by

Alice and her husband due to the fact that he was illegitimate.

Use of Space and Set

Both actors used the performance space well, for they made sure that they projected and were visible to the whole audience. At one point, the Young Actor climbed across the scaffolding, so they definitely used all the space available.

Also, the Woman in Black and the Young Actor used the aisles in the audience. This was not only shocking and scary, but it made the audience feel included and absorbed into the play.

The stage was relatively small and sloped downwards. There was a gauze across the stage and this was very effective, for when the young Arthur Kipps went through the door, the light changed to show a child’s bedroom behind the gauze, which the audience could not see before.

There were many different props used, however the set was a constant reminder that it was a play within a play, and that they were really in a theatre. Things that suggested this were the buckets on the floor, which were there because there was a leak in the theatre, and a clothes rail with various costumes on it.

In addition to this, the actors used the props to create all the different locations. For example, the baskets and chair were placed on the stage in a square formation when Kipps was travelling on the train. Whenever he changed stations, he would swap and sit on a different basket, which made the narration seem more realistic.

The basket, chair and cushions were also used as a bed and the basket was used for the pony and trap. This was very effective, because Arthur Kipps was playing Keckwick, the driver and the Young Actor was playing Mr Kipps, They were both sat on the basket and jolted up and down as though they were travelling on bumpy ground. This made it very believable, especially when Keckwick pulled on the reigns and they both jolted backwards. The tight unison made it clear that it had taken a lot of rehearsal.

The fact that the Fortune Theatre looked old and forgotten from the outside, meant that the mood of the play was immediately presented to the audience. This theme was continued inside the theatre through tattered curtains and fabric covering the bottom of the stage. This made the audience feel included in the play.

Semiotics and Period

The play is set in the Victorian/Edwardian period and this is shown through the use of semiotics. The lighting is dark in many parts, lit only by candlelight which adds to the ghostly mood. Also, the Special FX used such as the pony and trap show that the play is not set in modern times. The Special FX also have the intention of helping the play come alive, for they are a powerful influence on the atmosphere of the play.

The time period was also shown when, through the use of gauze, the audience was able to see Nathaniel Humfrye’s bedroom. When the cupboard was opened, it revealed old-fashioned toys which would have been incredibly popular in the Victorian times.

The costumes were slightly more modern, long coats and suits, and I think this is a reminder that they are re-enacting the story, so times have changed since then. Kipps uses different, simple costumes, such as a hat or glasses, when he is multi-rolling which helps the audience follow the complicated plot. Changing costumes in front of the audience, is another method developed by Bertolt Brecht, and ensures that the audience are not too attached to the characters by reminding them that it is simply an actor, playing a character.

The sound used in the pub was very effective, for it was a dull murmur of people talking, but as soon as Alice Drablow’s name was mentioned, it went silent. This is guaranteed to create tension because there is a sudden contrast between the level of sound in the scene.

I think that the historical influence is very important to the plot, for it revolves around a son being born out of wedlock. Nowadays, that wouldn’t be a problem, however in those times it could lead to ostracism. This is why Jennet Humfrye was forced to give up her son, which eventually led to her becoming the Woman in Black.

The semiotics also showed different locations in the play. For example, the dark lighting and Special FX of the howling wind, and crashing waves clearly conveyed the idea that the characters were outside in dreadful conditions at night.

Mood and Atmosphere

As soon as you walked into the theatre, there was a tense atmosphere, for it was dimly lit and the stage looked tattered and forgotten. We were all nervously excited, for we knew that the play was a ghost story.

The different locations in the play are deliberately chosen to add to the sinister mood, such as the moors and marshes, the empty, narrow streets and the foggy graveyard. They are all associated with ghost stories, so make the play seem scarier for the audience.

The semiotics add to the atmosphere because everything seems much scarier when the only source of light is a candle. It keeps everyone alert and aware, because nobody knows what is going to happen next. The black colours worn by the woman, as well as the dark lighting made everything look intimidating, and they were a symbol of death and grief.

The atmosphere was very intense, and was kept this way because neither of the actors broke focus at all. The audience was clearly engaged by the performance, and anticipating the next twist in the plot. As you looked round, people were either cowering in their seats or sat alert waiting for a surprise.

I thoroughly enjoyed the play, and I thought it definitely fulfilled my expectations. It was scarier than I thought it was going to be, and think that was due to the unpredictability of the plot, as well as the use of lighting and Special FX. The sound of the pony and trap made it seem as though the horse was galloping past you, which made you feel like part of the story.

I particularly liked the ending, when there is a grim realisation that the Young Actor is in trouble, for he could see the Woman In Black. He had assumed that Mr Kipps had hired another actor to play her, but after thanking him for it, there is a strong, emotional connection between the two as the horror of what is going to happen dawns on them. It is also effective because the audience know what is going to happen, but the play ends on a cliffhanger, leaving it up to the audience to decide what happened next.

I also thought the use of props was very effective, because they were all simple, everyday objects but were used in different positions and combinations to show many other objects. They were also an easy reminder that it was a play within a play, which the audience had to keep reminding themselves of.

If I was the director of the play, I would introduce the character of the Woman In Black later on in the play, for I think the audience saw her two early. Lots of tension could have been built up by just getting fleeting glances of her, which not everybody would see. It would make her character seem more mysterious and haunting for the audience.

Document Details

Word Count 2543
Page Count 5
Subject Drama

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Gothic Conventions in ‘the Woman in Black’

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I was 1 of thousands who traveled to Texas for the eclipse. Here's how it went

I first heard about the Great American Eclipse from my now husband , Dave, three years ago. He told me he was absolutely, without a doubt going to see the eclipse in 2024, because the last one had changed his life.

He described what really happened once the moon fully blocked the sun’s light back in 2017: The sky grew dark. The air cold. To him, it felt like being on another planet entirely. While he stood there in a field in rural Tennessee, the strangers around him began to cheer. “It’s like, you’re not even human anymore,” he said about witnessing totality firsthand.

Eclipse comes from the Greek word for “abandonment,” because for a few minutes, it’s as if the sun leaves us, and something strange and magical takes its place.

Dave's experience lasted for three whole minutes before life returned to normal — but onlookers everywhere felt like they had been changed for good. They were aware of having passed through a once-in-a-lifetime experience. Actually, a once-in-a-universe one.

One that I, stupidly, missed out on because I was too cheap to pay for an overpriced flight to Greenville, South Carolina, and too nervous to take yet another day off from my first job. Seeing that 2017 partial eclipse from downtown Manhattan, I realized that my human concerns got in the way of a celestial breakthrough. After that very human error, I vowed I would see an eclipse eventually. Next time, I would get my chance in 2024.

The eclipse on April 8 was notable for a few reasons. For one, it cut across many major metropolitan areas, from Mazatlan, Texas through Dallas, all the way up to Maine and Montreal. Timing matters, too: This eclipse hit North America on a day with clear weather and it’s the last one the contiguous U.S. will see until 2043.

This eclipse stands to be an even more powerful experience than the last. “This one will be even longer, with more than four minutes of darkness along much of the path of totality,” says Catherine Pilachowski, the Kirkwood Chair in Astronomy at Indiana University Bloomington.

“A total eclipse is a deeply moving experience — it's a sense of connection to nature, to the universe, in a way we don’t often experience,” she says, echoing Dave’s words.

But what is an eclipse, and why is this one special enough to send millions in search of a few minutes in the dark?

“Eclipses occur when the moon and sun appear to be the same size and line up in the sky,” Dr. Anita Cochran of UT Austin says. The alignment of the sun, earth and moon is a “complex dance,” she says, given their elliptical patterns. Actual eclipses aren’t uncommon and occur multiple times a year, though solar eclipses happen less frequently. The trouble is that most eclipses occur over the ocean and their paths of totality are very small.

“You get really lucky when you get into the path,” Cochran says of the small but populous swath of America that will have front-row seats to the show.

Astrologer Lisa Stardust has a different take. She warns that astrologers recommend staying far away from the path of totality, since “eclipses can bring intense emotions and secrets to the surface, causing people to act out or behave unpredictably.”

I decided that was a risk I would take, which was good, because Dave and I planned to travel to the epicenter of it all: Texas. Historically, Texas is the state along the eclipse path with the lowest cloud cover this time of year. Because of the weather conditions, an estimated 5 million people would travel to the state to see the eclipse.

John Beckman, who traveled to Montana to witness the eclipse in 2017, drove across the country from California to Texas this year to meet a group of 20 family members and friends.

“It’s really hard to get through to people that you’re going cross country for three minutes (of eclipse),” he says.

A whole year prior to the eclipse, we solidified our plan to hit the road. We would meet up with Dave's cousins, who live in Austin, and drive to a camp site in Llano, Texas, right at the center of the eclipse path. There, over 120 people from around the wold — from Melbourne to Colorado — would convene to witness the cosmic event together.

In the months leading up to April 8, we met the fellow travelers on Zoom calls. We learned who would be bringing telescopes and tents, and signed up for potlucks and Peruvian fire rituals (yes, really).

Meanwhile, the people of Llano, Texas — a town of 2,000 — prepared for an influx of eclipse chasers just like us. Michelle Long Hagli, the owner of Brown Chicken Brown Cow Ranch, warned us to have supplies. At times, I couldn’t tell if we were preparing for a natural phenomenon or disaster.

Public notes from the mayor of Llano seemed to take on the same tone of resignation and anticipation as Michelle. She advised townspeople to have “ two weeks of supplies” secured by April 1, and put it this way in a poetic Facebook post to her constituents: “We could not stop this wave of eclipse watchers from coming here to Llano even if we wanted to, so we will make the best of it. And even though it will be a boost for the economy, it will be like trying to get a drink out of a fire hose.”

Diana Stewart, a Llanite who owns a local tamale business, said, days before the eclipse, “We’re not sure what to expect. We don’t know if we should prepare for the masses, or if it will be similar to a Christmas holiday.” She adds generally, she and her neighbors are “excited,” saying, “We think this will be a great time to show everyone how beautiful and unique our little town is.”

As we prepared (and as I watched airfare rates nearly triple) I started to relax and dream of totality in a small Texas town.

Last eclipse, I was so worried with my human concerns I missed out on something great. This eclipse, I was so sure of my human plans that I forgot about the other key player: The sky. It turns out that weather doesn't care for even the best-laid plans.

The weekend before the eclipse, I began to panic at the sight of the weather forecast. Clouds . I studied the forecast so much, I felt like I had accrued enough credits for a meteorology minor. I learned the difference between cloud types: High, cirrus clouds were good; it meant the sun could poke through. Cumulus clouds, which cover the sky like a blanket, foretold total eclipse doom. Still, as I looked at chart after chart, it felt a bit like reading tea leaves. How were we to know until Monday at 1:35 CT?

Dave, forever calm, kept telling me to close the computer and my multiple browser tabs for “Texas weather eclipse.”

All the local Texans I spoke to, including our family, said not to bother: Texas weather changes on a dime. Still, I wanted certainty that this trip would be worth the trek.

Looking at cloud cover blanketing Texas, I entertained canceling the whole trip and going to Alexandria Bay, New York, where the forecast appeared to be clearer. There, I could watch the eclipse on the St. Lawrence River.

But Dave and had a plan, and we would stick to it, whether or not we had a pact with the sky.

Our flight to Austin from Newark on April 6 was nearly full. Just before takeoff, the flight attendant got on the loudspeaker and asked, “How many of you are going to see the eclipse?” Passengers cheered as if it were a sporting event, myself included.

While boarding the plane, I realized this trip, and the weather, hadn’t just consumed me — it had consumed nearly everyone else as well.

A family of five boarded ahead of us. The dad, wide-eyed, said his friends told him about the 2017 eclipse, and he couldn’t miss out on this one, so he was bringing the whole family along. His son chimed in saying it was going to be cloudy, but they all seemed determined to have a good time despite the weather.

One of the sons chimed in with “Spain 2026.” It was an invocation I heard often on my eclipse Facebook groups, calling to the next visible total solar eclipse. As if to say: we might not have Texas, but we’ll always have Spain.

I asked a woman ahead of me if she was traveling to see the eclipse. “More like not going to see it,” she said. She went on to compare the eclipse to her wedding night: “Dark and cloudy.”

The flight attendant warned me as I left. She said her friend was from Llano, where we were headed — and that it was going to be mobbed. I decided not to text my mom that.

Once we landed in Austin, Dave’s cousin, Brian, and his partner Erika picked us up from the airport. On Sunday morning, we left for the campsite. Michelle Long Hagli, who bought the land with her husband after the pandemic, greeted us with a huge hello, wearing the eclipse shirts she had designed for the occasion. On it was a brown chicken and a cow donning eclipse glasses.

My first impression of Brown Chicken Brown Cow Ranch is that it smells much better than I thought a ranch ever could. The bluebells has blossomed, and so did a sense of excitement among everyone we passed. What followed was a slideshow of Texas’ greatest hits: We ate barbecue from Cooper’s, went to a big, empty bar in downtown Llano, met four longhorn cows and hiked Enchanted Rock. Yes, it was enchanted (and also steep).

By night, we could see the stars. The evening before the eclipse, we woke up in the dark to a clear night sky.

The next day, those skies had changed to gray. Still, Michelle was cheery when I asked if she ever worried about the weather. She said at 56, she had lived long enough to stop worrying about things out of her control. Anyway, she said, “it was all a gift from God.”

By then, I was so happy in the Texas landscape that I started to believe she was right.

We had pancakes, then we participated in a shamanic ritual meant to situate ourselves as one with the planet and harness the manifesting powers of the eclipse. Obviously, I prayed for a clear sky. As we were directed us to pray toward the sun, the sun suddnely broke through the clouds.

Then came the crucial decision that would determine our entire eclipse experience: The question of whether to stay put or go elsewhere. To play the cards we had, or drive until we found a better deck.

Dave, who reads weather maps for fun, made the call. We would go west for an hour where it seemed less cloudy — 25% coverage to Llano’s 75% — and totality still stretched for over three minutes.

Still, I was worried. What if we left, and the conditions were clearer back at BCBC Ranch? What if we encountered traffic and missed it all? I thanked myself for marrying someone so decisive. Dave dismissed my worries and we hit the road.

We took a nearly empty stretch of Road 171 westward toward Brady, before stopping in the small community of Voca. The only structure we could see was a vineyard (closed) and a post office (also closed). The post office parking lot was filled with about 10 cars and plenty telescopes — it was clear that others were waiting in anticipation.

We parked and set up our chairs in a field of bluebonnets. Together, all us strangers waited patiently. Many had waiting for years, but the last few minutes leading up to the eclipse felt the longest.

The other onlookers were seemingly in this tiny town on accident. Vice, Texas (population: 50), was not the plan, but the travelers I met and spoke to had made the same calculations that Dave and I had. All except Shirlene Miller, the woman whose field we congregated next to. She moved to Voca for her husband, who was born and raised there. At 84, she told me this was her last chance at an eclipse. I hoped the clouds would clear for her. And, ok , for me, too.

The moon started its journey into the sun’s path at 12:15 and would reach totality at 1:35. I felt like I was at a championship game and the teams were tied, only there was no coaching, no reason, nothing that could be done. Low clouds started to gather. For about 15 minutes, the sun was gone.

Then, like some sort of cosmic red carpet, a pathway opened between the clouds. It looked like a path made for the sun to travel — and travel it did. We all looked up, glasses on. Everything but the sun was dark. We watched as the sun went from a crescent to a sliver. Then, it was gone.

I took off my glasses and saw it: totality. The moon blocking the sun. This is what no one else could see outside the path of totality.

Here is where I get to the part that's almost impossible to express. Now that I've experienced a total solar eclipse, I know that no video, photo or description will do it justice.

The best thing I can say is to travel in 2026 to see the next total eclipse yourself. All words and video will fail you in the meantime.

Because you’re curious, I’ll try my best to describe the experience. It is like a third sun or moon you never knew before coming out to introduce itself, and you wondered how you missed it this whole time. It’s like the eye of God coming out to blink. It’s like the clock turning to 1/1/2000 and standing in a crowd, trying to make sense of time and the universe and our place in it. It’s feeling that not only are the sun, moon and earth aligned but somehow, you are too.

It was enough to make me literally fall to my knees.

This is actually what happened. The moon covered the sun and the world grew dark. Venus and Mercury were visible in the dusk-like sky. People cheered and shouted (fine, people being me). Simply put, it was so incredibly cool.

Perhaps Brian put it best when he said, “I get why people 1000 years ago were terrified. It gets dark out, and you look up and there’s a black circle?”

Then it was over, the vista was gone. I put my eclipse glasses back on, and realized I couldn’t get back that magical moment if I tried. If I tried, I'd quite literally go blind.

The sky lightened. The birds began chirping again — I didn’t realize how silent it had become. We all looked back at each other in awe.

We did it. With plenty of planning and a lot of luck, we actually accomplished what we had come to Texas to see.

I’m still processing the eclipse and processing the lessons it has for me. Is there a way to make sense of luck? Does it just happen? Or does luck happen by putting yourself in its path, and making sure you’re looking up, ready to marvel at whatever comes your way?

I do know this; I got lucky, and it’s only because I didn’t get in the way of myself. I surrendered to the day — and to Dave — who never worried.

The truth is my worries never mattered. They never had any sway over the clouds. No matter what happened, I was lucky to come along for the ride — lucky for another day under this sun.

My sense of awe and luck was shared with Jay Lawson, an amateur astronomer at the Brown Chicken Brown Cow Ranch, who wore a shirt emblazoned with four eclipses he has seen from 1979 to 2024. It turns out that totality was visible for only 90 seconds at BCBC ranch, but it was still something.

“You plan for years, and it’s done in a few seconds. And all you can think is, ‘When can I see another?’” Lawson said, taking the words right out of my mouth.

It goes without saying: Spain 2026! Dave and I hope to see you there.

Elena Nicolaou is a senior entertainment editor at Today.com, where she covers the latest in TV, pop culture, movies and all things streaming. Previously, she covered culture at Refinery29 and Oprah Daily. Her superpower is matching people up with the perfect book, which she does on her podcast, Blind Date With a Book.

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The Woman in Black

Everything you need for every book you read..

Susan Hill’s The Woman in Black is saturated with references to popular Gothic horror novels. Though written in the mid-1980s rather than the late eighteenth century, The Woman in Black is in many ways a classic Gothic novel—and a love letter to the genre, which spawned emotionally and atmospherically evocative classics such as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein . Through her reliance upon Gothic horror tropes throughout protagonist Arthur Kipps ’s story, Hill is able to fulfill and subvert her readers’ expectations at alternating turns, and ultimately uses the narrative to suggest that though an audience familiar with the genre may be able to intuit what is coming next, true horror often comes from having one’s worst fears confirmed.

Even in moments of happiness throughout the novel, Susan Hill creates an atmosphere of intense foreboding. Such atmospheric dread is a staple of literary horror—and especially of Victorian Gothic literature—and Hill uses it to create an intensifying sense of terror as the story unfolds. At the start of the novel, Arthur is a well-to-do lawyer who lives in a stately country home with his large, happy family. It is Christmas Eve, a time of joy and good tidings; as Arthur celebrates with his wife and stepchildren, though, it becomes clear that he is a man haunted by a painful past. Arthur’s family asks him to share a ghost story, and the full force of Arthur’s dormant trauma suddenly rears its head. Arthur is rattled by the simple, innocent request for a story; as he removes himself from his family and takes a walk outside, memories of the true ghost story he suffered through as a younger man assault him, and he laments that even at Christmastime he cannot escape his pain. This darkness that looms over Arthur in the beginning of the tale—and the retrospective sense of foreboding his reflections create—echoes the beginnings of novels such as The Picture of Dorian Gray , which start off sunnily but disguise a deeper, creeping dread.

Arthur was not always so afflicted by pain and grief—as he recounts the sad tale of the “horror” that assailed him in his youth, he reflects on how naïve, cheerful, and positive he was. After arriving in the insular northeast England town of Crythin Gifford to attend the funeral of a recently deceased client of his law firm, even rumors of the deceased woman’s involvement in a shadowy and horrific slice of local lore do not deter Arthur from his confident, sunny outlook on life. After all, Arthur has a beautiful fiancée, a steady job, and an exciting future awaiting him back in London—he is blind to the turmoil lurking just out of sight, and thus becomes an active participant in inviting grief and pain into his life. The beginning of Arthur’s recollection of his younger self is a nod to the opening pages of Bram Stoker’s Dracula —an 1897 Gothic horror novel considered by many critics to be the epitome of the genre—in which a young English solicitor travels to the home of the ancient, dangerous Count Dracula under the supposition that he will be handling boring legal documents. The young lawyer of course finds himself deep in over his head, pulled into a dark and frightening world of horror and hauntings—very much like a certain Arthur Kipps.

Architecture is an important motif in Gothic horror—from Dracula’s castle to the decaying abode in Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher,” mansions, estates, family graveyards, and even crumbling ruins serve as physical symbols of the emotional or atmospheric conditions within. In The Woman in Black , Susan Hill uses this technique to suffuse Eel Marsh House with an eerie, claustrophobic, isolated sensibility. Cut off from the town of Crythin Gifford by a long causeway traversing a dangerous marsh that floods daily at high tide and is often obscured by sudden fogs and sea mists , Eel Marsh House is emblematic of the isolation Mrs. Drablow—and her sister Jennet —suffered during their lives. Jennet was isolated by the shame of bearing an illegitimate child, and having to relinquish that child to her sister’s care. Alice Drablow was isolated not just by the physical aspects of her home, but by the knowledge that she had caused her sister such great pain—and had been in charge of Nathaniel when he was killed in a terrible accident. When Arthur comes to Eel Marsh House, he finds it in mild disrepair. However, the nursery, the site of Jennet’s most concentrated haunting, is immaculate, suggesting either that Alice Drablow kept the room neat for fear of what her sister’s spirit would do should it be disturbed, or that the veil between worlds is thin enough to allow Jennet to influence the physical layout of the room as well as its psychological, emotional atmosphere.

Some of the most frightening scenes of the novel relate directly to the physical layout of Eel Marsh House. A bump in the night, a door suddenly ajar as if of its own volition, an empty rocking chair swaying to and fro, a mysterious presence on the staircase—these moments are predictable but nonetheless hair-raising. When Arthur creeps down the hallway in the middle of the night to the haunted nursery, readers must stand by and watch as he offers himself up to whatever lies within it; the reader’s knowledge of horror tropes, especially those related to Gothic novels set in sprawling mansions and haunted houses, heightens the terror of this moment.

In employing Gothic horror tropes throughout her contemporary novel The Woman in Black , Susan Hill creates an air of familiarity even for readers who are not avid consumers of Gothic literature. The tropes she employs are familiar to many—a foggy November day in London; an isolated mansion at the edge of the civilization; a slew of frightened townspeople; a silent, haggard cabbie who ferries the protagonist back and forth seemingly between worlds. Through reliance on these staples of genre, Hill shows how tropes can provide a shorthand for readers and thus actually allow for easier, even effortless engagement with a work—and for an even more total emotional immersion in the moments of pure horror it has to offer.

Gothic Horror ThemeTracker

Gothic Horror Quotes in The Woman in Black

Fog was outdoors, hanging over the river, creeping in and out of alleyways and passages, swirling thickly between the bare trees of all the parks and gardens of the city and indoors, too, seething through cracks and crannies like sour breath, gaining a sly entrance at every opening of a door. It was a yellow fog, a filthy, evil-smelling fog, a fog that choked and blinded, smeared and stained. […]

Sounds were deadened, shapes blurred. […] it was menacing and sinister, disguising the familiar world and confusing the people in it, as they were confused by having their eyes covered and being turned about, in a game of Blind Man's Buff.

The business was beginning to sound like something from a Victorian novel, with a reclusive old woman having hidden a lot of ancient documents somewhere in the depths of her cluttered house. I was scarcely taking Mr. Bentley seriously.

It was true that neither Mr. Daily nor the landlord of the inn seemed anything but sturdy men of good common-sense, just as I had to admit that neither of them had done more than fall silent and look at me hard and a little oddly, when the subject of Mrs. Drablow had arisen. Nonetheless, I had been left in no doubt that there was some significance in what had been left unsaid.

I can recall it still, that sensation of slipping down, down into the welcoming arms of sleep, surrounded by warmth and softness, happy and secure as a small child in the nursery […] Perhaps I recall those sensations the more vividly because of the contrast that presented with what was to come after. Had I known that my untroubled night of good sleep was to be the last such that I was to enjoy for so many terrifying, racked and weary nights to come, perhaps I should not have jumped out of bed with such alacrity, eager to be down and have breakfast, and then to go out and begin the day.

[…] I do not believe I have ever again slept so well as I did that night in the inn at Crythin Gifford. For I see that then I was still all in a state of innocence, but that innocence, once lost, is lost forever.

"Well," I said, "if he's buying up half the county I suppose I may be doing business with him myself before the year is out. I am a solicitor looking after the affairs of the late Mrs. Alice Drablow of Eel Marsh House. It is quite possible that her estate will come up for sale in due course."

For a moment, my companion still said nothing, only buttered a thick slice of bread and laid his chunks of cheese along it carefully. I saw by the clock on the opposite wall that it was half past one, and I wanted to change my clothes before the arrival of Mr. Keckwick, so that I was about to make my excuses and go, when my neighbor spoke. "l doubt," he said, in a measured tone, "whether even Samuel Daily would go so far."

No car appeared. Instead, there drew up outside the Gifford Arms a rather worn and shabby pony and trap. It was not at all out of place in the market square—I had noticed a number of such vehicles that morning and, assuming that this one belonged to some farmer or stockman, I took no notice, but continued to look around me, for a motor. Then I heard my name called.

The pony was a small, shaggy-looking creature, wearing blinkers, and the driver with a large cap pulled down low over his brow, and a long, hairy brown coat, looked not unlike it, and blended with the whole equipage.

Suddenly conscious of the cold and the extreme bleakness and eeriness of the spot and of the gathering dusk of the November afternoon, and not wanting my spirits to become so depressed that I might begin to be affected by all sorts of morbid fancies, I was about to leave […] But, as I turned away, I glanced once again round the burial ground and then I saw again the woman with the wasted face, who had been at Mrs. Drablow's funeral. […] As I stared at her, stared until my eyes ached in their sockets, stared in surprise and bewilderment at her presence, now I saw that her face did wear an expression. It was one of what I can only describe—and the words seem hopelessly inadequate to express what I saw—as a desperate, yearning malevolence; it was as though she were searching for something she wanted, needed— must have , more than life itself, and which had been taken from her. And, toward whoever had taken it she directed the purest evil and hatred and loathing, with all the force that was available to her.

So I thought that night, as I laid my head on the soft pillow and fell eventually into a restless, shadowy sleep, across which figures came and went, troubling me, so that once or twice I half-woke myself, as I cried out or spoke a few incoherent words, I sweated, I turned and turned about, trying to free myself from the nightmares, to escape from my own semi-conscious sense of dread and foreboding, and all the time, piercing through the surface of my dreams, came the terrified whinnying of the pony and the crying and calling of that child over and over, while I stood, helpless in the mist, my feet held fast, my body pulled back, and while behind me, though I could not see, only sense her dark presence, hovered the woman.

"It seems to me, Mr. Daily," I said, "that I have seen whatever ghost haunts Eel Marsh and that burial ground. A woman in black with a wasted face. Because I have no doubt at all that she was whatever people call a ghost, that she was not a real, living, breathing human being. Well, she did me no harm. She neither spoke nor came near me. I did not like her look and I liked the… the power that seemed to emanate from her toward me even less, but I have convinced myself that it is a power that cannot do more than make me feel afraid. If I go there and see her again, I am prepared."

"And the pony and trap?"

I could not answer because, yes, that had been worse, far worse, more terrifying because it had been only heard not seen and because the cry of that child would never, I was sure, leave me for the rest of my life.

I shook my head. "I won't run away."

As soon as I awoke, a little before seven, I felt that the air had a dampness in it and that it was rather colder and, when I looked out of the window, I could hardly see the division between land and water, water and sky, all was a uniform gray, with thick cloud lying low over the marsh and a drizzle. It was not a day calculated to raise the spirits and I felt unrefreshed and nervous after the previous night. But Spider trotted down the stairs eagerly and cheerfully enough and I soon built up the fires again and stoked the boiler, had a bath and breakfast and began to feel more like my everyday self.

In Scotland, a son was born to her and she wrote of him at once with a desperate, clinging affection. For a few months the letters ceased, but when they began again it was at first in passionate outrage and protest, later, in quiet, resigned bitterness. […]

"He is mine. Why should I not have what is mine? He shall not go to strangers. I shall kill us both before I let him go."

Then the tone changed. "'What else can I do? I am quite helpless. If you and M are to have him I shall mind it less." And again, "I suppose it must be."

But at the end of the last letter of all was written in a very small, cramped hand: "Love him, take care of him as your own. But he is mine, mine, he can never be yours. Oh, forgive me. I think my heart will break. J."

I picked things up, stroked them, even smelled them. They must have been here for half a century, yet they might have been played with this afternoon and tidied away tonight. I was not afraid now. I was puzzled. I felt strange, unlike myself, I moved as if in a dream. But for the moment at least there was nothing here to frighten or harm me, there was only emptiness, an open door, a neatly made bed and a curious air of sadness, of something lost, missing, so that I myself felt a desolation, a grief in my own heart. How can I explain? I cannot. But I remember it, as I felt it.

But she was alive and so was I and, gradually, a little warmth from each of our bodies and the pause revived us and, cradling Spider like a child in my arms, I began to stumble back across the marshes toward the house. As I did so and within a few yards of it, I glanced up. At one of the upper windows, the only window with bars across it, the window of the nursery, I caught a glimpse of someone standing. A woman. That woman. She was looking directly toward me. Spider was whimpering in my arms and making occasional little retching coughs. We were both trembling violently. How I reached the grass in front of the house I shall never know but, as I did so, I heard a sound. It was coming from the far end of the causeway path which was just beginning to be visible as the tide began to recede. It was the sound of a pony trap.

[…] I had been growing more and more determined to find out what restless soul it was who wanted to cause these disturbances and why, why . If I could uncover the truth, perhaps I might in some way put an end to it all forever.

But what I couldn't endure more was the atmosphere surrounding the events: the sense of oppressive hatred and malevolence, of someone's evil and also of terrible grief and distress. […] But I was worried, not wanting to leave the mystery unexplained and knowing, too, that at the same time someone would have to finish, at some point, the necessary work of sorting out and packing up Mrs. Drablow's papers.

The door was ajar. I stood, feeling the anxiety that lay only just below the surface begin to rise up within me, making my heart beat fast. Below, I heard Mr. Daily's footsteps and the pitter-patter of the dog as it followed him about. And, reassured by their presence, I summoned up my courage and made my way cautiously toward that half-open door. When I reached it I hesitated. She had been there. I had seen her. Whoever she was, this was the focus of her search or her attention or her grief—I could not tell which. This was the very heart of the haunting. […] It was in a state of disarray as might have been caused by a gang of robbers, bent on mad, senseless destruction.

I began to run crazily and then I heard it, the sickening crack and thud as the pony and its cart collided with one of the huge tree trunks. […]

They lifted Stella gently from the cart. Her body was broken, her neck and legs fractured, though she was still conscious. […]

Our baby son had been thrown clear, clear against another tree. He lay crumpled on the grass below it, dead. This time, there was no merciful loss of consciousness, I was forced to live through it all, every minute and then every day thereafter, for ten long months, until Stella, too, died from her terrible injuries.

I had seen the ghost of Jennet Humfrye and she had had

her revenge.

They asked for my story. I have told it. Enough.

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Book review: Short story anthology ‘The Black Girl Survives in This One’ challenges the horror canon

Ahh, the Final Girl — a point of pride, a point of contention. Too often, the white, virginal, Western ideal. But not this time.

“The Black Girl Survives in This One,” a short story anthology edited by Saraciea J. Fennell and Desiree S. Evans, is changing the literary horror canon. As self-proclaimed fans of “Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark” and “Goosebumps,” the editors have upped the ante with a new collection spotlighting Black women and girls, defying the old tropes that would box Black people in as support characters or victims.

The 15 stories are introduced with an excellent forward by Tananarive Due laying out the groundwork with a brief history of Black women in horror films and literature, and of her own experiences. She argues with an infallible persuasiveness that survival is the thread that connects Black women and the genre that has largely shunned them for so long.

These are the kind of stories that stick with you long after you’ve read them.

“Queeniums for Greenium!” by Brittney Morris features a cultish s moothie MLM with a deadly level of blind faith that had my heart pounding and my eyes watering with laughter at intervals. And “The Skittering Thing” by Monica Brashears captures the sheer panic of being hunted in the dark, with some quirky twists.

Many of the stories are set in the most terrifying real-life place there is: high school. As such, there are teen crushes and romance aplenty, as well as timely slang that’s probably already outdated.

Honestly, this was one of the best parts: seeing 15 different authors’ takes on a late-teens Black girl. How does she wear her hair, who are her friends, is she religious, where does she live, does she like boys or girls or no one at all? Is she a bratty teen or a goody-two-shoes or a bookworm or just doing her best to get through it? Each protagonist is totally unique and the overall cast of both characters and writers diverse.

And even though we know the Black girl survives, the end is still a shock, because the real question is how.

The anthology has something for everyone, from a classic zombie horror in “Cemetery Dance Party” by Saraciea J. Fennell to a spooky twist on Afrofuturism in “Welcome Back to The Cosmos” by Kortney Nash. Two of the stories have major “Get Out” vibes that fans of Jordan Peele will appreciate (“Black Girl Nature Group” by Maika Moulite and Maritza Moulite and “Foxhunt” by Charlotte Nicole Davies). If your flavor is throwbacks and cryptids, Justina Ireland’s “Black Pride” has you covered. Or if you like slow-burn psychological thrillers and smart protagonists, read “TMI” by Zakiya Delila Harris.

Overall, it’s a bit long and the anthology could stand to drop a couple of the weaker stories. But it’s well worth adding to any scary book collection, and horror fans are sure to find some new favorites.

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The Woman in Black Essay Questions

By susan hill, essay questions.

These notes were contributed by members of the GradeSaver community. We are thankful for their contributions and encourage you to make your own.

Written by Micola Magdalena

What is the genre of this story?

This story can be characterized as being a gothic story for multiple reasons. Even though it was written quite recently and not in a time period when this type of literary genre was popular, this method of writing makes the story unique. In this type of writing, a greater accent is put on the feelings experienced by the characters instead of putting the accent of horrific descriptions of death. Even though death is mentioned, the reader becomes scared by experiencing the feelings of uncertainty and despair which plagues the main character. A great influence is put on the place where the action takes place, which in this type of writing is also someplace isolated and yet beautiful. In this context, the main character discovers a gruesome secret that almost inevitably affects his or her life in a permanent manner.

Why was Jennet Humfrye unable to keep her child?

The Woman in Black is revealed to be Jennet, the sister of the woman who owned the house when the action takes place. The main character finds that Jennet became pregnant but she was forced to give up her child to her sister. Jennet was unmarried and while the timeframe is not clearly stated, it is easy to deduct that the action most likely took place at the beginning of the 18th century. In those times, it was seen as unacceptable for a woman to have a child out of wedlock. Automatically, the child and the mother had to face extreme scrutiny by those around them. The child would be always regarded as a bastard and would face difficulties in finding a job and being taken seriously in society. It is probably that because of these reasons, the mother of the child took the decision to give him to her sister and her husband, so he could be properly adopted and have both a mother and a father.

Why is the timeframe not mentioned and how can we be certain when the action took place?

It is unclear why the writer decided not to give the exact year and place where the action took place. One of the main reasons could be that the author tried to create another dimension of suspense through this lack of information. Still, from the way the characters and the story are presented, we can conclude that the action takes place at the beginning of the 18th century. In the city, the people have the opportunity to move around using cars but this is generally true only for the upper class. In the country, horse carriages are still the common mean of transportation. Also, from the social stigma, the Woman in Black had to go through because she got pregnant before getting married we can assume that society was still strict when it came to sexual relationships outside of marriage, thus pointing to a time before the 1950s.

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The Woman in Black Questions and Answers

The Question and Answer section for The Woman in Black is a great resource to ask questions, find answers, and discuss the novel.

Women in black what dose the narrator see lined up by the railing outside of the churchyard?

There is a school next to the church and, lined up along the iron railing which separates the church from the school, are twenty or so children standing silent and motionless, presumably having watched the entire outdoor portion of the service.

Why could the author have chosen the name ‘Drablow’?

Are you referring to The Woman in Black ?

features of gothic literature

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Study Guide for The Woman in Black

The Woman in Black study guide contains a biography of Susan Hill, literature essays, quiz questions, major themes, characters, and a full summary and analysis.

About The Woman in Black
The Woman in Black Summary
Character List

Essays for The Woman in Black

The Woman in Black essays are academic essays for citation. These papers were written primarily by students and provide critical analysis of The Woman in Black by Susan Hill.

Gothic Conventions in 'The Woman in Black'
The Ways in Which Susan Hill and Thomas Hardy Present the Supernatural in The Woman in Black and Poems 1912-13
Fear, Foreboding, and a False Sense of Security: The Importance of Spider in The Woman in Black

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The Woman in Black Study Guide: Analysis
The Woman in Black is an example of Victorian Gothic literature. Narrated in the classic 19th-century tradition, it incorporates several elements of horror such as enigmatic strangers, desolate landscapes, haunted houses, and graveyards. It offers perspectives from a social, psychological, and feminist viewpoint.
The Woman in Black Analysis
Analysis. The Woman in Black, Susan Hill's story-within-a-story, follows English lawyer Arthur Kipps as he confronts a paranormal experience from his younger days. As the novel begins, a retired ...
The Woman in Black Study Guide
Key Facts about The Woman in Black. Full Title: The Woman in Black. When Written: Early 1980s. Where Written: England. When Published: 1983. Literary Period: Contemporary. Genre: Fiction, horror, mystery, historical fiction. Setting: The fictional town of Crythin Gifford, in Northeast England. Climax: A local man named Samuel Daily narrowly ...
The Woman in Black by Susan Hill Plot Summary
The Woman in Black Summary. Next. Chapter 1. Arthur Kipps is a well-to-do lawyer living in the English countryside. After Christmas Eve dinner, Arthur joins his family in the drawing room, where they are trading ghost stories—an "ancient" tradition. The children urge Arthur to contribute, but Arthur becomes agitated and upset, proclaims ...
The Woman in Black Themes
The main themes in The Woman in Black are grief, loss, and revenge; perception and myopia; and fear and haunting. Grief, loss, and revenge: Grief and loss drive Arthur to finally tell his story ...
Isolation and Trauma Theme in The Woman in Black
The story at the dark heart of The Woman in Black is that not of protagonist Arthur Kipps, but of Jennet Humfrye —the titular spirit who, after having been forced to give up her illegitimate son to the care of her sister and brother-in-law, now haunts her late sister's isolated estate, Eel Marsh House. As Jennet's chilling, painful story ...
The Woman in Black Essays
The Woman in Black. A key theme occurring across Susan Hill's The Woman in Black and Thomas Hardy's Poems 1912-13 is the concept of the supernatural. Both Hill and Hardy describe apparitions of ghosts and communication with spirits in their work; however, the... The Woman in Black essays are academic essays for citation.
The Woman in Black Summary
The Woman in Black (1983) by Susan Hill follows the gothic literary tradition. Hill explores traditional horror tropes, such as abandoned estates and ghost hauntings, set in an unspecified time in England's countryside. The horror novella focuses on the first-person point-of-view of Arthur Kipps as he reflects on a ghost haunting he ...
The Woman in Black Themes
These papers were written primarily by students and provide critical analysis of The Woman in Black by Susan Hill. Gothic Conventions in 'The Woman in Black' The Ways in Which Susan Hill and Thomas Hardy Present the Supernatural in The Woman in Black and Poems 1912-13; Fear, Foreboding, and a False Sense of Security: The Importance of Spider in ...
The Woman in Black
The Woman in Black is a novella by Susan Hill about a ghostly experience that haunts the narrator, Arthur Kipps. The story is narrated by the main character, Arthur Kipps. He is haunted repeatedly ...
The Woman in Black movie review (2012)
Not since young Hutter arrived at Orlok's castle in "Nosferatu" has a journey to a dreaded house been more fearsome than the one in "The Woman in Black." Both films (and all versions of "Dracula") begin with the local townspeople terrified of a residence and the legends surrounding it. In this case, a green, Victorian-era attorney named Arthur Kipps (Daniel Radcliffe) is visiting a haunted ...
The Woman In Black: Critical Essay
1700 Words. 7 Pages. Open Document. The Woman In Black: Critical Essay. When novels are adapted for the cinema, directors and writers frequently make changes in the plot, setting, characterization and themes of the novel. Sometimes the changes are made in adaptations due to the distinctive interpretations of the novel, which involve personal ...
Essay: Susan Hill
This page of the essay has 7,159 words. Download the full version above. Susan Hill's novel The Woman in Black (1983) is a fundamental example of women's Gothic Horror. It successfully employs well-known Gothic conventions and tropes that have already been embraced by fans of the genre such as loneliness, gloominess, vengeance, death, the ...
The Woman in Black Literary Elements
The Woman in Black essays are academic essays for citation. These papers were written primarily by students and provide critical analysis of The Woman in Black by Susan Hill. The The Woman in Black Community Note includes chapter-by-chapter summary and analysis, character list, theme list, historical context, author biography and quizzes ...
woman in black essay
woman in black essay. Our GCSE Drama group went to see 'The Woman In Black' at the Fortune Theatre, London on the 24th March 2009. The play is written by Stephen Mallatratt and the performance was put on by PW Productions. It is set in the early 20th century, on the eerie marshes of the east coast.
The Elements of Horror in "The Woman in Black"
An atmosphere of mystery and suspense is another key Gothic element in the gothic genre and 'The Woman in Black' is no different. The presentation of London in 'A London Particular' establishes the mystery and mood of the novel. The city is presented as 'dark', 'evil-smelling', with a 'foul gloom' atmosphere, when these carefully constructed ...
Gothic Conventions in 'the Woman in Black'
Published: Jul 27, 2018. 'The Woman in Black' by Susan Hill is often described as a 'ghost story' and it's eerie and considerably terrifying narrative falls well within gothic tradition. In this essay I will explore the gothic conventions used and the effectiveness with which they are portrayed through the employment of language, form ...
The Woman in Black / Jennet Humfrye Character Analysis
The Woman in Black / Jennet Humfrye. The titular woman in black appears to Arthur for the first time at the funeral of Mrs. Alice Drablow. Arthur is struck by the woman's antiquated mourning garb and her frightening appearance; though young, the woman is ghastly pale and sickly. When Arthur mentions the woman to his companion at the funeral ...
The Woman in Black Essay
The Woman in Black Gothic Conventions in 'The Woman in Black' Amy Allison 11th Grade 'The Woman in Black' by Susan Hill is often described as a 'ghost story' and it's eerie and considerably terrifying narrative falls well within gothic tradition. In this essay I will explore the gothic conventions used and the effectiveness with which ...
The Woman In Black Film Analysis
The Woman in Black is a 1983 horror novella by Susan Hill, written in the style of a traditional Gothic novel. The plot is about a mysterious spectre that haunts a small English town, Crythin Gifford, heralding the death of children. In The Woman in Black weather is an important aspect which influences the narrator's actions and the ...
2024 Total Solar Eclipse: A Firsthand Account from Texas
John Beckman, who traveled to Montana to witness the eclipse in 2017, drove across the country from California to Texas this year to meet a group of 20 family members and friends. "It's really ...
Gothic Horror Theme in The Woman in Black
Susan Hill's The Woman in Black is saturated with references to popular Gothic horror novels. Though written in the mid-1980s rather than the late eighteenth century, The Woman in Black is in many ways a classic Gothic novel—and a love letter to the genre, which spawned emotionally and atmospherically evocative classics such as Mary Shelley's Frankenstein.
About this Reading Room
About this Reading Room. Letter from Patsy T. Mink soliciting support for H. R. 208 (Women's Educational Equity Act) with small edits in Mink's hand, circa 31 July 1974. Patsy T. Mink Papers. The Manuscript Division seeks to acquire, preserve, and make available for research use personal papers and organizational records documenting the scope ...
The Woman in Black Essay
Join Now Log in Home Literature Essays The Woman in Black Fear, Foreboding, and a False Sense of Security: The Importance of Spider in The Woman in Black The Woman in Black Fear, Foreboding, and a False Sense of Security: The Importance of Spider in The Woman in Black Katie Long 11th Grade. In 'The Woman in Black' Spider is an anthropomorphic character.
Book review: Short story anthology 'The Black Girl Survives in This One
But not this time. "The Black Girl Survives in This One," a short story anthology edited by Saraciea J. Fennell and Desiree S. Evans, is changing the literary horror canon. As self-proclaimed ...
The Woman in Black Essay Questions
These papers were written primarily by students and provide critical analysis of The Woman in Black by Susan Hill. Gothic Conventions in 'The Woman in Black' The Ways in Which Susan Hill and Thomas Hardy Present the Supernatural in The Woman in Black and Poems 1912-13; Fear, Foreboding, and a False Sense of Security: The Importance of Spider in ...

The Woman in Black

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Essay: Susan Hill – The Woman in Black (1983)

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The Woman in Black Essay Questions

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The Woman in Black Questions and Answers

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