the woman in black essay

The Woman in Black

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Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapters 1-3

Chapters 4-6

Chapters 7-9

Chapters 10-12

Character Analysis

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

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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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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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Supporters of Kamala Harris holding American flags at Howard University.

News Analysis

For Black Women, ‘America Has Revealed to Us Her True Self’

Kamala Harris’s resounding defeat affirmed the worst of what many Black women believed about their country, even as some looked to the future with a wary determination.

Vice President Kamala Harris held her election-night party at Howard University, the historically Black institution in Washington she once attended. The mood quickly grew bleak as results arrived. Credit... Maansi Srivastava for The New York Times

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By Erica L. Green and Maya King

Erica L. Green reported from Kamala Harris’s concession speech at Howard University in Washington, and Maya King from Atlanta.

Published Nov. 7, 2024 Updated Nov. 8, 2024

Donald Trump has won the 2024 presidential election. Follow live updates here .

From the moment Kamala Harris entered the presidential race, Black women could see the mountaintop.

Listen to this article with reporter commentary

Across the country, they led an outpouring of Democratic elation when the vice president took over the top of the presidential ticket. But underneath their hope and determination was a persistent worry: Was America ready, they asked, to elect a Black woman?

The painful answer arrived this week.

It affirmed the worst of what many Black women believed about their country: that it would rather choose a man who was convicted of 34 felonies, has spewed lies and falsehoods, disparaged women and people of color, and pledged to use the powers of the federal government to punish his political opponents than send a woman of color to the White House.

Many Democrats saw the brutal political environment for the party, peppered with anger about President Biden’s leadership, as more to blame for Ms. Harris’s crushing loss than the double-edged sword of racism and sexism. But others, reflecting on a campaign devoid of controversy or obvious missteps by a qualified candidate who almost never held out her race or gender as reasons to vote for her, found it difficult to ignore suspicions about why Mr. Trump won with such ease.

Kamala Harris standing at a lectern during her concession speech.

“This isn’t a loss for Black women, it’s a loss for the country,” said Waikinya Clanton, the founder of the organizing group Black Women for Kamala. “America has revealed to us her true self,” she added, “and we have to decide what we do with her from here.”

It was the moment that Black female political leaders and organizers had feared most and worked hardest to avoid. Across battleground states, the Democrats organizing fund-raisers, door-knocking and other get-out-the-vote efforts were often Black women, motivated to campaign for a presidential candidate who was not just a member of their party but one of their own.

The tens of millions of voters who supported Ms. Harris saw her candidacy as a chance to usher in a new generation of leadership. (In one small bright spot for the party, two Black women will be in the next Senate for the first time ever.) But for Black women, the Democratic Party’s most active and loyal voting bloc, it was something bigger: a hard-fought recognition of the work they had done for a party that often failed to support them.

“The party has always wanted our output, not necessarily our input,” Marcia Fudge, a former housing and urban development secretary under Mr. Biden, said in an interview this year. “We have for a very long time been the people who did the work, but never been asked to sit at the table.”

‘It is not over, because we never go away.’

From the start of her first presidential campaign, Ms. Harris’s supporters saw her as the redemption for their party and vindication for the Black women who had come before her.

During her 2019 bid, she modeled much of her political persona after Shirley Chisholm, the first Black woman elected to Congress, in 1968, and the first Black woman to run for a major party’s presidential nomination, in 1972. Many of Ms. Chisholm’s acolytes became Ms. Harris’s advisers and closest confidants during her second presidential campaign.

But even Ms. Chisholm predicted a slow walk to progress. That was, in part, because of the intense sexism that she faced from men of all races, who believed that her campaign was too tailored to issues favoring women, people of color and the poor.

“This ‘woman thing’ is so deep,” she said of her presidential run . “I’ve found it out in this campaign, if I never knew it before.”

“That I am a national figure because I was the first person in 192 years to be at once a congressman, Black and a woman proves, I would think, that our society is not yet either just or free,” she wrote in her autobiography, “Unbought and Unbossed.”

Maya Wiley, the chief executive of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, said there was deep anger about the license that Mr. Trump’s victory had given to continue to undercut Black women in politics, down to the derogatory ways he and his allies have described female leaders.

“Not only have we always been on the menu, but they have been eating us, and it’s been happening for generations,” Ms. Wiley said. “And what this represents for Black women right now is it has deepened and been given significantly more permission.”

Still, she added, “it is not over, because we never go away.”

The underappreciated heart of a party

Mr. Trump’s overwhelming victory leaves Democrats with a lot of work to do.

Nearly the entire country shifted sharply to the right as it returned him to power. Democrats watched as he won alarmingly high shares of the vote in blue states: 47 percent in Virginia and New Jersey. 44 percent in New York. 43 percent in Connecticut.

The night represented a striking rebuke of a Democratic Party that has grown more aligned with college-educated, wealthier Americans, and struggled to maintain support from working-class voters and people of color.

As the party picks up the pieces, preparing to oppose a second Trump administration and looking ahead to 2026 and 2028, Black women are likely to again play a central role. Long hailed as the backbone of the Democratic Party, they have supported liberal candidates in overwhelming numbers, organized political operations on the ground and fueled victory after victory.

Yet Black women running for office have often said that the party is not investing adequately in their campaigns, particularly those for higher positions like Senate and governor (there has still never been a Black female governor). Some candidates have argued that this dearth in support has been the difference between winning and losing in close races.

Ms. Harris had plenty of investment, hauling in more than $1 billion , but the circumstances of her candidacy were far from ideal.

Overnight, she had to resuscitate a dying campaign and re-energize a despairing Democratic base that had fallen into despondency over Mr. Biden’s poor debate performance and sinking political standing.

She stayed fiercely loyal to a boss who had grown widely disliked, and who at times privately doubted her chances . She stayed a cheerleader for the administration even though some of its leaders spent the first half of her term undermining her to the point of rendering her invisible and ineffective. And she fired up a party whose leaders had only in July talked quietly about bypassing her to put a white man at the top of the ticket.

Ms. Harris worked feverishly to introduce herself and sell her political vision to an angry and exhausted American public — even as she struggled to separate herself from Mr. Biden. She built a multiracial, bipartisan coalition of supporters and allies.

And it wasn’t enough.

“She ran a damn good race, and we voted for white nationalism,” Melanie L. Campbell, the chair of the Power of the Ballot Action Fund, an advocacy group focused on policies for Black Americans, said of American voters. Ms. Campbell also served on a committee of women who advised Mr. Biden in choosing Ms. Harris as his running mate.

“This level of vote was not because they were worried about grocery prices,” she said of voters. “They were worried about white privilege, white status, and sent the message that a multiracial democracy is fine as long as they’re at the top.”

As Ms. Harris conceded, she tacitly acknowledged the challenge she had faced.

“Don’t you ever listen when anyone tells you something is impossible because it has never been done before,” she said.

Smaller progress on a disappointing night

There were some signs on Tuesday of political momentum for Black women down the ballot.

Representative Lisa Blunt Rochester of Delaware and Angela Alsobrooks, the Prince George’s County executive in Maryland, both won their races for Senate, giving the chamber two Black women for the first time — a long-sought goal for Black Democrats.

But for Black women in the party, the defeat of Ms. Harris will sting for a long time.

“The vice president said from the very beginning that she was going to be running this race as an underdog, when you have 107 days versus somebody who’s been running for nine years,” Senator Laphonza Butler of California, a close adviser to Ms. Harris, said on Tuesday night as the vice president’s prospects dimmed.

Citing the hundreds of Black women who were running in races across the country, Ms. Butler said that even if Ms. Harris lost, she would have proved to the Democratic Party and to the country that not only were Black women the beating heart of the party, “but we are ready to take our seat at the table.”

“The country better be ready for the future of Black women who are going to continue to show up and demand their seat,” she said.

Read by Maya King

Audio produced by Adrienne Hurst .

Erica L. Green is a White House correspondent, covering President Biden and his administration. More about Erica L. Green

Maya King is a politics reporter covering the Southeast, based in Atlanta. She covers campaigns, elections and movements in the American South, as well as national trends relating to Black voters and young people. More about Maya King

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The Presidential Race

‘Trump’s America’ : Donald Trump’s comeback victory has established him as a transformational force reshaping the United States in his own image.

How Trump Won: Trump gambled that his grievances would become the grievances of the MAGA movement, and then the G.O.P., and then more than half the country.

Democrats Play the Blame Game : Lawmakers and strategists tried to explain Kamala Harris’s defeat , pointing to misinformation, the Gaza war, a toxic Democratic brand and the party’s approach to transgender issues.

Other Results

Senate: With a decisive margin in the Senate, an emboldened Republican majority is ready to empower Trump .

House: Republicans made early gains in their drive to maintain control of the House, though the fate of the majority remains unclear .

South Texas : Trump’s biggest gains were along the Texas border, a Democratic stronghold where most voters are Hispanic. He won 12 of the region’s 14 counties , up from five in 2016.

More Coverage and Analysis

Transgender Anxiety: For many transgender Americans, the experience of being invoked by political candidates as a symbol of absurdity or an object of disgust has taken a toll.

Abortion Rights: In states like Arizona and Nevada, some voters split their tickets, supporting abortion rights measures while also backing Donald Trump .

Trump’s Fiscal Agenda: Advisers to Trump and Republicans on Capitol Hill are already looking at ways to scale back some of his more expensive ideas .

Black people are receiving racist text messages about picking cotton 'at the nearest plantation'

Dozens of Black people across the country said they have received text messages telling them they had been “selected” to pick cotton “at the nearest plantation.”

The messages came just hours after the polarized presidential election came to a close this week.

On Wednesday morning, Monèt Miller, a publicist from Atlanta, was reeling over Donald Trump winning the White House when she received a text message from an unknown phone number.

“Our Executive Slaves will come get you in a Brown Van,” the message read, “be prepared to be searched down once you’ve enter the plantation.”

Miller, 29, was shocked. She wondered how the person got her phone number, and questioned whether she was being watched. In a panic, she responded, “Who is this?! I’m going to find who you are” and shared a photo of the text on social media. She learned that some of her friends had received the same text.

“It’s a scare tactic,” Miller said in an interview. “I saw it and was like, ‘What in the world?’ Usually, in any other instance, someone is racist to the point where it’s funny, it’s a bad humor sort of funny. But that day, with the climate and everything going on, I genuinely felt scared.”

Black social media users across the country said they have received text messages similar to Miller’s. Many of the recipients are college students from a wide range of schools nationwide, including Ohio State University, Clemson University in South Carolina, the University of Southern California and Missouri State University, NBC News has confirmed.

Domonique Valles, 23, who attends the University of Southern California, said he and some of his fellow Kappa Alpha Psi frat brothers who received the text messages and has since filed a complaint with the FBI.

“I definitely feel kind of unsafe on campus,” Valles said. While he said he’s unclear what the campus can do to make people feel safe, “they definitely need to at least come in support of people who are suffering from this Black community.”

In a statement, the university called the messages "hateful and unacceptable," and added that it was referring students who received them to the campus Office for Equity, Equal Opportunity, and Title IX.

The FBI said in a statement Thursday that it is aware of the texts, has been in contact with the U.S. Department of Justice and encourages people who receive them to report the messages to local law enforcement authorities.

Various Clemson University students reported receiving the text messages , prompting a public statement from the school. “These numbers have been determined to be associated with online spoofing sites.” Campus police is “actively investigating the matter and working with state partners to identify the source of the messages,” the statement reads in part.

It is unclear who is behind the mass text messages, what motivated them or how they obtained phone numbers for swaths of Black people. But some of the anonymous numbers appear to be tied to TextNow, a text messaging service that allows users to obtain untraceable, “burner” phone numbers.

A TextNow spokesperson told NBC News in a statement that it is aware of the messages. “As soon as we became aware, our Trust & Safety team acted quickly, shutting down the accounts involved within the hour,” the statement said. “TextNow is proud to be an inclusive service offering free mobile text and data to millions of Americans. We do not tolerate or condone the use of our service to send harassing or spam messages and will work with the authorities to prevent these individuals from doing so in the future.”

The Attorney General’s Office in Virginia condemned the messages Wednesday and directed anyone who “believes themselves to be under threat” to contact law enforcement. Police departments and leaders in cities across the country have also addressed the situation.

People as young as high school students, and some beyond college have also received these messages, which began rolling out the morning after Election Day. Some of the messages mention Donald Trump .

Brian Hughes of the Trump campaign denounced the texts and said it is “absolute nonsense” to link the president to the messages.

“If we can find the origin of these messages which promote this kind of ugliness in our name we will obviously take legal action to stop it,” Hughes said in a statement to NBC News.

“President Trump built a diverse and broad coalition of support, with voters of all races and backgrounds,” he added. “The result was a landslide victory for his common sense mandate for change. This will result in a second term that is beneficial to every working man and woman in our nation.”

Some recipients responded to the texts with anger and others with a sense of humor, but many agree that the messages seem to be a bleak foreshadowing. The NAACP condemned the messages, saying they believe the messages were a product of the president-elect’s rhetoric.

“The unfortunate reality of electing a President who, historically has embraced, and at times encouraged hate, is unfolding before our eyes,” the statement read.

Although college students seem to be the most targeted with the texts, Black people of varying ages have reported receiving the messages. Corryn Freeman, 35, of Fort Lauderdale, Florida, said she along with her friends’ high school-age students have received the messages. She said that if the texts are a mass spam operation, it may signal danger for the recipients, that, “our collective safety is potentially at risk.”

“I don’t think that it’s a coincidence that this is happening just a day after a Donald Trump election,” Freeman told NBC News. “I think that the election has reignited and inflamed people who have racist tendencies to show up and show out. I think that this is intentional to scare people of color, Black people, into a reality that we don’t want to go back to.”

Black Democrats weren’t the only recipients of the text messages. John Anthony, a Black Republican who hosts a conservative radio show in Illinois, said he received the message Wednesday afternoon and immediately chalked it up to a leftist ploy.

“They tried to make it appear as if it came from Trump or Republicans,” Anthony said of the message, adding that he believes the message came from a “leftist organization” hoping to sow racial discord. “This is the beginning of the, ‘let’s go after Trump and his supporters’ type of thing. That’s what I got out of it.”

The Federal Communications Commission said in a statement that it was aware of the messages and “is looking into them alongside federal and state law enforcement.”

A spokesperson for the CTIA, the official trade association representing the wireless communication industry, told NBC News in a statement that several wireless carriers were impacted by the mass texts and the association is “pushing back on the aggregators which handle text message campaigns like this from the outset.”

The text messages seemed to have died down as of Thursday evening, but Miller said she’s afraid that they may only be the start of an onslaught of racist targeting.

“Now, people are testing the limits of how far they can go with playing with people,” she said. “I definitely see that this is just the beginning … I just feel like we’ll be attacked more in person in the future rather than behind phone screens.”

Char Adams is a reporter for NBC BLK.

Maya Eaglin is a digital reporter for NBC News' "StayTuned" on Snapchat.

Zinhle Essamuah is a correspondent and anchor for NBC News.

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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 . 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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The Woman in Black Themes

By susan hill.

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 Timothy Sexton

The Psychology of Fear

The novel is a ghost story, after all, so fear should naturally be a dominating theme. What is especially interesting about how the author handles this theme, however, is that she reveals the insidious process by which a rational reaction to fear devolves into the irrational. It is this slow, deliberate process that transforms Arthur from a basically normal young man into a soft puddle of almost psychotic paranoia who no longer has any control over the effects of being terrorized.

Maternal Vengeance

At the heart of the novel’s plot is stimulation of vengeance by a woman whose most precious gift has been taken from her. Vengeance over deprivation is a time-honored subject; Hamlet is really about a son who embarks upon revenge because his father has been taken from him. Being deprived of a father at a young age—even as advanced a young age as Hamlet—would be bad enough, but surely that would nothing like losing an infant. The bloodlust for revenge under these circumstances—no matter the quirkiness of the details and specifics—is an understandable enough reason for ghost to go a-haunting.

The theme of isolation is common to such ghost stories, stretching from the earliest gothic novels to Stephen King. Because time is such a significant element to the story, the isolation of Eel Marsh House does not come across stereotypical or lazy plotting, but is instead integral to the story. Being cut off from society, the very inaccessibility of the setting stirs the psychological effects of fear upon Arthur by its very remoteness. Thematically, that remote quality also applies to the ghost which haunts him.

The Ghosts of Time

The novel continually plays with time to pursue themes related to how the past intrudes upon the present to create a continuous line. The novel is structured as a story-within-a-story which introduces the concept of past and the present being connected. The isolated house is also show to be haunted irreversibly steeped in the decisions of the past through Mrs. Drablow’s collection of documents. And, of course, both Arthur and the demonic ghost terrorizing him are haunted by traumatic memories of earlier times. Even the language of the novel itself is a revelation of this continuous line of time as it speaks to an outdated formality that does not seem to fully jibe with its period setting.

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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

Check this out:

https://gradesfixer.com/free-essay-examples/gothic-conventions-in-the-woman-in-black/

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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COMMENTS

The Woman in Black Study Guide
As a love letter of sorts to the Gothic horror novel, The Woman in Black is chock-full of references both overt and more subtle to other staples of the genre. The arrival of a naïve young solicitor to a haunted and even dangerous mansion is a trope employed most famously in Bram Stoker's Dracula, while hauntings, possessions, and family ...
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: Plot Summary
The Woman in Black: Plot Summary. Written by Susan Hill in 1983, the Woman in Black is a pastiche to traditional Victorian Gothic stories. The novella is split into twelve chapters, with the first chapter set in the narrative present and the rest set in the past. Arthur Kipps, the narrator of the story, joins his family in the drawing room on ...
The Woman in Black by Susan Hill Plot Summary
The Woman in Black Summary. 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 that he has no ...
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 ...
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 Essay
In 'The Woman in Black' Spider is an anthropomorphic character. He takes the form of a small dog owned by Samuel Daily. ... Essays About The Woman in Black; 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 ...
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—which culminates in the death of her son and her ...
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 Essay Topics
Thanks for exploring this SuperSummary Study Guide of "The Woman in Black" by Susan Hill. A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
The Past Theme in The Woman in Black
The Past Theme Analysis. The Past. LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Woman in Black, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work. The past is such a forceful presence within Susan Hill's The Woman in Black that it is almost a character in and of itself. The novel's frame story forces protagonist Arthur ...
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 Essays
In 'The Woman in Black' Spider is an anthropomorphic character. He takes the form of a small dog owned by Samuel Daily. Although easily overlooked, the importance of Spider as a literary device in the novel should not be overlooked. The first... The Woman in Black essays are academic essays for citation. These papers were written primarily ...
The Woman in Black Quotes
Chapter 8 Quotes. "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.
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 ...
For Black Women, 'America Has Revealed to Us Her True Self'
Erin Schaff/The New York Times. "This isn't a loss for Black women, it's a loss for the country," said Waikinya Clanton, the founder of the organizing group Black Women for Kamala ...
Black people are receiving racist text messages about picking cotton
Nov. 7, 2024, 3:24 PM PST. By Char Adams, Maya Eaglin and Zinhle Essamuah. Dozens of Black people across the country said they have received text messages telling them they had been "selected ...
The Woman in Black 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… read analysis of The Woman in Black / Jennet Humfrye.
The Woman in Black Summary
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 ...
Gothic Horror Theme in The Woman in Black
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Woman in Black, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work. 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 ...
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

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

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The Woman in Black

Gothic Horror ThemeTracker

Gothic Horror Quotes in The Woman in Black

The Woman in Black Themes

The Psychology of Fear

Maternal Vengeance

The Ghosts of Time

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