three decades of The Woman in Black

Studies in Theatre and Performance, 2014
Vol. 34, No. 2, 126–139, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14682761.2014.910999
Gender, adaptation and authorship: three decades of The Woman in
Black
Robin Roberts*
English Department, University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, AR, USA
The second-longest running play in London, The Woman in Black draws its energy
from presenting the threat posed to patriarchal society by the repressed feminine.
Analyzing the novella and film as well as a dramatic text, this essay focuses on the
portrayal of a murderous,vengeful female ghost who, having lost her child, terrorizes
a village. Attempting to banish her by appropriating and retelling her story, male
authors and the audience learn the repressed feminine cannot be contained.
Keywords: female ghosts; horror; play; film; Woman in Black
One of London’s most durable tourist attractions, the play The Woman in Black exposes
the relationship between gender, adaptation and authorship in popular theatre. The
Woman in Black’s history of genre-shifting, moving from a novella to a play and, most
recently, into a commercially successful film, is worth examining for what it reveals
about the interplay of gender and authorship in performance. The narrative’s widespread
popularity and its continued place in popular culture over four decades, in three different genres, attest to its success in presenting the threat posed to patriarchal society by
the repressed feminine. While the plot’s overt warning is to fear and avoid ghosts, the
underlying message is that the repressed feminine cannot be completely contained. The
narrative’s horror emerges from this lesson expressed through the story of a malevolent
female ghost who, having lost her child, terrorizes a village.
Unlike a conventional detective story in which justice is served and social order
reinstated, a ghost story like The Woman in Black does not allow the male storyteller to
succeed in restoring order to the text. Instead, his every effort to control the narrative is
frustrated. Despite his resistance and the activities of other male characters who attempt
to eradicate her malign presence, the ghostly Woman in Black remains visible, powerful
and triumphant. While this ghost is compelling in all three versions – the novella, the
play and the film – it is the stage play that most fully and concretely develops her
power. In contrast to the usual lament about adaptations being frustratingly inadequate
versions of the original, in this case the play most vividly realizes the figure of the
Woman in Black. Reading the novella and film in relation to the play illuminates all
three texts as they focus on the abject feminine.
Representing the feminine as it exists in society, the Woman in Black cannot overturn but can disrupt the society that confined her in life. The story of the novella, play
and film is her story, and the ghost wrestles for authorship by refusing to let the male
narrator recreate her as he desires. Exemplifying the conundrum of female authorship in
*Email: roberts1@uark.edu
© 2014 Taylor & Francis
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a patriarchal society, this female ghost is both present and absent. Julia Kristeva’s concept of the abject, an alternative feminine construct against which the dominant maleoriented society defines itself, provides a key to the Woman in Black’s terrifying appeal.
The abject is the reviled object which society casts out. In the conventional binary of
masculine/feminine, the abject is the uncontrollable, hysterical, destructive and irrational
feminine. For Kristeva (1982), the maternal female body embodies the abject. In this
particular ghost story the female spectre, defined by her maternity, contests male control
of the narrative. This feminist reading of the Woman in Black acknowledges the limits
of her ghostly power, but affirms that the narrative’s appeal lies in its ability to terrify
through a female character who resists traditional framing. She manifests the power of
the excluded maternal feminine and in so doing destabilizes patriarchal society.
While there is little scholarship on The Woman in Black in its many versions, the
novella and play have been a mainstay for English school children, as the authorized
‘Education Pack’ devises activities for a variety of disciplines. So many people have
seen the play over the decades, that it is perhaps surprising that there is no audience
response research on it. Val Scullion (2003) published a thoughtful essay about gender
in the play and novella, and more recently Kelly Jones (2012) dealt with the play in an
insightful article about contemporary ghost plays and authorship. Focusing exclusively
on The Woman in Black and gender, as I do in this article, and including the novella
and film, however, expands and complicates what Jones has to say about this play’s
anxiety of authorship and what this reveals about the play’s representation and interrogation of the abject. Gender does make a difference in both apparition and authorship.
As its eponymous title The Woman in Black suggests, the dominant figure in the play is
the female ghost. Her appellation denies her specificity but also suggests her role as a
representative of the feminine generally. Her shadowy, liminal role is underscored by
the absence of a credit for the actress who plays the Woman in Black on stage. While
we learn her name, the persistent use of the descriptive phrase ‘the Woman in Black’
and characters’ unwillingness to utter her given name confirm her remarkable power
and her function as a version of femininity.
The horror in this ghost story emerges from the text’s acknowledgement of the powerful female ghost who defies the class structure that kept her powerless in life and who
remains outside of patriarchal law and order. In so doing, the Woman in Black points to
the constructedness and vulnerability of patriarchy’s reliance on rationality and legality.
The laws and customs that kept a living unmarried woman from her child have no effect
on her as the ghostly Woman in Black. This point is emphasized in the film version
when a police constable (representing the law) sputters and cannot even say her name
as another young child affected by the ghost dies in his office. Despite adding a benevolent married maternal ghost (a woman in white), the film’s faithfulness to the Woman in
Black’s story emphasizes the power of the excluded feminine and the inherent instability
of masculine law and order. Examining the three versions of The Woman in Black
reveals the centrality of gender to the creation of the horror of authorship wrested from
the masculine. While the process and production of the horror varies in each medium,
the focus remains on the feminine author who resists control.
Plot
The plot is the same in all three versions, with a framing narrative separating the novel
and play from the film. A deceptively simple ghost story, The Woman in Black focuses
on an older man recounting a devastating encounter with a female ghost that occurred
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when he was a young man. Following the traditional English Christmas Eve pastime of
telling ghost stories, a family turns to their stepfather, Arthur Kipps (the narrator), for a
tale. He refuses and instead writes down his experience. A sceptic before his encounter
with the Woman in Black, he had not previously believed in and was contemptuous of
the supernatural. His story, then, is a conversion narrative, a cautionary tale. By writing
the story, Kipps appropriates the Woman in Black’s narrative, with the express purpose
of exorcising her; his story attempts authorial co-option. But the Woman in Black resists
this effort.
The story of the haunting (the same in all versions) proceeds as follows. As a young
solicitor, Kipps is sent to a remote village to oversee the closing of a wealthy elderly
woman’s estate. Mrs Drablow had lived in a large mansion, isolated from the village by
a tidal marsh. Though warned by locals about an evil female ghost haunting the house,
Kipps does not heed the locals’ veiled remarks. Sixty years previously, Mrs Drablow’s
sister, Jennet Humfrye, had been forced to give up custody of her infant son to her
respectable married sister. The child died at a young age in the marsh, and then Humfrye herself died, returning as a ghost. That plot alone would be horrible enough, but
Humfrye, the Woman in Black, not only haunts but also brings death to the beloved
children of the male characters unlucky enough to cross her path.
Decades later, sent by his law firm to the decaying mansion, Arthur Kipps first sees
the ghost without realizing she is an apparition; his world view cannot comprehend the
supernatural. The alternative world view discussed by Mary Belenky et al. in Women’s
Ways of Knowing (1986) is relevant here. Like the real women Belenky and her coauthors discuss, Humfrye has experiences and a point of view antithetical to a solicitor’s
legalistic, rational world. Kipps learns the details of Humfrye’s tragedy from letters he
finds in her sister’s papers. Sent there to review and destroy all documents, his job is to
eradicate her by eradicating the record of her life. As a solicitor and a father and stepfather, Kipps represents the legal power that fathers, rather than mothers, have over their
offspring. ‘For much of the nineteenth century fathers [in England] had primary legal
rights to their children’ (McKnight 2011, 6). The Woman in Black never speaks
directly; her story is told through the paperwork that Kipps wearily examines. While
alive, Humfrye is an outcast. As an unwed mother she is at the mercy of a society that
denies her identity and agency. Humfrye loses her child and moves into a working class
position as a servant in her sister’s home and is never permitted to acknowledge her
relationship to the boy, serving instead as his nursemaid. The legal records and letters
reveal that her sister’s husband had the means and authority to adopt the child. As the
wife of a wealthy propertied man, Alice Drablow had access to class privilege denied to
her unmarried sister.
In contrast to the Drablows, the unhappy Humfrye exists on the margins, impoverished, despised and denied her identity as a mother. Watching and unable to intervene
when the child tragically drowns, Humfrye never recovers from the tragedy and wastes
away, terrifying the village with her pale, drawn face and emaciated body in black mourning in life as she does in death. Class joins with gender to create her exclusion, but in her
supernatural state the Woman in Black has powers that eventually triumph over wealth
and class privilege. In Powers of Horror, Kristeva (1982) describes the abject not as the
unclean or polluting, but rather as that which ‘questions borders and threatens identity’
(Oliver 2002, 225). This aptly characterizes Humfrye, who as an unwed mother defied
paternal authority. She is even more of a threat to patriarchal notions of order after her
death. Her ghostly existence breaks down the boundaries between death and life,
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masculine notions of individuality and subjectivity, the community and the individual in
ways that are destructive and horrifying, especially to the male characters.
This character’s specific quality of being outside – outside of patriarchal society,
outside of life, outside of individuation – makes her representative of the feminine
excluded from society. As a ghost she is treated by the villagers as she was in life. They
attempt to deny her existence by refusing to name or acknowledge her. As Kristeva
explains, the abject is ‘on the edge of nonexistence and hallucination, of a reality that,
if I acknowledge it, annihilates me’ (Oliver 2002, 230). The villagers refuse to tell her
story, placing Kipps in danger and forcing him to learn her history from old documents.
The villagers also refuse to go to the house she haunts, but she haunts them in the village, appearing in the cemetery (novella and play), hovering behind the narrator (in all
three versions) and in their homes and workplaces behind locked doors (novella, play
and film). She appears abruptly, without reason, and her appearances are all the more
disturbing because of their unpredictability. Denied the power of words, law and language, she demonstrates that the non-verbal can be horribly destructive and disruptive.
Set in the early twentieth century, deliberately vague as to the specific year or town,
the narrative revisits events of a Victorian sensibility, with the play’s script identifying
the setting as a ‘Victorian theatre’. In the novella and play, the ghost appears in London
to threaten Kipps and his family. In the play and film, she malevolently turns her direct
gaze to the audience in the twenty-first century, threatening us in the here and now. Her
anger and rage exist not just over decades but over centuries. Kristeva sees the differentiation, the separation between mother and child, as a cause of such archetypal terror.
The abject confronts us … within our personal archeology, with our earliest attempts to
release hold of the maternal entity, even before existing outside of her, thanks to the autonomy of language … The difficulty a mother has in acknowledging (and being acknowledged by) the symbolic realm. (Oliver 2002, 239)
The Woman in Black can be read in this light as representing the terror that all children
(but especially male children) experience, the psychological necessity of separating
physically and emotionally from the mother.
The Woman in Black’s power to disrupt appears in numerous instances in all three
versions, where male characters are physically overcome by her presence. The language
of the novel is echoed by the same actions in the play and in the film. The solicitors
strive to make an orderly closure of the Drablow estate but cannot do so. When Kipps
mentions to the local solicitor, Mr Jerome, that he has seen a woman dressed in black
with a wasted face, the effect is immediate and terrible: ‘Mr. Jerome looked frozen,
pale, his throat moving as if he was unable to utter’. As Kipps points to where the
Woman in Black was standing, Jerome responds by appearing ‘about to faint, or collapse with some kind of seizure’ (Hill 1983, 52). When Kipps makes to leave to seek
medical help for him, Jerome ‘almost shrieked’ a negative, because of his fear of being
left alone. Jerome’s extreme, non-verbal and physical response to the mere mention of
the Woman in Black provides graphic testimony to her power over male characters.
Gradually, Kipps too falls under her aura and realizes she manifests a ‘desperate, yearning malevolence’ (65). Alone in the ghost’s former abode, Kipps experiences a similar
incapacitation: ‘my knees began to tremble and my flesh to creep, then to turn cold as
snow … my heart … gave a great lurch’ (65–66). Unable to do his work, he is no
longer in control of his life or even his body. These vivid descriptions of the novel are
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performed in the play and film, as the actors playing Jerome and Kipps display horror
on their faces and their bodies crumple to the floor.
Dramatizing the novella presented the playwright Stephen Mallatratt with a creative
opportunity to create a meta-theatrical frame that emphasizes the patriarchal inside versus the outside/feminine. Showing how stories are created on stage foregrounds the
Woman in Black’s defining presence, as well as the attempt by the male characters to
define/confine her in words and on a stage. In order to justify the narrator’s story
appearing on a stage, Mallatratt has Kipps commission an actor to assist him in bringing
the story to life. As in the novella, Kipps has been asked to tell a ghost story, and he
writes down what has happened. But the resultant manuscript is too long; the actor’s
professional assessment is that it ‘will take five hours to read’. Kipps insists that he
wants it communicated for his family and ‘for those who need to know’ (Mallatratt
1989, 4), and agrees with the actor, who insists, ‘No matter how horrible, if your tale is
to be heard, it must be offered in a form that is remotely palatable’ (6). The play is performed by two male actors, with a woman playing the silent role of the Woman in
Black. The emphasis on the constructedness of the narrative, as a story and then a play,
shifts as it is deconstructed by the Woman in Black’s appearances.
Emphasized particularly in the play, the male characters become physically paralysed
by fear while the Woman in Black moves freely through time and space. Her ability to
appear in the isolated house, in the town and at the graveyard ironically reverses Humfrye’s silence before society and law when she was alive. The ghost’s mobility, contrasting strikingly with the male characters’ paralysis, is a central performative feature.
Audiences are startled when she appears suddenly and without warning: behind Kipps,
in a window, on the edge of the stage, in the audience in the theatre, in the back of the
frame in the film. Her appearances disrupt the narrative flow and are startling and disturbing because they interrupt the narrator’s point of view, actions and, most significantly, control of the story. The play provides the most graphic version of reaction; a
live, usually very expressive audience (many children on school trips) vents surprise
and emotion with screams.
A theatre audience watching The Woman in Black can remain safely in their seats,
grab a friend’s hand, close their eyes in group solidarity. In contrast, the character Kipps
is alone and he is overwhelmed and collapses. He sees the Woman in Black in various
places around the village and in the house, culminating in a terrifying encounter in the
mansion’s nursery. He falls desperately ill and suffers nightmares for several days. After
he recovers, Kipps leaves for London but he is fated to see her one more time, years
later. In a park with his son and wife, Kipps sees the ghost. As it has for so many others, his son’s (and wife’s) death follows, in a pony trap accident in the park. The horrified Kipps looks on, unable to help. In his words, the concluding words of the novella
and the penultimate speech in the play, ‘I had seen the ghost of Jennet Humfrye and
she had had her revenge’ (Hill 1983, 160; Mallatratt 1989). Re-enacting her tragedy, the
male character experiences again the Woman in Black’s agony and emotional despair.
Through his account, the audience also vicariously suffers. The Woman in Black controls the story and resists the male characters’ attempt to achieve narrative closure by
closing the estate and banishing the ghost. By destabilizing the plot and the characters,
especially those who challenge her control of the narrative, the Woman in Black asserts
her control and the inability of the male upper middle class characters to dominate her.
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The maternal silencing
Kristeva locates the psychoanalytic experience of the abject in the weaning child’s rejection of the maternal body. The identification with and necessary separation of the infant
from the mother’s body leads to both the eroticization and the horrification of the
female body. As Kelly Oliver explains, ‘Kristeva claims that the social is set up against
the feminine, specifically the maternal. The social is defined by repressing maternal
authority’ (Oliver 2002, 226). Kristeva’s analysis of the abject feminine as being part of
horror aptly fits this ghost story, in which an unwed mother is repressed and denied her
maternal role. The Woman in Black is ‘The Woman’, and her malevolent haunting
results from her pariah status as an unwed mother.
A sighting of the Woman in Black always prefigures the tragic death of a child.
Through her silent presence she underscores the silencing of working class women/
mothers. Because she has lost her son, the ghost haunts and terrifies the living. Without
words of her own, only uttering sounds, the character is primal, animalistic even. ‘The
abject confronts us, on the one hand, with those fragile states where man strays on
the territories of animal’, explains Kristeva (Oliver 2002, 239). The female ghost is all
the more menacing because her negative emotion is too strong to be put into words.
Instead, Kipps feels what she feels, and then he and the other male characters experience pure rage and terror in response to the Woman in Black’s anger. When we hear
the words of the Woman in Black, they are mediated by the male characters who read
selections from her letters. The power and strength of her frustrated maternal potential
typify ‘the maternal anguish, unable to be satiated within the encompassing symbolic’
(Kristeva, quoted in Oliver 2002, 239). There are no words powerful enough to represent the Woman in Black’s violent ‘mourning for an “object” that has always already
been lost’ (241). The Woman in Black, then, represents not only a patriarchal ethos that
denied unmarried women the right to be mothers but, more generally, the exiled, outsider status of the maternal and the feminine in patriarchal society.
Despite the male characters’ verbal belittling of her pre-verbal feminine power, they
all eventually succumb to the Woman in Black’s ability to terrorize and disrupt normal
life. In her complete and total absorption in pure emotion, she is not only beyond their
control but she is also able to control living men. For example, in the novella, when
Kipps enters the nursery where the ghost has been, he is overcome. ‘I felt I was a small
boy again’, he explains. Trying to rationalize away his experience and senses, he is
unable to do so: ‘I tried desperately to provide a rational explanation I had been so
aware of … at that moment I began to doubt my own reality’ (Hill 1983, 125). Again,
these words can be read as directions to the actor who has to use his facial expressions
and body to convey his terror. Instead of asserting masculine order and logic, Kipps is
overwhelmed by powerful, uncontrollable feelings, the Woman in Black’s emotion of
loss. ‘I felt not fear, not horror, but an overwhelming grief and sadness, a sense of loss
and bereavement, a distress mingled with utter despair’. These devastating emotions, he
explains, ‘all but broke me … it was as though I had, for the time I was in the room
[the nursery] become another person, or at least experienced the emotions that belong to
another’ (Hill 1983, 128). This forced empathy is short-lived but it provides another
example of the Woman in Black’s power over male characters. It is the power of the
abject feminine. For a time, she is able to cause male characters to experience the pain
that she suffered, and in so doing wrest an acknowledgement of the injustice she experienced when alive. As ‘the Woman’ she also symbolically acts for all women’s oppression and suffering.
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By forcing others to experience her alienation and suffering, she causes them to feel
the pain and suffering created by repressing the feminine. In the novella, the reader
identifies with the narrator’s strong emotions and sense of loss. In the play, the audience
watches the deterioration of the actor playing Kipps and many react viscerally, moving
in their seats and yelling as the actress playing the Woman in Black glides through the
audience. In the film, we see and hear her guttural moans of sadness and we see her
dead child. Although she never speaks, she dominates the texts. She reflects a feminine
power of the pre-verbal, a Medusan power to paralyse through fear, as described by
Helene Cixous’s call for women to write their bodies (Cixous 1976). To call the play a
‘two-handed piece’ (Hello magazine, no date) ignores the importance of the third character, the Woman in Black. This reviewer seems to make the same error as the characters in neglecting, at least initially, the importance and power of the feminine.
Curiously, this characterization is supported by the programmes for the play which, after
1989, do not list an actress credit for the Woman in Black. This omission undergirds
the idea that she cannot be contained, that she might perhaps be ‘real’. Val Scullion suggests that the Woman in Black ‘terrifies readers because we recognize the potential for
similarly barbaric behavior in ourselves’ (2003, 302). I agree, but argue that there is
more to the plot’s moral than that it is ‘sobering’, as Scullion says. Instead, all three
texts can be read as the triumph of the repressed feminine, a warning not merely of the
dangers of the barbarity within all, but more specifically the dangers of excluding and
repressing the feminine at all. Marginalized, the feminine uses that marginalization to
commandeer the narrative.
Adaptations and genre
In the novella, Kipps’s narrative makes clear that his encounter with the Woman in
Black has led to him being sadder and wiser, particularly compared to his stepfamily,
who make light of ghosts. Susan Hill uses the setting in the countryside and descriptive
language to convey the narrator’s sadness. The reader is removed from the immediate
horror because the ghost does not appear to readers directly. In the play, the audience is
included in the horror and the marginalization of the ghost. We see her when the actors
cannot. In the novella and play, Kipps’s young son and wife die and he is left alone,
bereft in the land of the living. In the film, it is only by dying himself that the narrator
escapes the repressed feminine, by joining it. He and his son join his dead wife and
walk out of the real, living world. This cinematic ending suggests how deeply woven
into the very definition of society is the repression of the feminine. By killing not only
Kipps’s son but also Kipps himself, the film’s ending makes a radical critique of patriarchal society. Like Kate Chopin’s The Awakening (1899) the plot of The Woman in Black
implies that the only escape from a class- and gender-bound society is death.
Merely retelling the Woman in Black’s story results in her appearance and the subversion of patriarchal hopes and power. This aspect is redoubled by the choices made
by play and film scripts and the respective directors to involve the audience in seeing
the Woman in Black. Because she affects and kills the offspring not only of a lawyer, a
representative of male authority, but also of a writer/actor/director/performer, she challenges two critical features of patriarchy: the law and the word. Neither confines her or
limits her power. The Woman in Black appears, unbeknownst to the actors, but in the
audience’s sight. In Kristeva’s words, ‘a massive and sudden emergence of uncanniness,
which familiar as it may have been in an opaque and forgotten life, now harries me as
radically separate, loathsome. Not me. Not that’ (Oliver 2002, 230). Her appearance is
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threatening and disrupts the characters’ fantasy that this story is only a performance.
Thus it breaks their narrative, as she breaks down the fourth wall. This theatrical feature
enhances the emphasis on the Woman in Black’s power, and it is a feature peculiar to
the stage play; novella and film do not have a fourth wall.
The way in which the abject is dramatized helps to explain its power and the popular appeal of a depiction of the author under attack. Scullion’s analysis focuses primarily
on how Hill’s novella is amplified by the play: ‘In addition to the final “silencing” of
the terrorized Kipps by the ghost of the woman in black, his authority as a male narrator is also undermined throughout the novel[la] by its dialogic structure’ (Scullion 2003,
297). The novella does not move back to the original framing device and time, when
Kipps is an elderly man, yet the play does, reinforcing the Woman in Black’s power
over time and space. ‘The particular horror of The Woman in Black is that the ghost is
still not laid to rest. In the last pages she is still at large, having ranged freely across
two centuries unbound by geographical constraints and driven to bring misery to families again and again’ (298). In the play and the film, by implication the audience, who
have also now seen the Woman in Black, should also fear for their children’s lives.
Merely seeing her, as the narratives make clear, ‘whenever she has been seen … however briefly, and whoever by, there has been one sure and certain result … In some violent or dreadful circumstance, a child has died’ (Hill 1983, 149; Mallatratt 1989, 47–48;
film). Her direct gaze at the viewer, in spotlight on stage and in extreme close-up in the
film, reveals the gaze of the Medusa, threatening us.
While all three texts emphasize the cost of ignoring the abject feminine, the novella
and play emphasize a metafictional and metadramatic frame that places the conflict in
sharper relief. These gendered conflicts play out in the context of contested authorship.
In the novella, Kipps is asked to tell his story at the family gathering; he refuses, and
walks outside in the countryside, eventually deciding that he will communicate his tale
in writing. He states his hope: ‘to banish an old ghost that continues its hauntings is to
exorcise it … I should tell my tale … I would write my own ghost story. Then perhaps
I should finally be free of it’ (Hill 1983, 22; Mallatratt 1989, 6). His stated desire, then,
is to take over the Woman in Black’s story and use the narrative to expunge her power.
In the play, the frame presents the story as Kipps’s tale, but also shaped by the professional actor he has hired. Yet the fiction of a play being created is disrupted by the
Woman in Black’s physical presence. The same occurs in the film, as the audience sees
her when the characters do not, and she turns her threatening, deadly gaze on the audience in both play and movie. Having the Woman in Black triumph not only over a male
narrator but also the theatre and screen enhances and expands her power of authorship.
The playwright and film director expand the ghost’s fearsome powers through their use
of each genre’s audience.
All the texts emphasize a conversion of the male narrator/author to respecting feminine power. Initially, Kipps reduces the idea of feminine supernatural power to mere
prejudice and ignorance: ‘any poor old woman might be looked at askance; once upon
a time, after all, she would have been branded a witch’ are words repeated in both
novella and play (Hill 1983, 43; Mallatratt 1989, 16). The Woman in Black demonstrates a powerful alternative, a version of women’s ways of knowing that undercuts a
male Londoner’s suppositions about the world; the country setting of the ghost, including the emphasis on the natural world, highlights the gendered association of the city
with civilization and masculinity, and of the feminine with nature. The female spectre’s
ability to disrupt patriarchal order appears as her presence silences the male characters;
Kipps makes the initial mistake of thinking that the male characters’ fear of her is
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unjustified and unmanly. In thinking about Jerome’s reaction, Kipps realizes Jerome
‘had been weakened and broken, by what? A woman?’ (Hill 1983, 90). This thought in
the novella is underscored in both novella and play when a wealthy landowner, Mr
Daily, who befriends Kipps, warns him about the Woman in Black, but first qualifies
his warning: ‘I’m not going to fill you up with a lot of women’s tales’ (Hill 1983, 98;
Mallatratt 1989, 35). But the narrative itself becomes a women’s tale.
In the play, the tale is framed by the stage setting and the two male characters. The
very opening of the play alerts the audience to the effort of mounting a stage production, for Kipps explicitly mentions payment to the actor. Kipps plays the parts of the
other male characters, while the actor plays the role of Kipps as a young man, a doubling that places the actor in the same jeopardy from the Woman in Black. The actor
creates and attempts to take over the Woman in Black’s story for profit. Significantly,
both men have children and in this regard alone are appropriate subjects of the Woman
in Black’s ire. They enjoy the privilege of parenting denied to her. In this artistic birth
of a play, they evoke again the Woman in Black, who resists their version of her life
and haunting. In front of the stage audience’s eyes, the story is transformed from a
long-winded, handwritten account into a live performance. That the play’s title is her
appellation reveals the centrality of this silent but powerful figure. Her power stems
from her exaggerated femininity: no language, only female attire and unabated maternal
desire. The character is a silhouette, if not a caricature, of nineteenth-century femininity,
with sweeping black skirts, shawl, bonnet and veil.
The play’s overt and self-conscious references to dramatic construction – at one
point the actor chastises Kipps for his weak and too-fast delivery, for example – draw
the audience’s attention to the fact that they are being manipulated by very simple
effects. Yet, somehow, acknowledging the staged-ness does not weaken the effects’
impact. A spotlight on a turning doorknob, a creaking door, a wildly rocking chair,
smoke generated by dry ice, all effects achieved very simply, nevertheless rivet the
crowd. The audience, in school holidays in particular, is chiefly comprised of school
children and families, used to the film industry’s expensive special effects. Yet these
audience members, perhaps compelled by the quality of ‘liveness’ and simplicity,
scream loudly each time, as if on cue. Many reviewers have praised the craft of the
play, particularly its ability to involve the audience.
The poverty of resources on the stage, then, has the desired effect of turning characters and audience more to the non-material, ghostly world and to the imagination (and
also at the same time evokes Humfrye’s poverty and marginalization). While the initial
design owed more to the necessity of a quickly produced Christmas play in a regional
theatre, the inclusion of recorded sound effects and their novelty to Kipps show the
actor’s impulse to do more with the piece and to amplify the importance of having a
voice. Kipps and the actor attempt to exorcize the Woman in Black by shaping and thus
controlling the narrative of the experience. But the story continually escapes their control. Exhausted, Kipps lies down and collapses, to quote Kristeva, ‘[o]ut of the daze that
has petrified him before the untouchable, impossible, absent body of the mother’ (Oliver
2002, 233).
Advertising stills for the play show the extreme reaction of the two male performers
to the Woman in Black. The various males huddle together against the threat she poses.
Bundled up against the cold in heavy coats and scarves, they seem outside of their element, exposed despite their winter attire. In several of the shots they futilely hold up a
lantern (or single candle) against the darkness, the small flame only accentuating the
darkness and solitude. The men’s gestures, frozen expressions, physical repulsion from
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what they perceive demonstrate the physicality of the horror the ghost produces. A similar reaction occurs in the audience, as numerous reviews attest: ‘I have never witnessed
an audience jump and gasp in such genuine shock as they do here’ (Daily Telegraph,
September 3, 2002). A reviewer for The Independent (January 5, 1998) describes the
play as ‘send[ing] shock waves through the auditorium with splendid thrills and chills
… [O]n more than one occasion the entire audience screamed in terror’. The wordless
reactions reflect the power of the Woman and replicate her experience.
The play is a futile attempt to conquer fear, especially fear generated by the
unknowable, unstoppable power of the feminine. The play generates fear in audiences
not only through theatrical effects but also through its harrowing reminder that men’s
attempts to conquer their fear of the feminine are futile. The Woman in Black is created
simply: no special effects or use of technology, just a black-clad woman wearing a bonnet, with white stage makeup and a malevolent expression on her face. As she glides
across the stage or through the audience, the figure cuts through the words of the male
characters. Kipps and the actor experience her presence as a horrific epiphany of mortality, and particularly their children’s mortality. This appalling realization of powerlessness
against death provides a moment of negative catharsis. In the dialogue between Kipps
and the actor who is helping him craft his tale there emerges a sense of order that is
defied by the eerie and silent presence of the female ghost. This play, then, operates at
the level of the specific, exposing the oppression of women as subjects. At the same
time, however, the play evokes also a fundamental psychic and social dynamic in which
the maternal is demonized. The Woman in Black resists closure, and by the conclusion
in all three texts the audience is reminded that the Woman in Black still exists and still
threatens.
The Woman in Black demonstrates that even when financial concerns and audiencepleasing are paramount considerations, a play can nevertheless achieve profound effects.
While inexpensive, the minimal stage set actually enhances the feeling of fear and
intimidation and increases the audience’s sense of the Woman in Black’s power. The
creation of intensity occurs through a spare set, consisting of a coat rack, a wicker
chest, a door, stairs and a backstage set of a child’s bedroom with a rocking chair. These
are no doubt intensified by the Fortune Theatre’s relatively intimate space – the theatre
has fewer than 500 seats and is the second smallest theatre in the West End. Simple but
powerful effects are achieved by the use of sudden lighting: the stark theatrical white
face of the silent Woman in Black illuminated by a spotlight, a dropped flashlight. A
door on the side and a full backstage curtain create the bleak and depressing feeling that
underscores the grim plot. The Daily Telegraph reviewer quoted above explains the
power of this simplicity: ‘This is a classic example of less meaning more in the theatre.
A change of coat means a different character, an old wicker basket does duty for a desk,
a train carriage and a horse and cart. Even the coups de theatre couldn’t be more simple
or more effective’ (Daily Telegraph, September 3, 2002). That the Fortune Theatre itself
has changed little inside since it opened in 1924 adds to the sense of periodicity and
simplicity. When the Woman in Black glides through the audience, artificial smoke creates an illusion of the marsh, obscuring her actual physicality and leaving the impression that the actress is a spectre.
By the same token, having only three actors creates the classic triangle of tension in
drama. There are only two speaking parts, as the Woman in Black herself never speaks
directly. Her words are read by Kipps as he discovers her letters. Yet even this act of
reading is taken over in the play, as a woman’s voice urgently and emotionally describes
her desire for her biological child. His ‘translation’ of her experience underscores the
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mediation of the feminine by the masculine, which controls the law (Kipps’s profession
and his reason for being at the estate). The metadramatic aspect of the play, in addition
to its live performance and physicality, is what separates the novella from the staged
version. Yet the manner of its presentation not only engages us to repeatedly view the
play but also allows us to see the abject feminine as a key part of society. The threatening, uncontrollable maternal body is embodied in the Woman in Black.
The abject is appropriately enacted through the stage play’s clever use of sound
effects, their very use foregrounded in the actors’ dialogue. Throughout the theatrical
production, the audience is provided with explanations of the stage scene as the performance moves forward. Kipps and the actor explain that they are on a stage, and so ask
for lights, move props around and acknowledge the artificiality of the setting. Significantly, the theatre audience hears the tragedy performed, with full sound effects of a
screeching cart and the calls of Jennet Humfrye and the yell of the cart driver, the
horse’s scream. These sounds evoke again the silent Woman in Black and the abject
feminine: it is the space of the pre-verbal where, without words, experience is communicated. Kipps describes them as ‘dreadful noises … horrors’ (Hill 1983, 146; Mallatratt
1989, 46).
Initially resisting the performative, Kipps soon becomes enthralled with recorded
sound and the narrative begins to capture him and the audience. The very minimal
props and a few sound effects are those indicated in the play’s script. The emphasis,
then, lies on the two actors and the pre-recorded sounds. As Kaja Silverman explains in
her book The Acoustic Mirror (1988), ‘sexual difference is the effect of dominant cinema’s sound regime as well as its visual regime’ (viii); the impact of sound is even
more marked in Mallatratt’s stage play. As Silverman goes on to explain, in classic cinema the female ‘voice also reveals a remarkable facility for self-disparagement’ (31). In
contrast, the play The Woman in Black includes a female voice-over, very rare in film,
‘a voice which speaks from the position of superior knowledge’ (48). In addition, the
Woman in Black’s screams and cries have a rare impact that is both ‘culturally gratifying [and] … the acoustic equivalent of an ejaculation, permitting the outpouring or
externalization of what would otherwise remain hidden or invisible’ (68). In The Woman
in Black, the acoustic mirror reflects the abject, maternal suffering and loss in a patriarchal world.
The audience is in the position of spying on the rehearsals for the performance that
will exorcize the ghost once and for all. Kipps’s narration very closely follows the
novella, with much of the dialogue repeated verbatim from the source text. While
remaining faithful to the source text, the play expands the Woman in Black’s power to
the present day. The actor sees her and as he too has a young child, the implication is
that now that child is also threatened. By playing the role of Kipps, the professional
actor has also fallen under the Woman in Black’s purview. Authorship, then, appears in
each genre differently: the first person male narrator in the novella; in the play, the actor
and director; in the film, the auteur (director) and the camera.
While the novella and play differ only in the framing device of a theatrical performance of the story being rehearsed, the film, in part due to the demands of the medium,
makes some significant changes. The intense focus on three live bodies on the stage disappears in the 2012 film version of The Woman in Black. The novella is cited in the
credits, but the stage play is not. The film employs only a few of the play’s devices and
only a small part of the dialogue from play or novella survives in the screen play by
Jane Goldman. Goldman’s script and director James Watkins’ direction emphasize the
cinematic, with panning shots providing visuals that replace the vivid and creepy
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descriptions of the landscape, house and female ghost. A commercially successful film,
it received strongly positive reviews, with few critics commenting on the popular play
version or even the source novella. Successful on its own terms, the process of cinematic adaptation highlights the emphasis of the novella and stage play on the power of
the abject feminine. While the power still exists in a fearsome and unforgiving Woman
in Black, it is ameliorated.
The film emphasizes silence; much of the narrative is communicated through visuals. The film is shot with one light source, with ‘pools of dark and light all throughout
the film’, as Watkins describes it. He emphasizes that in his film, ‘locations are very
much characters in their own right’ (Watkins 2012, Commentary). Wide sweeping establishing shots, aerial shots and so on provide the context that in both the novella and the
play is provided by words. The film contains a long sequence of almost 20 minutes with
no dialogue (as Kipps explores the house). This silence mirrors the Woman in Black’s
experience in patriarchy; no words break her isolation and horror.
Significantly changing the timeline so that Kipps has already lost his wife in childbirth (in the novella and play the two are only engaged) and the son survives, the film
undercuts the power of the feminine. Kipps’s wife appears throughout as a ghost, but
she is a positive counterpoint to the Woman in Black. Like the evil female ghost,
Kipps’s wife never speaks, but her essential goodness is telegraphed by her appearance
all in white, including a white veil that appears bridal. In the novella, play and film, the
Woman in Black appears in heavy Victorian mourning attire, completely black with a
black veil. Only her hideous and angry face is white, in the novella and play indicating
the ‘wasting disease’ that killed her. In the film, by contrast, the Woman in Black had
committed suicide by hanging herself. Kipps’s wife dying in childbirth and the Woman
in Black’s suicide both undercut the abject power of the feminine. However, the cinematic effects of placing the Woman in Black in numerous frames, making her presence
seen in ways that are inhuman but visible, emphasize her power.
Daniel Radcliffe, who plays Kipps, describes the contrast between his character’s
passivity and the Woman in Black’s aggression: ‘Arthur is someone who has been just
pushed into complete inaction by the death in his life, while the Woman in Black’s
bereavement has made her become murderous and vengeful even after death’. Radcliffe
further explains that his character has to ‘man up and get on with being a dad’ (Watkins
2012, Extras). The screenwriter Goldman reinforces this in the commentary, explaining
that the first scene with Kipps shaving is an ‘association … with becoming a man’. In
the film, this feminine power is inherently self-destructive, as the Woman in Black has
hanged herself rather than having died of a strange unnamed disease. Kipps himself is
motivated not by a desire to do well for his own sake, so that he might be rewarded
financially and thus be able to marry his fiancée, but instead because this job at Eel
Marsh is his last opportunity to retain a professional position he has neglected since his
wife’s death. His boss is not the sympathetic supervisor of the novella and play, but a
harsh master threatening him with dismissal. This alteration weakens the gender emphasis on the masculine rational protagonist, as Kipps is weakened and pressured to accept
the job.
Similarly, Samuel Daily, a stalwart figure in the novella and play, in the film has lost
a son and has to cope with a wife who has been driven insane by losing her child. Mrs
Daily even becomes possessed by spirits twice during the film, collapsing and gibbering. She is an additional female figure who represents female weakness rather than the
power of the Woman in Black. In the novella and play, the Woman in Black represents
the feminine; this significance is underscored by her prominence as the only female
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character of note. By adding other female characters (there is also a landlady who has a
scene with Kipps), the film undercuts feminine power.
The most significant change is the ending. Kipps and Daily have interred the son’s
body in the Woman in Black’s coffin, and they imagine she will now be placated. But
as Kipps rushes to the train station to meet his son and the nursemaid, the Woman in
Black appears again. The little boy walks onto the tracks and into the path of an arriving train. Kipps jumps to save him, and both are killed. Kipps’s son asks his father,
‘Who is that lady?’, and we imagine that he is pointing to the Woman in Black. Instead,
it is his mother, dressed in white, and the nuclear family, reunited in death, walk off
down the train tracks, hand in hand. In the novella, Kipps remains alive, an Ancient
Mariner-like figure, warning of the abject feminine. In the play, the effect is intensified
as both the actor helping Kipps with the tale and the audience have seen the Woman in
Black. The implication is that she is still wreaking havoc and that we are all at risk for
having seen her. The film, then, provides a happy ending, for Kipps’s family at least,
who are joined in death. However, at the end of the film, the Woman in Black dominates the frame, as she does in the stage play, directing her gaze at the audience.
In his ‘Adaptor’s Note’ to the play, Mallatratt is quite clear that the Woman in Black
should not be centre stage or seen in full light, as ‘[f]ew things could have been less
frightening’ (Mallatratt 1989). He explains, ‘Darkness is a powerful ally of terror, something glimpsed in a corner is far more frightening than if it is fully observed’. He calls
for ‘the simplest of simple effects’, a call that the film, by its cinematic nature, resists.
So we are given scenes where a child goes up in flames, where the Woman in Black’s
son is pulled from the marsh, a black and scary corpse. In the film Daily and Kipps
even open her grave and we see her skeleton quite clearly. In addition, the action is
defined by omniscient aerial shots from far above the land, and even inside the house.
The camera as narrator works effectively for the film, but as a replacement for the male
narrator’s voice in the novella and play reduces the intimacy and liveness.
The essential dynamic remains consistent across all three genres, as the Woman in
Black demonstrates a power to kill that cannot be contained. Her anger at the loss of her
son extends to all, and the male characters literally crumple. The play’s skilful use of dark,
light and shadow is maintained, and the very basic stage tricks of the rocking chair
moving violently by itself, wildly turning doorknobs and creaky doors have a similar
chilling effect. When I saw the film in a theatre, the audience screamed at some of these
same effects. The film does a good job of creating tension by point-of-view shots from the
Woman in Black’s perspective, as well as effectively employing shot/countershots with
the ghost and Kipps. In addition, sound and light effects are used sparingly so that the
audience is not separated from Kipps by these film devices. These are a clever way of
paralleling the tension created by audience perspective of the Woman in Black, unseen by
the actors on the small stage set. All three versions of the text, then, perform the essential
plot of the feminine abject, relying on different media to create the performances. Susan
Hill uses a narrator and traditional ghost story recitation; Mallatratt’s play adds a
meta-theatrical frame which expands the haunting to the audience, bringing us closer to
the threat; and, finally, Watkins’ film supplants dialogue and language with the grammar
of film. While both the novella and film have been critical and popular successes,
the stage play’s remarkable run of decades suggests that its complexity and liveness
provide the longest-lasting, most indelible way to communicate a major tension in our
society: the angry, terrifying and completely uncontrollable maternal power that
overwhelms the attempt of male authors to contain it.
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Notes on contributor
The author of five books on gender and popular culture, Robin Roberts is currently working on a
book on female ghosts.
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Hill, Susan. (1983) 1998. The Woman in Black. Reprint, London: Vintage.
Jones, Kelly. 2012. “Authorized Absence: Theatrical Representations of Authorship in Three Contemporary Ghost Plays.” Studies in Theatre & Performance 32 (2): 165–177.
Kristeva, Julia, 1982. Trans Leon S. Roudiez. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. New
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