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The Woman in Black

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The Woman in Black: Introduction

The woman in black: plot summary, the woman in black: detailed summary & analysis, the woman in black: themes, the woman in black: quotes, the woman in black: characters, the woman in black: symbols, the woman in black: theme wheel, brief biography of susan hill.

Historical Context of The Woman in Black

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• Full Title: The Woman in Black
• When Written: Early 1980s
• Where Written: England
• When Published: 1983
• Literary Period: Contemporary
• Genre: Fiction, horror, mystery, historical fiction
• Setting: The fictional town of Crythin Gifford, in Northeast England
• Climax: A local man named Samuel Daily narrowly rescues Arthur Kipps from the woman in black—the malevolent spirit that haunts Eel Marsh House and is now bent on Kipps’ destruction.
• Antagonist: The woman in black (Jennet Humfrye)
• Point of View: First person retrospective

Extra Credit for The Woman in Black

Highly Adaptable. The hair-raising horror of The Woman in Black has proved so captivating that it has been adapted several times for stage, radio, film, and television. The stage play, which still runs today in London’s West End, is the second longest-running non-musical play in West End history, while a 2012 film adaptation featuring Harry Potter star Daniel Radcliffe as Arthur Kipps debuted to critical and commercial success, becoming the highest-grossing British horror film in several decades.

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

Discussion Questions

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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Home — Essay Samples — Literature — Gothic Fiction — Gothic Conventions in ‘The Woman in Black’

Gothic Conventions in ‘the Woman in Black’

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The triple weight of being Black, American, and a woman

While we have always shared many of the concerns championed by the mainstream women’s movement, we have never had the luxury of fighting a singular fight..

• Sara Lomax-Reese

Sara Lomax-Reese is shown with her mother, Beverly Lomax, who she says instilled in her a sense of pride and love of self. (Image courtesy of Laura Elam)

At times this three-ness has felt like a weight — having to navigate racism, sexism, implicit bias, and all the limitations that come when you’re placed in these tiny little boxes, often ignored or underestimated and told to wait your turn.

• “The unemployment rate for African Americans in 2017 (the last full year of data) was 7.5 percent, 0.8 percentage points higher than it was in 1968 (6.7 percent). The unemployment rate for whites was 3.8 percent in 2017 and 3.2 percent in 1968.
• “In 2015, the Black homeownership rate was just over 40 percent, virtually unchanged since 1968, and trailing a full 30 points behind the white homeownership rate, which saw modest gains over the same period.
• “The share of African-Americans in prison or jail almost tripled between 1968 (604 of every 100,000 in the total population) and 2016 (1,730 per 100,000). In 1968, African-Americans were about 5.4 times as likely as whites to be in prison or jail. Today, African-Americans are 6.4 times as likely as whites to be incarcerated.”

Deeply disturbing is the reality that, in 2018, Black people still suffer the brunt of systemic racism and inequality.

The last election laid bare the distance and disconnect between Black and white women. What could be more blatant than 94 percent of African-American women voting for Hillary Clinton, and 52 percent of white women — the majority — voting for Donald Trump? While I still haven’t recovered from this betrayal, it is sadly consistent with a long history in this country that shows, for white women, race often eclipses gender (and sanity).

As I look through my personal and professional lens as a Black woman CEO, I see WURD as an important part of the solution to the challenges facing us in this moment. The media is extremely powerful. It shapes and perpetuates perceptions. It creates thought leaders and opinion makers. It holds the powerful accountable to the people. And when done well, it can unify our community — regardless of the double- or triple-consciousness that shapes our world view — to empower us to fight the constructs and institutions designed to contain, destroy, or silence us.

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Sara Lomax-Reese is the president and general manager of WURD Radio, LLC , Pennsylvania’s only African-American owned talk radio station.

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10 Memoirs and Essay Collections by Black Women

Reading Lists

These contemporary books illuminate the realities of the world for black women in america.

In her 1993 poem, “won’t you celebrate with me,” author and educator, Lucille Clifton, invites us to wonder at the life she has created:

“… i had no model born in babylon both nonwhite and woman what did i see to be except myself?  i made it up.” 

As a Black woman existing at the intersections of these marginalized identities (“both nonwhite and woman”), Clifton finds herself rendered invisible in the mainstream and—consequently—creates herself in the process. 30 years onwards, Black women writers continue to take on the mantle of rendering themselves visible across genres and constructing models for future generations to see themselves in. 

This has been especially true in the case of personal narratives, from memoir to essay collections. Starting with Harriet Jacobs’ Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl published in 1861 as a foundational abolitionist text, through to Angela Davis: An Autobiography released only a few years after the acquittal of the Black Panther leader and prominent feminist, Black women  have narrated their stories and transformed the personal into the political with radical results. 

In our own personal narratives, we shrug off duty and expectations, the needs of others become secondary to our primary, as we catalog our hurts and our hopes. We become the hero, not saving anyone else but ourselves. To borrow a phrase from the late bell hooks, we move from the margin to the center. 

The following contemporary memoirs and personal essay collections released in the past ten years exemplify this growing urgency by Black women to tell our side of the story. Their words illuminate the realities of the world and the impact of racist and sexist systems of powers on the lives of the most disenfranchised. These works are affecting, funny, haunting, inspiring and all urgently salient. They are additions to the records and the archives, insisting and reminding us that our voices always matter. 

Men We Reaped: A Memoir by Jesmyn Ward

Within a four-year time span, two-time National Book Award winner Jesmyn Ward saw the deaths of five Black men in her life, including that of her brother. She chronicles their lives, alongside her own, of growing up in Mississippi and the history of racial violence that surrounds around them. “Hopefully, I’ll understand why my brother died while I live,” Ward writes, ”and why I’ve been saddled with this rotten fucking story.” Her journey of reflection is one of grief, anger, and guilt, all buoyed ultimately by the love that comes through of her family and the home that raised her. 

Negroland: A Memoir by Margo Jefferson

Writing about her upbringing in a wealthy, professional Black community of Chicago in the 1950s, critic Margo Jefferson reflects on the intersections of race, gender, class, and color within her community, poetically delving into the nuances of Black life. The Pulitzer Prize winner manages a tight balancing act, honestly approaching the privileges and prejudices of her childhood family and friends, whilst remaining steadfast in her knowledge and understanding that Blackness—regardless of status or hue—is still ultimately Black. “We’re considered upper-class Negroes and upper-middle-class Americans,” her mother tells her, “But most people would like to consider us Just More Negroes.”

We Are Never Meeting In Real Life: Essays by Samantha Irby

Though comedy writing—much like comedy itself—continues to be a boy’s club, Samantha Irby fuses sarcasm, self-deprecation, and toilet humor into musings and anecdotes about her life in the Midwest. Whether she is writing about The Bachelorette or mental health or falling in love, her singular voice is sure to bring you to tears of laughter or sadness, if not both at the same time. In an especially funny take on her pain she asks, “Do Black girls even get to be depressed?” and hordes of us nod in synchronized recognition. 

Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body by Roxane Gay

Author, cultural critic, and professor Roxane Gay has never shied away from the story of the violent sexual assault that took place as a child, but the story extends from that experience to explore additional themes around the (her) body. Using examples from her own lived experiences, she challenges assumptions and conventional thinking about health and wellness, taking to task all the unacknowledged fatphobia we pervasively encourage in our society. Gay’s memoir is sometimes difficult to read, but necessarily so, particularly the parts where she works through her own demons and leaves us no choice but to confront ours too. “I buried the girl I had been… and perhaps I am writing my way back to her, trying to tell her everything she needs to hear.” 

Thick: And Other Essays by Tressie McMillan Cottom

In a series of wide-ranging essays, the university professor and MacArthur Genius covers beauty standards, Black maternal mortality, and the election of Barack Obama, told through personal stories, academic scholarship, and cultural criticism. Thick is intentional in centering herself and the experiences of Black women and girls—a revolutionary and counter cultural endeavor given how “[the] personal essay [has] become the way that black women writers claim legitimacy in a public discourse that defines itself, in part, by how well it excludes Black women.” McMillan Cottom refuses to be shut out. 

The Yellow House: A Memoir by Sarah M. Broom

“Remembering is a chair that is hard to sit still in,” writes Sarah M. Broom in her National Book Award-winning debut work. The title comes from the name of her childhood home in New Orleans where she grew up with her large, loving, and complicated extended family. She moves away for college and continues to move further away from the yellow house, until the tragedy of Hurricane Katrina forces her to reckon with her home and all the historical and political context of where she came from. She looks at race, class, and inequality from a humanistic lens, using her story and the stories of her loved ones to reveal the harder truths about the country and how far left there is for us to go. 

Memorial Drive: A Daughter’s Memoir by Natasha Tretheway

For years, former Poet Laureate and Pulitzer Prize winner ran away from the defining tragedy of her childhood—the murder of her mother by her ex-husband when Tretheway was a teenager. “All those years I thought that I had been running away from my past I had, in fact, been working my way steadily back to it,” and her memoir is her way of unpacking that journey back, beginning with her mother’s death and studying all around it. As Tretheway looks at her own life, from growing up biracial around the time of Loving v. Virginia to finding her way to becoming a writer, she is tenderly attentive to the memory of her mother and grappling with the situation of her death, taking us along the often dark journey with her. 

Just Us: An American Conversation by Claudia Rankine

Much like its author, Just Us is a text that defies categorization. The poet, playwright, and essayist utilizes poems, footnotes, essays, photographs, quotes, scripts, tweets and Facebook statuses to explore and indict American racism. Rankine’s writing is grounded in her own experiences, using everything from dinner party conversations with other academics and faculty members to moments between her and her White husband in couples therapy, resulting in a text that is personal, vulnerable, and filled with beauty. Rankine asks, “How does one combat the racism of a culture?” Just Us answers. 

Shine Bright: A Very Personal History of Black Women in Pop by Danyel Smith

Former editor of the iconic hip-hop and R&B publication VIBE Magazine , Danyel Smith’s memoir doubles as a music history on Black women musicians. Smith chronicles her life growing up in Oakland and her journalistic path, looking to icons like Aretha Franklin, Donna Summer and Stephanie Mills as inspiration as to who she could be, and pays them their due through her own story. “I want Black women who create music to be known and understood, as I want to be known and understood,” Danyel writes, demanding that we pay attention to them and her too. 

Ordinary Notes by Christina Sharpe

Ordinary Notes can be understood best as meditations—on Blackness, on life, on the human condition—penned deftly and poignantly by the woman described in the New York Times as “shaping a generation of Black thought.” Professor Sharpe intimately walks us through her life, from the museums she walks, to the songs she listens to, to the family histories she unearths, and in the final section, she dedicates pages considering the books she describes as “giving me a place to land in difficult times.” To Sharpe, they show “Black worlds of making and possibility.” Ordinary Notes does the same.

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Katy Perry wears barely-there cutout dress for Vogue World: Paris

Katy Perry hit the runway in a barely-there look at Vogue World: Paris Sunday.

The former " American Idol " judge showed skin in a black, strategically cut-out archival Noir Kei Ninomiya dress during the fashion show at the Place Vendôme in Paris.

Perry, 39, led a marching band in the geometric dress detailed with soft pink and black tulle on the skirt, paired with lace-up black boot heels and her black hair slicked back.

The "Dark Horse" singer was seen getting tips on her walk from FKA Twigs and Cara Delevingne in an Instagram video posted on Sunday.

View this post on Instagram A post shared by Vogue (@voguemagazine)

"Make sure it looks like you're going somewhere, but not in a pop star way," FKA Twigs says to Perry.

"I've only ever been a pop star," Perry returns, eliciting a laugh from the cameraman.

Last week, Perry announced her new single, "Woman's World," set to debut July 11, and a new album to follow 2020's "Smile."

The single will come nearly two months after she signed off of "American Idol" as a judge after seven seasons. In February, Perry announced on "Jimmy Kimmel Live!"  that she would bow out at the end of  Season 22  to "go and see the world and maybe bring new music."

'American Idol' judges reveal must-haves for Katy Perry's replacement after season finale

Kendall Jenner, Sabrina Carpenter model at Vogue World show

Other stars in attendance at Vogue World included Sabrina Carpenter , Bad Bunny , Kendall Jenner , Gigi Hadid , Serena Williams , Ciara , Emma Chamberlain and more. The event paired different sports like gymnastics, tennis, and fencing with a specific decade in French fashion, going back to the 1920s.

Vogue World has previously been held in New York and London.

The fashion show included performances from Bad Bunny and French singer-songwriter Aya Nakumura.

Contributing: KiMi Robinson

The Woman in Black Background

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 Sana Kapur and other people who wish to remain anonymous

The Woman in Black is a 1983 horror novella written in the style of a traditional Gothic novel by Susan Hill. The story begins with Arthur Kipps surrounded by his stepchildren at Christmas, each telling ghost stories. When Kipps is asked to talk about the topic, he becomes agitated and leaves the room, only to write a letter communicating the haunting incidents he experienced while he was a junior solicitor for Bentley and was sent to Crythin Gifford, a small town on the north east coast of England, to sort out the papers of a dead client, Mrs. Alice Drablow.

This well-written novella describes the horrors that Arthur Kipps faced while staying at Crythin Grifford. The vivid description, gothic style and elements of mystery keep the readers hooked on till the very end. The influence of this novella resulted in a television film based on the story, called The Woman in Black , which was produced in 1989, with a screenplay by Nigel Kneale. A movie adaptation of the story was released in 2012, directed by James Watkins, starring Daniel Radcliffe. The book has also been adapted into a stage play by Stephen Mallatratt.

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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

Discover the best running shoes for women

• By Cameron French
• Jun 24, 2024

For both seasoned runners and beginners, the right running shoes are a game-changer. They provide essential support, cushioning, and shock absorption, protecting your feet and enhancing your performance. We’ve curated a list of top-rated running shoes from reputable brands that promise comfort , durability, and the endurance to go the distance.

Our top picks

Best overall: Adidas Ultraboost Light – A versatile, super lightweight shoe that offers an extra boost for continued momentum.

Best race shoes: Women’s Fresh Foam X 1080v13 by New Balance – Ideal for race day with cushioning that doesn’t weigh you down.

Best for trails: Nike Pegasus Trail 4 – Offers support and traction suitable for both trails and roads.

Best for road running: Brooks Glycerin GTS 20 – Features a GuideRails system for joint protection and stability.

Best for flat feet: Hoka Gaviota 4 – Comes with a plush midsole for cushioning and support, perfect for flat-footed runners.

Best trainers: Saucony Women’s Ride 14 – Designed with form-fit technology for a personalized and comfortable fit .

Each of these shoes has been selected for their unique features that cater to different running needs. Whether you’re hitting the track, trail, or pavement, these shoes are designed to provide the optimal running experience.

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• Adidas Ultraboost , beginners , Brooks Glycerin , cushioning , digital , New balance , Nike Pegasus , running shoes , seasoned runners , shock absorption

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ABC’s new series Ladies in Black gives us vintage fashions and feminist anthems

Professor & Dean, School of Media and Communication, RMIT University

Disclosure statement

Lisa French does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

RMIT University provides funding as a strategic partner of The Conversation AU.

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Ladies in Black, the new six-part ABC series, opens with Magda (Debi Mazar), the head of Goodes luxury department store’s “Model Gowns”.

As Magda is striding assuredly down the main street, we hear Peggy Lee’s famous 1962 anthem of feminist resilience: I’m A Woman .

Chic and modern, the epitome of the confident 1960s woman, she wears a hat from the vintage clothes collection of costume designer Marion Boyce. We are introduced to several other key characters, see a streetscape lined with classic cars. The scene of Sydney, 1961, is established.

Inspiration and adaptation

Taking its inspiration from the 1993 bestselling novel The Women in Black by Madeleine St. John, the series follows two earlier adaptations, firstly the 2015 theatrical musical Ladies in Black, which featured Tim Finn’s music, and then director Bruce Beresford’s successful 2018 feature film Ladies in Black.

Director Gracie Otto is quoted in press kit as offering the inspiration as Mad Men (2007–15) or The Marvellous Mrs. Maisel (2017–23), both of which are set in the same era as this series, and, like this one, tell stories about women who are seeking to achieve a place in the world on their own terms. One Australian production that comes to mind in a similar style is Miss Fischer Modern (2019).

However, it also belongs to a tradition – or perhaps it could almost be a genre – of shows set in department stores which have similar tropes: The Paradise (2012–13), set in 1875 and based on a novel about the founder of Paris’ Le Bon Marché; Mr Selfridge (2013–16), the recounting of the founding of Selfridge’s in London between 1908–28; and House of Promises (2022–23), set in a glamorous department store in 1920s Berlin.

The Cultural Context

Moving from the original book and various adaptations, all set in 1959, this television series is set two years later, suggesting that it is the next instalment.

The 1960s offers some key story elements: the postwar immigration boom (reflected in the migrant characters and storylines); burgeoning arts and culture (picked up in references to “free love and French cinema” or “ The Push ” — a left-wing libertarian group that existed in Sydney); and reference to the contraceptive pill, released in Australia in 1961 .

None of these are offered in any detail, but they point to the context, as does the signalling of the sexism, classism and racism of the era from the first episode.

This show’s tribute towards the spirit of the swinging sixties includes several characters with sex on their minds.

Lisa (Clare Hughes), a naive first-year university student, gets into a bad situation that she won’t let streetwise Angela save her from.

Fay (Jessica De Gouw) and her husband Rudi (Thom Green) make out in a stylish Borgward Isabella car he bought to keep her entertained when their babies arrive – but she isn’t keen on having them yet and goes on the pill.

In contrast, the terrifying Mrs Ambrose (Miranda Otto) is the foil against all the other characters. Recruited from Harrods to be the new head of Model Gowns, we know from the first moment when she moves a vase of flowers a few centimetres it is her way or the highway.

She epitomises colonialism, seeming to loath Australia and its messy local flowers, she sports a sense of English superiority, standing for the old world against modernity.

Finding its audience

People who love shopping are more likely to like this show than those who don’t.

Consumption and luxury department stores are, for those in the know, an experience that causes “feel good” dopamine release, sometimes referred to as retail therapy . Whether one buys anything or not, it is a space where those who shop can imagine an alternative self. It has a lure, creates desire and admiration for something beautifully made, cut, or crafted, and importantly, connects to the individual.

In the first episode, Angela (Azizi Donnelly) understands this as she delightedly touches the stock and thrilled, swings herself in a 360-degree circle on her first day on the “ladies’ cocktail” counter – clearly in heaven!

It is a big cast for a six-part series. This would imply the producers have more scenarios and are hoping it does well with viewers so they can make another.

The experience of the women is at the centre and female characters, whether friends or foes, get a lot of screen time and steal the show. The male characters are awful. They are inept, constantly let their wives, girlfriends and daughters down, and see everything from their own, male point of view.

A musical accompaniment to the future

The music is dominant throughout and working hard for the story. When Angela is getting ready for work in the second episode, the lyrics aren’t in English underpinning that she is a Lebanese girl from Redfern.

Music connects well to the humour. Riffs of As Time Goes By (Dooley Wilson’s tune from Casablanca) provide musical link to lines such as Angela saying: “Of all the department stores in all the world, he had to walk into mine”. These references link characters and prepare the audience for trouble.

Whether you like Ladies in Black or not will depend on if you like shopping, fashion, stories with female leads about female friendship, clever music, and 60s costumes. If there is another series made, there are plenty of places for this story to go.

Ladies in Black is now screening on ABC TV and streaming on iView.

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Unveiling the Mask: Exploring the Angry Black Woman Steroretype

Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) serve as pivotal cultural and educational institutions, fostering academic excellence and community engagement. However, within the HBCU workplace, Black women often navigate complex dynamics shaped by pervasive stereotypes and societal expectations.

We invite scholars, researchers, educators, administrators, and practitioners from diverse fields to contribute abstracts for chapters to be included in an anthology Unveiling the Mask: Exploring the Angry Black Woman Stereotype. This anthology aims to illuminate the multifaceted experiences of Black women in these cultural spaces, critically examining stereotypes such as the "Angry Black woman" and other detrimental narratives that impact our professional and personal lives. 

We welcome abstracts exploring a breadth of topics, including but not limited to:

Literature Reviews:

• Historical perspectives on stereotypes of Black women within academia and the workplace.
• Analysis of media representations and their influence on perceptions of Black female professionals in the academic setting.
• Examination of existing research on the intersection of race, gender, and workplace dynamics within HBCUs.

Reflective Papers:

• Personal narratives and lived experiences of Black women working in HBCUs, encompassing challenges, triumphs, and strategies for empowerment.
• Intersectional analyses considering how factors such as class, sexuality, and ability intersect with race and gender in shaping workplace experiences.
• Exploration of resistance strategies and resilience among Black women in navigating stereotypes and bias within the HBCU workplace.
• In addition to the themes outlined above, we encourage submissions that explore innovative pedagogical approaches, curriculum development, fostering inclusivity and diversity, and classroom engagement techniques within the context of HBCU environments.
• This anthology aims to be inclusive and welcomes contributions from scholars representing diverse perspectives and methodologies. We particularly value submissions that amplify marginalized voices and offer innovative insights into the complexities of Black female experiences within HBCUs.

Submission Guidelines:

• Abstracts should be no more than 500 words and should clearly outline the proposed chapter's objectives, methodology, and potential contributions to the anthology's theme.
• Please include a brief author biography (100 words) with your submission.
• Abstracts should be submitted via email to  [email protected]  by the deadline specified below.
• Selected contributors will be notified of acceptance and provided with guidelines for full chapter submission.

Deadline: Fri. Aug. 30,  2024

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• attempted sex assault

$100K bond set for alleged sex assault suspect who was taken down by family of martial artists

KATY, Texas (KTRK) -- The man accused of trying to sexually assault a woman before he was taken down by a family of black belt martial artists answered to a judge on Thursday.

Bond has been set at $100,000 for 19-year-old Alex Robinson, charged with attempted sexual assault.

Harris County Sheriff's Office deputies said Robinson attacked a woman inside the Cricket store on Fry Road earlier this week.

Han An and his three children, Simon, Christian, and Hannah, were in their tae kwon do studio next door when they heard the woman's screams and came running.

"We heard the second scream, which was a horror scream," Simon remembered. "Very loud."

The An family said they went inside the wireless store and opened the door to the back room to find a man on top of the young female employee.

ORIGINAL REPORT: Family of Tae Kwon Do black belts thwart attempted sexual assault in Katy

Han said he had seen Robinson on a bike outside the store earlier in the day. Despite having trained in martial arts for years, the An family said they had never had to use their skills outside of the studio.

"My dad just grabbed his shirt, twisted it so he doesn't move," Simon said. "He pinned him in the corner, and that's when he started assaulting my dad by biting him and scratching him."

Han used his skills to subdue Robinson before HCSO deputies arrived and took him into custody.

Investigators said Robinson doesn't know the woman he's accused of attacking.

During his court appearance, a public defender told the court Robinson had mental health issues.

Robinson is expected to appear again in court on Friday.

Related Topics

• HARRIS COUNTY
• ATTEMPTED SEX ASSAULT
• SEXUAL ASSAULT
• SELF DEFENSE

Attempted Sex Assault

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JK Rowling will 'struggle to support' Labour with Starmer's stance on gender

Rowling, who has always denied being transphobic, has been widely condemned in recent years for her views on transgender rights, having claimed that she would rather go to jail than refer to a trans person by their preferred pronouns.

Political reporter

Friday 21 June 2024 23:09, UK

JK Rowling has said she will "struggle to support" Labour if Sir Keir Starmer keeps his current stance on gender recognition.

The Harry Potter author has authored a 2,000-word essay in The Times in which she outlines her dissatisfaction with the Labour Party 's current position.

In the piece, she criticises Sir Keir , as well as shadow home secretary Yvette Cooper, shadow equalities secretary Anneliese Dodds, shadow foreign secretary David Lammy and shadow attorney general Emily Thornberry.

Election latest: Starmer makes 'Swift pit stop'

Rowling has been outspoken in her belief that biological women should be able to have separate spaces, and trans women - who were born male - should not be allowed access.

She has been criticised for her position, being widely condemned in recent years for her views on transgender rights, for example claiming that she would rather go to jail than refer to a trans person by their preferred pronouns.

Transgender newsreader India Willoughby recently responded to comments by Rowling as "genuinely disgusted".

She added: "Grotesque transphobia, which is upsetting. I am every bit as much a woman as JK Rowling."

Daniel Radcliffe, who became a worldwide star after playing schoolboy wizard Harry in the blockbuster adaptations of the novels, has also criticised her views, and said in an interview last month that the fallout with Rowling " makes me really sad ".

In the article, the author speaks about how she thought she "misheard" Sir Keir in 2021 when he criticised Labour candidate Rosie Duffield for saying only women have a cervix.

Sir Keir was asked about this statement in a recent leaders debate, at which point he said he agreed with Sir Tony Blair that women have vaginas and men have penises.

Rowling says she felt the Labour leader gave "the impression that until Tony Blair sat him down for a chat, he'd never understood how he and his wife had come to produce children".

She added that she "really wanted to give him the benefit of the doubt".

In her article, Rowling claims to "have been a Labour voter, a member (no longer), donor (not recently) and campaigner (ditto) all my adult life" - and she wants to see the end of the Conservative government.

According to Electoral Commission records, she gave £1m to the party in 2008, and £8,000 in 2015.

Read more: Troll who threatened to kill Rowling and Duffield avoids jail Rowling accuses Starmer of 'misrepresenting equalities law' Starmer says 99.9% of women 'haven't got a penis'

In the article, the author highlighted Ms Dodds for saying what a woman is "depends on what the context is".

Ms Cooper is criticised for saying she was "not going to get into rabbit holes on this".

Rowling points to Ms Thornberry for saying: "some women will have penises. Frankly, I'm not looking up their skirts, I don't care".

And Mr Lammy draws ire for saying women like Rowling are "dinosaurs hoarding rights".

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The Harry Potter author also claims Mr Lammy said that a cervix is "something you can have following various procedures and hormone treatments".

Rowling wrote: "It's very hard not to suspect that some of these men don't know what a cervix is, but consider it too unimportant to Google."

The NHS definition of the cervix is the opening between the vagina and the womb.

Rowling says the debate for "left-leaning" women like herself "isn't, and never has been, about trans people enjoying the rights of every other citizen, and being free to present and identify however they wish".

Instead, she says it is "about the right of women and girls to assert their boundaries".

She adds: "It's about freedom of speech and observable truth.

"It's about waiting, with dwindling hope, for the left to wake up to the fact that its lazy embrace of a quasi-religious ideology is having calamitous consequences."

The author says she met a mother of a girl with learning difficulties who was "smeared as a bigot and a transphobe for wanting female-only intimate care" for her.

"I cannot vote for any politician who takes issue with that mother's words," Rowling adds.

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She concludes: "An independent candidate is standing in my constituency who's campaigning to clarify the Equality Act.

"Perhaps that's where my X will have to go on 4 July.

"As long as Labour remains dismissive and often offensive towards women fighting to retain the rights their foremothers thought were won for all time, I'll struggle to support them.

"The women who wouldn't wheesht didn't leave Labour. Labour abandoned them."

Earlier in the day, Sir Keir ruled out lifting the block on the Scottish government's controversial gender reforms.

Sky News has approached the Labour Party for comment.

Related Topics

• Keir Starmer

• kidney transplant

Northwestern Medicine performs its 1st awake kidney transplant procedure in under 2 hours

CHICAGO (WLS) -- A Chicago man was the first patient at Northwestern Medicine to receive a kidney transplant that he was awake for.

John Nicholas, 28, had been experiencing kidney issues for over a decade, since being diagnosed with Crohn's Disease. Lab work showed he had inflammation in his kidneys, but the root of the issue was never found.

ABC7 Chicago is now streaming 24/7. Click here to watch

Nicholas avoided dialysis, and managed his disease with medication. After moving to Chicago in 2022, he found his kidney was declining, and he needed a transplant.

However, Nicholas had some trouble finding a kidney donor. His mom had initially planned to donate her kidney, but was unable to after her breast cancer diagnosis.

Nicholas turned to his childhood friend, Pat Wise, sharing that his doctors told him it was time to look for a donor.

"I stared at my phone and without hesitating, filled out the form that night," Wise said. "John is a good friend. He needed a kidney, and I had an extra one. I had to at least explore the potential of being his donor."

Wise found out he was a match and traveled to Chicago, where surgeons removed one of his kidneys to transplant it to Nicholas.

"Give an incredible gift to a friend is always a good feeling, and in some way contributing to this incredible medical advancement is icing on the cake," Wise said.

On May 24, Dr. Satish Nadig, a transplant surgeon at Northwestern Medicine; Dr. Vinayak Rohan, a transplant surgeon at Northwestern Memorial Hospital; and Dr. Vicente Garcia Tomas, an anesthesiologist at Northwestern Memorial Hospital, performed the procedure in under two hours.

Nicholas received anesthesia similar to those who undergo cesarean sections.

RELATED: Doctor with cancer gets unprecedented liver, double-lung transplant from Northwestern Medicine

"Doing anesthesia for the awake kidney transplant was easier than many C-sections," Tomas said. "For John's case, we placed a spinal anesthesia shot in the operating room with a little bit of sedation for comfort. It was incredibly simple and uneventful, but allowed John to be awake for the procedure, improving the patient experience. Not only can awake kidney transplantation help patients who have risks or phobias to general anesthesia, but it can help shorten their hospital stay so they can recover more comfortably at home."

Although Nicholas didn't exhibit any risks or phobias to general anesthesia, he was a great candidate due to his age, limited risk factors and eagerness to participate in a historical procedure for Northwestern Medicine.

"It was a pretty cool experience to know what was happening in real time and be aware of the magnitude of what they were doing," Nicholas said. "At one point during surgery, I recall asking, 'should I be expecting the spinal anesthesia to kick in?' They had already been doing a lot of work and I had been completely oblivious to that fact. Truly, no sensation whatsoever. I had been given some sedation for my own comfort, but I was still aware of what they were doing. Especially when they called out my name and told me about certain milestones they had reached."

The surgery was successful, and doctors discharged Nicholas the following day.

The typical hospitalization is two to three days for patients undergoing a kidney transplant at Northwestern Medicine.

Northwestern Medicine is looking to establish the AWAKE program, or Accelerated Surgery Without General Anesthesia in Kidney Transplantation, for patients who want the operation, can't have or are at a high risk of general anesthesia, or could benefit from it.

"It really opens up a whole new door and is another tool in our toolbelt for the field of transplantation," Nadig said. "If you think of what kidney transplant is, taking an organ, saving somebody's life, now, making it an overnight stay, 24 hours in the hospital, remarkable, to mitigate the risks with invasive procedures in the hospital."

Nicholas and his team of doctors spoke about the rare procedure Monday.

"I just want to express how truly powerful this experience was, fact that it was truly life changing," Nicholas said. "We've always said to each other, ride-or-die friends with each other for life. Actually having a bona fide example, we got each other's back. It meant the world to me,"

More information about Northwestern's Medicine's kidney transplant program can be found here www.nm.org .

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