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. 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:įocusing on crumbling castles as sites of terror, and on homeless protagonists who wander the face of the earth, the Gothic, too, is preoccupied with the home.

(The Improper Feminine, 4) Susan Hill unlike traditional Gothic appreciably reworks on the Gothic trope of feminine captivity within the household space. 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’. It concerns the mental trauma which a woman experiences when she is metaphorically caged in free world. The Woman in Black is somewhere a personal outburst which unveils the sub-conscious anguish that Susan went through after her miscarriage. 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. 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. The Hill’s novel mediates women’s apprehensions about motherhood and self- independence during the early 1980s.

The Woman in Black could be interpreted from numerous critical perspectives: psychological, feminist, intertextual, generic, historical and biographical. 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 is not allowed to live freely as an active member and it is the masculine decisions which are forced upon her. 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 novel being a popular ghost story proffers a social critique of motherhood and contemporary rhetoric surrounding the family. 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. Susan Hill’s novel The Woman in Black (1983) is a fundamental example of women’s Gothic Horror.

The woman in black by susan hill