“I have no story to tell!”: Maternal Rage in Susan Hill’s The Woman in Black

Abstract

Intertexts, Vol. 4, No. 1, 2000 Ihave no story to tell!”: Maternal Rage in Susan Hill’s The Woman in Blacli D o n n a C o x U n i v e r s i t y o f H u l l Preface This paper considers Susan Hill’s novel The Woman in Black, atext that, despite its adaption by Stephen Mallatrat into along-running theatri¬ cal production for the West End, has received little critical attention in terms of literary analysis. It makes use of psychoanalytical and post¬ structuralist theory to comment upon the location of the writing subject andtheproductionofnarrativeinrelationtoamaternalpresenceoperating as aschematic absence in Hill’s text. Just as the fictional mother haunts the textual production of Hill’s main character, Victorian ghost story motifs and textual references haunt the storyline of her novel so that amechanics of intertextuality may be seen to operate within its literal dimension. Its own narrative mechanism also offers ahaunting from within, as stories witlnnstoryareunravelledsothat,justasthenarrative“I”ishauntedbyits terrible tale, the story itself is revealed within another layer of narrative. Thispresentsuswithacomplexinterleavingofnarrationreminiscentofthe convolutednarrativestructureofEmilyBronte’sWutheringHei^/hts,ex¬ cept that in this parodic tale, “the wind did not moan through the case¬ ment” (Hill95).2 TheintertextualreferencescontainedinthetextualbodyofTheWoman in Black function by means of an implied extra-textual presence, which is actually amechanics of operative absence in the textual structure. The storyline is haunted by these other texts, which pre-exist it and rely upon thereader’srecollectionofpasttextualencountersthatmaybecalledupby the interpretative act. This scenario of reading echoes the replay of past eventstowhichKippsissubjectedinhisownpsychicalarena.Whentheaf¬ fairs of Mrs. Drablow are first related to him, he notes that “[t]he business beginning to sound like something from aVictorian novel ...” (28). He later describes Eel Marsh House as “like the house of poor Miss Havisham”(61).Theactivationofsuchcommentsreliesuponthereader’s recognition of the motifs, characters and conventions of Victorian texts. Wilkie Collins’ The Woman in White (1860) is an absent presence in the text due to the inference carried in its title. Kipps may be said to occupy the place of the detective in astructure which is dependent for the success of its revelatory movement upon the depiction of tantalizing suspense. What is hidden provides the page-turning impetus to reveal, while its horror is w a s 7 4 Cox—“I have no story to tell! 7 5 directly dependent upon remaining concealed. To stave ofFhis terror of the unknown, Kipps reads the poetry of John Clare and Sir Walter Scott’s The Heart of Midlothian (93-4, 107) as if wishing to displace himself from his “present” situation by being absorbed into texts tied to other spaces and places. It is perhaps ironic that Clare’s poem “I Am” contains the lines, Ilong for scenes, where man hath never trod Aplace where woman never smiled or wept. (Ricks 169) Another character who reads himself to sleep due to the effects of an unsettling haunting is Professor Parkins in the M. R. James short story, “Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad.” Events of the day cause him to “get out abook” while being contained within the pages of one (James 83). The Professor, formerly possessed of acertainty that ghosts are “not real,” is haunted by anotliing which comes in answer to awhistle. The name of this short story will be recognized as the title of Hill’s chapter, “WhistleandI’llCometoYou”inwhichSpiderthedogcomestohisname in adirect performative result of tlie auditory signifier. It is interesting that anotherdimensionisaddedtotliisintertextualscenariobyJames’simplied reference to the Robert Burns’s poem, “Oh, Whisde, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad.” This tertiary' haunting of text within text within text is analogous to the mechanics of the story with which we are presented, in which Jennet’s story is contained within Kipps’s narration of the ghost storywhichisrecollectivelyplacedwithinhisprimarynarrationwithwhich the text opens. This results in abreakage of the narrative “I” which becomes dislocated in its very localized existence, tied as it is to the con¬ ventions of textual representation. “I” becomes “not-I” in this intrusion of sign systems one into the other. Kippswriteshisghoststoryagainstthestereotypedconventionsofthe Victorian ghost story. His tale will not tell of “dank charnel houses and overgrown graveyards, of footsteps creaking upon staircases and fingers tappingatcasements,ofbowlingsandshriekings,groaningsandscuttlings...