Storytelling Theme Analysis

The Woman in Black is a story within a story within a story. The protagonist, Arthur Kipps, is prompted to share a ghost story during his family’s Christmas Eve celebration one year, but the only ghost story he knows is unfortunately true—and more macabre and upsetting than his family is perhaps prepared for. Confronted with an incident from his past he has fought so hard to shake, Arthur realizes he must at last face down his demons and bear witness to his own horrific story—just as he vowed, on his fateful trip to Eel Marsh House so many years ago, to bear witness to the horror within it. Through Arthur’s tale, Susan Hill—herself carefully reconstructing the Victorian Gothic genre in order to convey Arthur’s frightful tale—illustrates the power of storytelling, ultimately arguing that in the face of pain, trauma, and isolation, sometimes one’s story is all they are left with.

At the beginning of the novel, Arthur is hanging onto happiness and stability by a very thin thread. Things as benign as a few days of bad weather upset him and send him reeling back into the depths of his past; an invitation to contribute to a fireside ghost story contest with his family triggers him so deeply that he must remove himself from the room. As Arthur confronts the thin veneer of his happy front and the darkness lurking just beneath it, he realizes that his only chance of moving forward with his life is to tell his story; not for anyone to read or share, but simply for his own peace of mind.

Arthur’s story is not the only one that must be “exorcised” from him over the course of the novel—the woman in black’s own story, too, is all that remains of her. Jennet’s story is revealed in fits and starts—when he arrives in Crythin Gifford, Arthur does not know anything of the woman in black at all. When she first appears to him—and seemingly to him alone—it is at the funeral of Alice Drablow, who will eventually be revealed to be her sister. The woman in black seems to be there to bear witness to Alice’s burial as a way of adding to the narrative of her own life—or afterlife. When Arthur mentions the sight of a wasted-faced woman in black to his companion at the funeral, Mr. Jerome, Jerome becomes visibly frightened, and hurries Arthur away from the churchyard. As Arthur begins exploring Eel Marsh House, he finds a packet of letters that tell a story he is intrigued by but does not fully understand. The letters to Alice, from a woman named Jennet, reveal that Jennet bore an illegitimate son and was forced to surrender him to Alice for adoption. Jennet harbored ill will toward her sister, though, and warned her that the child would never truly belong to Alice. Arthur is touched by the story the letters tell, and feels deep sympathy for Jennet. He does not yet know that she is the terrible woman in black—the malevolent spirit-woman who has haunted Eel Marsh for years and has selected Arthur as the newest object of her hatred.

Arthur at last learns the full extent of the story after he has been rescued from Eel Marsh House. Having had terrible encounters with a ghostly presence in the home’s immaculate nursery, Arthur senses that the nursery, the woman in black, and the letters are all somehow related—but does not see how until he discovers three death certificates attached to the letters. The certificates tell their own story, and reveal that Jennet’s son, Nathaniel, drowned at the age of six in a pony trap accident in the marsh. Arthur thinks he knows the full story—but there is more to learn still. Samuel’s one true friend in town, the kindly landowner Samuel Daily, reveals to Arthur that Jennet, deranged by the loss of her child, died at the age of thirty-six and from then on haunted the town; her sporadic appearances always signaled the violent, untimely death of a local child. The full story now revealed, Arthur feels an intense mix of pity for Jennet and fear of her—her complicated and devastating story explains her hateful malevolence and desire for vengeance, but does not exonerate her crimes against the town. In a cruel twist of fate, Arthur—who leaves Crythin Gifford believing he has ended the woman in black’s cycle of violence (since no local child died this time) and thus her story as well—becomes another pawn within it. Upon his return to London, all seems well for many months, until the woman in black returns with a vengeance to murder Arthur’s wife and child in the very same way her own child was killed—in a pony trap accident. Arthur’s story, then, is the story of the woman in black—his and Jennet’s narratives are inextricably bound up with one another, and his suffering is begat of her own. All these two poor souls have to cling to—one in death, and one in a cursed, horror-filled half-life—are their stories, and Arthur’s fierce protectiveness and secrecy regarding his own story as the years go by reflects Jennet’s desire to change the course of her “story” and reclaim control of a narrative which ran away from her.

The layered narrative of The Woman in Black reveals the author’s faith in the power of storytelling from the outset—and ultimately engenders within its protagonist Arthur Kipps a faith in the power of his own story, even if that power is just to free himself from the torments of his past. Jennet’s own story, too, is a story-within-a-story; the “story” of Jennet’s sad life, a tragedy and even perhaps an embarrassment to the isolated, afflicted woman, continues past her death as she becomes the tormentor of the town of Crythin Gifford and creates a new narrative. No longer a sickly woman whose child was stolen from her not just once but twice, Jennet rebrands herself as a powerful figure able to steal other people’s children away from them at last. Their stories are all Arthur and Jennet have, and in this way, they are bound to each other by more than a mere haunting.