May Sinclair in about 1916

Born in 1863 and a celebrated author in her lifetime, Sinclair has, like so many women writers, been largely forgotten, despite her close friendships with some of modernism’s poster boys: Ezra Pound, Ford Madox Ford, Robert Frost, and others. She was an early champion of T.S. Eliot and the first critic to use the term “stream of consciousness” to describe a literary technique.

Rather brilliantly, Sinclair also campaigned for women to get the vote, and in 1912 wrote a pamphlet called ‘Feminism’ which argued for women’s equal potential for intellectual endeavour and political engagement. Her feminism seems to have been rather essentialist, but she was still a powerful voice for equality at a time when women were routinely denied the vote, an education, economic independence or sexual agency.

Sinclair had no formal education, although she read widely and developed an interest in psychoanalysis, philosophy and mysticism in particular. She attended Cheltenham Ladies College for a year before leaving to care for her four brothers who all had a hereditary heart defect. In spite of this, she wrote a dozen novels including bleak bildungsroman The Life and Death of Harriett Frean, essays, poems and short stories before the onset of Parkinson’s disease prevented her from writing.

She died in 1946, having already drifted into obscurity. However, her literary significance as a pioneer of feminism and modernism is starting to be recognised, as this great post points out: “Her work is good, even great, and it covers all the stops. It fits quite neatly in between George Eliot and Virginia Woolf, and she can serve well as a missing link.”

I stumbled upon Sinclair entirely by accident when I picked up her 1923 collection Uncanny Stories, which is where the horror connection comes in. There’s a near-complete copy available on Google Books if you want to check it out, although it’s missing one of my favourites.

Sinclair’s letters show that her idea for the title predates the publication of Freud’s essay The Uncanny by nearly a decade, but she seems to have welcomed the coincidence and it’s certainly fitting. Her stories are intensely psychological; there is no gore or ghouls, but instead a creeping horror and eerie imagery, and a sense of claustrophobia which lingers long after you’ve finished reading.

Some of the stories are intensely sad, such as ‘If The Dead Knew’, in which a son realises his dead mother has heard him tell others how he had secretly hated her:

Something compelled him to turn round and look towards his mother’s chair.

Then he saw her.

She stood between him and the chair, straight and thin, dressed in the clothes she had died in, the yellowish flannel nightgown and bed jacket.

The apparition maintained itself with difficulty. Already its hair had grown indistinct, a cap of white mist. Its face was an insubstantial framework for its mouth and eyes, and for the tears that fell in two shining tracks between. It was less a form than a visible emotion, an anguish.

Hollyer stood and stared at it. Through the glasses of its tears it gazed back at him with an intense, a terrible reproach and sorrow.

Then, slowly and stiffly, it began to recede from him, drawn back and back, without any movement of its feet, in an unearthly stillness, keeping up, to the last minute, its look of indestructible reproach.

And now it was a formless mass that drifted to the window and hung there a second, and passed, shrinking like a breath on the pane.

But other tales are comic. In ‘The Victim’, a ghostly visitation to a murderer isn’t full of reproach, but thanks – for freeing the victim from his debts.

Sinclair’s themes and imagery chime with many of the ideas popularised by Freud. Earlier in ‘If the Dead Knew’ the central character Hollyer is alarmed to discover he wishes his mother would die:

In the dark, secret places of the mind your thoughts ran loose beyond your knowing: they burrowed under the walls that shut off one self from another; they got through. It was as if his secret self had broken loose.

You are the unconscious mind and I claim my five pounds.

Founding a literary tradition which would later include Elizabeth Bowen and Margaret Atwood, Sinclair’s uncanny stories feature divided and dislocated selves, the dance of impulse and resistance and the hidden tracks and traces of memory and unspoken desire. And as Philippa Martindale explains, these stories are particularly concerned with feminine and feminist experience:

Sinclair’s uncanny fiction is a subtle tool for feminist expression, deconstructing patriarchal paradigms of power… Her uncanny stories serve as a forum for ‘deviant’ subjects, addressing cultural issues such as female desire, sexuality, and gender roles.

When I first read the collection, it reminded me of Daphne du Maurier’s short stories, and especially ‘The Apple Tree‘ – in part because most of the stories concern relationships between men and women. Martindale highlights the “sense of struggle for mastery between Sinclair’s male and female protagonists, typically played out in the sexual arena.” One of the best examples is ‘Where Their Fire Is Not Quenched’, which deals at once with the fantastic and the horrifically mundane as a former couple are compelled to eternally repeat their loveless affair in a shabby hotel room in the afterlife.

On the subject of ghost stories, Sinclair herself said:

Ghosts have their own atmospheres and their own reality, they also have their setting in the everyday reality we know; the story-teller is handling two realities at the same time.

For me it is this touching of two worlds which makes ghost stories so thrilling. The idea of something surfacing or reaching through, reaching back is unsettling and deeply uncanny. Sinclair’s protagonists find themselves at points where the membrane between the natural and supernatural, life and afterlife, the conscious and unconscious has grown thin.

Naturally, these skills are directly applicable to his role as Arthur Kipps, a harrowed, traumatised, suicidal young single father-of-one sent to catalogue the creepy shit in a haunted house on some salt marshes in The Woman In Black. Obviously a laugh a minute, there. I can only assume he took the role determined to prove himself a Serious Actor, You Guys – which we’ll talk about in a minute. First, let’s talk about the actual story.

**** Obligatory this-is-how-my-reviews-tend-to-roll SPOILER WARNING here!****

I’ve seen the stage adaptation of Susan Hill’s novel several times, because I love having the shit scared out of me. The scares in WiB come from Surprise. They’re things that jump out at you and say, “Boo”. Nothing more sophisticated than gribblies in the dark, which is a bit damning of me, but seriously – that’s all they are. They’re good at it, but I never find the horror in WiB particularly horrifying.

On stage, in the intimacy of seeing real life flesh-and-bone players getting menaced by things in the dark renders the jump-and-boo tactic of scare artistry very powerful, because you all empathise together in a big knot; you notice what the actors notice, when they notice them. Things can be hidden and sneak about, and then you, as an audience, find yourselves watching the scenery as much as the actors, and the hidden gribblies play out in real time and it’s all very nice and spooky.

SERIOUS FACE

You can’t do that in a film. You gotta work harder.  The film (directed by James Watkins) does its best to reproduce the “things lurking in the background” feel of the play by having Mr Radcliffe constantly off-centre in shots and filling the space behind him with shapes that might be an out-of-focus human face. It’s one way to create the atmosphere, and it does it well, but the main thing the film does differently from the stage show is that it recognises that cinema can’t get away with jump-scaring all the time without being boring. You have a lot more time with the camera up in your character’s face, and you gotta give them reasons for all them facial wranglings. Theatre is … all close up on your audience, and cinema is all up in your character’s grill. Distance is important. You can get away with less in film. You gotta have backstory and all that. The Woman In Black movie understands this, and Jane Goldman‘s screenplay valiantly fills the holes that the stage version simply doesn’t have the room to fill. We get suspicious villagers! Pale, zombified children drinking lye! Backstory and juice all about The Children and that, and that certainly goes some way to giving horror that’s more psychologically fulfilling than just working on pure adrenaline.

Problem is, in a way that it simply isn’t in the play (and I ain’t red t’book, so I can’t comment on that), it really is all about The Children (in the stage version, there’s a play-within-a-play motif that more-or-less prevents this focus wholesale). And, you know, while there’s nothing wrong with that per se, I just never feel particularly comfortable with anything that centralises female desire for children and biological motherhood. There’s a lot of that in the film, and I mean one hell of a lot – we’ve got the Woman In Black going literally insane over the loss of her child, first through adoption and then through death, and then we’ve got Mrs Daily (Janet McTeer), who isn’t so much of a medium as a large,¹ channelling her dead son’s spirit all over the place and keeping little dogs as child replacements, and then we’ve got Dan Radcliffe being traumatised over the death of his wife who died in childbirth and all that. So it’s a pretty central theme.

Hold up a sec, Society. I got a little request. It’s no biggie, just: CAN WE PLEASE, AS A CULTURE, STOP CENTRALISING PHYSICAL GENETIC PARENTHOOD AS THE ONLY VALID FORM OF PARENTHOOD. Please. Please. Because right here, right, we’ve got the demonisation of the Mr and Mrs Drablow – who have adopted Nathaniel, the eponymous black-clad Woman’s child – as literal child thieves. This is what drives the whole descent into madness which leads to the haunting, deaths and general destruction. That’s it. That’s the root cause. Adoption. And I know there are tales that do it worse, but seriously; The Woman In Black revolves around how terrible it is when biological parenthood is subverted, either through death, or worse, through adoption!

It drives me a bit up the wall. We know that parenthood isn’t inherently holy and pure; there’re neverending streams of news stories about the extreme situations where it all goes wrong, but what about chosen family? Is it really that terrible to form familial bonds with people to whom you are not genetically tethered?

Aside from that, this flick catalogues Dan Radcliffe’s fine ability to look serious while opening doors, see ghosts and drink heavily. That’s pretty much what he does. He does so with alarming dedication, actually, and while I know we’re meant to, as an audience, suspend disbelief and accept that he’s a man on the edge with nothing left to lose, he has a wanton lack of a survival instinct. I mean, I’d realise I was in a horror film way back at the beginning with the creepy staring children and the rural locals who are afraid of cars. You end up feeling that his determination to open all the doors and chase disturbing sounds around the OBVIOUSLY HAUNTED HOUSE is remarkable. The man’s a hero. But you do really rather want to shout, “STOP OPENING THE SODDING DOORS!” at him.² Still, his frowning skills have come on a long way from that other film thing he did when he was younger, whatever it was called.

They’ve also changed the ending from the play, which has it quite open-ended and desolate. (Skip this paragraph if you still want to watch the film without knowing the fine detail!) The film does something completely different, and it’s ridiculous. I imagine some people may find posthumous familial reunion on an otherworldly railway track quite comforting, but I found it ludicrous. It goes quite a long way to undermine the sincerity of the plot, and isn’t it funny that in horror/survival films, the pragmatic, rationally-minded one is always shown to be wrong or narrow-minded? Mr Daily (Ciarán Hinds), who is vocally sceptical of ghosts and contacting the dead… well, it’s a bloody ghost film, isn’t it? So he’s proved wrong all over the place, and the stupendously melodramatic ending pretty much consolidates his comprehensive wrongness, and I’m like, well, actually I sympathised with him a lot, so what do I take home from this?

YOU SHOULD SEE THIS FILM BECAUSE:

• It does surprise!horror very well.
• It’s very well cast and located, and check out that house, I mean goddamn.
• Mrs Daily is the best thing in the film, what with her mediumage and her creepy little dogs and all.
• Oh fine, yes, Daniel Radcliffe is worth a watch as something other than that other role he played in That Other Film Series.

YOU SHOULD NOT SEE THIS FILM BECAUSE:

• It only really does the “boo!” horror very well; the rest is very, very cheesy.  That said, I found myself jumpy in the dark for a week afterwards, and I’m hard to scare.
• OH MY FUCKING GOD, ADOPTION REALLY ISN’T A SODDING CRIME, IT IS 2012 CAN WE REALISE THIS PLEASE
• The soundtrack is like Fisher Price Psychological Tension Music and I could have provided a more subtle and nuanced soundtrack on vox and kazoo.
• Some children die.  But I suppose you wouldn’t be even considering going to see this film, of all things, if that was likely to distress you.

1. DO YOU SEE WHAT I LITERALLY DID THERE
2. Which I did, several times, which is why I shouldn’t be allowed in cinemas.