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What is the major theme of The Woman in Black by Susan Hill?
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The major theme of The Woman in Black by Susan Hill is vengeance. The ghost of Jennet Humfrye, the Woman in Black, seeks revenge for the loss of her child, who died tragically in a marsh. Her need for retribution extends indiscriminately to those around her, including village children and ultimately Arthur Kipps, the protagonist. This theme of revenge is intertwined with the power of secrets, as the hidden truths of the past resurface with destructive force.
The Woman In Black is a deliberate pastiche of second-wave Gothic fiction. It utilizes as many of the tropes of late Victorian Gothic as possible, from obfuscating, foggy marshes which reflect the inner landscape of the characters in the story, to a causeway which isolates the protagonist from the world and a shadowy, dark building in which mysterious letters are hidden. Its key themes can probably be identified as:
1. Secrets. The power of secrets is very important to the story; Arthur Kipps is dispatched to Crythin Gifford to settle an estate, but the people in the village clearly do not want him to uncover anything. The secret Alice Drablow kept throughout her life has been repressed but emerges to Arthur in ghost form, because its power to destroy has become so intense: Alice took her sister's child, who later died in the marshes, and this has had a...
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terrible effect upon the village.
2. Revenge. The ghost in this story, the titular Woman in Black is a traditional vengeance spirit. She wants revenge not only on her sister, but on everyone she feels has wronged her—including a world that would not let her keep her baby. She enacts this revenge on everyone from the village children and to, at the end of the story, Arthur Kipps himself.
The 2012 film The Woman in Black is actually based on a novel with the same title, written by Susan Hill in 1982. The novel is a straightforward ghost story, concerning a lawyer who attends to the affairs of a recently-deceased woman and is haunted by a mysterious ghost.
Throughout the book, the overriding theme is vengeance. The ghost is that of the dead woman's sister, who had her son taken from her because she was not married at the time of birth. While becoming close to her son, who never knew that she was the real mother, she witnessed his death in a carriage that fell into a marsh. Her trauma at his death led to her own, and then she returned to haunt the village. According to legend, her appearance heralded the coming death of another child; at the end of the book, when the lawyer is riding in a carriage with his wife and son, she causes the horse to panic and the lawyer's wife and son are killed.
Her need for revenge is past the point of specification; the lawyer was never involved with her affairs, or with her family except to close her sister's files. Instead, she is a creature of mindless revenge, with only one goal, and no care as to who suffers. It is suggested that she has killed many children over the years, and that the follow her in the afterlife.