Susan Hill’s novella ‘The Woman in Black’ tells the story of a young London solicitor, Arthur Kipps, sent to a small northern town to settle the affairs of an old woman, Alice Drablow, who has recently died. When Kipps arrives in Crythin Grifford he finds that the locals are unfriendly; they shun him and refuse to talk of Mrs Drablow. However, after repeated sightings of a frighteningly ill woman dressed all in black, his descent into true heart-pounding horror begins as he tries to figure out the story behind the mysterious apparitions. At the funeral of Mrs Drablow, Arthur Kipps catches his first sight of the Woman in Black.
Hill uses onomatopoeia to create mood and atmosphere; Kipps hears the “slight rustle” which repeated throughout the novel becomes associated with the approach or departure of ghost of Jennet Humfrye. Using words like rustle (onomatopoeia) is literary device ideal for Hill as using such vivid language appeals to the five senses. The sound suggests the movement of fabric, crucially the movement of the apparition’s clothes, however rustle implies an element of subtlety, hence the apparition is slight and not obvious, and for Kipps to hear this sound also presents the silence of the church during the funeral’s procession, also adding to the ominousness of the atmosphere. When Hill uses the word rustle, the word itself sounds like the sound it’s describing this way Hill is making her text realistic, almost audible, imagistic and tangible.
Hill also uses symbolism, to create a sinister atmosphere. Upon this first sighting the Woman in Black is described as having a “Bonnet shaded her face,” women wearing bonnets is typically Victorian, the novel is set at the turn of the 20th century so the bonnet consequently symbolises the ghost as unfashionable. Hill uses this bonnet to hide Jennet Humfrye’s expression and emotions, the hiding of her emotional expression allows for elusiveness to assume of what is to come, thus the bonnet is used to symbolise her sinister intentions.
Hill employs creepy descriptions to create mood, Kipps describes the woman as “She was quite possibly no more than thirty” and “there was still some faint trace on her features, some lingering hint of a not inconsiderable former beauty.” She's not even your typical ghost who wanders through a big old house, weeping and trying to find its way to a better place. Hill’s ghost is angry and filled with vengeance and will not let anyone stand in her way.
In the funeral passage Hill uses contrasts between light and relative warmth in the churchyard to throw the darkness and lack of warmth of Jennet Humfrye into even sharper relief, “limpid sunshine, comparative warmth and brightness” contrasting with the fog throughout the novel for example at Eel Marsh House. Also here, the use of ‘Limpid’ suggests Kipps’ view of the woman is now very clear, even if she is “some yards back, beside another headstone” which adds to our impression that the woman he sees is real. It is important here, to draw emphasis to Hill taking influence from Henry James’ ‘The Turn of the Screw’ also a gothic novel set in the Victorian era. The imagery of ‘The Woman in Black’ is reminiscent of the ‘The Turn of the Screw’ and the gothic genre as a whole, Hill similarly to James relates the amount of light present in various scenes to the strength of the supernatural or ghostly forces apparently at work.
Hill also repeatedly represents Humfrye as ‘skeletal’ through her language “Skin…. and flesh tautly stretched and strained….bones …eyes sunken back into her head…ravages of the flesh.” The skull is popularly used as a symbol of death, Hill’s description recalls an image similar to that of images of the dead from medieval and renaissance art, from the C19th such as Edvard Munch’s paintings, The Scream; The Scream is the popular name given to each of four versions of a composition, created as both paintings and pastels, by the Expressionist artist Edvard Munch between 1893 and 1910. Der Schrei der Natur (The Scream of Nature) is the title Munch gave to these works, all of which show a greenish figure with an agonized expression against a landscape with a tumultuous orange sky, similar to the image Hill tries to recall when describing Jennet Humfrye.
The most bloodcurdling factor Hill uses in the passage are the children looking through the bars of the school fence at the funeral with 'pale, solemn faces with great round eyes' it could be suggested at this point that this description symbolises the faces of the dead children, victims of the Woman in Black herself. Hill’s description employs adjectives that support this reading - 'pale,’ ‘silent,’ ‘grave,’& ‘motionless.’ Death in gothic literature is prevalently used as a plot device; Hill’s dead vengeful ghost with her army of dead children is popular in gothic novels of this kind, the shades of people who used to live on the earth have haunted literature. Sometimes these opaque creatures are quite real in stories, other times they are figments of the imagination, and other times it's never quite clear.
To conclude, Hill has not written a horror story where things aren't always what they seem, and Jennet is no disembodied ghost going bump in the night. She's fully embodied, with eyes, clothes, and skin—even if that skin does look like bone. In The Woman in Black, appearances matter. Hill’s foreshadowing creates an atmosphere because of what's outside gives us a pretty good clue to what's inside, and it's not always good. However despite her sinister look and her wasted face, Kipps at first feels sympathy for her and talks about how brave the ghost is however by end of this chapter that opinion has changed.