British Horror Cinema by Steve Chibnall & Julian Petley (edt)

Author:Steve Chibnall & Julian Petley (edt) [Chibnall, Steve & Petley, Julian]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Humanities
Published: 2011-05-29T21:58:10+00:00

116 John C. Tibbetts

Railo, E. (1927), The Haunted Castle: A Study of the Elements of English Romanticism, London: Routledge.

Rebello, S. (1983), ‘ Something Wicked This Way Comes’, Cinefantastique, 13, 5 (June–July): 28–49.

Svehla, G.J. and S. (eds) (1996), Cinematic Hauntings, Baltimore, MD: Midnight Marquee Press.

Smith, D.G. (1996), ‘ The Innocents’, in Svehla and Svehla.

Varma, D.P. (1957), The Gothic Flame, London: Arthur Barker.

9

Barbara, Julia, Carol,

Myra, and Nell: diagnosing

female madness in British

horror cinema

Steven Jay Schneider

At the level of proverb and popular culture, if not in medical science, the connection between madness and England has persisted with remarkable tenacity . . . Most significantly, in England the differences in the perception of madness as it appeared in men and women stand out with particular clarity . . . Even when both men and women had similar symptoms of mental disorder, psychiatry differentiated between an English malady, associated with the intellectual and economic pressures on highly civilized men, and a female malady, associated with the sexuality and essential nature of women. Women were believed to be more vulnerable to insanity than men, to experience it in specifically feminine ways, and to be differently affected by it in the conduct of their lives.

(Elaine Showalter 1985: 7, emphasis added)

This essay takes as its focus the depiction of psychologically unstable female protagonists in five critically lauded (if not all commercially successful) British horror films of the 1960s and 1970s: The Haunting (Robert Wise, 1963), Séance on a Wet Afternoon (Bryan Forbes, 1964), Repulsion (Roman Polanski, 1965), Asylum (Roy Ward Baker, 1972),1 and Full Circle (US: The Haunting of Julia (Richard Loncraine, 1976)). Despite these films’ differences with respect to production history, sub-genre and narrative detail, there are a number of complex and highly specific themes relating to female madness which are not only foregrounded in all five pictures, but which constitute what might profitably be viewed as an ongoing intertextual dialogue. In what follows, I shall examine in a preliminary manner the way in which each picture tackles these themes of Identity, Sexuality, Domesticity, Foreignness and Subjectivity, with an eye towards identifying their Gothic origins, their subtle variations and their complex meanings.

Limitations of space prevent my providing detailed plot synopses of the five films here under investigation. By way of introduction, however, let me just say a few words about the female protagonists at the centre of each of them. Both Julia (Mia Farrow in Full Circle) and Myra (Kim Stanley in Séance) have lost children, the former to an everyday choking-while-eating incident, the latter during childbirth.

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