The twentieth- and twenty-first-century horror movie has a
convention of showing you what is to come in a sequence prior to the opening
credits. After this there may be gradual build up – an hour of creaking doors
and establishing relationships between the central characters (read: victims)
before the demons, ghosts, or chainsaw-wielding maniacs reappear to wreak
havoc. But the opening sequence is important – both for letting us know what
kind of filmic experience this will be and for, perversely, giving us a taste
of the horrors to look forward to.
In this post I’m looking at the openings of the two most
famous ‘sensation’ novels of the nineteenth-century – Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White (1859-60) and
Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s
Secret (1861-2) – to see if they do something analogous to the modern day
horror movie with their first few pages. Designed to thrill and shock likewise,
how do they set the tone for what is to come?
‘I had now arrived at
that particular point of my walk where four roads met—the road to Hampstead,
along which I had returned, the road to Finchley, the road to West End, and the
road back to London. I had mechanically turned in this latter direction, and was
strolling along the lonely high-road—idly wondering, I remember, what the
Cumberland young ladies would look like—when, in one moment, every drop of
blood in my body was brought to a stop by the touch of a hand laid lightly and
suddenly on my shoulder from behind me.
I turned on the
instant, with my fingers tightening round the handle of my stick.
There, in the middle
of the broad bright high-road—there, as if it had that moment sprung out of the
earth or dropped from the heaven—stood the figure of a solitary Woman, dressed
from head to foot in white garments, her face bent in grave inquiry on mine,
her hand pointing to the dark cloud over London, as I faced her.’
Walter’s first sight of Anne in The Woman in White is a shocking opening event with all the hallmarks
of the typical horror movie – secluded location, lonely protagonist, creepy
woman in nightdress. But of course, despite the use of this passage for the
opening of TV and film adaptations of the novel, this isn’t the opening at all.
The true opening, prior to the dramatic introduction of Anne
and some pages dealing with the relatively minor characters of Walter’s mother
and sister, and Pesca, is much less obviously affecting and draws attention to
the novel’s textual nature rather than seeking to scare or thrill.
‘This is the story of
what a Woman’s patience can endure, and what a Man’s resolution can achieve.’
The first line is arresting and definitive, with the writer
assuming a level of authority which the narrative – which will be voiced by
multiple speakers – never returns to. The novel is set up as dry and
unemotional, a legal document, with a clear moral, and then fails to deliver on
all these fronts, while the opening sentence also sets up a dichotomy between the
male and the female which the multiple instances of gender confusion in the
novel belies.
Collins appeals to the model of criminal justice – ‘the
story here presented will be told by more than one pen, as the story of an
offence against the laws is told in Court by more than one witness’ – but the
truth is the sensational narrative will not give the reader (or ‘judge’) the opportunity
to ask questions, or the ability to remain impartial. If you go into the cinema
expecting to be ‘scared’, you won’t really be unnerved. The opening of The Woman in White sets a high standard
of emotional disconnectedness, so that when your senses react, your response is
more extreme.
Less textual and more obviously filmic is the opening to
Lady Audley’s Secret, which follows a pattern typical of Braddon’s writing –
description leading to a scene of dialogue with a dramatic end. The description
of Audley Court and its grounds however is one of Braddon’s most extensive and
the length of build up worthy of serious attention. The house is introduced
simply as ‘it’:
‘It lay down in a
hollow, rich with fine old timber and luxuriant pastures; and you came upon it
through an avenue of limes, bordered on either side by meadows, over the high
hedges of which the cattle looked inquisitively at you as you passed,
wondering, perhaps, what you wanted; for there was no thorough-fare, and unless
you were going to the Court you had no business there at all.’
In a novel named after a secret, whose first chapter is
entitled ‘Lucy’, we may be expecting to begin with a mystery or a person, but
Braddon makes it clear from the opening that the house is central – and not
only important, but idyllic – surrounded not only by the kind of personified
cattle suggesting pastoral, but by peace and history (‘when the place had been
a convent, the quiet nuns had walked hand in hand’).
The introduction of a beautiful and peaceful place here, as
in a movie, suggests that something is about to come to disturb this harmony,
but this opening isn’t only about setting up the kind of domestic bliss
sensation fiction destroys. Audley Court is too perfect – and too desirable –
and there are already notes of unease:
‘A place that visitors
fell in raptures with; feeling a yearning wish to have done with life, and to
stay there forever, staring into the cool fish-ponds and counting the bubbles
as the roach and carp rose to the surface of the water.’
Anywhere which inspires viewers to ‘have done with life’ is
potentially hazardous, while the idea of gazing into the pool suggests the
story of Narcissus, with the corresponding dangerous of self-love and vanity.
The place is:
‘A spot in which peace
seemed to have taken up her abode, setting her soothing hand on every tree and
flower, on the still ponds and quiet alleys, the shady corners of the
old-fashioned rooms, the deep window-seats behind the painted glass, the low
meadows and the stately avenues—ay, even upon the stagnant well, which, cool and
sheltered as all else in the old place, hid itself away in a shrubbery behind
the gardens, with an idle handle that was never turned and a lazy rope so
rotten that the pail had broken away from it, and had fallen into the water.’
The introduction of the well is something of a Chekhov’s gun
and it is remarkable that this scene of crime is so firmly linked to the
desirability of the rest of the estate. The chapter ends with Lucy accepting
Sir Michael’s proposal of marriage and, offered such a paradise, can we blame
her for accepting? The structure of Braddon’s story means we cannot be let into
the moral choice at stake in Lucy’s decision, but this opening means we
experience the same seduction.
We don’t learn we are reading a sensation novel in quite the
same style as we find out we’re watching a horror movie – that would be giving
the game away. In reading it’s more a question of hooks than early peeks –
mysteries are set up (What has the woman mentioned here endured? Who is Lucy’s
ring from?’), further action promised (multiple narrators, a well-positioned
well) and scenes set.
Packed with incident, and designed to alarm, sensation
novels are ripe for adaptation and share much with movie conventions but,
looking at these openings, they also have effects which rely on their textuality
for their success.
What should be ‘P’ in my Victorian Alphabet? Let me know
here, on Facebook or by tweeting @SVictorianist.
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