Dir. Rodney Bennett
A Woman Sobbing was part of the BBC’s Dead of Night horror anthology series from the early Seventies. Unfortunately not all of the episodes of the series have survived – three out of seven are all that is left, but they exemplify the series perfectly, capturing that unmistakably creepy and strangely nostalgic feel of ‘hide behind the couch’ television horror from yesteryear. A Woman Sobbing tells of Jane (Anna Massey), a middle aged woman who, after moving to the country with her family, begins to suspect that her home is haunted by a baleful spectre who ceaselessly weeps throughout the night in the attic room above Jane’s bed.
Like many great ghost stories, the most haunting aspect of A Woman Sobbing is its ambiguity. Like most of the other episodes of the series, it unfurls as a study of psychological breakdown in modern society. Supernatural elements are present, but vaguely so. Jane may very well be haunted by a distraught ghost, but then again, it could all be in her mind. An intelligent, but bored and lonely woman, she struggles to pass the time until her husband returns from his office job in the city and her sons come home from school. She's isolated and before long even begins to feel estranged from her family. They cannot hear the crying in the attic and her feelings of isolation and helplessness gradually render her incapable of interacting with them.
Jane's plight mirrors that of many housewives; social isolation, financial dependence, emotional labour, and struggling with her identity, all of which contribute to significant psychological distress, including depression. With the focus of the story on a woman descending into despair, confined by conservative societal expectations, A Woman Sobbing also contains indisputable traits of the Gothic. Robert Holmes’s script successfully transfers the Gothic from storm-lashed turreted castles to British suburbia in the Seventies. The theme of the past returning to haunt the present also courses throughout. Visually too, it contains certain imagery imbued with high-Gothicism, utilised to interesting effect given the modern setting; Jane cautiously ascending her stairs to the attic room – where things are stored away to be forgotten - wearing a flowing nightgown - she may as well be carrying a candelabrum - while striking lighting and shadows create a sense of menace and unease as she tiptoes throughout her increasingly creepy home. Echoes of Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper, the despair of Sylvia Plath and myriad titles by Shirley Jackson (no one does marginalised and repressed female characters like Ms Jackson) and other such notions of the Female Gothic permeate proceedings.
Throughout, various social and feminist themes are addressed, such as sexual frustration, menopause, the loneliness of middle aged housewives, traditional gender roles and stereotypes, and mental illness, as A Woman Sobbing poses some pointed questions. While things have changed since then (and some have not: casual misogyny, gender pay gaps, gender-based discrimination), the 70s was still a time when societal narratives pushed women to marry and have children; a woman's success and stability were tied to her marital status, her home and family, overshadowing other aspects of her identity and aspirations. It was much more difficult for women to work if they had a family. Indeed, it was only since the late 1960s that women were no longer required to obtain permission from either their husband or their father to open bank account. Jane finds herself left alone during the day with no creative outlets, nor stimulation for her sharp intellect and wit. When her husband tries to explain away her fears of a weeping ghost in the attic, he dismisses it as her imagination. When she can’t sleep he impatiently tells her to take another pill, not realising (or ignoring) that she is possibly going out of her mind with loneliness and despair. Her concerns aren't resolved by medication, they're only numbed. As Jane, Anna Massey is movingly convincing as a woman slowly consumed by her fears.
Things come to a head when a young Dutch woman is hired as an au pair and Jane’s paranoia increases – is her husband having an affair with this woman? The crying in the attic drives her to smash through walls with a pick-axe in search of the wailing entity. She pleads with the au pair, beseeching her to confess she too can hear the sobbing because she’s a woman and she ‘understands’, before performing a kitchen-sink exorcism of the house with water, salt and desperation.
Is the house haunted? Can only certain women hear the ghost, if indeed there is a ghost? Is it her own helpless sobbing that Jane hears, somehow fracturing her own mind trying to distance herself from her unhappiness? The ambiguity only adds to the haunting feel of this masterful domestic horror tale.