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| Margaret Hamilton plays the creepy housekeeper in 13 Ghosts. |
Good Haunted Housekeeping: The
Housekeeper in the Gothic Film Tradition
The
Gothic tradition features a host of particularly striking stock characters. We
have the mysterious first wife, whether missing, mad, or murdered, the brooding
Bluebeard lover, the inquisitive orphaned heroine, and, perhaps the most iconic
in modern popular culture, the creepy housekeeper, a curator of keys,
cupboards, and the family’s closeted skeletons. In her book, Hollywood Heroines: Women in Film Noir and
the Female Gothic Film, Helen Hanson identifies two major tasks set for the
housekeeper character in the traditional Gothic film: the first is “to mark the
heroine as an outsider,” and the second is “to act as keeper of knowledge about
the family” (75). These roles underline the unique power of the character as
part of the typical Gothic machinery. In the genre’s often feminized world, the
housekeeper’s function as a woman with dominion over the domestic space and its
secrets can make her a formidable ally or enemy to the heroine. Her loyalties,
however, may not lie with the intruding newcomer; she may choose to protect the
secrets of the family or may even devote herself to the house itself. In Gothic
films, the housekeeper becomes an especially potent creator of terror and dread
through her penchant for lurking in shadows, watching the heroine, and
manipulating both characters and audience with her ominous movements and
expressions. Looking at classic Gothic films like Rebecca (1940), Dragonwyck
(1946), and The Haunting (1963), we
can see the housekeeper’s development into a crucial figure of the genre, while
later incarnations of the character in films like Young Frankenstein (1974) highlight her importance while
simultaneously mocking the clichéd representation of her type.
Tracing
the development of the housekeeper character and appreciating her importance to
the Gothic film tradition requires some sense of her earliest appearances. Like
the modern Gothic novel, Gothic film has its roots firmly planted in the
literary traditions of eighteenth and nineteenth-century England. There is no
menacing housekeeper in Horace Walpole’s original Gothic text, The Castle of Otranto, but the type had
already been established by the time Walpole’s novel first appeared on the
scene in 1764. Going as far back as
Samuel Richardson’s Pamela in 1740,
we can see the housekeeper as an important stock character with a marked
potential for duality. Richardson’s novel offers us two opposing but
suggestively linked housekeeper models: the first, Mrs. Jervis, is a kindly
matron who befriends and defends the heroine, while the second, Mrs. Jewkes, is
a masculine monstrosity who threatens and imprisons her. Their shared “J” names
hint at their function as two sides of a single character type, and in their
complex relationships with the virginal Pamela they also form a version of the
archetypal trinity of maiden, mother, and crone.
The
dual functions of the housekeeper remain distinct in Charlotte Brontë’s
influential Gothic novel, Jane Eyre,
which first appeared in print in 1847. Much of the Gothic film tradition that
developed in the twentieth century depends on this text, for Jane Eyre is the cornerstone on which
both Rebecca and Dragonwyck are built, just as Pamela
serves as the cornerstone for Jane Eyre
itself. In Brontë’s novel, the official housekeeper of Thornfield Hall is Mrs.
Fairfax, a generous, maternal woman who accepts Jane as part of the domestic
community and provides her with much-needed companionship, as well as
information about the hall’s inscrutable master, Mr. Rochester. Mrs. Fairfax,
however, does not possess all of the keys to unlock the mysteries of
Thornfield. Her mysterious counterpart in the house, Grace Poole, has knowledge
that Mrs. Fairfax and Jane both lack, but Grace Poole keeps the heroine at bay
and refuses to answer her questions about the ghostly presence that haunts the
hidden room of Thornfield’s highest floor. Like Mrs. Jewkes in Pamela, Grace Poole displays a rough,
masculine appearance and functions as a jailer, although it is the heroine’s
predecessor, mad Bertha Rochester, who is her prisoner. Mrs. Fairfax, as her
name suggests, represents the fair side of the housekeeper figure, a supportive
feminine presence capable of educating the heroine about her new home. Grace
Poole, however, is the dark secret keeper of the house, the guardian of a
forbidden zone hidden within the larger domestic space.
As
the Gothic begins to appear on film, the menacing Grace Poole version dominates
as the more potent form of the character. We get an early taste of housekeepers
to come in the old dark house picture, The
Cat and the Canary. Directed by Paul Leni, this 1927 silent film is
memorable largely because of its creepy housekeeper, a dead-eyed horror
humorously christened Mammy Pleasant. Like later and more familiar Gothic
housekeepers, Mammy Pleasant acts as a menacing presence, constantly watching
the heroine but refusing to divulge the secrets of the house to her. In
addition, Mammy reveals the housekeeper’s evolving taste for a rather morbid,
deadpan brand of humor. In one conversation, another character says, “You must
have been lonely here these twenty years, Mammy Pleasant,” to which she
replies, “I don’t need the living ones.” Mammy also operates as a predictor of
doom, alarming the houseguests with her assertion that “something terrible will
happen here tonight!” Mammy’s dark hair, dour expression, and thin, tight lips
become the standard equipment of Gothic housekeepers forever more, making her
an important figure in the character’s cinematic development.
Of
course, the lynchpin figure in the evolution of the Gothic housekeeper is Mrs.
Danvers, the terrifying antagonist who protects the territory of her dead
mistress in Daphne du Maurier’s 1938 novel, Rebecca.
The nameless heroine recalls her first encounter with Mrs. Danvers thus:
Someone
advanced from the sea of faces, someone tall and gaunt, dressed in deep black,
whose prominent cheek-bones and great, hollow eyes gave her a skull’s face,
parchment-white, set on a skeleton’s frame.
She
came towards me, and I held out my hand, envying her for her dignity and her
composure, but when she took my hand hers was limp and heavy, deathly cold, and
it lay in mine like a lifeless thing. (67-68)
The heroine’s language
loads Mrs. Danvers with images of death and horror, and it also sets the stage
for the housekeeper’s function as the guardian of the dead Rebecca. Mrs.
Danvers is the housekeeper not of a living home but of a tomb that enshrines
the memory of her lost idol; she rejects the new mistress of Manderley as an
interloper and seeks to drive her away. Obsessive, manipulative, and in total
control of the house, Mrs. Danvers imprisons the new Mrs. de Winter in
Manderley while simultaneously trying to eject her from it. When she feels that
Rebecca’s ownership of Manderley can no longer be protected, Mrs. Danvers sets fire
to the house rather than see the second Mrs. de Winter successfully inhabit it.
Alfred Hitchcock’s 1940 adaptation of Rebecca is a watershed moment in the
history of the female Gothic film, not least because it perfectly captures the
menacing allure of Mrs. Danvers’ character. Among its eleven Oscar nominations
was a Best Supporting Actress nod for Judith Anderson, who delivers a truly
iconic performance as Mrs. Danvers. Her appearance in the movie owes something
to Mammy Pleasant while capturing the spirit of du Maurier’s description, if
not the letter, for Anderson’s version is menacingly alive, with piercing eyes
and a coiled braid of black hair perfectly arranged above the severe white line
of her part. On screen, Mrs. Danvers controls the heroine with her gaze and her
gestures; we can see her watching Joan Fontaine’s mousy victim with a
predator’s glittering interest. In the famous bedroom scene in which Mrs.
Danvers tries to drive the heroine to commit suicide, Hitchcock faithfully recreates
du Maurier’s written description, but the visual representation lends the
moment an additional sense of suspense and horror. Mrs. Danvers leans over the
heroine, her burning eyes intensely fixed on her victim, her power over the
younger woman tellingly displayed in their physical positions. In this scene
and in others throughout the film, Anderson creates a definitive image of the
Gothic housekeeper, endowing her with characteristics and mannerisms that will
be hallmarks of the character in the popular imagination from 1940 onward.
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| Edith Barrett as Mrs. Fairfax |
The
box office success and Best Picture Oscar of Rebecca inspired a wave of female Gothic films in the early 1940s,
including, somewhat ironically, a 1943 film adaptation of Jane Eyre, also starring Joan Fontaine as the heroine. For the
housekeeper character, however, this is a throwback to the pre-Danvers era,
back to the dual figures of good and bad household guardians. Edith Barrett
plays a nervous, rather frail Mrs. Fairfax, with English stage actress Ethel
Griffies in an uncredited appearance as Grace Poole (Hitchcock fans might
remember Griffies as the skeptical ornithologist in The Birds). Barrett again plays the family secret keeper in the
same year’s Eyre-inspired Val Lewton
horror film, I Walked with a Zombie.
Lewton’s picture has no menacing housekeeper; the most important domestic
servant is Alma, a cheerful young black woman played by Theresa Harris.
Barrett, however, fills in for the housekeeper as Mrs. Rand, the mother of the
two male leads; she alone knows what really happened to her son’s first wife,
the zombified Jessica. Like the motherly housekeepers of older Gothic stories,
Mrs. Rand tries to help Frances Dee’s heroine even as she withholds the most
important family secrets from her, but she lacks a menacing female counterpart.
More
interesting, perhaps, is the 1946 adaptation of Anya Seton’s 1944 novel, Dragonwyck, written after both the
original novel and the film version of Rebecca
and thus ostensibly able to capitalize on the evolving conventions of the
female Gothic genre. The film trailer, in fact, proudly announces the new
picture’s appeal to fans of the earlier work. Like Rebecca, Dragonwyck draws
from Jane Eyre as its source
material, but it translates the Gothic action to nineteenth-century New York
and the upper class Dutch society of the Patroons. Differences between the
novel and the film affect the representations of the housekeeper characters,
but both offer some insight into the type’s importance to the genre by showing
the pitfalls of tinkering with effective conventions.
The
novel itself takes a problematic dual approach to the housekeeper figure. As in
Jane Eyre, we have two domestic
characters who highlight the heroine’s outsider status and possess power and
information that might be able to help or harm her. The official housekeeper,
Magda, resents the heroine’s arrival and persistently gives her the cold
shoulder, reserving her loyalty for the mistress of the house. Seton does very
little with Magda, failing to provide even a single detailed description of her
appearance. She gives greater attention to the other, more ominous domestic
secret keeper, the ancient mixed-race servant, Zélie. Zélie gets all of the
creepiest, most Gothic scenes, revealing to the newcomer the haunted history of
Dragonwyck and foretelling the doom of the Van Ryn family members. Seton gives
this character a suitably striking introduction:
The
door opened and a strange woman walked in, shutting the door behind her. A thin
old figure in a shapeless black dress who came over to the bed and gazed down
at the frightened girl. The woman was nearly six feet tall and erect, her
coarse black hair, which showed no gray, drawn back into a scraggy knot, her
face a ruddy brown crisscrossed with wrinkles from which peered two shrewd
little eyes as black as dewberries
“What
do you want?” whispered Miranda.
“Me
old Zélie,” said the woman in a harsh accented voice, touching her slab-like
chest. “I want to see what you look laike.” (49)
Unfortunately, Seton abruptly
writes both Magda and Zélie out of the book about a third of the way through,
and no similar character fills the resulting gap. The problems with Seton’s
treatment may help to explain why her novel is little read today, since she
mishandles two different variations on one of the genre’s most important
character types.
Director
Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s film adaptation makes some marked changes to Seton’s
novel, especially in the housekeeper department. Sadly, the movie completely drops
Zélie, who would be quite provocative, to say the least, to see on screen. It
transfers her ominous warnings and insider knowledge to Magda, revising Seton’s
flat, barely described character into something audiences might more properly
expect in a female Gothic tale. Played by the very capable character actress,
Spring Byington, the movie Magda embodies both the menacing and the maternal,
and the result is a woman who strikes both the audience and Gene Tierney’s
heroine as slightly insane. In one early scene, for example, Magda suddenly
veers off from seemingly friendly talk to warn, “One day, you’ll wish with all
your heart you’d never come to Dragonwyck.” Byington’s character occupies a
middle distance between Mrs. Fairfax and Mrs. Danvers, which makes her
interesting in terms of the housekeeper’s changing role in the genre, but the
movie, like the novel, drops Magda midway through, and thus the potential for a
really serious engagement of the housekeeper figure remains unrealized.
Unlike
Anya Seton, Shirley Jackson takes full advantage of the creepy housekeeper in
her 1959 novel, The Haunting of Hill
House, which was adapted into the film, The
Haunting, in 1963. The film makes a number of changes to the original text,
but it faithfully preserves the unnerving housekeeper, Mrs. Dudley, while also
highlighting her relationship to Mrs. Danvers through casting and costume
decisions. Like earlier housekeepers, Mrs. Dudley possesses insider knowledge
of the house she oversees, and she resents the presence of the newcomers who
disrupt her routine. Hill House has no master or mistress to command her
loyalties, and Mrs. Dudley’s feelings about the house are never quite clear,
just as everything else about Hill House remains shrouded in questions and
doubt. Jackson does, however, hint at the connection between Mrs. Dudley and
Hill House near the end of the novel, when she describes Mrs. Dudley as
“shudder[ing] in her sleep” from six miles away when the heroine touches a
kitchen door (171). In contrast to the visitors, Mrs. Dudley seems to
understand and respect the house, never trespassing against its unspoken rules,
and in return the house never affects her as it does the others.
Jackson
offers little description of the character when she first appears in the novel,
but she does provide a truly memorable exchange with the protagonist, Eleanor,
a few paragraphs later.
“I don’t stay after I set out dinner,” Mrs. Dudley
went on. “Not after it begins to get dark. I leave before the dark comes.”
“I know,” Eleanor said.
“We live over in the town, six miles away.”
“Yes,” Eleanor said, remembering Hillsdale.
“So there won’t be anyone around if you need help.”
“I understand.”
“We couldn’t even hear you, in the night.”
“I don’t suppose-“
“No one could. No one lives any nearer than the
town. No one else will come any nearer than that.”
“I know,” Eleanor said tiredly.
“In the night,” Mrs. Dudley said, and smiled
outright. “In the dark,” she said, and closed the door behind her.
(27-28)
The ominous warning
from the housekeeper becomes a kind of nervous joke between Eleanor and
Theodora, but it sets the stage for the horrors to come and provides both
characters and readers with important information about Hill House. The locals
are afraid of the place, none of them will have anything to do with it, and the
residents can expect no assistance when their presumptuous occupation rouses
the house into action. The inmates of the house laugh at Mrs. Dudley just as
they laugh at the strange things that happen in Hill House; both frighten them,
although they cannot necessarily explain why.
The film adaptation, directed by Robert Wise, reflects
these elements of the novel and builds on them by making the most of the
character conventions established by earlier films like Rebecca. Rosalie Crutchley, whose earlier roles had included the
terrifying Madame Defarge in a 1958 adaptation of A Tale of Two Cities, is just the sort of actress for the Gothic
housekeeper role, with a thin face, dark hair, and a most unnatural smile. Her
somber attire and pinned-up hair, both black of course, signal her sorority
with Mrs. Danvers and Mammy Pleasant, and Crutchley delivers Mrs. Dudley’s
lines to great effect, especially in the scene mentioned earlier. Building on
the character as originally created in Jackson’s novel, the film reveals the
conventional traits that have come to be associated with the Gothic
housekeeper. Mrs. Dudley, as much an insider as Hill House allows, lays out the
house rules to Eleanor and the other guests in a way that emphasizes her own
power and position of authority. “I don’t wait on people,” she tells the
newcomers firmly. “What I agreed to, it doesn’t mean I wait on people” (27). She
clearly knows more about the house than she is willing to tell, and her veiled
warnings serve only to alarm the visitors and the audience without helping them
prepare for the terrors that they will face. Like Mrs. Danvers, Mrs. Dudley
projects menace rather than maternal comfort, and the film emphasizes this
aspect by eliminating a kitchen scene in which Jackson has Mrs. Dudley
gossiping about the young people in a very motherly, ordinary fashion.
Unfortunately, by the time the next film adaptation of The Haunting of Hill House arrived in 1999, the Gothic housekeeper
character had become so familiar that Mrs. Dudley is merely a cliché, another
stale note in an over-played symphony of horrors.
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| Mrs. Slydes frightens a guest in House on Haunted Hill. |
Anything
repeated often enough to be a cliché is already ripe for parody, and in the years
after the original film adaptation of The
Haunting the Gothic housekeeper became an obvious target. William Castle
had helped to entrench the conventions of the character with films like House on Haunted Hill in 1959 and
especially 13 Ghosts in 1960, which
featured The Wicked Witch of the West herself, Margaret Hamilton, as a creepy
housekeeper complete with black dress, tight bun, and dour expressions, who
also turned out to be a medium able to communicate with the ghosts who haunted
her employers’ house. Today, the website, tvtropes.com, even has an entry for
“Creepy Housekeeper” that identifies her major traits and aligns her with
another stock character, the “Crusty Caretaker.” Most importantly, the
incarnation of the creepy housekeeper chosen for the entry’s quote and image is
not Mammy Pleasant, Mrs. Danvers, Magda, or Mrs. Dudley, it is Cloris Leachman
as Frau Blücher in Mel Brooks’ 1974 Gothic horror parody, Young Frankenstein. The character, as written by Mel Brooks and
Gene Wilder and performed by Leachman, incorporates all of the Gothic
housekeeper clichés and then revels in them, permanently altering the way in
which movie audiences perceive her role.
Young Frankenstein,
as its name suggests, draws its inspiration from James Whale’s 1931 Frankenstein and 1935 Bride of Frankenstein, and the origins
of Frau Blücher can also be found there. In the second Whale film, Irish
character actress Una O’Connor plays a frequently hysterical housekeeper named
Minnie, although Whale uses her for comic effect rather than horror. Despite
her shrieking, Minnie herself is all motherly concern, much like Mrs. Fairfax
in Jane Eyre. In Young Frankenstein, Frau Blücher’s costume and position in the
household are references to O’Connor’s character, but her creepy and often
menacing behavior develops from housekeepers like Mrs. Danvers and Mrs. Dudley.
Leachman also sports the thin lips, severe bun, and sinister facial expressions
of the more menacing housekeeper type. In fact, Frau Blücher is so absurdly terrifying
that horses whinny in fear every time her name is mentioned. Early on, the
movie exploits one particularly popular housekeeper trope, in which the
taciturn household guardian conducts newcomers through the mysterious domain
over which she reigns, often with a large candle in hand. Frau Blücher carries
a holder with three candles, all of them markedly unlit, as she warns Frederick
to “stay close to the candles. The stairway can be… treacherous.” Like other
Gothic housekeepers, but unlike Minnie, Frau Blücher has special insider
knowledge about her house and its family. She manipulates Frederick
Frankenstein into resuming his grandfather’s research, apparently out of
loyalty to the deceased Victor, with whom she was in love. Brooks and Wilder,
of course, play all of these plot elements for laughs, but they depend upon the
already established conventions of the housekeeper role and show the extent to
which the writers expect the audience to be familiar with them. The parody
succeeds so well that Frau Blücher usurps the place of earlier, more serious
treatments of the character to become the quintessential example of the type.
The
entwined literary and cinematic evolution of the Gothic housekeeper
demonstrates the ways in which genre conventions gather force and then
sometimes sink under their own weight. In this case, the housekeeper character,
along with the rest of her genre’s conventions, developed first in literary
works of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and then gathered new steam
with the rise of film. She reached her peak when Rebecca took the world by storm, thanks in part to the ways in
which the film version capitalized on her potential. After that, other literary
works and films could only repeat what had already been accomplished or twist
that representation for parodic effect, since efforts to tinker with the
formula were problematic at best. Audiences today will come to any housekeeper
character with a very distinct mental image, that developed by the earlier
Gothic novels and films, but they will also almost certainly have a sense of the
character as inherently clichéd and even ridiculous, given the immense cultural
impact of the later parody. We haven’t seen much of the Gothic housekeeper in
recent years, perhaps because Mrs. Danvers and Frau Blücher have so completely
occupied the spaces in which such a character can stand. Perhaps the recent
return of Hammer films will bring the creepy housekeeper back to us in a new
but still eerily familiar form. For now, however, it is the housekeeper herself
who has become haunted, not by the ghosts of her employers’ house, but by the
enduring influence of her own most iconic incarnations.
This essay was written for presentation at the 2012 meeting of the Popular Culture Association in the South (PCAS). The Works Cited page is intentionally excluded in order to discourage plagiarism of the material. This content is the intellectual property of the author and must be properly cited if referenced elsewhere. The author reserves the right to send Mrs. Danvers to have a little personal chat with any plagiarists!
