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Gaslight
centres on a duplicitous husband intent
on deranging his wife in order to claim her wealth. Although insanity
is the primary threat faced, the fact that he has murdered the previous
occupant of the house to steal jewels makes him capable of killing her
also. As with Perrault’s tale, the marriage definitively ends with the
heroine’s realisation of her husband’s criminality.
Secret beyond the
Door
differs greatly due to its heroine’s continued devotion to her hus-
band, and stands out as one of Tatar’s few examples where a marriage is
saved – albeit a somewhat unhealthy one. Openly playing on ‘Bluebeard’
in terms of a hasty marriage between strangers, a groom with a grisly
interest in murder, and a locked room his wife is forbidden to enter, the
story presents a clearly unhinged spouse admitting his desire to kill his
new bride, yet also works to preserve their union.
The fact that his first wife mysteriously died is but the tip of the
iceberg. Mark (Michael Redgrave) is revealed to have six rooms in his
house designed to emulate actual murder scenes (in which mothers
and wives were the victims) while a seventh is kept locked. Celia ( Joan
Bennett) learns the basis of his emotional problems when she asks
what this room contains. He denies her wish, stating, ‘Ever since I was
a child I’ve been hemmed in by women wanting to live my life for me:
Caroline, Eleanor, and now you. No thanks!’ Despite unfairly conflat-
ing his meek bride with his ‘domineering’ sister and first wife, claiming
she is similarly interfering in his life, Celia becomes convinced that
the room will help her to understand him. Secretly gaining entry, she
realises with shock that it is a copy of her own bedroom – signalling
Mark’s scarcely subconscious desire to kill her. It is at this point that
Celia dramatically differentiates herself from Bluebeard’s wife, overcom-
ing her impulse to escape and opting to confront and ‘cure’ her hus-
band instead. Evincing the most disturbing of masochistic impulses she
exclaims: ‘I’d rather be dead than be without you. That would be a slow
death!’ Psychoanalysing Mark as he agitatedly fingers a scarf – intent
Demon Lovers and Defiant Damsels
97
on strangling her – the film takes a still more bizarre turn in its final
act. Apparently succeeding in unlocking his repressed rage towards his
mother (signalled by eventually dropping the scarf), a fire started by a
jealous female employee adds a dash of
Jane Eyre
to the mix, forcing
Mark to prove his love by facing the flames and saving Celia’s life. We
are ultimately led to believe that she has made their marriage work by
helping to release his demons, with Mark recollecting the night of the
fire and stating ‘that night you killed the root of the evil in me, but I still
have a long way to go’. Freudian connotations in his relations with his
mother may be suggested as the ‘root’, yet another cause is hinted at in
the film, with his sister stating that problems in his first marriage began
after he returned from the war. Tatar notes the coincidence of such nar-
ratives with the psychological consequences of the Second World War:
It is not surprising that the cinematic culture of Hollywood in the
1940s would be invested in staging dramas that enacted both the
anxiety and excitement of marriage to a stranger. This was, after all,
a time of crisis, when women in great numbers were marrying men
who were real strangers ... It was also a time when women were real-
izing that the men to whom they had been married were becoming
strangers. (2006: 89)
Post-traumatic stress disorder is thus offered as the cause of Mark’s
problems, yet the women in his life are also tacitly blamed. Unable to
communicate with his first wife, we are told that she died of loneliness –
although their son, David, is convinced his father murdered her. Tension
between father and son is all too apparent, with Mark displaying petu-
lant jealousy when Celia defends the boy, revealing a profoundly con-
trolling nature and pronounced immaturity. The extent of his problems
are flagged up in a scene in which he admits wanting to kill Celia from
the moment they met, apparently seeing death and love as synony-
mous. That she is prepared to sacrifice everything for him, including
her potential life at his hands, offers a disturbing idea of good wifely
conduct and there is even a hint that fairy tales have distorted Celia’s
perceptions. She refers to Mark as her ‘beast’ soon after their wedding –
asking ‘when is my beast expected to arrive home?’ – and is, in turn,
referred to as a ‘twentieth-century sleeping beauty’ by her groom, con-
descendingly stating that she has been ‘wrapped in cotton and wool’
and is in desperate need to be woken. Portrayed as somewhat pampered,
her late brother having taken care of her finances, and a string of bro-
ken engagements suggesting little in the way of worldly experience or
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