Sometimes certain fantasy short-stories give me a tummy ache. Or threaten to compromise my sleeping habits for a while. I have just finished “Sob in the Silence,” and I hate that I saw everything coming (yeah, it was a bit cliché) and yet I am still scared witless. Maybe it was a little (lot) too cliché. I was thinking the entire time, “Is Mr. Wolfe really going there? Oh, yes. Yes, he did.” I couldn’t help but remember one of the scariest movies I have ever seen, The Devil’s Backbone. A good lead-in to Pan’s Labyrinth, no? Also directed by Guillermo del Toro, this ghost-story fantasy/horror has been called a thematic lead-in to “Labyrinth” on many levels (Pan’s Labyrinth even has two background characters straight out of “Backbone”). We will definitely have to discuss this later, after the viewing-party, perhaps. But I was going somewhere with this, I promise. I thought the use of orphanages, ghosts, and bad-guys getting what they deserved at the hands of… those without hands… was all too clear an echo between the two works. Has anybody seen this? It’s not too bad a movie. The story in the anthology, though, seems lacking compared to what we have read before.
So… looking a little deeper than the tired plot, I realized that there was no “sob in the silence.” The title is actually from an 1843 poem, “The Cry of the Children,” by Elizabeth Barrett Browning (of Sonnet 43 fame). She was out-spoken about oppression, the lower-class, and child labor. Her (terrifying) poem spoke of the impoverished, working children, who cry out futilely for an unreachable Heaven. Deep stuff, considering the woman whose family was murdered searched for a heaven of her own, and ended up robbing others of their life on earth. It's too late for me to dwell upon similar meanings, but as far as I can tell, the other seems to be commenting on the fact that adults have no right to play God (or any other tyrant) to society's children.
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3 comments:
Bravo, Susan, for pointing out the allusion of the title. Barrett Browning's poem ends: "The child's sob in the silence curses deeper / Than the strong man in his wrath." The whole poem is available online at many sites, for example this one.
Dickens may have been thinking of Barrett Browning's last stanza -- which begins "They look up with their pale and sunken faces, / And their look is dread to see" -- when he created the Ghost of Christmas Present's two charges, Ignorance and Want, in A Christmas Carol, published in December of the same year "The Cry of the Children" appeared, 1843.
Oh, and speaking of The Devil's Backbone and "the use of orphanages, ghosts, and bad guys getting what they deserved at the hands of ... those without hands," you definitely should check out The Orphanage, directed by Del Toro's colleague Juan Antonio Bayona. It's not on DVD yet, but see it when you can.
I agree about the cliche nature of the story. I felt all the stories we read were comparable to Link or Ford or some story somewhere. No real breakthroughs in the typical fantasy plot-line were made, only characters and places given new names. Which is not to say that I didn't enjoy them, because I did. Yay.
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