Cliffhanger - History

History

The idea of ending a tale at a point where the audience is left in suspense as to its conclusion (which, in most cases, is then given at another time) may have been a staple part of storytelling for almost as long as the idea of stories has existed. It is a central theme and framing device of the collection of stories known as the One Thousand and One Nights, wherein the queen Scheherazade, who is facing a morning execution on the orders of her husband, King Shahryar, devises the solution of telling him a story but leaving it at a cliffhanger, thus forcing the king to postpone her execution to hear the rest of the tale. The term 'cliffhanger' may have originated with Thomas Hardy's serial novel A Pair of Blue Eyes in 1873. At the time, newspapers published novels in a serial format with one chapter appearing every month. To ensure continued interest in the story, many authors employed different techniques. When the novel was serialised in Tinsley's Magazine between September 1872 and July 1873, Hardy chose to leave one of the main protagonists, Henry Knight, literally hanging off a cliff staring into the stony eyes of a trilobite embedded in the rock. This became the archetypal—and literal—cliff-hanger of Victorian prose. Once Hardy created it, all serial writers used the cliff-hanger even though Anthony Trollope felt that the use of suspense violated "all proper confidence between the author and his reader." Basically, the reader would expect "delightful horrors" only to feel betrayed with a much less exciting ending. Despite the rhetorical distaste all serial authors used the cliffhanger and Wilkie Collins is famous for saying about the technique: "Make 'em cry, make 'em laugh, make 'em wait – exactly in that order." Collins is famous for the Sensation Novel, which relied heavily upon the cliffhanger. Examples of his endings include: "The next witnesses called were witnesses concerned with the question that now followed--the obscure and terrible question: Who Poisoned Her?" (The Law and the Lady) "Why are we to stop her, sir? What has she done?" "Done! She has escaped from my Asylum. Don't forget; a woman in white. Drive on." (The Woman in White) "You can marry me privately today," she answered. "Listen--and I will tell you how!" (Man and Wife)" This anticipation and conversation-inducing authorial technique would often be very contrived as the only purpose was to maintain interest in the monthly serial. Therefore, these were regularly removed from the plot when the serial was published as a full novel. The cliff-hanger migrated to film and is best known from the popular silent film series The Perils of Pauline (1914), shown in weekly installments and featuring Pearl White as the title character, a perpetual damsel in distress who was menaced by assorted villains, with each installment ending with her placed in a situation that looked sure to result in her imminent death – to escape at the beginning of the next installment only to get into fresh danger at its end. Specifically, an episode filmed around the New Jersey Palisades ended with her literally left hanging over a cliff and seeming about to fall.

Although a cliffhanger can be enjoyable as a page turner at the end of a chapter in a novel, a cliffhanger at the very end of a work can be frustrating. Possibly the most famous example is at the end of the 1969 movie The Italian Job, in which the escape vehicle is literally balancing on the edge of a cliff as the final credits roll.

Cliffhangers can build anticipation (and, subsequently, profit) for sequels. However, if no sequel follows, effective suspension of disbelief can leave the audience or readership wondering what happened in the work's fictional realm. Sometimes (for example at the end of Blake's 7) that goes so far that people write fan fiction (or even publish a novel) deciding what happens next.