All three of the narrators write in first person, showing it as a personal experience to make the reader feel more involved. This builds fear and tension because you can sense the build up of emotions and imagine being in the narrators place. For example, in ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ the narrator says ‘I get unreasonably angry with John sometimes’ – expressing her anger emotion, so we feel more involved. She says that her anger is unreasonable but really it is not because she has the right to be angry with him as he locks her up all the time and won’t even let her see her baby. Although all three of the stories are written in first person they are written differently, for example in ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ the narrator builds all the fear and tension herself, whereas, in ‘The Black Cat’ the narrator brings outside influences into it, for example, the black cat and the narrator’s wife influence some of the fear and tension. In ‘ The Black Cat’ and ‘The Red Room’ the narrator is male and both males are quite dominant, but in ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ the narrator is female and is overpowered by her husband. This means that a lot of emotional tension is built in the story.
At the beginning of ‘The Black Cat’ and ‘The Red Room’ the respective characters are portrayed in a certain light. Poe portrays his main character as firstly being a very kind, considerate man, ‘my tenderness of heart was even so conspicuous as to make me the jest of my companions’. Wells makes his character seem very brave by saying ‘it will take a very tangible ghost to frighten me’, this makes us, as the reader want to see him more vulnerable. At the end of both stories the characters change, in ‘The Black Cat’ the narrator becomes ‘moody, more irritable and more regardless of the feelings of others’. In ‘The Red Room’ the narrator becomes scared whilst he is in the room, completely contradicting what he said earlier. The characters in each of the stories help create tension because they openly express a fear of where they are or what they are doing; you do not only experience the tension from the writers description, you also experience it through the way the characters express their emotions.
In ‘The Black Cat’ tension is developed throughout because the series of events that happen are described in enough depth to cause fear and mystery. This is shown at the end of the story because the cat manages to get inside the place where the narrator has hidden his wife’s dead body. This is very mysterious as it is unexplained how it got in there.
The narrator is also very shocked as he says ‘I staggered to the opposite wall; and then the corpse, already greatly decayed and clotted with gore, stood erect before the eyes of the spectators. Upon its head, with red extended mouth and solitary eye of fire, sat the hideous beast whose craft had seduced me into murder’. This is very descriptive language and allows the reader to be able to picture the cat sitting on the head of the corpse. In ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ the narrator thinks she sees a woman trapped behind the wallpaper and Charlotte Perkins Gilman describes it in a way so it takes a while to realise that it is the narrator who is actually feeling trapped by her husband. This contributes to the tension because you don’t know who or what is trapped until the very end of the story.
In ‘The Red Room’ the language influences how scary the story is as Wells was extremely descriptive in his writing and used the gothic genre a lot in this story. ‘A bronze group stood upon the landing, hidden from me by the corner of the wall, but its shadow fell with marvellous distinctness upon the white panelling, and gave me the impression of someone crouching to waylay me’. This is gothic and scary because it is describing something scary like a ghost or spirit or perhaps he is just imagining things because of the intimidating surroundings. Wells says words like ‘shadow’ then ‘marvellous distinctness’; this increases the tension built because these words make the setting more daunting as a shadow is a silhouette of a solid object or person and seeing a shadow in a terrifying circumstance can increase your fear
The highest point of tension in ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ is when the woman is trying to find out who is trapped as it is scary and builds a lot of tension by the language that the writer uses and the way that the writer rushes through what is happening (and sometimes changes the subject to say something totally irrelevant) as if there is no time to stop and take a breath. For example, she says ‘to jump out the window would be admirable exercise, but the bars are too strong to even try. Besides I wouldn’t do it. Of course not’, in that quote although there is sufficient punctuation it seems as though the narrator says it really fast and says it all in one breath in short, sharp sentences.
In ‘The Black Cat’ Poe is purposely ambiguous to build tension. He often says one thing that could mean something else. One example of this is at the beginning of the story, he says ‘my wife… made frequent allusion to the ancient popular notion, which regarded black cats as witches in disguise’ he then dismisses it by saying ‘not that she was ever serious upon his point and I mention the matter at all for no better reason than that it happens, just now to be remembered’.
