"Compare the way in which Helen Stoner and Mary Maloney are treated in the two stories

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"Compare the way in which Helen Stoner and Mary Maloney are treated in the two stories. They are innocent and guilty players, but how are they represented by their respective authors?"

This essay will consist of a study of the short story, 'The Speckled Band' by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle written in 1292. Short stories are condensed fictional narratives, which have been popular since the nineteenth century and still remain so today. They typically concern a relatively small number of characters involved in a single event or situation. There is usually only one thermatic focus, aimed at provoking a single emotional response from the reader. Short stories may be created or written for magazine articles but have also developed into a real significant work of prose fiction. The dialogue is used very carefully in a short story due to a lack of space for extended development of conversation and narrative. The length of short stories vary.

The two story I will be looking at is from the murder mystery genre. This is a category in itself. Murder mysteries hold certain connotations that we constantly associate with the genre, for example, a detective, a victim, a culprit and often believers. The narrative is often concentrated around an investigation, but may offer a variety of view points i.e. from the detectives point view, from the victims point of view, or from the murderers point of view.

Due to the different times that the two stories, I have been asked to analyse, were written in the demands of society would be totally different, causing actions and responses to be different. The 1800's expressed a repressed society for women. Their lives were limited and activities often had to be supervised by, whereas the late 1950's, the feminist movement was at a high, offering women greater opportunities and high demand for equality.
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Both stories offer different points of view, 'Lamb to Slaughter' the story tends to come from the murderers point of view, Mary Maloney, and how she plans to cover up the murder of her husband. However, in 'The Speckled Band' it tends to come from the detectives point of view, Sherlock Holmes and his plans to investigate the situation, concentrating less on the women and more on the investigation due to s. Roald Dahl's story is more modern and female concentrated and is from the male point of view with a more important female character again due to ...

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