On the other hand, “The Darkness Out There” is aimed at a younger more modern audience as its text is simple, its sentence structure is less complex and therefore is easier to understand than “The Black Veil’s. This may also be because of the time it was written, after the Second World War more and more people were consumed with the effects of the modern times and the devastation of the war features it brought so people had less time for reading.
My personal favourite has to be “The Darkness Out There” as it appealed to me more with its modern, simple, understandable language and had children around my age featured in it. However, “The Black Veil” kept me in suspense and was a lot more exciting as I was constantly kept from knowing the full facts until the story progressed, keeping me reading on.
The tension and suspense starts in “The Black Veil” with the presence of a mysterious figure “shrouded” by a “thick black veil” entering the surgeon’s surgery the tension rises as we have no idea about the “apparition” described to us. The tension throughout The Black Veil slowly rises as the story develops, leading to a final climax at the end when the surgeon discovers the dead criminal was the person he was sent to treat. The tension rises throughout at a steady continuous rate.
“The Darkness Out There’s” tension rises when Kerry Stevens jumps out on Sandra and gives her “the fright of [her] life”, an unknown character is introduced and the tension soon falls quickly after. The text continues to rise suddenly in small amounts then fall just as fast throughout the text.
The main character in “The Black Veil” is the young doctor and Sandra in “The Darkness Out There”. Both are similar in the fact that they are both young, changed after their discoveries, and are of a high class. Both are focussed on at the start of each story until they discover the “darkness” like from Mrs Rutter in “The Darkness Out There” and the woman and her dead son in “The Black Veil” those characters take over each text until both stories progress and the attention is drawn back to the main characters as their feelings are told.
Sandra and the Doctor are different in that Sandra judged people by the way they looked and thought of herself as perfect while the Doctor didn’t judge but was curious and helped the woman in need of his help. We focus on Sandra and the Doctor because they are the two who discover the “darkness” and go from ignorance into knowledge.
We can compare certain characters in each of the texts by the roles they play and what they contribute to the plot. Mrs Rutter for instance is a parallel to the woman in “The Black Veil” as they both reveal a hidden secret. Sandra is a parallel to the Doctor in “The Black Veil” as they are the main characters and focussed on for the greatest amount of time.
In The Black Veil we are meant to sympathise with the woman as she is clearly very worried about this sick person. Coming out on a dangerously cold winters evening to find help just shows her deep worry. We may also sympathise with Kerry Stevens ‘In The Darkness Out There’ as Sandra doesn’t like him at first, she thinks that he ‘isn’t up to much’ and would rather be going to help Mrs Rutter with “Susie” or “Liz”.
In “The Black Veil” the son of the estranged woman who the story is based on, is not described in detail at all. All that we are told is that they are very ill and have something to do with the woman who visits the surgeon. The lack of information given about this character could be intentional by Dickens to add mystery.
The characters in both stories fit into society differently in the way they act towards other characters and their class. Sandra in ‘The Darkness Out There’ fits into society by trying her best to fit in with everyone especially her friends. She acts like she is young and better than everyone else and not to befriend boys like Kerry Stevens.
I think that Kerry Stevens doesn’t care what people think of him as “his chin [is] explosive with acne” and “at his middle, his jeans [yawn] from his T-shirt showing pale chilly flesh” this shows his lack of concern for his appearance. I think that Sandra may actually like him, but she follows her friend’s opinions and pretends not to like him very much in order to be like them.
I think that Mrs Rutter fits into her society in the Second World War by supporting her country in the war against the Germans by letting a German soldier to die, something which you were meant to do in those times as Germany were the sworn enemy. As these characters are trying fit into their own society it just shows how people can disagree on their actions and think they are wrong.
Nowadays it takes more than money to fit into society unlike the Victorian times when money was everything it even separated people into classes. For example the surgeon is nice and intelligent, he fits into his upper class society because he has money and he has a good job. Because of this, the mysterious women may have gone to the surgeon for help because she feels he has the power to help with the amount of money and education he has. The son of the woman in “The Black Veil” probably ended up stealing because he needed money to provide for his mother, if he had been in a different society where everyone was equal and help was given to the less fortunate he wouldn’t have had to steal. The mysterious women in ‘The Black Veil’ wears a black veil to hide her identity because she doesn’t want anyone knowing she was the mother of a son who had been stealing as she is trying to fit into society and doesn’t want to be discriminated against just because her son committed a crime. Both “The Black Veil” and “The Darkness Out There” portray two different societies where different actions are made by the characters to fit in with the times they were written in.
Characters from both texts change and develop into something we don’t expect by the end of reading them. Our view of old Mrs Rutter is meant to change because at first we expect her to be a nice old lady who has lived a proper respectable life and now in her old age needs people to help her with her house work. But as we later discover she isn’t ‘a dear old thing’ like she was described earlier on in the story as she shows no remorse for leaving someone to die and even explains how she laughingly said to him ‘you had this coming to you mate’ and then cheered when she found out it was a German plane. Kerry and Sandra now see Mrs Rutter as a heartless, weird old woman who is bitter after the death of her own husband dying in the war and are shocked that she must have thought it was acceptable to take someone else’s life to make up for her loss. Our view of the mysterious women changes as well, as at first we think she is a ghost or a sinister character of some sort but again as the plot develops we realise she is an actual person and isn’t so scary as previously thought.
“The Black Veil” and “The Darkness Out There” are similar in many ways them being that they both have two main characters which both change and realise new things about themselves by the end of the stories, they are both short stories which both have unexpected out comes at the end. They include suspense at peaks of tension when either new characters are introduced or things are learned. They also both have fluctuating tension as in both stories it goes up and down to keep us reading. However the ‘Darkness Out There’ has more fluctuating tension than ‘The Black Veil’. They also both have a death in both texts although this is where the stories are different, ‘The Darkness Out There’ has a death in the past in World War Two, and “The Black Veil” has a death in the story on the day the story is set. More similarities are that they both have a sinister character Mrs Rutter in “The Darkness Out There” and the women in “The Black Veil”. There is also a sense of isolation as “Packers end” and “Walworth” are both scarcely visited and feared.
However they are quite a few differences which separate them as in ‘The Darkness Out There’ the story is basically using Mrs Rutter’s secret to drive the plot and when she reveals her secret the tension rises. “The Black Veil” is more of a horror story than “The Darkness Out There’s” as its plot is a lot more mysterious and there is a darker side to it. “The Black Veil” is more mysterious as it has scarier characters like the mysterious women. Other things like “the hanging” and “Walworth” all add to the horror with their bad reputations. “The Black Veil” also has a concealed truth from the audience up until the last few paragraphs when we find out who this mystery character is. Whereas in “The Darkness Out There” we have no idea that there is a concealed truth in the story until Mrs Rutter tells the children unexpectedly. With it being set in the day this doesn’t add much to the scary atmosphere expected of a horror story so its characters don’t feel frightened in anyway just shocked and disgusted.
The styles of these texts also have similarities and differences. “The Black Veil” has longer paragraphs than “The Darkness Out There’s” with a lot more description but not much action happening as detail prolongs the story, again suggesting a great length of time in writing the text. Its sentences are very long and are broken up with commas to show a developing of action. “The Darkness Out There” has short paragraphs and more action as it can flow without a lot of detail preventing it. “The Darkness Out There” also has shorter sentences with a couple of lines in each.
The use of figurative language in both texts helps to create a picture of the characters and settings. “The Black Veil” uses more figurative language, as there is more description, so Dickens uses metaphors and similes to help him describe the characters and the scenes. He uses a simile to describe his helper to be like an ‘animal’. He also uses things such as alliteration to describe the women. In “The Darkness Out There” Lively uses both similes and metaphors. She uses a simile ‘her eyes investigated quick as mice’ to describe Mrs Rutter and what she does when Sandra and Kerry arrive at her house. Lively makes Mrs Rutter sound suspicious and curious as she ‘investigates’ the room. This could show how Mrs Rutter is hiding something. There is less need for figurative language in “The Darkness Out There” because altogether there is less description.
The effect this chosen type style has on me as a reader is a positive one as it helps me to understand both texts a lot easier. For instance, without the use of figurative language in “The Black Veil” I wouldn’t have been able to understand most of what was going on so as a result of the similies and metaphors created I was able to take what something was compared to an understand by that.
When Sandra is walking through “Packers End” everything is bright, sunny and not scary at all until she starts to think of the “German Plane” that crashed there, her perspective on “Packers End” stays the same and doesn’t change even though it is day time and the German plane crashed long ago and the bodies would have been removed. In contrast, when the Doctor walks through Walworth the buildings and parts of Walworth described to us are that of a “ruinous and dismantled” nature and don’t “dispel any feeling of anxiety or depression”. Both Sandra and the Doctor are anxious to go through Packers End and Walworth with both places having reputations of a bad and horrific nature.
Both texts have suspense in them but “The Black Veil” has more suspense than “The Darkness out There” as it has more detail and not much is given away in what is actually happening.
In “The Black Veil” the suspense starts near the beginning when the surgeon is suddenly woken up from a dream by his ‘corpulent’ employee. The suspense then rises when ‘an unusual apparition’ of a woman appears at his window and we begin to wonder who the woman is and what she wants on a late winters evening. The suspense keeps on rising as ‘the mysterious figure slowly moves’ to enter the surgery and explains desperately about a stranger who is in a ‘desperate condition’, at this point we are left wondering who this stranger is and what has happened to them for the woman to be so distressed.
The suspense keeps on rising as the story continues, there is a steady build up, but the tension doesn’t fall as all the way throughout the story we are kept in suspense wondering who the stranger is and what the surgeon is going to do to help them.
Later on, the suspense rises rapidly as the surgeon wanders through Walworth, a place ‘no better than dreary waste’ we begin to become concerned as he wanders alone through a place where people are scared and hesitant to go. The suspense then rises again as the surgeon finds the person dead and it comes to an end as the woman proclaims that the stranger is ‘her son’. An authorial intervention made by Dickens at the end doesn’t really build up the story to a terrific climax, although it sums up what we have just read and makes things make sense it doesn’t really strike me as a great ending for a horror story.
Both Lively and Dickens say different things about society as they were written at different times to each other. Dickens tells us that money was a key factor in succeeding as it brought education to them who were wealthy and a life of crime to those less fortunate. Lively tells us that in a modern era we judge people by the way they look then are terribly surprised when we realise that we were totally wrong, this changes the way we look at people from then on and perhaps the way we see ourselves. Both writers have morals to their stories as they want to make us respond in reading both their texts with our actions as for us to think when we believe someone is a good or scary person without actually meeting them.
My personal response to “The Black Veil” was that of a horrified nature, I couldn’t believe the person in need of help was the woman’s son and how desperate he must have been. It made me think about how poor people must live and the extreme things they do in order to keep themselves alive. My response to “The Darkness Out There” was different in that I was shocked by what Mrs Rutter had told Kerry and Sandra and I also questioned the way I looked upon people I don’t really know.
I enjoyed the suspense in “The Black Veil” and not knowing what was going to happen but was disappointed by the fact that to finish an authorial intervention was used as it brought the story to a boring end. In “The Darkness Out There” I enjoyed how Lively made out that everything was pretty and innocent when really it only seemed that way. The thing that didn’t make me enjoy this story in as much parts as “The Black Veil” did was that it didn’t have enough mystery and suspense.
Overall both stories have morals about society and successfully have them put across in “horror” stories used to shock and disturb making you think about your actions.