I have chosen to look at four short stories which were written in the victorian age
Compare and Contrast a selection of pre 1914 short stories commenting upon features of interest
People have written short stories for hundreds of years; however it was not until the 19th century that they really became popular. Short stories were the ideal form for writers who wanted to earn some immediate money and reach a wide audience. As more people were given the chance of receiving basic education, literacy rates improved and more were able to enjoy reading. As the technology improved printing became cheaper meaning that more people could afford to buy and read cheap magazines. This was in the days before television or radio when reading aloud was a much more popular form of entertainment.
I have chosen to look at three short stories which were written in the Victorian age by different authors. They are "The Signalman" by Charles Dickens, "The Adventure of the Speckled Band" by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and "The Yellow Wallpaper" by Charlotte Perkins Gilman.
The story "The Signalman" takes place in an isolated railway cutting, where a traveller meets and befriends a lonely signalman who has a strange tale to tell. He is being haunted by a mysterious figure that lurks in the mouth of a rail tunnel, warning him of impending tragedy. He has appeared twice before and on both occasions the signalman witnessed terrible accidents; a train crash and a young bride falling from a speeding carriage. The signalman fears that the figure will return and some other tragedy will occur.
Charles Dickens wrote this tale after being involved in a train wreck in which he narrowly escaped injury. The accident haunted him for the rest of his life.
"The Yellow Wallpaper" is a very strange story.
The story is about how a woman is driven mad through being trapped in a room. It shows how the relationship between an oppressive husband and his submissive wife pushes her from depression into insanity. At first she does not like the room and its horrid wallpaper but soon she becomes intrigued by its patterns and what lurks behind them.
The third story "The Adventure of the Speckled Band" is a typical murder-mystery story. Sherlock Holmes is presented with a baffling set of circumstances from which he deduces the facts and reveals the villain.
All three stories are common in that they are written in the first person singular. This has the effect of engaging the reader and making him feel part of the unfolding tale.
Conan-Doyle uses this technique in writing 'The Speckled Band'. His story revolves around the character of the detective, Sherlock Holmes, however it is told as seen through the eyes of his companion, Dr Watson, providing a good example of writing in the first person.
"The Signalman" is told in first person narrative; which makes the story extremely personal, meaning that the reader becomes more involved in the story and it feels like it is actually happening at the same time as you read it.
Charles Dickens also uses dialogue to reveal the account of the haunting and I believe he does this to make it even more personal still.
"The Yellow Wallpaper" is written almost in a diary form. Reading it you feel as if you are in the woman's head as she makes notes in her journal.
All three are thrillers but of different kinds. "The Adventure of the Speckled Band" is a traditional detective story. An unexplained death is solved by clever detective work. "The Yellow Wallpaper" is a very strange psychological thriller of a sinister type. What is lurking behind the wallpaper? Is it all a figment of imagination? "The Signalman" is a ghostly mystery. Is there an apparition and why?
The start of a story is very important. The author has to grab the reader's attention and make them want to read more to find out what is going to happen.
"The Signalman" begins with a very dramatic opening; starting abruptly with speech "Halloa! Below there!" These same words echo throughout the story with a growing sense of dread until the final deadly conclusion. This makes the reader continue as we don't know who's speaking and so tension is created immediately. The man below that he is shouting to looks round to face the tunnel, "Looked down the line". Any normal person would look upwards in response to this. The reader does not know why and so more intrigue is created.
"The Yellow wallpaper" starts in an interesting way. Why are they spending the summer in an ancestral hall? The mention of a haunted house intrigues the reader and starts putting ideas into their head.
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle however starts his story slowly and gradually introduces the reader to the mystery which unfolds. He relies on the strength of the story to hold the reader's attention.
The setting of the scene is also very important to the development of the story. Both "The Signalman" and "The Yellow Wallpaper" take place almost entirely in one location. They ...
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"The Yellow wallpaper" starts in an interesting way. Why are they spending the summer in an ancestral hall? The mention of a haunted house intrigues the reader and starts putting ideas into their head.
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle however starts his story slowly and gradually introduces the reader to the mystery which unfolds. He relies on the strength of the story to hold the reader's attention.
The setting of the scene is also very important to the development of the story. Both "The Signalman" and "The Yellow Wallpaper" take place almost entirely in one location. They differ in that the signalman's action takes place in a deep, dark and damp railway cutting whereas the yellow wallpaper is set entirely in a large but dismal bedroom.
The cutting would be pretty dark; this darkness creates the atmospheric mood. It is also described as being "Extremely deep and unusually precipitous" and "Solitary and dismal". It seems like the place is very isolated and cut off from the real world, the perfect place for supernatural happenings. The tunnel also creates suspense. Why did he look down there in the first place and what could be down there? It is described as "Barbarous, depressing and forbidding". The smells and surroundings make him a little bit reluctant to descend, "Air of reluctance". Also the darkness impairs the narrator's vision so he can't be sure what's out there.
It gives the reader "the don't go down there feeling."
"The Adventure of the Speckled Band" however moves location from Sherlock Holmes house in Baker Street to the decaying manor house in Stoke Moran.
The story is set in an old forbidding house. Just the look of it could make you think twice about going inside; after all, it could collapse on you at any moment, as Dr Watson described. "In one of the wings the windows were broken, and blocked with wooden boards, while the roof was partly caved in, a picture of ruin."
The bedroom in the yellow wallpaper almost becomes a main character as it develops a sinister personality of its own.
The characters are obviously extremely important in a short story. They have to be developed quickly and be interesting to the reader and engage their attention. The signalman is evidently going to be an important character; which we can deduce from the title of the story. The signalman himself is an anxious, lonely man who works alone down in the gloom of the isolated railway cutting. The surroundings of where the signalman works are creepy enough but it is made even worse from the fact that he does it alone. The signalman himself looks mysterious, "A dark sallow man". This would add to the reader's suspense and build up the tension.
When the narrator and the signalman start talking his actions are very weird to begin with; he stands intently in the railway tracks with his hand on his chin, not moving a muscle until they are face to face, "Before he stirred I was near enough to have touched him". Also, when they do meet he makes no attempt to start the conversation; instead he looks at the red light, "Look towards the red light". He seems very mysterious and unpredictable. As they begin to talk again the man becomes slightly hostile and the narrator speculates that he might be a ghost, "This was a spirit". This is a very tense point in the novel because the ghost's identity may have already been revealed, but the signalman begins to show fear and asks if they have met before. It makes you think why should the signalman show any fear? After their conversation the man leaves and the signalman tells him that on his return journey not to call out those words, "Halloa! Below there". It builds tension over what these words really mean to the signalman and why he is scared of them.
There is only really one character in "The Yellow Wallpaper" and we do not even know her name. We do not need to know it however because as we read we are that person and we know our own name.
She is virtually imprisoned in her bedroom, supposedly to allow her to rest and recover her health. She is forbidden to work, "So I . . . am absolutely forbidden to "work" until I am well again."
She is not even supposed to write: "There comes John, and I must put this away he hates to have me write a word."
She has no say in the location of the room she is virtually imprisoned in: "I like our room a bit. I wanted . . . But John would not hear of it." She can't have visitors: "It is so discouraging not to have any advice and companionship about my work. . . but he says he would as soon put fireworks in my pillow-case as to let me have those stimulating people about now." Probably in large part because of her oppression she continues to decline. "I feel as if it was not worthwhile to turn my hand over for anything." It seems that her husband is oblivious to her declining condition, "You see, he does not believe I am sick!", because he never admits she has a real problem until the end of the story when he faints: or is it possible that he is dead because he remains prostrate while she climbs over him. Her husband John could have obtained council from someone less personally involved in her case, but the only help he seeks was for the house and baby. Therefore in this story the villain is the husband because he has driven his wife into insanity.
Conan-Doyle went with the more traditional approach, making his main character a very typical murderer. The character Dr Roylott is a very violent man. You can assume that he is the murderer in this story just by the description Dr Watson gives of him. He describes Dr Roylott as "a huge man", who possessed "A large face seared with a thousand wrinkles and marked with every evil passion". He has "deep-set, bile shot eyes" and a "high thin fleshless nose, (which) gave him the resemblance of a fierce bird of prey"
Dr Roylott would seem to be evil from the start. Dr Watson, looking at him, remarked that his face was "marked with every evil passion"; and this appearance gives a prediction of what the personality may be like, in this case evil. Hearing the story that Helen Stoner told Holmes you would assume that this man was the same man whose "violence of temper approaching mania" resulted in "long term imprisonment" in India because "in a fit of anger caused by some robberies which had been perpetuated in the house, he beat his native butler to death."
Dr Roylott lived a secluded life after he moved to Stoke Moran. When he arrived, instead of being sociable, "he shut himself up in his house, and seldom came out, save to indulge in ferocious quarrels with whoever might cross his path." This lack of friends and the absence of a friendly personality resulted in a void, which he used anger to fill. He became an embittered angry man after the death of his wife. Helen Stoner said that after the death of his wife, he abandoned all ideas of setting up a practice in London and moved to Stoke Moran. "But a terrible change came over our stepfather at that time... he became the terror of the village, and folks would fly at his approach, for he is a man of immense strength, and absolutely uncontrollable in his anger." This, along with my other points proves that Dr Grimsby Roylott was an extremely violent man, who could quite possibly be capable of murdering his own daughters with little or no remorse; just for money.
When the murderer is as typical as Dr Roylott, the typical victim in a murder mystery is a person, usually a woman, invariably rich or about to come into money. Miss Helen Stoner fits this description exactly. Firstly, she is obviously a woman, and a scared one, terrified by her predicament. "It is not cold which makes me shiver... It is terror". As for the second requirement, money, it is revealed that Helen Stoner is about to come into a fairly large amount. She says that an agreement was made whereby all her mothers fortune was to go to Dr Roylott, "with a provision that a certain annual sum should be allowed to each of us in the event of our marriage". She then later reveals that she will soon be marrying "a dear friend, whom I have known for many years"
Later in the plot, Holmes uncovers the will of Helen Stoner's mother and finds out "each daughter can claim an income of £250, in case of marriage". From these quotes, we can determine that after Helen Stoner's wedding Dr Roylott would have to give her £250 per year. This is a vast amount for the period and an amount which could have ruined the "good doctor".
Charles Dickens creates a great deal of mysterious atmosphere throughout the story. This helps to engage the reader in that they become tense and want to find out how the tension will be released through what will happen next.
Suspense is created through use of the supernatural, horror and ambiguity. A good suspense story should have all of these. I will explore these qualities and look at the other stories to see if they contain them.
The plot in "The Signalman" uses a lot of suspense, which is typical of gothic horror, to keep your mind fixed and to make you wonder. The atmosphere also has a way of being strong in gothic horror and to really help amplify the impact of the setting there are a lot of descriptions like "the unhealthy damp" and "the blackness of the tunnel". The atmosphere is usually one of coldness and darkness and black is a word that appears a lot to describe nothingness.
The language is very old and awkward. Phrases like "good evening to you sir and here is my hand", convey the period of time and bring to mind images of the old steam trains burning coal, creating a lot of dirt and soot to make the cutting even more dingy. These trains were of course a recent invention in these days.
In this story you are soon convinced of the fact that the signalman is visited by a spectre that has come to warn him of some danger; but the danger of what you are left wondering. To show that this is a gothic story there is a definite twist in the end of the tale where you are left to wonder whether the narrator is connected to the spectre when he says, "the words which I myself - not he -had attached, and that in my own mind, to the gesticulation he had imitated".
Suspense is created in "The Adventure of the Speckled Band" by the description of Roylott as a ferocious character; and because of this we fear for the safety of Holmes, Watson and Miss Hudson. Our picture of Roylott as a dangerous and violent man is reinforced when he bends the poker with his bare hands and then hurls it into the fireplace "snarling" at Holmes before leaving. Conan Doyle never actually tells us that Dr. Roylott is evil however menacing and dangerous he may appear.
Many writers use suspense in their work in order to excite the reader and to make him or her want to turn over to the next page. This can be done by giving the reader some information, but not enough for him or her to be able to answer the mystery or riddle that they may be trying to solve. This can also be done by suggesting things to the reader but never actually confirming or denying them. This means that the reader is constantly asking questions in their head. Denying us knowledge of particular scenes keeps us reading until the end
In "The Adventure of the Speckled Band" we are denied knowledge at many places because the story is told by a first person narrator, Dr Watson, who cannot deduce all that Holmes can from the information given. A point where we are denied knowledge is the action scene where Watson cannot see anything, but Holmes knows exactly what is going on. We have to wait until afterwards when Holmes can explain the mystery to us in its full glory. Keeping things from us allows us to imagine a possible set of events which we cannot be sure to be true, but whether correct or not, suspense is created by these imaginings. This is especially so in "The Yellow Wallpaper" where Charlotte Gilman keeps us on the edge of our seat waiting for the next entry in the journal to explain to us what is happening.
Delaying the action, withholding vital pieces of information or even misleading the reader, these all create suspense in their own way.
At the same time as delaying the action we are given snippets of the information we need to solve the mystery. Holmes refuses to tell us his suspicions before he has more proof. He and Dr Watson sit there in "the gathering darkness"; this adds an element of suspense and danger to the wait. Then they see their signal and leave; there is a "chill wind", which makes things seem sinister. Next they see what is described as "a hideous and distorted child." This startles the reader, but it is the action scene we are waiting for. It alleviates some of the suspense already created, but then even more suspense is made by telling us that there are more dangerous animals lurking around the grounds, which could spring on Holmes and Watson at any moment. Once they are both in the room Holmes tells Watson not to go to sleep and that his "very life may depend upon it" Then they are left "in darkness", and the tension builds as the parish clock is booming out every quarter of an hour, and the hours tick by. Then suddenly all the tension and suspense is released in the scene of the action, but Conan Doyle denies us the knowledge of what is going on.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman creates suspense in her story by only drip feeding the reader with information. At the start of the story the woman seems quite normal but we gradually gain the impression that everything is not right inside the woman's mind. "This paper looks to me as if it knew what a vicious influence it had!" The "prisoners" inside the wallpaper take control of her sanity. She tries to free them by peeling off the paper. "I pulled and she shook. I shook and she pulled, and before morning we had peeled off yards of that paper."
Holmes is, as I have already pointed out, the classic detective. Assisted by Dr Watson, he makes the "rapid deductions, as swift as intuitions, and yet always founded on a logical basis" that have made him so famous among avid readers and film buffs alike as the super-sleuth of Baker Street. Holmes has a clear and very sharp ability to deduce even the most complex mysteries; a gift which Dr Watson admires greatly. He says "I had no keener pleasure than in following Holmes in his professional investigations, and admiring...(the way in which)...he unravelled the problems which were submitted to him." Holmes takes every chance he gets to exercise, or sometimes show off, his abilities. When talking to Helen Stoner, he says "You have come by train I see... I observe the second half of a return ticket in the palm of your left glove." He then goes on to deduce that she went to the train station by dog-cart. "The left arm of your jacket is spattered with mud in no less than seven places. The marks are perfectly fresh. There is no vehicle save a dog-cart which throws up mud in that way and only when you sit on the left hand side of the driver." He may be exercising his skill, or he may be using this occurrence as a sales tactic, impressing a potential client.
Comparing the three stories I have described how they are all written in the first person singular, but from very different perspectives. The story "The Signalman" is told to us by a narrator, "The Adventure of the Speckled Band" by an observer and "The Yellow Wallpaper" by the diary of the subject. "The Adventure of the Speckled Band" is the typical detective story. Holmes is presented as an observant, intelligent and committed detective, which is the typical investigators role in a murder mystery, and the story ends happily with a definite conclusion. This contrasts with "The Yellow Wallpaper" where the end is far from satisfactory and the reader is left wondering what has happened! Has she killed her husband? What will she do next? What will happen to her? The woman in "The Yellow Wallpaper" is very untypical of the normal subject in a psychological thriller. She at first seems to be a perfectly normal woman not really ill at all, but gradually we see her mind deteriorate and she slowly turns into a creature resembling a wild animal, prowling around her bedroom. "The Signalman" bears some similarities to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's story in that there is a definite ending when the signalman is killed. There is a difference however in that the reader is then left with a question in their mind, which is similar to "The Yellow Wallpaper". Is the narrator of the story a normal person or is he possibly the ghost? This is the typical ending of a mystery story; leaving the reader with a quandary to ponder over after they have finished reading, making them want to read it all over again.
By Chris Davies
