This story is structured in episodes like a TV serial to make it easily visible to reader. There are roughly about 5 episodes and the longest one is the first one running from the start up to ‘…and went to bed herself’. The narrator signals the beginning of each episode by change or lapse of time, changing characters and changing location. Each episode adds a further layer of superstition to the one before it because each one stops abruptly and leads onto the next one. The author uses language to manipulate the story by reviewing the last episode each time. All this creates tension in the story and shows how the tension builds up.
He uses first-person narrator and he speaks very casually with informal English. This conversational style and tone of the narrator gives the impression that the story is being spoken and makes the reader more interested. This is very similar to the story of The Ostler because the same techniques are used to grab the reader’s attention and to develop the plot of the story further.
Characterisation is used to help the readers understand what sort of character William is and also emphasises the reader’s sympathy for the character. He is seen as a quiet and curious man who works hard for a living and is more or less an ordinary villager.
In this story the position of women and wives are explored because the character of Betty reflects the role of a wife and women in the 19th century. We know that women were expected to do the domestic work in the house such as ironing, cooking and cleaning. This is because in the story Betty is the wife and she is the one that stays up late doing ironing while her husband sleeps. She is also expected to set up the breakfast and dinner for her husband while he goes out to work.
The aspects of politeness and manners are also explored through children. For example when Betty bumps into a girl called Nancy after the peculiar night. Nancy is very polite and speaks to Betty with good manners. We know this because she uses Betty’s second name to speak to her, for example she says, “Yes Mrs Privett” when she is asked a question by Betty.
Also the writer has craftily linked the extra-ordinary with the ordinary in order to build tension and create a feeling of suspense. It has ordinary events as well as the superstitious events. For example, going to sleep, waking up, eating breakfast is very ordinary, however spirits going into and coming out of the church in the middle of the night and a moth coming out of your mouth whilst you are asleep are very extra-ordinary and certainly unusual.
Similar to The Superstitious Man Story, the story of the Ostler is also very mysterious and strange. The character that I have chosen from this story is Rebecca Murdoch, who is a strange woman that Isaac Scatchard gets married to and who haunts him in his dreams. This woman is introduced into the story as a ghostlike figure as found because she is described when Isaac is having a nightmare in the stable. Again like the first story, this story also has a narrator and is in first-person point of view.
The author arouses our curiosity in the opening of the story by using descriptive language to describe Isaac’s appearance. For example, ‘the eyebrows painfully contracted’, gives the reader a good image of the characters face, which also illustrates what he may be thinking, or feeling. The sleep-talk of Isaac grabs the reader’s attention because he says words such as ‘knife’ and ‘murder’, which symbolise death or danger to us because the words are not what we would use all the time and it sounds dangerous, it seems as if someone is being murdered. It also creates tension, as the reader is unaware of what has happened and why this man seems so panicky. The use of first-person narrative helps us to relate to this story because it sounds like the narrator is talking directly to us.
The structure of the sentences also adds to the panicky affect of the story. The author uses broken sentences to create this feeling. For example, ‘He stops, and sighs again – moves one lean arm slowly, till it rests over his throat – shudders a little…’ it gives us a good image of the ostler because the author is using descriptive language and the broken sentences slow down the pace of the action so we can just about imagine what this man is doing.
Rebecca Murduch is not introduced as herself in the beginning of the story, which creates suspense for the reader because we do not know who she is. All we know is that the ostler is having a nightmare with this woman and during that nightmare the women is trying to murder him. The story starts off in the present tense and then leads onto the past tense as the narrator tells the story.
The woman that is described is very scary and terrifying character. She has ‘light grey eyes’,’ a droop in the left eyelid’, ‘flaxen hair with a gold-yellow streak in it’, ‘fair white arms with a little down on them’, ‘little lady’s hands, with a reddish look under the fingernails.’ These characterisations help us to picture the image of the women that is haunting Isaac in his dreams. This image is also repeated during the story to create tension and to make this lady seem very real.
The author uses techniques to create a feeling of suspense and horror throughout the story, which emphasises on the supernatural things that happen.
He uses descriptive adjectives and interesting verbs to describe a setting or character. For example he says,’ the bleak autumn wind was still blowing, and the solemn, monotonous, surging moan of it in the wood was dreary and awful to hear through the night-silence.’ This passage describes the sounds of the wind and senses are used to make the atmosphere seem real and very ‘bleak’. He is trying to create a very negative scene and is using nature to help him do this. This also slows the pace of the story because it takes longer to get to the point therefore the suspense grows and grows.
Repetition is used recurring throughout this story to remind us of theme of horror and strangeness of the story. The most obvious example is the one where the dream women’s descriptions are being repeated throughout the story with the same words, and it builds tension as well as leaving the reader bewildered. There is an appeal to senses and personification is used to make the descriptions more interesting to the reader. An example of this is shown when the author describes the weather,
‘The bleak autumn wind was still blowing, and the solemn, monotonous, surging moan of it in the wood was dreary and awful to hear through the night silence.’ He uses many interesting adjectives to make this extract appealing to the reader. He also uses personification to make it more engaging to the reader, because he gives the wind and woods the personality of humans by using words such as, ‘surging moan’. We all know that woods do not moan but the sounds that the winds were making were almost as if the woods were moaning. He relates to the reader like this because we all know what moans sound like therefore can imagine the sounds heard by Isaac, making the story more realistic.
The third character that I have chosen is from the story, The Red Room. He is the narrator of the story but his name is not given so we do not know what he is called. This story is slightly different to the other two because the narrator is like the main character in the story and it is in present tense. Again the author is using first-person point of view, this makes the reader more interested in the story because it is like they are being involved in the conversations. This story also starts off with speech, like The Superstitious Man Story, which immediately draws the reader into the story. The settings are also very 19th century like because the setting is in an old, haunted house which is said to have a haunted room. The narrator wants to find out what is so scary about this room, the red room, and he goes to investigate. The author uses many different techniques whilst describing the narrator’s experience in this house to make it strange and frightening for the readers. He keeps the reader guessing until the end of the story about what is so haunting about the red room. There are a variety of sentence length and a range of techniques used in the language to give the reader an image of this old house and the people that live within. There are old people who live there, which makes it seem more creepy because old people have a different way of behaving, for example, the way they walk and talk is different to younger or middle aged people. An example of this is shown when the narrator describes what he thinks of the old people, ‘…I had scarce expected these grotesque custodians. There is to my mind something inhuman in senility, something crouching and atavistic…’ As described by the narrator, these people seem very ancient looking and like ugly servants to him, and he thinks that there is something odd or strange about them because of their unusual appearance. He also explains how the atmosphere in the room was tense and awkward because he mentions, ‘The three of them made me feel uncomfortable, with their gaunt silences, their bent carriage, their evident unfriendliness to me and to one another.’ Also, old people are said to be wiser and when they tell the narrator not to go to that room he goes against them and says that he will. This gives us the impression that something bad is bound to happen to him because he did not listen to the advice of the elderly and wise people.
There are several passages to show how the author creates tension and builds it up to make the reader very curious to find out what will happen next. For example, ‘ The effect was scarcely what I expected, for the moonlight coming in by the great window on the grand staircase, picked out everything in vivid black shadow or silvery illumination…’ the author goes on to describe the house and creates an image of what it may look like in the readers head. We can imagine what the surroundings looked like so the image is visibly clearer and it also seems more realistic to the reader.
There are several ideas discussed in these three stories and I will explain some of them in detail and compare how they vary from story to story. The ideas include portraying women as mysterious and dangerous, presenting them as powerless and cunning, describing individuals who are seen as victims, describing characters that are seen as victims of the nineteenth century social attitudes and values, arousing the readers sympathy and creating a feeling of the extraordinary, suspense and terror.
The idea about women being very mysterious is portrayed in different ways within these stories. In The Superstitious Man Story there is one woman, who may have been portrayed as mysterious as like the character of William. He is a very mysterious character because the reader never gets to meet him and we just hear what he did before he died and also the author describes him as slightly mysterious. The woman that may be seen as mysterious in the story is his wife, because she is the one that actually experiences the strange event of seeing her husband go out through the door and not return. She, as a character may not have been portrayed as mysterious in this story but the reader may have a different point of view. They may think that she is the odd one who sees weird things that are unexplainable. In the story, The Ostler, there is such a woman who is depicted as very mysterious. The character of Rebecca Murdoch is an incredibly mysterious character because of the way she is introduced in the story and because of the way the story ends. Rebecca is the lady in Isaac’s dream who, in the beginning of the story is having a terrible nightmare of her trying to murder him. In this dream Rebecca’s image is described and we later on find out that it was she in the dream. The author has made her seem very mysterious by not mentioning who she is or where she comes from, also she leaves the story as strangely as she entered it. In the end of the story the narrator makes the reader think further into the plot even though it has ended the reader is unaware of what happened to this character, for example ‘Who can tell?’ is a rhetorical question which the author used at the end of the story to make the reader think and to make it more pragmatic.
There is also a character in the story of The Red Room, which is an old woman and is also portrayed as a mysterious character. The reason she is represented as mysterious is because she is an old woman and the elderly people are shown as very odd and strange to add to the tension of the story. The old woman in this story seems very odd because she repeats herself many times, for example when she and the other old men are warning the young man about the red room she repeats the same line twice, ‘This night of all nights!’
The old woman is referred to, as ‘the old woman’ and the old men are referred to as ‘the man with the withered arm’ or ‘the old man with the shade’, rather than being given a name. This is a clever technique that the author has used, he has made the characters anonymous which builds tension and adds to the suspense. As we do not know who these people are, without a name the people are still a mystery to the reader. This may involve the reader starting to think all sorts of things like maybe the old people are ghosts that haunt this house and warn the narrator about the red room or something to explain their strangeness. The author uses this technique to get the reader thinking and to add to the mysterious atmosphere in the story.
Another idea that is explored in these stories is the idea of presenting women as powerless and cunning. In the stories of The Superstitious Man the character of the woman, Betty is seen as powerless and the character of the women in The Ostler is represented as cunning. The reason Betty is seen as powerless is because the strange events that take place are out of her power, as she cannot do anything to stop the death of her husband. And the reason Rebecca was cunning is because she made Isaac fall in love with her and she was a very mysterious and crafty character. She did things that made the reader feel frightened of her and which illustrated her craftiness. For example she was in control of Isaac and had control of what he did therefore she was able to make him her husband even after Isaac’s mother warned him. We know that she had control over Isaac from the following extract, ‘She had taken possession, not of his passions only, but of his faculties as well. All arrangements for the present and all plans for the future were of her devising…she directed him on every point…’ so the character is instantly represented as cunning even though she may be powerless at first, she has found a way to get underneath Isaac’ s skin. He does as she says even when he has to break the news to his mother about their marriage. The author clearly states that this character is cunning because he writes, ‘...said the cunning women.’ It relates back to people of the pre 1914th century because women were seen as cunning and superstitious at that time. She is a mysterious character also because when Isaac first meets her she is on the verge of committing suicide, we are not told why or given any background information on her, and also she easily becomes the centre of Isaac’s world even though she is a complete stranger. It is very mysterious because she was very similar to the dream women and it is odd how Isaac is so attracted to this stranger woman. Some of the women were represented as powerless and cunning in these strange and superstitious stories just like how they were at the time these stories were written.
All three of these characters were described and portrayed in different ways. Either they were the victims or they were the villains. In each case the authors use descriptive language, emotion, imagery and much more to make their experiences seem very frightening and strange to the reader. An example of this is shown in the story, The Ostler, when Isaac first meets the dream women, otherwise known as Rebecca Murdoch. The author is using effective language to describe her image because he says, ‘ …her stern, pale, but still most beautiful face…’ It is ironical of him to say that her face was pale but still beautiful because these words do not go together and is an odd way of describing her face. Another example of effective figurative language is shown in this story, ‘Besides the natural compassion and sadness moved in his heart by what he heard, Isaac felt within him some mysterious influence at work all the time the woman was speaking…’ this represents the emotion that the characters are feeling which then makes us sympathise with the character.
They arouse the reader’s sympathy for the characters and create a feeling of the extraordinary, fear, terror and suspense. The use of interesting language also has a large impact on the audience because the author makes the experiences seem very frightening to the readers by using a range of techniques. The time at which these stories were written also has a large impact on the theme of the stories. The reason being that in pre-1914 times there was not as much technological advances as there are now because the scientific explanations of the strange and supernatural were not known at that time period. Therefore people used their own theories to explain the causes of strange and supernatural events. However, today we have more technology and scientific explanations of such events that may lead us into not believing in the strange and supernatural unlike in the past. People were also afraid of these things because of its strangeness and incongruity, which means these stories were associated with the reader’s own experiences as well.
I think the writers were very interesting when writing the story as it is not only aimed at the people of the time but also makes it feel realistic to us. The authors describing these events and talking about the superstitions behind them make the reader fascinated by it and its strangeness. People of today can also relate to some of these events, which makes the story very interesting to the reader today. For example, when in the story, The Red Room the main fear of the story is the dark, this is similar to people nowadays because there are many people who are still afraid of the dark and it can be a fear for anyone. I think the reason why people have this fear is because in the dark they are unable to or see very little of the surroundings therefore images and objects automatically form in their imagination, making it seem more realistic to them because they start believing in their imagination. Even though there is more scientific knowledge now than before, there are still thousands and thousands of unexplained events which are justified by the theories from the past.
In these stories the authors describe individuals at the mercy of forces beyond their control. These forces are things such as strange and supernatural, ghosts, dreams and nightmares, etc. All of these things are beyond people’s control; they just happen without people knowing and they shock or scare the people when such an event takes place. The moral, philosophical and social significance of the text relates not only to the people of the 19th century but also to the reader’s of today. It is significant to both readers because it teaches us the moral, social and philosophical understandings and explanations for these strange and supernatural occurrences. The writer’s narrative craft and appeal to the reader is shown through the style, structure, imagery, language and characters. The authors use a variety of techniques to grab the reader’s attention and to create a feeling of suspense and terror throughout the story.
There are several different patterns and details of language exploited for implication or suggestion, for example emotive, ironic, and the figurative effect. The authors use these effects to make the story more appealing to the audience and to create suspense or to build tension, al of which result in a more interesting superstitious story. The range of effects achieved by the writer makes the story as a whole very interesting to read and keeps the reader at the edge of their seat.
