While the fire is lit we feel more secure as in the original room. It provides light, which allows us to face whatever is in the red room and prevents us from allowing our imagination to frighten us.
When he is in control of the candles he is able to make a joke and for a brief moment at least, we are calmer.
“When the ghost came in, I could warn him not to trip over them.”
Until the lights begin to go out, you feel comforted by the pleasantry of it.
H.G Wells uses personification to bring life into the darkness. It is the enemy, the thing that we must try to resist.
“Black shadow sprang back.”
“Quality of a presence.”
“Lurking, living thing.”
Getting nervous he tries to reassure himself by lying that a draught is responsible when there isn’t one. Losing control he makes another joke in a hysterical way but this time we can take no comfort from it. It is clear that he has become a victim of his own fears.
Approaching the climax, the tension is highlighted by the structure of each sentence. The sentences are long but each one containing many short pieces of information.
“I bruised myself on the thigh against the table, I sent a chair headlong, I stumbled and fell and whisked the cloth from the table in my fall.”
The way it is written is meant to show the mans constant attempts dashing back and forward all over to try and relight the candles, his total loss of control.
The climax comes when he runs into something and knocks himself out; up to this point the suspense was unbearable.
The gap in time, when he wakes up in the morning after being rescued by the three old people slowly unwinds the tension.
It is now clear that he was fighting his own fear and eventually it overcame him. For each person, their experience would be different inside the red room, as they would have to fight their own personal fears.
The language plays an important part in this short story. With the castle, is sets the time and place of the events and also gives you a clue about the characters.
However, when reading “By Jove!” which is very old fashioned to modern vocabulary it can sometimes detract from the tension.
Overall as the reader, you feel satisfied that the story has been unraveled to you but some questions are still left unanswered. What caused the candles to go out?
The last line is just as effective as the first:
“So long as this house of sin endures.”
Sin is associated with evil and evil can take many forms, with this the story ends and it leaves you paused for a moment taking in all that has just happened.
The Ostler
This story is an embedded narrative. It begins in the present tense when the narrator finds an ostler asleep in a stall. The fact that a man is having a nightmare and shouting out “murder” and “she-devil” in the middle of the day already introduces something peculiar.
The landlord is the first character to speak to the narrator when he shows his concern; he then introduces us to the ostler and tells the story.
Isaac, the ostler is said to have ‘ill luck’ but he is still faithful and honest. We immediately feel no threat by him because he is a good character. The fact that he is cursed with bad luck just confirms that something is almost certainly going to happen to him.
We are also introduced to Isaacs mother, who is a typical caring woman and another good character. The strong bond between the two of them is clear, when she takes him in on his ill luck and makes him promise to return to her on his birthday.
It is when Isaac is too late for a job offer and begins home that the atmosphere changes.
The weather is cold and wet so he decides to stay at an inn. The description of it however, creates an uneasy feeling, suggesting he should move on:
“Lonely roadside inn, standing on the outskirts of a thick wood.”
The mounting uneasiness increases as the bolts and bars on the doors and windows emphasize the vulnerability of the inn.
Being alone on the edge of a wood gives it an uninviting and suspicious feel.
In his room the candle is Isaac’s only comfort and he keeps it alight for as long as possible. The candle symbolizes comfort and warmth as in ‘The Red Room’. In the light nothing seems frightening.
Pathetic fallacy is used to describe the moment of haunting:
“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.”
When Isaac sees the woman with a knife it is totally unexpected, and I believe that here is where the first climax occurs.
Her description and movements are of a disturbing nature. She is an evil beauty, the droop in her eyelid suggests a deformity of some kind and her delicate hand seems inappropriate to be holding a large knife. It is all the more frightening that she does not speak and simply stares at him. The way she moves over to him slowly with no emotion suggests that she is not human and her intentions are certainly to kill him. As the reader you can feel her coming closer, not only to the protagonist but to you, you are in that room with them.
When she lifts the knife, instead of tension you feel panic. He needs to get out of the way, is she real? If she isn’t real could she stab him? When the candlelight goes out, I believe that there is an anti-climax. That one aspect of safety that means he can see where she is has just disappeared and he is in darkness. But instead the candle relights to show no one in the room.
It is obvious that the dream is the significant moment. The fact that the landlord does not believe him just emphasizes how significant the dream was to the rest of the story.
Now the reader is totally drawn in by the overwhelming desire to find out who the woman was and what she wanted.
When Isaac returns to his mother it is clear that she knows something that we have yet to find out.
“His mothers face grew paler and paler.”
Her immediate concerns about the dream that cause her to record every detail causes us concerns, we can see her worry. She later refuses to even talk about it; this gives the writer the opportunity to hide whatever is about to happen.
The tension begins to rise again when Isaac meets a distressed woman outside the chemist who clearly wishes to commit suicide. We aren’t ever told why she wants to end her life but she captures Isaacs fascination over her story.
“There is no need to relate it here; it is told over and over again in police reports.”
Talking about attempted suicides in reports may relate to her. Or she may be referring to women in general who feel vulnerable. In any case she has introduced something unsafe and suspicious about herself and we can see the dangers before Isaac can.
His language and attitude towards her shows us that he is clearly infatuated by her and the reader has an intuition that something is about to happen.
“His mind was so completely absorbed by its new subject of interest.”
When she later begins to take control of his life our suspicions are confirmed.
“How to break the news of his approaching marriage… to his mother.”
The bond between Isaac and his mother is so strong yet she still manipulates him.
She later lies when she promises never to see him again, but breaks that promise and returns. Out of the characters that the reader is introduced to, she is the only one that cannot be trusted.
A small climax occurs when Isaacs mother meets the woman, Rebecca Murdoch for the first time:
“Blank look of terror.”
Isaacs mother has only reacted in this way when he told her about the dream and so we can immediately assume that she is that same woman. The author avoids any connection between the two of them until this moment so that it is totally unexpected. She may try to kill Isaac.
We can now empathise with the mother for Isaac is still blind to the resemblance. Again a feeling of panic overwhelms us because Isaac is in danger again, only this time he cannot see it coming. Previous warnings to him had been totally ignored by his obsession with her.
“He could never feel quite at ease with her.”
When Rebecca Murdoch storms out angrily at the way she is being treated she returns and watches them through the window. It is not only her personality that makes the reader feel uneasy around her, but also her body language.
“ Something darkened at the parlour window…a sudden chill ran through him. Rebecca Murdoch had come back. She was peering in curiously at them over the low window blind.”
Even Isaac begins to feel scared around her. The way she is described peering through the window makes you feel as though she is a slimy creature of some kind watching you, waiting to latch on.
For a brief time the tension has dropped considerably, Isaac now knows who she really is and so, is weary around her.
When Isaacs mother goes to have dinner with the two of them the tension immediately begins to mount:
“The same ghastly change pass over her face.”
We do not even need to know what has changed his mother’s expression; having witnessed it twice already we sense that she has become aware of something linked with Rebecca Murdoch and the dream.
The tension is only ever built when it has something to do with that significant moment at the inn.
When we realize that Isaacs mother has seen the fatal weapon used to attack him in his dream, a desperateness to escape overcomes the reader. The knife symbolizes violence, which causes tension. By seeing the knife it is clear that Rebecca Murdoch will attempt to kill Isaac but we do not know if she will succeed.
Our predictions are correct when Rebecca Murdoch attempts to stab him, only his precautions to stay awake at night makes the story so predictable that it is not a very tense moment, we knew that it was coming.
However, in 1855 when this story was originally written, women were still considered to be weak and vulnerable. No one would have expected a woman to be the culprit.
Due to the fact that this story is an embedded narrative we know that it must all end with the present conversation between the landlord and the original narrator.
It is left on a cliffhanger; our answers about the ostler asleep in the stall have been confirmed. He is haunted by the thought that the woman may return to kill him and so he does not sleep at night. However we are left not knowing whether she returns or not and by the end of the conversation it is as if we were standing with the landlord the entire time.
The adventure of the speckled band
Conan Doyle has cunningly devised suspense in a variety of different ways, not only in ‘The Speckled Band’ but also in ‘The Engineers Thumb’.
The stories are structured to include mystery and murder; he achieves this by using a detective format.
The Sherlock Holmes stories were appealing during the Victorian and Edwardian times due to his variety of techniques. Also many people at the time believed in the detective’s actual existence and felt safe to take risks because he always caught the criminal.
Conan Doyle uses pathetic fallacy and deliberately makes you feel anxious about what will happen next. By creating mysterious setting, using strange characters and providing small hints he makes us desperate to read on without giving away the story.
‘The Speckled Band’ is a typical murder mystery where a crime needs solving and a person needs to be protected from death.
This story is cleverly structured as it gives out a series of red herrings, the cheetah, the baboon, and the gypsies are all used to play on our minds and mislead us.
Gypsies are stereotypically known to cause trouble and similarly the cheetahs are very vicious. However, slowly we are able to avoid these misconceptions and follow the role of Sherlock Holmes trying to guess the culprit before he does.
Throughout the beginning of the story the credibility of the narrator, Dr Watson, is built up to ensure a relationship of trust between him and the reader. This means that everything he says is instantly believable and this amplifies the suspense.
When he refers to the last 70 case and believes this story is the most memorable of all we instantly wonder, why is this story so good? It simply feeds our curiosity to continue reading.
Our impressions of Helen Stoner at first are that she is grieving.
“She was dressed in black and heavily veiled.”
This does not only suggest mourning. Black is associated with death and evil and perhaps the veil is used to hide herself from someone, or something.
The simile used to express her fear and agitation suggests that she is weak and vulnerable:
“Restless frightened eyes, like those of some hunted animal.”
Conan Doyle’ description of her, portrays her as a rapidly ageing woman.
“Her features and figure were those of a woman of 30, but her hair was shot with premature grey.”
It is clear that some great amount of stress or events has truly scared her and caused her to age considerably. When your hair turns grey very early, it is often a sign of overwhelming stress and as the reader we are unaware of the details of the death and it remains a mystery to us. We are very intrigued as to what has caused her to be so upset.
“It is not cold that makes me shiver it is fear, it is terror.”
She is no suspect in this unknown mystery; she is the victim desperate for help.
Our first impression of Dr Roylott is somewhat different from reality. He seems to be a better man than his relatives. With a medical degree and a large practice it is totally unexpected that he is capable of murder.
“Beat his native butler to death.”
As his personality and past offenses are revealed he becomes a typical murder suspect in a mystery story.
When he confronts Sherlock Holmes about talking with Helen we feel the tension rise. This ‘maniac’ is capable of murder and Holmes is rude straight back to him. It is clear that he is a dangerous man and as the reader we are very curious as to why he doesn’t want Helen speaking with them. Is he hiding something? Although bending a metal poker was a sure threat and sign of strength we do not feel intimidated because Holmes has an equal amount of strength when he bends it back to shape, and we know they are an equal match for one another.
Dr Roylotts physical appearance confirms our suspicions.
“A huge man” “large face seared with a thousand wrinkles and marked with every evil passion” “deep-set, bile shot eyes” “High thin fleshless nose, (which) gave him the resemblance of a fierce bird of prey.” Along with carrying a hunting crop, it is probable that he is the hunter that Helen is so afraid of and we can empathise with her, he is the hunter and she is the ‘hunted animal’.
Due to this we can accuse him of being the murderer, he has the temper and experience to be a killer, and also the motive. A motive that is always responsible for deaths…money. If his daughters were to marry he would lose his money and if they were dead he’d keep it all.
There are still many unanswered questions though, what is the speckled band? How did Julia really die?
When Holmes and Watson arrive at Stoke Moran the atmosphere is the opposite of the lovely day they left behind them.
“The building was of grey, lichen-blotched stone.”
The word grey makes the atmosphere feel dull and drab whilst lichen-blotched makes the house old and uncared for. Doyle’s simile of the house having ‘two curving wings like the claws of a crab’ makes you very anxious, it makes you feel as the though the entire house will grab you. A description such as this creates the tension that is building to a climax, it is clear something is going to happen inside the house.
The very thought that Holmes is inside the house of a killer is enough to cause the reader to feel very tense. Along with ventilators that do not ventilate, dummy bell ropes which are not attached to a wire and a bed clamped to the floor you can tell that you are drawing close to the answer behind it all.
As in the previous two stories the setting of the discovery is in the dark.
“All was dark in the direction of the Manor House.”
Darkness instantly builds tension because without light, things are not what they seem. The shady distorted child would simply be the baboon in daylight.
The word ‘dark’ is used often to create tension and remind the reader that the mood is very uneasy.
“Dark roads…” “…Across the lawn into the darkness…” “…Left in the darkness.”
This is where the author uses pathetic fallacy. The reader must be put into the right frame of mind to accept the events that are happening and so Doyle sets the eerie mood.
The use of language is vital in the success of this story, it determines each character. Holmes is very intelligent with an eye for clues who is a sophisticated gentleman. Helen is a very fragile woman but most importantly Dr Roylotts threats and attitude helped us to accuse him.
The resolution of the story is very satisfying. Justice has been served when the murderer brings about his own destruction. Holmes knew the answers to our questions but let us reveal them ourselves which helped to create the suspense.
Unlike the previous two short stories this ending leaves us with no unanswered questions to play on our minds.
