The ostler

Another strange fact about Rebecca, is that she is dominating in the relationship between her and her husband, in the 1800s this would have been practically unheard of, she seems to have Isaac wrapped around her little finger, this is shown well in this 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." This is a very good representation of how she is in complete control of his life and everything that he does.

She also wants to keep it a secret about how she met Isaac from his mother, it would seem that she wants to impress Isaac's mother because Rebecca knows that old Mrs Scatchard is wary of her as she is the woman from the dream.

When the reader reads The Ostler, they immediately know that Rebecca is to be treated with suspicion as she is so unusual for her time and we don't know whether to assume that she is a ghost or not. Her element of mystery makes the reader feel wary of her and we feel scared for Isaac as neither us or him knows whether she is a murderer and it was her in the dream or whether she is just an innocent woman who Isaac had just merely seen in his dream.

But this conclusion is highly unlikely because there are too many coincidences such as near the end of the story when she again tries to kill him however this time it is far from a dream: "With one hand he felt up her sleeve-and, there, where the dream-woman had hidden the knife, she had hidden it, -the knife with the buck-horn, that looked like new." Although this is very late in the story, it still seems that Isaac still doesn't believe that his wife and the woman in the dream are the same woman, as he refers to them as to different people.

The reader also feels that the author does not want us to feel sympathy for Rebecca, Wilkie Collins doesn't seem to like his villanes and seems to be hostile towards her, although he tries to make us feel sorry for Isaac by constantly calling him "Poor Isaac" or "Poor old chap".

Wilkie Collins creates an atmosphere of suspense and horror in his story and grips the reader. At the start of the tale, it begins with the end of the story, this is a good technique to engage the reader as it wants to make us read on and find out what is happening to the ostler as he seems to be having a disturbing dream and the author gives a detailed description of the man, that leaves us wondering what had happened to him to leave him with "prematurely wrinkled cheeks" and a "withered woe-begone face" .This seems very odd for a man who apparently is not that old.

Collin is trying to create a gothic atmosphere several times in the story, Such as when he stops at an inn on his way home: "The first house he found to inquire at was a lonely road-side inn, standing on the outskirts of a thick wood" the reader gets an image of a shack in the middle of nowhere, barely standing up under the weight of the heavy rain and the wind late at night.

Only a few paragraphs later Collins uses the same technique when he is describing the locking up of the inn: "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.

One critic said "Wilkie Collins is a master of the creepy effect". I agree with this statement and think that the description and dialogue that Collins uses makes him the master of the creepy effect.

Natalie Crouchley 10A 10th October 2004