‘The Follower’ is set in many different places. One of the settings is the Baker Street Tube, which is associated with Sherlock Holmes but the tube station is usually very busy. The underground is dark and spooky place and in the tunnels there is a cold breeze, and there are weird noises which are creepy. The setting in which there is the hospital, is also scary. Because there are ill people in hospital and sometimes it is a deadly place. There is also a mention of mental illness, which is really frightening because it makes the reader sense a lack of control. I think the settings are less frightening than ‘The Signalman’, because in most of the encounters the women has with her stalker were busy places, where other people were around. The setting also gives us a familiar feel because they are mainly based in London in places we know of.
When the figure of the signalman is first described: ‘…even though his figure was foreshortened and shadowed...’ this creates fear. Then he is described as a dark sallow man with a dark beard and heavy eyebrows. This suggests him as a scary character and the way Dickens builds his character up, it gives us a feeling of strangeness. But later along in the story we get to know more about his character, we learn that he has been educating himself in all his spare time so he is anxious to improve himself. He is not a social person but is very dedicated to his work. The ghost is isn’t really presented as a character but Dickens makes it sounds like a character by saying ‘spectre’. Many times, describing how it appears and it’s actions so the reader tries to visualise the image. I think the way Dickens did this was good because people always imagine the worst, so when the reader is trying to visualise, it will see the worse. The ghost signifies the story as frightening. The character of the narrator isn’t frightening at all. His character is a calm, loyal and logical person, and does not believe in the supernatural and thinks there is an explanation for everything. He is a character, which helps the reader feel safe within but near the end of the story, there is the suggestion that he has been controlled by the supernatural in some way. So the writer might be suggesting that ghosts could also control normal people and this is a frightening thought because it could happen to anyone. I think the characters in here are described very clearly so the reader can visualise each character. The character, I liked most was the ‘signalman’ because his character gave you a sense of fear and it fitted also with the description of his job.
The character of ‘The Follower’ is built up as a maniac. The way Mrs Meade describes his face as horrible, moistly pale like toadstool and his bold, malignant eyes this gives the reader quite a scare because he is described so horribly and he was stalking Mrs Meade. The follower adopts different personalities or identities. They range from an ordinary person standing in a crowd. A taxi driver, a short man who works in a nursing home, and a doctor wearing a mask. The follower also appears in unexpected places this creates a lot of tension and fear, especially with all the different identities, you never know when he could turn up. Mrs Meade sounds like an ordinary woman in the story so this applies that these things could happen to anyone. The characters in this story weren’t really clear to me, the story never mentioned anything about Mrs Meade’s family except something about her children. We never really got to know her character except how she felt when she was being traumatised by these experiences. I think Cynthia Asquith did this deliberately by not telling us anything else, she allows the reader to feel what it was like to be unable to think about anything except the ghost.
The language Charles Dickens used in the ‘The Signalman’ is more complex than ‘The Follower’ it is less immediately accessible for us to read. The story is started in a different way to ‘The Follower’, because as soon as the story opens, someone is calling out to an another person: ‘Halloa! Below there!’. We get no information of who is calling out and who is below there, or what place there at. Unlike ‘The Follower’, where the story opens by telling us a name of a women who is sitting in a nursing home because of a heart trouble. The opening line is also a shorter length than the other lines which quickly gives us a sense of tension. Also in the opening line, Dickens has used a exclamation mark twice, I think he did this because he is emphasizing that this line is important throughout the story. There is a repetition of the words: ‘Halloa’ ‘Below’, again I think Dickens did this to make the story unusual so it grabs the reader’s interest.
In the language, there is a use of nature: ‘angry sunset’, this is when the colour red is introduced, it suggests that there is danger. The word ‘angry’ gives us a ominous feel.
There is a repetition of the words: ‘red light’ throughout the story, I think this is purposely done again because the red is associated with danger. Because the use of language used in ‘The Signalman’ is not easy to understand, the story will be less appealing to the younger generation. Dickens uses lines like, for example, ‘…as if I had left the natural world’, ‘…a force draw me down’ and ‘…that they were conveyed to you in any supernatural was’ all of this lines hints that there is a connection of supernatural.
The language used in ‘The Follower’ is more colloquial than ‘The Signalman’, so the story is easier to get into. As the language is of our time, the story is more real to us, it helps us to be involved with it. In the line ‘moistly pale like...like a toadstool!, here Cynthia Asquith has used imagery, so we can visualise how horrible the man looked.
I felt that throughout the story there was a great use of exclamation marks, I think that is because exclamation marks emphasizes danger which then creates tension.
Cynthia Asquith used many different words, for example, ‘utterly’ ‘hateful’ ‘bold’ ‘malignant’, to give a horrible impression of the man to the reader.
In both stories, a character is telling their story that creates a sense of urgency, it also brings the reader closer to the story, gives them a sense of involvement. Tension is also created when they don’t think they are being believed. In ‘The Signalman’, the signalman says he is troubled which creates expectation, also gets the reader curious and makes them want to read on. The narrator and the reader have to wait to hear his story, which creates suspense because the reader wants to know what the signalman’s trouble is. It is also weird that the signalman tells he’s story at night, which makes it scarier because some people are scared of the dark and the night is also associated with evil things. When the signalman tells his story, the narrator interrupts him by explaining the story rationally but he cannot explain everything. This makes the story, even more frightening because the narrator is seen as a logical person and does not believe in the supernatural. But he has no explanations for the spectre and accidents which makes the reader think that what is happening with the signalman is really happening, that it is not just the signalman’s minds playing tricks on him.
The narrator gets scared, ‘A disagreeable shudder crept over me…’ as the signalman carries on telling the story this makes the reader scared because the reader thinks the narrator is a normal person, and if he’s scared that makes the story more frightening. I think the reason Dickens did this because to make people believe that even people who are logical and have an explanation for everything might start having doubts and think that there is supernatural. The way the signalman tells the story by doing creepy things, he does all the actions ‘I followed his action with my eyes…’, I find this really weird. It got me thinking that the signalman is making the story up to scare the narrator but I realised I was wrong later in the story. There was also a twist in the tale because the way the signalman told the story, it made the reader think there is going to be accident on the line, but I think the reader would have had no idea that is would have been the signalman that died. This twist is chilling because you never know what might happen. I also noticed that in ‘The Signalman’ the length of the sentences were shorter, I think the Dickens did this in order to create tension.
In The Follower, Mrs Meade hasn’t been believed before; we get a feeling that her husband thinks that is an obsession because she never talks about him. As the story is largely told in the first person, we experience this obsession. Also he hasn’t been mentioned in the story, which leads us to believe that he hasn’t supported her. Her doctor also thinks she is having hallucinations because no one has actually seen the follower except for Mrs Meade. She is hoping that the psychoanalyst believes hers, there is a hint of desperation that also creates tension. When the doctor comes in with a mask this creates fear because you don’t know who is behind the mask, the reader will also think that this is pretty odd even if the doctor gave an explanation. Throughout the whole story, Mrs Meade only tells us about the stalker, no other information is given. I think this gives us a taste of what it must be like to think constantly of one thing. There is also a twist in the tale here because in the end we find out that the man; Mrs Meade tells everything to turns out to be the man who has been stalking her, this is a really forbidding thought. Another thing is that no one will ever know how she died, she could have been frightened to death or killed. Her death will put on her heart condition and her imagination. No one will ever know the truth, only the reader is aware of what happened in that room with her, which is a very chilling thought.
There is criticism of industrialisation in ‘The Signalman’. The train can be seen as dangerous symbol by implying that it causes accidents and kills people. I also think the story is trying to say that industrialisation destroys the quality of life, Dickens is saying that all progress is not necessarily good. For example, the quality of life for many people working in industry at that time was very poor.
It was believed that industrialisation will alienate man from nature that if everyone works in the industry, no one will bother with the nature any more. The story could be warning to people in the future that the sort of world man is creating with industrial machines. This is quite a modern worry as well; people are worried that everything is going to be by machine that there will be less communication that everything is going to be run by computers and machines. I think that this quite a scary thought that people will no longer need to communicate because computers will do everything.
‘The Signalman’ suggests that there are powerful forces stronger than man because there is a force that controls the thoughts in the narrator’s head. Both character’s, the signalman and the narrator are a bit scientific. Both are influenced by the supernatural, which they cannot explain with science.
The Follower is written by a woman, with a woman as the main character. I think the author is trying to explain and express her views on how women are treated in society today. This story deals with a lot of fears a woman has today, being followed and stared at by strange men, not having the freedom to travel without being scared and the biggest pain is of losing a child. These are common fears for a woman, their lives are restricted and their freedom to travel. This story might be trying to say that women’s fears are not taken seriously by men because in the story Mrs Meade talks to a number of men, who do not believe her. She is not taken seriously, her doctor thinks they are hallucinations, another thing the story might be saying that male doctors are quick to judge a woman mentally unstable if they have a fear about something. Women don’t have their stories listened to properly, not many men believe a woman about her fears.
I think both writers were successful in making their stories frightening. In the ‘Signalman’, I found that the spectre’s movements and the place he was standing at very chilling Also the isolated place where the signalman works and lives sounded very forbidding, it is a very scary place to live and it is very lonely without having other people around you. I think in the end where the train driver said the same words as the ghost worked really well because that just sends a shiver up your spine because we know that everything the signalman said was true. The Follower, was also very good story, at the end where he pulls his mask off was really scary. The story had a very good ending, no one knowing what happened. Also when the doctor walks in with a mask causes a lot of tension. The story I liked best was ‘The Follower’ because that frightened me, finding out what could happen to you, just because you’re women also because it was more interesting.
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English Coursework
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