Compare "The Red Room" by H G Wells and "Farthing House" by Susan Hill examining how the writers create suspense in the stories.

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Katie Hill

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        Compare “The Red Room” by H G Wells and “Farthing  

        House” by Susan Hill examining how the writers create

        suspense in the stories.

“The Red Room” is a pre 20th century story and “Farthing House” was written in the 20th century. Many social changes happened after “The Red Room” was written before “Farthing House” was, and this affected how they were written. “The Red Room” has a definite Victorian style and it is a piece of typical gothic fiction, written during the industrial revolution. Before there was radio and television, novel reading privately and aloud in family circles was very common especially as a middle class leisure activity. Conditions were right for the large numbers of novels in the Victorian age, especially with the industrial revolution strengthening the position of the middle class, who made the majority of the novel reading public. Many novels were sold and read and it became very profitable for writers and also very popular for the middle class. “The Red Room” is about the nature of fear and how it affects you, it was written in 1896. In 1994 when “Farthing House” was written many changes had happened since 1896 such as the industrial revolution had been and gone, women had many more rights and reading was not as popular since television and radio had been invented.

“The Red Room” is about the narrator who starts of in an apparently haunted house which is only lit by candle light, he is with two people a man and a woman but a short while later another man joins them. The narrator insists on going to the red room and spending a night there on his own. The three other people repetitively warn him that he shouldn’t go but he does. He has to go up a spiral staircase and down a corridor to get to the red room, which he does. Wells has told us that the staircase is where the duke died but it was only because he tripped but this leaves us guessing. In the end the narrator wakes up being tendered by the three people and reveals that the only thing in the room is fear.

 

The writers of “Farthing House” and “The Red Room” both use various techniques to help build more suspense. In both stories metaphors, similes and personification are used. They also withhold information, control the pace, rhythm, sentence length and make use of rhetorical questions to build suspense.

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“The Red Room” is set in an old derelict house, which makes you immediately associate it with an old haunted house. The name “The Red Room” engages the reader because if it were just called “room” it wouldn’t be as noticeable, as you associate red with blood, danger and death. It is a very strong colour and has associations with fear. Red Room makes you think there is something dangerous or something bad has happened within an enclosed space in a room. Suspense is created in “The Red Room” firstly by no one being addressed by a name ...

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