" How effective is the setting in creating tension and suspense in Stevenson's works?"

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" How effective is the setting in creating tension and suspense in Stevenson's works?"

Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde is a novella about a scientist who experiments with the morals of good and evil. He then decides to try to separate these elements and difficulties arise with this. This novella concerns how one individual has conflicting emotions that are both good and evil. Dr Jekyll tries to make one-person 'wholly' good and another 'wholly' evil, but his experiments become quite dangerous.

'The Body Snatcher' is about two old friends, Fettes and Doctor Macfarlane, who studied under someone who was a famous, but unorthodox, anatomist. They would collect bodies for this person but they soon regret collecting one body. The confession of William Burke, murderer and procurer of corpses, inspired this short story.

Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde is set in Soho, London, which is famous for being the 'seedier' side of London in the nineteenth century. At this time there was a great divide between the poverty-stricken and the rich. Even in the daytime, London was very dark due to the industrial London smog, and this adds to the atmosphere of fear, creating tension to make the reader feel uneasy. Stevenson presents the atmosphere of chill and darkness, therefore making the reader have a sense of foreboding about coming events. 'The Body Snatcher' is set in Robert Louis Stevenson's home town of Edinburgh. At that time, it was illegal but common, to collect bodies and experiment on them, and this is the basis of this tale. Experimenting on bodies at this time was not acceptable; there is already something chilling about this practice, and collecting bodies from graves is also very unnerving, done late at night. By setting these two stories in effective, atmospheric times and places, Stevenson creates tension and suspense.

Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde is very effective in the way that whenever Mr Hyde is around, such as when Mr. Utterson goes to visit Dr.Jekyll, he meets Hyde, though he never sees his face as he talks with him. It is always dark so that the reader cannot get a description of his face, and the scenes are always in the middle of the night. Even where Dr Jekyll's house is situated creates tension. The book mentions that it is in Soho; which at the time was the 'seedier' side of London. People can relate to this and the setting makes the novella sound realistic and that is why Stevenson creates tension and suspense, whereas if the setting was somewhere such as Mars it would not be true as people may have visited Soho and they may know the town quite well. If Stevenson wrote a book that was set on Mars, the reader would feel more safe when reading it because they know this is not really going to happen, and so Stevenson would not fulfil his task of creating tension in the reader. At one point in the story, Mr. Utterson is looking for Mr Hyde and the book mentions that he looks for him "at night under the face of the fogged city moon." This creates tension because it suggests that people would not be out late at night and the "fogged city" is giving the reader a sense of insecurity as the words seem dark and damp, and people that go out at that time of night were probably up to no good. Other ordinary, good people were too scared to go out so the reader expects Mr Hyde to be very dangerous. Also, Stevenson mentions that "the shops were closed the street was very solitary and in spite of the low growl of London, all around very silent" which creates a setting in the readers' mind so the scene will seem more realistic to them, making the reader wonder as to what happens next. "Solitary" , suggests that nobody is about, but somehow there is still a low "growl" which would panic readers as they may think something is going to happen in this scene that could have something to do with a iniquitous person as a "growl" from anybody is never very good as it makes you think of a dog getting angry at you. "Silent" would give the effect to the reader that the streets are empty and there is nobody around for miles and that if something was to happen in the shops or in the street then there would be nobody to help. This one quotation truly makes the reader think of how scared a person would be to be alone on their own as everyone has been scared or frightened at some point in their lives. The reader can imagine being in the street alone, and frightened. It is not just through dialogue that Stevenson creates suspense and tension for the reader. In the incident of the cabinet door, it makes people anxious wondering why it is open; I think younger people would be scared by this because after watching films today and reading more modern stories, they would always expect someone to be murdered at that point or for something else terrible to happen. This is only one example of Stevenson as a classic author of chilling thriller stories.
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In his narrative, Stevenson gives the reader the feeling of discomfort as he uses short sentences. Sometimes when there is dialogue between Mr Hyde and Utterson, Stevenson will use simple, short, answers or responses, while at other times, longer sentences in the dialogue are used. In this story questions are asked as a way of finding out more about the characters, and depending on the length of these sentences, it may vary on how much information on the characters is found out. "Will you let me see your face?"; this question is very important, because it shows that ...

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