Haunted House By Susan Gilman Analysis

The crumbling walls and foundations symbolize the crumbling of his mind, suggesting that all must come to an end eventually. Additionally, The Haunted House isn't just a spooky setting; it's a journey into our minds. For instance, the mansion's ghostly manifestations symbolize the mental strain haunting the Usher family (Poe). Through the Usher family's story, Poe shows how psychological scars can affect people and their environment, pushing readers to face their own inner struggles. Lastly, when the narrator escapes from the falling mansion, it's like a fresh start, a new beginning.

First, the writings of her journal show that the narrator is not convinced with her “rest cure” treatment. Her writings depict that her husband, John, continuously belittles her condition and concerns while she knows that her illness is real and more severe than he

The protagonist of Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House is Eleanor Vance, an emotionally underdeveloped young woman with a dark past. As a character, she has a deep connection to the broad theme of family within the novel, and more specifically, how the lack of family when it is desperately needed leads to emptiness.

The forceful tone throughout the passage I chose, and story, shows that Gilman was forcefully trying to get her point across through the narrator of the story, that resting, and confinement were not the answers to curing mental health issues, such as postpartum depression, in the late nineteenth century, “Personally, I disagree with their ideas. Personally, I believe that congenial work, with excitement and change, would do me good. But what is one to do? I did write for a while in spite of them, but it does exhaust me a good deal- having to be so sly about it, or else meet with heavy opposition” (Gilman, P. 462). She is forceful. She does not agree with the ideas of rest and confinement as a cure. The narrator wants to be able to be free and live with the normal excitements of life. In addition, she states forcefully, that she writes in spite of her husband and brother. The narrator knows that writing helps her and wants the reader to know that she continues to do it anyways, because she knows that it is in the best interest of her health, to be able to clear her head, by writing down her

            Confined to this room day after day, the narrator begins to study the wallpaper:  ". . . I determine for the thousandth time that I will follow that pointless pattern to some sort of conclusion."  That “pointless pattern" refers to the rigid pattern of complete subjugation to men that women of Gilman's day were expected to follow.  A woman of that era was the "property" of her father until she married.  She then became subject to her husband’s will with no legal rights and no authority to determine what was best for her.

The house was a sepulcher, our fear and suffering lay buried in the ruins." The house would then become an isolated tomb that will never be inhabited by anyone again. This hinted a much more significant meaning under its surface beauty, which contributes to the setting of a Gothic novel.

The unequal relationship between the narrator and John is a miniature of the larger gender inequity in society. Gilman makes it clear that much of John’s condescending and paternal behavior toward his wife has little to do with her illness. He dismisses her well-thought-out opinions and her “flights of fancy” with equal disdain, while he demeans her creative impulses. He speaks of her as he would a child, calling her his “little girl” and saying of her, “Bless her little heart.” He overrides her judgments on the best course of treatment for herself as he would on any issue, making her live in a house she does not like, in a room she detests, and in an isolated environment, which makes her unhappy and

Within the story, Gilman represents the domestic sphere as a prison(Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism). The narrator is considered to be in prison but in a nursery because she cannot handle her duties as a mother to watch her children or a wife to clean(Delashmit). The windows in the room symbolize the windows in a prison cell. She feels as though, since someone is behind the wallpaper, she is being watched(MacPike).

The setting of this story takes place in the Usher manor a creepy place located in a “dreary tract of country.” When the narrator first sees the estate he feels “an insufferable gloom” because of the manors horrible state. With its “eye-like windows” and “decayed trees...I can compare to no earthly sensation more properly than to the afterdream of the reveler upon opium.” Poe establishes a Gothic setting through the narrator's point of view just like in “Young Goodman Brown.”

"The Fall of the House of Usher" by Edgar Allan Poe has a gothic horror story setting. Gothic means that the author emphasizes the mysterious, the horrible, the ghostly and the fear that can be aroused in the reader. Everyone knows that a gothic story or a ghost story will often have a setting that will be in an old, decaying mansion far out in a desolate countryside. The mansion will be filled with cobwebs, strange noises, bats, and an abundance of secret panels and corridors, in which people might be running and screaming in terror. The author uses every literary trick to give us an eerie sensation or to scare us if we hear an unexpected noise. The

At the time, to own or stay at a haunted house is considered to be the height of fashion. There is something romantic about a haunted house as that means something forbidden went on in the house before a great tragedy. However, the colonial house they have been able to lease, while not haunted, is “queer;” or why else would they have been able to lease the house so cheaply.

The classic gothic theme of light versus dark. A smear of light only, the house mostly engulfed in darkness. A mention of ghosts and extinction both resonate with the theme of death.

The central theme of all Gothic novels is the presence and symbolism of the Gothic castle. Depiction of ruinous abbeys, monasteries, subterranean passages, vaults, secret panels, and the trapdoors is a standard method of achieving the atmosphere. Howells sees the Gothic castle as being ‘a shadowy world of ruins and twilight scenery lit up from time to time by lurid flashes of passion and violence ’(6). Therefore, the gloominess of the exterior and interior environment is illuminated by intense emotional and passionate moments of the characters that inhabit the castle. As Sage claims, the castle is ‘the lair of the villain’(166), and it is an accurate reflection of his dark and frightening character. Gloomy, dark, and dangerous, the castle reflects the emotions and psychological experience of many of the novel’s characters.

In Virginia Woolf’s A Haunted House, images of darkness and light have numerous symbolic meanings. Light is associated with the presence of the ghostly couple that roams the speaker’s home, but it has symbolic meanings beyond that—it represents the insight and truth the speaker gains from observing the couple. In addition, as is revealed by the last lines of the story and the images of darkness used in the story (which provide a counterpoint to the symbolism of light), light represents the love and happiness that comes from union. Overall, light plays a major role in the development of one of the major themes of the story: human relationships are more valuable and lasting than any tangible riches or treasures.

Two boys were walking on the campus of Bridgeville Academy. They were each armed with a pile of books that threatened to topple onto the well-worn paved parking lot of the school. They turned out of the campus and began walking down the sidewalk towards home. The air was chilly and the leaves were beginning to shed their emerald green gowns for scarlet, gold, and, fiery orange. The boys were in good spirits and they walked briskly down the walkway. Before long, the houses had started to get bigger and farther apart.