Meanwhile, Dr. Seward must also look after a patient at an insane asylum. Things continue to go wrong, Lucy’s mother passes away, and eventually Lucy dies too. In between and during these events, author Bram Stoker skillfully utilizes the gothic elements “omens, portents, and visions”, “women in distress”, and “metonymy of gloom and horror.” One cleverly used gothic element in Dracula is “omens, portents, and visions.” For example, Jonathan mentions an old woman telling him, “It is the eve of St. George’s Day. Do you not know that tonight, when the clock strikes midnight, all the evil things in the world will have full sway?” (5). The old woman at the hotel desperately wanted him to postpone his journey.
In Great Expectations, Is Miss Havisham crazy and/or evil? The mad,eccentric and incredibly peculiar Miss Havisham,a wealthy dowager who lives in an old, rotting mansion secluded from the outside world is certainly one of the most memorable creations in the book Great Expectations written by Charles Dickens. From the first introductory scene on encountering Miss Havisham’s character it is immediately clear that she is supposed to leave a lasting impression on the reader. Dickens uses a vast variety of imagery and word choice to describe the appearance of the house in which Miss Havisham lives . Satis house,as it was called, emits an ominous presence with its old brick walled up windows and many iron bars.This gives the sense that outsiders where not entirely welcome and rarely visited.
The conflict between the past and the present is symbolized in the beginning of the story by this description, “only now Miss Emily’s house was left, lifting its stubborn and coquettish decay above the cotton wagons and gasoline pumps-an eyesore among eyesores” (91). It is ironic that the same description “stubborn and coquettish decay” can be a description for Miss Emily herself as well. Miss Emily had becoming just like her house, which had once been white and on a “select street”, she had been a slim young lady dressed in white but as the house fell into a decrepit state so had she. “She looked bloated, like a body long submerged in motionless water and of that pallid hue” (92). The town played a definite part in Miss Emily’s mental delusion.
In around eight interrelated written stories, Margaret Laurence recreates the world of Vanessa MacLeod a granddaughter of a tyrant woman who lived as perfectionist though under depression. Margaret Laurence’s symbolically titled A Bird in the House, follows the protagonist, Vanessa, through the retelling of her youth and the untimely death of her father, Ewen. Like the image of the sparrow “caught between the two layers of glass”(145), Vanessa and her father are caught in the rigid confines of the never “endearing” MacLeod household. The relationship between Vanessa and her father is unable to flourish due to the repressive nature of their environment, but it is in how they choose to accept this that they differ. Their sufferance of confinement and guilt, along with unorthodox religious views, Vanessa and Ewen are obliviously similar yet distinctively different in their attitudes.
When the narrator does not leave the house till the house has completely collapsed the reader also starts feeling trapped. Since Poe also uses the word “house” metaphorically, the reader also learns that this confinement can symbolise the biological fate of the Usher family. Also, since the narrator had previously personified the house, by noticing its “eyelike windows”, the house seems to be in itself a member of the Usher family, which, when the last of the family members die, collapses on the previous inhabitants still bodies. Throughout his story, Poe uses the setting
William Faulkner’s story, “A Rose for Emily”, makes use of imagery to depict a theme of death and decay. This imagery ultimately shows the transition of Ms. Emily to her insanity as well as her death. Looking at the last few paragraphs, Faulkner uses imagery to create this sense of disturbance in the readers. Upon breaking and entering the door on the second floor of Ms. Emily’s house, everyone stood in dismay. They look upon a dead man.
Both Dora and Jane are quiet young when they first encounter some kind of hysteria, or symptoms of hysteria. In Jane’s case her first encounter would we the incident at the Red Room (Bronte 12). The Red Room incident is perhaps most important in establishing the rigid structure of patriarchy because we see that the image that appears before her in the ghostly pale moonlight as she imagines is that of her dead uncle, Mr. Reed (Bronte 12). We see earlier in the story that Jane is being punished by Aunt, for “misbehaving” with her cousin John (Bronte 10). The idea that her aunt would lock her away in the Red Room, the place where her husband had lain before his death, shows us what kind of fear her aunt wants to invoke in the child.
William Miller February 27, 2012 “The Yellow Wallpaper” A Critical Analysis Through a woman's perspective of assumed insanity, Charlotte Perkins Gilman comments on the role of the female in the late nineteenth century society in relation to her male counterpart in her short story "The Yellow Wallpaper." Gilman uses her own experience with mental instability to show the lack of power that women wielded in shaping the course of their psychological treatment. Further she uses vivid and horrific imagery to draw on the imagination of the reader to conceive the terrors within the mind of the psychologically wounded. The un-named woman is to spend a summer away from home with her husband in what seems to be almost a dilapidated room of a "colonial mansion" (Gilman 832). In order to cure her "temporary nervous depression- a slight hysterical tendency" (Gilman 833) she is advised to do no work and to never to even think of her condition.
The Fall of the House of Usher: My Reflection The Fall of the House of Usher is a fantastic novel for horror-lovers. At the end of the novel, there is a feeling of something being missing, a subtle melancholy of sorts, as the House of Usher crumbles into the tarn. Roderick Usher, the current owner of the House of Usher, is emotionally bound to the house, which in turn has given Roderick an illness which makes him much more sensitive to minute details than regular people. Roderick seeks comfort, thus writing to a friend and asking him, the narrator, to come and stay with Roderick. Roderick’s sister, Madeline, suffers from a similar disease but she is dying off, like “a flower without water”.
This has led some people to interpret the poem as a metaphor for dealing with this disease. It was first identified a few years before the poem was written. The poem is a narrative of a murder, told calmly and callously. On a stormy night the apparently depressed narrator is sitting alone in a cold and dark cottage. Out of the storm the girl he loves, Porphyria, arrives and makes up the fire.