Nineteenth Century Short Stories and the Gothic Genre

Nineteenth Century Short Stories and the Gothic Genre

The three short stories that I have chosen to compare and contrast

are: The Signalman by Charles Dickens, An Arrest by Ambrose Bearcy and

Napoleon and the Spectre by Charlotte Brontë. All these stories were

completed by the mid to late eighteenth hundreds.

The Signalman is set by a railway in Britain, along a lonely stretch

of a railway line in a steep cutting. An Arrest is set in America and

for the most part in a forest. Napoleon and the Spectre is set in

Paris.

Gothic genre was one of the leading and most used genres of the

nineteenth century and this genre is very prevalent in all three of

the stories that I have chosen. The gothic genre originated from South

America in the seventeenth century and the idea of it is to add

certain characteristics to the story that alienate and distinguish a

section of a story form the rest of the novel making it feel and sound

more eerie. Gothic novels tended to contain a supernatural element in

them. This probably due to the Victorian fascination with the

paranormal, as a reaction to the technological advances of the past

century, which had denied the existence of such a phenomenon. There

was growth of religious fervour at the time, which helped to admiss

the existence of ghosts and the like.

The very setting of The Signalman form the start gives the story an

eerie gothic feel to it with the signalman working and living in a

dark lonely place with the tunnel that is very close by adding to the

sense of mystery of the man and the place. The railway line is set in

a shallow gorge with 'dripping wet walls of jagged stone,' which gives

the sense that the jagged stone is evil and the dripping sense is

forbiddi...

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...find that no one enters behind

him, but there upon a table 'lay the dead body of Burton Duff.' This

suggests that the most hardened of criminals who has killed twice with

ease has been haunted by a murder he has committed.

The setting in which this novel is set makes for a scary story. This

is because of the use of language in the gothic style like: 'the

haunted man saw the visible embodiment of law,' this suggests a ghost

who is telling a man the right thing to do but the word 'haunted,'

makes the thing that should be done sinister in tone. The trees make

for an eerie setting because no one knows what could be hiding behind

the next one and so keeps the sense of mystery high and keeps it

forbidding. The setting of this novel can be likened to Napoleon and

the Spectre because of the dark setting and the ghost that enters and

haunts the main character.