Preview

A Centuries Old House

Good Essays
Open Document
Open Document
315 Words
Grammar
Grammar
Plagiarism
Plagiarism
Writing
Writing
Score
Score
A Centuries Old House
A Haunted House AnalysisSetting: The setting for A Haunted House by Virginia Woolf takes place in a centuries old house. The story starts off at dusk, just as the sun is setting. This house is on a tree-lined avenue close to a farm. The season is most likely spring or summer, considering grass and green leaves are described. The weather is stormy; it is very windy and raining.The moon is present as the setting transitions into night.


“A moment lat er the light had faded. Out in the garden then? But the trees spun darkness for a wandering beam of sun…death was between us, coming to the woman first, hundreds of years ago, leaving the house…”  “The wind roars up the avenue. Trees stoop and bend this way and that.
Moonbeams splash and spill wildly in the rain.”


“The windowpanes reflected apples, reflected roses; all the leaves were green in the glass.”  “…the garden still as ever, only the book had slipped into the grass.” Tone: The tone is mysterious and suspenseful throughout most of the story as the ghosts are searching for something. This something is unknown to the reader until the last sentence of the story.Use of it and here. Unknown, engages reader , pulls them into story


“…lifting here, opening there, making sure…”  “ „Here we left it,‟ she said. And he added, „Oh, but here too!‟ „It's upstairs,‟ she murmured. „And in the garden,‟ he whispered. „Quietly,‟ they said, „or we shall wake them.‟ ” The tone changes to calm, remembrance and reflection and embracement.


“…only the wood pigeons bubbling with content…‟‟  “…the garden still as ever…”  “…from the deepest wells of silence the wood pigeon drew its bubble of sound.


"The doors go shutting far in the distance, gently knocking like the pulse of a heart.” When dealing with Death the tone changes again to obscurity and

You May Also Find These Documents Helpful

  • Satisfactory Essays

    The similarities from the houses in both eras is that they both have tiled roofs which provide shelter and protection against strong weather conditions and both eras of housing have a small amount of land at the front and back of the house but both vary in size depending on the location and wealth of the person.…

    • 103 Words
    • 1 Page
    Satisfactory Essays
  • Good Essays

    The passage immediately begins with a metaphor that uses the images of darkness and then the rising sun. It says:…

    • 593 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    The Sun is a star. It is a rather ordinary star - not particularly big or small, not particularly young or old. It is the source of heat which sustains life on Earth. Jane Urquhart’s “Shadow” illustrates how important the sun is in people’s lives. Structural device and personification are used throughout the poem with imagery to describe the sun’s importance and its functionality towards humans. These devices work to express a leading understand of how the sun works in our favour and its every human’s personal guardian.…

    • 601 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    A haunted house should be a place where visitors feel excitement, fear and relief. Excitement begins in line towards the entrance of the haunted house because one is experimenting this with a group of friends. Fear rushes throughout the body, legs begin to shake, and palms begin to sweat because one is mentally preparing for what is coming up. After going through the 20 minutes haunted house toward the end, which felt like hours one begins to feel a relief because it is finally over. In the…

    • 593 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Satisfactory Essays

    Established and weathered authors use certain literary techniques to further enhance the reader’s experience. Tone is one of these techniques, and is easily described as the general character or attitude of a piece of writing. Tim O’Brien’s combat experience in Vietnam led him to suffer from PTSD, and this condition led him to establish a hopeless tone in the first chapter of The Things They Carried.…

    • 288 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Satisfactory Essays
  • Good Essays

    Night Reading Journal

    • 2026 Words
    • 9 Pages

    “ Night. No one Prayed, so that the night would pass Quickly. The stars were only sparks of the fire which devoured us. Should that fire die out one day, there would be nothing left in the sky but dead stars, dead eyes.” (18)…

    • 2026 Words
    • 9 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    The Fall of the House of Usher, written by Edgar Allen Poe is more then a spooky bedtime story. Published in 1839, it made itself famous before the Revolutionary War. This time period, often referred to as the American Renaissance, was the period during which many of the literary works most widely considered American masterpieces were produced. In the text, we get this description of the Ushers mansion, which almost seems to have a character of its own. The detail Poe put into the mansion, means that it is more then just a place to live but a symbol of what the people inside are like too.…

    • 869 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Dialectic Journal

    • 829 Words
    • 4 Pages

    “My love and my Faith….of all the nights in the year, this one I must tarry away from thee. Me journey, as thou callest it, forth and back again, must needs be done ‘twixt now and sunrise….”…

    • 829 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Mr.Hxy

    • 335 Words
    • 2 Pages

    5 Daybreak took away The magic of dreams, Fragments of apparitions That became More tangible than words – Echoes and reflections Of the trust That men had bartered For silence. Had we talked Of death Perhaps something More than time Would have been lost. But the gestures Of darkness and starlight Kept our minds Away from the finalities Of surrender – As they beckoned towards A blood-rimmed horizon Beyond…

    • 335 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Tying in with the religious similarities in ‘That Ethnic Differences Should’, Iain Crichton Smith’s ‘Old Woman’ exhibits themes of religion while focussing on death as the very final manifestation of exile. The poem follows a woman close to death and her husband’s final fight at keeping her alive. His prayers to God only strengthen Crichton Smith’s personal views and opinions of religion itself – where not even God can stop the finality of death, that death, ultimately, is an inevitable aspect of life.…

    • 1335 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Satisfactory Essays

    In this poem, the speaker speaks from the spiritual realm. As the narrator is speaking, the narrator talks about the day she died. The theme of this poem is death is inevitable yet peaceful.…

    • 210 Words
    • 1 Page
    Satisfactory Essays
  • Good Essays

    The tone, along with the foreshadowing used in the beginning of the story, create a mood of anticipation and uncertainty. The purpose of all this is to create suspense and to make the story move along faster. For instance, halfway through the story the reader gets a clear feeling that something bad is going to happen, which helps to build up their expectations and alerts them that the story will take an unexpected turn soon. The line, “It became clear at once that help was needed, because the husband was not pleased” is an example of the foreshadowing in the story, because it is at this moment that the reader realizes that the wife’s good intentions did not have a positive effect on her…

    • 534 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Better Essays

    The setting of this book changes as the story goes on. First, it takes place in a small yet plentiful house in Pennsylvania. But after the death of his father during a car accident, the mother and four kids, move down to Virginia to the kid's grandparent's house. However the main setting of this book should be the attic and the small, cramped room the kids stay in. The attic was full of dust, mice, spider webs, ancient furniture and dirty mattresses. There was only one window, which barely showed any sunlight because it was always closed. The small room where they slept was stuffy, hot, but chilly at the same time because it was dim, without any natural coming in from anywhere, because as again, the evil grandmother keeps the shadow down so no one would notice the kids. The places in the book seems real to me because it was the 1930's and 50's, which still had mansions around that people live in with dirty attics.…

    • 1443 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Good Essays

    The Second chapter of Susan Hills chilling novel, The Woman In Black, is host to some of the conventional gothic aspects found in such ghost stories. The focus of this essay is the first eight paragraphs of the second chapter. Story telling lies at the heart of this novel and there is definite mix within the story of new and old ghost stories which would allow Susan Hill to select what she would have thought to be essential components of a successful ghost narrative. ‘A London Particular’ imparts a strong sense of place, mood, season and of the elements to the point that our main character, Arthur Kipps, is very effected by the various scenarios; whether it be sunny in the open or dark and cloudy. These senses mean the traditional ‘haunting’ fundamentals; an isolated house, narrow empty streets at night (lonely churchyards and convents later on), are heavily relied upon.…

    • 1014 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    A Haunted House

    • 780 Words
    • 4 Pages

    “A Haunted House” by Virginia Woolf, is a short story that tells the experience of a young couple, living in a house with a ghostly couple. The story begins with a “ghostly couple” looking for their treasure, in the house they previously lived in while alive. While alive, the ghosts lived in the house more than a century before the current residents. The woman died first, this is when the man left her and the house, he “went North, went East, saw the stars turned in the Southern sky.” Later when the man died, he returned to join the woman ghost at the house they occupied while together. Fearing, that the new couple may have found their treasure, the ghosts go from “room to room they went, hand in hand, lifting here, opening there. Opening windows, whispering not to wake us, the ghostly seek their joy.” The narrator, being aware that there are ghosts in the house, never feared being harmed. In the end, the author reveals that the buried treasure is “the light in the heart,” referring to all the different places in and around the house, where they had expressed their love to each other. The female ghosts says, “Here, sleeping; in the garden reading; laughing, rolling apples in the loft. Here we left our treasure.” It had never been missing.…

    • 780 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays