Authors Treatment of Fate and the Supernatural in Short Stories Written Before 1914 :: Short Stories Yellow Wallpaper Lost Hearts Essays

Authors Treatment of Fate and the Supernatural in Short Stories Written Before 1914Using a selection of short stories written before 1914, compare andcontrast their authors treatment of fate and/or the supernaturalI understand the term supernatural to be an guinea pig or being that isabnormal in some way and for which there is no rational explanation.Although traditionally the supernatural is confined to spiritualbeings, such as ghosts, I perceive it to have a much wider meaning. Iwill be investigating how certain writers of short stories view thesupernatural and how they adapt it into their stories. The authors Iwill be looking at in this essay are M.R.James, Thomas Hardy andCharlotte Perkins Gilman their stories, Lost Hearts The Withered Armand Yellow Wallpaper, respectively. I will be focussing mostly onthe supernatural in this essay, further will also investigate the questionof fate briefly. Fate is the tracing that all events happen for areason, and that there is a greater po wer watching over us.Both these subjects are ones that greatly interested the Victorians,the era in which these stories are written. They were especiallyintrigued by the spiritual world, and the upper classes held sances,attempting to contact the dead. This preoccupation with thesupernatural, and indeed fate, is one that emerges repeatedly in theseshort stories.The first taradiddle that I will be looking at is The Withered Arm byThomas Hardy. Hardys style was very progressive for the time, butalso reactionary conservative, even, in certain aspects. His storieshave a preoccupation with fate and the inevitability of death.The main supernatural aspect is the fantasy of Mrs Lodge that Rhodasees. The vision taunts her, and Rhoda retaliates by grabbing its arm.The vision appears sitting on her chest whilst she is in bed Thepressure of Mrs Lodges person became heavier, and yet is not MrsLodge as she should be But the features were shockingly distorted,and wrinkled as by age. Although Rh oda can feel its presence, it isextremely strange that it should be sitting on her chest in the middleof the night, and it is undoubtedly a vision or a distortion of adream. Harding even describes it as a spectre. This is furtherconfirmed by its emergent disappearance, She looked on the floorwhither she had whirled the spectre, but there was nothing to beseen. The whole story really revolves around the actions of thespectre or vision, and this is the definite supernatural cistron inthe story. Later on however, both women go to see a ConjurerTrendle, and Mrs Lodge sees the face of the person who cursed her in