Fear and Tension in The Whole Towns Sleeping and A Terribly Strange Bed

William Shakespeare is a successful playwright as he uses the style of history, tragedy and comedy which is an entertaining aspect that is in all his plays.

While the narrator recognizes the great care with which her husband is treating her she seems to constantly feel that she is being ungrateful. She calls herself out in her journal for being a “comparative burden” (Gilman) The room in which the narrator resides has a sturdy bed that is nailed to the floor. The narrator notes that there are bars on the windows and rings hooked into the wall. She wrongly assumes that this room was used as a nursery or gymnasium by the previous owners. As the reader, we are able to instill our own thoughts that this room was in fact built to house someone with a mental disorder. This begs the question of what the house really is, to contain such a room away from decent society.

While, the narrator refers to the room as a nursery, the circumstances suggest that the room was really used to “treat” women like the narrator from similar illnesses. The room has a bolted down bed that “is fairly gnawed” (Gilman 517), which the narrator bites a piece off of in frustration, suggesting it was under similar circumstances that the bed came to be gnawed. Therefore, the narrator’s creeping inside the room is the only way for her to be part of society, as in the room she can “creep smoothly on the floor, and [her] shoulder fits... so [she] cannot lose [her] way” (Gilman 518). She has to suppress and hide her true self in front of others, even her husband, as many women had to during those times.

A mutual theme in the four literary texts Mrs. Shearn’s 2nd period class has read is humans can destroy themselves through each other and technology. Teasdale's poem states, “And not one will know of the war, not one will care at last when it is done” (stanza 4, lines 7-8). In Stephen Vincent Benet’s poem, ‘Nightmare Number 3,’ it talks about how humans created technology so advanced, that the humans were overpowered and demolished by their own creations (lines 16-19). In Stephen Vincent Benet’s other literary text, “By the Waters of Babylon,” the ‘Gods’ of the old world fought in a war and destroyed themselves. Through the ‘God’s’ own technology, they destroyed each other leaving only a few to survive (page 7-8). Ray Bradbury’s short story,

Throughout the course of humanity, we have experienced terrible transgressions in our society. Although they took place sixty-one years apart, similar horrific events from the Holocaust (1933-1945) and the Rwandan Genocide (1994) occurred. In Night, the Holocaust was the systematic, bureaucratic, state sponsored persecution and murder of approximately 6 million Jews by the Nazi regime and its collaborators. The Nazis believed they were “racially superior” so they killed the Jews because they were deemed “inferior” and needed to be eliminated.

In the book “night” written by Elie Wiesel, the reader is able to catch a glimpse of the holocaust and how it dangerously impacted not only the Jewish, but the whole world. Written for everyone and anyone, “Night” is an emotionally draining book designed to help the reader understand just how devastating the holocaust was.

Fear brings forth a certain atmosphere which compels us to act upon it. The era in which the book was published allows us to see how common these fears were. Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House is an excellent portrayal of how fear controls the human mind by using the characters as examples. In the book Eleanor, Theodora, Luke, and Dr. Montague have all been influenced by fear in the story, whether it be the fear of love, the unknown, family, rejection, expression, or loneliness. These different types of fear plagued their minds, causing their actions to reflect upon them. Jackson explores the theme of fear in The Haunting of Hill House by creating a cast of characters that in turn are manipulated by the inner workings of their minds and the malevolent manifestations of Hill House.

In What Night Brings, the author creates the character of Marci as this young girl with a very curious mind, which as a reader one could see that her intuition about life and the way people respond to her make her question honesty and the way adults try to hide things from children. This leads her to discovering the reality and the reasoning behind why adults act the way they do. Carla Trujillo writes this novel using a first person view, using the voice of Marci, who is an 11 year old pre lesbian, catholic. The author takes the reader on a journey of Marci’s development in discovering her sexuailty, to what her beliefs are, and the despise she has towards her father. Not only does the author express these feelings, she also indicates how

The bed represented that women were used only when men wanted to have an intimate relationship with them, like a woman chained up to a bed and was ferociously forced to have sex with men. It is associated to the Victorian age because women were forced to have sex even if they didn’t want to, especially if the women were married to her husband. “Not only did the husband have almost complete control over his wife’s body, since beatings and marital rape were legal, their children also belonged to him, as did any property and money that the wife brought into the house” (). Even though in the story the wife was not physically forced to have sex with her husband, the bed was a clue to the readers that during the Victorian era women had to obey their husbands and to please them as they were told to do so. The wife in the story was told by her husband/doctors to be in bed to get plenty of rest to cure her depression “quote from story”.

The bedroom can be substituted for the female body, and thereby represents "the enigma and threat generated by the concept of female sexuality in patriarchal culture" ("Pandora" 63). Concealing sexuality but also reifying the female body as and in the forbidden space of the bedroom, John invokes spatial and bodily associations of enclosure and mystery.

It was the summer of 1983; I was reading my first Horror novel by Jay Anson “The Amityville Horror”, it was the scariest thing I had ever picked up. Despite the late hours I continued to read into the early morning hours until my eyes burned for relief. Whenever I got up to use the rest room I would stand on the end of my bed lean over and open the door and jump so not to be grabbed by monsters that might be laying in wait under my bed. This started a long love affair for horror stories.

We all think children are all innocent and cute, but is that really true? We always give excuses for children’s misconduct, distracting ourselves from the real truth. Kids are capable of terrible things that adults quickly ignore. Children can be very scary because of their capabilities that most adults believe to be innocent mistakes. One story that explores this fear is Ray Bradbury’s “The Man Upstairs.”

Horror Stories are a very popular genre of books. Some can be exceptionally malicious and gruesome in nature while others are tamer and rely on suspense. People tend to read these stories for the adrenaline rush, to explore the unknown, and to conquer their own adversities. Studies show that us as humans like to experience fear. We read and view scary stories so we can experience artificial situations of “fight or flight.” These scenarios, whether real or imagined, get your body ready for action by giving you an extra dose of adrenaline. The thrill and suspense that hangs over us while reading, is a welcomed feeling. Scary stories also allow us to explore the unknown. In books there are boundless supernatural realms, where wonder and horror walk side by side- realms were people rise from the dead, and fight their own

Another detail that seems irrelevant when reading the story is when the narrator talks about the woman that she sees in the wallpaper. She says this on page 8.

Adrian Flynn’s playwright “The Valley of the Fear”, adapted from the novel by Conan Doyle, demonstrates how the writer uses techniques to convey an impression of suspense and mystery through scenes with a high level of anticipation and uncertainty. Suspense is achieved through the use of literary devices and events that stimulate the viewer’s moods. Readers wait with anticipation for the next secret to be revealed in strong, sudden scenes. Furthermore, Doyle creates a sense of tension by never giving the reader an entire answer so they can make up their own mind about what’s happening.