22 pages • 44 minutes read
A Haunted House
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Literary Devices
Characterization
There is a close connection between the description of the environments in the short story and the general disposition of the characters, especially the ghostly couple. The sense of abandonment and loss is one of the main characteristics of the house that makes it haunted. The description of the drawing-room, a place where people receive family and friends, as an empty and abandoned place mirrors the ghostly couple’s feelings of losing a previous loving life. The return of the couple to seek a “treasure,” that is, love that has been lost somewhere in the house, intensifies the sensation of desertion that accompanies both “he” and “she,” the two ghostly characters. Finally, the peace the ghostly couple finds in the faces of the sleeping couple mirrors, in an inversed vector, their own anguish of knowing that such a peace cannot be found after death.
Point of View
One of the striking characteristics of Virginia Woolf’s short story is the use of ambiguous points of view to deliberately confuse the narrative and thus subvert a classic type of storytelling. The ambiguity arising from the existence of ghosts (or not) is mirrored in the multiple points of view. The narrator is alternatively a first-person singular and plural, and no second person is defined besides the narrator. The sudden changes in points of view create the ambiguity with which Woolf sought to transform the classical ghost story into a modern one.
Setting
The story is set in an abandoned house and its gardens in a farm, providing the story with a sense of isolation from the world. The run down appearance of the house adds to feeling of loneliness that the ghostly characters feel after returning to the house they had lived in centuries ago. The gardens outside the house are described as still, where nothing seems to move except when the story is close to the end. Woolf describes movement in the gardens but from a perspective that is set inside the house: the winds blowing and the trees bending outside. The room where the sleeping couple is is the only place in the house that resembles a home; there, the narrator and its companion live the peace that the ghosts wish they could recover by seeking their “treasure,” that is, the light of love.
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By Virginia Woolf
