Student Question
How does "The Open Window" depict Mr. Sappleton and his brothers' return as a chilling death story?
Quick answer:
In "The Open Window," the return of Mr. Sappleton and his brothers is depicted as a chilling death story through Vera's tale of their tragic disappearance, suggesting they were swallowed by a treacherous bog. The atmosphere is heightened by Vera's description of waiting for them to return through the open window, implying a ghostly presence. However, the story ultimately reveals Vera's deceit, highlighting her mischievous nature rather than a genuine haunting.
The words and atmosphere created in “The Open Window” seem to show the return of Mr. Sappleton and Mrs. Sappleton’s brothers as a chilling story of death. Even before the nervous protagonist, Framton Nuttel, visits Mrs. Sappleton, his sister predicts,
You will bury yourself down there and not speak to a living soul.
Words like “bury” and “down” conjure up images of interment and entombment, as if Nuttel is descending into a state of isolated death himself. The fact that he will “not speak to a living soul” further emphasizes his disconnection from others. In fact, he later admits to Mrs. Sappleton’s niece, Vera, that he knows “hardly a soul.”
While waiting for his hostess, Nuttel wonders Mrs. Sappleton is widowed; his gloomy conjecture brings death into a situation that may not warrant death; after all, until that point, he does not know if the woman is...
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married or a widower.
Yet the setting’s atmosphere suggests an unsettling lingering male presence:
An undefinable something about the room seemed to suggest masculine habitation.
Just after Nuttel notices the place’s “masculine” aura, Vera reveals the “great tragedy” of Mr. Sappleton’s mysterious death three years earlier, eerily “to the day.” This fact, coupled with the setting’s “undefinable something,” implies that the room is haunted.
Vera intensifies the chilling atmosphere by describing the death of Mr. Sappleton and Mrs. Sappleton’s two young brothers:
They were all three engulfed in a treacherous piece of bog. It had been that dreadful wet summer, you know, and places that were safe in other years gave way suddenly without warning. Their bodies were never recovered. That was the dreadful part of it.
Words like “engulfed” and “treacherous” portray the bog as a voracious and dangerous creature. The sinister swampland swallowed up (“gave way suddenly without warning”) the men while they were hunting with their spaniel. The repetition of “dreadful” emphasizes the horror of the whole situation (the wet summer, the sucking earth, the corpses’ disappearances).
Vera drives home the scary nature of the setting with the line
Sometimes on still, quiet evenings like this, I almost get a creepy feeling that they will all walk in through that window.
She explains the reason for the open window to an already unnerved and delicate Nuttel: that a deluded Mrs. Sappleton believes that her men will return and thus keeps the window open. Vera’s reaction to the men’s return (supposedly as ghosts) further rattles Nuttel, who
shivered slightly and turned towards the niece with a look intended to convey sympathetic comprehension. The child was staring out through the open window with a dazed horror in her eyes.
Yet all along, Vera has been lying to Nuttel; the men and dog all are alive and well. In fact, earlier she planted specific details (e.g., the brown spaniel, the hunting rifles, the white coat) to make the men’s return seem even more eerie. She fakes her fright at the men’s return.
Therefore, “The Open Window” is less a chilling story of death than a tale of an adolescent’s mischievous, deceitful nature.