Shirley Jackson, `We Have Always Lived in the Castle` and Doris Lessing, `The Fifth Child`

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Fear and Suspense : A Closer Look at Doris Lessing 's The Fifth Child

and Shirley Jackson 's We Have Always Lived in the Castle

Fear and suspense are part of people 's sentiments . They are two of the many natural and inevitable emotions that human are prone and capable to feel . They are part of our behaviors they are embedded in human nature This is the main reason why fear and suspense are two of the themes that are usually depicted in the media and the

arts . They are commonly used as the favorite s for various works and materials . For example fear and suspense have already become the target emotions of most movies before and nowadays . To cite examples , there are the Psycho , Jaws Alien , The Bride of Frankenstein , The Exorcist , The Texas Chainsaw Massacre , Resident Evil , The Hills Have Eyes and others that definitely made the viewers scream and become paranoid for a short time . The point is , these movies and other suspense and horror materials are continuously gaining success and popularity because they tackle two of the most common and universal emotions among humans . People support horror and suspense materials because they can relate to the themes that these works present to them

According to behavioral theorists like Watson and Ekman , fear is one of the basic human emotions , like anger and joy . Fear serves as human 's defense mechanism against negative stimulus . It is also said that most people feel fear because they associate it to pain . For example , a person suffers a fear of heights because he knows that when he falls , he may get injured or dies . Although it seems as a simple emotion only fear is as complex as anyone could imagine . In fact , this human emotion is associated to other feelings like anxiety , paranoia , worry , and horror

Suspense , on the other hand , is felt when a person waits uncertainly on series of events . Most of the time , suspense can create tension on the part of the person experiencing it . Suspense is one of the emotions that are commonly employed to various kinds of works

As said earlier , people patronize horror and suspense works because they can share the same sentiments portrayed into these kinds of materials . This mentality , perhaps , was what Doris Lessing and Shirley Jackson thought when they decided to write two of the most acclaimed horror and suspense literary works ever written - The Fifth Child and We Have Always Lived in the Castle

The Fifth Child by Doris Lessing was set in the 1960s , narrating the life of a happy couple Harriet and David Lovatt who had a child very different from his other four siblings , physically , emotionally , and socially . The novel tried to tackle about the issues of human normalcy and variation , pregnancy , and childhood development while invoking to its readers the theme of fear and suspense

How does Lessing really invoke such emotions to her readers

Analyzing the novel , Lessing used the idea of...