The Phantom Coach Essay

The Gothic genre is characterized by elements of fear, horror, death and terror. Gothic literature also contains supernatural elements, decay, and dark romanticism. In the short story “The Phantom Coach'', the author Amelia B. Edwards uses imagery to showcase the gothic elements, atmosphere and mood in the story. The story starts with a young lawyer James Murray who is hunting in the snowy moors of England but gets lost and after struggling through the snow and worrying about not reaching his wife, he meets Jacob, who takes James to the farmhouse of his master’s where they stay for a couple of hours. Once the snowstorm stops, Murray leaves and takes a carriage to Dwolding. While aboard he notices that the passengers are corpses, after seeing

He recalls his experience and describes the setting as “the month, December; the place, a bleak wide moor in the far north of England(…) staled anxiously into the gathering darkness” (Edwards 1). The month of December is when winter is at its peak, in which most animals are dying from the cold or migrating to less harsh conditions, the effect of the cold can be seen on the naked trees and dead grass. This time of the year ties in with gothicism and symbol of darkness and death. Secondly, while Murray is sitting in the coach he notices his passengers look like corpses and describes them as “ Only their eyes, their terrible eyes, were living; and those eyes were all turned menacingly upon me [Him]! A shriek of terror, a wild unintelligible cry for help and mercy; burst from my lips as I flung myself against the door, and strove in vain to open it” (Edwards 9). The passengers are representing death and the grotusque of them slowly dying as the rest of their body is dead. The ugliness and the monstrous look of the passengers clearly means that this is grotusque and symbolizes death. It also shows that this is infact a trait of gothic literature. Finally, symbolism can be seen when Murray enters the house and he perceives that “ The whitewashed walls were in parts scrawled over with strange diagrams, (...) shelves crowded with philosophical instruments, the uses of many of which were unknown to me[Him](...)on the other, a small organ, fantastically decorated with painted carvings of mediæval saints and devils” (Edwards 4). The painted carvings of saints and devils on an organ means the devil and death taking over a person's internal organ and harming the person inside. It is also an allusion to Hell and bad taking over good which is a symbol of disaster approaching and downfall. The unknown philosophical