Huntly and the woods

On page 94 the first paragraph talks about how he reached the mouth of the cave. He had forgotten to bring a lamp or a torch. This brings fear to the reader because this man is about to enter the cave with no acceptable lighting. He may or may not run into obstacles that he cannot see because of the lack of light. There might be animals or other dangerous objects that would hinder his path and that could have been avoided if he was able to see them. Even though the reader cannot see exactly what the mouth of this cave looked like because the author does not give it a good description; we can imagine it because of the sensation that is produced from the text. The text talks about how using a lamp or something else to give light would be a more cautious thing to do, but he doesn’t let that stop him. He goes ahead and enters the cave bringing the reader even more fear because of the unknown. Someone more oriented toward the picturesque might have described the cave in full detail giving the reader an inch by inch description of exactly what everything looked like. This might have taken away from the interpreted sensation that we get from not fully knowing what the scene looked like and only being able to draw on the text that we do have and the character’s reaction to it. Being able to interpret this scene in our own way produces more fear because of the lack of knowledge. If it were written by an author more oriented with picturesque it would have possibly produced a different kind of fear.

On page 122 in the fourth paragraph it talks about how the bridge that he wanted to use had been destroyed. He thought about how he could repair it, but he knew that he would not have enough strength to get a fallen tree to mend it. Not only did he have to now think about another path to which he might be able to take but he was exhausted as well. For the reader this brings upon feelings of fear for the character because we think that this exhaustion is going to hinder him from going further down his journey and also may ultimately be detrimental to his life. He is tired and so he probably wasn’t thinking with a clear head. In this passage in particular Brown definitely succeeds in making the wilderness a threat for the reader. Because we don’t know exactly what the different paths look like we can only interpret the fear that Huntly has to feel because of not knowing which path to take. The only path that he recognizes is out of the question and he is forced to go a different way in which he has never been. The text produces the sensation of his exhaustion by setting us up for what has just happened. He has been on this long journey through the woods and not only is he tired and disoriented but now he has to figure out what he is going to do next when clearly he not able to think straight. If another author who was oriented in picturesque had written this passage we would have clearly been able to see each possible way that Huntly could have gone therefore losing the interpretation that we as the reader have to make about Huntly and his state of mind and the difficulty of choosing the correct path. Without knowing exactly how the woods look we are able to imagine things we would have been unable to otherwise.