Reading project on The Canterville Ghost characters summary opinion

1. English Project

2. PLOT
• The story is about a ghost which lives in a house. The ghost tries to scare
everybody who live in the house. He loves doing what he had done before to all
who live in the house. But everything is changes when a family from America
decided to live in the house. The family already knows that there is a ghost in
the house, but they do not believe in ghost. The family consist the parents and
their four children. The head of the family is Mr. Hiram B. Otis. He is an
American ambassador. The ghost plays many tricks to scare the family but
they do not work. The ghost does the same thing that he had done to all families
that lived in the house before. He thinks the family will get scared of him and
will move out from the house. All the tricks played by the ghost to scare the
family does not work, but the family plays the same game and the ghost is
scared by them. The only daughter in the family, Virginia is a kind-hearted
girl. She becomes a friend to the ghost. One day, the ghost says that he wants to
'sleep‘ because he has not taken rest for three hundred years. He considers death
to be very peaceful. He takes Virginia along with him to the Garden of Death.

3. • Finally, the family finds the skeleton in a room. It belonged to Sir
Simon. The skeleton was finally buried in peace. As asked by the ghost,
Virginia always visited the ghost's grave and prayed for him.

4.  The Canterville Ghost is a ghost story. Ghost stories belong to
the genre called horror literature, whose purpose is to scare the
reader with situations that cause horror or fear. The most
common technique is suspense, the slow insinuation of a doubt
or of a frightening revelation, which keeps the reader interested.
 This story can be defined as an inverted ghost story, because a
lot of elements are different from the traditional ones. The main
difference is the fact that Mr Otis is not scared by the ghost,
while usually people should be. Moreover, the Ghost itself is
frightened by the Otis twins.

5.  There is also comic relief bordering on farce, including
buckets of water balanced on half-open doors. But the story
has a dark centre. The crime and retribution which led to the
haunting is ghastly, and this is really not a comedy at all, but
a tale of redemption through the power of love. The innocent
girl of the family, appropriately called Virginia, prays for the
ghost and endures terrifying if unnamed experiences to
release the ghost.
 Also, The Canterville Ghost is both a parody of the
traditional ghost story and a satire of the American way of life.
Wilde obviously intends to satirize American materialism, but
he pokes fun at English traditional culture as well.

6. CHARATERS
 The ghost: he is the ghost of Canterville Chase. He was Sir Simon de Canterville and
died in 1584, his spirit still haunts the Chase. His aspect is very terrible
 Mr. Otis: The head of the Otis family and father. He is a middle-agedAmerican
ambassador; he is determinate, inflexible, rational, practical and pragmatic, in conclusion
a trueAmerican.
 Virginia:The daughter is the only one in the family who is scared by the ghost. She
never speaks except to the ghost, at the end of the story. She is fifteen years old and very
kind-hearted.
 Washington: the Otises' oldest son
 The twins:These children always play tricks on the ghost and make him depressed and
desperate.All along the story, they imagine jokes and even dress up as ghosts.

7. • Mrs Otis: The mother isn't scared of the ghost and even asks him if he
wants a remedy for his stomach. “She is a very handsome middle-aged
woman with fine eyes and a superb profile. She has a magnificent
constitution and a wonderful amount of animal spirits.”
• Duke of Chesire: He is a duke desperately in love with the fifteen-year
old Virginia Otis. However, his guardians pack him off to Eton, and he
must wait to marry. When Virginia vanishes, he insists on being part
of the search party. As soon as she reappears, he smothers her with kisses.
His devotion is rewarded, and Virginia consents to become the Duchess
of Cheshire.
• Lord Canterville: He is a respectable descendent of the Canterville
family, that was the owner of the Canterville Chase.
• Mrs.Umney: She is the old house-keeper of Canterville Chase who is very
terrified by the ghost and tries to warn the family.

9. • When the story starts, the American minister, Mr Hiram B. Otis has
purchased Canterville Chase, an English country house. Otis is
warned by Lord Canterville that the house is haunted, but he doesn’t
believe in ghosts.
• Washington applies some strong stain remover – Pinkerton’s
Champion Stain Remover and Paragon Detergent – to the blood
stain, which disappears temporarily and reappears the next day. As
soon as they remove the stain it reappears the following day – bright
red, dull red, purple and even bright emerald green.
• After the blood stain reappears the first time, the Otis family
conclude that there must be a ghost. Mrs Otis is a modern day
woman and declares that she is going to join the Psychical Society.
Washington decides to write to Messrs Myers and Podmore, “on the
subject of the Permanence of Sanguineous Stains when connected
with crime.”

10. • The Canterville Ghost by Oscar Wilde is mostly told through the eyes of the
very theatrical ghost, Sir Simon, who appears in many different costumes
and personas – Red Reuben, Strangled Babe, Dumb Daniel, Suicide’s
Skeleton, Martin the Maniac, Masked Mystery, Reckless Rupert, Headless
Earl and so on. The first night Sir Simon decides to haunt the Americans,
Mr Otis greets him with a container of Rising Sun Lubricator for him to oil
his manacled chains so he doesn’t make so much noise and disturb the
family’s sleep. The twin boys also throw a pillow at him.
• The ghost quickly retreats to his hiding place and feels quite insulted. Never
in his three hundred years of haunting people at Canterville Chase has he ever
received that kind of reception. The tables have been turned on the ghost, and
instead of him terrifying the residents, they instead “terrify” him. The twins
use their pea shooters and discharge pellets at Sir Simon. One night after he
attempts to frighten the family with one of his terrible laughs, Mrs. Otis lets
him know that he sounds quite terrible and offers him a bottle of Doctor
Dobell’s tincture.

11. • Sir Simon suffers great indignities at the hand of the American
family, who are not afraid of him. He enters the twins’ room to scare
them and a large jug of water falls on him, which just about does him
in. He has a grand plot to exact revenge against Washington whom
he bears a special grudge for removing the blood stain with
Pinkerton’s Paragon Detergent. But once again, the joke is on Sir
Simon, when he encounters, what he perceives as another. The ghost
has never seen another ghost and is quite terrified and flees to his
room. When he regains his composure and courage, Sir Simon seeks
out the ghost to form some sort of alliance. He discovers to his
chagrin, that the ghost wasn’t a real ghost. In another instance,
Washington and the twins force him into the great iron oven, which
luckily wasn’t lit at the time, forcing Sir Simon to escape through
chimneys.

12. • Sir Simon’s nerves begin to unravel because nothing is working
and he is becoming quite weak. He even decides not to bother with
replacing the stain on the floor in the library. He doesn’t think very
highly of the Otis family “They were evidently people on a low,
material plane of existence, and quite incapable of appreciating the
symbolic value of sensuous phenomena. The question of phantasmal
apparitions, and the development of astral bodies, was of course
quite a different matter, and not really under his control…”
• The ghost resigns to the fact that he will not be able to frighten the
“rude” American family. The twins lay in wait for Sir Simon on
several occasions laying traps for him but he never appears. The
family concludes that the ghost has left Canterville Chase. All
during this time, Virginia was the only one in the family that did
not play a trick on, or even approach the ghost.

13. • One day while out riding, Virginia tears her riding habit quite
badly and decides to enter Canterville Chase through a back door.
She is surprised to discover the Canterville Ghost sitting by a
window. His disposition is that of someone suffering from
depression and she feels sorry for him. An interesting dialogue
takes place between them and during that time, he admits that he
killed his why and why, and Virginia tells him that it is wrong
to kill. She is also upset because he stole her paint to replace the
blood stain and hence the mystery of the different colours of
“blood” is solved.

14. • Virginia tries to convince Sir Simon to go to America
because they would appreciate a ghost there, but he
doesn’t want to go to America. Sir Simon is weary because
he hasn’t slept in over three hundred years. He wants
rest, but is terrified of the Garden of Death. He believes
that through Virginia he will receive forgiveness and allowed
to rest. He believes that through the purity of a child,
hell cannot prevail.
• She takes him through the portal, and doesn’t tell her
parents, so when they cannot find her they panic. But no
one even thinks about Sir Simon, because they believed he
had left. Virginia appears the next day after her family had
searched for her everywhere and couldn’t find her. She
relates what happens and shows them the gift of jewels
she received from Sir Simon. Mr Otis tries to return the
jewels to Lord Canterville who refuses them and is
convinced that should he take them, Sir Simon would
return.

15. • The story ends when Virginia is married a few years later, and the
reader gets the sense that something profound took place with her
encounter with Sir Simon that she has never revealed.

17. This story is quite funny and humorous. But when one stops to
think, this is a story of contrasts. When one thinks about it he can
observe, an American family immigrates to England and buys a
very English country home. Though they are warned that the house is
haunted, they initially do not believe. However, when they realize that
the house is indeed haunted, they do not respond in a “British” way by
being scared, they turn things around on the ghost baffling him. One
can see the ghost going through a range of emotions until he is a
broken man. It’s a story of role reversals, instead of the ghost
terrorizing the residents of Canterville Chase, they terrorize him
instead.