Unit 9: Jacobs’s The Monkey’s Paw

I. Orientation: W. W. Jacobs and the Supernatural Short Story

W. W. Jacobs (William Wymark Jacobs, 1863–1943) was an English short-story writer best known for humorous tales of sailors and for the supernatural horror story The Monkey’s Paw (1902). First published in Harper’s Monthly and later collected in The Lady of the Barge, the story combines domestic realism, Gothic suspense, and moral fable. Its central principle is that attempts to control fate can produce destructive and unforeseen consequences.

• Author and period: Jacobs wrote during the late Victorian and Edwardian transition, when popular fiction frequently explored empire, foreign cultures, spiritualism, and anxieties about modern life.
• Literary form: The work is a short story with a tightly controlled plot, few characters, a limited setting, and a single central supernatural object.
• Genre: It combines several related forms:
  • Gothic fiction: Darkness, isolation, death, fear, and possible supernatural intervention create horror.
  • Supernatural tale: The monkey’s paw is said to possess magical power, although some events can also be explained as coincidence.
  • Moral fable: The three wishes demonstrate the danger of greed, dissatisfaction, and interference with destiny.
• Narrative method: A third-person narrator mainly follows Mr. and Mrs. White, presenting their actions and reactions without fully explaining whether the paw truly works.
• Setting: Most of the action occurs at Laburnam Villa, the Whites’ isolated home, while wind, rain, darkness, and an empty road establish vulnerability.
• Central dramatic pattern: Each wish seems to be granted in a distorted or terrible manner:
  1. The wish for money is followed by Herbert’s death and compensation.
  2. The wish for Herbert’s return produces terrifying knocking.
  3. The final wish apparently removes whatever stands outside.
• Governing idea: The story repeatedly contrasts acceptance of ordinary life with the desire to gain power over fate.
• Key ambiguity: Jacobs never directly displays a resurrected Herbert; therefore, the story preserves tension between supernatural causation, coincidence, and psychological fear.

II. The Text — Desire, Fate, and Domestic Horror

A. Synopsis

The story traces how a seemingly playful wish transforms the White family’s secure domestic life into grief and terror.

• Opening situation: Mr. and Mrs. White live with their adult son Herbert at Laburnam Villa. On a stormy evening, Mr. White plays chess with Herbert while the family waits for Sergeant-Major Morris, an old friend recently returned from India.
• Arrival of the paw: Morris shows them a dried monkey’s paw and explains that an old fakir placed a spell on it to prove that people should not interfere with fate.
• Rule of the object: According to Morris, three different men may each receive three wishes. Morris has already used his own wishes, while the first owner’s final wish was for death.
• Warning rejected: Morris throws the paw into the fire, but Mr. White retrieves it. Although Morris repeatedly warns him, Mr. White keeps the object.
• First wish: Encouraged partly by Herbert’s joking attitude, Mr. White wishes for two hundred pounds—the amount needed to pay off the house.
• Apparent fulfilment: The next day, Herbert goes to work at Maw and Meggins. A company representative later reports that Herbert has been killed in machinery and gives the family two hundred pounds as compensation.
• Second wish: After Herbert has been buried for ten days, Mrs. White remembers the paw and forces her husband to wish their son alive again.
• Climactic knocking: A knock sounds at the front door. Mrs. White believes Herbert has returned, while Mr. White imagines the condition of a body damaged by machinery and altered by burial.
• Third wish: As Mrs. White struggles to open the door, Mr. White finds the paw and makes his final wish.
• Ending: The knocking stops. Mrs. White opens the door, but the road outside is empty. The content of the third wish is unstated, though it apparently reverses the second.

B. The Monkey’s Paw by W. W. Jacobs

Jacobs uses the enchanted paw, the three wishes, and the destruction of the White family’s happiness to examine desire, fate, grief, and fear.

• Title and central symbol: The title focuses attention on the monkey’s paw, a small object that represents forbidden power.

  • Its dried and unnatural form suggests death, decay, and the distortion of nature.
  • A hand normally symbolizes human agency; this severed paw instead shows how the desire for control can reduce human beings to helplessness.
  • Its association with India gives it mystery within the story’s British imperial setting, but its moral danger lies in the Whites’ choices rather than simply in its foreign origin.

• The three-wish structure: The plot is organized around a traditional folktale pattern, but Jacobs turns wish fulfilment into horror.

  1. First wish—material desire: Mr. White asks for two hundred pounds, a modest sum rather than immense wealth. The wish appears harmless, yet its fulfilment through Herbert’s death establishes the paw’s cruel logic.
  2. Second and third wishes—emotional desperation: Mrs. White wants her son restored, while Mr. White uses the last wish to prevent or end the horrifying result. The movement from money to resurrection shows rapidly increasing stakes.

• Fate and human interference: Morris says that the fakir created the spell to demonstrate that “fate ruled people’s lives” and that interference brought sorrow.

  • Mr. White is not severely deprived; he admits that he already has what he needs.
  • His wish therefore arises from dissatisfaction and curiosity rather than necessity.
  • The story does not present fate merely as punishment imposed from outside. It shows how choices—keeping the paw, making the wish, and ignoring warnings—help produce tragedy.

• Desire and consequences: The Whites think chiefly about what they want, not about the possible method by which it may arrive.

  • The exact sum links wish and consequence: Mr. White asks for two hundred pounds, and Maw and Meggins pays precisely two hundred pounds.
  • The payment converts Herbert’s life into financial compensation, making the fulfilment morally grotesque.
  • Jacobs thus challenges the fantasy that benefits can be separated from their costs.

• Mr. White: Mr. White is curious, suggestible, and increasingly fearful.

  • His reckless chess move at the beginning anticipates his later treatment of the paw: he takes unnecessary risks and recognizes danger too late.
  • Before the first wish, he is amused and sceptical; after it, he becomes aware of the paw’s possible power.
  • During the final scene, his fear is based on imagination. He understands that the second wish may restore Herbert physically but cannot erase mutilation and burial.

• Mrs. White: Mrs. White develops from a cheerful and practical mother into a grief-stricken woman dominated by hope.

  • At first, she treats the paw’s story humorously.
  • After Herbert’s death, ordinary judgement gives way to maternal desperation.
  • She interprets the knocking as proof of Herbert’s return, whereas her husband interprets it as a threat. Their opposing responses create the climax.

• Herbert White: Herbert represents youthful confidence, affectionate humour, and tragic vulnerability.

  • He jokes that the wished-for money may fall onto his father’s head.
  • His playful references to the paw reduce the family’s caution and help make the first wish seem like entertainment.
  • His absence dominates the second half: the unseen Herbert outside the door becomes more frightening than a visible monster.

• Sergeant-Major Morris: Morris acts as both messenger and warning figure.

  • His long service in India gives him direct knowledge of the paw.
  • His reluctance, serious manner, and attempt to burn it indicate that its danger is genuine to him.
  • Yet his decision to bring it into the Whites’ home allows temptation to begin, showing that warnings may also stimulate curiosity.

• Foreshadowing: Early details prepare the reader for later events.

  • Mr. White’s dangerous chess strategy anticipates the risk of making wishes.
  • The storm and isolated house forecast the family’s exposure to threatening forces.
  • The first owner’s wish for death predicts the connection between wish fulfilment and mortality.
  • Morris’s act of throwing the paw into the fire anticipates Mr. White’s eventual desire to undo its effects.

• Atmosphere and suspense: Jacobs builds horror gradually rather than through graphic description.

  • The warm fire and family conversation initially create domestic security.
  • Herbert’s death changes the home into a place of silence, grief, and emotional isolation.
  • In the climax, darkness, the extinguished candle, the staircase, the bolt, and the repeated knocking delay the opening of the door.
  • Short actions and pauses make the imagined figure outside increasingly terrifying.

• Irony: The difference between expectation and outcome drives the story’s moral effect.

  • The Whites expect money to improve their lives, but it arrives because their family has been destroyed.
  • Mrs. White sees resurrection as comfort, while Mr. White recognizes that it may produce horror.
  • A magical object that promises freedom from ordinary limits instead traps the family in consequences they cannot control.

• Ambiguity: The supernatural remains powerful because Jacobs withholds final proof.

  • Herbert’s accident could be coincidence, though the exact compensation strongly suggests the paw’s influence.
  • The knocking could indicate Herbert’s return, but neither the reader nor Mrs. White sees the visitor.
  • The empty road after the third wish implies supernatural reversal without confirming what had stood outside.

C. Significance

The story endures because it turns a universal fantasy—the granting of wishes—into a disciplined study of responsibility, bereavement, and fear.

• Moral significance: Desire must be judged not only by its object but also by its possible cost; apparently modest wishes can have irreversible consequences.
• Psychological significance: The final terror emerges from opposed forms of grief: Mrs. White’s desperate hope and Mr. White’s horrified imagination.
• Literary significance: Jacobs demonstrates how compression, foreshadowing, repetition, symbolic objects, and an unresolved ending can create intense suspense.
• Final effect: The empty road offers no comforting explanation. The family has lost Herbert, the wishes have been exhausted, and knowledge of the paw’s power has replaced their former domestic happiness.