Similarities Between And Then There Were None And The Maid's Bell

This essay will be comparing and contrasting And Then There Were None and “The Lady’s Maid’s Bell” and how they are both classified in the Gothic Literature. In And Then There Were None, Agatha Christie casts ten characters out on an island called Soldier Island in which she puts suspicion on all of her characters and making them all possible killers. One by one all the characters start dying. In contrast, in Edith Wharton’s “The Lady’s Maid’s Bell” (1903) a maid who has recently gotten over Typhoid, is sent to work for a woman at her country house. She is constantly curious of the room across from her, which is the room of a maid named Emma, who had died. This led to any replacements never staying long. While these stories do not have everything in common, they do have some similarities that tie them together in Gothic Literature. However, whereas Christie illustrates how everything is logical and does not show supernatural elements to be the main cause, Wharton demonstrates that supernatural elements are what effect the story most of all. Usually characters play a big role in literature to influence a …show more content…
In And Then There Were None, Christie decides to end her story by having all ten characters die in some way. The ironic thing about this ending is that the former judge killed everyone because he thought it was justified to kill the people who committed murder. However, in “The Lady’s Maid’s Bell” Wharton ends his story by having the maids and butlers bury the house mistress with the husband driving off. The servants end up returning home all alone. Similarly, both stories have at least one death by the end of the story. Unlike in And Then There Were None where all the characters died of murder, the mistress in “The Lady’s Maid’s Bell” died of shock and was not murdered. Typically Gothic stories have death or dark endings to retain that darkness to