The Monkey’s Paw

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The Monkey’s Paw

W. W. Jacobs 1902

Author Biography

W. W. Jacobs was one of the most popular humorists of the early 1900s, although his most famous story, “The Monkey’s Paw,” is considered a horror classic. William Wymark Jacobs, born September 8, 1863, was the son of a wharf manager and his wife. He grew up in Wapping, a seaport section of London. The docks and wharves of seaport towns later provided the setting for many of his stories.

Jacobs attended private schools and entered the civil service as a clerk in 1879, a job that he hated. When he was about twenty years old, he began writing stories and articles for fun, and by 1885 he began to publish them in magazines. His first collection of stories, Many Cargoes, was published in 1896, and the following year, he published two novellas in a single volume— The Skipper’s Wooing/The Brown Man’s Servant. However, Jacobs was a cautious man, and he did not quit his civil service job to devote himself to writing until his third book—another volume of stories, entitled Sea Urchins—was published in 1899.

Jacobs married soon after that. His wife, a militant suffragette and socialist, was very different from the conservative Jacobs, and their marriage was not a happy one. This fact may have contributed to the negative depiction of women that runs through most of his fiction.

The writer was very prolific during the early years of his career, producing a book nearly every year until 1911. At that time, the rate at which he wrote new material slowed dramatically, and he wrote very little during the last seventeen years of his life. However, it was in these years that Jacobs enjoyed great popularity with readers and some

fame. Many of his early works were reissued, and he wrote some adaptations of his stories for the stage. He died in 1943.

Plot Summary

The story opens with Mr. White and his son Herbert playing a game of chess. Mrs. White is knitting by the fire. Mr. White loses the game and becomes agitated and exasperated. Soon, there is a knock at the door and the Sergeant-Major enters. They share a few drinks and the Sergeant-Major tells them some tales about his trips to India, where he obtained a monkey’s paw. The paw is magical, allowing three men three wishes each. One man has died and the Sergeant-Major has used up his three wishes. He tosses the paw into the fire, but Mr. White snatches it out and keeps it for himself. The Sergeant-Major tells them that a fakir has put a spell on the paw “to show that fate ruled people’s lives.” Those who tamper with fate “did so to their sorrow.” But Herbert coaxes his father to wish for something modest, like 200 pounds. His father does so, while Herbert plays dramatic chords on the piano in accompaniment. They all go to bed for the night.

In the morning, Herbert leaves for work and tells his parents not to break into the money before he comes home that evening. Mr. and Mrs. White make light-hearted comments about Herbert’s return and his reactions to an arrival of the money.

Later, a stranger comes to the door and, after coming into the house, tells the parents that Herbert has been killed at work that morning when he was caught in some machinery. The stranger then gives them compensation from the company: 200 pounds.

Herbert is buried in a nearby cemetery. About a week later, Mr. White is awakened by the sounds of Mrs. White weeping over their son. Suddenly, she remembers the paw and the two wishes that remain. She pleads for Mr. White to get it and to make a wish that Herbert would be alive again. He tries to tell her that since he was mangled in the machinery and had been buried for a week, it would not be a wise wish. But she insists. Despite misgivings about invoking the magic of the paw again, Mr. White wishes for Herbert to be alive again.

They wait. They watch out the window, but nothing happens and no one arrives. They start to bed again when suddenly a slight knock is heard at the door.

Mrs. White then remembers that the cemetery is two miles away and that it would have taken Herbert a while to walk home. The knocking increases, ending in a series of rapid hangings on the door. Mr. White tries to stop her from opening the door. She persists and climbs up on a chair to open the top-most bolt.

Just as she opens the door, Mr. White asks his third wish. The door opens; the street is still and empty. Only a dim streetlight flickers on the roadway.

Characters

Father

See Mr. White

Morris

See Sergeant-Major Morris

Sergeant-Major Morris

Sergeant-Major Morris is the catalyst for the story: he brings the monkey’s paw to the Whites’ home. He is “a tall, burly man, beady of eye and rubicund of visage,” whose eyes get brighter after his third glass of whiskey at the Whites’ hearth. Morris is both familiar and exotic. Morris and Mr. White began their lives in approximately the same way; Mr. White remembers his friend as “a slip of a youth in the warehouse.” But in his twenty-one years of travel and soldiering, Morris has seen the world and has brought back tales of “wild scenes and doughty deeds; of wars and plagues and strange peoples.” Morris also carries with him the monkey’s paw, which changes all the Whites’ lives forever.

Mother

See Mrs. White

The Other

See The Stranger

The Stranger

The last character to appear in “The Monkey’s Paw” has no name. He is the messenger of death— the company representative sent to tell Herbert’s parents about the death of their son in a terrible accident at work. On one level, Jacobs paints a realistic portrait of this man; Mrs. White notes that he is well dressed, and that he seems very nervous, hesitating at their gate, and picking lint from his clothes before he delivers his horrible news. However, on another level, the writer keeps this character anonymous: the man never gives his name, and his face is not described except as “perverted.” In this way, the character works as a symbol of death or fate.

The Visitor

See The Stranger

Herbert White

Herbert White lives with his elderly parents and gets along with them quite well. He works at a local company called Maw and Meggins. Like his father, he is good-natured and reliable.

Despite this steadiness of character, Herbert is also a little bit silly. He is the first to ask Morris whether the old soldier used three wishes himself, and Morris looks at him “in the way that middle age is wont to regard presumptuous youth.” He teases his parents about wishing on the monkey’s paw, goading his mother into chasing him around the table, and his father into making the first wish. He remains skeptical and flippant about the paw’s powers: “‘Well, I don’t see the money,” said his son as he picked [the paw] up and placed it on the table, ’and I bet I never shall.’” A bit later in the story, Herbert jokes, “I expect you’ll find the cash tied up in a big bag in the middle of your bed.”

Like his father’s failings, Herbert White’s irreverence is perfectly understandable. This quality even contibutes to why Herbert is so likeable. However, when Herbert dies a horrible death, “caught in the machinery” at Maw and Meggins, it is suggested that his death is related to his refusal to take the powers of the monkey’s paw more seriously.

Mr. White

Mr. White is a conservative, satisfied man who enjoys his quiet domestic life. Jacobs shows this in the very first scene in the story, which opens with father and son playing chess in their cozy cottage on a rainy night, while Mrs. White, knitting by the fire, comments on their game. Clearly, the Whites live a contented, if somewhat contained, life. Later in the story, the grandest thing Mr. White can think of to wish for is to clear the mortgage on their little house.

White does have reckless tendencies, though. In the first paragraph of the story, in the chess game with his son, he puts his king “into such sharp and unnecessary perils that it even provoked comment” from his normally docile wife. This recklessness leads him to tempt fate with the monkey’s paw, endangering his family as a result.

Mr. White is a kind of “everyman.” Happily retired, content with his life and his family, he is nevertheless intrigued by the tales of the exotic that his friend, Sergeant-Major Morris, brings home. His curiosity and his greed (a very minor greed, really) prove to be the undoing of his entire family—but these characteristics are what make him so human.

Although he is influenced by all the other characters, Mr. White is the principal force in the story—the one who makes things happen. Morris brings the monkey’s paw, but Mr. White rescues it from the fire and later purchases it from the sergeant-major. Herbert, Mr. White’s son, teases him into making the first wish; and it is his wife who forces him to make the second. He makes the third wish by himself, without even a witness to the wish-making. However, as the new owner of the paw, Mr.

Media Adaptations

In 1933, The Monkey’s Paw was made into a 58-minute, black and white film directed by Wesley Ruggles, produced by RKO, and starring C. Aubrey Smith, Ivan Simpson, Bramwell Fletcher, and Louise Carter.
A British version of The Monkey’s Paw, produced in 1948, was directed by Norman Lee and produced by Ernest G. Roy. The film is 64 minutes long, black and white, and the cast included Milton Rosmer, Megs Jenkins, Joan Seton and Norman Shelley.
In 1972 the anthology movie Tales from the Crypt, containing five dramatized stories, adapted “The Monkey’s Paw” under the title “Wish You Were Here.” The film was directed by Freddie Francis and produced by Cinerama. The cast included Sir Ralph Richardson, Joan Collins and Martin Boddey.
In 1979, the story was adapted as a 19-minute film produced by Martha Moran and now available on video from Phoenix/BFA Films and Video.
Stillife-Gryphon Films produced a 27-minute version of “The Monkey’s Paw” in 1983, available on video from Modern Curriculum Press.

White is the person who makes all three wishes. He is the person who truly sets the story in motion, and it can be argued that he is the character who pays the most awful price for wishing on the monkey’s paw. For although Herbert loses his life, and Mrs. White loses her central reason for living, Mr. White in effect loses his whole family, and must live with the knowledge that these losses are his own fault.

Mrs. White

Mrs. White is a calm, reserved woman. In the story’s first scene, Jacobs notes that Mr. White’s chess moves are so “radical” that they “even provoked comment from the white-haired old lady knitting placidly by the fire”—as if drastic events must take place in order for her to even speak.

Mrs. White enjoys a good relationship with both her husband and her son, Herbert. She jokes with them, and humors them; when Mr. White insists that the monkey’s paw moved in his hand when he made the first wish, she replies, soothingly, “You thought it did.” She fits the stereotype of the good housewife, common in the time when Jacobs was writing: she keeps the house and sets the supper; her husband and son are the center of her world.

In fact, it is the strength of her maternal instinct that empowers her at the end of the story, after Herbert has died. Overcome by the loss of her beloved son, she forces Mr. White to make the second wish on the monkey’s paw: to bring Herbert back. Tragically, neither Mrs. nor Mr. White remembers to request that he come back whole from the grave, and in the moments before the door swings open, Mr. White wishes him gone again, so that his wife need not see the mangled, partly decayed body that both characters believe will be there. Thus, Mrs. White loses her son not once, but twice.

Themes

Fate and Chance

In “The Monkey’s Paw,” Sergeant-Major Morris, an old family friend of the Whites, returns from India with tales of his exotic life and with a strange souvenir—a monkey’s paw. This paw has had a spell put on it by a fakir (a holy man), he tells the Whites. Morris goes on to say that the fakir wanted to show that “fate ruled people’s lives, and that those who interfered with it did so to their sorrow. He put a spell on it so that three separate men could each have three wishes from it.”

As the story unfolds, author Jacobs provides many hints that, indeed, the monkey’s paw does possess strange powers, and that tempting fate by making the three wishes is a grave mistake. First, the son, Herbert, asks Morris if he has made his three wishes, since he is in possession of the monkey’s paw. “’I have,’ he said, quietly, and his blotchy face whitened.

’“And did you really have the three wishes granted?’ asked Mrs. White.

’“I did,’ said the sergeant-major, and his glass tapped against his strong teeth.”

The sergeant major will say nothing else of his own misfortunes, but he does tell the Whites that although he does not know what the first owner of the paw asked for in his first two wishes, “the third was for death. That’s how I got the paw.”

Later that evening, Morris throws the paw on the fire, but Mr. White rescues it. Despite his friend’s grave warnings, Mr. White makes a rather modest wish for 200 pounds, so that he may pay off the mortgage on his family’s little house. And so, in spite of the original warning of the fakir, the story of the first owner of the monkey’s paw, who wished for death at the end, and the warnings of their friend Morris, the Whites attempt to interfere with fate, with terrible consequences.

Morris has also told them that “the things happened so naturally that you might if you so wished attribute [events] to coincidence.” This is, in fact, what happens in the story. A strange man appears at the Whites’ door the very next morning. He tells them that their son Herbert has been killed in an accident at work, and while the company admits no liability, they would like to settle on the Whites a sum of 200 pounds, as compensation for Herbert’s death.

Ten days after the funeral, Mrs. White, almost crazy with grief, forces her husband to make the second wish on the monkey’s paw: to bring Herbert back to them. Nothing happens for several hours, but then there is a knock at the door. “It’s my boy! It’s Herbert!” the old lady cries. “I forgot it was two miles to the cemetery!”

Mr. White imagines his mangled son, risen after ten days in a grave, whose face was barely recognizable after the accident, standing at their door. To spare his wife this horrible sight, he makes the third and final wish on the paw: that Herbert go away.

By tempting fate, and wishing for money, the Whites lose something even more precious: their son, and their happy life as a family.

Human Condition

It is human nature to want what one cannot have, and to undervalue what one does possess. Another common truth about the human condition is that people’s best qualities often turn out to be their worst: the characteristics that can save them on the one hand can be their undoing on the other. The downfall of the White family comes from tendencies within each of the Whites that are only natural.

For example, Mr. White, in his life a reasonable man, is reckless in small ways like in the chess game he plays with his son. He is skeptical about the power of the monkey’s paw; he feels foolish wishing on it and discounts the many warnings he hears and sees about the dangers of using it. He does, however, make his wishes. In the end, his “sensible” wish for the mortgage money is his undoing. The fact that he has wished at all is enough to bring on the fakir’s curse.

Mrs. White also carries the seed of her destruction in her own character. She is the picture of the ideal housewife at the time the story was written: a good housekeeper, devoted to her husband and son, happy to let the men in the household make the important decisions. In her great love for Herbert, her son—for which she can hardly be faulted—she seizes upon the idea of wishing him back from the dead. Normally quiet and demure, she exhorts Mr. White to wish Herbert back with such force that he cannot deny her, even against his better instincts.

Herbert himself is a good-natured young man, who teases his parents about the power of the monkey’s paw. He, too, is skeptical. His joking is not mean; under the circumstances, it seems normal. However, we wonder whether he would have lost his life if he had been more respectful of these mysterious powers.

Style

Foreshadowing

Foreshadowing is a technique in which the writer hints at the events to come. Sometimes, authors depict events early in a story that are really microcosms of the plot that is soon to unfold; other times, writers create this effect by developing an atmosphere that projects the tone of what is about to happen. For instance, a rather cliched example would be a stormy night on the eve of a murder. Jacobs uses both types of foreshadowing techniques in “The Monkey’s Paw.”

The Whites’ chess game at the opening of the story, when Mr. White puts his king into “sharp and

Topics for Further Study

Research England’s occupation and colonization of India. When did it begin? How long did it last? How was England’s culture influenced by the information that was brought back from India to the British Isles?
Research the Industrial Revolution, and locate Jacobs’ work within it. How did the Industrial Revolution change life in England? Life in the United States? How did it affect families like the Whites in Jacobs’s story?
What writers and artists were contemporaries of Jacobs? Did they have similar concerns? Did other writers of his day use the literary devices that Jacobs often employed? Were painters and sculptors operating under the same cultural constraints and assumptions, and how did this affect their work?

unnecessary perils” —and soon sees “a fatal mistake after it was too late” —is a kind of mini-drama, one that tells us what is about to happen in the story.

The Whites (and readers) are given plenty of clues that the monkey’s paw is dangerous and powerful. When Herbert asks if Morris has had his three wishes, he only replies, “I have,” and taps his glass against his teeth. We get the feeling that what happened to him is so terrible that he will not talk about it. Morris also tells the Whites that while he does not know what the first owner of paw wanted in his first two wishes, the man’s third wish was for death. Mr. White, despite these warnings, wishes anyway, and feels the monkey’s paw move in his hand when he does so.

The atmosphere in the White’s little house grows tense and ominous after Mr. White has wished on the paw. The wind rises outside, and “a silence unusual and depressing settled upon all three.” Finally, after his parents have gone to bed, Herbert sits alone in the darkness, watching faces in the fire.

“The last face was so horrible and so simian [monkey-like] that he gazed at it in amazement.” The face becomes so vivid that Herbert reaches for a glass of water on the table to throw onto the fire; instead of the water glass, his hand finds the monkey’s paw.

These elements of the story, plus the appearance and strange behavior of the “mysterious man” who appears the next morning, prepare readers for the story’s first horrible event: Herbert’s death.

Imagery and Symbolism

Two other techniques that Jacobs uses with great skill and subtlety are imagery (the picture created by the story’s language) and symbolism (the meaning of an image beyond its literal description). Often, when an image is repeated, it then becomes symbolic. One such image in “The Monkey’s Paw” is fire.

At the beginning of the story, fire is a warming, comforting element: with a storm raging outside, the family is grouped around the hearth, with father and son playing chess while mother knits contentedly. After the sergeant-major has arrived and had supper with the Whites, the men again sit in front of the fire, smoking their pipes.

A little later, when Morris tosses the paw onto the flames, the function of the fire changes: its intended role is to consume and purify the evil and destructive force that Morris believes exists in the monkey’s paw. At the end of the evening, the same fire becomes ominous (or perhaps, delivers a warning) to Herbert, who sees a horrible, monkey-like face in the flames—one that so disturbs him that he tries to put it out.

In the final scenes of the story, fire fulfills a different purpose—to illuminate, both literally and figuratively. After Mr. White makes the second wish, the candle in the White’s room goes out, symbolizing that even more darkness will come into their lives. The father lights a match to show his way to the door, but the match goes out too; frantic, he drops the box of matches in his attempt to light another match. Mr. and Mrs. White are in the dark. Symbolically, this loss of light means that they have lost their direction; that they have lost hope.

The final, sad image in the story is the view the Whites have when they have flung open their front door, where we suppose the dead and mangled Herbert, called forth from the grave, was standing just a moment before. All they see is a quiet and deserted road, illuminated by a flickering street light (street lights, when this story was written, were not powered by electricity and light bulbs, but rather by a gas flame). The Whites’ life, without their son, will now be desolate and empty.

Historical Context

The British Empire

When Jacobs wrote “The Monkey’s Paw” a popular saying was “the sun never sets on the British empire.” By the early 1900s, England had conquered and colonized countries all over the world. The saying meant that somewhere in the world it was always daylight, and there a British colony could be found. Sergeant-Major Morris returns from India, a British colony, in “The Monkey’s Paw.” In colonies like India, Hong Kong, Australia, and South Africa, British military men, explorers, archaeologists, and scientists were learning about ancient cultures and traditions little known in the West. Returning from distant colonies to England, they were firsthand sources of information about other peoples and countries for their countrymen curious about exotic far-off lands. The retired colonel just back from India was a staple character in British popular fiction for many years.

The Victorian Era

The last decades of the 19th century, and the first decade or so of the 20th century was, culturally, a very structured time, particularly in England. Jacobs grew up and wrote in an era when people lived by rigid, if unspoken, rules. Religious beliefs were strong, the growing middle class honored hard work and social stability. Men were the wage-earners; women were the housekeepers and in charge of raising the children.

Everyday Life

Over six million people lived in London by 1900. Because of the crowded conditions, several generations of the same family normally lived together in the same house. Housing was too expensive and scarce for most individuals or married couples to live alone. Grandparents, parents, and children often shared the same living quarters. There was no electricity, so all light came from candles or gas lamps. Young people looking for work sometimes turned to colonial service because it paid well and provided some relief from the conditions in England. Those who stayed home often worked in the many industrial factories.

Critical Overview

Popular with readers and critics alike (P.G. Wodehouse hailed him as a master writer), Jacobs was a prolific writer who published 19 volumes between 1896 and 1926. He wrote short stories, novels, and plays, although critics agree that he was most accomplished at the short story form. Despite the fact that most of his stories were humorous tales of life on the English waterfront at the turn of the century, his most famous story is “The Monkey’s Paw,” which James Harding in The Reference Guide to Short Fiction called “a little masterpiece of horror by an unusually gifted writer.”

Jacobs is known for his deft, economical scene-setting and his neat, logical plots, two characteristics which are easily visible in “The Monkey’s Paw.” His stories show a gradation in humor. Many of them could be considered comedies, but Jacobs also began to experiment with what later became known as “black humor.” This vein of writing led him to deal in the macabre, crafting pieces like “The Interruption” (Sea Whisper), about a man who murders his wife for her money and is then blackmailed by his housekeeper. He plans to poison the housekeeper but his plans go awry, and he dies instead. Another macabre story, “Jerry Bundler” (Light Freights), is a ghost story in which no ghost actually appears—similar to the last scene in ’ “The Monkey’s Paw,” in which we believe that the mangled, ghost- or zombie-like Herbert is at the door—but never see him.

Jacobs published his first collection of short stories, Many Cargoes, in 1896. The book was well received by both readers and critics. G.K. Chesterton, who was regarded as one of England’s premier men of letters during the first half of the twentieth century, gave the book a glowing review, favoring Jacobs over Rudyard Kipling: “Mr. Jacobs is in a real sense a classic. . .compared with Mr. Kipling, Mr. Jacobs is like the Parthenon.”

Similar to O. Henry, Jacobs became famous more for the type of story that he wrote, rather than any particular work. The action in his stories usually revolves around neat, surprise-ending plots, which were very popular in his day. Sometimes his characters are motivated by money; often they are motivated

Compare & Contrast

Early 1900s: England rules over an empire with colonies throughout the world, some of the most important being India and portions of South Africa.

Today: On July 1, 1997, Hong Kong, England’s last important colony, is returned to Chinese rule.
Early 1900s: Rickets, a bone disease caused by malnutrition, was common among poor children in England.

Today: Rickets is now a rare disease in England. Other once-common childhood illnesses, such as smallpox and polio, have also been eradicated through advances in medicine.
1902: Popular superstitions, like the curse of Egypt’s mummies or the powers of India’s shamans, arise from Britain’s contact with non-Western cultures.

Today: The popularity of alternative medicine and natural healing remedies stems from society’s disenchantment with Western medicine, which is based solely on science.

by the desire to either be married or to avoid marriage. Nearly all his plots contain trickery or deception.

Jacobs’ output slowed considerably, beginning around 1911. However, in the last twenty years or so of his life, his popularity escalated, and many of his earlier works were reissued. In these later years, Jacobs did not produce much new work, but he did write some adaptations of his better-known stories for the stage.

After he died, Jacobs’ works fell into obscurity. In the late 1960s, however, interest in his writing was revived, and a number of his works have since been reissued.

Criticism

Carl Mowery

Carl Mowery has a doctorate in rhetoric and composition and has taught at Southern Illinois University and Murray State University. In the following essay, he provides an overview of “The Monkey’s Paw” and examines fire imagery in the story.

The English author W. W. Jacobs did most of his writing in a fifteen-year period around the turn of the twentieth century. Many of his stories were lighthearted tales about life on the English waterfront. But “The Monkey’s Paw,” first published in 1902 in a collection called The Lady of the Barge deals with the ghastly and macabre. According to G. K. Chesterton, it rates very highly “among our modern tales of terror in the fact that [it is] dignified and noble.” Chesterton says that Jacobs” ’horror is wild, but it is a sane horror.” This is in contrast to Edgar Allan Poe’s tales of “insane horror.”

Even though “The Monkey’s Paw” is a short story and does not contain the royal characters or political intrigues of Greek drama, it does contain some elements of Greek tragedy. It begins in happiness and hope, and it closes in grief and despair. Mr. White’s desire for easy money (greed) leads him to challenge fate. That violation brings the whole family to grief.

In ancient Greece, there were two types of drama: Comedy and Tragedy. In a Comedy, the action is usually lighthearted and often humorous. The ending is a happy one. In a Tragedy, the action begins with the hero on a high social and/or political level. He or she then descends to a position that is significantly lower in status than where the story began. The hero in a tragedy has a character weakness—the tragic flaw—that causes him or her to make a serious mistake, which causes his fall from the high position. Fate is a major concern in these plays. If the hero interferes with the inevitable, because of his tragic flaw, serious consequences occur. The ending is often intensely dramatic and the hero may the or be killed at the end.

As our tragic little story opens, we are struck by the images of the happy family sitting in the living room, father and son playing chess and mother knitting by the fireplace. This is a typical English family from about the year 1900 and, as such, we know that their lives were highly structured. They lived by a set of strict but unwritten rules. Fathers were the wage earners, and the decision makers in the household. Mothers were homemakers and the family members most responsible for rearing the children. Sons were expected to follow in their father’s footsteps, or to go out and earn a living as soon as they were old enough. Daughters were expected to learn how to keep the house and then to marry and rear children.

But even in the most tightly organized situation, events occurred that disturbed the equilibrium. Equilibrium, in a story, is a state of balance among the characters. It is the disruption of equilibirum that creates interest in a story. Mr. and Mrs. White and their son, Herbert, are visited by the Sergeant-Major and things begin to go awry. He comes into the house and entertains the family with stories of his visits to India (a colony in the British Empire at this time). During one trip he has obtained a monkey’s paw that has had a magic spell put on it by a fakir (a holy man) “to show that fate ruled people’s lives, and those who interfered with it did so to their sorrow.” As he describes the paw, “His tones were so grave that a hush fell upon the group.” These powers, he explains, should be taken very seriously and should never be trifled with. After the Whites take possession of the paw, the Sergeant-Major tries to convince them not to indulge in its magic, warning them of dire consquences.

Despite the warning of the Sergeant-Major, the family is intent on testing the paw. Mr. White and Herbert are intrigued with the possibilities of gaining wealth by making a single wish. So, heeding the Seargeant-Major’s advice “to wish for something sensible,” Mr. White makes a wish for just 200 pounds. In one innocent act of greed, Mr. White has set into motion a series of events that are fated to end unhappily. After Herbert is killed in an accident at work, the company sends 200 pounds compensation

What Do I Read Next?

Selected Short Stories, reprinted in 1975, contains some of Jacobs’ best stories.
The ghost stories of M. R. James are among the finest of the twentieth century. Ghost Stories of an Antiquary (1905) is his best known collection.
An earlier writer of supernatural tales is Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, whose Ghost Stories and Tales of Mystery (1851) is highly regarded by critics in the genre.

to Mr. and Mrs. White. The wish seems to have come true!

If we accept these events at face value, several questions arise. Did Herbert the because they trifled with fate as the fakir warned? Or is Herbert’s death only a happenstance, as suggested by the Sergeant-Major’s remark that “things happened so naturally that you might if you wished attribute it to coincidence.”

No matter which possibility we choose, Mr. and Mrs. White continue to rely on the paw for assistance, which contributes to their continued descent into despair. Mr. White’s flaw, greed, has blinded him to his violation of fate. And after Herbert’s death, he succumbs to a deeper greed: to wish his son back from the dead. His failure to learn from his first interference with fate leads him deeper into the magical world.

But his tragic flaw has caused him to fall into a great despair. He ignores the warnings of the Sergeant-Major at the beginning and he ignores his own instincts at the end when, at his wife’s urgings, he makes the second wish. His third wish is made, restoring a desolate calm, and this little tragedy has come to an end.

There are two techniques that illuminate the tragedy of the White family. These are imagery (the picture created by the language) and symbolism (the meaning of an image beyond its literal description).

“Fire is often seen as a source of comfort and warmth. It is also seen as a purifying or a destroying element.”

A powerful symbol occurs in the opening scene with father and son playing chess. Here the game is more than just a chess match. It is symbolic of a set of rules, a strict order. As long as the players follow the rules of the game, everything is in order. But if one or the other player violates the rules then chaos will follow. The White family’s lives have been governed by a strict set of rules and when we first see them, they are still living within them. But then these rules are violated, and chaos indeed ensues.

Herbert moves from playing chess to playing childish games, taunting his father into making the first wish and then teasing him after the wish is made. Even Mrs. White joins in by chasing Herbert around the table. These childlike games have no rules and are ultimately more dangerous, because they indicate “a carelessness which betokened no great belief in [the paw’s] virtues.”

Another important image is the fire and flame. Fire is often seen as a source of comfort and warmth. It is also seen as a purifying or a destroying element. As a single flame of a candle or a match, it provides illumination. At first, fire is a part of a warming, comfortable image—mother sitting near the hearth, knitting. Later the two men sit comfortably before the fire and smoke their pipes before going to bed. But this image contains a double meaning. The fire and pipe smoking are both comforting, but they are also destroying something in the process. In both instances there is a reduction of substance, tobacco or fire wood, resulting in darkness, foreshadowing and symbolizing the dying happiness in the life of the family. During the evening, the fire takes on another meaning, when the Sergeant-Major, who is convinced that the paw is evil, tosses it into the fire. Here, fire is a destroying and/or purifying element.

Another important flame image occurs in the final scenes of the story. After Mr. White makes the second wish, the candle in their room goes out before any results come from the wish. Then father lights a match to show his way to the door. But it, too, goes out and he cannot see down the hallway. He drops the box of matches in his frantic attempts to light another match. The symbolism of lost direction and lost hope is seen in the candle and the match going out. The Whites are in the dark, both literally and figuratively. Their passion for the dark power of the paw has clouded their ability to see. But, perhaps, the most poignant fire image in the whole tale is the last, the flickering street light illuminating “a quiet and deserted road.” In this final scene, the realization of the loss of their son is all the Whites have.

Source: Carl Mowery, for Short Stories for Students, Gale Research, 1997.

Stefan Dziemianowicz

Stefan Dziemianowicz is the editor of many anthologies of horror and supernatural fiction. In the following essay, he examines the narrative structure of “The Monkey’s Paw,” which he judges to be “flawlessly crafted.”

W. W. Jacobs’ “The Monkey’s Paw” is one of the most reprinted tales of horror in the English language. Yet any study of the story’s merits as such must take into account that its author was not a horror writer. Although several of his short stories feature macabre elements, Jacobs was best known in his day as a writer of humorous tales, often concerned with the sea and sailors. “The Monkey’s Paw” was first published in the general literary magazine Harper’s Monthly in 1902, and collected that same year in The Lady of the Barge, a mixed bag of stories on various themes that differed little in content from Jacobs’ previous volumes of short fiction.

“The Monkey’s Paw” is a superior work of horror fiction because, first and foremost, it is a flawlessly crafted short story. A deceptively simple tale, it reveals on close inspection Jacobs’ meticulous attention to narrative structure and careful handling of foreshadowing, symbolism, and other narrative elements that contribute to its eerie effect.

The story is divided into three parts, a number that Jacobs treats with significance: the monkey’s paw grants three wishes, the White family is the third party to benefit from its magic power, and there are three members of the family. As a symbol, the number three can be interpreted to mean many things, including progression and imbalance. In Jacobs’ tale, the universe tolerates neither. The monkey’s paw has a spell put on it by a fakir who “wanted to show that fate ruled people’s lives, and those who interfered with it did so to their sorrow.” Jacobs orchestrates the story’s events to show how trying to change one’s fate upsets the existing balance and invites a counter-reaction. The futility his characters experience trying to improve their lot with the monkey’s paw is mirrored in the structure of the three parts of the story. Each is built around the same central event, a visit to the White household by an outsider. The repetition of this event and the consequences that follow reinforces the tale’s lesson concerning the immutability of fate.

The first part of the story lays the foundation on which the other two parts build. Jacobs begins by contrasting the internal and external worlds of his tale: “Without, the night was cold and wet, but in the small corner of Laburnam Villa the blinds were drawn and the fire burned brightly.” The world that the Whites know is presented as cozy and bright, and the world beyond their door as inhospitable and dark. Jacobs is setting his scene here, but he is also building the framework for a tale of supernatural horror, which traditionally involves the eruption of dark and hostile forces into the comfortably ordered world of its characters. Indeed, it does not take long for him to evoke this possibility. Although the Whites are at ease with themselves and their surroundings, the “sudden and unlooked-for violence” with which Mr. White responds to losing a chess game suggests that the stability of the household is tenuous and fragile. The first test of its vulnerability is the visiting Sergeant-Major Morris, recently returned from twenty-one years of military duty in India. Morris is a taciturn man whose dourness clashes with the conviviality of the Whites and is clearly related to his experiences abroad. When Mr. White wistfully wishes that he might visit India himself, Morris remarks, “Better where you are,” a comment that sounds particularly ominous in light of Mr. White’s earlier outburst that “of all the beastly, slushy, out-of-the-way places to live in, this [the family homestead] is the worst.” The monkey’s paw and the wishes it grants appear to be the root cause of Morris’s sullenness. He informs the Whites that he has availed himself of its magic, but is cryptically evasive when asked what he wished for. He does note that its previous owner’s third wish was for death, leaving the reader to infer the enormity of what he has suffered from his use of the talisman. This is the first of several instances in which Jacobs evokes horrors indirectly,

“Jacobs orchestrates the story’s events to show how trying to change one’s fate upsets the existing balance and invites a counter-reaction.”

foreshadowing the final horror which is so terrible that it is enough to suggest it without showing it.

In the first part of the story the monkey’ s paw is a symbol of the world beyond Laburnam Villa, a souvenir of a distant land but also an embodiment of the dark and foreboding forces that encroach outside the White’s happy home. Morris begs the family to wish only for “something sensible,” but knows that any wish made with it, no matter how sensible, will exact a devastating price. Mr. White believes “I’ve got all I want,” but is easily goaded by his wife and son Herbert to wish for two hundred pounds. From the moment it is introduced into White’s home, the monkey’s paw begins disordering its harmony.

The story’s second part follows the pattern of the first. When it appears that Mr. White’s wish has not come true, everyone makes light of his credu-lousness. A spirit of “prosaic wholesomeness” prevails in White household until the arrival of the second visitor, this time the representative of Herbert’s employer, who informs the mother and father that their son has been killed in a work accident. Jacobs carefully chooses the words that describe Herbert’s accident: “He was caught in the machinery” —literally the tools of his trade, but also the mechanism of fate which grinds down those who attempt to resist it.

“The Monkey’s Paw” abounds with allusions to a inflexibly ordered universe that is merciless towards those who deviate from its prescribed paths. The first part of the story opens with Mr. White and Herbert playing chess, a game with fixed rules. Mr. White is characterized as someone who “possessed ideas about the game involving radical changes,” a trait that puts his king into “sharp and unnecessary perils.” By contrast, the man dispatched by Herbert’s employers to deliver the news of his death

“Had White “been one merely to accept life, he would have taken the soldier’s advice and let the paw burn.”

remarks, “I am only their servant and am merely obeying orders.” Much of the story’s horror derives from its depiction of fate as a mechanism indifferent to human whims and ambitions. In the story’s first part, Herbert jokes that his father will find the money he has wished for sitting on his bed, “and something horrible squatting on top of the wardrobe as you pocket your ill-gotten gains.” This image, which captures the spirit of much supernatural horror fiction written in Jacobs’ time, suggests a world in which good is rewarded, evil is punished, and the moral concerns that govern human behavior matter. “The Monkey’s Paw” shows the foolishness of such a world view. When the representative of Herbert’s employers informs the family that they “disclaim all responsibility” for his death, he echoes Sergeant-Major Morris’s warning “don’t blame me for what happens” when Mr. White rescues the paw from the fireplace. There is no arbiter of good and evil working responsibly behind the scenes of Jacobs’ story, only a clockwork universe in which the two-hundred pound indemnity paid the Whites amounts to an equal exchange for Herbert’s life.

In the third section of the story the stasis one might expect in a universe so rigidly ordered becomes manifest. The Whites have buried their son and though they feel “a state of expectation as though something else was to happen,” they are mired in “the hopeless resignation of the old, sometimes miscalled, apathy.” A brief boost of hope revives Mrs. White when she realizes that the monkey’s paw can still grant two wishes. Once again Mr. White is pressed to make a wish, this time for the return of their son. Thus begins the third and final visit to the White household, a recapitulation of events from the first two parts which the reader knows by now can only lead to despair. When the knocking begins on the downstairs door some time later it appears that Herbert has returned and fate has been contravened. Belatedly, though, Mr. White realizes that in wishing his son back he has neglected to take into account the boy’s mutilation and time spent in the grave. A resurrected Herbert would be an abomination, as intolerable to look upon as impossible to exist in the fate-driven universe of the story. In a twist on the events of the first two parts, where outsiders bring misery into the White’s home, a family member must now be kept out to prevent even greater misery from occurring. The irony of this turn of events raises the impending sense of horror to an excruciating level at the climax. With his third and final wish, Mr. White cancels out his second, wishing the knocker away. The magic of the monkey’s paw is exhausted, and the Whites have gained nothing by it. Jacobs draws the reader’s attention to this methodical working out of fate in his final sentence, where Mr. White looks out upon the “deserted road,” as empty as it was at the story’s beginning.

“The Monkey’s Paw” is a model of storytelling economy, whose ’individual parts reflect and contribute to a tightly integrated whole. Jacobs works out the story’s simple premise—the inability to change one’s fate—through its plot, but also uses it to organize his narrative. This expertly calculated matching of form to content explains the extraordinary power of Jacobs’ tale, and possibly why its numerous imitators have never surpassed its effectiveness as a tale of horror.

Source: Stefan Dziemianowicz, for Short Stories for Students, Gale Research, 1997.

Joseph H. Harkey

In the following brief essay, Harkey explains some instances of foreshadowing in Jacobs’s “The Monkey’s Paw.”

In the early lines of W. W. Jacobs’ “The Monkey’s Paw,” an altogether chilling story, is embedded the germ of the entire story. Mr. White and his son Herbert were playing chess, the father,

(1) who possessed ideas about the game involving radical changes, (2) putting his king into. . . sharp and unnecessary perils. . . . “Hark at the wind,” said Mr. White, who, (5) having seen a fatal mistake after it was too late, (4) was amiably desirous of preventing his son from seeing it.

Contained in this passage are four elements that foreshadow the action of the story, although Jacobs is never heavy-handed in working out the tale as a projection of its opening paragraphs. The obvious parallel to the game of chess, is, of course, the game of life. While Mr. White’s choosing a small sum (two hundred pounds) when he made his first wish on the monkey’s paw might make him seem less than radical, we must remember that he snatched the paw from the fire when the old soldier tossed it there. Had White been one merely to accept life, he would have taken the soldier’s advice and let the paw burn.

The second element, that of putting his king into “sharp and unnecessary peril,” comes with the first wish. White had no way of knowing that he was endangering Herbert’s life in requesting the £200, but the soldier’s demeanor when he told of the magical powers of the paw should have warned a less radical man to let the paw burn. As it turned out, the £200 wished for came as an indemnity for Herbert, who was killed when he fell into some working machinery. While the Gothic tone of the story is not such that one would expect a pun on the “sharp” peril, certainly the peril was unnecessary. White planned to use the £200 requested to pay off the mortgage, but there was no urgent need for it to be paid off immediately.

White’s seeing a fatal mistake after it was too late was the third element. The fatal mistake here is not the death of his son, however, but something even more terrible—the resurrection of his son with his face still mangled from the machinery. When Mrs. White insisted that White make a second wish—to bring Herbert back—White feared that the wish might bring the son back mutilated. Nevertheless, his fear of his wife caused him to make the second wish. It was only much later, when they heard a noise at the door, that White sensed it was his mutilated son and frantically sought the paw to make a third wish.

This wish—that Herbert be dead again—was an acting out of the fourth element. But it is not the son he is preventing from seeing the fatal mistake this time. It is his wife, who is not aware that the second wish did not include the request that Herbert be restored whole. The third wish prevented the heartstruck mother from seeing the hideous creature outside the door.

Thus in the opening two paragraphs, Jacobs has given us a mt’cra-story which contains all the elements of the macro-story, if one may use those terms. Still, his symbolic foreshadowing is not heavy-handed. The use of the words “amiably desirous” to describe White’s efforts to prevent his son from seeing his mistake, for instance, would seem incongruous were they to describe his effort to prevent his wife from seeing their son. Indeed, despite the symbolic relationship of the chess game to the story proper, Jacobs handled it in such a sophisticated manner that the effect of the game on the reader is suggestive, hinting of the dangers implicit in Mr. White’s radical ideas about the game—of life, while at the same time giving us with a few bold strokes a preliminary sketch of the central character in the story.

Source: Joseph H. Harkey, “Foreshadowing in ’The Monkey’s Paw’,” in Studies in Short Fiction, Vol. VI, no. 5, Fall, 1969, pp. 653-54.