The mood of “The Monkey’s Paw” moves from lighthearted to ominous over the course of the story. At the beginning, the White family is enjoying an evening of playing chess and knitting by the fire, made all the better by Mr. White’s old friend Sergeant-Major Morris stopping by to have dinner with them and tell them stories of his time in India. The story moves into a more eerie register when Morris begrudgingly gives the Whites a monkey’s paw totem that grants wishes but, he claims, is also cursed. From this moment on, the story moves into the realm of horror, as the Whites learn their lesson about meddling with fate for their own selfish desires.
While some horror stories only seek to elicit fear in their readers (via eerie and ominous moods), Jacobs also seeks his readers to feel compassion and sympathy for Mr. and Mrs. White after their first wish with the monkey’s paw (seemingly) leads to the death of their son. The following passage captures the way the mood shifts into a heavy and grief-stricken place after Herbert’s death:
It was all over so quickly that at first they could hardly realize it, and remained in a state of expectation as though of something else to happen—something else which was to lighten this load, too heavy for old hearts to bear.
But the days passed, and expectation gave place to resignation—the hopeless resignation of the old, sometimes miscalled, apathy. Sometimes they hardly exchanged a word, for now they had nothing to talk about, and their days were long to weariness.
Jacobs’s language here moves away from scaring readers, encouraging them instead to witness the Whites’ sadness after the loss of their son—he writes that they longed for “lighten[ing] this load, too heavy for old hearts to bear” before moving into a place of “hopeless resignation” and losing their days to “weariness.” In this way, Jacobs stresses that this story isn’t simply meant to frighten people but also to communicate a moral lesson about not selfishly trying to change one’s fate (lest one end up unhappy like Mr. and Mrs. White).
