The Red Room

Throughout the first pages of “The Red Room,” Wells underlines the discrepancy of both age and wisdom between the narrator and Lorraine Castle’s custodians. All three custodians are significantly older than the narrator and seem—based on their knowledge of the castle—to have been working there for some time. They warn him repeatedly that it is far too dangerous for him to enter the Red Room, but he casts aside their worries due to his hubris. He is certain no ghosts can haunt the Red Room because, at 28 years old, he has never seen a ghost, which he effectively takes as evidence that ghosts can’t possibly exist. He pays no mind to the old woman’s insistence that there’s “a many things to see, when one’s still but eight-and-twenty,” even though she has lived a much longer life than he has. In fact, he sees the custodians’ age not as proof of wisdom but as proof that they are below him in knowledge and status. This bloated sense of self-confidence leads him to the Red Room, where, despite his surety, he becomes deeply frightened and unstable in the space’s haunting darkness. When he wakes up the next morning in the care of the custodians, he comes to the realization that, though he was perhaps right about a lack of supernatural haunting, the Red Room is still deeply haunted—if only by fear itself. This conclusion reveals the extent of his previous naivety, as he hadn’t considered the possibility that his undoing in the Red Room might have more to do with himself than anything else. The custodians may not have been correct in their assumption of a spiritual haunting, but they were correct that going into the Red Room would only bring the narrator fear and distress, if not tragedy. By outlining the narrator’s trajectory in this regard, Wells ultimately illustrates the ways in which naive and overly confident ways of moving through the world can keep people from considering all sides of a situation—even when more experienced people give them advanced warning.