The Red Room

Susan Hill, by using the Red Room, has brought the sense of blood lust, anger, fierceness of Hooper towards Kingshaw. Because Hooper is seeing Kingshaw as an ‘intruder’, therefore he is trying as hard as he can to get rid of Kingshaw, no matter what it takes.

The sense of dead is all over the red room. The symbols are the dead moths, the books that no one ever reads, and the dead animals that his grandfather collected. Also, Hill also explores the darkness of Warings. She created a very morbid, the sense of sickness by saying “The old man had breathed noisily, and dribbled a little, and never woken. The sick room smelled sour”. That quote was used to describe the grandfather, the one who created and made use of the red room. By using the image of him dying, Hill has showed the sense of collapsing of the relationship between the people that lives in the Warings.

The red room was originally used for a library, but then “nobody ever read, here. The first Joseph Hooper had not even done so.” This shows that the Hooper is a family full of fake things, just to show off. The library was full of famous novels; hence trying to look like they are smart and knowledgeable, but the truth is they are not. They probably don’t even know what the novels in their library are about. The red room resembles the place where the Hooper shows off their fake power, knowledge, and the money, which they clearly didn’t have that plenty to be proud of.