How to compare two prose texts

AO4 rewards texts that argue with each other, not a parallel report.

1. Lead with a thematic proposition: e.g. both texts use the ghost less to frighten than to expose what a society will not say aloud.
2. Interleave in theme-paragraphs (the haunting; the uncanny; the unreliable teller) that draw on both texts.
3. Prize the productive difference — where one ghost demands justice and the other only exposes a mind.
4. Let the pre-1900 text keep its own beliefs about death, God and the soul.

Stem: “Where [A] finally confirms the ghost as real, [B] refuses to, so that its horror is epistemological rather than physical.”

What AO4 rewards

The grammar of the ghost story

The supernatural tale has a recognisable machinery:

• The revenant — the dead returning, often to demand justice or reveal a buried crime.
• The haunted house — architecture as a mind or a family history made physical; forbidden rooms, thresholds, locked doors.
• Atmosphere — cold, decay, liminal times (dusk, midnight), the pathetic fallacy of a hostile setting.
• The buried secret — the supernatural as the return of something the household or society has concealed.

Comparative angle: ask what each text’s ghost is for — punishment, warning, grief, or social critique.

What is the ghost for?

Two indispensable concepts

Two critical ideas anchor sophisticated answers:

• The uncanny — Sigmund Freud’s essay Das Unheimliche (“The Uncanny”, 1919): the peculiar dread produced when the familiar becomes strange — the double, the automaton, the house that is home and not-home. It names the return of something repressed.
• The fantastic — Tzvetan Todorov (The Fantastic, 1970) defines it as the reader’s hesitation between a natural and a supernatural explanation. While we cannot decide whether the ghost is real or delusion, we are in the fantastic; once the text settles the question, it tips into the uncanny or the marvellous.

Precision pays: using “uncanny” and “fantastic” accurately, with their theorists, is strong AO5 and AO2 at once.

Name the concept

The unreliable teller and the doppelganger

The supernatural theme often turns on who is telling the story:

• The unreliable narrator — grief, guilt, isolation or fever may be manufacturing the haunting; we read the ghost through a mind we cannot trust.
• The double / doppelganger — a second self that externalises a divided psyche (a favourite of both Gothic and psychoanalytic reading).
• Ambiguity as method — the best supernatural fiction keeps both the literal ghost and the psychological reading alive at once.

AO2: narrative framing (a story within a story, a found manuscript) is itself a way of holding the supernatural at a doubtful distance.

Form creates doubt

Sort the motif

Tap a motif, then tap the strand of the Supernatural theme it belongs to.

Belief, doubt and the ghost

Track how belief shifts across your texts’ periods:

• Victorian — a boom in spiritualism and séances alongside a crisis of religious faith after Darwin; ghosts do cultural work in a doubting age.
• Gothic revival — the supernatural as a return of the pre-modern into a rationalist culture.
• Modern and contemporary — the ghost secularised into trauma, memory and the return of history.

Weld it: because the earlier text was written amid genuine spiritualist belief, its ghost can be sincere; the later text’s ghost may be metaphor for trauma — an AO3 difference that drives an AO4 comparison.

Context that compares

Reading the supernatural through theory

Pick a lens that produces a textual claim:

• Psychoanalytic — the ghost as the return of the repressed; the haunted house as the unconscious.
• Feminist — whose desire or knowledge is pathologised as madness; the confined, “hysterical” woman whose vision is dismissed.
• Historicist — the ghost as unfinished business of empire, class or family history.

Discipline: not “this could be psychological”, but “the text gives the ghost only to the woman no one believes, so the supernatural becomes a way of staging whose testimony a society refuses to hear.”

Using a lens well

Match the concept to its meaning

Tap a description on the left, then the concept or thinker it names.

The big ideas to take into the exam

You now have a theme-and-method framework for comparing any Supernatural pairing. Press Finish to see your score.