The Canterville Ghost

Fiction | Novella | Adult | Published in 1887

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Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Character Analysis

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Chapter 5Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapter 5 Summary

While out riding, Virginia gets her clothes caught and they rip a little, so she decides she will sneak into the back of the house. There, she thinks she has found one of the maids but instead comes upon Sir Simon. He is sad and watching the leaves fall outside. She approaches him and they talk, first about his wife. She tells him that it’s wrong to kill, and he replies by stating the ways in which his wife did not rise to the expectations of her duties.

Then, she challenges Sir Simon about stealing her paints in order to revive the blood stain in the library. She chides him for leaving her with nothing but indigo and white, which forces her to paint only moonlit scenes. “As for colour,” Sir Simon says, “that is always a matter of taste: the Cantervilles have blue blood, for instance, the very bluest in England; but I know you Americans don’t care for things of this kind” (24).

Virginia suggests that he emigrate to America, where she promises he will be successful, and find a reason for existing beyond rattling his chains and lurking in corridors late at night to scare people. Sir Simon declares that he would not like America and that what he really wants is to sleep—to rest in peace in what he and Virginia call the “Garden of Death” (25).

He asks for her help in finding the peace of Death’s slumber. To do this, she must cry for his sins, and pray for him, and witness Hell, though he promises she will not be harmed. Then, and only then, he tells her, “the Angel of Death will have mercy on me” (26). Virginia summons her courage and decides to help Sir Simon. Figures in tapestries and carved into the chimneys try to warn her not to accompany Sir Simon on this quest. However, she does not listen to them.

Chapter 5 Analysis

Virginia’s conversation with Sir Simon not only shows her innocence and kindness, but also reveals Sir Simon’s character. He reveals that he killed his wife because she displeased him. She was not as beautiful as Virginia. She was a bad cook and didn’t properly starch his ruffs. For this, he killed her, and laments that her brothers then starved him to death. Virginia’s response is to offer him a sandwich.

Her empathy leads him to believe that she is the prophesied one who can release him from his duties of haunting at Canterville Chase. He tells her he longs for the beauty of death; he is tired because for three hundred years he has not rested. When he first convinces her that she can release him from his tribulations by crying and praying for him and his sins, the reader is at first hopeful that Sir Simon has turned a corner.

However, as she moves through the house with the ghost, the rest of the house tries to warn her that she is doing something dangerous—that she might never be heard from or seen again. This doubt sows seeds of doubt in the reader’s mind, suggesting that Sir Simon’s motives can no longer be trusted. Is he still a murderous spirit bent on scaring everyone who comes upon him? Or does he just want to move on, leave Canterville Chase, and enjoy the bliss of his final sleep? The reader does not yet know the answer.

Virginia reveals in this chapter that she knew Sir Simoon was stealing her paints to recreate the bloodstain, because they would disappear from her art supplies and the paint would appear on the library floor every morning. She tries to earn Sir Simon’s favor by reminding him that she could have told on him to the rest of her family, but that she chose to keep his confidence. The fact that no one else in the Otis family has, by now, noticed that she paints only moonlit scenes is an insight into her place in the family, and shows they do not pay much mind to the details of her life, perhaps because she is a girl. However, she is the one Sir Simon singles out to help him with his dangerous task, whatever it might truly be.