Compare and contrast the British and American Culture as deposited in the novel The Canterville Ghost

The impression formed regarding the American attitude in the story is that these people were fearless, modern and products of rational thinking. While the English were still entrenched in tradition and superstition, they had a social hierarchy which had to be maintained with assiduity and seen to be comfortable in their age-old customs. Americans did not care for that kind of thing being a modern society that was outstripping other nations in terms of progress. As a new country, there was no traditional social structure and rules of society that the Americans had to adhere to. For the English, the ghost represents the ghost of their hierarchical social structure, the remnants of the aristocracy which still had a command over the social, political and economic life of England. The English were proud of their heritage and assigned a lot of value to ancestry and property. The Otis family are depicted as fearless even in the face of preternatural phenomena while the former English occupants of  Canterville  Chase were helpless victims in the hands of the ghost. This shows that an emergent modern nation like America and its citizens were of a pioneering sort with not a grain of fear because they had travelled to unknown lands and set up homes in wild places. The English on the other hand adhered quite rigidly to their customs, they were yet to banish their family ghosts. Although the English had been one of the first ones to venture out to unknown lands, they had become jaded by their traditions.