' The Tell-Tale Heart, And The Yellow Wallpaper, By Charlotte Perkins Gilman
The Paths to Insanity Throughout literature, there are many examples of stories of individuals progressing from sanity to being utterly insane. Literature is an indirect or farce mirror of actuality of what humans have endured or experienced physically or emotionally in order to make it relatable to the individual reader. Two literary pieces that do an excellent job at representing the path to insanity and resulting in extreme circumstances are “The Tell-Tale Heart” by Edgar Allen Poe and “The Yellow Wallpaper” written by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Although these stories are different in setting and characters, they have similarities in theme and concepts relating to characters regression into insanity. “The Tell-Tale Heart” is about an
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The narrator is also the main character of this story. A woman dealing with “ temporary nervous depression”(Gilman 1). moves to a large old estate for the summer with her husband, John, who is a physician to help her recover. As an outlet, the narrator starts a journal. The narrator is placed in a room with an ugly yellow wallpaper and over a course of several months, this wallpaper drives her more and more mad. Similar, yet different to “The Tell-Tale Heart”, which is over a duration of eight days until the narrator breaks and commits murder, it takes several months of gradually falling into insanity for the narrator from “The Yellow Wallpaper”. The wallpaper even worsens her physical state and well being. “The front pattern does move-and no wonder! The woman behind shakes it!”(Gilman 10). The narrator starts to notice a woman within the wallpaper. The narrator stops sleeping at night and stares at the wall getting more and more paranoid and suspicious of her husband, John, and her sister in law, Jennie, who had been helping take care of her. The final climax of this story is the narrator locks her self in the room and tears all the yellow wallpaper off the wall freeing the woman inside representing herself the entire time. Her husband enters the room the narrator says “And I’ve pulled of most of the paper so you can’t put me back!”(Gilman 13). She believed her husband had trapped her into the wallpaper and she had to set herself free. Unlike the “Tell-Tale Heart” the end of this story results in self affliction from insanity and not murder of
The narrator is also the main character of this story. A woman dealing with “ temporary nervous depression”(Gilman 1). moves to a large old estate for the summer with her husband, John, who is a physician to help her recover. As an outlet, the narrator starts a journal. The narrator is placed in a room with an ugly yellow wallpaper and over a course of several months, this wallpaper drives her more and more mad. Similar, yet different to “The Tell-Tale Heart”, which is over a duration of eight days until the narrator breaks and commits murder, it takes several months of gradually falling into insanity for the narrator from “The Yellow Wallpaper”. The wallpaper even worsens her physical state and well being. “The front pattern does move-and no wonder! The woman behind shakes it!”(Gilman 10). The narrator starts to notice a woman within the wallpaper. The narrator stops sleeping at night and stares at the wall getting more and more paranoid and suspicious of her husband, John, and her sister in law, Jennie, who had been helping take care of her. The final climax of this story is the narrator locks her self in the room and tears all the yellow wallpaper off the wall freeing the woman inside representing herself the entire time. Her husband enters the room the narrator says “And I’ve pulled of most of the paper so you can’t put me back!”(Gilman 13). She believed her husband had trapped her into the wallpaper and she had to set herself free. Unlike the “Tell-Tale Heart” the end of this story results in self affliction from insanity and not murder of