“The Fall of the House of Usher” and “The Yellow Wallpaper”: A Comparison Introduction
“The Fall of the House of Usher” and “The Yellow Wallpaper”: A Comparison
Introduction
Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” has received wide praise for its accurate depiction of madness and the symptoms attributed to mental breakdowns (Shumaker 1985). While these symptoms may seem obvious from today’s psychological perspective, Gilman was writing at the close of the 19th century when the discipline of psychology was still emerging out of a rudimentary psychiatric approach to treating the mentally ill. Though doctors have attempted to write about the treatment of insanity since ancient Greece, the history of madness has most often been characterized by a series of popular images, images that may have stunted the development of a medical model of mental illness: as a wild irrationality, an imaginative and corrupt gothic horror, a violent cruelty that must be confined in asylums, and lastly as a mere nervous disorder. The critic Annette Kolodny suggests that contemporary readers of Gilman’s story most likely learned how to follow her fictional representation of mental breakdown by reading the earlier stories of Edgar Allen Poe (Shumaker 1985), and indeed we can locate these strata of historical representations in both “The Yellow Wallpaper” and Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher.” But where Poe’s depictions seem to confirm negative – and thus not therapeutically useful – stereotypes of madness, Gilman tempers her representations through the emerging psychological model, which allowed her to articulate a new image anticipating the 20th century hope of curing mental diseases through psychological expression.
Background
Gilman’s story depicts the mental collapse of a late 19th century housewife undergoing the Rest Cure, who grows increasingly obsessed with a disturbing wallpaper pattern. It has been suggested that contemporary readers would have read the story as either a Poe-like study of madness, yet most modern critics focus on a feminist
Introduction
Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” has received wide praise for its accurate depiction of madness and the symptoms attributed to mental breakdowns (Shumaker 1985). While these symptoms may seem obvious from today’s psychological perspective, Gilman was writing at the close of the 19th century when the discipline of psychology was still emerging out of a rudimentary psychiatric approach to treating the mentally ill. Though doctors have attempted to write about the treatment of insanity since ancient Greece, the history of madness has most often been characterized by a series of popular images, images that may have stunted the development of a medical model of mental illness: as a wild irrationality, an imaginative and corrupt gothic horror, a violent cruelty that must be confined in asylums, and lastly as a mere nervous disorder. The critic Annette Kolodny suggests that contemporary readers of Gilman’s story most likely learned how to follow her fictional representation of mental breakdown by reading the earlier stories of Edgar Allen Poe (Shumaker 1985), and indeed we can locate these strata of historical representations in both “The Yellow Wallpaper” and Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher.” But where Poe’s depictions seem to confirm negative – and thus not therapeutically useful – stereotypes of madness, Gilman tempers her representations through the emerging psychological model, which allowed her to articulate a new image anticipating the 20th century hope of curing mental diseases through psychological expression.
Background
Gilman’s story depicts the mental collapse of a late 19th century housewife undergoing the Rest Cure, who grows increasingly obsessed with a disturbing wallpaper pattern. It has been suggested that contemporary readers would have read the story as either a Poe-like study of madness, yet most modern critics focus on a feminist
References: Davison, Carol Margaret. (2004). “Haunted House/Haunted Heroine: Female Gothic Closets in The Yellow Wallpaper.” Women’s Studies 33: 47-75. Gruesser, John C. (2004). “Madmen and Moonbeams: The Narrator in The Fall of the House of Usher.” The Edgar Allan Poe Review 5.1: 80-90 Poe, Edgar Allan. (2003). “The Fall of the House of Usher.” The Fall of the House of Usher and OtherWritings. Penguin Books, London. Shumaker, Conrad. (1985). Too Terribly Good to Be Printed: Charlotte Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper.” American Literature Thrailkill, Jane F. (2002). “Doctoring The Yellow Wallpaper.” Harvard University Press: Boston.