Two authors Edgar Allan Poe and Charlotte perkins Gilman both wrote well written stories about mental illness and the effects of it. Poe’s story, Tell Tale Heart was released in 1843. It is one of the shortest stories Poe wrote and takes a look into dysteria and mental health problems.
The other author Gilman, wrote the Yellow wallpaper and it was released in 1899. Her story is about mental health and the feminist problems of her day. Those two stories are very similar in how they show mental illness and relationship issues. However they are very different in the way they are written as well as the styles of the authors.
In the Yellow Wallpaper, the narrator’s mental health slowly deteriorates due to her being locked up in the yellow wallpaper room. There are two passages that shows our narrators declining mental health. The First is “I never saw a worse paper in my life. ” “One of those sprawling, flamboyant patterns committing every artistic sin. ” the second is “There are things in the wallpaper that nobody knows about but me, or ever will. ”. As her obsession grows with the wallpaper, she slowly becomes more and more insane which eventually affects her relationship with her husband. We see this in these lines“But these nervous troubles are dreadfully depressing. ” “I suppose John never was nervous in his life. He laughs at me so about this wallpaper! ”
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With Poe’s story we see the narrator’s mental health affect him in a very different way. The narrator begins to become obsessed with an old man’s eye color and this is the reason why he kills the old man. The narrator reduces the old man to just his eye color to eliminate any motives that could inspire the murder. He never acknowledges that the murder will end this old man’s life. After the narrator has committed the murder, he has a newly heightened sense of sound he calls“the beating heart”. He believes the beating heart sound is coming from the old man’s dismantled corpse. “My headache, and I fancied a ringing in my ears:—”It was a low dull quick sound”. “it is the beating of his hideous heart! ” Because the narrator is delusional he is unable to discern the difference in his own heart beating in his ears. This represents his subconscious guilt and fear of the officers finding out the truth.
These stories, although similar, differ in one big way which is how they were written. The Yellow Wallpaper was written like journal entries from the narrator. Whereas Tell tale hearts is written like a one on one conversation with the narrator. The way these stories were written it makes them unique and shows the different styles that the authors used in writing their stories.
In conclusion, both stories are using metaphorical languages and symbolisms to create the suspenseful atmosphere as well as using it to show the mental health of the narrators. The stories definitely have their own individuality. For example, Poe tells his story over a course of days whereas Gilman tells hers over a period of months. In any event, both stories captivate the reader from the beginning to end, whether it be from the insanity of the narrators or what the stories symbolize. Gilman and Poe have truly mastered the art of creating seemingly unrealistic events in to an overall plausible story.
Works Cited
- Maryland , Hilary. “Prowess and Poise: Paralympians Should Be Household Names.” The Yellow Wallpaper: a 19th-Century Short Story of Nervous Exhaustion and the Perils of Women’s ‘Rest Cures,’ The Conversation, 13 Feb. 2018,theconversation.com/the-yellow-wallpaper-a-19th-century-short-story-of-nervous-exhaustion-and-the-perils-of-womens-rest-cures-9230.
