Compare And Contrast The Yellow Wallpaper And The Fall Of The House Of Usher

Amyia Davis
02/01/23

Comparative Essay on The Yellow Wallpaper and House of the Usher

“There is no greater tragedy than losing yourself. To lose yourself is to lose all hope, all meaning, all purpose. To lose yourself is to be lost forever.” Prolonged social isolation, according to research, raises the potential for mental health concerns. Furthermore, a McGill University research team showed that isolation can cause a skewed perspective of time, elevated levels of anxiety, and even hallucinations after only a few hours. In this essay, I will compare how The Yellow Wallpaper and The Fall of the House of Usher examine the themes of how isolation can lead to madness and insanity, being controlled can often allow one

To begin, the main characters Jane and Roderick are indeed suffering from a mental illness and with the only answer being isolation, it only resulted in a troubled mind. For example, in The Fall of the House Of Usher, the home serves as a metaphor for isolation, representing how individuals become insane when they cannot communicate with other people. With this evidence, Roderick is mentally ill and reticent; the narrative aims to illustrate how the home collapsing reveals that being alone leads to insanity. In addition, in the novella The Yellow Wallpaper, it's the narrator's imprisonment that ultimately drives her insane. After staring at the print for a long time, she thought a woman was lurking in the wallpaper. For instance, the longer she stays alone, the more insane she gets. In fact, she can see the surrounding environment deteriorating; the wallpaper is getting worse and worse. It goes from being ripped off in places to being a weak body that wants to get out. Also, from the change in her perspective on her wallpaper, the reader realizes she's gone insane. In brief, the evidence is significant because, for Jane; the wallpaper comes to life on her and shows her madness; this proves that the longer you are isolated, the more the wallpaper seems to run away.

The narrative The Yellow Wallpaper ties into the period when women were often characterized as “childish” and “weak”, meaning that it shunned them from having any form of control in their own lives. In the Yellow Wallpaper, Jane’s character played a huge impact in giving a reader's insight into the lifestyle of women in the late 1800s. According to the text, Jane states, “John laughs at me, of course, but one expects that in marriage.” This quote highlights the idea that John belittles her, which contributes to her depression and lack of self-expression because of the powerful authority John has over their marriage. Comparatively, in The Fall of the House of The Usher, Roderick claims that the Usher mansion has intelligence and some control over its residents. In the text, “He had certain sick fears about the house in which he lived, and he had not stepped out of it for many years. He felt that the house, with its gray walls and the quiet lake around it, had somehow through the long years gotten a strong hold on his spirit. He said, however, that much of the gloom which lay so heavily on him was probably caused by something more plainly to be seen — by the long-continued illness.” This information shows Roderick believes his destiny is tied to the family mansion. Therefore, being under control can often cause an individual to feel less of