Comparison Of Insanity In Tell-Tale Heart And The Yellow Wallpaper

Insanity in “The Tell Tale Heart” and “The Yellow Wallpaper” In the short story “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, a new mother is forced to undergo the rest cure to try and heal. In the “Tell-Tale heart” Poe’s main character, a man known only by the ubiquitous title of caretaker, is insane prior to the start of the story. There are many similarities between these short stories, as well as many differences. These stories are similar; both dealing greatly with insanity and its physical manifestation, hallucinations. The stories are similar even in the forms of hallucinations the narrators suffer from. The greatest factor in the development of both of the stories are the characters' mental states. As the mental state of each

Merriam-Webster describes insanity as “a severely disordered state of the mind usually occurring as a specific disorder”. “Poe's short story features a narrator who deals with the symptoms of a serious mental disorder called schizophrenia. He hears things (in the end, the beating of a dead man's heart) that others do not hear, and he believes that people are out to get him. His thinking is distorted, and he has lost touch with reality.”(humanillnesses.com) The caretaker in “Tell Tale Heart” begins at the start of the story, completely and utterly insane, there isn’t any suspicion in existence by this point. If the caretaker hadn’t been insane, he wouldn’t have murdered the elderly man, and therefore would never have given himself up to the police. The caretaker exhibits many of the obvious symptoms of insanity; aggression, extreme paranoia, denial, hallucinations, delusion, elevated mood, and thoughts of conspiracy. He was paranoid; not only did he think the

The narrator of the yellow wallpaper has visual and olfactory hallucinations, but has a large and confusing fixation; yellow wallpaper; while the caretaker in “The Tell-Tale Heart” has visual and aural hallucinations but a fixation the size of a man’s eye. His insanity extended only as far as the eye was concerned; she went completely insane and actually began to have a second personality in an inexistent