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Mental Illness In The Tell-Tale Heart And The Yellow Wallpaper

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Essay Assignment One Mental illness is an ongoing issue today and is extremely difficult to overcome without a proper and strong support system. It is especially true for the protagonists in “The Tell-Tale Heart” and “The Yellow Wallpaper.” The narrators both deal with mental illness and it begins to get out of hand due to an object causing them to go mad. Their mental illness altered their judgment. Gilman and Poe both had a theme of insanity portrayed in their plots and added to character development. “The Tell-Tale Heart” is about a young man who is suffering from a mental illness. He denies being mad, but a nervous man, “. . .very dreadfully nervous I had been and am; but why will you say that I am mad?” (Poe 68) Other than this bit …show more content…

In the beginning we learn that Jane, her husband John, their new baby, move into a supposedly haunted home for the summer so Jane can go through treatment for her illness. We also learn that John is a physician and Jane is struggling with depression but possibly progressed into post-partum depression after having their child. Jane stays in a room with barred windows, scratched floors, furniture that is nailed to the floor and what she says, “I never saw a worse paper in my life. One of those sprawling flamboyant patterns committing every artistic sin.” (Gilman 194) Jane’s husband insists of jane being isolated so she can rest, and that doing this would cure her illness as Jane spends more and more time in the room, she became obsessed with the strange patterns in the wallpaper, claiming “The front pattern does move-and no wonder! The woman behind it shakes it!” (Gilman 203) and that the woman is “all the time trying to climb through. But nobody could climb through that pattern.” (Gilman 204) Both characters in the stories believe they are okay but in reality, they have put up this façade that they are fine but are in fact actually ill. “The Tell-Tale Heart” narrator obsessions ends with him killing the old man who he lives with, trying to get rid of the dreadful eye the old man had. His obsession does in fact not free him but causes him to confess to murder. “The Yellow Wallpaper” narrator became

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