Tell Tale Heart and the Yellow Wall Paper

“The Tell -Tale Heart” by Edgar Allan Poe, was released in 1843. It is one of Poe’s shortest stories and provides a look into paranoia and mental deterioration. “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, was released in 1899. This story also provides a look into mental deterioration and had been misinterpreted when it was first published. The Poe and Gilman stories discussed in this essay will help readers comprehend the credibility of the narrators and the different symbolisms used to create informative yet suspenseful content.

The Tell A tale Heart is a story that has a fear factor it is a horror story, It is made to put pressure on the reader to induce fear. It is about a butler that loves his master , but also he thinks that his eye is evil with his condition cataracts. In the short story there is a urgency for justice towards the old man when the butler kills him in bed. You also feel scared for the man and you feel emotion for the old man being killed. It is also very detailed in what happens and how it happens. In the end there is justice for all of the evil done from the butler towards the old innocent man that he killed then dismembered his corpse. This is some of the stuff that set apart The Tell A tale Heart From the other short story There Will Come Soft

    "The Yellow Wallpaper" takes a close look at one woman's mental deterioration. The narrator is emotionally isolated from her husband. Due to the lack of interaction with other people the woman befriends the reader by secretively communicating her story in a diary format. Her attitude towards the wallpaper is openly hostile at the beginning, but ends with an intimate and liberating connection. During the gradual change in the relationship between the narrator and the wallpaper, the yellow paper becomes a mirror, reflecting the process the woman is going through in her room.

In Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Black Cat” the story tells how the narrator falls into alcoholism and turns into a violent, mad person. His change in personality causes him to kill his first cat. While in his fit of killing the second cat, his wife tries to defend the cat, then her husband accidently kills her. “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman clarifies how the narrator has a wild imagination, but for treatment of depression, her husband keeps her confined to her bedroom (Gilman 88). With him taking away any way for her to use her imagination, it causes her to become extensive and turn it into craziness (Gilman 96). Both stories show significant similarities of the main characters suffering and how it affected their regular lives, but there’s a contrast between the two stories also.

Throughout “The Yellow Wallpaper” and “What the Tapster Saw” there were many similarities. Some of the main ideas were setting, insanity, doctors, and the sudden and gradual changes. The ideas of the stories have many similarities, even though they in very different times and places. The ideas of “The Yellow Wallpaper” are composed of inner thoughts of self- imposed insanity. “What the Tapster Saw” was an inner evaluation of the surrounding world situations about country invasion and how humans can only function under certain circumstances due to our nature of modern civilization.

First, horror is developed in “The Tell Tale Heart” by the insanity of the narrator. The narrator believes he is a sane person, but contradicted himself when he kills the old man. This creates a complex in the character’s mind. When the police shows because the neighbors heard a yell, he begins to hear the old man’s heartbeat, but his guilt consumes him and he confesses to murdering the old man and putting his body underneath the floorboards. Also, in the beginning of the story, the narrator describes why he wants to kill the old man. “It was impossible to say how first the idea entered my brain; but once conceived, it haunted me day and night” (Para. 2). His insane idea of killing the old man because of his vulture eye pops into his thoughts without a preconceived notion of doing so. The murder is premeditated and thought out as each night he cracks the door open and glares the lantern directly at the vulture eye. The insanity of the narrator develops “The Tell Tale Heart” into horror.

A mental health patient, a crazed murderer, and an amnesiac murderer; sounds like a recipe for disaster. Each of the three stories that we read had very unreliable narrators. “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman is about a woman with a mental health problem who has moved into a new house and is “prescribed” rest almost all hours of the day in her room, throughout the story we see an unfolding of her mental breakdown. “Tell-Tale Heart” by Edgar Allan Poe is about a madman (as the narrator himself puts it) who is driven to kill an old man just because he despises the old man's eye. “Strawberry Spring” by Stephen King is about a college student who kills a woman every time a suspicious fog rolls in around him, but he completely forgets

Diana Diaz La Palme Eng Comp 102 August 1, 2014 Contrast and Compare All stories are different, but are all the same in that they all contain a message. Stories are for entrainment or to tell you a lesson. “The Story of an Hour” and “The Yellow Wallpaper” both tells the story of a woman longing for freedom; the woman in “The Story of an Hour” finally obtains her freedom through death, while the woman in “The Yellow Wallpaper” freedom comes thanks to her fall into madness.

9. The major conflicts of the protagonists of The Moths and The Yellow Wallpaper are very similar despite being from two different backgrounds. In both stories, an aspect in their lives is haunting the protagonists and they cannot separate themselves from it. In the Moths, the main character hates her large hands that she refers to them as being mannish.

The narrator spends her time at the attic where she is kept by John. She shifts her attention to the yellow wallpaper. The paper repels her. The narrator starts to write about the wallpaper. The narrator sees a woman trapped inside the wallpaper.

Not allowed to write, the narrator becomes infatuated with the wallpaper in the room, which she discovers to be hideous and then fascination; on its messy exterior she in the end decodes and imprisoned woman who she makes an effort by taking off the wallpaper from the walls. I found this persuasive of it giving hopes to find out why the story of a middle-class wife went angry by a patriarchy directing her, and how it has become and American Feminist

“The Yellow Wallpaper” provides an insight into the life of the narrator- a woman suppressed and unable to express herself because of her controlling husband- leading the reader down her fall to insanity, allowing for her inner conflict to be clearly expressed. The first person point of the view the author artfully uses and the symbolism present with the wallpaper cleverly depicts the inner conflict of the narrator, losing her own sanity due to the constraints of her current life. However, while it seems that the narrator in “ The Yellow Wallpaper” succumbed to her own insanity, the endless conflict within herself and her downward spiral to insanity is seen through a different light, as an inevitable path rather than a choice taken as the story develops.

A common topic in many short stories is the the thought that everybody has an cruel and violent nature inside of them. The Tell-Tale Heart brings this to a whole new level, and shows the entire dark side of a man. The

Gothic literature is known for exploring the wicked, dark desires of ancient enclosed places, violence or death, and sometimes romance to stress on the influence of feelings and admire the potential power of one’s mind to engage in the external world emotionally. It is mostly created by personal experiences or the uncontrollable subconscious that fosters the desire to escape from reality. The characters, setting, and tone are important contributing factors within the stories because it helps guide the human mind into discovering the darkest dangers in a whole new world. Through the stories Tell Tale Heart and The Yellow Wallpaper we can see how gothic literature plays an important role in stimulating reader’s and awakening their sensibility by dramatizing an unease to capture the psychological danger.

The Tell-Tale Heart is the first-person narrative of an unnamed character that is taking care of an old man with a clouded eye. His feverishly heightened senses lead to an irrational fear of the clouded eye. The fellow becomes so distressed with the eye that towards the end he murders the old man. The narrator chops the body up, hides the pieces under the floorboards, and dresses the room so as to hide all signs of the crime. In the end, he loses his cool and bids the police tear up the floorboards to reveal the body.