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

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Insanity is a state of mind where you are not able to function like a normal person. In both, The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman and The Tell-Tale Heart by Edgar Allen Poe, the protagonists become fixated on an object. In The Yellow Wallpaper, the woman becomes obsessed with the yellow wallpaper surrounding her room, which soon takes control over her mind. In The Tell-Tale Heart, the man becomes obsessed with the eye of the old man, which causes him to commit a cold hearted murder. Both stories depict the theme of insanity, since there is a buildup of the protagonist becoming mad.
Insanity slowly develops in both stories. In The Yellow Wallpaper, the woman becomes insane due to the wallpaper surrounding her enclosed room. Insanity grew when she arrived to the vacation home; the house made her feel uneasy, she wanted to settle into the room downstairs that “opened into the piazza and had roses all over the window,” and she was forbidden from writing. In The Tell-Tale Heart, the man becomes insane considering that the eye of the old man is interpreted as the “evil” eye. He cannot stand his vulture eye, he fears …show more content…

The conflict begins as Gilman projects the narrator's inability to do anything she desires; her husband controls everything. Poe begins with the narrator being enraged by the hatred of the old man’s “evil” eye. Gilman adds an attribute to the narrator where the reader can visualize her becoming mad; she strips off all the wallpaper in her room, bites a piece of her bed as she becomes frustrated and ties herself with rope. Poe’s climax is a bit more dramatic, the narrator kills the old man and cuts up the body “not letting a single drop of blood to fall on the floor.” Both stories do not provide a clear

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