The Tell-Tale Heart Versus The Yellow Wallpaper

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In Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart” and Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper,” the narrators of each story exhibit similar behavior when being driven to insanity. In “The Tell-Tale Heart,” the narrator murders an old man because of his “evil eye,” dismembers the body and places it underneath the floorboards, and grows increasingly paranoid about a ticking noise he hears, leading him to confessing to the police. In “The Yellow Wallpaper,” the narrator and her husband, John, visit an old estate for the summer, where John confines her to a room with yellow wallpaper, in which she slowly descends into madness and visualizes a woman within the pattern. Both authors are unreliable, but in different fashions; the narrator in “The Tell-Tale Heart” is unaware of what is real and what is not, whereas the narrator in “The Yellow Wallpaper” projects onto the …show more content…
The narrator demonstrates her disagreement to John by saying, “Personally I believe that congenial work, with excitement and change, would do me good” (Gilman 1). The disagreement is over the fact that John has confined her to the attic room in a summer home. Her confinement leads her to obsess over the patterns on the walls, where she creates a woman she believes is trapped inside the wallpaper. This obsession causes her to believe she is the woman in the wallpaper, saying, ““I’ve got out at last,” said I, “in spite of you and Jane! And I’ve pulled off most of the paper, so you can’t put me back!”” (Gilman 17). The woman in the wallpaper is the narrator herself in the room, but she is unaware of that. The narrators of both “The Tell-Tale Heart” and “The Yellow Wallpaper” demonstrate their submission to madness through being unable to decipher between what is real and what is fictional, and living in solidarity, leading to obsession and
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