McGervey

Shelby C McGervey
Humber
English 11B
Wed, Oct 10, 2022
Poe Vs. Charlotte
By law, if a person is charged with insanity they will not be sent to prison, and
rarely will be freed from a sentence. They will be charged with a stay in a mental
institution, and if treated to the point of sanity they may even be given even more
time in prison. Like the narrators from both A Tale Tell Heart by Edgar Allen Poe
and The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, insanity can cause a plethora
of things that mentally healthy people cannot fathom. From dismembering a simple
old man for no other reason than his eye to losing your mind so far you crawl over
your lover's lifeless body because of wallpaper. The similarities between their
mental states are few and far between.

The narrator of a telltale heart is a man paranoid over an eye. He raves over it,
terrified until something in him snaps. He begins the story by telling us he is not
insane, he isn’t mad and has full mental capacity. He knows exactly what he has
done and why it is reasonable to him. But, to any other person, it makes no sense.
Opposite, the narrator of The yellow wallpaper has no idea she is slowly losing her
mind. Her writings seem so nonchalant and in the beginning, it isn’t obvious what’s
happening. With her, it's slow, and before you realize she's already past the line.
Professionals say this may be the initial shock of postpartum depression after the
birth of her child turning into a more heavy form of schizophrenia and paranoia.
With Poe’s narrator, he writes it as if it were a snap in his subconscious that
pushes forward possible paranoid schizophrenia or OCD. [Wordpress] Their triggers
are also fairly different. Poe’s narrator says the eye is the beginning, it’s the
first and only factor. Through his writings, it is implied that there's something
wrong with the eye that compels him, but once the deed is done he cannot get rid of
the delusions. Obviously, the dead man's heart wasn't still pumping, his
hallucinations and guilt propelled him into confession and if it weren't for that
he may have continued to do other heinous acts due to paranoia. Charlotte's
narrator, as far as the audience knows, doesn’t commit any crimes or acts that
would imply her danger to others. Her slip from sanity is caused by repetitiveness
and depression that many had to go through at the time. It slowly takes her over
until she takes the persona of the woman in the wallpaper. Other than a personality
change we don’t know what she does. We see the final piece in her head that fully
transforms her, unlike Poe’s narrator who is like this from the beginning.

Their similarities really stop with neither of them thinking they are in the wrong
and that they have a mental illness of some kind. Poe’s narrator kills someone with
almost no remorse shown until his life is negatively affected, even then he doesn't
really feel bad about it. He just tries to convince the reader what he did was
completely justified. Charlotte's narrator doesn’t do anything wrong, but there's
no question about her sanity or internal conflict about where she’s heading. She
fully accepts it.

In conclusion, the narrators have more differences than they do similarities.

Neither is in a healthy state of mind and that is what their stories are about. On
the other hand, they start at different points in their progression so we don’t
know if there's more to either that ties them together even more. He believes he is
justified, while she thinks there's nothing to be even thought about.