How did the writers in the stories you
have studied represent madness?
I have been studying 'The Yellow Wallpaper' by Charlotte Perkins Gilman and 'The Tell Tale Heart' and 'The Black Cat' both by Edgar Allen Poe. In this Essay, I am going to explore the ways in which the writers portray madness. Madness is "The quality or condition of being insane." Or "Fury and rage." Both meanings are displayed in different ways in each story.
In all three stories, the writers use obsession and possessiveness to portray madness. In The Yellow Wallpaper, the narrator becomes obsessed with the yellow wallpaper pasted in the room that she has been kept within. She was made to rest in a room at the top of the house. This was called "The rest treatment" and was Weir Mitchell's cure to hysteria before Post Natal Depression was discovered; this is what the narrator is actually suffering from. At first she talks about how disgusted she is by the wallpaper. "The colour is repellent, almost revolting, a smouldering unclean yellow" This shows that although she finds the wallpaper disgusting, she seems to pay attention to detail. This becomes more obvious when she starts to become more interested with it, watching it at night and pointing out every detail about the different patterns. "I kept still and watched the moonlight on that undulating wallpaper!" When she becomes obsessed with the wallpaper, she becomes possessive, and notices other people looking at the wallpaper. "I've caught him several times looking at the paper! And Jennie too! I caught Jennie with her hand on it... I am determined that nobody shall find it out but myself!" This shows her obsession and possessiveness of the wallpaper because she gets angry when other people do no more then look at it! As she becomes more obsessed with the paper, her mind deteriorates and she becomes madder. So Charlotte Perkins Gilman uses obsession to portray madness and the deterioration of her characters mind.
In the Tell Tale Heart, the narrator (the gender of the which is unknown) becomes obsessed with the eye of the old man. The eye is described by the narrator as "the eye of a vulture -a pale blue eye, with a film over it" The narrator describes how he loves the old man, and how he had never wronged him. He then speaks of the eye, almost as an excuse for the murder. "Object there was none. Passion there was none. I loved the old man... For his gold I had no desire. I think it was his eye! Yes, it was this!" This excuse could be used to cover up the murder. However it is still no reason to kill someone, which suggests he's mad. Other reasons to suggest he is mad are the ways in which he goes about killing the old man. "Oh, you would have laughed to see how cunningly I thrust it in! I moved it slowly- very, very slowly, so that I might not disturb the old man sleep. It took me an hour to place my whole head within the opening" He takes so long just to get his head through the door, he always opened his lantern the tiniest bit, just so he could see the old mans eye, but every night he found it closed. He was obsessed with the old mans eye and it infuriated him whenever he gazed upon it. This is one way in which Edgar Allen Poe portrays madness - through fury.
In The Black Cat, the narrator became seems to thrive on violence and drinks way too much alcohol. He uses his alcoholism as an excuse, he says it drives
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him to madness and murder. "Through the instrumentality of the Fiend Intemperance!" In The Black Cat and the Tell Tale Heart, both narrators use their obsession as an excuse for their behaviour. However, in The Yellow Wallpaper, she doesn't even notice what she's doing. These obsessions are used to portray madness, through fury and violence as well as hate and personal ...
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In The Black Cat, the narrator became seems to thrive on violence and drinks way too much alcohol. He uses his alcoholism as an excuse, he says it drives
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him to madness and murder. "Through the instrumentality of the Fiend Intemperance!" In The Black Cat and the Tell Tale Heart, both narrators use their obsession as an excuse for their behaviour. However, in The Yellow Wallpaper, she doesn't even notice what she's doing. These obsessions are used to portray madness, through fury and violence as well as hate and personal possessiveness.
All three stories are written in first person, which gives you an incite into their thoughts and helps you understand their madness. The Tell Tale Heart and The Black Cat seem to be confessions, in The Black Cat the first line states "which I am about to pen" which suggests, like The Yellow Wallpaper, it could be a journal or diary. However, you are getting the point of view from people who are considered mad or insane. So their accounts are not completely reliable. In the Yellow Wallpaper, the narrator seems to be well controlled in her writing and her syntax is good, however as her mind disintegrates, so does her syntax. "Why there's John at the door! It is no use, young man, you can't open it! How he does call and pound! Now he's crying for an axe. It would be a shame to break down that beautiful door!" It becomes much like that of a child, which relates back to her illness - Postnatal depression. Not only does her syntax break up, but the chronological order of the story breaks up too. At the beginning when she comes into the room, she talks of bites being taking out of the bed, which she assumes was the fault of a child, as she suspected that the room was used as a nursery before hand. However at the end of the story whilst she is trying to move the bed, she says. "I got so angry I bit off a little piece at one corner" This shows the breakdown in chronological order, and the breakdown of her mind. Another example of this is the smooch she sees in the wall, which at the end, after she has tied herself to the bed post she creeps around. "I can creep smoothly on the floor, and my shoulder just fits in the long smooch around the wall, so I cannot loose me way" this shows that she has made this smooch. Due to this confusion of chronological order, the story itself becomes maddening. Charlotte Perkins Gilman uses this to make an impact on the reader, and make them feel as mad as the character whose journal they are reading. This is another way in which she portrays madness.
In the Black Cat the narrator is writing a confession. "For the most wild, yet most homely narrative which I am about to pen" yet he doesn't want people to think he's mad, so he too is very unreliable. "Mad indeed would I be to expect it, in a case where my very senses reject their own evidence. Yet, mad am I not." This is the same as the narrator in The Tell Tale Heart, who starts off the story explaining in full detail to the implied listener that he isn't mad "How, then, am I mad?" He uses repetition of the word mad. This alone gives the impression there is something not quite right about this narrator. So the narrative voice helps to explore madness because you see it all through the eyes of the mad, and don't know quite what to believe.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman uses the wallpaper as a metaphor for the oppression of women in society in her time. She says that she sees a woman, sometimes a few women, creeping around, or behind bars. "The faint figure behind seems to shake the pattern" This woman behind the bars is her; she had been locked away in this room and is desperately trying to get out, to escape insanity. It also
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shows how women in her day were treated, they were expected to do what they were told when they were told, so the women creeping around the room, around the garden, is a metaphor for how women had to stay hidden if they wanted to go out, they had to creep around so they weren't caught doing something they shouldn't be. This is also represented in the eyes on the pattern. Women were watched over and judged within society. She also uses the wallpaper to represent John. She talks of how the pattern has "bulbous eyes" that watch her every move, much like John, and society watch her, although and tries to take care of her, being locked up in a room, being watched constantly and being unable to be free are what led to her obsession with the wallpaper and drove her to madness. There is another metaphor within the story that represents women in society in the same way as the wallpaper. And this metaphor is the "yellow smell"
the narrator talks about how she "creeps all over the house" just like the women she sees in the wallpaper! This metaphor represents madness because it shows that she's desperate to break free but she's trapped inside her own mad mind.
In The Tell Tale Heart, Edgar Allen Poe uses the narrator's heartbeat to represent guilt. The narrator thinks he can hear the dead old mans heart beating under the floor boards. He's certain he's not the only one who can hear it "Until, at length, I found that the noise was not in my ears... It grew louder -Louder! - Louder! ... Almighty God! -No, no! They heard!" What he does not realise is that the noise he is hearing, which he suspects is the old mans heartbeat, is in fact his own as he becomes more afraid and more guilty, his heartbeat gets louder and intolerable. This forces him to confess "I admit the deed! - tear up the planks! Here, here! - It is the beating of his hideous heart" This is proof that he thought the noise was the old mans heart, rather than his own guilt and anguish. Edgar Allen Poe uses this guilt to portray madness by describing how it drives the narrator crazy and makes him confess.
In The Black Cat, the metaphor, although it is not completely obvious at first, is also guilt. He hangs his first cat Pluto, and the guilt appears metaphorically in the second cat. The second cat is exactly like Pluto apart from a white mark on his chest that represents gallows. The way he killed his first cat. "To my hatred of the beast, was the discovery, on the morning after I brought it home, that, like Pluto, it also had been deprived of one of its eyes." The guilt of the brutal murder of his first cat comes back to haunt him in the form of another cat exactly like Pluto. The death of Pluto helps to represent his madness because, when he hangs the cat he says "...hung it with tears streaming from my eyes, hung because I knew it had loved me, and it had given me no reason of offence." Neither are justified reasons for killing Pluto, which suggest he's mad - Edgar Allen Poe uses these unjustified reasons to portray the madness and fury of his narrator.
Another way in which the writers portray madness is through outside influences. There are outside influences in The Yellow Wallpaper, which come across metaphorically as well as literally. John is a big influence because he is the one keeping her locked up in this room and watching her every move, not allowing her to write or do anything productive. "I don't know why I should write this. I don't want to. I don't feel able. And I know John would think it absurd. But I must say what I feel and think in some way -it is such a relief" This quote shows how, although John and Society frown upon women speaking their views, she has to write them down and get them out someway to relief herself of some of the things
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that trouble. However, the writing alone did not stop her from becoming mad, she was locked up and unable to do anything for herself. Although John thought he was helping her, he was doing nothing more than helping the collapse of her mind. Charlotte Perkins Gilman uses Johns influence to show how her narrator is, almost helped into her madness.
In the Tell Tale Heart, the outside influence is his obsession. The eye is what draws him on, what leads him to insanity. He goes into the old mans room every night to see if his eye is open. Upon the eight night he woke the old man by accident, however he still opened the lantern "a simple dim ray, like the thread of a spider, shot out from the crevice and fell full upon the vulture eye. It was open - wide, wide open - and I grew furious as I gazed upon it." It seems mad to want to kill the old man whilst he is awake rather than when he is asleep and motionless, but because the eye is what spurs him on, what makes him furious, it's what led him to suffocate the old man. So the writer used the narrators mad choices to portray his madness.
In each story, madness and obsession leads the narrators to destroy or murder. In the Yellow Wallpaper, she destroys the wallpaper, however she believes that
his is what cures her from insanity. "'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!" she broke free from the wallpaper, however she seems to be a different person entirely. She talks of "Jane" who is otherwise not mentioned in the story. This suggests that Jane was the woman locked up in the room, staring at the wallpaper. However, this doesn't really make sense, which is another way in which Charlotte Perkins Gilman portrays madness.
In the Tell Tale Heart, the old mans "vulture eye" leads the narrator to kill him. "I made up my mind to take the life of the old man -and thus rid myself of the eye forever!" He wishes to get rid of the eye, because it makes him mad.
Similarly in The Black Cat, the alcohol infuriates the narrator, which leads him to kill the 2 cats and his wife. "Pluto began to experience the effects of my ill temper." This shows that, he knew he was angry, however he didn't realise he was also mad.
The writers of the three stories I have studied use strong metaphors to portray madness, the wallpaper, the eye and the cat. Edgar Allen Poe takes the meaning of madness in both ways. He talks a lot about fury and anger in his stories, where as Charlotte Perkins Gilman focuses more on the mental illness of her narrator. Both writers use obsession to get across why their characters are becoming mad, which is also portrayed through the use of first person narrative, you experience the events first hand. The main technique both writers use, is making their stories hard to understand, their mad and jumbled, just like the narrators in their stories. This leaves a lasting impression on the reader.
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