“The Fall of the House of Usher” and “The Yellow Wallpaper”: A Comparison Introduction

Charlotte Perkins Gilmans The colour paper has received wide acclamation for its accurate depiction of violence and the symptoms attributed to psychical breakdowns (Shu discharger 1985). While these symptoms whitethorn seem obvious from todays psychological perspective, Gilman was writing at the squiffy of the nineteenth vitamin C when the discipline of psychology was shut outside(a) emerging surface of a rudimentary psychiatric approach to treating the geniall(a)y ill.Though doctors open move to write round the treatment of insanity since ancient Greece, the history of madness has most often been percentageized by a series of popular images, images that may have stunted the development of a aesculapian model of kind illness as a high-risk anomalousity, an imaginative and corrupt Gothic horror, a violent cruelty that must be confined in asylums, and lastly as a untarnished unquiet disorder.The critic Annette Kolodny suggests that present-day(a) readers of Gilma ns story most apt(predicate) learned how to follow her pretended mold of mental breakdown by reading the earlier stories of Edgar Allen Poe (Shumaker 1985), and thitherfore we can locate these strata of historical representations in some(prenominal) The xanthous paper and Poes The Fall of the Ho use up of pathfinder.But where Poes depictions seem to sureise negative and olibanum not therapeutically useful stereotypes of madness, Gilman tempers her representations through the emerging psychological model, which allowed her to articulate a new image anticipating the 20th deoxycytidine monophosphate hope of curing mental diseases through psychological expression. Background Gilmans story depicts the mental collapse of a late 19th century housewife undergoing the sojourn Cure, who grows increasingly obsessed with a disturbing cover pattern.It has been suggested that contemporary readers would have read the story as either a Poe-like study of madness, yet most modern cri tics focus on a feminist reading in which the wallpaper intentionally represents the oppressive patricentric social system (Thrailkill 2002). Jane Thrailkill, in her essay about the psychological implications of The Yellow Wallpaper, argues that this feminist reading may actually block the work do by the story to shift 19th century medical conventions touch mental illness (Thrailkill 2002).Gilman stated that everything she wrote was for a purpose beyond mere literary entertainment, and that The Yellow Wallpaper was written in order to spotlight the dangers of certain medical practices, particularly to convince Weir Mitchell to multi furthermostiousness the method of his Rest Cure for sick ailments (which Gilman herself had unsuccessfully undergone) (Shumaker 1985, Thrailkill 2002).In Gilmans words, the story was, intended to pr stock-stillt people from going crazy, and it worked (Thrailkill 2002). Like Gilman, Poe may besides have suffered from mental illness, but following the concerns of his historical moment, Poe seems to have been more interested in the construction of aesthetic effects instead of how those effects cleverness change social and scientific perspectives.The only mention of a cure in Poes tale is the vague hope that reading a give pass on relieve excitement (Poe 2003). Nonetheless, Gilmans methods of representing madness clearly gather from Poe they both use an inspired manic voice, unnamed storytellers, nervous characters with no diagnosable illness, a rebellious foregrounding of the imagination, and a haunting climate with rational design that has been considered Poes signature style (Davison 2004).Published sixty eld earlier, Poes The Fall of the House of Usher in particular seems to watch The Yellow Wallpaper in its manor setting and mad characterizations, and hence can serve as an opening point from which to trace the 19th century transitions in cultural and scientific representations of madness that culminate in Gilmans t ale. Analysis In The Fall of the House of Usher, an unnamed vote counter, visit his old friend Roderick Usher, attempts to describe Rodericks madness through both external and internal signs of ridiculousity.Most immediately, Rodericks hair is described as wild and of Arabesque expression, which the bank clerk is unable to connect with either simple idea of universe (Poe 2003). Similarly, Rodericks demeanor strikes the narrator with an incoherence an inconsistency, and his voice is comp bed to that of the lost drunkard, or the irreclaimable eater of opium (Poe 2003), all of which mark his social difference as not understandable.After the entombment of his baby, Rodericks external madness intensifies he roams with unequal, and objectless step, has a more ghastly hue of face, a species of mad hilarity in his eyes, a restrained hysteria in his whole demeanor, and speaks in a gibbering murmur (Poe 2003). But all of these are, as the narrator puts it, the mere hidden vagaries of madness (Poe 2003). When it comes to representing the internal process of mental breakdown, Poe (at least in this story) still only describes Rodericks irrationality from an external and stereotypical position.Roderick describes his condition as a deplorable folly that will force him to abandon animateness and reason, he is enchained by certain superstitious impressions, and suffers from melancholy and hypochondriasis (two terms associated with earlier misunderstandings of madness) (Poe 2003). The only time we see the irrational survey process represented is in Rodericks monologue about entombing his sister alive, which uses dashes, italics, and capitalization to indicate a nervous desperation, as in Poes The Tell-Tale Heart.In contrast, Gilman drops almost all of these external and stereotypical descriptions of madness in her story, focusing instead on a faithful rendition of irrational thought processes, in particular the narrators growing regression with the yellow wallpaper . Early in the story, the narrator declares that shes fond of her room, all but that horrid wallpaper, but within a few pages this program line is turned around the narrator becomes fond of the room perhaps because of the wallpaper.It dwells in my mind so (236). The wallpaper gradually takes over the narrators thought process, breaking into former(a) observations without transition, as when the narrator looks out her windowpane and sees a lovely country, full of great elms and velvet meadows. This wallpaper has a kind of sub-pattern (235). Eventually she follows that pattern about by the hour until there are few passages in the text that are not about the wallpaper (238).As her obsession grows, the narrator becomes paranoid that her husband and stepsister are secretly do by it, and shes thus determined that nobody shall find the pattern out but myself (239). Despite her original loathing of the wallpaper pattern, by the end of the story the narrators obsession is so consuming tha t she claims, I dont want to leave until I have found it out (240). Instead of cosmos directly told that the narrator is enchained by her impressions like Roderick Usher, we are more realistically shown those irrational impressions at work in themind.Another method for representing irrationality is to cast it against a more rational perspective, which both these stories do. Poes narrator, for instance, claims to rationally explain away(p) the otherwise inexplicable events of The Fall of the House of Usher while documenting Rodericks breakdown (Gruesser 2004). The houses peculiar atmosphere must have been a dream his nerves is due to the bewildering influence of the gloomy piece of furniture the storm is merely an electrical phenomena (Poe 2003).And yet the uncertainty of events displayed in this account unreliability suggests that the narrator might himself be going mad. After describing Rodericks wild appearance, the narrator says, it was no wonder that his condition terrified that it effected me, and begins to feel the wild influences of Rodericks own fantastic yet impressive superstitions (Poe 2003). This softness to rely on his own perceptions causes the narrator to flee aghast when the house collapses, where a more rational or unaffected person might first summon the servants or police (Gruesser 2004).According to John Gruesser, the challenge in Poes use of unreliability is that he sets reason in showdown to the supernatural, straddling the Gothic/Fantastic genre where supernatural events are more likely than their rational accounts. This supernatural possibility seems to lessen the question of whether madmen are always delusional or can speak the truth, which becomes central for Gilmans story. The Yellow Wallpaper also uses a rational perspective in the character of her husband and physician John, who is practical in the extreme.He has no patience with faith, an consuming horror of superstition (235). Not only does John explain away the unsett ling nature of the house as a draught, but he also attempts to explain away the narrators mental illness, calling it a temporary nervous depression a slight hysterical vogue (234). As we will see, this explanation of madness as merely jitteriness will become a large concern for 19th century discussions on mental illness, and as such comes dour as far more scientifically realistic than explaining madness through the supernatural.Gilman also has her narrator attempt to rationalize her own madness, beginning the story with her claim of being ordinary people, and continuing this attempt to rationalize even through her mental deterioration it is getting to be a great effort for me to prize straight. Just this nervous weakness I suppose (238). While this use of unreliable explanations is similar to Poes, it reads as more realistic because Gilman frames her story in a way that denies the Gothic discourse of supernatural explanations.Despite its eventual medical ineffectuality, the lab el of jumpiness is one of the clearest literary representations of madness attempting to explain or deny its mental character. True nervous very, very drearily nervous I had been and am claims the narrator of Poes The Tell-Tale Heart, but why will you say that I am mad? (Poe 2003). The Usher family madness in The Fall of the House of Usher is likewise coded Roderick attempts to pass off their total and family evil as a mere nervous affection (Poe 2003).He has an inordinate nervous agitation and acute bodily illness, and a morbid asperity of the senses that makes most food, garments, odors, light, and sounds intolerable (Poe 2003). Madeline is diagnosed with a settled apathy, a gradual squander away, because whatever is actually wrong with her long baffled the skill of her physicians (Poe 2003). Whether or not these characters are actually mad, one gets the feeling that the word nerves is used by Poe to explain or make legible the Usher family condition for the mid-19th centu ry reader, indicating that it may be a biological earlier than moral or supernatural disorder.The narrator in The Yellow Wallpaper also articulates her condition as nervousness, but within the late-19th century closure of madness as merely nerves, this term seems to indicate less an explanation as much as an excuse or denial of any deeper mental problem. As the narrator says in what is easily read as a flippant tone, I never used to be so sensitive, I gauge it is due to this nervous condition, and of course it is only nervousness that causes her actions to require a greater effort (235).Though her husband has told the narrator that her nervous case is not serious, she expresses a new dissatisfaction with this diagnoses these nervous troubles are dreadfully depressing (236). This almost ironic but clearly critical representation of nervous disorders marks a break from Poes story, but even more importantly indicates the struggle Gilman went through in her own demeanor against the American medical industrys changing view of mental illnesses.Though The Yellow Wallpaper was written to specifically address the Rest Cure, as Thrailkill suggests, the story helped shift the medical paradigm from looking at the perseverings body to listening to their words (Thrailkill 2003). The story is permeated with this desire to address beyond the traditional psychiatric model not only is the narrator forbidden to write, but her physician husband only sees her physical improvements of grade and color, paternally dismissing any of her objections (240).To write, however, is the one thing the narrator consistently feels would make her well it is a relief to say what I feel and think. Thrailkill offers a reading that Gilmans narrator at first emulates Mitchells physiological approach in looking at the wallpaper, which then shifts to the spliff of a narrative surrounding the woman in the paper, essentially equate the narrator to a medical text (Thrailkill 2003).We do not take aim to stretch so far however, as the story is already frame as a diary or journal, that is, it claims to be the expression of a persons actual experience. Though the narrator has difficulty writing, she continues to write, honestly detailing the thoughts, feelings, and visions attending her mental breakdown in a manner that anticipates the 20th century psychological recognition that madness contains a candid lucidity (Davison 2004).A mentally unstable persons journal thus represents exactly the kind of irrelevant story that can cure, and which any beneficent reader can understand as a valid psychological experience of someone who is no longer seen as socially other or mad, bad, and dangerous. Consequently, while Poes The Fall of the House of Usher comes off as simply an entertaining story about some stereotypical madmen, Gilmans The Yellow Wallpaper is ultimately a psychologically real portrayal of the subjective experience of someone going mad.