Comparing Insanity In The Tell-Tale Heart And The Yellow Wallpaper

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There is a thin line between obsession and the black pit known as insanity.. Although obsessions may differ, the end result is the same the obsessor falls victim to their infatuation. Gilman use isolation to trigger the narrator’s obsession in The Yellow Wallpaper, while the narrator in Poe’s, The Tell-Tale Heart, is consumed by the eye of a man without a trigger. Obsession and insanity go hand in hand almost always, and in both The Tell-Tale Heart and The Yellow Wallpaper by Edgar Allan Poe and Charlotte Perkins Gilman respectively, the narrators give a first person point of view account that shows the reader their journey to insanity and the destruction of their mania.
An obsession isn’t just a switch in the brain for the most part, there …show more content…

It’s like when some know the lyrics to a song and that one line plays over and over in their head, but they can’t remember the name of the song and it bothers them. That’s what it’s like for the narrator's, every moment is spent think over and over about it, replaying the image of it. They are unable to escape it, until it’s gone. The obsessor of the wallpaper sees “a woman stooping down and creeping about behind the pattern” (122). The woman is the narrator and she is so lost in her mind already that she can’t see this. The yellow wallpaper also has the shadows of the barred windows casted upon it and she says the woman is behind them. She is obsessed and she “....pulled off most of the paper, so you can’t put me back” (129). She has lost her mind and was crawling on the floor, most likely with bloody nails and teeth as Gilman implied she, the narrator, had bitten at the bed posts. This isn’t normal behavior of a sane person. She came into this house with a nervous mind and ended up in the never ending pit that is insanity. While the obsessor of the eye wasn’t on the ground crawling around after destroying his mania, he was driven mad. The narrator acknowledges the fact that people view his actions as mad, but he disagrees. The fact of the matter is he couldn’t kill the man himself as that was not the object of his affections. The eye which

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