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Recommended: Mental illness essay
A Reliable Narration of Mental Illness An author’s use of an unreliable narrator can effectively provide readers with a first-person experience of mental illness. Two authors who have masterfully utilized unreliable narrators in their short stories are Edgar Allan Poe and Charlotte Perkins Gilman. These particular authors intended to induce fear, influence psychology, or both with their use of an unreliable narrator. Edgar Allan Poe, an American author credited with inventing the horror genre, wrote his short stories intending to produce “a single, intense response in the reader” (Art 707). In Poe’s frightening short story, “The Tell-Tale Heart”, he produces this response with the use of an unreliable narrator. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, an …show more content…
The story begins with the narrator explaining the recommendations for treatment of her nervous depression given by her husband John, a physician. John brings the narrator to a secluded home for the summer, and orders her to rest in a bedroom with yellow wallpaper for the vast majority of her stay. The narrator quickly develops an obsession with the wallpaper and insists that there are “things in the wallpaper that nobody knows about but me, or ever will” (302). Here Gilman hints that the narrator’s logic is flawed and separate from her pragmatic husband rationale. Then, the narrator begins to see women trapped behind the wallpaper and is determined to free them. She creeps along the edges of room like the women she sees in the wallpaper waiting for the opportunity to free them. The climax of the story begins when the narrator is able to lock herself in the room to tear down the wallpaper in the absence of John. She starts tearing apart the wallpaper freeing all the women and believing she too has been freed she is pleased with her new ability to freely creep around the great room (308). Just as this takes place John opens the door and faints while the narrator “kept on creeping just the same” (308). This sequence of events, told from the narrator’s point of view, allows readers to infer that the narrator is an unreliable source of information. The reader is lead to disregard the narrator’s conception of reality, as her behavior is so shocking that it causes her husband to lose consciousness. Therefore, Gilman effectively utilized an unreliable narrator to accentuate her narrator’s mental
In the “Tell-Tale Heart” by Edgar Allan Poe, the narrator is extremely uncanny due to the reader’s inability to trust him. Right from the beggining the reader can tell that the narrator is crazy although the narrator does proclaim that he is sane. Since a person cannot trust a crazy person, the narrator himself is unreliable and therefore uncanny. Also as the story progress the narrator falls deeper and deeper into lunacy making him more and more unreliable, until the end of the story where the narrator gives in to his insanity, and the reader loses all ability to believe him.
Under the orders of her husband, the narrator is moved to a house far from society in the country, where she is locked into an upstairs room. This environment serves not as an inspiration for mental health, but as an element of repression. The locked door and barred windows serve to physically restrain her: “the windows are barred for little children, and there are rings and things in the walls.” The narrator is affected not only by the physical restraints but also by being exposed to the room’s yellow wallpaper which is dreadful and fosters only negative creativity. “It is dull enough to confuse the eye in following, pronounced enough to constantly irritate and provoke study, and when you follow the lame uncertain curves for a little distance they suddenly commit suicide – plunge off at outrageous angles, destroy themselves in unheard of contradictions.”
Edgar Allan Poe demonstrates a key theme through out gothic literature, which is the death of beautiful women due to fixation. He accomplishes this in two of his stories “ The House of Usher” and “Bernice”, by have an unreliable narrator in both of his stories telling the tale of how these two women fell from the horrible actions of emotionally and sexually repressed men. The unreliable narrator is a first person narrative that is experiencing everything occurring in the story. However, as the audience we are unsure wheatear or not we can trust this narrative. In Poe’s stories distrust is establish by the narrator mental state and how they choose to describe what is occurring around them.
Narration is one literary element of a story that controls the meaning and themes perceived by the reader. The author uses this as a way of putting themselves in their writing; they portray a personal reflection through the narrator. We see this in pieces of literature, such as Charlotte Gilman’s, “The Yellow Wallpaper”, an intense short story that critics believe to be an autobiography. Charlotte Gilman wrote this piece in 1892, around the time of her own personal mental depression, after the birth of her child. This story invites the readers into the mind of a well-educated writer who is mentally ill, and takes you through the recordings of her journal, as her mental health deteriorates so does the credibility of her writing. The author uses the element of the narrators’ mental health to create a story with different meanings and themes to her audience. Gilman uses the role of an unreliable narrator to persuade the audience’s perception of protagonists’ husband John and create a theme of entrapment.
Frightening details begin to unfold about the room, including: barred windows, a bolted down bed, and of course, the wallpaper itself (227). Gilman uses the imagery to create an air of suspense and insinuates the narrator’s coming fall into insanity. The setting of “The Yellow Wallpaper,” in large, leads to the narrator’s collapse. Almost instantly, the narrator’s already unstable mind perceives a ghostliness that begins to set her even more on edge. Her tense mind is then further pushed towards insanity by her husband,
After reading Charlotte Perkins Gillman's "The Yellow Wallpaper" I have come to think that the narrator does not suffer from hysteria. I have reached this idea from comparing the research I have done on hysteria to her symptoms in the story. In this paper I will discuss why I feel the narrator does not suffer from hysteria but may be suffering from postpartum depression.
The narrator was forced by her husband, John, to stay in a room all day and rest, he thought that he was doing her good by restricting her activities. In reality he was only doing more harm to his wife and making her go more insane. The narrator told John about the wallpaper and even though John knew that the wallpaper was bothering her he didn’t do anything about it. At the end of the story the narrator locks herself in the nursery and starts stripping the wallpaper off to free the woman, she even tries to capture the woman in the yellow wallpaper. “I want to astonish him. I've got a rope up here that even Jennie did not find. If that woman does get out, and tries to get away, I can tie her!”(Gilman Pg. 9) this quote shows that the narrator is trying to capture the woman in the yellow wallpaper to prove to her husband that the women is indeed real. The narrator’s husband comes in and sees what she’s doing and then he faints, the narrator creeps
In “The Yellow Wallpaper”, the author, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, through expressive word choice and descriptions, allows the reader to grasp the concepts she portrays and understand the way her unnamed narrator feels as the character draws herself nearer and nearer to insanity. “The Yellow Wallpaper” begins with the narrator writing in a journal about the summer home she and her husband have rented while their home is being remodeled. In the second entry, she mentions their bedroom which contains the horrendous yellow wallpaper. After this, not one day goes by when she doesn’t write about the wallpaper. She talks about the twisting, never-ending pattern; the heads she can see hanging upside-down as if strangled by it; and most importantly the
The short story titled, “The Yellow Wallpaper” is given its name for no other reason than the disturbing yellow wallpaper that the narrator comes to hate so much; it also plays as a significant symbol in the story. The wallpaper itself can represent many various ideas and circumstances, and among them, the sense of feeling trapped, the impulse of creativity gone awry, and what was supposed to be a simple distraction transfigures into an unhealthy obsession. By examining the continuous references to the yellow wallpaper itself, one can begin to notice how their frequency develops the plot throughout the course of the story. As well as giving the reader an understanding as to why the wallpaper is a more adequate and appropriate symbol to represent the lady’s confinement and the deterioration of her mental and emotional health. In Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper”, the color of the wallpaper symbolizes the internal and external conflicts of the narrator that reflect the expectations and treatment of the narrator, as well as represent the sense of being controlled in addition to the feeling of being trapped.
While the Narrator is denied contact and forced to remain in the bedroom due to her husband’s insistence she begins to create a world within the hideous yellow wallpaper that covers the walls. She sees patterns and shapes, such as trapped creeping women, in the wallpaper. In the beginning of the short story, it is clear that the narrator desires social interaction and even believes that it would improve her mental condition.
Evidence of Gilman's life experiences can be seen all throughout the story. The main character in the story, a slightly neurotic woman, is married to a prominent physician. This husband refuses to believe anything is wrong with his wife's health simply because her physical health is intact. Thus, he prescribes for his wife nothing more than relaxation and cessation of her writings. This character clearly correlates to the doctor who "treated" Gilman for her nervous breakdown. The description of the room and the wallpaper is clearly crucial to the story as a whole. The room itself is described as large and airy, with windows facing towards a "delicious garden." The wallpaper does not fit the room at all. It is a repulsive, pale yellow color. The description of the wallpaper seems to function metaphorically. The wallpaper becomes much more detailed and much more of a fixture in the main characters life as the story progresses. The wallpaper essentially takes on a life of its own. This progression seems to represent mental illness itself. As mental illness progresses, it becomes much more whole and enveloping. Gilman attempts to represent the depth of mental illness through the wallpaper. For example, the woman in the story comes to the conclusion that there is a woman in the wallpaper behind the pattern.
“John is so queer now, that I don’t want to irritate him. I wish he would take another room! Besides, I don’t want anybody to get that woman out at night but myself.”(Gilman) She is now imagining the woman out of the paper and creeping around outside. She wants to catch her even though there is no one to even catch, but she doesn’t know that. Her husband is at work all day which gives her the opportunity to creep around, explore and find this woman. Her husband John would suspect her of something if she left the room at night so she must do it during the day. This quote shows symbolism in relation to the fact that the woman in the paper is symbolizing the narrator wandering around outside. Moreover, she is clearly hallucinating about this woman in wallpaper. Her visibility of insanity is quite clear when the author says, “That was clever, for really I wasn’t alone a bit! As soon as it was moonlight and that poor thing began to crawl and shake the pattern, I got up and ran to help her. I pulled and she shook, I shook and she pulled, and before morning we had peeled off yards of that paper.” (Gilman) The narrator is imagining interactions that have occurred with the woman she sees in the wall. They begin to peel off all the paper, working together in her mind. She then begins to imagine the wallpaper laughing at her when the sun is out. It can be concluded that her husband should not be taking care of her because he is the sole reason she is insane in the first place. This quote demonstrates symbolism because the woman in the wall represents the psychotic state that the narrator’s husband has driven her to. With this in mind, the narrator becomes connected with the woman in the wall. “I have locked the door and thrown the key down into the front path. I don’t want to go out, and I don’t want to have anyone come in, till John comes. I want to astonish him. I’ve got a
The narrator, already suffering from a "nervous condition," is forced to stay in her bedroom for most of the story. Her husband does not let her do anything that may take the least bit of energy because she needs to concentrate her energy on getting well. Her mental condition quickly deteriorates from the original "nervous condition" to complete insanity due to this isolation. As the narrator begins to see figures behind the wallpaper, the reader realizes that the wallpaper is a manifestation of her condition.
Gilman shows through this theme that when one is forced to stay mentally inactive can only lead to mental self-destruction. The narrator is forced into a room and told to be passive, she is not allowed to have visitors, or write, or do much at all besides sleep. Her husband believes that a resting cure will rid her of her “slight hysterical tendency” (Gilman 478). Without the means to express herself or exercise her mind in anyway the narrator begins to delve deeper and deeper into her fantasies. The narrator begins to keep a secret journal, about which she states “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” (Gilman 483)! John tells his wife that she must control her imagination, lest it run away with her. In this way John has asserted full and complete dominance over his wife. The narrator, though an equal adult to her husband, is reduced to an infancy. In this state the narrator begins her slow descent into hysteria, for in her effort to understand herself she fully and completely loses herself.
Upon moving in to her home she is captivated, enthralled with the luscious garden, stunning greenhouse and well crafted colonial estate. This was a place she fantasized about, qualifying it as a home in which she seemed comfortable and free. These thoughts don’t last for long, however, when she is prescribed bed rest. She begins to think that the wallpaper, or someone in the wallpaper is watching her making her feel crazy. She finally abandons her positivity towards what now can be considered her husband’s home, and only labels negative features of the home. For example, the narrator rants about the wallpaper being, “the strangest yellow…wallpaper! It makes me think of… foul, bad yellow things” (Gilman). One can only imagine the mental torture that the narrator is experiencing, staring at the lifeless, repulsive yellow hue of ripping