Drills, Pills, and Ginger-Nuts “Bartleby, the Scrivener” by Herman Melville and “The Fall of the House of Usher” by Edgar Allen Poe both use isolated characters in a main role. These stories deal with how the isolation of man leads to the death of humanity.
Herman Melville was a writer during the 1850s American Renaissance. His father showed symptoms of mental illness and suffered delusions until his death, while Melville was still a young boy. Melville was successful with some of his first stories, but hit a bump in the road with later writings. At the time he had three children and was struggling finically, so he turned to poetry to help him provide for his family. Soon after this, his second son died. Melville entered a period of darkness and depression, which can be seen in many of Melville’s novels. Close examination of Bartleby …show more content…
Instead, asylums were merely reformed penal institutions where the mentally ill were abandoned by relatives or sentenced by the law and faced a life of inhumane treatment, all for the sake of lifting the burden off of ashamed families and preventing any possible disturbance in the community. The majority of asylums were staffed by unqualified individuals who treated mentally ill patients like animals. A case study describes a typical scene at a hospital starting with patients shackled to the wall in dark, cramped cells. Iron cuffs and collars permitted just enough movement to allow patients to feed themselves but not enough to lie down at night, so they were forced to sleep upright. Little attention was paid to the quality of the food or whether patients were adequately fed. There were no visitors to the cell except to deliver food, and the rooms were never cleaned. Patients had to make do with a little amount of straw to cover the cold floor and were forced to sit amongst their own waste that was also never cleaned up (Butcher
Herman Melville was a writer during the 1850s American Renaissance. His father showed symptoms of mental illness and suffered delusions until his death, while Melville was still a young boy. Melville was successful with some of his first stories, but hit a bump in the road with later writings. At the time he had three children and was struggling finically, so he turned to poetry to help him provide for his family. Soon after this, his second son died. Melville entered a period of darkness and depression, which can be seen in many of Melville’s novels. Close examination of Bartleby …show more content…
Instead, asylums were merely reformed penal institutions where the mentally ill were abandoned by relatives or sentenced by the law and faced a life of inhumane treatment, all for the sake of lifting the burden off of ashamed families and preventing any possible disturbance in the community. The majority of asylums were staffed by unqualified individuals who treated mentally ill patients like animals. A case study describes a typical scene at a hospital starting with patients shackled to the wall in dark, cramped cells. Iron cuffs and collars permitted just enough movement to allow patients to feed themselves but not enough to lie down at night, so they were forced to sleep upright. Little attention was paid to the quality of the food or whether patients were adequately fed. There were no visitors to the cell except to deliver food, and the rooms were never cleaned. Patients had to make do with a little amount of straw to cover the cold floor and were forced to sit amongst their own waste that was also never cleaned up (Butcher