Dancing Within Sanity
Through the discourse of The Yellow Wallpaper and The Tell Tale Heart, both wrapped up and enclosed in the open space that entails its given genre, Gothic Literature. However, despite its given distinction of characters, settings, gender, and action, both are dually intertwined in regards to the nature each narrative and plot takes. The Tell-Tale Heart illustrates and manifests itself with a distinct narrator with a kind of “split nature”, a man who can perhaps be described as suffering from an intense form of paranoia, while the latter denoting an exacerbation of a mental condition and ultimately concluding with a paradoxical and freeing insanity, yet despite such unintended respite, both alike through the …show more content…
Now is the time that face should form another, Whose fresh repair if now thou not renewest, Thou dost beguile the world, unbless some mother.”(Shakespeare 3) such introduction and word craftsmanship creates the visual parallel between both narratives and the reader, through the mentioning of a metaphorical mirror as well as the mentioning of self reflection. In The Yellow Wallpaper, the narrator whom through isolation from the outside and physical world, joins in a mental union with the wallpaper, is given the opportunity to free herself as well as manifesting the reflection the future generations of humanity. Bak describes and gives meaning to such setting, as the following “It is a room whose wallpaper reduces an artistic and articulate woman to a beast, stripped entirely of her sanity and humanity and left crawling on all-fours in circuits, or smooches, about the room.” (Bak 1), such wallpaper, revealing to Jane, the narrator the condition of all men and women, “Behind that outside pattern the dim shades get clearer every day. It is always the same shape, only very numerous. And it is like a woman stooping down and creeping about behind that pattern. I don’t like it one bit. I wonder- I began to think- I wish John would take me away from here!”(751 …show more content…
As May states in “The Tell-Tale Heart: Overview”, “Although there are ostensibly two characters in “The Tell-Tale Heart”- an old man and the younger man who lives with him- the story is really about only one character psychically split in half.”(May 1) That character is not just the man in the story whom we claim to be paranoid and perhaps with a case of schizophrenia, but ourselves as well. The Tell-Tale Heart, separates us from our current mindset and breaks through our defense mechanisms that have so held the treasure within the dark of our minds. We are constantly torn and split in half, perhaps due to our fear, our fear of ourselves. Our fear of recognizing that we all suffer from this life binding sensation of anger, anxiety, guilt, paranoia, painful obsessions, insecurity, hurt and hate. As May states again in the same piece,“There is a kind of method to the narrator’s madness. The only way he can defeat the inevitability of time is to destroy that which time would destroy, that is the self. However, to
Through the discourse of The Yellow Wallpaper and The Tell Tale Heart, both wrapped up and enclosed in the open space that entails its given genre, Gothic Literature. However, despite its given distinction of characters, settings, gender, and action, both are dually intertwined in regards to the nature each narrative and plot takes. The Tell-Tale Heart illustrates and manifests itself with a distinct narrator with a kind of “split nature”, a man who can perhaps be described as suffering from an intense form of paranoia, while the latter denoting an exacerbation of a mental condition and ultimately concluding with a paradoxical and freeing insanity, yet despite such unintended respite, both alike through the …show more content…
Now is the time that face should form another, Whose fresh repair if now thou not renewest, Thou dost beguile the world, unbless some mother.”(Shakespeare 3) such introduction and word craftsmanship creates the visual parallel between both narratives and the reader, through the mentioning of a metaphorical mirror as well as the mentioning of self reflection. In The Yellow Wallpaper, the narrator whom through isolation from the outside and physical world, joins in a mental union with the wallpaper, is given the opportunity to free herself as well as manifesting the reflection the future generations of humanity. Bak describes and gives meaning to such setting, as the following “It is a room whose wallpaper reduces an artistic and articulate woman to a beast, stripped entirely of her sanity and humanity and left crawling on all-fours in circuits, or smooches, about the room.” (Bak 1), such wallpaper, revealing to Jane, the narrator the condition of all men and women, “Behind that outside pattern the dim shades get clearer every day. It is always the same shape, only very numerous. And it is like a woman stooping down and creeping about behind that pattern. I don’t like it one bit. I wonder- I began to think- I wish John would take me away from here!”(751 …show more content…
As May states in “The Tell-Tale Heart: Overview”, “Although there are ostensibly two characters in “The Tell-Tale Heart”- an old man and the younger man who lives with him- the story is really about only one character psychically split in half.”(May 1) That character is not just the man in the story whom we claim to be paranoid and perhaps with a case of schizophrenia, but ourselves as well. The Tell-Tale Heart, separates us from our current mindset and breaks through our defense mechanisms that have so held the treasure within the dark of our minds. We are constantly torn and split in half, perhaps due to our fear, our fear of ourselves. Our fear of recognizing that we all suffer from this life binding sensation of anger, anxiety, guilt, paranoia, painful obsessions, insecurity, hurt and hate. As May states again in the same piece,“There is a kind of method to the narrator’s madness. The only way he can defeat the inevitability of time is to destroy that which time would destroy, that is the self. However, to