The Yellow Wallpaper Montresor Mental Illness

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The protagonist in Edgar Allen Poe’s “the Cask of Amontillado” and the protagonist in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “the Yellow Wallpaper” suffer from mental illness. Specifically for Poe’s story, the narrator and main character is Montresor; he is a psychopath. Montresor commits a crime against his friend, Fortunado who caused many “injuries” (Pike and Acosta 543) towards Montresor, but what he did is never mentioned. Patrick McGrath, in an essay for the New York Times newspaper, notices the psychopathy in “the Cask of Amontillado.” He notes the type of characters Poe creates, “but none are quite as deranged as the narrator of ‘The Cask of Amontillado.’ His name is Montresor…;” The “deranged” behaviour of Montresor is hidden within the important …show more content…
All throughout the story her name is ambiguous until the end when she has a psychotic break by tearing off the wallpaper in her room. Once Jane has the episode, she sets the woman behind the wallpaper, who represents her true identity, free. This is where the woman possesses Jane and the narrator is given a name: “‘I’ve got out at last,” said I, “in spite of you and Jane’” (Pike and Acosta 560). Jane Thrailkill is a critic of “the Yellow Wallpaper” and thinks “the narrator recognizes the woman in the paper as herself, and suddenly sees her embodied, observing, recording self as the enemy, referring to her in the third person as ‘Jane’” (551). Jane is known as the victim in the story since she is a prisoner in her own home and mind, but she sees herself as the antagonist. Actually, police departments are known to name any unidentified female victim as “Jane Doe.” Just like the female victim, Jane is lost and no one except for her knows the type of person she is. When she cannot do what she loves: reading and writing, she cannot find her true self. In other words, she is an unidentified person when her thoughts are trapped and cannot be expressed. Jane’s name is a discreet way to describe her mental

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