Poe was born in a family of professional actors in the year 1809, on January 19th in Boston. At the age of three, Edgar Allen Poe lost his mother and father and Edgar Allen Poe was separated from his elder brother and a younger sister. The children were dispersed and went on to live with different families. Edgar was sent to John and Frances Allen who lived in Richmond, Virginia and was this given their middle name Allen. Poe was an astounding writerand was an expert in writing styles such as poetry and non-fiction--and a leader of genus such as mystery and horror stories. Poe also had immense knowledge and interest for science and medicine. Indeed, Poe through his poem Eureka in 1948 was the very first person to determine Olbers illogicality of cosmology and astrophysics. Poe was way ahead of time when it came to the process of research. Edgar Allan Poe was not just known to his generation as a writer, in fact he was also a renowned editor and critic whose poems and short stories were acclaimed only by a small number of audiences. His hallucination asserts that certainty for the human being is basically bottomless, conflicting to outside realism, and deeply unreasonable in nature. Two generations later he was summoned by the symbolist group as the forecaster of the contemporary responsiveness.
Charlotte Anna Perkins Stetson Gilman was born in Hartford, Connecticut, U.S. on July 3, 1860 and died in Pasadena, California on Aug. 17, 1935. Charlotte Perkins grew up in a very poor family where her father having fundamentally deserted the family. Her education was unbalanced and incomplete however she managed for some time to go to the Rhode Island School of Design. In May 1884 she wedded Charles W. Stetson who was an artist by profession. She however could not adjust to the life of a domesticated wife and soon separated from her husband as she had started to suffer from a nervous breakdown and be totally unsuited to the domestic routine of marriage, and after a year or so she was suffering a major nervous breakdown. After moving on to California, Perkins had started to write poems and short stories for miscellaneous. The Yellow Wallpaper which was initially published in The New England Magazine was among the best of her short stories and was known for a major realistic account of the a mental nuance of a pampered but psychologically ravenous young wife.
Comparing insanity as the main theme in the Yellow Wallpaper, Cask of Amontillado, the Black Cat and a Tell Tale Heart
Though The Cask of Amontillado and The Yellow Wallpaper both demonstrates the major characters to be of dubious wisdom, they depict lunacy in a different way for men and woman. Madness in women is far more restrained than it is in men. This is mainly owed to how men and women are visualized differently. Edgar Allan Poe and Charlotte Perkins Gilman have very varied styles of writing and so write about the topic of madness differently from each other. One of the reasons was that they belonged to different periods, where men and women were treated differently.
In Cask of Amontillado the major character is moved on by an insane want to demand revenge on Fortunato. Montresor visualizes that Fortunato has affronted him in some grave way. This is obvious in the aperture of the narrative where Montresor introduces the personality of Fortunato and pays references to much enlightenment he has previously tolerated from him. The narrator further mentions, that he has tolerated enough insult from Fortunato until now and that he could not tolerate it any further. If one was to question why Edgar Allen Poe did not reveal this information, one may think that he wanted to aim on the idea of depicting how Montresor was being an untrustworthy storyteller and did not want to illustrate the full degree of his madness. The Yellow Wallpaper portrays a woman with a theoretical anxiety as she slowly goes into a state of insanity. The heroine of the story has been has been taken away from home on a vacation, from her husband who was a doctor by profession. Because she is a female, she is shown to be delicate, and in requirement of a man to set limitations for her. Due to the limitations put ahead her by her loving husband she is allowed not to do a single thing that would possibly strain her weak feelings and starts to build up a harmful charm for the wallpaper in her room.
As she becomes more fanatical with the wallpaper, we see her repulsion of it turn into an overexcited image of her perplexing and dizzying fall into madness. She is a writer characterized in the story and as she says I know a little of the principle of design, and I know this thing was not arranged on any laws of radiation, or alternation, or repetition, or symmetry, or anything else that I ever heard of (Gilman 12).
This was one of the possible reasons why she got infatuated with the wallpaper in the beginning. As her husband glorifies his want to keep her in isolation and keep her talent away from any incentives she would start staring at the wallpaper with rising eagerness and also starts seeing objects which are not even there on the wallpaper. This is evident from the following lines There are things in that paper that nobody knows but me, or ever will. Behind that outside pattern the dim shapes get clearer every day (Gilman 14).
Eventually at the closing of the story mental disturbance becomes quite evident and noticeable. She would spend most of her time trying to figure out the wallpaper and did not find anything else interested. Finally although the change is very slight, the moment of her madness is fully exposed in this line --there are so many of those creeping women, and they creep so fast. I wonder if they all come out of that wall-paper as I did (Gilman 19).
In comparing The Yellow Wallpaper and The Black Cat by Edgar Allen Poe, we will see again the theme of insanity as a common theme. Both the stories are penned down by American authors. One more common thing in both the stories is the use of color in their titles. The Black Cat is about a psycho lover of animals who finds a black cat and makes friends with her. However eventually a moment occurs and the man hangs the cat after cutting out its eye. Therefore the narrator shows madness. He again finds another black cat and befriends her till she finds it not interesting anymore. One day he trips down the stairs of his cellar because of the cat and wants to kill it with an axe. But he is stopped by his wife from doing so however she faces the trauma and is killed by her husband. Later on she is discovered walled with the cat when the police come around looking for her. Edgar Allen Poe characterizes his understanding of madness, and confronts the readers deferral of incredulity by using metaphors in unfolding the plot and characters. Foreshadowing is one of the imagery used to describe the scenes of sanity versus insanity. He writes for the neither most wild yet homely narrative which I am about to pen, I expect nor illicit belief. Yet mad I am not- and surely do I not dream. (Poe 18)
The destiny of the mad man in Black Cat is very similar to the one in The Tell-Tale Heart. It seems that Poe tries to utilize satire and overstatement to somewhat cruelly ridicule his characters slip into sanity. They wrongly associate sanity with the capability to remain calm and the capability to build and carry out plans. Both characters act as if they are mentally stable and normal at the start of the story however they are shattered men, jabbering their acknowledgments to the policemen. In Tell-Tale Heart the nature of transformation of the characters mental state is very objective in nature and what seems to be the main reason for this transformation is great hypersensitivity, while in The Black cat the narrators condition is worsened in the itinerary of the story by his waning personality and the rising love of the cat.
The Tell-Tale Heart, one of his best-known stories about murderous madness, is also one of his most psychologically complex works. The story is told in the first-person voice by the killer, who has obviously been locked up in a prison or in an insane asylum for his crime. He begins by arguing that he is not mad and that the calm ways he committed the crime and can now tell about it testify to his sanity.
The central problem of the story is the narrators motivation for killing the old man. He begins by assuring his listeners (and readers) that he loved the old man, that he did not want his gold, and that the old man had not abused him or insulted him. There was neither object nor passion for his crime instead, it was the old mans eye. He says that when the eye fell on him, his blood ran cold (Poe 15) and that he made up his mind to kill the old man and rid himself of the eye forever. Because the narrator provides no explanation for his extreme aversion to the eye, the reader must try to understand the motivation for the crime, and thus for the story itself, in the only way possibleby paying careful attention to the details of the story and trying to determine what thematic relationship they have to one another.
The Tell-Tale Heart, like many of Poes other tales, seems at first to be a simple story of madness however, as Poe well knew, there is no such thing as meaningless madness (Poe 17) in the short story. The madness of the narrator in this story is similar to the madness of other Poe characters who long to escape the curse of time and mortality but find they can do so only by a corresponding loss of the selfa goal they both seek with eagerness and try to avoid with terror.
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