Charlotte Perkins Gilman and \"The

¶ … Charlotte Perkins Gilman and "The Cask of Amontillado" by Edgar Allan Poe

Nineteenth century American literature is characterized by the horror and mystery genres, wherein the works of famous writers such as Edgar Allan Poe, Charlotte Perkins, and William Faulkner, among others, proliferated. Most of the literary works under the horror and mystery genres provide insightful depictions and illustrations of social criticisms that the writers wants to critique symbolically or figuratively. In effect, stories of the grotesque are primarily used to increase awareness on a particular social issue.

Indeed, this objective is found in the works of popular writers Edgar Allan Poe and Charlotte Perkins Gilman, whose works criticizes social issues through symbolism and via the horror story genre. Specifically, Poe and Gilman's works have the dominant themes of psychological downfall into insanity and the celebration of death. This paper discusses and analyzes the short stories "The Cask of Amontillado" by Poe and "The Yellow Wallpaper" by Gilman regarding these two themes. These stories are described to be tales of grotesque because of both stories' depiction of insanity of their respective protagonists, while Poe's story utilizes death (specifically murder) as one of the consequences of insanity.

The texts that follow offers a comparative analysis of how Gilman and Poe utilizes the themes of (1) the protagonist's downfall to insanity and (2) the celebration of death to discuss issues of social relevance and offer a creative avenue for social criticism.

The short story "The Cask of Amontillado" illustrates both themes of the protagonist's downfall to insanity and celebration of death through the commitment of murder. The story shows how Poe, through the main character's (Montresor) narration, behavior, and action, is able to generate fear and the air of mystery, especially in illustrating the shocking narration and illustration of the death of Fortunato, the man Montresor despised and considered as his enemy and competitor.

Different forms of irony are used in the story to illustrate the presence of these two dominant themes. With verbal irony, Poe illustrates through the narrator/Montresor's language and dialogues the forthcoming death of Fortunato, established already at the start of the story. As Montresor narrates the unpleasant between him and Forunato, which made the former despise the latter, Montresor planned to avenge his humiliation from Fortunato: "I must not only punish but punish with impunity. A wrong is unredressed when retribution overtakes its redresser. It is equally unredressed when the avenger fails to make himself felt as such to him who has done the wrong." Montresor, as the narrator (still not identified as such in this part of the story), uses formal language in a threatening and determined tone his pledge of revenge to Fortunato.

Furthermore, the use of Montresor's doubly-meaningful language while conversing with Fortunato illustrates effectively that his actions and behavior towards his enemy is not parallel with the words he uses while conversing with Fortunato: "I continued... To smile in his face, and he did not perceive that my smile now was at the thought of his immolation." Indeed, through language, Poe uses Montresor and his verbal conversations and interactions with Fortunato to show how Montresor uses concealment to hide his true character, which is that of a madman and a murderer.

It is evident that as the story progresses, Montresor gains advantage over Fortunato, who is clueless about his friend's plan to kill him. Montresor, once the insulted and underdog, shifted from being a respected man to being a cold-blooded and ruthless killer: "... I busied myself among the pile of bones of which I have before spoken... With these materials and with the aid of the trowel, I began vigorously to wall up the entrance of the niche." In "The Cask," both insanity and murder operates to create a feeling of the grotesque all throughout the story. Moreover, these themes were symbolically "concealed" by Montresor's cultured personality (to hide his insanity) and the cask of Amontillado (to hide his murder of Fortunato).

While Poe uses both themes of insanity and murder in his story, Gilman's "The Yellow Paper" effectively uses the protagonist's downfall to insanity to portray the grotesqueness of not only of psychological instability, but also of emotional repression the woman character had experienced in the story.

As the woman's insanity progresses further, the significance of the yellow paper comes into focus as the story's symbolic object that illustrates women suppression in Gilman's society. The house that they rented for the summer for rest and relaxation had yellow wallpaper pasted on a wall in one of the bedrooms wherein the woman sleeps in. The constant suppression of her husband to let her roam around the house, and his insistence to rest and sleep all day, became the catalyst for her to have delusions about the intricate patterns on the yellow wallpaper. Her daily 'imprisonment' inside the bedroom, and constant deliberation of where the pattern leads to and what the pattern is revealed to the woman an important discovery: the pattern in the yellow wallpaper, as the woman discovered, "... is like a woman stooping down and creeping about... At night in any kind of light... And worst of all by moonlight, it becomes bars!... [b]y daylight she is subdued, quiet. I fancy it is the pattern that keeps her so still." This, perhaps best summarizes and shows the woman's own feelings about her constant 'imprisonment' by her husband, and in general, by the society. The woman becomes aware that the pattern is a 'woman' like her.