Language Madness Rooms

Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart" and Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper" are surprisingly coherent considering that they are meant to represent the thoughts of individuals going insane. Either one could easily have been done in a stream-of-consciousness style that would have quickly moved from linear plot into disjointed expressionism. Instead, both generally preserve an illusion of order and proceed in a linear fashion. Nonetheless, in both stories the narrative begins to decay as the end approaches and madness creeps into the very wordchoice and punctuation of the language.

In Gilman's story, though not so much so in Poe's, the language choices actually clearly point to an exact sort of psychological diagnoses, giving clues to the character's state in a then-common mental illness. "The Yellow Wallpaper" narrator is clearly suffering from nervous hysteria, not only because she says states that this is her diagnoses but also because of the symptoms presented in her language choices. Now, nervous hysteria is not now considered a particularly legitimate mental illness, but it was extremely common around the turn of the 19th century and extensively documented. As a woman, Gilman herself may have been diagnosed at some point with hysteria or had a friend who had been. Many critics today consider hysteria to be a diagnoses directly related to patriarchal social control over women. Despite that criticism, however, it did present real symptoms and could really be dehabillitating. Gilman's portrayal...

One of the most notable and obvious examples is her identification with the woman she imagines being "behind the pattern." (Gilman) This is of course obvious at the end when the narrator suddenly starts inverting her pronouns and refering to herself as being that woman. She begins by cleverly hiding a rope with which she will tie up the woman-in-the-pattern should that woman escape, and then within a matter of lines begins speaking of being herself tied by that rope. " I am securely fastened now by my well-hidden rope -- you don't get me out in the road there ! I suppose I shall have to get back behind the pattern when it comes night, and that is hard!" (Gilman) Yet this theme is evident in many very subtle ways as well. For example, when the narrator first discovers the woman she says: "I didn't realize for a long time what the thing was that showed behind, that dim sub-pattern, but now I am quite sure it is a woman. / / By daylight she is subdued, quiet. I fancy it is the pattern that keeps her so still. It is so puzzling. It keeps me quiet by the hour." (Gilman) In these lines there is a triple repetition of "quite...quiet..quiet" and the subject of these terms switches each time between the narrator and the woman. Likewise, the pattern is referred both to keeping the woman quiet and to keeping the narrator quiet. This connection between the narrator and the woman indicates that for her the paper is acting not so much as a spur to madness as to display and interpret it. The paper is a sort of Rorschach test in which the viewer sees whatever they want to imagine. (It cannot be coincidence that the housekeeper sees…