Language Is Used to Portray a Character\'s Mental State

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 of her narrator's state of mind is so entirely life-like and realistic that even today one could make a clinical diagnoses from it (a affective-depression disorder of some sort).

There are several ways in which Gilman's language choice point to the exact diagnoses in this story. 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 the paper as dirtying and needing to be cleaned, while the woman locked in her room sees the paper as entrapping) So the narrator sees herself as trapped and insanely struggling to make sense of patterns. She is also described as feeling as if it were not " worth while to turn my hand over for anything, and I'm getting dreadfully fretful and querulous. / / I cry at nothing, and cry most of the time." (Gilman) These words, taken with her feelings of being trapped and hopeless, seem like nearly clinical markers for depression and/or hysteria.

"The Tell-Tale Heart" is not nearly as clinically careful in its description of madness, and this is not only owing to the fact that its narrator claims to be sane and is even shocked that "you say that I am mad..." (Poe) Of course, the narrator of this short story seems even crazier from the very first line. The use of capitalization to get across stress in the speaker's voice is only one sign of instability. The very sentence structure used here is unstable and the punctuation overly expressive in lines such as "Almighty God! -- no, no? They heard! -- they suspected! -- they KNEW! -- they were making a mockery of my horror! -- this I thought, and this I think. But anything was better than this agony! Anything was more tolerable than this derision!" (Poe) The over use of dashes, exclamation marks and question marks helps to mark out, as it were, the excessiveness of the work. This piece is far more melodramatic and gothic than clinical. It is hard to imagine this effusive narrator belonging in a real asylum, with his fancy speech and absurd imaginings. He would seem more at home in an H.P. Lovecraft story raving about Cthulu than in a psychology text being examined by Freud. His larger-than-life persona is not made explicit only in his actions, for others have killed for no better reason than that someone had an evil eye, but in his over the top choice in language. Everything is said "in...enthusiasm.. vehemently," (Poe) as it were, with expansive phrases such as "the hellish tattoo," (Poe) and lines such as "ALL IN VAIN, because Death in approaching him had stalked with his black shadow before him and enveloped the victim." (Poe)