Madness and Imprisonment in "The Yellow Wallpaper" and "In the Field"

Introduction: Shared Themes Across Contrasting Stories

The two stories reviewed and analyzed in this paper share common themes despite featuring very diverse characters, conflicts, and settings. A shared theme illustrated through the characters, within the settings, and within the conflict is a sense of human confusion, emotional chaos, and certainly a degree of madness. The theme of imprisonment is also evident — in very different ways, within dramatically different settings. Characters held in custody in a sense, locked into a situation from which they cannot escape, form part of the conflict that haunts the protagonists in these stories.

The contrasts could not be more stark: one story places men trudging through slime and filth while searching for a dead colleague in the midst of a chaotic war; the second story places a misdiagnosed woman — battling a phantom illness — in a room that contributes to her mental deterioration. And yet both stories' themes revolve around madness and imprisonment. This paper presents those themes and asserts that the fictionalized depictions of madness and imprisonment are poignant and revealing, reflecting real situations that happen to real people.

A review of each story is presented in terms of why the characters and their settings function as metaphors and symbols for madness and incarceration, and this review sheds light on what the conflict adds to the reader's consciousness. A comparative narrative follows, examining the thematic juxtapositions and similarities between the two works.

In the Field: Conflicts, Ironies, and the Madness of War

Tim O'Brien's "In the Field" builds tension through descriptions of war, the madness of killing, and the futility of wallowing in a "shit field" (2392). The mental image of eighteen men wading side by side, heads bowed as they slosh through a hideously unsavory field — vulnerable to attack at any moment — is numbing and repulsive for a reader who has never been subjected to such repugnant circumstances. O'Brien writes, "…the rains had fallen without stop…and the muck had now risen thigh-deep in the field along the river." A great deal of dialogue between the characters helps pick up the tempo of the dark themes while humanizing the soldiers at the same time.

Here they were in a living hell, wallowing not just in muck, rain, and death, but metaphorically in an unwinnable war against the looming madness of it all. They are lost, yet locked into a sea of human excrement while searching for one of their own — a comrade who has become a victim of the quagmire's stink and ooze.

"In the Field" offers the muck, rain, and misery as a metaphor for war itself. Time and again, the dialogue and narrative are cloaked in imagery of darkness, uncertainty, and insanity. "The rain was the war and you had to fight it," O'Brien writes (2392). In searching for their dead colleague Kiowa, the soldiers are also lost in terms of their own identities. They are victims in so many ways, thrust into a jungle war they were clearly not prepared for.

"In his hooded poncho, everything caked with mud, the boy's face was impossible to make out," O'Brien explains (2392). As they searched for Kiowa somewhere beneath that awful field of slop and ooze, "…the filth seemed to erase identities, transforming the men into identical copies of a single soldier…" (2392). Men without faces, men without identities — mud erasing their otherwise solid humanity. O'Brien creates the universal soldier searching for a lost colleague; readers learn that this lost colleague was brave, and that his father taught Sunday school. Led by a Lieutenant Cross, the search continues even though its inevitable outcome is already known. Still, bodies must be retrieved so they can be carried home. "Cross" is perhaps used by O'Brien as a symbol of Christianity, of salvation, of a spiritual power now lost in the impossible mud and chaos of war — a powerful juxtaposition against the evil of mindless killing in a dark, confusing conflict.

O'Brien's use of dialogue allows the story to be told by the characters themselves. The narrator sets the stage and drives the plot and theme forward, but dialogue delivers the main substance for the reader. This is especially important in O'Brien's story, because so much has already been written about war — from Hemingway onward — and even the Vietnam War has been fictionalized numerous times. Allowing the soldiers to speak for the author, and indeed for humanity, is an effective technique. The voices in this story's dialogue are the voices of a million soldiers in five thousand wars — men who spend their time wondering how they got there while trying to stay alive in a scene scarred by death and dying.

While Lieutenant Jimmy Cross feels guilty about his lost platoon mate and wonders what he will say to Kiowa's father, the dialogue delivers a double dose of irony. All the irony in the world is available because of the dead colleague and the rising river of human excrement — and on top of that, the dialogue makes light of the situation, creating a story within a story, an irony within an irony.

"Wasted in the waste," Azar quips, "A shit field. You got to admit, it's pure world-class irony" (2393). The reason they had to endure this misery — beyond the raw facts of war, which dictate that soldiers go where they are ordered, even after Vietnamese women ("mamma-sans") had warned the GIs that this was "evil ground" — is that the enemy had launched a mortar attack. "The field just exploded. Rain and slop and shrapnel, it all mixed together, and the field seemed to boil" (2395). It was raining water from the sky and fire from the enemy.

When they finally locate Kiowa's body, the soldiers continue to voice their bitterness about the place: "Camps us in a toilet. Man don't know shit," says Sanders (2394). Kiowa had been killed because of the overflowing river and all the mud. Just like war itself — where a river of violence washes over foot soldiers, never ending and always carrying the smell of death — the setting becomes inescapable.

Here they were in the most miserable place imaginable, led by a First Lieutenant (Cross) who had "never wanted" the responsibility of leading men through a field of filth. "Military matters meant nothing to him…he was unprepared…twenty-four years old and his heart wasn't in it" (2394). The irony of being too young and too inexperienced for such a role, yet stuck in a killing field where death could come at any moment, is central to O'Brien's indictment of war.

Works Cited

Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. The Yellow Wallpaper. New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1993.

O'Brien, Tim. "In the Field."