Carbajal 1
Sabrina Carbajal
Professor Girardi
English 1B
21 November 2017
The Danger of Gothic Literature
Gothic literature is known for exploring the wicked, dark desires of ancient enclosed places, violence or death, and sometimes romance to stress on the influence of feelings and admire the potential power of one’s mind to engage in the external world emotionally. It is mostly created by personal experiences or the uncontrollable subconscious that fosters the desire to escape from reality. The characters, setting, and tone are important contributing factors within the stories because it helps guide the human mind into discovering the darkest dangers in a whole new world. Through the stories Tell Tale Heart and The Yellow Wallpaper we can see how gothic literature plays an important role in stimulating reader’s and awakening their sensibility by dramatizing an unease to capture the psychological danger.
The Tell Tale Heart was written by Edgar Allan Poe and addresses the idea of a true mental illness. Statements in the story were the reasons why the readers were able to easily identify the narrator’s mental state was insanity- “But why do you say that I have lost control of my mind, why do you say that I am mad? Can you not see that I have full control of my mind? Is it not clear that I am not mad? Indeed, the illness only made my mind, my feelings, my senses stronger, more powerful.”
Carbajal 2
The setting of this story was in an old, dark house in the 18th century and the story was mostly told during the night time. It contributed to the reader’s assumption of insanity because the narrator had explained his well thought out plan to kill the old man he was living with in the house. The narrator first had no idea how the idea of murder entered his head considering he did not hate the old man and even expressed his love for him. He explained further that it was his eye being the eye of a vulture that put a cold feeling up and down his back whenever the old man looked at him. The narrator soon developed a fixation on the vulture eye which finally made him decide to carefully plan out the old man’s death. This eye was the only reason the narrator had came up with in order to murder the old man and he made it seem as if he feared the eyes as a justification to kill him. He also had claimed that since he had carefully taken the time to plan the murder it does not make him insane. After committing the murder, it was very obvious that the narrator was experiencing guilt. It came to the point where it was too overwhelming and made him confess and sell himself to the cops. Although he got himself in trouble, he felt freedom because he was holding in so much guilt from the murder. Many people tend to think that those with a mental illness are not capable of experiencing feelings that people in the right state of mind experience. This is a false statement because guilt is shared between all humans and easily breaks through those with a mental illness. Overall in the Tell Tale Heart the tone is portrayed as exciting and danger because the narrator does not see any wrong in what he had done after killing the old man and that shows how mentally unstable his mind is and how psychologically dangerous he is to himself.
Carbajal 3
The Yellow Wallpaper is another piece of gothic literature where psychological danger is occurring from inside out of a woman. The Tell Tale Heart and The Yellow Wallpaper both feature characters experiencing a mental illness where they can no longer bear until they each find a way to let themselves escape and be free. The tone in this story was more seen as a nervous anticipation because there was a feeling of the unknown while in the presence of the wallpaper. It is suggested that there was something “queer” about the hall they were staying at temporarily but she could not put her finger on it. The setting was in a huge mansion that was kept in the family during the 19th century. It was quite isolated from the town and it was a very old and mysterious building structure that was being rented out for the summer. As time goes on there definitely is a strange feeling about the hall which soon builds up into the narrator’s mind adding to her insanity. In the story, the wife had been building so may thoughts in her head and did not know any other way to express herself besides writing them down even though she was not allowed to write. The pieces of writing really set a tone for the story and expresses the anxiousness and depression that was in the wife’s mind. “I’m getting really fond of the room in spite of the wallpaper. Perhaps because of the wallpaper.” Similar to the Tell Tale Heart according to the obsessions, she was so fixated on the yellow wallpaper that it had eventually made her go crazy the only way she believed she would be free is if she had escaped the yellow wallpaper by ripping it off the walls piece by piece. Although the statement is simple it deeply portrays a meaning of a dangerous obsession by fixating herself on the wallpaper so much that she starts picking out a pointless pattern to some sort of conclusion. This is a great example to
Carbajal 4
show the reader’s that the woman’s mind is guiding herself to become closer to the wallpaper for no apparent reason thus capturing the psychological danger for herself.
“I’ve got out last,” said I, “in spite of you and Jane. I’ve pulled off most of the paper, so you can’t put me back!” Who is Jane? William Veeder helps us interpret “The Yellow Wallpaper” from a psychoanalytic perspective that emphasized childhood relationships and the process of establishing ego boundaries. Veeder had suggested that while the confinement of the rest cure exacerbated her madness, a reciprocal marriage of equals could repair earlier damage. His explanation branches out of the recent critical work by feminist scholars that have established “The Yellow Wallpaper” as one of the premier women’s text. This source was very interesting to read because it explains how the heroine’s victimization was clearly with herself and that all eventually concludes that she was psychologically dangerous herself. I was not able to see it through Veeder’s perspective but after reading the source I can also agree that the woman had brought problems to her marriage that were from her childhood. He concludes that the wife is not to blame nor the husband to be at fault for his actions. The journey women have to go through with their bodies is put on the line for the text and is essentially promoted because those challenges resort to their ego. That tendency to return to the infantile state which most mothers experience to some extent after childbirth is experienced in extremis both by the young mother of “The Yellow Wallpaper” who ends up crawling on all fours and by Charlotte Perkins Stetson whom postpartum depression drove to “crawl into remote closets and under beds”.
Along with the intricate feminism being portrayed Jonathan Crewe proposed a queer reading of “The Yellow Wallpaper” asserting that a "connection is strongly posited in the narrative" between "tabooed same-sex desire and broader 'queer' subjectivity or cognition."
Carbajal 5
It has been implied that the piece was viewed as a literary text that stages the captivity of not only the human imagination but as the women’s imagination. The imagination is understood to be permanently at odds with the socially constructed forms that confine it. The story is used to confirm the truth by using the imagination from the protagonist’s captivity. The story displayed how the woman revolted against the therapy she was subjected which becomes the subject of power known as her madness. It was questionable how the husband was seen as completely normal and sane compared to his wife because in a way he was separating his wife from society and keeping her to herself for very long periods of time. The husband denied the mental illness but treated the wife as if she was sick and did not let her have any thoughts of her own because he considered them as “fancies” which as not good for her.
Moving on to the “Tell Tale Heart” there are prioritized links between the words “eye” and “I”. According to Ki, the narrator’s problematic “I” originated from his eye which was his scope drive. I think it is so interesting that in this source it emphasizes how much impact the eye had on in the story. It pushes the narrator to structure his pleasure by his eye and seek fulfillment by circling around the object of interest. This eye is one of the strongest symbols in the story and is the best example to define the psychological danger of the narrator. Ki made valid points by saying how The eye defends a unified perspective, and makes the self compulsively hate, abhor, and pursue with intent to "destroy all objects which are a source of unpleasable feeling for it”. This basically describes the whole meaning of the story by capturing that evil of the eye.
In conclusion, I think we could all agree that when gothic literature comes to our minds it is easy to picture stories that are filled with death, violence, dark desires that all lead to us having very uneasy feelings. In gothic literature it is important to have the characters, setting and tone
Carbajal 6
all put together for the story. In Tell Tale Heart and The Yellow Wallpaper they represented the danger in the story by creating the characters with psychological illnesses to create the potential power to engage the reader into the danger of gothic literature.
Carbajal 7
Works Cited
Ki, Magdalen Wing-chi. "Ego-Evil and 'The Tell-Tale Heart'." Renascence: Essays on Values in Literature, vol. 61, no. 1, 2008, p. 25+. Literature Resource Center, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do? p=LitRC&sw=w&u=sara12140&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA193755761&it=r&asid=326404355fb9fb6ad0df95fde43815dc. Accessed 2 Nov. 2017.
Crewe, Jonathan. "Queering The Yellow Wallpaper? Charlotte Perkins Gilman and the Politics of Form." Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism, edited by Thomas J. Schoenberg, vol. 201, Gale, 2008. Literature Resource Center, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do? p=LitRC&sw=w&u=sara12140&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CH1420082955&it=r&asid=b1020d966f18fb34e18427edae172ef4. Accessed 14 Nov. 2017. Originally published in Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature, vol. 14, no. 2, Fall 1995, pp. 273-293.
Veeder, William. "Who Is Jane? The Intricate Feminism of Charlotte Perkins Gilman." Short Story Criticism, edited by Lawrence J. Trudeau, vol. 182, Gale, 2013. Literature Resource Center, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=LitRC&sw=w&u=sara12140&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CH1420114789&it=r&asid=e788f553c8a11618cf277d48f0f90e69. Accessed 14 Nov. 2017. Originally published in Arizona Quarterly, vol. 44, no. 3, 1988, pp. 40-79.