Essay Comparing Tell-Tale Heart And The Yellow Wallpaper

Humans are not perfect beings free from illness and corruption. Things can go wrong and often types people suffer for it. They can go insane. This is further explored in the short story “The Tell-Tale Heart.” written by Edgar Allan Poe and “The Yellow Wallpaper.” written by Charlotte Perkins Gilman they are similar due to the recurring themes in both texts featuring appearance vs. reality, and Madness. With their similarities in writing styles, we see the struggle that the human mind goes through when dealing with dark obsession, an important aspect of the human condition. There are also some differences, for instance, there is death in both but they are a bit different, and one of the narrators has more control of their situation than the other.
Not everything is as it appears, for example in Poe’s “Tell-Tale Heart.” it appears like the narrator is a sane man. He ushers the police officers into his home,

In both the short stories they use similar sentence structure to convey madness. In “The Tell-Tale Heart” Poe does this by short sentences and frequent skips, for example when he writes this: ““True!- nervous- very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am; but why will you say that I am mad? The disease had sharpened my senses- not destroyed- not dulled them” (Poe 670). The jumpiness creates a sense of confusion and disturbs the reader which furthers the authors point. In the literary analysis on “The Yellow Wallpaper,” Janice Haney-Peritz analyzes Gilman’s short story. She explains “Such contradictions not only betray the narrator’s dependence on the oppressive discursive structure...she jumps from one thing to another producing paragraphs that are usually no more than a few lines in length” (Haney-Peritz 116). She jumps from sentence to sentence because she is scared and is caused to go even more insane because of the oppressive power structure she is