NOTE: Before reading this essay, do note that this was for an application for a writing tutor position for a faceless company called KP Study. I was busy so I only had three or so hours to read the short stories and write about their shared themes before the deadline. Bearing that in mind, please forgive any minor errors in format or content; I did the best that I could to juice every last drop of relevant information from these short stories, both of which are classics and I highly recommend. The following was my result. Enjoy.
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Vincenzo Joseph Frosolone
Professor Xample
English 433
24 March 2023
The Writing is On the Wall: Catharsis in Two Gothic Short Stories
The latter half of the 1800s saw a revival of Gothic literature as demonstrated by authors male and female alike. Edgar Allan Poe and Charlotte Perkins Gilman forty-nine years apart penned tales which took advantage of Gothic literature’s horror element from different perspectives. Poe’s publication alluding to a vicious crime in contemporary Salem and Gilman’s feminist showpiece inspired by her diminutive experience with the rest cure exhibit how the weight of time on two nameless narrators energized by fear plot to free their souls from seclusion in spite of the forces shutting them into their singular rooms.
TARGETS
The title of Poe’s The Tell-Tale Heart, first published in 1843, does not describe the narrator’s target, but rather foreshadows the guilt emanated by the heart of his victim. The narrator has murdered an old man, one of whose eyes had stricken fear in him as it “resembled that of a vulture— a pale blue eye, with a film over it” (Poe). Why focus on the heart and not the eye? Over the eight midnights when the narrator quietly stalked the man in his slumber, the man’s heartbeat had become markedly louder. The narrator’s concentration got the best of him as the deafening silence suffocated all but the heartbeat, which the narrator anticipated would expose his mission to “a neighbor” (Poe), until the pulse reached a precipice and stirred the narrator to suffocate the man as well. Later, the lazily lounging police officers drove him to confess as time ticked by like the beat of a heart. The old man’s “Evil Eye” (Poe), however, had pierced his soul, and caused him to start his vigil in the first place.
Meanwhile, Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper, first published in 1892, made this narrator’s motive quite clear from the start. The “sickly” (Gilman) yellow wallpaper, peeling and worn, bored into her vision during her prescribed seclusion in the nursery. Having studied design in the past, the narrator’s months-long examination of the wallpaper whose curves “plunge off at outrageous angles, destroy themselves in unheard-of contradictions” (Gilman), and whose lines were mismatched at the breadths (Gilman) emboldened her to dive into the unorthodox intricacies and secrets of the patterns. Eventually, she detected an imprisoned woman scratching at the bars to escape. Empathetic to the shadowy figure, herself feeling jailed by her husband’s rest cure, the narrator’s obfuscation provoked action and in the end she shredded the wallpaper. Her reflection animated her desire to lacerate the ugly facade once and for all.
TIME
Yet, what else but light was required for Poe’s narrator to cross the elder’s pupil, and for Gilman’s ghost to hide and be hidden? Light is the appendage of time which tore through Gilman’s nursery windows. Her narrator’s husband, John, assigned her to stay in the nursery because in order to relieve her nerves, she “was to have perfect rest and all the air [she] could get” (Gilman). She consequently attended the passing of mornings and nights and observed shifts in caricatures and outlines on the wallpaper at all hours until she saw the woman in the wall begging to escape. The narrator soon suspected that John and his sister Jennie were onto her because of their respective “queer” and “inexplicable” studies of the wallpaper to determine how it seemed to “smooch” everything that it touched (Gilman). She concluded that she had to wait until she was alone to explore both within and outside of her quarantine room, and these times were mostly during the daytime when the light shone just so that she could make out the “strange, provoking, formless sort of figure” (Gilman). Daily scheduled tasks build routines, and her circadian stakeouts fueled her fears to their critical mass, pushing her to test them and break out of her sanity and her husband’s tyranny over her soul.
Poe’s narrator, on the other hand, was programmed to uncover his lantern “just so much that a single thin ray fell upon the vulture eye” (Poe). This nightly routine undid him when the man woke flustered, feeling like he was being watched. He decided that “the old man’s hour had come” (Poe) and finally suffocated him. His own catharsis crept up on him until he realized that he could counter the vulture’s call by acting as Death himself (Poe). Darkness mitigated his impulses, and its shadow cast over him when the officers arrived in response to a noise complaint from the dreaded neighbor. The police were not there every night as he was, yet the narrator felt that he could no longer hide and confessed to the murder. His own heart became tired of sheltering its anxious rhythm once it was caught under the light.
AGE
This narrator’s victim, identity unknown, was definitely old. Just as there lacks any indication of his relationship to the man, it is to be debated how long they had known of one another. Perhaps purely this man’s existence contributed to the narrator’s longing for revenge. Have they been acquainted for years? Decades? Even mere weeks of dealing with the man’s glossy eye may have accumulated enough to give the narrator pause and vanquish the beast. It has been long enough for the narrator to don Death’s cloak for sure.
More can be said on this matter in relation to Gilman’s narrator. She wishes that her baby “does not have to occupy this nursery with the horrid wallpaper” due in part to the design and “such ravages as the children have made here” from past tenancies (Gilman). This wallpaper has endured decades of torture, and it follows that its own generation of seclusion has prompted its own, one may say, lack of physical and mental proportion as with its occupants. The narrator uncovered it, literally and through visual dissection, to release the forgotten souls to the sunlight, to the garden waiting down the road.
CONCLUSION
Through two different lamps, generations, and hands, Poe and Gilman shone light on the elusive catharsis awaiting the mentally incapacitated participants of the 1800s, whose souls had not found a way out from the thumb of their suppressors, whose victims had not envisioned an escape, until their pupils could glance upon the pages of these two wonderful short stories of horror, darkness, and sweet destruction.
Works Cited
Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. New England Magazine: An Illustrated Monthly. 1892. vol. 11, 1892.
Poe, Edgar Allan. The Pioneer. A Literary and Critical Magazine. 1843. Edited by J.R. Lowell and R. Carter, 1st ed., vol. 1, Leland and Whiting, 1843.
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