Edgar Allen Poe and Charlotte Perkins Are Unreliable...

Poe and Perkins Unreliable Narrators Edgar Allan Poe and Charlotte Perkins were two prominent American writers that explored the psychological constructs of the characters contained within their short stories. In The Tell-Tale Heart, by Poe, the unnamed narrator maintains that he is not mad despite the fact that he has murdered someone in the process of trying to destroy an Evil eye. On the other hand, in The Yellow Wallpaper, by Perkins, the unnamed narrator recognizes that her nerves have contributed to her descent into madness. It can be argued that both unnamed narrators are equally unreliable because of their behavior and because they reject the notion that they are crazy. At the beginning of The Tell-Tale Heart, the narrator emphatically denies that he is mentally unstable and cries, True! nervous very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am; but why will you say that I am mad?...Hearken! and observe how healthily how calmly I can tell you the whole story (Poe 37). As the na rrator begins to tell the tale of how he prepared to murder his neighbor in order to rid himself of his narrators evil eye, it is evident that the narrator is mentally unstable and may be suffering from paranoid schizophrenia or some other ailment. The narrators false belief that he is mentally sound leads to his argumentative nature. Regardless of the fact that the narrator is himself convinced that he is mentally stable, he finds it necessary to try and convince everyoneShow MoreRelatedâ€Å"The Fall of the House of Usher† and â€Å"The Yellow Wallpaper†: A Comparison Introduction2266 Words   |  10 Pages â€Å"The Fall of the House of Usher† and â€Å"The Yellow Wallpaper†: A Comparison Introduction Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s â€Å"The Yellow Wallpaper† has received wide praise for its accurate depiction of madness and the symptoms attributed to mental breakdowns (Shumaker 1985).  Ã‚   While these symptoms may seem obvious from today’s psychological perspective, Gilman was writing at the close of the 19th century when the discipline of psychology was still emerging out of a rudimentary psychiatric approach to treating