Bartleby The Scrivener And The Yellow Wallpaper Analysis

Mental illness has gripped America since its beginning; the first strides in treatment beginning in the late nineteenth century toward female “hysteria.” The industrial revolution is the first time we see men being diagnosed with more than simple insanity, realizing that the machine-inspired overworking culture of America was already full steam and driving men into the ground through mental exhaustion. “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman and “Bartleby, the Scrivener” by Herman Melville touch on these issues and expand on how mental issues may affect others. The characters of both stories go through a mental decline, and Gilman and Melville implement point of view, symbolism, and their time period between a passive and active
In “Bartleby, the Scrivener,” walls come into play when Bartleby first takes a seat at his desk. Melville states, “I placed his desk close up to a small side-window in that part of the room, a window which originally had afforded a lateral view of certain grimy back-yards and bricks, but which, owing to subsequent erections, commanded at present no view at all, though it gave some light. Within three feet of the panes was a wall, and the light came down from far above, between two lofty buildings, as from a very small opening in a dome” (6). In “The Yellow Wallpaper,” walls are obviously used. The narrator’s irritation with the wallpaper and confinement begins with, “The paint and paper look as if a boys’ school had used it. It is stripped off—the paper—in great patches all around the head of my bed, about as far as I can reach, and in a great place on the other side of the room low down. I never saw a worse paper in my life” (Gilman 309). In both works, the walls symbolize entrapment and dead ends, a cut-off from the rest of the world forming real and assumed isolation. Along with the walls, the color of the paint and wallpaper also works to develop the characters’ insanity. “The Yellow Wallpaper” uses the color yellow, surprisingly, as a symbol. Similarly to Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky, yellow is used as an archetype for insanity, the narrator in Gilman’s piece saying, “The color is
In “The Yellow Wallpaper,” everything about the narrator’s condition is made into something about her husband. She states that her husband said, “...I was his darling and his comfort and all he had, and that I must take care of myself for his sake, and keep well” (Gilman 313). Though this is a work of fiction, this has been the function of women in male dominated relationships since society started caring about what gender someone was. He blatantly leaves responsibility to her, stating that it is her problem and implying that she must either stop making it up or get through it on her own. Bartleby, however, gets much more sympathy. The narrator states, “I was touched. I said something in condolence with him. I hinted that of course he did wisely in abstaining from writing for a while; and urged him to embrace that opportunity of taking wholesome exercise in the open air. This, however, he did not do” (Melville 17). The narrator’s sympathy toward his male coworker is a stark contrast to the way the husband in “The Yellow Wallpaper” regards his wife. The narrator understands that the work would get to a man, yet the husband disregards the possibility of his wife really needing some sort of treatment. Stigmas against mental institutions of the time and conditions of said mental institutions also prevented either character from getting true help. However, the way men are treated versus the way women are treated in