The spirit of Perverse vs. Mental Illness

As humans we all could relate how the spirit of perversity has affected our lives whether at a low cost or a large one. The story “The Black Cat” Edgar Allan Poe and “The yellow wallpaper” Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s both have a character who plays the part of spirit of perversity at a high level. The narrator in the story “The black cat” and the narrator in the story “The Yellow wallpaper” are both two characters whose behavior created many impacted moments in the story. Both of these characters took decisions and actions that needed to happen through the spirit of perversity. The spirit of perversity can be affected more when the characters are experiencing a mental illness. 

    The narrators of both “The black cat” and “the yellow wallpaper” suffer from mental health which creates a lot of violence and actions that harm themselves and their surroundings. In the story “The black cat” the narrator used alcohol to cure his depression and anxiety but alcohol also led him to be alone. In the story the narrator had his broken point and decided to push all his anger into Pluto” his cat. In the story the narrator describes the ways he tried to harm and attend to kill pluto. He knows it is wrong to harm Pluto but his impulsive actions made him do it. 

The narrator in “The yellow wallpaper” shows the readers how the spirit of perversity can be affected more when the person has a mental illness. In the story the narrator suffered from a depression or a postpartum depression. As the narrator explains her depression she was experiencing a lot of anxiety attacks and began to cured herself through writing about the yellow wallpaper in her room. Her husband John tried to cure her depression by keeping her out of writing but she refused and wrote behind him. The narrator had an illusion that thought the yellow wallpaper in her room was moving. She began to write about it and little by little began to pull the yellow wallpaper out.  As a comparison to the narrator of the story “The Black Cat” the narrator blames Pluto for all his misfortunes and finds every excuse to blame him. The narrator creates this mentality that the cat is his enemy.