.. With these materials and with the aid of the trowel, I began vigorously to wall up the entrance of the niche." In "The Cask," both insanity and murder operates to create a feeling of the grotesque all throughout the story. Moreover, these themes were symbolically "concealed" by Montresor's cultured personality (to hide his insanity) and the cask of Amontillado (to hide his murder of Fortunato).

While Poe uses both themes of insanity and murder in his story, Gilman's "The Yellow Paper" effectively uses the protagonist's downfall to insanity to portray the grotesqueness of not only of psychological instability, but also of emotional repression the woman character had experienced in the story.

As the woman's insanity progresses further, the significance of the yellow paper comes into focus as the story's symbolic object that illustrates women suppression in Gilman's society. The house that they rented for the summer for rest and...
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