John Sutherland’s “The Literary Detective” inadvertently makes apt connection between “The Yellow Wall-Paper” and “A Tale of Two Cities”

John Sutherland, Emeritus Lord Northcliffe Professor of Modern English Literature at University College London, “taught The Yellow Wall-Paper for ten years” (1, p. 440). He cites “a puzzling feature” (1, p. 441) of the story: “Where there was previously a relationship of two (woman and reader), there are now three persons involved (woman, reader, and an unidentified narrator who has stepped in to take charge)” (1, p. 442).

Also, in Sutherland’s discussion of “the enigma at the heart of The Yellow Wall-Paper…is the woman mentally ill or has she been driven mad by solitary confinement” (1, p. 443), he twice mentions, as another literary example of someone on the edge of madness, Dr. Manette in Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities (1, pp. 443, 445).

The “puzzling feature” of “an unidentified narrator who has stepped in to take charge” might have been solved by Professor Sutherland if he had realized that Dr. Manette has multiple personality. The third person, the unidentified narrator in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s story, is an alternate personality, who takes over at the end of the story, similar to the way the alternate personality takes over at the end of Dostoevsky’s The Double.

And mentioning a third person reminds me of Graham Greene’s The Third Man (his novella, not the film), which has a character with clear, if gratuitous, multiple personality.

Search “A Tale of Two Cities,” “The Yellow Wallpaper,” “Dostoevsky’s The Double” and “The Third Man.”

1. John Sutherland. The Literary Detective: 100 Puzzles in Classic Fiction. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2000.