Salinger’s “A Perfect Day for Bananafish” made me realize a brand new perspective on how society deals with mental illness. I was very uncomfortable reading Seymour Glass’s interactions with the young girls, as was a lot of other people who agreed with me in the Discussions forum. I was ready to dismiss Seymour as a pedophile. When the focus of the short story suddenly switched to him without warning, I had the warnings from Muriel’s mother at the forefront of my mind so I viewed Seymour as someone unstable and dangerous, a ticking timebomb. The first time I reached the end of the story, I felt almost blindsided by his suicide.

My discomfort with Seymour’s actions was reasonable, in my opinion, because I have certain morals about how adults should act around children, but in the end my view of Seymour was still superficial at its best. I didn’t make the effort to understand him, and neither did Muriel or her mother in the story. Society tends to avoid the topic of mental health because it makes people uncomfortable and because it goes against their idea of what is normal or what is moral. Or maybe it is simply because many people are still ignorant about the different manifestations of bad mental health. Every case is unique, in a way.

People have to be actively openminded in order to help out people suffering from mental illness, and it is not an easy task sometimes. There are human limitations to empathy and sometimes we can be ignorant or quick to judge without meaning to.

I never realized that many older works of literature was ever aware of what mental illnesses were (similar to how we see them today, at least), such as Poe’s “Fall of the House of Usher” and Perkins’ “The Yellow Wallpaper”. To be honest, I was under the impression that people back then saw it as a kind of ‘demonic possession’. Although that idea may have been true hundreds of years ago, it is interesting to note how the understanding and representation of mental illnesses changed over time. It is easier to see the change in the representation of mental illness over time when comparing “Usher” which was published in 1839 to “The Yellow wallpaper” which was published in 1892.

Although it seems strange comparing such different pieces of work, it is worth noting that Usher’s strange mental illness was accompanied by the uncanny atmosphere that made the entire situation almost otherworldly and frightening while the narrator’s mental decline in “The Yellow Wallpaper” was gradual and it was clear to see why she declined this way due to her treatment and by understanding the general attitude towards women during this time period. The outcome of “Usher” was a tragic one, where the narrator witnesses his friend and his twin sister die in front of him, while the ending of Perkins’ story can be viewed as either tragic or liberating. Personally, I enjoyed “The Yellow Wallpaper” the best.