The common factor to these two stories is that they are both first person narratives by someone going insane due to fantastical thoughts playing on their immaginations.
Hey, I'm not saying it's an invalid comparison. I just suggested a reason the professor might have reacted strangely. The Yellow Wallpaper is often analyzed as a condemnation of men's/society's control of women rather than as a story about madness per se, so the professor was probably surprised by the topic. There are a number of Poe stories about societal pressures destroying women, so they seemed like a natural comparison to me. (Oh! Sorry. The way the original post was written, I thought the OP was looking for additional stories by these two authors to add to the two he is already using. Oops.)
One could probably get some good material out of the externalized violence of
The Tell-Tale Heart vs. the internalized violence of The Yellow Wallpaper as gendered behaviors. I guarantee that writing a paper about
The Yellow Wallpaper without including at least some mention of gender is asking for a bad grade. I've never met a lit prof who wasn't obsessed with its feminist implications.
