_黄色墙纸_的生态女性主义分析_英文_陈康妮

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《黄色墙纸》的生态女性主义分析

An Ecofeminist Analysis of The Yellow Wallpaper

陈康妮 暨南大学外国语学院 广东 广州 510632

夏洛特 帕金斯 吉尔曼是十九世纪末，二十世纪摘 要 ：

初著名的女权主义者兼作家。她的代表作——《黄色墙纸》是一部女性主义文学作品，描绘了妇女如何挣扎着寻求自我，表现了妇女对自由和独立自主的强烈渴望。这篇论文从生态女性主义理论的视角研究《黄色墙纸》，旨在讨论十九世纪妇女的悲剧命运以及资本主义工业革命对妇女和生态的负面影响。

《黄色墙纸》；生态女性主义；父权制；二元论；自然关键词：

陈康妮，女，硕士研究生，暨南大学外国语学院。作者简介：

研究方向：英语语言文学，华裔美国文学。

[中图分类号]：I106.4 [文献标识码]：A [文章编号]：1002-2139(2012)-17-0035-03

Wallpaper, first published in 1892, is largely considered as

Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s best work. This landmark work appeared during the era of the “New Woman,” a transitional time in American history and literary history. It challenged the inequalities between the sexes and generated debates in literary and political circles. This semi-autobiographical short story is about a young mother’s succumbing to madness with postpartum depression. Doctor Silas Weir Mitchell’s unsuccessful prescription of the “rest cure” leads Gilman to write The Yellow Wallpaper. In response to the readers who feared her story was madness-inspiring, after Gilman had written The Yellow Wallpaper, she decided to write her purpose behind the story. She said that she based it on her own personal experiences through this disease and “it was not intended to drive people crazy, but to save people from being driven crazy, and it worked” (Gilman, 1913). She wrote this story to represent the oppression of women in a masculine society, illustrating how women’s lacks of autonomy were detrimental to their mental and physical wellbeing. Today, this outstanding work is hailed both as a feminist classic and a key text in the American literary canon.

The short story has been studied in numerous ways, among which the research on the theme of feminism is the most common. Much attention has been paid to the women’s subordination in marriage. For Gilbert and Gubar, the wallpaper signifies the oppressive situation in which the woman nds herself; for Kolodny the paper is the narrator’s “own psyche writ large”; for Fetterly it is the husband’s patriarchal text which becomes increasingly feminine in form. Susan S. Lanser suggested that “one of the messages of ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ is that textuality, like culture, is more complex, shifting, and polyvalent than any of the ideas we can abstract from it, that the narrator’s reductive gesture is precisely to isolate and essentialize one ‘idea about sex and gender’ from a more complex textual eld” (Lanser, 1989). Elaine Hedges praised that the story is “one of the rare pieces of literature we have by a nineteenth-century woman which directly confronts the sexual politics of the male-female, husband-wife relationship” (Hedges, 1996:37). This essay tries to reveal the deep meaning of woman and nature in The Yellow Wallpaper under the perspective of ecofeminism that few research has done before.

2. The Curse of God

According to the Holy Bible, before Adam and Eve are expelled from the paradise, God said to Eve: “I will greatly increase your pains in childbearing; with pain you will give birth to children. Your desire will be for your husband, and he will rule over you” (Genesis, 3:17). In the nineteenth century, women not only had to endure the pain of giving birth to children, but also had to endure the pain brought by men under the control of patriarchy.

In The Yellow Wallpaper, the narrator’s husband, John rents an ancestral hall in which they are going to spend for summer. Actually, they are not going to spend their summer holidays there. The narrator is confined in the mansion to receive the “rest cure” for a depression seemingly brought by the birth of her child, in clinical terms a postpartum depression. However, the sickness was not diagnosed as a serious health problem in 19th century. At the beginning of the story, the narrator says his husband does not believe she is sick and he “assures friend and relatives that there is really nothing the matter with one but temporary nervous depression---a slight hysterical tendency” (Gilman, 1997:6). As her husband is a physician, he believes that the only way to cure his wife is to take the “rest cure” which has great popularity in the 19th century. In 1873, American neurologist Silas Weir Mitchell introduced what he called “The Rest Cure”. “He essentially imprisoned women for up to two months, and gave them little contact with the outside world. In the first few weeks, women were not allowed engaged their minds by reading or performing small activities. Most were even not allowed to roll over in their beds”(Christensen, 2003). The narrator’s husband rents the mansion for three months, and it is long enough for his wife to take the “rest cure”. The narrator says the mansion “is quite alone, standing well back from the road, quite three miles from the village. There are hedges and walls and gates that lock”(Gilman, 1997:7). The repetition of “quite” emphasizes the distance between this location and that of other people. The descriptions like hedges, walls and locked gate are the symbols of isolation. The narrator’s husband doesn’t allow the narrator to go out even she hopes to visit her cousin. Any works of excitement are also forbidden though the narrator tries to convince her husband that the “rest cure” is not the right method for her. She believes congenial work is good for her health but her husband shows no attempt to agree what his wife asks for. In the story, the narrator has to stay in the mansion all the days. “I lie down ever so much now. John says it is good for me, and to sleep all I can. Indeed he started the habit b …… 此处隐藏：18727字，全部文档内容请下载后查看。喜欢就下载吧 ……