本站原创摘 要：夏洛特·帕金斯·吉尔曼是十九世纪末,二十世纪初著名的女权主义者兼作家.她的代表作——《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《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.
关 键 词 ：《墙纸》；生态女性主义；父权制；二元论；自然
作者简介：陈康妮,女,硕士研究生,暨南大学外国语学院.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)-17-00-03
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 unsuccesul 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 se 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 femini is the most mon. 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 finds herself, for Kolodny the paper is the narrator’s “own psyche writ large”, for Fetterly it is the husband’s patriarchal text which bees increasingly feminine in form. Susan S. Lanser suggested that “one of the messages of ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ is that textuality, like culture, is more plex, 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 plex textual field” (Lanser, 1989). Elaine Hedges praised that the story is “one of the rare pieces of literature we he by a nieenth-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 ecofemini that few research has done before.