"The Yellow Wallpaper"

.....我不是夏綠蒂．吉爾曼（Charlotte Perkins Gilman），我不用觀察莊園裡頂樓育嬰室牆上的黃色壁紙。

《黃色壁紙》（Yellow Wall Paper）1892年首次刊登，沒沒無名近八十年，1973重刊，以女性主義文學批評重新詮釋，方成為女性主義文學的鼻祖。一篇自傳式作品，滿紙控訴丈 夫／醫生如何聯合女性幫兇日復一日嚴密監視控制一個人。以溫柔的話語：愛／親愛的我是為妳好。力勸其實是強迫之下，要求以當時流行的休養治療法，離群索 居、不事生產，只吃藥發呆，呼吸「可以永遠吸個夠」的空氣，成為丈夫的「幸福的小鵝」。被滿滿的愛與善意包圍，卻無法為自己做任何決定，「每天每小時都有 時刻表指示我做什麼」。即使她自認為「合自己志趣的工作，再加上一點刺激和變化，對我很有好處」，但她依然只能服從父權／醫療體制之下，無所事事。如此剝 奪一個人的人身自由及思想自由，每天觀察黃色壁紙的變化與寫作，是她最後的稻草，最後也只有精神崩潰方能解脫。

這種文以載道的小說，至今依然是女性主義文學課的必讀經典。如此老舊的論述架構，不體諒彼此的差距，不留一點當代運動策略中強調的理解、聯合的可能，只是 愛倫坡式的恐怖小說，只能養出一批又一批以男人作假想敵的過去式女性主義者，也只有這種人看這小說才能得到認同與感動。現在已經不再是1892年，冰島也 有女同志總理了。

但還是有所感動：一個人只能依照他所願意相信的方式活下去。.....

【聯合報╱法蘭奇】

"The Yellow Wallpaper" is a six-thousand-word short story by American writer Charlotte Perkins Gilman, first published in January 1892 in The New England Magazine.^[1] It is regarded as an important early work of American feminist literature, illustrating attitudes in the nineteenth century toward women's physical and mental health. The story also has been classified as Gothic fiction and horror fiction.

"The Yellow Wallpaper" is written in epistolary narrative style, as a collection of first person journal entries written by a woman whose physician husband has confined her to the upstairs bedroom of a house that he has rented for the summer. She is forbidden from working, and has to hide her journal entries from him, so that she can recuperate from what he calls a "temporary nervous depression—a slight hysterical tendency," a diagnosis common to women in that period.^[2] Her husband controls her access to the rest of the house. A key locks the door.

The story depicts the effect of confinement on the narrator's mental health, and her descent into psychosis. With nothing to stimulate her, she becomes obsessed by the pattern and color of the wallpaper. "It is the strangest yellow, that wall-paper! It makes me think of all the yellow things I ever saw — not beautiful ones like buttercups, but old foul, bad yellow things. But there is something else about that paper—the smell! … The only thing I can think of that it is like, is the color of the paper! A yellow smell."^[3]

In the end, she imagines that there are women creeping around behind the patterns of the wallpaper, and comes to believe that she is one of them. She locks herself in the room, now the only place where she feels safe, refusing to leave when the summer rental is up. "For outside you have to creep on the ground, and everything is green instead of yellow. But here I can creep smoothly on the floor, and my shoulder just fits in that long smooch around the wall, so I cannot lose my way."^[4]

The Yellow Wallpaper
1997 Dover Publications cover

The Yellow Wallpaper at Project Gutenberg.