"The Yellow Wallpaper"とThe Awakeningにおける意志ある選択

概要

論文の詳細を見る
In late nineteenth-century America where the Victorian morals and ethics still dominated especially women's consciousness and behavior, Charlotte Perkins Oilman published "The Yellow Wallpaper", and Kate Chopin The Awakening. "The Yellow Wallpaper" is a story which directly confronts "the sexual politics of male-female, husband-wife relationship." (E.R.Hedges) As a first-person narrator the heroine tells her story of rebelling against patriarchal power and struggling for self-liberation. In the end the heroine determinedly refuses to identify herself with her other self who tries in vain to get free from a patriarchal enclosure and is forced to creep on the ground, being unable to reject 'the feminine mystique'. The heroine chooses of her own free will to confine herself to the room rather than 'to be sane' in the patriarchal society, that is, she shows her firm will for self-confinement and descends into madness. In The Awakening, a pioneering novel describing the theme of women's self-awareness and selfrealization, Edna approaches life trying to discover who she is in the deepest sense of the term, rebels against patriarchal social norms like the heroine of "The Yellow Wallpaper", and tries to satisfy her spiritual instincts, as well as her sexual ones. She first becomes conscious of a sense of indescribable oppression, and then, through awakening to the physical pleasure of swimming, senses that her own identity as a human being is essential. Her death in the final scene means her defeat, but it is 'a defeat that involves no surrender' (D.A.Ringe). Tough it may be symptomatic of their times that both of the stories end with the madness and death of their heroines, their self-destruction is the final willed choice (E.R.Hedges) motivated by a human basic desire for spiritual emancipation.
2008-03-01

著者

馬場佐和子
西九州大学

"The Yellow Wallpaper"とThe Awakeningにおける意志ある選択

スポンサーリンク

概要

著者

関連論文

スポンサーリンク