Pulped and Reduced, Dried Out and Flattened 75 Studies in American Fiction 50.1–2 (2023): 75–96 © 2024 by Johns Hopkins University Press Pulped and Reduced, Dried Out and Flattened: the Horrors of Aborted Agency in “The Yellow Wallpaper” Simon C. Estok Sungkyunkwan University C harlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” pushes its readers to see beyond what is visible, both metaphorically and literally, at the same time calling into question what it means to see the unseen and what it means not to see it. Haunted by pasts that refuse to remain in the past, the ecogothic dimensions of the story become more pronounced the deeper the reader peers in. At the center of the story is paper, and obviously it is the visions the narrator has from the paper that generate the plot. These visions and the plot they generate in turn reveal to the reader things that might otherwise be unseen—including, most obviously, the subjugation of the narrator under patriarchal authority. They reveal far more than this, however. Like the images in a 3D movie or a stereogram, there are things in this story that are in front of but not easily visible to the reader, at least not the way that the narrator’s suffering is—experiences that bob and float in the long stream of sexism that returns and haunts the narrative. Indeed, the story exposes more than simply human relationships and histories, relationships and histories that reside in the very paper itself. This essay builds on the foundational work of scholars such as Dawn Keetley, Matthew Wynn Sivils, Elizabeth Parker, and Michelle Poland1 on vegetal agency while exploring the explicitly entangled complexities of the truncated agencies of nature and women in “The Yellow Wallpaper.” I argue that this story pushes the reader to think beyond the convenient anthropocentric and ecophobic notions of a vengeful nature toward a more balanced understanding of vegetal agency, an understanding of plants on their own terms. It is in our continuing failure to do so and through our thwarting of the agency of the vegetal world that the magnitude of ecogothic horror takes form in this story. 76 Studies in American Fiction Defining the ecogothic is a relatively new endeavor. Arguably, the first volume to explore the ecogothic was the 2013 collection Ecogothic, edited by Andrew Smith and William Hughes. This impressive collection does indeed provide “a starting point for future discussions,”2 as the editors hope it will, and it does so as much by what it omits as by what it covers. The most notable and surprising omission is any serious discussion of ecophobia. It is one thing to follow Timothy Clark in “tracing different conceptions of nature and their effects throughout the history and cultures of the world,”3 but it is quite another to misperceive (or, worse yet, ignore) the roots of the ecogothic. To be perfectly clear: no ecophobia, no ecogothic. Tom Hillard’s dismissive response to theorizing about ecophobia is as clear in his 2013 “From Salem Witch to Blair Witch” as it was in his 2010 “‘Deep Into That Darkness Peering’: An Essay on Gothic Nature,” where he suggests that to start analyzing ecophobia, “we need look no further than the rich and varied vein of critical approaches used to investigate fear in literature.”4 To look “no further,” however, seems—to use Hillard’s own words, originally aimed at calls for critics to address ecophobia—“overly proscriptive, potentially stifling, and, let’s be honest, unlikely to happen.”5 Nonetheless, Hillard is perhaps the first scholar to have made the connection between ecophobia and Gothic nature. In their “Introduction: Approaches to the Ecogothic” in their edited collection entitled Ecogothic in Nineteenth-Century American Fiction, Dawn Keetley and Matthew Wynn Sivils offer a more nuanced and, in many ways, more honest discussion of the roots and scope of the “ecogothic,” explaining at the very outset that “efforts to characterize the term ‘ecogothic’ arguably began with Simon C. Estok’s provocative 2009 essay ‘Theorizing in a Space of Ambivalent Openness: Ecocriticism and Ecophobia’.”6 They explain that “at the broadest level, the ecogothic inevitably intersects with ecophobia, not only because ecophobic...

纸浆和减少、干涸和扁平化美国小说中的 75 项研究 50.1–2 (2023): 75–96 © 2024 约翰·霍普金斯大学出版社纸浆和减少、干涸和扁平化：“黄色壁纸”中流产机构的恐怖西蒙·C·埃斯托克 (Simon C. Estok) 成均馆大学 夏洛特·珀金斯·吉尔曼 (C harlotte Perkins Gilman) 的《黄色壁纸》推动读者超越可见的事物，无论是隐喻还是字面意义，同时质疑看到看不见的事物意味着什么以及不看到看不见的事物意味着什么。看见。由于被那些拒绝留在过去的过去所困扰，读者越深入地观察，故事的生态维度就越明显。故事的中心是纸，显然，正是叙述者从纸上看到的幻象产生了剧情。这些幻象和它们产生的情节反过来向读者揭示了原本可能看不见的事情——其中最明显的是，叙述者在父权权威下的屈服。然而，他们揭示的远不止这些。就像3D电影或立体图中的图像一样，这个故事中有一些东西在眼前，但读者不容易看到，至少不像叙述者的痛苦那样——在长流中起伏和漂浮的经历性别歧视的回归并困扰着叙事。事实上，这个故事揭露的不仅仅是人际关系和历史，关系和历史也存在于报纸本身之中。本文以道恩·基特利 (Dawn Keetley)、马修·韦恩·西维尔斯 (Matthew Wynn Sivils)、伊丽莎白·帕克 (Elizabeth Parker) 和米歇尔·波兰 (Michelle Polish) 等学者关于植物能动性的基础研究为基础，同时探讨了《黄色壁纸》中被截断的自然和女性能动性明显纠缠在一起的复杂性。我认为这个故事促使读者超越便利的人类中心主义和仇视自然的生态观念，转向对植物能动性的更平衡的理解，从植物自身的角度来理解植物。正是由于我们一直未能做到这一点，并且通过我们对植物世界代理机构的阻挠，才在这个故事中形成了生态恐怖的规模。 76 美国小说研究 定义生态哥特式是一项相对较新的尝试。可以说，第一本探索生态哥特式的书是 2013 年由安德鲁·史密斯 (Andrew Smith) 和威廉·休斯 (William Hughes) 编辑的合集《生态哥特式》(Ecogothic)。这本令人印象深刻的合集确实提供了“未来讨论的起点”2，正如编辑们所希望的那样，它所遗漏的内容和所涵盖的内容一样重要。最值得注意和令人惊讶的遗漏是对生态恐惧症的任何严肃讨论。追随蒂莫西·克拉克“追踪不同的自然概念及其在世界历史和文化中的影响”是一回事，3但误解（或者更糟糕的是，忽视）生态哥特的根源则是另一回事。明确地说：没有生态恐惧症，没有生态哥特式。汤姆·希拉德 (Tom Hillard) 对生态恐惧症理论的轻蔑回应在他 2013 年的《从塞勒姆女巫到布莱尔女巫》中和他 2010 年的《深入黑暗凝视》：一篇关于哥特式自然的文章中一样明显，他在其中建议从在分析生态恐惧症时，“我们只需看看用于调查文学中恐惧的丰富多样的批评方法即可。”4 然而，“不再进一步”似乎是用希拉德自己的话来说的，最初是为了呼吁批评家解决生态恐惧症——“过于规范，可能令人窒息，而且，说实话，不太可能发生。”5 尽管如此，希拉德可能是第一个将生态恐惧症与哥特式自然联系起来的学者。道恩·基特利 (Dawn Keetley) 和马修·韦恩·西维尔斯 (Matthew Wynn Sivils) 在他们编辑的题为《十九世纪美国小说中的生态哥特式》的文集中的《引言：生态哥特式的方法》中，对“十九世纪美国小说中的生态哥特式”的根源和范围进行了更细致、在许多方面更诚实的讨论。 “生态哥特式”，一开始就解释道，“描述‘生态哥特式’一词的努力可以说始于西蒙·C·埃斯托克 (Simon C. Estok) 2009 年发表的颇具争议性的文章《在矛盾开放的空间中进行理论化：生态批评和生态恐惧症》。”6 他们解释说，“在从最广泛的层面来看，生态哥特式不可避免地与生态恐惧症相交叉，不仅因为生态恐惧症……