by Jill Bergman
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
and a Woman’s Place in America
STUDIES IN AMERI CAN LITERARY REALISM AND NATURALISM
series editor
Gary Scharnhorst
editorial board
Donna Campbell
John Crowley
Robert E. Fleming
Alan Gribben
Eric Haralson
Denise D. Knight
Joseph McElrath
George Monteiro
Brenda Murphy
James Nagel
Alice Hall Petry
Donald Pizer
Tom Quirk
Jeanne Campbell Reesman
Ken Roemer
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
and a Woman’s Place in America
Jill Bergman
The University of Ala bama Press
Tuscaloosa
The University of Ala bama Press
Tuscaloosa, Ala bama 35487- 0380
uapress.ua.edu
Copyright © 2017 by the University of Ala bama Press
All rights reserved.
Inquiries about reproducing material from this work should be addressed to
the University of Ala bama Press.
Typeface: Garamond
Manufactured in the United States of America
Cover image: Gilman in Las Casitas, California, 1900; courtesy
of Walter Stetson Chamberlin
Cover design: Mary Elizabeth Watson
The volume editor and contributors wish to thank the Dorothy M. Healy
Endowment at the University of New England for providing financial assistance toward the publication of this volume.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Bergman, Jill, 1963– editor.
Title: Charlotte Perkins Gilman and a woman's place in America /
[edited by] Jill Bergman.
Description: Tuscaloosa : University Alabama Press, 2017. | Series: Studies in American Literary Realism and Naturalism | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016028743| ISBN 9780817319366 (hardback) |
ISBN 9780817390709 (e-book)
Subjects: LCSH: Gilman, Charlotte Perkins, 1860–1935—Criticism and
interpretation. | Place (Philosophy) in literature. | Women and literature—United States—History—19th century. | Feminism and literature—United States—
History—19th century. | Women and literature—United States—History—20th
century. | Feminism and literature—United States—History—20th century. |
BISAC: SOCIAL SCIENCE / Women’s Studies. | LITERARY CRITICISM /
Women Authors.
Classification: LCC PS1744.G57 Z59 2017 | DDC 818/.409—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016028743
Contents
List of Illustrations vii
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction: A Woman’s Place Is Not in the Home
Jill Bergman 1
I. GEOGRAPHY AND BIOGRAPHY:
PLACES IN AND OF GILMAN’S LIFE
1. Charlotte Perkins Gilman and the US West
Jennifer S. Tuttle and Gary Scharnhorst 13
2. Artistic Renderings of Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Denise D. Knight 47
3. “The Yellow Wall- Paper” as Modernist Space
William C. Snyder 72
II. KNOW YOUR PLACE:
LIMITS ON WOMEN’S FREEDOM AND POWER
4. “Perhaps This Was the Opening of the Gate”:
Gilman, the West, and the Free Will Problem
Brady Harrison 97
5. Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Giant Wistaria”:
A Hieroglyph of the Female Frontier Gothic
Gary Scharnhorst 119
III. RECLAIMING AND REDEFINING A “WOMAN’S PLACE”
6. “A Crazy Quilt of a Paper”: Theorizing the Place of the Periodical
in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Forerunner Fiction
Sari Edelstein 131
7. The Power of the Postal Service in Gilman’s “Turned”:
Exposing Adultery and Empowering Women to Find a Meaningful Place
Catherine J. Golden 146
8. Eavesdropping with Charlotte Perkins Gilman: Fiction, Transcription,
and the Ethics of Interior Design
Peter Betjemann 163
9. Recovering the Work of Charlotte Perkins Gilman;
or, Reading Gilman in Rome
Jennifer S. Tuttle 186
Contributors 219
Index 223
Illustrations
1.1. Grounds of the 1915 Panama Pacific International Exposition 27
1.2. Alexander Stirling Calder, Leo Lentilli, and Frederick G. R. Roth,
The Nations of the West, 1915 28
1.3. Perham W. Nahl, “The Thirteenth Labor of Hercules” 29
1.4. Promotional postcard for the PPIE 33
2.1. Gilman oil by cousin Ellen (“Nellie”) Day Hale, 1877 49
2.2. Gilman oil by Charles Walter Stetson, 1882 50
2.3. Evening—Mother & Child, 1886–1887, oil by Charles Walter Stetson 53
2.4. “Bedtime”—pencil sketch by Charles Walter Stetson, August 1886 55
2.5. Pencil sketch by Katharine, ca.1898–1900 55
2.6. Pencil sketch by Katharine, 1904 56
2.7. Charcoal sketch by Katharine, ca.1906 57
2.8. Gilman in Las Casitas, California, 1900 59
2.9. Bas- relief by F. Tolles Chamberlin, 1919 61
2.10. Gilman, ca.1910 61
2.11. Gilman death mask cast by Sherry Peticolas, August 1935 63
2.12. Gilman bust by Katharine Beecher Stetson Chamberlin, 1917 64
3.1. Claude Monet, Antibes Seen from La Salis, 1888 78
3.2. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, botanical painting, 1884 78
3.3. Coast live oak, Descanso Gardens, Pasadena, CA 81
3.4. Paul Cézanne , Mont Sainte- Victoire and the Viaduct of the Arc River Valley, 1882–1885 83
3.5. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, detail from lake watercolor, 1884 83
3.6. Paul Cézanne, Mont Sainte- Victoire from near Gardanne, 1887 84
3.7. Mark Rothko, Ochre and Red, 1954 85
3.8. Georges Braque, Woman with a Guitar, 1913 88
3.9. Pablo Picasso, Guernica, 1937 89
7.1. Augustus Leopold Egg, Past and Present, No. 1, 1858 148
7.2. Richard Redgrave, The Outcast, 1851 149
8.1. Gustav Stickley’s Morris chair 167
8.2. The dictograph’s master station 178
9.1. Anna Scacchi’s Italian translation of Gilman’s works, La terra delle donne ( The Land of Women) 187
9.2. Charlotte Perkins Stetson [Gilman]’s letter to S. Weir Mitchell 196
Acknowledgments
First and foremost I would like to thank all the contributors to Charlotte Perkins Gilman and a Woman’s Place in America for their diligence, hard work, and faith in this project. Beyond being experts in the fields of Gilman studies and Ameri can literature, they have all been exemplary collaborators and generous colleagues in the development of this book.
Some of the chapters were origi nally presented at “Gilman Goes West: 5th
International Conference on Charlotte Perkins Gilman,” held at the Univer-
sity of Montana in June 2011. That conference—and subsequently this book—
could not have happened without the goodwill and support of Royce C. Eng-
strom, the president of the University of Montana; Perry Brown
, the provost
and vice president for academic affairs; and Chris Comer, the dean of the College of Humanities and Sciences. My thanks as well, to Sarah Knobel, my re-
search assistant, for her tireless work on the conference.
I would also like to thank Dan Waterman and Vanessa Rusch, our editors,
and the anonymous readers for their time, energy, and expertise. The book
is much stronger and smarter for their guidance and careful criticism; they
have been the best sort of participants in the growth and development of this collective study of Gilman and place. Moreover, I am grateful for the professionalism and skill of the staff at the University of Ala bama Press; this book would not exist without you.
The editor and authors would like to thank the following organizations
and publications for permission to reprint earlier versions of chapters in-
cluded in this work:
Peter Betjemann’s “Eavesdropping with Charlotte Perkins Gilman: Fiction, Transcription, and the Ethics of Interior Design” first appeared
in Ameri can Literary Realism 46, no. 2 (Winter 2014): 95–115.
Gary Scharnhorst’s “Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s ‘The Giant Wistaria’:
A Hieroglyph of the Female Frontier Gothic” origi nally appeared in
Frontier Gothic: Terror and Wonder at the Frontier in Ameri can Literature, ed. David Mogen, Scott P. Sanders, and Joanne B. Karpinski (Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1993): 156–64.
Portions of “Charlotte Perkins Gilman and the US West” first ap-
peared in Jennifer S. Tuttle’s “ ‘New England Innocent’ in the Land of
Sunshine: Charlotte Perkins Gilman and California,” West ern Ameri can
Literature 48, no. 3 (Fall 2013): 284–311.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
and a Woman’s Place in America
Introduction
A Woman’s Place Is Not in the Home
Jill Bergman
Since the publication of Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space (1957; translated and published in English in 1964), space and place have become central
concerns in the study of literary and cultural productions. Imagining a house, a physical structure, besieged by “the bestial hostility of the storm,” Bachelard argued that, for the house’s inhabitants, its “virtues of protection and resistance are transposed into human virtues. The house acquires the physical and moral
energy of a human body.” The roof, walls, and rooms of the house, he sug-
gested, take on meanings beyond their mere physical existence, and in some
of the most famous lines in the book he concluded that “in this dynamic ri-
valry between house and universe, we are far removed from any reference to
simple geometrical forms. A house that has been experienced is not an inert
box. Inhabited space transcends geometrical space.”1 The house, of course, is not alive—Bachelard was not telling an Edgar Allan Poe story. Rather, the
house is shot through, in the experience of its inhabitants, with all the complexities of human emotions, desires, beliefs, values, ideologies, history, and more. In human terms, space must be understood as much more than the dimensions or floorplan of a building. As Joan Ockman writes of Bachelard’s
Poetics, “in lyrical chapters on the ‘topography of our intimate being’—of nests, drawers, shells, corners, miniatures, forests, and above all the house, with its vertical polarity of cellar and attic—he undertook a systematic study, or ‘topoanaly sis,’ of the ‘space we love.’ ”2 Bachelard, along with contemporaries such as Maurice Merleau- Ponty, Martin Heidegger, and others, fostered the exploration of the social dimensions of space and place in literary studies, philosophy, architecture, and other fields.
2 / Introduction
Since then, a number of scholars have continued and elaborated on the
work of the 1960s, and have firmly established place studies. Among the most
celebrated works—many of which are referenced or cited in this collection—
are Yi- Fu Tuan’s Topophilia: A Study of Environmental Perception, Attitudes, and Values (1974) and Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience (1977), Peter Jackson’s Maps of Meaning (1989), Edward J. Soja’s Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory (1989), Henri Lefebvre’s The Production of Space (1991), Gillian Rose’s Feminism and Geography: The Limits of Geographical Knowledge (1993), Tim Cresswell’s In Place/Out of Place: Geography, Ideology, and Transgression (1996) and Place: A Short Introduction (2004), Krista Comer’s Landscapes of the New West: Gender and Geography in Contemporary Women’s Writing (1999), Linda McDowell’s Gender, Identity, and Place: Understanding Feminist Geographies (1999), Mona Domosh and Joni Seager’s Putting Women in Place: Feminist Geographers Make Sense of the World (2001), and Wendy Harding’s The Myth of Emptiness and the New Ameri can Literature of Place (2014).
In turn, and building upon these and other works, literary scholars have
undertaken analyses of the construction, representation, and gendering—and
more—of space and place in poetry, drama, fiction, memoirs, and other genres
and forms. Yet for all of this work, not all writers have earned equal atten-
tion. In particular, for our purposes, the diverse and many works of Charlotte Perkins Gilman have not received their due in terms of place studies: our collection seeks to fill at least part of this criti cal gap.
If we return to Bachelard for a moment, we can perhaps see why place
and space should be central categories of concern in the analy sis of Gilman’s oeuvre. He wrote that “a house is first and foremost a geometrical object, one which we are tempted to analyze rationally. Its prime reality is visible and tangible, made of well hewn solids and well fitted framework. It is dominated by straight lines, the plumb- line having marked it with its discipline and balance.
A geometrical object of this kind ought to resist metaphors that welcome the
human body and the human soul. But transposition to the human plane takes
place immediately whenever a house is considered as space for cheer and in-
timacy, space that is supposed to condense and defend intimacy.”3 Houses, as
homes, are supposed to be places of safety and warmth, good feeling and af-
fection, but where in Gilman’s works are such houses, such buildings, such
places and spaces? They are not possible until the women shed themselves
of men or enter, eyes wide- open, relationships with the proper sort of men,
who understand that women possess rights and dreams apart from their hus-
bands or lovers.
Bachelard did not offer a naive or single- mindedly optimistic take on the
home; he cited, after all, “an unusually moving exhibition of drawings by Pol-
Bergman / 3
ish and Jewish children who had suffered the cruelties of the German occupa-
tion during the last war.”4 Yet he nonetheless read mostly male poets and did not inquire too deeply into how a woman might otherwise view the home, the
legal and social possession—in most West ern cultures—of men. As article after article, poem after poem, story after story, novel after novel, and occasional piece after occasional piece by Gilman demonstrates, she did not find houses
all that comforting, nurturing, progressive, or dedicated to the right sorts of social arrangements or commercial enterprises. In most cases, the home, replete with the rules, prohibitions, and power of patriarchy, did not foster the ambitions, desires, or free dom of wives, daughters, sisters, or mothers.
In Gilman’s most famous story, “The Yellow Wall- Paper,” we see how deeply
saturated place and space can be with male authority—backed up with such
forms of manipulation as “reason,” “knowing what’s best,”
and a few timely
commands. The rules, regulations, and laws of the father—almost by them-
selves, by their all- but- palpable presence—force the narrator into the nursery–
prison cell and otherwise assault her thoughts, creativity, and desire for freedom of expression and of the self. The narrator moves as if through a force
field of emotional and psychological violence and oppression, and even as she gazes out the window at the “delicious garden”—or what she hopes to be a more genial, open space—her plight seems hopeless. Who, after all, owns the
garden? Who rules the world beyond the gate? What sort of escape can she
actually achieve? Embodied in the form of “a physician of high standing, and
one’s own husband,” patriarchy—which also seems to depend upon the col-
lusion of women such as Jane—browbeats the would- be writer until she be-
comes a nightmarish animal fig ure, lost in her own fractured mind:
I kept on creeping just the same, but I looked at him over my shoulder.
“I’ve got out at last,” said I, “in spite of you and Jane! And I’ve pulled
off most of the paper, so you can’t put me back!”
Now why should that man have fainted? But he did, and right across
my path by the wall, so that I had to creep over him every time!5
In what must be one of the most harrowing stories and denouements in Ameri-
can fiction, Gilman left little doubt about the destructive powers of the world of men—even a man who gets kneed occasionally as his wife crawls over him—
and about how encoded place and space can be with inimitable, even mad-
dening, cultural, po liti cal, and economic forces beyond the in di vidual wom-an’s control.
This brings us to the title of our collection, Charlotte Perkins Gilman and a Woman’s Place in America. So much of Gilman’s work stands in direct, and sometimes not very subtle, contradiction of the Victorian notion of a wom-
4 / Introduction
an’s place being in the home and not out in the larger cultural, economic, and po liti cal worlds. The “angel in the house,” a phrase coined by Coventry Patmore (an English appellation, if there ever was one) in 1854, represented so
much of what Gilman detested and battled against: docility, domesticity, ac-
quiescence to male authority, a lack of intellectual curiosity, willful ignorance disguised as innocence, and no work outside the home. Gilman argued for