Charlotte Perkins Gilman and a Woman's Place in America

by Jill Bergman

  10 / Introduction

  2. Joan Ockman, “The Poetics of Space by Gaston Bachelard,” Harvard Design Magazine 6 (Fall 1998).

  3. Bachelard, Poetics of Space, 47–48.

  4. Ibid., 72.

  5. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, “The Yellow Wall- Paper,” in Herland, The Yellow Wall- Paper, and Selected Writings, ed. Denise D. Knight (New York: Penguin, 1999), 167, 182.

  WORKS CITED

  Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics of Space. Translated by Maria Jolas. Boston: Beacon Press, 1964.

  Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. “The Yellow Wall- Paper.” In Herland, The Yellow WallPaper, and Selected Writings, edited by Denise D. Knight, 166–82. New York: Penguin, 1999.

  Ockman, Joan. “The Poetics of Space by Gaston Bachelard.” Harvard Design Magazine 6 (Fall 1998).

  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

  Charlotte Perkins Gilman is usually considered an east erner, the child of such distinguished families as the Beechers, the Perkinses, and the Westcotts. After all, she lived most of her life in the Northeast: in New England, where she

  spent her first twenty- eight years (largely in Hartford, Connecticut, and Providence, Rhode Island); in New York City, where she resided between 1900 and

  1922; and in Norwich, Connecticut, where she lived from 1922 until 1934. But

  this long residence in the East belies a more complex regional affiliation. Certainly Gilman spent some nomadic years “at large,” proudly claiming no fixed

  address.1 More significant, she resided for a time in California: in Pasadena, Oakland, and San Francisco, where she lived off and on for eight years and

  visited on multiple occasions. She repaired to the West during two crises in

  her life: in 1885, in the midst of severe depression; and again in 1888, after her failed rest cure and as her marriage to Charles Walter Stetson was unraveling.

  She returned to the West in 1934 to be near her daughter and grandchildren

  in Pasadena as she was dying of cancer. The US West, particularly California, was significant to Gilman both biographically and intellectually, and its impact on her work merits greater criti cal scrutiny.

  Recovering Gilman’s affiliations with and relationship to the West compli-

  cates prevailing views of her as an east erner and yields a more accurate picture of her self- construction as an author. It also provides new and compel-

  ling contexts in which to interpret her writing and her social philosophy. For beyond its healthy climate and geographical distance from the oppressive duties of the East (as she described it), the West appealed to Gilman because of its supposed association with progressive values, the vanguard of women’s suf-

  14 / Chapter 1

  frage, and new possibilities for social organization. It was no accident that the West was the region in which Gilman launched her career as the poet of the

  socialist movement known as Nationalism and found her voice as an author.

  Hence the West’s preponderance in Gilman’s creative output as a laboratory

  for social experimentation and a setting for utopian plots. We advocate here, then, a more expansive conception of Gilman’s relation to place through illustrating how extensively and inextricably the West fig ures in her life and work.

  Understanding Gilman through this lens also makes possible a new reading

  of her best- known utopia, Herland, that ties the novel to a west ern locale.

  Acknowledging the ways that the West informed and enabled Gilman’s

  career as an early feminist philosopher has the power to shift our frames of

  reference in Gilman studies. In general, recognizing the west ern origins of

  Gilman’s utopian texts and reformist ideals further elucidates her leadership in the turn- of- the- century US women’s movement and therefore the West’s

  role in shaping the movement’s intellectual underpinnings. Finally, this work can further illuminate west ern literary studies and criti cal west ern regionalism, where the recovery of women’s cultural production is still underway and

  where, despite promising and innovative recent work, a masculinist orienta-

  tion still tends to remain unchanged.

  Although a significant portion of Gilman’s writing is implicitly or explic-

  itly about the West, only one of her more than twenty- one- hundred pub-

  lished poems, stories, and essays contains the word West in its title, and that work illuminates her association of the region with progressive social change.

  “Woman Suffrage and the West” was published in the Kansas Suffrage Reveille in 1897; the single extant origi nal copy of this essay resides in the archives of the Kansas His tori cal Society. Gilman was on a lecture tour in Kansas when it appeared. As she remarked in the article, the first four states to recognize the right of women to vote and run for pub lic office, all between 1869 and 1896, were in the West: Wyoming, Colorado, Idaho, and Utah.

  “It is a significant fact that the first state to adopt full woman suffrage [Wyoming] was a west ern one,” Gilman wrote, “after long experience of its advan-

  tage in territorial government; and that all the three following states to set their women free are also west ern, and are in close geographical relation.” (The first nine states to pass suffrage laws were, significantly, in the West.) In a comment that betrayed her tendency toward racial essentialism, she averred, “In

  China you should allow a thousand years for a new idea to take root and not

  look for a crop for another thousand. It takes longer to move an Oriental than a European, longer to move a European than an Ameri can, and in America

  the west erner moves faster than his grandfather ‘back east.’ . . . As Ameri can women are given higher place—have won higher place—than any women

  on earth, so the women of the west stand higher than any in America.”2 Sev-

  Tuttle and Scharnhorst / 15

  enteen years later, in her essay “Why Nevada Should Win Its Suffrage Cam-

  paign in No vem ber,” she reiterated that “the South ern and East ern states” are

  “the least progressive of the whole country” and called for “a ‘Solid West’ of courage, liberty, and justice—the land that is not afraid of its women.”3 That is, Gilman shared the conventional opinion, epitomized by Frederick Jackson

  Turner’s essay “The Significance of the Frontier in Ameri can History,” that

  west ern Ameri cans, in her case especially west ern Ameri can women, were the most progressive people in the world. She was a believer not only in American exceptionalism but also in west ern Ameri can exceptionalism.

  The Turnerian bent of Gilman’s work undoubtedly was informed by her

  biographical experience, in which the West served as a zone of healing, regeneration, and intellectual progress. Although S. Weir Mitchell’s rest cure failed to restore Gilman to health in 1887 after her now infamous nervous breakdown, she twice recovered her health in the 1880s by self- administering what mod ern critics Barbara Will and Jennifer S. Tuttle have called the West Cure, which Mitchell of ten prescribed for men, a treatment that embraced the masculine prerogatives of free dom and independence and contributed to the West’s preeminence as a popu lar site for health tourism. Like Mitchell’s West Cure

  practitioners, Gilman healed and revitalized herself in the West repeatedly

  through out her long life. The West, not rest, rejuvenated her.4 Echoing pro-

  motional language commonly used about the region, Gilman opined of her

  first journey to Pasadena in 1885, “This place did not seem like earth, it was paradise.” Her use of a religious trope to describe the West was quite deliberate; in her poem “In Mother- Time” she touted California as a pre
lapsarian Eden,

  “the Garden of the Lord”—a characterization that would fuel her portrayals

  of the West through out her career. During her first use of the West Cure, she reported, she recovered her health “so fast” that she “was taken for a vigorous young girl.” When she returned to Providence and to her husband and her

  daughter after several months, however, she relapsed. Soon after welcoming

  his wife home from Pasadena, Walter observed that “it is pretty hard to see

  what real good her winter’s sojourn did her.” Gilman herself confirmed, “I

  saw the stark fact that I was well while away [in the West] and sick while at home [in the East].”5

  In 1888, after Mitchell failed to help her, Gilman separated from her hus-

  band, left Providence with her daughter in tow, and moved west to California, where she lived until 1895. This move signified her embrace “of the principles of the West Cure not as a temporary salve, but as a way of life.” Coincident

  with (and, as she suggested, enabled by) the move to California, Gilman in-

  augurated her career as a professional writer, lecturer, reformer, and activist.

  “Before that there was no assurance of serious work,” she wrote in her auto-

  biography. “To California . . . I owe much. Its calm sublimity of contour, rich-

  16 / Chapter 1

  ness of color, profusion of flowers, fruit, and foliage, and the steady peace of its climate were meat and drink to me. . . . Everywhere there was beauty, and the nerve- rest of steady windless weather.” Her husband Walter, who traveled West in vain seeking a reconciliation, confirmed in a letter to R. S. Stetson in July 1889, “It is astonishing how much she has changed for the better in every way. She never was so well or so calm. She is doing lots of good work and making no end of friends without any effort.”6 During these years Gilman

  became a member and the president of the Pacific Coast Women’s Press As-

  sociation and edited its magazine, the Impress. She helped organize a pair of Women’s Congresses in the Bay Area and became active in the women’s club

  movement. Gilman was mentored by Charles Fletcher Lummis, the editor of

  Land of Sunshine magazine (later called Out West), and regularly published work in his magazine as well as in the Pacific Monthly, the Pacific Rural Press, the California Nationalist, the San Francisco Star, the San Francisco Wasp, the San Francisco Call, the Oakland Enquirer, the Stockton Mail, and the Californian Illustrated Magazine. The first edition of In This Our World, a collection of her poetry and her first important book, was issued by an Oakland press

  in 1893, and this was followed by a sec ond Ameri can edition issued by a San Francisco press in 1895.

  It is understandable, then, that Gilman associated California (and the West

  in general) with health, free dom, beauty, and a potential for change; it was the site of a personal and professional transformation, inspiring and enabling her creative and intellectual work.7 “Almost all of my descriptive poetry is about California,” she allowed. “To this day, when in that lovely country, the verses come of themselves.”8 She wrote lyrics with such titles as “Thanksgiving Hymn for California,” “Christmas Carol for Los Angeles,” and “Our San Francisco

  Climate.” She wrote “Powell Street,” the free- verse dramatic monologue of

  a passenger on the Powell Street cable car in San Francisco. A good deal of

  this work conveys a promotional tone and is written from the perspective of

  a blue- blooded New Englander making herself at home in the Edenic West.

  “Thanksgiving Hymn for California,” which first appeared in the Pacific

  Monthly, imagines that the poet and the reader share a Puritan ancestry, which survived legendary hardship in that first New World settlement and now enjoys “a land all sunny with gold,— / A land by the summer sea; / . . . Com-

  fort, and plenty, and beauty, and peace, / From the mountains down to the

  sea,” In “The Changeless Year—South ern California,” which appeared in Harper’s Bazar in the midst of winter, the speaker beckons: “Come here, where the West lieth golden / In the light of an infinite sun, / Where Summer doth

  Winter embolden / Till they reign here as one!” Gilman’s poetic boosterism

  continued well beyond her departure from California in 1895. “An Invitation,”

  Tuttle and Scharnhorst / 17

  for example, encourages the beleaguered east ern reader, “tired of the doctoring and nursing, / Of the ‘sickly winters’ and the pocket pills,” to come West.9

  Despite her cultural and familial allegiances with New England, Gilman

  wrote frequently and satirically on east ern snobbery. Take, for example, “Our East”:

  Our East, long looking backward over sea,

  In loving study of what used to be,

  Has grown to treat our West with the same scorn

  England has had for us since we were born.

  You’d think to hear this East ern judgment hard

  The West was just New England’s back yard!

  That all the West was made for, last and least,

  Was to raise pork and wheat to feed the East!

  A place to travel in, for rest and health,

  A place to struggle in and get the wealth, . . .

  Our West ern acres, curving to the sun,

  The West ern strength whereby our work is done.10

  Gilman expressed the same point more succinctly in the epigraph to chapter

  5 of The Crux: “Old England thinks our country / Is a wilderness at best— /

  And small New England thinks the same / Of the large free- minded West.”

  However hackneyed such lyrics may be, Gilman’s west ern writings in general

  were no more or less didactic than her other work. (Even “The Yellow Wall-

  Paper,” after all, was written while she was living in Pasadena.) What is significant is her repeated self- assertion as a champion of the West and that much

  of her writing was fueled and shaped by her life there. Throughout her life,

  her verse expressed such praise of the region. The final poem she is known to have composed pays homage to the California Grapevine, the “long and winding” mountain pass leading to the “paradise” of California.11

  While the West inspired Gilman’s poetry, it also served as the stage for her

  rise to fame.12 Gilman launched her pub lic career by writing and speaking

  around California on behalf of Nationalism, the socialist movement inspired

  by Edward Bellamy’s 1888 utopian romance Looking Backward, which con-

  trasted the class conflict and cutthroat competition of the Gilded Age with

  the commonwealth of the imagined twenty- first century. In this utopia all industries have been nationalized (hence the name of the movement), and all

  citizens enjoy equal economic and po liti cal rights. Female readers were at-

  tracted by the promise of the abolition of sexual slavery, and from the begin-

  18 / Chapter 1

  ning Nationalism thrived in California even more than in its native New En-

  gland. About sixty- five Nationalist Clubs had been organized in the state by No vem ber 1890, according to the movement’s publication.

  Gilman noted, “California is a state peculiarly addicted to swift enthusi-

  asms. . . . In 1890 the countryside was deeply stirred” by Looking Backward.

  She joined the movement, and her poem “Similar Cases,” composed in March

  of that year, was published in the leading Nationalist magazine and won her

  immediate celebrity. William Dean Howells, the most prominent Ameri can

  man of letters at the time, wrote to her, “We have nothing since [James Russell Lowell’s] Biglow Papers half so good for a good cause,” and Lester Ward hailed the poem as “the most telling answ
er that has ever been made” to Social Darwinians. Even Gilman’s bête noir, Ambrose Bierce, conceded in his weekly

  column in the San Francisco Examiner that “Similar Cases” was a “delightful satire upon those of us who have not the happiness to think that progress of

  humanity toward the light is subject to sudden and lasting acceleration.” By

  the summer of 1890, Gilman had begun to lecture regularly around central and

  south ern California on such topics as “What Is Nationalism?,” “Nationalism

  and the Virtues,” “Nationalism and the Arts,” “Nationalism and Love,” “Na-

  tionalism and Religion,” and “Why We Want Nationalism.” “It was pleasant

  work,” she later recalled. “I had plenty to say and the Beecher faculty for saying it.”13 Soon after joining the lecture circuit, Gilman also helped organize a Social Purity society in Pasadena—which, in her view, was allied with the Nationalist cause. From the beginning, her feminism was inextricable from her advo-

  cacy of socialist principles, women’s sexual education and self- determination, and eugenics. Through her activism she met Edwin Markham and other progressives. More than any other fig ure active in the movement, Gil man built

  her career by espousing its platform while she lived in the West, and to the

  end of her life Nationalism was the source of her utopianism.14

  For many months after she left California in the summer of 1895, Gilman

  continued to position herself within the state’s literary and reform establishment. In 1896 she attended a suffrage convention in Wash ing ton, DC, as well as the International Socialist and Labor Congress in Lon don. On both occasions she registered as a delegate from California. In February 1896 she expressed the hope to return eventually to California—“my dear Southland”—

  to live. Two years later she went so far as to berate Lummis for not in clud ing her in his New League for Literature and the West, a joint- stock company of

  “recognized West ern writers who would be listed on the masthead of Land of Sunshine.” Melody Graulich has rightly labeled this an “insist[ent] claim” to the title of “West ern writer,” and it was effective: Lummis included Gilman’s name in the magazine’s next issue, formalizing her status as a California writer and legitimizing her as an authority on the state’s curative and progressive po-