Charlotte Perkins Gilman and a Woman's Place in America

by Jill Bergman

  ing Herland, a utopian novel in which an all- female population of “pure stock”

  has reproduced through parthenogenesis for “two thousand uninterrupted

  years.” Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar note, “Divorced from heterosexu-

  ality, the private family, and economic dependence, a fully liberated mater-

  nal feeling flows through the Amazonian society of Gilman’s parthogenetic

  women” in Herland.39

  Composed while Gilman’s address of record was in New York City and

  published in the Forerunner, Herland is not conventionally interpreted in relation to the US West; as a utopia, after all, the story is set in “no place”—by definition in an imaginary locale. But recovering the west ern identification that runs through so much of Gilman’s work, and recognizing the centrality

  of the West (and particularly California) to her vision for social reform, pro-

  Tuttle and Scharnhorst / 25

  vides an interpretive context that demands we rethink our criti cal framework for Herland. Although we are not arguing here that the novel is actually supposed to take place in California, we do assert that its setting suggests an idealized version of the state, particularly that presented at the 1915 Panama- Pacific International Exposition (PPIE) in San Francisco, a world’s fair celebrating

  the completion of the Panama Canal.40

  This interpretation overlaps (rather than conflicts) with the suggestion made by some critics that the novel’s setting evokes South America: such references, after all, remind readers of the fair’s namesake; they also call to mind the fair’s centerpiece exhibit—a replica of the canal itself.41 Understanding the novel’s reliance on the PPIE for its sense of place not only expands our understanding of Gilman’s west ern orientation but also illuminates the imperialist strain that runs through out her social philosophy. Although it partakes of other major

  strands of Gilman’s theory and literary output, Herland can and should be read as part of her west ern body of work.

  Herland features a long- isolated society of women and girls who have survived through selective asexual reproduction: only those who can pass on de-

  sired characteristics allow themselves to become pregnant, which allows Her-

  landers to “breed out . . . the lowest types.” This lost civilization is discovered by three male explorers who represent a spectrum of masculine attributes and

  who share assumptions about women and gender that Gilman knew to be

  typical of her day. Filtering the story through the men’s point of view, Gilman critiques their reductive views of women, gender, sexuality, and reproduction,

  “confront[ing] the real- life intransigence of normative masculinities” that their attitudes represent. Having heard legends of a “strange and terrible ‘Woman

  Land’ . . . . where no men lived,” the explorers are baffled by the “large- minded women” they encounter who are uniformly lacking in all trappings of femininity. They “had expected hysteria,” the narrator admits, “and found a stan-

  dard of health and vigor” they would not have believed possible.42 Herland’s

  matriarchal society is harmonious and hygienic, free of sex, desire, war, ag-

  gression, and the bugbear of individualism.

  Gilman advocated for a world in which women and men reject gender dif-

  ferences in recognition of their common humanity, share power and responsi-

  bility, and thus enjoy a cooperative existence, and Herlanders embody a level of maternal achievement that Gilman believed was necessary to achieve this

  end. The utopian women of Herland exemplify (if taken to an unrealistic ex-

  treme) what Gilman called social motherhood, a calling wherein the maternal

  impulse is mobilized to benefit society as a whole and children are raised by experts in a socialized fashion, in “baby gardens” like those pilloried by Wister.

  Through long exposure to Herlanders, the narrator, Vandyke Jennings—and

  through him, Gilman’s hoped- for readers—eventually begins to understand

  26 / Chapter 1

  that gender is socially constructed and thus malleable; through recognizing

  the superiority of Herland’s way of life, Van, as he is called, comes to recognize some of the flaws in his own (i.e., Gilman’s) society.

  If this utopia is meant to inspire readers to enact the principles of Gil-

  man’s social philosophy, then its west ern setting is key to the novel’s success.

  The most explicit comparison of Herland to California in the novel is made

  directly by the narrator, Van: the most liberal of the three men who discover the country and the one most sympathetic to the Herlanders’ experiments,

  he hails from that state. He observes that the climate of Herland, which he

  describes as “first- rate” and semitropical, “was like that of California, and cit-rus fruits, figs, and olives grew abundantly.” Van’s language echoes the pro-

  motional tracts that had long been used to lure east ern settlers to the state, and it also contributes to the idealized setting that Gilman constructed for her utopia. The male interlopers describe Herland in language that echoes Gilman’s own praise for California: it is “a heavenly country” and “a paradise.”

  Insisting that “there’s no country lovelier” than California, Van admits that Herland surpasses it in its well- designed towns. As “a land in a state of perfect cultivation,” Herland “looked like an enormous park” with “clean, well- built roads, . . . attractive architecture, . . . [and] ordered beauty.” The men marvel at the “towering trees [that] were under as careful cultivation as so many cab-bages.” The “perfect road” is well designed, “with every curve and grade and

  gutter as perfect as if it were Europe’s best. . . . Everything was beauty, or der, perfect cleanness.”43

  This language of perfection and carefully cultivated nature is amplified in

  Van’s labeling of the Herlanders as “lady Burbanks” for their meticulous breeding of cats; here he alludes to California horticulturalist Luther Burbank, who was known for his application of Darwinian principles to the breed ing of edible and decorative plants. From here it is no great leap for the reader to learn that Herlanders were of “Aryan stock” and had bred themselves to a “new race.”

  Having reproduced in isolation by parthenogenesis for two millennia, the in-

  habitants of Herland “had no enemies; they themselves were all sisters and

  friends; the land was fair before them, and a great Future . . . [had formed]

  itself in their minds.”44

  Although this idealized portrait of Herland is obviously what Gilman con-

  sidered utopian and was clearly influenced by her love affair with California, it has, as we indicated above, an even more specific referent. Upon entering

  Herland for the first time, the three men exclaim that it is “like an Exposi-

  tion. . . . It’s too pretty to be true.” It is no accident that this comparison to an exposition occurs in the novel’s sec ond installment in the Forerunner, in February 1915—the same month that the PPIE opened in what is now the

  marina district on San Francisco Bay (see fig ure 1.1). In order to grasp the full

  Tuttle and Scharnhorst / 27

  Figure 1.1. Grounds of the 1915 Panama Pacific International Exposition, featuring the Tower of Jewels and Festival Hall (PAM PPIE Collection, GOGA 22023; courtesy

  Golden Gate National Recreation Area, Park Archives)

  significance of Gilman’s allusions to the fair, it will be helpful to briefly tour some of its highlights.45

  The exposition championed what it proclaimed as San Francisco’s phoenix-

  like reemergence after the 1906 earthquake and fire. Typically for a world’s fair, it presented visitors with a “sanitized” and “idealized consumer city,” a model of innovation and b
eauty in architecture and urban planning that little resembled the real city (and nation) beyond. This idealized San Francisco (and, by extension, California) was portrayed as the culmination of the preceding

  century’s territorial expansion as well as the gateway to extending US influ-

  ence abroad. As “the apotheosis of empire on the Pacific Rim,” the fair paid

  tribute to both “the Aryan advance to the West” and an emerging “interna-

  tionalist nationalism.”46 In part this vision was articulated through works of visual art featuring stock characters in the drama of Manifest Destiny.

  Some of the sculptures created for the fair, for example, clearly followed

  the common attitude of celebrating “the advance of civilization into the new

  Ameri can Eden.” Solon Hamilton Borglum’s statue The Pioneer: A Reverie depicted this central fig ure in Ameri can mythology, tellingly described by Gray A.

  Brechin as “an archetype of ‘the race’ advancing westward with his rifle erect.”

  28 / Chapter 1

  Figure 1.2. Alexander Stirling Calder, Leo Lentilli, and Frederick G. R. Roth, The Nations of the West, 1915, with Calder’s “Mother of Tomorrow” at the center (BANC

  PIC 1959.087- ALB. V. 3, p. 108; courtesy of the Bancroft Library, University of California, Berke ley)

  This statue was paired with James Earle Fraser’s The End of the Trail, featuring the long- familiar Vanishing Ameri can whom the artist characterized as standing for “a weaker race . . . steadily pushed to the wall by a stronger [one].” Yet another sculpture, The Nations of the West, by Alexander Stirling Calder, Leo Lentilli, and Frederick G. R. Roth, assembled the entire cast: a white man

  on horseback, Native Ameri cans, trappers, farmers, a prairie schooner with

  oxen, and a white pioneer woman at the center dubbed the “Mother of To-

  morrow” (see fig ure 1.2).47

  Many of the sculptures at the fair “embodi[ed] . . . the concept of racial

  progress [that] permeated the . . . Exposition as a whole,” a fact made ex-

  plicit by the preponderance of educational displays and scholarly meetings

  at the fair having to do with so- called race betterment, or eugenics, and by the fair’s commodification of fertile white womanhood.48 At the fair as elsewhere, then, US imperialism went hand in hand with the race- and gender-

  coded discourses of progress and domination, in which both men and women

  played important roles.

  An important function of these sculptures, of course, was to put “into

  grandiose his tori cal context” the exposition’s most prominent aim: to hail the

  Tuttle and Scharnhorst / 29

  Figure 1.3. Perham W. Nahl, “The

  Thirteenth Labor of Hercules,” PPIE

  promotional poster (Markwyn, Empress

  San Francisco, plate 7)

  completion of the Panama Canal and with it the achievement of “U.S. hemi-

  spheric domination.”49 The centerpiece of the fair was a replica of the canal itself, located in the sixty- five acre Joy Zone. A $250,000 project, the feted miniature canal represented the apex of the fair’s more generalized celebra-tion of Ameri can technological innovation, from the steam locomotive, the

  automobile, and the airplane to high- tension electrical current and transcontinental telephone service.

  As marvels of “time- space compression,” these new technologies “medi-

  ate[d],” as Brown has put it, “between a residual and an emergent, prosthetic mode of imperialist perception.” The iconic photograph of Teddy Roosevelt

  perched “at the controls of the Bucyrus shovel at Pedro Miguel, the startlingly white Ameri can in control of, but miniaturized by, the gargantuan, dark prosthetic machine” used to carve the canal announces this tension, for the faded image of Roosevelt’s now- residual Rough Riders surely still lingered in the

  Ameri can imagination. “America’s new empire,” writes Moore, “was recreated

  in miniature” by the canal exhibit and the fair more generally.50

  The canal’s symbolic importance to US assertions of power on the world

  stage is made clear in the official poster of the fair, Perham Nahl’s “The Thirteenth Labor of Hercules” (see fig ure 1.3). The poster features a hypermasculine nude colossus “thrusting apart,” as the fair’s official historian put it, “the continental barrier at Panama to let the world through to the Pacific.” This im-

  age certainly partakes of the sexualized violence that is central to westward ex-

  30 / Chapter 1

  pansion and to imperialist discourse in general. “Embod[ying] a dialectic of

  the national and the international,” the poster presents an “imperialist phy-

  sique”: it invokes the strenuous masculinity advocated by Wister, Mitchell,

  and the young Roosevelt in service of a newer, mechanized, eugenic form of

  masculine embodiment.51

  Sarah J. Moore describes it succinctly: Nahl’s Hercules combines “the his-

  tory of the United States’ taming of the frontier and its imperialist future,

  . . . offer[ing] visual evidence of the inevitability of Ameri can progress.” Like Hercules, the exposition itself embodied the transition in the US national

  imagination from a Turnerian model of continental expansion to a vision of

  unbounded Ameri can influence made possible by the opening of an “impe-

  rial frontier.”52

  Just as Gilman appropriated and intervened in the masculinist discourse

  of the US West, her writing also makes clear her familiarity with the cultural function and significance of world’s fairs like the PPIE; as we argue here, Gilman mobilized the fair’s eugenicist, imperialist discourses to advance her own vision of social reform, rejecting the prevailing Herculean model for one favoring white women’s central role. Gilman recognized the utopian, didactic

  nature of world’s fairs, which rendered them an ideal setting for visionary work such as Herland. Gilman’s innovative proposals for domestic architecture and urban planning underlay model societies in both her fiction and her nonfiction on social reform; in an essay in the same issue of the Forerunner wherein Van likens Herland to an exposition, Gilman hopefully remarked, “Since the

  World’s Fair at Chicago in 1893, we have had our dream cities. Soon we can

  have them real.” She was alluding to the Columbian Exposition, the so- called White City along the lakefront in Chicago.53 For Gilman, as for others in her time, world’s fairs were a foretaste of utopia.

  In the coming months, as Herland’s installments continued to appear in the Forerunner, Gilman visited the PPIE. She shared her impressions of the fair in the magazine’s May issue; significantly, her essay “The Gorgeous Exposition” was printed so that it immediately preceded that issue’s installment of Herland. Gilman gloried in the “dream city,” built “on one of the loveli-est sites in all the world.” Her central concern in the essay was to maximize the fair’s potential for “social education”: “the human race,” she asserted, “is a stock to be improved! ” The fair has the potential to model “a clean well- ordered world,” which, she argued, could be achieved through both a cultivation of

  beauty and a deployment of “scientific ingenuity” such as that exemplified in the canal replica, “a wonder of relief- map work and marvelous mechanics.”54

  The fair’s official historian expressed the aims of the PPIE in terms that could apply equally, in every respect, to Gilman’s agenda in Herland. The exposition, he averred, “will generate fresh ambitions, awaken new motives, and give that

  Tuttle and Scharnhorst / 31

  practical turn to thought which brings the vision and the dream into the realm of reality, and directs them to the service of human welfare.”55

  The feats of engineering that Gilman praised in her review of the fair “markr />
  the utopian vision of the times, that humans had control over the environment and could manipulate it at will with the aid of technology and science”; the

  “race betterment” movement similarly “supported a utopian vision that both

  nature and nurture could be manipulated by humans.” In his cultural history

  of the fair, Alexander Missal explores how early twentieth- century writers, artists, and policymakers, inspired (like Gilman) by Bellamy’s Looking Backward, transformed the “Canal Zone . . . into an Ameri can utopia” in their works, a tendency concretized in the fair itself. Although Missal does not include Herland in his analy sis, Gilman’s novel exemplifies many aspects of his thesis: “the expansionists’ program” that he describes “was based on the decidedly modern, neo- Lamarckian belief that bodies, people, and nations could be remade in an evolutionary, transformative, and ultimately technological act.”56 Gilman departed from this program primarily, of course, in her deployment of gender,

  for although a powerful and authoritative masculine ideal was central to this expansionist discourse, Gilman explicitly repudiated this patriarchal model in Herland as primitive and passé, asserting instead that the new society could be achieved only through the maternalist feminism outlined above.

  Bridget Bennett frames this repudiation in Gilman’s novel as a parody of

  popu lar tales featuring male adventurers “in contemporary literature and journalism.” Noting Herland’s appearance in the same year as the PPIE, Bennett highlights the ways that the canal exhibit invoked recent advances in avia-tion to signal “the possession of land and of a land- and water- based colo-

  nial dominance,” for it “presented the visitor . . . with what appeared to be an aerial view of” the canal zone. In Bennett’s reading, Gilman used the male interlopers’ initial flyover of Herland, along with the later scene in which