by Jill Bergman
Kollin, Susan, ed. “Introduction: Postwest ern Studies, Dead or Alive.” In Postwest ern Cultures: Literature, Theory, Space, ix- xix. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2007.
Lummis, Charles Fletcher. “The New League for Literature and the West,” Land of Sunshine, April 1898.
Markwyn, Abigail M. Empress San Francisco: The Pacific Rim, the Great West, and California at the Panama- Pacific International Exposition. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2014.
———. “Encountering ‘Woman’ on the Fairgrounds of the 1915 Panama- Pacific
Exposition.” In Gendering the Fair: Histories of Women and Gender at World’s Fairs, edited by T. J. Boisseau and Abigail M. Markwyn, 169–86. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2010.
Mead, Rebecca J. How the Vote Was Won: Woman Suffrage in the West ern United States, 1868–1914. New York: New York University Press, 2006.
Missal, Alexander. Seaway to the Future: Ameri can Social Visions and the Construction of the Panama Canal. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2008.
Moore, Sarah J. “Manliness and the New Ameri can Empire at the 1915 Panama-
Pacific Exposition.” Gendering the Fair: Histories of Women and Gender at World’s Fairs, edited by T. J. Boisseau and Abigail M. Markwyn, 75–96. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2010.
Polk, Dora Beale. The Island of California: A History of the Myth. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1991.
Rich, Charlotte J. “From Near- Dystopia to Utopia: A Source for Herland in Inez Haynes Gillmore’s Angel Island.” In Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Her Contemporaries: Literary and Intellectual Contexts, edited by Cynthia J. Davis and Denise D. Knight, 155–70. Tuscaloosa: University of Ala bama Press, 2004.
Tuttle and Scharnhorst / 45
Rives- East, Darcie. “Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland and the California Suffragist Movement, 1896–1911.” Paper presented at the Ameri can Literature As-
sociation Conference, San Francisco, May 24, 2012.
Rudnick, Lois. “Re- Naming the Land: Anglo Expatriate Women in the South-
west.” In The Desert Is No Lady: Southwest ern Landscapes in Women’s Writing and Art, edited by Vera Norwood and Janice Monk, 10–26. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1987.
Rydell, Robert W., John E. Findling, and Kimberly D. Pelle. Fair America: World’s Fairs in the United States. Wash ing ton, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2000.
Scharnhorst, Gary. Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Boston: Twayne, 1985.
———. “Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s ‘The Giant Wistaria’: A Hieroglyph of the Female Frontier Gothic.” In Frontier Gothic: Terror and Wonder at the Frontier in Ameri can Literature, edited by David Mogen, Scott P. Sanders, and Joanne B.
Karpinski, 156–64. Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1993.
———, ed. “Introduction.” In The Virginian, by Owen Wister, 1902, vii- xxii. New York: Pocket Books, 2002.
———. “Making Her Fame: Charlotte Perkins Gilman in California.” California History 64, no. 3, (Summer 1985): 192–201.
———. Owen Wister and the West. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2015.
Seitler, Dana. “Unnatural Selection: Mothers, Eugenic Feminism, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Regeneration Narratives.” Ameri can Quarterly 55 (March 2003): 61–88.
Stetson, Katharine Beecher. Papers. 1827–1956. Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA.
Todd, Frank Morton. The Story of the Exposition: Being the Official History of the International Celebration Held at San Francisco in 1915 to Commemorate the Discovery of the Pacific Ocean and the Construction of the Panama Canal. 5 vols.
New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1921.
Tuttle, Jennifer S. “Gilman’s The Crux and Owen Wister’s The Virginian: Intertextuality and Woman’s Manifest Destiny.” In Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Her Contemporaries: Literary and Intellectual Contexts, edited by Cynthia J. Davis and Denise D. Knight, 127–38. Tuscaloosa: University of Ala bama Press, 2004.
———, ed. “Introduction.” In The Crux, by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, 1911, 11–
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———. “ ‘New England Innocent’ in the Land of Sunshine: Charlotte Perkins Gil-
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2
Artistic Renderings of
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Denise D. Knight
Twelve days before her suicide at the age of seventy- five, Charlotte Perkins Gilman wrote to her literary executor and nephew, Lyman Beecher Stowe,
that after her sec ond husband, Houghton Gilman, died suddenly in 1934, she
had casually discarded “some kind of plaster thing crated up,” which she re-
alized too late was the bust of herself that had been sculpted by her daugh-
ter, Katharine, years earlier. The loss of the bust, cast in 1917, was immeasurable to Gilman researchers. It captured Gilman’s likeness at the pinnacle of her long career and replicated the contours, dimensions, and features of her head and face, which are lost in the one- dimensional flatness of even the clearest photographs. Seventy- three years later, in August 2008, when Gilman’s great-granddaughter, Linda Chamberlin, was going through old boxes stored in
her family’s garage, she made a stunning discovery: a signed and dated plas-
ter bust that was a duplicate of the origi nal mold of Gilman. Chamberlin ar-
ranged to have the bust cast in bronze, and it now graces the sec ond- floor
reading room at the Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library on the History
of Women in America at the Radcliffe Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts,
a fitting place for a woman who spent the better part of her life promoting
the cause of women.1
Remarkably, Chamberlin’s rescue of the bust is just one of a number of re-
cently recovered renderings of Gilman produced by vari ous artists between
1877 and 1919. Created in a variety of media (oil, plaster, charcoal, ink, pencil, and photography), the artistic renderings include a painting of Gilman
breastfeeding her daughter, Katharine, by Gilman’s first husband, artist Charles Walter Stetson, just before Gilman’s nervous breakdown; a sketchbook of
48 / Chapter 2
Stet son’s, which contains twelve drawings of Gilman from 1885 to 1887; early sketches of Gilman, drawn by Katharine, from around 1898 through 1906; a
bas- relief cast by Gilman’s son- in- law, artist F. Tolles Chamberlin, in Sep tem-ber 1919; and several candid photographs of Gilman taken in Las Casitas, California, in 1900.2 These works of art join other better- known renderings, in-
clud ing a portrait at age seventeen completed by Ellen Day Hale in 1877; an
early Stetson painting from 1882; and a death mask of Gilman made by her
Pasa dena physician and cast by a local artist in August 1935.3
It is surprising that even the works that have long been known to exist have
generated little
criti cal commentary thus far. Their existence, however, along with the recently recovered works, is exciting; the visual art allows us to both
“see” and “read” Gilman through the eyes of others. But they also illuminate
the concept of place in its vari ous forms: the concrete physical world that Gilman inhabited; the wide- ranging emotional space that she occupied; and her
position in Ameri can literary history. Each rendering provides a snapshot of a particular moment, or even a chapter, in Gilman’s life.
The earliest rendering to surface in the last thirty years is a portrait painted when Gilman was seventeen by her cousin Ellen (“Nellie”) Day Hale, who
later became an accomplished artist and author.4 The typically hard- boiled Gilman was uncharacteristically fond of this particular painting; six weeks after Houghton’s death, Gilman, who was packing up her Connecticut home to
join Katharine in Pasadena, informed her daughter that she had made a will
leaving to her what few items she was bringing: “a couple of trunks . . . a few boxes of books & mss.,” and vari ous paintings. The only painting Gilman
identified specifically was the Hale portrait. “I want to leave you the [portrait that] Nellie Hale painted of me at seventeen,” she wrote in June 1934.5 Gilman apparently treasured the painting: a newly recovered photograph of the
inside of Gilman’s Pasadena home taken around 1890 shows the Hale portrait
occupying a prominent place on the cottage wall.
On display at the National Portrait Gallery at the Smithsonian Institution
in Wash ing ton, DC, Hale’s painting of Gilman is in good company: portraits
of Walt Whitman, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Mark Twain occupy the same
area of the museum. The Hale canvas is fairly small; it measures approximately twelve by sixteen inches and depicts the teenage Gilman seated in a casual
pose (see fig ure 2.1). The eye is drawn immediately to the light on Gilman’s face and right hand; her head is resting on her right fist. The illumination of not only her face but also her hand, cuff, and collar stands in contrast to the darkness of her hair and dress. The tension between light and darkness that
Hale depicts anticipates the dichotomy in Gilman’s life, which was marked
by exhilarating highs and devastating lows.
Hale, the daughter of Unitarian minister and author Edward Everett Hale,
Knight / 49
Figure 2.1. Gilman oil by cousin Ellen
(“Nellie”) Day Hale, 1877
produced this early portrait of Gilman when she was just twenty- two. As in
many of Hale’s earlier works, the influence of impressionism on this portrait is evident. Her technique became more refined with experience, but even this
early work reveals not only technical skill but also an ability to capture the essence and mood of her subject, both through the expression on Gilman’s
face and through the use of color. The contrast of darkness and light evokes
the duality in Gilman’s nature that began to emerge as Gilman came of age;
it is likely that she would have found Hale, five years her senior, to be a perceptive and sympathetic confidante. The seventeen- year- old Gilman had, for
some time, struggled to determine her place in the world. It was incumbent on human beings, she wrote, to “find our places, our special work in the world,
and when found, do it, do it at all costs.”6
But her desire to be independent—to do her “special work in the world”—
collided with her yearning to find happiness through conventional love. In 1882
she wrote to Charles Walter Stetson, “I knew . . . the time would come when
I must choose between two lives, but never did I dream that . . . the struggle would be so terrible.” The untitled portrait depicts a contemplative Gilman,
pondering, perhaps, the possibility of integrating each part of her dual nature.
Her face is elevated above the darkness, but Hale’s rendering obscures the distinctness of her features and expression. Yet Hale draws attention to the part in Gilman’s hair; it is well- defined and suggests, in a subtle way, the divide between her choices—her “vacillating nature” as she later characterized it.7 It is a
50 / Chapter 2
Figure 2.2. Gilman oil by Charles
Walter Stetson, 1882
painting that speaks of possibilities, as light pours in from an unseen window, representing the promise of life outside the realm of domesticity. But Gilman wears an expression of studied neutrality, and even though her face is bathed by warmth and sunlight, she is not looking through the window at the world
outside; rather, the rendering suggests that she has yet to achieve the wisdom that would enable her to decide which of the “two lives”—representing vastly
different places—would be the better choice.
Another early rendering of Gilman, the whereabouts of which are regret-
tably unknown, was painted by Walter Stetson in the autumn of 1882, at the
Fleur- de- Lys, his Providence studio, when the two were nine months into
their relationship (see fig ure 2.2). They had met at the Providence Art Club earlier that year, when Gilman attended a lecture by Stetson on etching. Stetson’s star was rapidly rising; his work had caught the attention of such influential critics as Charles DeKay and artist George Whitaker. Yet the painting
of Gilman’s portrait did not go well. Stetson intended “to show the thought-
ful side of [Charlotte’s] nature,” but, as he acknowledged in his diary, “I do not advance the portrait as I ought: her face is very difficult to paint. May be
[because] it [is] hers I want to say it so well that at the thought of saying it I stammer.” Stetson’s metaphorical ascribing of speech to the process of painting illustrates his insecurities as a young artist; he relied on the more familiar convention of speaking than on the representation—even in the privacy of
his diary—of himself as a painter. “No one need tell me how poor [my work]
Knight / 51
is,” he wrote in his journal. “I never felt it more strongly than since I began to paint my love. . . . while I improved one part of the face I injured another so I can scarce see any progress.” Like the experience of Anne Bradstreet’s
speaker in “The Author to Her Book,” the more Stetson tried to improve the
portrait, the worse it seemed to get.8
When on Sep tem ber 16, 1882, Gilman arrived at the Fleur- de- Lys for yet
another sitting, Stetson tried to focus on her sensual nature. She “unbound her hair and let it fall over her shoulders,” Stetson wrote in his diary; “it fell . . .
in rich dark waves and framed her rich complexion and intensified the soft
ivory of her neck! I have never seen her so beautiful.”9 This is the pose that we see in the portrait. Despite repeated attempts to render a likeness, however, Stetson continued to falter.
Three weeks into the project, he poured his frustration into two rather in-
condite sonnets, in which he lamented his inability to replicate Gilman’s likeness. In the first poem he expressed his inability to “fix the face . . . on canvas.” The word fix is interesting in this context; it means, among other things, to “secure,” to “capture,” to “take revenge upon,” and to “repair.” The first sonnet invokes many of the hyperbolic conventions that are common in roman-
tic verse: it alludes to Gilman’s “grace,” her “marvellous . . . dark and bright”
eyes, her “eloquent” red lips, her “delicate smooth chin,” her “supple throat,”
and her “heaving breasts” with their “cream[y] white . . . mounds”—all features that Stetson tried to “fix” on the canvas. In the sec ond sonnet Stetson chides himself while searching for the “fault” or “sin” that “dulls [his] sight or warps her image.” He turns to the “Lord” for
answers and questions whether “within
[his] heart” he has “an image true” of his love. He wonders, too, whether he
actually “know[s] her spirit [that] dwells therein” and even questions his aspirations to be an artist. He wrote, “What then the hope for eminence in Art
/ When what I love e’en as my very soul / Is not seen clear, is scarcely understood?” He ended the poem again bemoaning his inability to “fix [even] the
smallest part” of Gilman’s “great loveliness.”10
Despite being a poor verse, the sec ond sonnet is noteworthy because in it
Stetson clearly wonders whether his rendering of Gilman is an illusion. He
can’t quite “read” her or “say” her face; when he tries, he “stammers.” He questions whether he “know[s] her spirit [that] dwells” within her; he admits that he hasn’t yet “seen [Gilman] clear[ly]” and that he “scarcely” understands her.
Thus, the portrait Stetson created is both flawed and deficient—a reminder, he believed, of his inadequacies as an artist, as he strove, unsuccessfully, to situate Gilman in his life. In hindsight, of course, what he seemed to be witnessing
was the wild and inevitable fluctuation in Gilman’s mood as she struggled,
much more openly than in her sitting with Hale, to reconcile what she re-
ferred to as the “wild unrest of two strong natures.”11
52 / Chapter 2
After Gilman left Stetson’s studio on Sep tem ber 28, he wrote, “I painted & painted but I could not get it to come [out] right.” In “sheer desperation” Stetson abandoned his brushes and turned instead to a palette knife, and while
he saw some improvement in the likeness, it was “still . . . far away from her loveliness,” he wrote. And Stetson was correct: the portrait he rendered bears little resemblance to Gilman. She is positioned in profile with her head dipped; we see a demure and subdued young woman with hands clasped, quietly posing. But her pose and demeanor seem to be directed rather than natural; it is no wonder, then, that Stetson couldn’t “fix” the portrait; the canvas as a place to capture or contain Gilman’s essence is unsatisfactory because it is patently false. The painting that Stetson rendered is his idealized and romanticized vision of Gilman as a humble, yet sensual, young wife- to- be—a far cry from