by Jill Bergman
fragrant rosy room” with a “rose- draped balcony”—much like the one that
the narrator longed for in Gilman’s chilling story, “The Yellow Wall- Paper.”31
Another image of Gilman that was recovered at the home of her grandson
is a bas- relief that was sculpted by Gilman’s son- in- law, F. Tolles Chamberlin, in New York in Sep tem ber 1919, the year after his marriage to Katharine.32 The relief, in the Gilman Papers at the Schlesinger Library, was cast using plaster of Paris and measures approximately twenty- one by fourteen inches (see figure 2.9). In this rendering too we see a smiling Gilman, at the age of fifty-
nine, whose expression suggests serenity and peace.
In fact, in 1919 Gilman was in a happy place; for the first time in her life
she had a steady income as a contributor to the New York Tribune syndicate, where she turned out nearly 250 columns. The bas-relief, however, is
not a precise likeness of Gilman; when we compare it to a photographic por-
trait of Gilman that was shot nine years earlier, it appears as though Cham-
berlin performed a cosmetic “lift” on her profile, sof tening the sharpness of her nose and reducing the beginnings of a double chin (see fig ure 2.10). Indeed, Gilman was consciously trying to sof ten her image; after a year of em-
Figure 2.9. Bas- relief by F. Tolles
Chamberlin, 1919
Figure 2.10. Gilman, ca.1910
62 / Chapter 2
ployment as a syndicated writer, she was let go because her column could no
longer “hold the popu lar taste.” In order to earn a living, she again turned to the lecture circuit.33
As Gilman biographer Cynthia Davis points out, Gilman’s “lecture oppor-
tunities had dwindled by the late teens,” in part, Gilman insisted, because the nation was focused on the threat posed by World War I; as a result, her lecture bookings declined precipitously, and her income was reduced, she estimated,
“by as much as 80 percent.” Gilman’s response, Davis notes, was to remake
her image, to “[play] up her physical charms,” and to downplay “her repu-
tation as a ‘radical.’ ” Davis also points out that “the word ‘gentle’ appears in nearly all” of the promotional materials that Gilman wrote and marketed, and
she also borrowed language from favorable reviews that commented upon her
“engaging smile and general charm of manner,” as well as those that charac-
terized her as “perfectly delightful,” “gentle,” and “feminine.”34 In a word, Gilman reinvented herself to appeal to a larger audience. We don’t know whether
she was complicit in the sculptural makeover or Chamberlin made the image
more flattering in an attempt to win the approval of his mother- in- law, who could, at times, be more than a little hard to please.
After Houghton’s death from a massive stroke in 1934, Gilman returned to
Pasadena to die. The breast cancer that had been diagnosed two years earlier
was inoperable, and Gilman resolved that “when all usefulness is over, when
one is assured of unavoidable and imminent death, it is the simplest of human rights to choose a quick and easy death.” To a friend she wrote, “I love California, and this beautiful little city is more like home to me than any place on earth.” She described the beauty of the natural surroundings: “[I] spend
my afternoons under a tall orange tree. . . . The white petals drift down softly.
A large back garden; plenty of roses and other flowers.” When Gilman was
ready to “exit” the world, as she referred to her suicide, she inhaled chloroform, preferring it, she said, to cancer.35
When the coroner arrived to pronounce the death, Katharine informed
him “that [she would] probably . . . want to make a death masque.” There is
no evidence that Gilman herself had requested that a mask be made, nor is
there anything to suggest that she would have opposed such a plan. The mask,
made by the family physician, Dr. Henry G. Bieler, was cast the next day by
Sherry Peticolas, a local sculptor and a friend of Katharine and Tolles. It is a remarkable—and final—rendering of Gilman; every pore, line, and eyelash
is preserved (see fig ure 2.11). To her cousin Lyman Beecher Stowe, Katharine wrote that “there was an air of peaceful triumph in her quiet fig ure,” and, indeed, the barest hint of a smile appears on her emaciated face; the breast cancer that she had been fighting for three years had clearly had taken its toll.36
Five weeks before her death, Gilman had complained to Stowe, “I’m noth-
Knight / 63
Figure 2.11. Gilman death mask cast by
Sherry Peticolas, August 1935
ing but bones and wrinkles—and to my disgust, I weigh [only] 100 [lbs.]!”
Likewise, to her old friend, Edward Alsworth Ross, she remarked, “I’m just
bones and drapery! and can’t sit up long. Comfortable & happy all the same.”
She no longer “walked,” she told long- time friend Zona Gale; she “totter[ed].”
Paraphrasing Walt Whitman, she wrote to Gale that she was “absolutely at
peace . . . about God and Death,” and just two days before she inhaled the
lethal vapors, she said to Ross, “I’m getting ‘fed up’ with sheer weakness . . .
so I’m going to go peaceably to sleep with my beloved chloroform.”37 Made
just hours after Gilman’s death, the mask serves, in effect, as her final portrait. It reflects serenity and triumph, self- determination and free dom. Her friend Hattie Howe observed, “Death did not seize her, an unwilling victim.
She went resolutely to meet it . . . as she met all things, gallantly, like a soldier on the field of battle.”38
Howe’s metaphor was appropriate in many ways. Gilman found deep within
herself a well of courage that allowed her to soldier on through a num ber of battles: poverty, depression, censure, and loss. Col ectively, the recovered works are emblematic of Gilman’s voyage through life. The early Hale painting and
the first Stetson portrait suggest the youthful Gilman at a crossroads, as she contemplated the choices before her; the sec ond Stetson painting, along with the Stetson sketches, depicts Gilman’s pain as she nursed Katharine and struggled with the realization that “even motherhood brought no joy.”39 Katharine’s early drawings reflect her mother’s reserve as the two tried to navigate their way
64 / Chapter 2
Figure 2.12. Gilman bust by Katharine
Beecher Stetson Chamberlin, 1917
through what was sometimes a complicated mother- daughter relationship. The
photos taken in Las Casitas, California, in 1900 capture a radiant and opti-
mistic Gilman looking forward to the promise that the new century would
bring. The bas-relief reveals a softer Gilman as her career begins to wane, and the death mask illustrates her determination to exercise her right to die. Examining the artistic renderings against the backdrop of Gilman’s biography
allows us to view them not solely as objects but also as tools in discovering how the vari ous works inform our study of Gilman’s life.
I will close this essay where I began it: with the recovered bust (see fig-
ure 2.12). Once fragile and now resilient, the bust symbolizes not only Gil-
man’s recovery from her breakdown, but also her enduring impact. She began
her life in the East, settled in the West (California) after her separation from Charles Walter Stetson, made her way back East after she married Houghton
Gilman, and ventured West again after his death to live out her days—as, she
said, a “Distinguished Invalid” in a “little house” with a “big green yard—
flowers—. . . a blossoming orange tree, bees & birds and sunshine.”40
air, the chirping birds in the boughs, and the warmth of the sun on her skin.
But her intellectual and emotional ties were deeply rooted in New England.
In 1972, thirty- seven years after her death, the first installment of Gilman’s papers arrived, back East, at Harvard University’s Schlesinger Library in Cam-
bridge, Massachusetts.41 The origi nal cast of Gilman’s bust was inadvertently discarded in the East; the duplicate was discovered in the Southwest, after its
Knight / 65
long storage in Katharine’s Pasadena garage. The bust was finally cast in bronze and shipped to Cambridge, Massachusetts, where it joined the collection of
Gilman artifacts at the Schlesinger Library.
The youthful Gilman, captured in Ellen Day Hale’s 1877 portrait, could
not have foreseen the journey that her life would take, from East to West and back again. Nor could she have known that she would one day be famous
enough not only to occupy a prominent place in the annals of the Ameri-
can literary landscape but also to have her bust—an enduring image of her
legacy—securely installed in a library that is dedicated to the preservation and study of women’s history.
There is no place more fitting for it to be.
NOTES
1. Charlotte Perkins Gilman to Lyman Beecher Stowe, August 5, 1935,
Charlotte Perkins Gilman Papers, Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA. As has been well docu-
mented, much of Gilman’s rhetoric promoted the cause of middle- class women
but largely ignored the plight of working- class and minority women.
2. The oil painting by Stetson, Evening—Mother & Child, 1886–1887, is in the private art collection of Christopher and Melinda Ratcliffe, Providence, RI; Stetson’s sketchbook was purchased by me at an auction in 2005 and is in my
private collection in Cortland, NY; the early sketches of Gilman by her daughter, Katharine Beecher Stetson Chamberlin, are in the Walter Stetson Chamber-
lin Family Papers, the private collection of Gilman’s grandson, as are the photographs of Gilman taken in 1900; and the bas- relief by F. Tolles Chamberlin is in the archives, Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA.
3. The location of the 1882 painting, if it survives, is unknown. A photograph of the painting is in the Walter Stetson Chamberlin Family Papers. The painting by Hale is in the National Portrait Gallery at the Smithsonian Institution in Wash ing ton, DC. The death mask is in the Gilman Papers.
4. Ellen Day Hale (1855–1940) studied painting both in the United States
with William Morris Hunt and in Europe under the tutelage of a number of art-
ists. She had her first exhibition in 1876. Her portrait of Gilman was donated to the Smithsonian by Gilman’s heirs in 1983.
5. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Selected Letters of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, ed. Denise D. Knight and Jennifer S. Tuttle (Tuscaloosa: University of Ala bama Press, 2009), 202.
6. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman: An Autobiography (New York: Appleton- Century, 1935), 43.
7. Gilman, Selected Letters, 29; Charles Walter Stetson, Endure: The Diaries
66 / Chapter 2
of Charles Walter Stetson, ed. Mary A. Hill (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1985), 121.
8. Stetson, Endure, 99, 100, 104; Anne Bradstreet, “The Author to Her Book,”
http://www.annebradstreet.com.
9. Stetson, Endure, 101.
10. Charles Walter Stetson, “The Painting of The Portrait,” in The Diaries of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, ed. Denise D. Knight (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1994), 1: 876–77. The sonnets are written in Stetson’s hand on loose paper that was inserted in Gilman’s diary for 1882, and the title is from this copy.
The sonnets are also included in Stetson’s diary, Endure, but there they are untitled. In full, the sonnets read as follows:
The Painting of The Portrait
These many days I’ve tried to fix the face
Of her I love on canvas, that it might
Remain to tell of her and glad the sight
Of those to come with intellectual grace.
Most patiently did she sit, and I did trace
And study the marvellous eye that’s dark and bright,
The curve from the wide clear brow’s fair height
Along the cheek to the eloquent lips’ red place;
And then adown the delicate smooth chin
To the supple throat, until it was so lost
In the hid and heaving breasts’ cream white high mounds.
But Oh! today ’tis not more like to her within
My soul, nor like to what her soul surrounds,
Than ’twas when first my brush the canvas crossed.
II
O what in me the fault, or what the sin,
That dulls my sight or warps her image fair
Until my hand may not her lovliness [ sic] declare—
For which I’ve prayed e’er since I did begin?
Ah, Lord, and hath it always suchwise been,
That ne’er within my heart I yet did bear
An image true of all her shape so rare,
Tho’ sure I know her spirit dwells therein?
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?
And while I cannot fix the smallest part
Of her great loveliness what can console,
And what of all my life and Art is good?
Knight / 67
11. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Diaries of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, ed.
Denise D. Knight (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1994), 1: 882.
12. Stetson, Endure, 106. The timing here is also important; the portrait was completed just three days before Gilman’s closest friend, Martha Luther, was
married— an occasion that brought a sense of loss, sadness, resignation, and rebellion into Gilman’s life. Gilman’s romantic friendship with Luther has been well documented by biographers; see, e.g., Cynthia J. Davis, Charlotte Perkins Gilman: A Biography (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010), 48–56.
13. Stetson, Endure, 93.
14. Charles Walter Stetson, “Opera Book,” 1881–1908, 77, Charles Walter
Stetson Papers, Smithsonian Archives of Ameri can Art, Smithsonian Institution, Wash ing ton, DC. Stetson finished the painting on February 5, 1887; he exhibited it in May of that year at the Providence Art Club, and in Oc to ber 1888 the portrait was purchased by Mrs. George V. Cresson of Philadelphia. The Ratcliffes purchased the painting in 2008 from the John Moran Auction House in Altadena,
CA. “Opera Book” is a treasure trove of information about the vari ous drawings, sketches, and paintings that Stetson created. It contains dates, titles, sales, exhibition information, and personal reflections about the works.
15. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, “Records of My Daughter Katharine Stetson,”
Chamberlin Family Papers.
16. Gilman, Living, 91, 92, 96.
17. Gilman, Living, 91; Stetson, Endure, 148. We know that one additional portrait of Gilman and Katharine has survived, but its whereabouts are unknown.
Titled From My Window after Rain, Pasadena, (1889–1890), the portrait depicts the two walking through an orange grove. In a letter to Gilman dated July 9, 1894, Stetson wrote that Katharine, who was living with him at the time, “loves that
[painting] & finds in it the ‘Mama’ you desired as being in it.” Cynthia J. Davis,
“The Two Mrs. Stetsons and the ‘Romantic Summer,’ ” in Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Her Contemporaries, ed. Cynthia J. Davis and Denise D.
Knight (Tuscaloosa: University of Ala bama Press, 2004), 9.
18. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, A Journey from Within: The Love Letters of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, 1897–1900, ed. Mary A. Hill (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 1995), 65. Katharine’s sketches are in the Chamberlin Family Papers. On one of them, Katharine wrote in green pencil that the sketches “are all Drawn from my mother[—]not a likeness[.]”
19. Stetson, Endure, 244.
20. Katharine Beecher Stetson Chamberlin, “MacDowell Colony Question-
naire,” n.d., 2, Chamberlin Family Papers.
21. Ibid. Katharine also studied for a year (1906) at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, where she further refined her skills.
22. Charles C. Eldredge, Charles Walter Stetson: Color and Fantasy (Lawrence, KS: Spencer Museum of Art, 1982), 95.
68 / Chapter 2
23. Throughout the years Gilman was told that she bore a resemblance to a
number of famous women: the French writer George Sand (1803–1876), the En-
glish novelist George Eliot (1819–1880), the biblical matriarch Rachel, and the English poet Christina Rossetti (1830–1894)—a “noble list,” she remarked in 1894.
Gilman, Diaries, 576.
24. For a discussion of Gilman’s allegiance to her New England roots, see Denise D. Knight, “ ‘That Pure New England Stock’: Charlotte Perkins Gilman and the
Construction of Identity,” in Charlotte Perkins Gilman: New Texts and Contexts, ed. Jennifer S. Tuttle and Carol Farley Kessler (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2011), 27–43.
25. “Gilman . . . vacillated dramatically in her views on California and her
place in its literary pantheon.” Jennifer S. Tuttle, “ ‘New England Innocent’ in the Land of Sunshine: Charlotte Perkins Gilman and California,” West ern American Literature 48, no. 3 (Fall 2013): 286–87. Indeed, Gilman was captivated by the natural beauty of the Golden State, yet she felt an allegiance to New England, where she was born and raised. She was also bitter about the sensationalized coverage in the California newspapers of her divorce in 1894 from Stetson and the pub lic condemnation that followed.