by Jill Bergman
7. Chris Baldick, The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 213; Christopher Butler, Early Modernism: Literature, Music, and Painting in Europe, 1900–1916 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), 16.
8. Bachelard, Poetics of Space, 11.
9. 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.
10. Robert Hughes, The Shock of the New: Modern Art; Its Rise, Its Dazzling Achievement, Its Fall (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1991), 113.
11. Gilman, “The Yellow Wall- Paper,” 168.
92 / Chapter 3
12. Ibid., 169–70.
13. The coast live oak ( Quercus agrifolia) is native to and prevalent around Pasadena. The tree has evergreen properties, so in mature specimens the branches meander to find space and water, winding and twisting away from the trunk in
kinked and serpentine patterns.
14. “Being naturally moved to rejoicing by this narrow escape, I wrote The Yellow Wall- Paper, with its embellishments and additions, to carry out the ideal (I never had the hallucinations or objections to my mural decorations) and sent a copy to the physician who so nearly drove me mad.” Charlotte Perkins Gilman,
“Why I Wrote The Yellow Wall- Paper,” Forerunner (Oc to ber 1913), 271.
15. Gilman, “The Yellow Wall- Paper,” 171.
16.
Cézanne and Beyond (Philadelphia, PA: Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2009).
17. Gilman, “The Yellow Wall- Paper,” 175–76, 179.
18. Peter Selz, Mark Rothko (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1961), 10.
19. Gilman, “The Yellow Wall- Paper,” 170. The investment of creative imagi-
nation in everyday objects hints at the Dadaist idea of the ready- made. The story’s next sentence is “I remember what a kindly wink the knobs of our big, old bureau used to have, and there was one chair that always seemed like a strong friend.”
The “ready- made,” a term coined by Marcel Duchamp in 1913, is defined by Hans Richter as a “deliberate process of ‘subjectivization’ of the world of objects by incorporating it as a raw material into works of art. . .” (88). Under these terms, as a large ready- made, the wallpaper itself is modernist.
20. Gilman, “The Yellow Wall- Paper,” 175.
21. Gilman, Living, 90.
22. Gilman, “The Yellow Wall- Paper,” 172.
23. Hughes, Shock of the New, 141.
24. Gilman, “The Yellow Wall- Paper,” 171–72.
25. Barbara Maria Stafford, Echo Objects: The Cognitive Work of Images (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 135.
26. Gilman, “The Yellow Wall- Paper,” 171.
27. Ibid., 174.
28. Ibid., 170, 181.
29. Ibid., 170.
WORKS CITED
Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics of Space. Boston: Beacon Press, 1969.
Baldick, Chris. The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991.
Butler, Christopher. Early Modernism: Literature, Music, and Painting in Europe, 1900–1916. Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1994.
Snyder / 93
Cézanne and Beyond. Philadelphia, PA: Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2009.
Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. The Living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman: An Autobiography. 1935. New York: Arno Press, 1972.
———. Papers. Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA.
———. The Selected Letters of Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Edited by Denise D.
Knight and Jennifer S. Tuttle. Tuscaloosa: University of Ala bama Press, 2009.
———. “Why I Wrote The Yellow Wall- Paper.” Forerunner, Oc to ber 1913.
———. “The Yellow Wall- Paper.” In Herland, The Yellow Wall- Paper, and Selected Writings, edited by Denise D. Knight, 166–182. New York: Penguin. 1999.
———. The Yellow Wallpaper. Edited by Dale M. Bauer. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 1998.
Hughes, Robert. The Shock of the New: Modern Art; Its Rise, Its Dazzling Achievement, Its Fall. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1991.
Richter, Hans. Dada: Art and Anti- Art. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1965.
Selz, Peter. Mark Rothko. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1961.
Stafford, Barbara Maria. Echo Objects: The Cognitive Work of Images. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007.
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
In “Why I Wrote The Yellow Wall- Paper” (1913), the brief coda to her most
famous short story, Charlotte Perkins Gilman recounted how, after consult-
ing with “a noted specialist in nervous diseases,” she “went home and obeyed
[his] directions for some three months, and came so near the borderline of
utter mental ruin that [she] could see over.” Then, she remarked, “using the
remnants of intelligence that remained, and helped by a wise friend [Grace
Ellery Channing], I cast the noted specialist’s advice to the winds and went to work again—work, the normal life of every human being; work, in which is
joy and growth and service, without which one is a pauper and a parasite—
ultimately recovering some measure of power.”1
Providing a sororal, po liti cal, economic, and all but profane reply to Dr.
Silas Weir Mitchell and his supposed cure, Gilman also offered a culturally
and his tori cally understandable, yet perhaps too dogmatic, take on the problems of liberty and power. For Gilman, free dom for women seemed to mean
the right and opportunity to work, to support oneself, and to be financially
independent of men. At the same time, as we can see in Women and Econom-
ics (1898) and many of her other works, it also meant the ability to labor in the service of what Gilman took to be greater goods: a redefinition of the social order, the advancement of women, racial regeneration and progress, eu-
genics, and national progress.
Although we can certainly appreciate much of Gilman’s feminist politics
and economics, if we turn to The Crux (1911)—an exemplum of her views on gender, the economic independence of women, the lowness of some men,
sexually transmitted diseases, and much more—we can argue that her no-
98 / Chapter 4
tion of free dom appears troubling for at least two reasons. On the one hand, she seemed to seek a rather whole- cloth capitulation of the self to the sundry greater goods that, a priori, she deemed the right and proper goals for women.
In The Crux, liberty appears to mean the right and opportunity to work—in the wide- open spaces of Colorado rather than the narrow, parochial spaces of the East—for the collective economic and po liti cal advancement not only of
women but also of the Anglo- Saxon “race,” men without sexually transmit-
ted diseases, the Ameri can West, and the nation. Gilman seems to suggest
that the in di vidual woman—and here we will be focusing on Vivian Lane, a
protagonist who, for much of the novel, seems unable to make a single deci-
sion for herself and who suffers the constant interference in her life of almost everyone she has ever known—can be said to possess free dom if she is able
to serve these preordained greater goods. The author did not trouble herself
with questions about whether these greater goods actually served the interests or nascent ambitions of the self.
On the other hand, as a soft determinist and a relatively sophisticated clas-
sical compatibilist in the mode of Thomas Hobb
es, David Hume, and John
Stuart Mill, Gilman argued that although most women, as objects and com-
modities, have been conditioned—or, to use the term preferred by philoso-
phers of free will, determined—by forces beyond their control so as not to possess any measure of free will, they nonetheless would be better off in terms of everyday free dom if they took advantage of their predeterminedness by thinking and acting, in effect, as men think and act.2 The author, in other words, adroitly sidestepped the free will problem and transformed Vivian and her
friends from women as objects to women as petit bourgeois capitalists.
The difficulty with these two problems taken together is, as I see it, that
even as Gilman argued in favor of the economic, po liti cal, and social liberty of women, she offered so narrow a standard of how a woman should be, think,
and act that her solution to the lack of liberty and free will under the rule of the father is as prescriptive and oppressive as the patriarchal sys tem she opposed.
“IS IT I, GOD, OR WHO, THAT LIFTS THIS ARM?”
Since some of the terms, theories, and debates of the philosophers of the free will problem may not be familiar to literary scholars, a brief overview seems in order. (Those familiar with the vigorous—some might even say byzantine—
criti cal conversations on the questions of free dom and free will may wish to skip this section.) In particular, two concepts will be of central importance in our reading of The Crux: surface free dom and the free will problem. Although we cannot here do anything resembling justice to the long history of
Harrison / 99
arguments over the meaning of such familiar yet difficult to pin down notions as free, free dom, and free will, we can at least offer some working definitions.
To begin, we can consider surface free dom, the everyday forms of free dom that—if we’re lucky—many of us take for granted: the right to leave our houses when we wish, to stroll in the park, to relocate from one part of the country to another, and so on. Surface free dom, in other words, is probably what most of us would come up with if someone asked us to define free dom. Freedom, we might say, is “the ability to think and act as I wish”; or, put another way, we might say that free dom means “the absence of restraint or coercion.” As
Robert Kane, one of the leading philosophers on free will, remarks, “These
everyday free doms do seem to amount to (1) the power or ability to do what
we want (and the power to have done otherwise, if we had wanted to) and (2) doing so without any constraints or impediments getting in our way.”3 We’re
free if we wish to cross state lines, buy a house in a certain neighborhood,
or meet a friend for coffee and no legal, cultural, psychological, or physical impediments prevent us from acting or not acting on our desires. We’re free
if we wish to vote in a presidential election and no one ties us to our beds, holds us at bay with a weapon, stops all the buses, or otherwise prevents us
from entering the polling station, waiting our turn, and casting our vote for the candidate of our choice.
The term surface free dom immediately begs any number of questions: “Surface” in comparison to what? Why use a seemingly pejorative adjective to de-
scribe the type of free dom that most of us either take for granted or long to take for granted? Isn’t this the very type of free dom that matters the most?
Without pushing too hard, we can pretty readily come up with all sorts of
objections and caveats that complicate and undermine the concept of an un-
impeded or pure free dom.
I’m free to vote, for example, if I am eighteen or older, have registered to
vote, and am otherwise permitted by law to exercise the franchise. In fact, I’m not really free to vote unless other people say, in the law, that I am eligible to vote. Moreover, a person might ask, am I really free to vote for whom I
wish? My family, friends, community, and country and their values certainly
exert sundry influences on my decision making. The two- party sys tem limits
my choices, and I’m constantly bombarded with po liti cal advertisements and
pundits trying to push me around and make up my mind for me. What about
my religion or lack thereof? Aren’t there any number of cultural and his torical forces and traces at play in me, as the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci
once observed, that I don’t even really know about yet that work to pre determine how I think and therefore act? And what about my genes—who knows
how they work in affecting my decisions? Then there’s my unconscious, which
100 / Chapter 4
according to Sigmund Freud is not under my control since I am, if he was
right, a stranger to myself.
The list of potential factors and forces could go on and on. This brings us to the vexed question of whether we actually possess free will or just think we do.
Since at least the time of the Stoics (the early third century BCE), philoso-
phers have wrestled with a fundamental and seemingly unanswerable problem:
To what degree, if any, are our actions under our control? This, in a nutshell, is the free will problem. On the one hand, we like to think that we have free dom and free will and that we have some control over ourselves and our world, but on the other hand, we can pretty readily grasp that any number of factors and forces influence and shape our thoughts, desires, and actions. Kane explains: Consider that when we view ourselves as agents with free will from a
personal standpoint, we think of ourselves as capable of influencing the
world in vari ous ways. Open alternatives seem to lie before us. We reason
or deliberate among them and choose. We feel it is “up to us” what we
choose and how we act; and this means that we could have chosen or
acted otherwise—for as Aristotle succinctly put it . . . , “when acting is
‘up to us,’ so is not acting.” This “up to us- ness” also suggests that the
origins or sources of our actions lie in us and not in something else over
which we have no control—whether that something else is fate or God,
the laws of nature, birth or upbringing, or other humans.
His tori cal doctrines of determinism may seem to pose a threat to ei-
ther or both of these conditions for free will. If one or another form of
determinism were true, it may seem that it would not be (a) “up to us”
what we chose from an array of alternative possibilities, since only one
alternative would be possible; and it may seem that (b) the origin or
source of our choices and actions would not ultimately be “in us” but
in conditions, such as the decrees of fate, the foreordaining acts of God
or antecedent causes and laws, over which we had no control.4
For the determinists, any number of genetic, psychological, environmental,
social, cultural, and spiritual factors and forces beyond our control and calculation may determine all our thoughts and actions.5 If they are right, then we do not possess free will (and we may therefore not be held responsible for our thoughts and actions).6 If at this point, as Kane believes, we are only scratch-ing the surface of the free will problem—What do the libertarians, theolo-
gians, Stoics, Pre- Socratics, and others have to say on the subject?—then we should consider, albeit briefly, the compatibilist position, since I would place Gilman in that camp, at least at the time she was writing The Crux.
Kane, a libertarian and thus a philosopher in disagreement with the com-
Harrison / 101
patibilists, notes that “compatibilists say that indeterminism isn’t required for free will; we can have all the free will (and moral responsibility) worth want-ing even in a determined world.”7 According to the compa
tibilists, even if our thoughts and actions are predetermined by forces and factors beyond our control, this does not mean that we do not possess free dom. Rather, even if the decisions we will make and the actions we will take are already determined, as long as no one or nothing interferes with our desire or will to think and act in such a manner, we possess the only free dom worth having, in the words of
Daniel Dennett (and echoed by Kane in the passage just quoted).
As Dennett remarks, “There are real threats to human free dom, but they
are not metaphysical.” Dennett, like Hobbes, Hume, Mill, and other classical
compatibilists before him, dispenses with the free will problem—and many
of the most intricate debates and arguments put forth by scores of philoso-
phers. Instead he concentrates, like Gilman in The Crux, on the here and now.
Anxieties over the philosophical “bugbears” that Dennett calls the Cosmic
Child Whose Dolls We Are, Sphexishness, and the Disappearing Self should
not distract the in di vidual and society from focusing on such fundamentals
as the dignity, desires, opportunities, and even the survival of the self: “Most people—99 percent and more, no doubt—have always been too busy staying
alive and fending for themselves in difficult circumstances to have any time
or taste for the question of free will. Po liti cal free dom, for many of them, has been a major concern, but metaphysical free dom has just not been worth worrying about.”8 For compatibilists like Dennett, and Gilman in The Crux, worrying about free will amounts to so much wasted time and energy; what really
matters, as Hobbes put it, is that a person is free if he or she “finds no stop, in doing what he [or she] has the will, desire, or inclination to do,” howsoever he or she may have come upon such an inclination.9
Although I read the author of The Crux as a compatibilist, we can at this point note that Gilman, perhaps like most of us, was not of a single mind on