Charlotte Perkins Gilman and a Woman's Place in America

by Jill Bergman

  the issues of free dom and the self. As Cynthia Davis notes, “In her younger

  days, Charlotte had afforded greater significance to the human will: indeed,

  she frequently read her lecture audiences a poem by Ella Wheeler Wilcox called

  “Will,” which praised it as a force stronger than “destiny.” But the more she embraced eugenics, the more the will seemed to drop out of her equation. As

  she aged, she came to believe that, for some people or peoples, there was neither will nor way.”10

  Davis contends that Gilman’s ideas on free dom and the self evolved: Are

  some individuals more free than others? Are some more wholly determined

  than others? Does the self matter? Should we think of the collective as more

  important than the self? Can we extricate the self from the collective suffi-

  ciently even to consider the self as a subject? To assert that Gilman offered a

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  compatibilist position in The Crux is not to take a position on her overall career. Rather, I see her compatibilism as yet another attempt in a lifetime of thinking through the possibilities of free dom for women.

  Finally, to put this wrangling among philosophers into a literary perspec-

  tive, we can close this section by turning to another famous Ameri can writ-

  er’s direct and deliberate dive into the free will problem. At the end of chapter 132 in Herman Melville’s Moby- Dick, crazy old Ahab returns once more to the issues that have plagued him since the long voyage home after his first, terrible encounter with the white whale. Starbuck, seeing the old man leaning over the side of the Pequod, tries once more to persuade the captain to turn for home; Ahab, despite experiencing a vision of his wife and son, remains en-meshed in the free will problem: “What is it, what nameless, inscrutable, un-

  earthly thing is it; what cozening, hidden lord and master, and cruel, remorseless emperor commands me; that against all natural lovings and longings, I so keep pushing, and crowding, and jamming myself on all the time; recklessly

  making me ready to do what in my own proper, natural heart, I durst not

  so much as dare? Is Ahab, Ahab? Is it I, God, or who, that lifts this arm?”11

  Like Ishmael, Ahab wonders why we act as we do and why what happens

  to us happens, but he cannot come up with a solution to who or what moves

  him. Does he possess free will, does God force his every action, has everything been fated since the instant of creation for reasons and by forces he cannot

  even begin to fathom? He does not know, and he will not leave the problem

  alone; he keeps on wondering until the problem kills him. Melville, we could

  say, delves as deeply as any Ameri can writer into the philosophical abyss—or is it, as Dennett might put it, a self- made cesspool of useless dramatics and worry? From here we turn to Gilman’s descent into the issue of surface free-dom and her rather outright dismissal of the free will problem.

  “SHE HAD LONGED FOR FREEDOM”

  In the case of Vivian Lane, we can hardly imagine a character more suscep-

  tible to the cultural and economic forces of her place—a genteel yet suffo-

  cating New England town— and to the will and coercion of sundry interlopers. Although “only twenty- five—and good looking” (as Miss Josie Foote, one

  of the town’s gossipy three maiden sisters, observes), Vivian seems younger

  in her inability to think and especially to act for herself.12 On the one hand, she possesses some inchoate ambitions and desires for an education or a career, and she seems to long to break away from the stifling, parochial atmo-

  sphere of the suggestively named Bainville, Massachusetts. On the other hand, while she imagines, however vaguely, a future different from the one her parents and community expect of her, she lacks any clear sense of direction. She

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  lacks the will to push back or away from the forces and people hemming her

  in, and she remains, despite her age, readily susceptible to the views, suggestions, and values of others—especially other women. Rather than being an

  agent possessed of a will, Vivian is subject to both macro and micro forces so far beyond her control that she seems to be a virtual cypher upon which others constantly seek to etch their opinions and exert control. No doubt Gil-

  man wished us to understand this as precisely the plight of the young Ameri-

  can woman at the turn of the twentieth century.

  If we accept that the first enemy of the liberty of women is patriarchy and

  all its desires, laws, and coercive forces, we can begin to account for Vivian’s hesitancy and susceptibility to the manipulations of others by examining patriarchy as Gilman concretized it in the form of Bainville and its inhabitants.

  As The Crux opens, we see the three “Foote Girls” rushing to share the latest gossip with the Lanes; as they approach “the austere home of Mr. Samuel

  Lane,” we can already judge Vivian’s parents to be humorless, rigid, and lacking in all color and spontaneity: “It was a large, uncompromising, square,

  white house, planted starkly in the close- cut grass. It had no porch for summer lounging, no front gate for evening dalliance, no path- bordering beds of flowers from which to pluck a hasty offering or more redundant tribute.”13

  Tim Cresswell has argued that “value and meaning are not inherent in any

  space or place—indeed they must be created, reproduced, and defended from

  heresy,” and in her direct manner, Gilman wanted us to know that Vivian

  lives in an archly conservative, repressed, and repressive household and almost equally oppressive town.14 When the young woman, then sixteen, intrudes on

  the news about Morton’s expulsion from college, the full weight of repression falls upon her—yet again, we can infer. Mrs. Williams, the minister’s wife,

  asks Vivian if she has plans to attend college, “but her questions soon led to unfortunate results,” Mr. Lane immediately weighs in: “ ‘Nonsense!’ said her

  father. ‘Stuff and nonsense, Vivian! You’re not going to college.’ ” And in case any doubts remain about her parents’ views, her mother reinforces the message: “A girl’s place is at home—’till she marries.” All her life Vivian has had to endure such a narrow, coercive, intellectually and emotionally violent environment, and as her parents browbeat her, the reader finds that at least some of the town shares their values: “The Foote girls now burst forth in voluble

  agreement with Mr. Lane.”15

  From this brief scene, we can deduce that Vivian has had little opportu-

  nity to find her own way, or even to express her own ideas, yet drawing on

  what rebellion and resources she possesses, and taking courage from the few

  more liberal elements in Bainville, she attempts to push back against her parents and the Footes: “I don’t know why you’re all so down on a girl’s going to college. Eve Marks has gone, and Mary Spring is going—and both the Austin

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  girls. Everybody goes now.”16 Here we see Vivian’s bind most clearly: the du-

  tiful daughter, she has been raised to obey, yet she has conflicting desires, and other young women of her class have begun to venture into the world. She

  has been taught to defer, to think as her parents think, and they have more

  or less succeeded in infantilizing what otherwise might have been an adven-

  turous and intelligent young person. Vivian reads books on medicine and

  pedagogy— one of the Foote sisters calls it “pedagoggy”; was Gilman perhaps

  hinting at the conservative element’s demagogy? Yet Vivian seems unable to

  take any further concrete steps, at least on her own, to break away from the

  dominance and values of the fathers. By now we have little doubt where Gil-

 
; man stood: the rule of the fathers makes at least some young women into pas-

  sive, miserable, mushy things.

  If we cast Vivian’s plight in terms of the free will problem, we can say that at least as far as we can tell—since the narrator usually offers glimpses into Vivian’s consciousness rather than sustained passages of introspection or reflection—the protagonist’s thinking has been determined by paternal and cultural

  forces at work in a particular place at a particular time. The conditioning she endures has reduced her thinking to mere binaries: either she can cooperate

  with her father’s orders and vision or she can narrowly work against them by

  offering the alternative of college or vague notions of meaningful employment.

  In other words, Vivian wants what she has been habituated to want: she can

  either do as she is told or pursue options usually open to men (such as the

  ne’er- do- well object of her affections, Morton). Although the latter course may seem much more desirable, from a Gramscian point of view, Vivian wants

  only the little bit more that the patriarchy has already allowed in the exercise of its hegemony. Nevertheless, as a feminist and, at least at this point in her career, a compatibilist, Gilman would have had little patience for such logic: that little bit more—higher education and jobs for women—makes all the

  difference, even if the desire for those particular forms of advancement have been determined within the workings of patriarchal power.

  The forces of normative heterosexual desire further complicate the possi-

  bility of Vivian possessing even a teaspoon’s worth of free will: in addition to her incipient desires for an education and a worthwhile job, she longs for a

  meaningful, substantial love life: “She felt the crushing cramp and loneliness of a young mind, really stronger than those about her, yet held in dumb subjection. She could not solace herself by loving them; her father would have

  none of it, and her mother had small use for what she called ‘sentiment.’ All her life Vivian had longed for more loving, both to give and take; but no one imagined it of her, she was so quiet and repressed in manner.”17 The forces

  of coercion have clearly borne down on Vivian so strongly and so of ten that

  what spirit she possessed has been reduced to “dumb subjection.” She cannot

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  speak her desires, cannot act upon them—except for one kiss with Morton

  nine years earlier?—and her passional life seems about to wither completely.

  Nevertheless, her desire for love, like her desires for an education and a

  job, have been largely determined by her culture and her genes. She wants

  what she has been conditioned to want: her parents want her to marry even-

  tually, and she wants to be with the feckless Morton. If any measure of free

  will percolates in her desires, the reader would be hard- pressed to find it. Once more, however, I think that Gilman, working as a compatibilist, would not

  have worried about where Vivian’s desires come from; what matters more is

  the ability of a young woman to act on her desires, howsoever determined

  those desires may be. For Gilman, the issues remained pretty much black and

  white: a smart, able, promising young person like Vivian must be allowed a

  wider, more challenging and rewarding life. As readers, we could hardly argue.

  What Vivian needs, Gilman not too subtly suggested, is the right sort of

  guidance; she needs someone, in other words, to intervene in her affairs and

  to show her the way to a better and freer life, at least in terms of surface free-dom. In her canny way, Gilman turned the preconditioning and oppression of

  women into an opportunity: because Vivian has been subject to the not par-

  ticularly benign pressure of her parents, her community, and the greater pa-

  triarchal culture of puritanical New England, she has been made particularly

  susceptible to the influence of others; told repeatedly how to think and be-

  have, she has learned to let others do most of the thinking for her. For Gilman this susceptibility became the crack in the foundation through which some

  light could enter: if the right person illuminates the way ahead for women like Vivian, then eventually, as they become accustomed to some everyday free dom

  and some free dom of thought and action, they might become valuable active

  contributors to society and the advancement of Ameri can civilization as well as subjects with a passion for more and more kinds of free dom that matter.

  Gilman dramatized just how perilous this process can be by bringing two

  women into Vivian’s life, each with different values and ambitions for them-

  selves and the always beset protagonist. First we meet Adela (sometimes Adele) St. Cloud, who urges Vivian to remain loyal to Morton and who stirs in her

  young friend notions of romance and self- sacrifice: “Then came Mrs. St. Cloud into her life, stirring the depths of romance, of the buried past, and of the un-born future. From her she learned to face a life of utter renunciation, to be true, true to her ideals, true to her principles, true to her past, to be patient; and to wait.” Playing upon both the notions of a woman’s responsibility and

  the hackneyed conventions of romance fiction and the novel of seduction, Gil-

  man has Adela tell her young friend that “it is the most beautiful work on earth” to shape and uplift a wastrel like Morton: “Ah, my dear, I have seen good women—

  young girls, like yourself—ruin a man’s whole life by—well, by heartlessness;

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  by lack of understanding. Most young men do things they become ashamed

  of when they really love. And in the case of a motherless boy like this—lonely, away from his home, no good woman’s influence about—what else could we

  expect? But you can make a new man of him. A glorious work!”18

  We cannot really tell why Adela argues such things. She shows herself to be

  rather mercenary in her personal life: when one husband dies, she decides on

  the suitability of a replacement based largely on his income. Davis goes so far as to call her “an ultra- feminine parasite who enjoys toying with both men’s and women’s affections to ruinous effect.”19 Nonetheless, Adela pours nonsense into Vivian’s ears, reminding her of “that hot, sweet night so long ago; the world swimming in summer moonlight and syringa sweetness; the stillness everywhere—and your first kiss!” Always susceptible to the influence of

  others and, as Dana Seitler argues, half in love with Adela, Vivian almost succumbs to the older woman’s visions, revealing once again how little control she exerts (or knows how to exert) over her everyday free dom and how easily her

  life could be pushed into a punishing routine of servitude and abnegation.20

  While Adela murmurs in one of Vivian’s ears, Dr. Jane Bellair hectors in

  the other. Bellair, the rest of the novel makes clear, is the character who has the most—and the most positive—impact on Vivian’s life and surface liberties: “And then, into the gray, flat current of her daily life, sharply across the trend of Mrs. St. Cloud’s soft influence, had come a new force—Dr. Bellair.”21

  However frightening and aggressive Jane may seem to Vivian, Jane also stands

  as Gilman’s heroic progressive: seeing opportunity in the ways young women

  have been conditioned to allow others to do the thinking for them, she de-

  termines to save Vivian both from a life of repression and disease and from

  her own timidity.

  Whereas Adela would have Vivian remain in Bainville and her father’s house

  —that uncozy, stern space rife with subjugation and control—and wait for

  Morton to return or to summon her west, Jane all bu
t browbeats Vivian into

  acting on her desires for a meaningful, fuller life of self- sufficiency. As far as Jane is concerned, Vivian must move to Colorado, a state bustling with

  economic and personal opportunity: “You are a grown woman, and have as

  much right to decide for yourself as a grown man. This isn’t wicked—it is a

  wise move; a practical one. Do you want to grow up like the rest of the use-

  less single women in this little social cemetery?”22

  Adela would have Vivian marry Morton, regardless of his diseases and vices;

  we see her influence in Vivian’s momentary vision of a life of denial: “She

  saw a vista of self- sacrificing devotion, forgoing much, forgiving much, but rejoicing in the companionship of a noble life, a soul rebuilt, a love that was passionately grateful.” Jane, in contrast, tells her point- blank that if she marries Morton she will become ill, resulting in infertility or children born with

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  physi cal and psychological challenges: “You may have any number of still- born children, year after year. And every little marred dead face would remind you that you allowed it! And they may be deformed and twisted, have all manner

  of terrible and loathsome afflictions, they and their children after them, if they have any.” As Davis writes, “The crux of The Crux was Charlotte’s out rage over the knowing transmission of venereal disease to unknowing women.”23 Jane,

  as the novel’s straight- talking, no- nonsense hero, acts to save Vivian (and her potential children) from a life of anguish and instead set her on the road to a life replete with surface free dom.

  In fact, Jane seizes such control over Vivian and her future that she not

  only bullies Vivian into action, she also takes concrete, practical steps to ensure her protégé’s success. After the group of women—in clud ing Orella, Susie, Mrs. Pettigrew, and Vivian—reach Carston, Colorado, and take over the Cot-tonwoods boardinghouse, Vivian stagnates despite “the strange, new sense of

  free dom [that] grew in her heart, a feeling of lightness and hope and unfolding purpose.” To keep Vivian away from Morton and tap her “natural love of

  children,” Jane conspires to set her up in a kindergarten (“Aren’t you ready