Charlotte Perkins Gilman and a Woman's Place in America
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to begin that little school of yours?”) and finds her a beginning number of
wards: “I’ve been making some inquiries. . . . There are six or eight among
my patients that you could count on—about a dozen young ones. How many
could you handle?”24
Jane will not take no for an answer, and once more she tries to force Vivian
into action, brushing aside the young woman’s anxieties over her abilities,
training, and lack of formal education. Later, after Vivian rejects Morton and falls into a depression, Jane and Mrs. Pettigrew find a house for Vivian to purchase and operate as her school: “It’s a first- rate little kindergarten. I’ve got the list of scholars all arranged for, and am going to pop the girl into it so fast she can’t refuse. Not that I think she will.”25 At key moments, when Vivian
seems about to succumb to the ways she was raised, or to the visions of Adela, Jane intervenes and takes advantage of the young woman’s susceptibility to
the influence of others and gives her a forceful shove in what she deems to be the right direction. Moreover, she taps into Vivian’s undeveloped ambitions
and dreams and turns them into a tangible, material reality. And, once more,
who could argue? The protagonist is much better off self- employed and do-
ing the work of the world than being burdened with the syphilitic, gonor-
rheal, unable Morton.
Having analyzed, however briefly, Gilman’s strategy of turning subjugation
into opportunity, we have now reached a criti cal point in our analy sis: In what measure could we say that Jane’s values and manipulations actually foster the protagonist’s surface free dom? The answer, at least in my reading, is that Jane’s feminism and emotional pressure do at first seem to result in a dramatic and
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heartening enhancement of Vivian’s surface free dom, yet the doctor’s dedica-
tion to turning women into petite bourgeoisie while endorsing a vague form
of medically sanctioned eugenics sets Vivian on a road that reveals economic
success as possibly just another form of entrapment and suppresses any explo-
ration (by the author, narrator, or characters) of the deeper and more difficult matter of in di vidual free will. Gilman, of course, would have had no sympathy for such a reading or position: we must be wooden- headed if we can-
not tell that Vivian is much better off at the end of the novel than she was at the beginning (and I am not unsympathetic to this argument). To begin this
phase of our analy sis, we turn to a consideration of Jane’s feminism and how it exponentially seems to enrich Vivian’s surface free dom.
Oddly, Jane’s beliefs sound somewhat like Adela’s, at least in terms of the
need of women to take responsibility for men, but whereas the latter hews to
romance and the old values of self- sacrifice, the former (like Gilman) takes a no- nonsense approach to economic self- sufficiency even as she concedes that most young women will probably want to marry young men and that the
nation needs healthy and vital children to carry forward the work of civilization. In her effort to convince the single women of Bainville to move west,
she plays upon the values they have been raised with, but she breaks them
from the realm of self- sacrifice and service solely to patriarchy and pushes them into the realm of female economic free dom and self- sufficiency. Jane
remarks, “You folks are so strong on duty. . . . Why can’t you see a real duty
[in moving to Colorado and operating a boardinghouse]? I tell you, the place
is full of men that need mothering, and sistering—good honest sweetheart-
ening and marrying, too. Come on, Rella. Do bigger work than you’ve ever
done yet—and, as I said, bring both these nice girls with you. What do you
say, Miss Lane?”26 Fully realizing that most of the women—especially Susie
and Vivian, but also the somewhat older Orella—have a strong interest in
men and marriage, Jane reshapes those desires and focuses the women on men,
and their supposed responsibility toward men, in a way that not only piques
their sexual and matrimonial interests but also transforms them into modest,
money- making entrepreneurs.
Even as the women will be able indulge their desires for sweethearts and
husbands all they want, they will also be doing the hard yet rewarding work
of advancing Ameri can civilization. Jane believes (as Gilman did) not only in the economic free dom of women but also, like Walt Whitman, in the need of
the nation to produce strong, healthy, well- educated, and independent young
people. We see this deeper set of values precisely in the directions in which Jane gives Vivian a few timely shoves: first, Vivian must leave the stifling, crippling social space of Bainville in order to free herself of the worst forms of patriarchal oppression; sec ond, once out in the expanse of the West, she must start the
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kindergarten and must buy a building to house the school; and third, in the
summertime she must assist the doctor in running an outdoor camp for girls.
At each step Vivian becomes more self- sufficient, self- confident, able, and economically independent; at each step she educates and inspires the young
women to be like her and Jane. Everybody seems to win, especially Vivian:
“She tramped the hills with the girls; picked heaping pails of wild berries,
learned to cook in primitive fashion, slept as she had never slept in her life, from dark to dawn, grew brown and hungry and cheerful.” From a muddling,
subservient, desolate daughter and would- be partner to Morton, Vivian has
transformed, under Jane’s supervision, into a vibrant and happy woman en-
joying a much wider, fuller, and rewarding (albeit vaguely racist and eugenic) world.27
The apotheosis of Vivian’s transformation and surface free dom occurs in
the hills and mountains of the West. Like the young Henry David Thoreau,
she and her charges live the spartan, close, perceptive life of both the mind and the body, and in what may be the finest scene in the novel, Vivian comes
to love not only her body but also the free dom to enjoy it and test her lim-
its. Vivian, we could say, enjoys an exaltation of the free dom to do what she wishes, to go where she wishes, and to be whom she wishes. In other words,
she enjoys an exaltation of hard- won surface free dom: “Often in the earliest dawn she would rise from the springy, odorous bed of balsam boughs and slip
out alone for her morning swim. A run through the pines to a little rocky cape, with a small cave she knew, and to glide, naked, into that glass- smooth water, warmer than the sunless air, and swim out softly, silently, making hardly a ripple, turn on her back and lie there—alone with the sky—this brought
peace to her heart. She felt so free from every tie to earth, so like a soul floating in space, floating there with the clean, dark water beneath her, and the
clear, bright heaven above her.”28
Vivian feels alive while immersed in nature, floating unencumbered be-
tween earth and sky. This is described in a passage that rivals the sensuality and natural imagery of Whitman’s “From Pent- Up Aching Rivers,” with out
the stark loneliness and want that permeate the observer of the energetic swimmers in the poet’s “Song of Myself”; or of Kate Chopin’s descriptions of Edna’s first, triumphal swim in The Awakening, yet without the undertones of drowning and death that mark the extraordinary lyricism of the scenes at Grand
Isle. The proliferation of sibilants in the descriptions of Vivian floating on the water—“glass,” “smooth,” “sunless,” “softly,” “silently,” “sky,” “peace,�
�� and more—evoke the sounds and sway of the water. We can feel confident that
Vivian has at last passed through the gate and seized “the opportunity of a
life time.”29 Her life could have gone so badly, so wrong, if she had married Morton, but thanks to Jane’s proactive meddling, Vivian’s measure of surface
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free dom seems to have expanded immeasurably in the open, nearly unfettered
physical and social spaces of the West.
Indeed, Carston and the surrounding wilderness stand as an antithesis to
Bainville and its cramped and only seemingly genial homes and culture. Al-
though the Lanes’ home embodies precisely the sort of confined, socially re-
pressive place that Cresswell describes, Melody Graulich argues that “Gilman
represents the West as a ‘healing place’ where women find adventure, eco-
nomic independence, and work for which they are suited.” Like Mary Austin,
Carolyn Kirkland, Ella Higginson, and other female writers of her generation, Gilman “believed that the West offered them opportunities to live freer lives than those dictated by social conventions in more settled regions, a persistent theme in their work and lives.”30
Unlike the houses and streets of the East, the open spaces and new towns of
the West have not been overcoded with unadulterated patriarchal power and
control. The space is not yet replete or oppressive; the West, as a place, has potential, and in such a relatively unsettled environment Vivian and her friends appear to thrive: whereas they enjoyed almost no surface free dom in Bainville, in and around Carston they seem to count as human beings with their
own desires, bodies, and abilities. Seitler notes, “The Crux exemplifies a culture in uneasy transition, eschewing the vestiges of New England Puritanism
for what is represented as the enlightened sexual- civic discourse of the West.”31
At this point we can raise at least two objections to Gilman’s vision of what constitutes success for a young woman. In the first instance, we might object to the strength and surety of her convictions: Gilman possessed a very clear
prescriptive sense of how a young woman should think, act, and be and did
not question her own value system. She had made up her mind about such
matters as work, race, and eugenics, and she offered characters who embody
or come to embody her beliefs. Jane knows, without a doubt, what is best for Vivian, but how can she be so utterly sure? Granted, the characters are not
particularly rounded, and Gilman had a polemic mission—as Jill Bergman re-
marks, The Crux serves as a work of “sex education for young women.”32 Yet Gilman never really took a step back to ask whether other possibilities and
other types of lives might be open to Vivian and the others from Bainville.
She hinted that Vivian has a crush on Adela and Jane, but for lots of per-
fectly good reasons she did not push the implications or possible trajectories of these desires. Gilman had her own agenda, and readers would have to wait
for later writers such as Radclyffe Hall and Djuna Barnes.
If Gilman set aside issues of alternative sexualities and genders, she also
focused on work to the exclusion of other possible ways of moving forward
in the world. Vivian, for example, expresses a keen interest in education and thinks at least a little about becoming a doctor, like Jane. Gilman, however, was in a rush to get her characters working and earning their own keep and so
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shut down any consideration of what Vivian might be losing by not going to
college. Although we can certainly understand the po liti cally motivated character and plot choices Gilman made, in the end she offered a funny vision of
free dom: be free in the ways that I think are important, and let’s not waste time thinking about other sorts of lives, dreams, or philosophies.
However free the women appear to be in Colorado, we can nonetheless
counter Gilman’s arguments and dramatizations and assert that even though
Jane has good intentions, she has perhaps substituted one form of oppression
for another. As Davis writes, “For the most part, [Gilman] sought her de-
sired economic transformations within the capitalist sys tem even while criticizing that sys tem for its intrinsically patriarchal attitudes and practices.” Davis cites a passage in Gilman’s autobiography in which Gilman contends that
her brand of socialism did not suit the hard- core followers of Marx: “Among
the unnecessary burdens of my life is that I have been discredited by con-
servative persons as a Socialist, while to the orthodox Socialists themselves I was quite outside the ranks.” Falling somewhere on the left, yet still willing to have women live (and, if possible, thrive) in the capitalist system, Gilman would have Vivian and the others give themselves over to a sys tem with its
own logic and imperatives— profit, growth, the exploitation of resources, and more—that perhaps once more signals the capitulation of the self to forces
beyond its control.33
Like everyone else, the characters in The Crux collide with necessity, but once they have begun to enjoy a measure of economic success and independence they must, according to the pressures of the sys tem and the logic of
desire, always be rededicating themselves to their enterprises. By the logic of increase, just as Jane encouraged Vivian to buy the house and establish her
kindergarten, Vivian must in the future take on new students and supplement her building; she must eventually become a manager and hire others to work for her.
The surface free dom achieved by moving from Bainville to Carston may
appear to be a quantum leap in the sum of Vivian’s liberty, but we might also understand it as a matter of switching masters. In Bainville Vivian was expected to follow the law of the fathers. In Carston, Vivian’s (and the other women’s) success seem easy enough, but the world of capital and competition may be a
bit grittier and ugly than the author allowed. How much of the young wom-
an’s new strength, health, confidence, and free dom will be sacrificed to sustain and expand her business? How much will she and other women have
to act like men, the dominant players in capitalism, and come to see others
as objects rather than subjects? Of course, Gilman’s task in writing the novel was not to ask such questions, and The Crux ends with marriages all around (perhaps the first ever polemic comedy about sexually transmitted diseases).
In closing, we have one more matter to consider: Why didn’t Gilman, in the
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course of exploring the problem of surface free dom, also confront the deeper problem of free will? At first glance the answer seems obvious enough: as a
soft determinist as well as a compatibilist, Gilman, I think, did not quite believe that free will exists; or if it does, it’s so bruised and battered as to be neg-ligible in the conduct of an individual’s life, thoughts, and actions. Her novel suggests that women, especially young ones, have been so overcoded that they
possess no measure of thought or desire of their own, or perhaps they have
been so crippled by forces beyond their control that any atom of selfhood that has not been determined cannot battle those massive obscene forces.
As a matter of practical concern, Gilman did not have to worry about the
free will problem: she focused on the plight of women and what might be
done about it in her lifetime; she did not have time for Melvillian belly flops into the ocean- size pool of arguments and counterarguments over whether
we think any thoughts or take any actions that have not been predetermined
or programmed into us. I can accept this, but I think we can also understand
/> her silence from another perspective.
Karl Marx famously wrote that “men [and women], developing their mate-
rial production and their material intercourse, alter, along with this their real existence, their thinking and the products of their thinking. Life is not determined by consciousness, but consciousness by life.”34 As a hard determinist— at least in this moment of his long and shifting career—Marx suggested that we
cannot think certain things at certain times; the dominant economic sys tem
tells us, in advance, what to think and how to act. If that is the case, then we could argue that the capitalism of Gilman’s era prohibited, negated, or pre-cluded her interest in exploring—indeed, her very ability to explore—the free will question. The system, as so many philosophers of ideology have argued,
does not want anyone to think about problematic issues like free will; rather, the sys tem wants folks to work at their jobs, go about their business quietly, and leave such seemingly beside- the- point questions to, perhaps, a few ne’er- do- wells hanging out at universities or a few revolutionaries hunkered down in the cafés or hinterlands of strange countries. Contrary to Dennett—
and The Crux–era Gilman—we might then argue that for all of us, no matter what amount of surface free dom we enjoy, the question of metaphysical
free dom might be precisely the issue we should be thinking about, talking
about, and acting on.
NOTES
1. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, “Why I Wrote The Yellow Wall- Paper,” in The Charlotte Perkins Gilman Reader, ed. Ann J. Lane (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1999), 19–20.
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2. Since the works of Hobbes (1588–1679), Hume (1711–1776), and Mill (1806–
1873) were in the intellectual air of America in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the larger debate over free will was also a topic of concern. In Herman Melville’s “Bartleby, the Scrivener,” for example, the narrator ponders the plight of his occasional ward and tells us that he now and then looks “a little into ‘Edwards on the Will,’ and ‘Priestley on Necessity.’ ” Herman Melville, Billy Budd, Sailor and Selected Tales, ed. Robert Milder (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 31. Jonathan Edwards’s A Careful and Strict Inquiry into the Prevailing Notions of the Freedom of the Will appeared in 1754, and Joseph Priestley’s The Doctrine of Philosophical Necessity Illustrated was published in 1777; although we know that Melville read philosophy with some keenness, we can also imagine that if Gilman had not read Edwards or Priestley directly, she was no doubt at least familiar with some of the debates between the philosophers of the free will problem. My thanks to Robert Milder for directing me to Edwards’s and Priestley’s works through the excellent notes in his edition of Melville’s short fiction.