by Jill Bergman
3. Robert Kane, A Contemporary Introduction to Free Will (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 14.
4. Robert Kane, ed., The Oxford Handbook of Free Will (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 4–5.
5. Daniel Dennett offers one of the best summations of determinism that
I have come across: “If determinism is true, then our every deed and decision is the inexorable outcome, it seems, of the sum of physical forces acting at the moment, which in turn is the inexorable outcome of the forces acting an instant before, and so on, to the beginning of time.” Daniel C. Dennett, Elbow Room: The Varieties of Free Wil Worth Wanting (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1984), 1. In short, we’re doomed.
6. Sam Harris leaves no doubt where he stands on the issue: “Free will is an illusion. Our wills are simply not of our own making. Thoughts and intentions emerge from background causes of which we are unaware and over which we exert no conscious control. We do not have the free dom we think we have.” He states categorically that “seeming acts of volition merely arise spontaneously (whether caused, uncaused, or probabilistically inclined, it makes no difference) and cannot be traced to a point of origin in our conscious minds.” Sam Harris, Free Will (New York: Free Press, 2012), 5–6. If Harris is right—and for what it’s worth, I don’t think he is—then he may be the bearer of good news (for at least some of us): whatever we do, we’re not responsible.
7. John Martin Fischer et al., Four Views on Freewill (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2007), 166.
8. Dennett, Elbow Room, 4, 9, 10, 13, 169. Dennett clearly takes pleasure in mocking these “bugbears.” He scorns our fear that we are merely God’s playthings (the Cosmic Child Whose Dolls We Are), that we are automatons “at the mercy
114 / Chapter 4
of brute physical causation” (Sphexishness), or that God created us but then left town, so that we are actors without meaning, beings going through motions we do not comprehend (the Disappearing Self). Dennett is, if nothing else, very witty.
9. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. J. A. C. Gaskin (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 140. Gary Watson nicely captures at least one of the problems with the compatibilist position: “compatibilists have their own troubles explaining how human beings can be products of nature and at the same time authors of
their actions, how free dom as they see it can amount to anything more than what Immanuel Kant contemptuously called ‘the free dom of the turnspit.’ ” Gary Watson, Agency and Answerability: Selected Essays (New York: Clarendon Press, 2004), 197. A turnspit is a type of dog specifically bred to walk on a treadmill in order to turn a roasting spit—a fine, free life if ever there was one. Kant authored this bon mot in his Critique of Practical Reason (1788).
10. Cynthia J. Davis, Charlotte Perkins Gilman: A Biography (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010), 300; Ella Wheeler Wilcox, “Will,” In Poetical Works of Ella Wheeler Wilcox (Edinburgh, UK: W. P. Nimmo, Hay, and Mitchell, 1917), 129–30. For a glimpse, perhaps, of Gilman’s notion of free dom and the will in her younger days, we can turn to Wilcox’s sonnet:
WILL
There is no chance, no destiny, no fate,
Can circumvent or hinder or control
The firm resolve of a determined soul.
Gifts count for nothing; will alone is great;
All things give way before it, soon or late.
What obstacle can stay the might force
Of the sea- seeking river in its course,
Or cause the ascending orb of day to wait?
Each well- born soul must win what it deserves.
Let the fool prate of luck. The fortunate
Is he whose earnest purpose never swerves,
Whose slightest action or inaction serves
The one great aim. Why even Death stands still,
And waits an hour sometimes for such a will.
11. Herman Melville, Moby- Dick or, the Whale (New York: Penguin, 1992), 592.
12. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Crux, ed. Dana Seitler (1911; repr., Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 36.
13. Ibid., 25–26.
14. Tim Cresswell, Place: A Short Introduction (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004), 9, 27. Cresswell looks back at one of his earlier works, In Place/Out of Place: Ge-
Harrison / 115
ography, Ideology, and Transgression (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), and summarizes his intent there in a way that captures Vivian’s plight even more vividly: “The purpose of [that] work was to show how place does not have meanings that are natural and obvious but ones that are created by people with more power than others to define what is and is not appropriate.”
15. Gilman, Crux, 29. Cresswell, Place, 122, further argues that “vari ous conceptions of place and place as home [play] an active role in the constitution of the normal, the natural and the appropriate and how deviation from the expected relationship between place and practice [leads] to labels of abnormality and inappropriateness.” Vivian, in wishing for some other form of life than the one her parents sanction, runs the risk of being considered abnormal and inappropriate; fear of these labels—and the attendant gossip—account at least in part for how quickly and how vociferously her parents attempt to shut down her dreams. They do not want their neighbors gossiping about their daughter in the way, for example, that they talk about Morton. What makes this scene also interesting is the way in which women—Vivian’s mother and the Foote sisters—serve as the
agents of patriarchy. Judith Allen argues, “Gilman absorbed contemporary theories postulating ‘the frontier’ as a zone of free dom, democracy, and innovation, first expounded in 1893 by Frederick Jackson Turner. She represented women as holding a better sexual economic bargaining position in the demographically male-dominated West than in the female- dominated Northeast.” Judith A. Allen, “Reconfiguring Vice: Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Prostitution, and Frontier Sexual Contracts,” in Charlotte Perkins Gilman: Optimist Reformer, ed. Jill Rudd and Val Gough (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1999), 176–77.
16. Gilman, Crux, 29.
17. Ibid., 47.
18. Ibid., 48, 108–9.
19. Davis, Biography, 154. I find Adela to be an interesting character, perhaps the most interesting in the novel, because she seems oddly sinister. Up front she peddles romance, but in her own affairs she focuses much more on practical matters such as money and social standing. Moreover, we learn that her gauzy co-
quetry while married to her first husband led to the suicide of a young male admirer, and the fate of her sec ond husband remains a bit of a mystery, adding to the dark cloud around Mrs. St. Cloud: Is she something of a black widow, if only in terms of psychological sway? Finally, is her insistence that Vivian wait for Morton based on some sort of animosity toward either Vivian or other women in general?
After all, if Vivian were to follow Adela’s advice, she would certainly lead an awful life and perhaps even have a premature, painful death. Gilman did not give us much to go on, yet there are a few fascinating, unanswerable questions nonetheless.
20. Gilman, Crux, 109; Dana Seitler, ed., “Introduction,” in The Crux, by
116 / Chapter 4
Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1911; repr., Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 15. Seitler remarks that Vivian has “a vaguely eroticized” relationship with both Adela and Dr. Jane Bellair.
21. Gilman, Crux, 49. Jennifer Tuttle calls Adela “the novel’s patron saint of traditional gender roles” and notes that although Jane “is not the most radical example of New Womanhood, her status as a woman physician nevertheless represents a significant challenge to traditional orthodoxies of gendered behavior.”
Jennifer S. Tuttle, ed., “Introduction,” in The Crux, by Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1911; repr., Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1992), 18–19.
22. Gilman, Crux, 60.
23. Gilman, Crux, 129–30; Davis, Biography, 303. For another of her takes on the problem of venereal disease, written in 191
6, see Charlotte Perkins Gilman,
“The Vintage,” in Herland, The Yellow Wall- Paper, and Selected Writings, ed. Denise D. Knight (New York: Penguin, 1999), 297–304.
24. Gilman, Crux, 64, 112, 114.
25. Ibid., 151.
26. Ibid., 57.
27. Ibid., 155. “The Crux argues that eugenic unions are the origins of a fit and vigorous national identity.” Dana Seitler, “Unnatural Selection: Mothers, Eugenic Feminism, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Regeneration Narratives,” Ameri can Quarterly 55, no. 1 (2003): 72.
28. Gilman, Crux, 155.
29. Ibid., 57.
30. Melody Graulich, “Walking Off Society- Made Values: Did the West Lib-
erate Women? And Which Women?” Paper presented at “Gilman Goes West,” the
Fifth International Conference on Charlotte Perkins Gilman, University of Montana, Missoula, June 19, 2011. My deepest thanks to Melody Graulich for such a fine plenary and for allowing me to quote from the as yet unpublished address.
My thanks as well to Jennifer S. Tuttle for her wonderful coplenary, “Is Gilman a California Writer?” Finally, I wish to express my gratitude to Gary Scharnhorst for his exemplary keynote address, “Charlotte Perkins Gilman and the Ameri can West.” Although I have not quoted Tuttle’s or Scharnhorst’s addresses directly, their remarks—and distinguished work on Gilman—have influenced this paper.
31. Seitler, “Introduction,” 9.
32. Jill Bergman, “Doing It ‘Man- Fashion’: Gender Performance in Charlotte
Perkins Gilman’s Unpunished,” in Charlotte Perkins Gilman: New Texts, New Contexts, ed. Jennifer S. Tuttle and Carol Farley Kessler (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2011), 146.
33. Davis, Biography, 197; Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman: An Autobiography (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1935), 198. Perhaps, as Ishmael wryly observes, none of us can be free in this world: “Who
Harrison / 117
ain’t a slave? Tell me that. Well, then, however the old sea- captains may order me about—however they may thump and punch me about, I have the satisfaction
of knowing that it is all right; that everybody else is one way or another served in much the same way—either in a physical or metaphysical point of view, that is; and so the universal thump is passed round, and all hands should rub each other’s shoulder- blades, and be content.” Melville, Moby- Dick, 6.
34. Karl Marx, “The German Ideology,” in The Marx- Engels Reader, 2nd ed., ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York: W. W. Norton, 1978), 155.
WORKS CITED
Allen, Judith A. “Reconfiguring Vice: Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Prostitution, and Frontier Sexual Contracts.” In Charlotte Perkins Gilman: Optimist Reformer, edited by Jill Rudd and Val Gough, 173–99. Iowa City: University of Iowa
Press, 1999.
Bergman, Jill. “Doing It ‘Man- Fashion’: Gender Performance in Charlotte Per-
kins Gilman’s Unpunished.” In Charlotte Perkins Gilman: New Texts, New Contexts, edited by Jennifer S. Tuttle and Carol Farley Kessler, 140–57. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2011.
Cresswell, Tim. In Place/Out of Place: Geography, Ideology, and Transgression. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996.
———. Place: A Short Introduction. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004.
Davis, Cynthia J. Charlotte Perkins Gilman: A Biography. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010.
Dennett, Daniel C. Elbow Room: The Varieties of Free Will Worth Wanting. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1984.
Fischer, John Martin, Robert Kane, Derk Pereboom, and Manuel Vargas. Four Views on Freewill. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2007.
Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. The Crux. 1911. Edited by Dana Seitler. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003.
———. The Living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman: An Autobiography. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1935.
———. “The Vintage.” In Herland, The Yellow Wall- Paper, and Selected Writings, edited by Denise D. Knight, 297–304. New York: Penguin, 1999.
———. “Why I Wrote The Yellow Wall- Paper.” In The Charlotte Perkins Gilman Reader, edited by Ann J. Lane, 19–20. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1999.
Graulich, Melody. “Walking Off Society- Made Values: Did the West Liberate
Women? And Which Women?” Paper presented at “Gilman Goes West,” the
Fifth International Conference on Charlotte Perkins Gilman, University of
Montana, Missoula, June 19, 2011.
118 / Chapter 4
Harris, Sam. Free Will. New York: Free Press, 2012.
Hobbes, Thomas. Leviathan. Edited by J. A. C. Gaskin. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996.
Kane, Robert. A Contemporary Introduction to Free Will. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005.
———, ed. The Oxford Handbook of Free Will. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002.
Marx, Karl. “The German Ideology.” In The Marx- Engels Reader, 2nd ed., edited by Robert C. Tucker, 146–200. New York: W. W. Norton, 1978.
Melville, Herman. Billy Budd, Sailor and Selected Tales. Edited by Robert Milder.
New York: Oxford University Press, 1987.
———. Moby- Dick or, the Whale. New York: Penguin, 1992.
Seitler, Dana, ed. “Introduction.” In The Crux, by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, 1911, 1–19. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003.
———. “Unnatural Selection: Mothers, Eugenic Feminism, and Charlotte Perkins
Gilman’s Regeneration Narratives.” Ameri can Quarterly 55, no. 1 (2003): 61–88.
Tuttle, Jennifer S., ed. “Introduction.” In The Crux, by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, 1911, 11–75. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1992.
Watson, Gary. Agency and Answerability: Selected Essays. New York: Clarendon Press, 2004.
Wilcox, Ella Wheeler. “Will.” In Poetical Works of Ella Wheeler Wilcox. Edinburgh, UK: W. P. Nimmo, Hay, and Mitchell, 1917.
5
Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s
“The Giant Wistaria”
A Hieroglyph of the Female Frontier Gothic
Gary Scharnhorst
Charlotte Perkins Gilman, a socialist, a sociologist, and the “leading intellectual” in the US women’s movement in the early twentieth century, first rose to pub lic prominence as a poet and a writer of fiction during the last decade of the nineteenth. Gilman “has made a place of her own” the literary critic William
Dean Howells announced, although he feared that her work was mostly ap-
preciated by “fanatics, philanthropists, and other Dangerous Persons.”1
Such has been the case, it seems, with two gothic tales Gilman published
early in the 1890s in New England Magazine. The sec ond of these stories was
“The Yellow Wall- Paper,” a harrowing and “macabre postpartum fantasy,” which has been disinterred from the moldering pages of bound periodicals after long neglect and widely circulated.2 The first of Gilman’s works in New England Magazine, however—published under the name C. P. Stetson—is virtually unknown to modern readers: “The Giant Wistaria” (1891) is a largely forgotten
tale remarkable for its adaptation of frontier mythology to the tradition of the female gothic, and it deserves to be resurrected in its own right.
“The Giant Wistaria” is, in its most elementary sense, a formulaic ghost
story, a terrifying diptych (a work made up of two matching parts) about an
unwed mother tormented by Puritan patriarchy whose spirit haunts a decay-
ing mansion. In the first section of the story, set sometime in the late eighteenth century, the unnamed woman suffers disgrace for bearing a child upon
her arrival in the wilderness of the New World. Her father physically abuses
her and insists that she marry a cousin, a “coarse fellow” whose proposals she had “ever shunned.” Her father also demands that she return with him to E
n-
120 / Chapter 5
gland, abandoning her child, and that she be locked in her chamber, captive
to his authority until she agrees to this plan.
In the sec ond and longer section of the story, set a century later, a young
couple rents the old house and invites several friends for a visit. They con-
sider the mansion “a real ghostly place” nestled in a riot of savage nature. The grounds, “once beautiful with rare trees and shrubs,” have now gone to seed
and become “a gloomy wilderness of tangled shade”: “The old lilacs and la-
burnums, the spirea and syringa, nodded against the sec ond- story windows.
What garden plants survived were great ragged bushes or great shapeless beds.
A huge wistaria vine covered the whole front of the house. The trunk, it was
too large to call a stem, rose at the corner of the porch by the high steps, and had once climbed its pillars; but now the pillars were wrenched from their
places and held rigid and helpless by the tightly wound and knotted arms.”
The visitors, particularly the women, soon begin “to see bloodstains and
crouching fig ures” in the sinister landscape, in clud ing the silhouette of a woman in the trunk of an ancient wistaria. That night, the ghost of the woman appears to two of the male visitors. The next morning, one of them reports that the “poor creature looked just like” all “those crouching, hunted fig ures” they had discerned the night before in the dark landscape. The other reveals that