Charlotte Perkins Gilman and a Woman's Place in America
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he followed the ghost into the cellar, where it rattled the chains of the draw-bucket in the well. Each of them mentions a small red cross the ghost wore
on a necklace of gold. The residents of the house quickly descend to the cel-
lar, haul the mud- laden bucket to the surface of the well, and discover in it the tiny skeleton of a month- old child. The story ends as workmen find, beneath the rotting planks of the old porch and “in the strangling grasp of the roots of the giant wistaria,” the bones of a woman with “a tiny scarlet cross on a thin chain of gold” around her neck.3
On the first reading, the story seems to be a chilling if rather transparent
indictment of sexual oppression. By piecing together a number of disparate
clues, the reader may guess the ending to the tale of tyranny and woe recounted in the first part. The young woman apparently escaped from her chamber, hid
under the porch, drowned her baby rather than abandon it, and then starved
to death rather than submit to her father’s demand that she marry for the sake of propriety and return to England. As in other works of female gothicism,
the protagonist is “simultaneously persecuted victim and courageous heroine.”
Her literary forebear is not so much Hester Prynne of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s
The Scarlet Letter, however, as the maddened slave Cassy of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Lest this point seem forced or contrived, note that Gilman considered Stowe, her great- aunt, “one of the world’s greatest women”
and her novel “a great book” and the most popu lar and influential “work of
fiction that was ever written.”4
Scharnhorst / 121
Like Cassy, the heroine of “The Giant Wistaria” kills her child rather than
allowing it to suffer ostracism or persecution. In an early poem, “In Duty
Bound,” Gilman had alluded to childbearing as an “obligation preimposed,
unsought, / Yet binding with the force of natural law.” In “An Old Proverb,”
written some months after the “Wistaria” story, Gilman again illustrated this horror of maternity in a man- made world:
No escape under heaven! Can man treat you worse
After God has laid on you his infinite curse?
The heaviest burden of sorrow you win
Cannot weigh with the load of origi nal sin;
No shame be too black for the cowering face
Of her who brought shame to the whole human race!
No escape under heaven!
For you feel, being human. You shrink from the pain
That each child, born a woman, must suffer again.
From the strongest of bonds hearts can feel, man can shape,
You cannot rebel, or appeal, or escape.
You must bear and endure. If the heart cannot sleep,
And the pain groweth bitter,—too bitter,—then weep!
For you feel, being human.5
Under the circumstances, the murder and suicide seem acts of heroic defi-
ance that save child and mother from lives of shame. Much as Cassy haunts
Simon Legree in Uncle Tom’s Cabin until she has literally scared him to death, the ghostly presence in Gilman’s story appears to exact her own measure of revenge upon her persecutors. Terrorized by men in the first part, she becomes
the source of terror to men in the sec ond.
“The Giant Wistaria” is not merely a tract in the gothic mode, however. Gil-
man also assimilated vari ous elements of frontier mythology into it. Like many other Ameri can writers, she viewed the Ameri can West in paradoxical terms,
as both promised land and howling wilderness. In her early allegorical poem
“Nature’s Answer,” for example, she wrote of a man who homesteaded on the
fairest spot on earth, with its “Soft hills, dark woods, smooth meadows richly green, and cool tree- shaded lakes the hills between.” But a pestilence in the night swept “his paradise so fair” and “killed him there.” The poem continues:
“O lovely land!” he cried, “how could I know
That death was lurking under this fair show?”
And answered Nature, merciful and stern,
“I teach by killing; let the others learn.”6
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Gilman expressed similarly ambivalent views about the Ameri can wilderness
in “The Giant Wistaria.” On the one hand, the mother in the story has fled
the oppressive Old World for a new start in the “luxuriant” New World gar-
den. She yearns to walk in the “green fields” of the frontier or virgin land.
Elsewhere in her writings, Gilman clearly associated the westering experience with free dom and opportunity, especially for women. “As Ameri can women
are given higher place—have won higher place—than any women on earth,”
she wrote, “so the women of the west stand higher than any in America.” Or,
as she wrote in her poem “In Mother- Time”:
We come to California for the sunshine and the flowers;
Our motherhood has brought us here as one;
For the fruit of all the ages should share the shining hours,
With the blossoms ever- springing
And the golden globes low swinging,
In the sun.7
On the other hand, however, the mother in “The Giant Wistaria” fails to realize the free dom and independence promised in the West. Like the biblical Eve,
she is banished from the garden for her sin and cursed to suffer in childbirth.
The cross on the chain around her neck represents the noose or halter of or-
thodoxy. The grotesque wistaria that takes root in her corpse, a mere seedling in the first part of the story, even fig ures as a tree of knowledge, a botanical cousin to Beatrice’s flowery shrub in Hawthorne’s “Rappaccini’s Daughter.”
In her art no less than in her life, Gilman revised the traditional pattern of male flight to the geographical frontier. For the record, the story is moored autobiographically: Gilman wrote it after she left her first husband in Rhode Island and moved to South ern California, “the Garden of the Lord” with her
infant daughter; that is, both the displaced author and the protagonist flee
(New) England for the West.8 Like conventional West ern male heroes, it seems, women might retreat westward from the sexual battlefield, albeit with one crucial difference: Whereas Natty Bumppo and Huck Finn “light out for the ter-
ritory ahead of the rest,” preserving their bachelor free dom, Gilman (like the woman she portrayed in the story) headed west with a cradle in tow.9 Obviously, mothers could not simply flee into the forest. For them, there was “no escape under heaven.” They could not merely abandon their children, as the
patriarch in Gilman’s story proposes. At the very least, they had to arrange
for alternative child care.
When she wrote the story in the winter of 1890, Gilman was (like her char-
acter) at the center of a brewing scandal, caught in a double bind: under fire as an irresponsible single mother and under pressure to return East cloaked in
Scharnhorst / 123
marital respectability.10 “The Giant Wistaria” thus betrays the author’s own predicament. Juliann Fleenor explains that female writers have of ten used the gothic form “to convey fear of maternity and its consequent dependent mother/ infant relationship.”11 Whereas Cassy and the heroine of “The Giant Wistaria” kill
their children, Gilman in 1894 dispatched her daughter to live with her for-
mer husband, the artist Charles Walter Stetson, and his sec ond wife, the poet Grace Ellery Channing.
As an adult, Katharine Stetson Chamberlin complained that her mother
had “seized the opportunity to get her free dom by shipping me East,” but
such a comment fails to account for Gilman’
s genuine regret that she had been forced to relinquish custody of her child. Gilman wrote later in her autobiography, “There were years, years, when I could never see a mother and child
together without crying.” Gilman desperately wished to be free of the bur-
densome routine of motherhood, to be sure, but she purchased her free dom
at a terrible price: a wrenching and permanent physical separation from her
daughter, a premeditated and “guilt- producing form of death” that she had
anticipated and symbolically described in “The Giant Wistaria.”12
Unfortunately, this all too tidy biographical analy sis of Gilman’s tale may
tend to obscure some of its startling formal characteristics as a literary text.
Leslie Fiedler reminds us that gothicism is an avant- garde literary movement, a protest or “rebellion of the imagination” against fiction of the commonplace.13
An ambiguous, half- told tale disrupted by silences and ellipses, “The Giant
Wistaria” is a type of open- ended riddle rather than a closed authorial monologue, an alternative fiction that reaches across the frontier of expression. The text responds to problems of authority by declaring its own indeterminacy.
The story consists almost entirely of dialogue. Events are narrated by sev-
eral distinct voices, none of them predominant—a cacophony of language akin
to Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of heteroglossia.14 The decentralizing, centrifugal forces tearing at the discourse—Gilman’s refusal to employ a single perspective or intelligence that can be trusted to observe and explain—compels the
reader to sift through the fragments of debris and puzzle over a sequence of
episodes. These parts, by any method of addition, yield no simple sum or sym-
metrical whole. Gilman’s tale resolves no causation, repairs no rifts in the mo-saic of the wistaria vine grown from an innocuous sprig. The past has become
a Gordian knot, a monstrous tangle of events that can never be straightened.
The narrative is, perhaps, all the more terrifying for the questions it leaves dangling.
Who really kills the child? The heroine seems the most likely candidate,
but her despotic father had earlier wished aloud that his pregnant daughter
would be cleanly drowned than live to this end.15 Does the heroine really hide under the porch and starve to death, or is she murdered (again, by her father?)
124 / Chapter 5
and her body secreted beneath the loose boards? And who fathered her child?
Might the heroine have been the victim of incest, given her father’s insistence on abandoning the infant and returning immediately to England? None of
these questions can be definitively answered on the basis of what we are told in the story, although we might reasonably expect some or all of them to be
answered in a traditionally unified authorial monologue. Like other female
gothicists such as Mary Shelley, Gilman amplified the terror her story evokes by refusing to resolve it.
Nor are these the only gaps or “places of indeterminacy” in the text.16 For
example, the heroine (the conventional designation never seemed less appro-
priate) is never directly described. Her presence is signified in the first part of the story by two brief comments; from the beginning, it seems, she is virtually a disembodied voice. Her father quickly silences her, significantly, by striking her across the mouth. As a ghost in the sec ond part of the story, she does not speak at all. When addressed “rather fiercely” by one of the men, “she
[doesn’t] seem to notice.” Instead, her eerie presence is reported sec ondhand by the visitors to the mansion who see her in the nightmare landscape. The deceptions author(iz)ed by patriarchy are underscored when one of the weekend
visitors, a reporter for a New York newspaper, declares upon his arrival that
“if we don’t find a real ghost, you may be very sure I shall make one. It’s too good an opportunity to lose!” After the ghost appears, he proposes to “put it in the Sunday edition!”17
Without the dialogue available in the first part of the story, however, the
journalist in “The Giant Wistaria” can neither raise the salient issue of sexual oppression nor pose questions about the identities of the murderer and the
victim. Blind to the intimations of sexual and maternal terror in the wilder-
ness, he trivializes the mystery by writing a spooky little story for the Sunday supplement about rattling chains and bumps in the night.
In retrospect, then, “The Giant Wistaria” is an experiment in the female
frontier gothic worthy of the author of “The Yellow Wall- Paper,” a tale Gilman completed only five months later. Both stories oppose sexual stereotypes and
extend the frontiers of female identity. The heroine of the first no less than the narrator of the sec ond is confined in a prison of language, represented by a turret room and an attic nursery, respectively. Neither woman is permitted
to describe her predicament as a victim of patriarchy; indeed, the first woman disappears from the story, at least in a corporeal sense, after speaking a total of three sentences, and the sec ond writes a clandestine epistolary tale, an absolutely forbidden discourse. Rather than submit to the demands of male au-
thority, each woman devises a set of signs that defy patriarchal control. Paula Treichler observes that by the close of “The Yellow Wall- Paper” the narrator has changed “the terms in which women are represented in language” and extended “the conditions under which women will speak.”18
Scharnhorst / 125
“The Giant Wistaria” is a tale with similar implications. The doltish men
who visit the haunted mansion initially ridicule the women for seeing ghosts.
One of the men imagines “a woman picking huckleberries,” a benign form of
domestic drudgery, whereas one of the women perceives “a crouching, hunted
fig ure.” Another man cracks wise when his wife discerns in the trunk of the
wistaria a “writhing body—cringing—beseeching!”19 The narrative’s young
mother has become, it seems, a natural hieroglyph in the hallucinatory wil-
derness or liminal frontier.
Much as the narrator of “The Yellow Wall- Paper” reads “sprawling outlines”
of her predicament in the pattern on the walls of her attic prison, the female visitors in “The Giant Wistaria” detect the intimations of sexual horror in the retrograde garden. Each of them respects the indeterminacy inscribed by the
foreboding hieroglyphics of the landscape. “I’m convinced there is a story, if we could only find it,” one of them declares—a far cry from the male reporter’s avowed intention to tell a story even if he cannot find one.20
“The Giant Wistaria” is, of course, the story as one of the female charac-
ters might have written it, not the authoritative half- truth of the journalist.
The implied author of the narrative understands that the land is cursed—not
by the blood of bondsmen or the victims of genocidal war (the dark fig ures
in the landscape are neither supplicant slaves nor crouching Indians) but by
the tears of anguished women on the most ancient of frontiers, the interstice defining the status and distinguishing the roles of men and women in patriarchal society. Gilman wrote in her poem “Nature’s Answer” that a young maid
once
found such work as brainless slaves might do,
By day and night, long labor, never through;
Such pain—no language can her pain reveal.21
Like the young woman in this poem, like the narrator of “The Yellow Wall-
Paper,” and even like the author in her autobiography, the heroine of “The
Giant Wistaria” devises a language to express ineffable pain—in her case, a<
br />
hieroglyphic of a natural symbol. Ironically, her tale has been mostly unread for nearly a century now—the same length of time that elapsed between the
heroine’s death and her revelation in the shadows and twisted vines. Eerily,
the story seems to have anticipated its reception.
NOTES
1. Carl N. Degler, ed., “Introduction,” in Women and Economics: A Study
of the Economic Relation between Men and Women as a Factor in Social Evolution, by Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1898; repr. New York: Harper & Row, 1966), viii;
126 / Chapter 5
W. D. Howells, “Life and Letters,” Harper’s Weekly, Janu ary 25, 1896; Howells,
“The New Poetry,” North Ameri can Review, May 1899.
2. Ellen Moers, Literary Women: The Great Writers (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1977), 148.
3. C. P. Stetson, “The Giant Wistaria,” New England, June 1891, 482, 483, 485.
4. Moers, Literary Women, 139; Charlotte Perkins Gilman, “Comment and Review,” Forerunner, July 1911, 196–97; Charlotte Perkins Gilman, “Social Darwinism,” Ameri can Journal of Sociology 12 (March 1907): 173.
5. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, In This Our World (Boston: Small, Maynard, 1898), 34, 137–38.
6. Ibid., 3.
7. Stetson, “Giant Wistaria,” 480–85; Charlotte Perkins Gilman, “Woman
Suffrage and the West,” Kansas Suffrage Reveille, June 1897; Gilman, In This Our World, 146.
8. Gilman, In This Our World, 145.
9. Mark Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (New York: Webster 1885), 366.
10. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, diary, vol. 29, March 11, 1890, Charlotte Per-
kins Gilman Papers, Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA.
11. Juliann Fleenor, ed., “The Gothic Prism: Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Gothic Stories and Her Autobiography,” in The Female Gothic (Montreal, Canada: Eden Press, 1983), 227.
12. Mary A. Hill, Charlotte Perkins Gilman: The Making of a Radical Feminist, 1860–1896 (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1980), 232, 234; Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman: An Autobiography (New York: Appleton- Century, 1935), 163–64.