Charlotte Perkins Gilman and a Woman's Place in America
Page 19
13. Leslie Fiedler, Love and Death in the Ameri can Novel (New York: Dell, 1966), 122.
14. Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, ed. Michael Holquist, trans.
Caryl Emerson (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981).
15. Stetson, “Giant Wistaria,” 480.
16. Wolfgang Iser, “Indeterminancy and the Reader’s Response in Prose Fic-
tion,” in Prospecting: From Reader Response to Literary Anthropology (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), 3–30.
17. Stetson, “Giant Wistaria,” 484.
18. Paula Treichler, “Escaping the Sentence: Diagnosis and Discourse in ‘The
Yellow Wallpaper,’ ” in Feminist Issues in Literary Scholarship, ed. Shari Benstock (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), 75.
19. Stetson, “Giant Wistaria,” 482.
20. Ibid.
21. Gilman, In This Our World, 4.
Scharnhorst / 127
WORKS CITED
Bakhtin, Mikhail. The Dialogic Imagination. Edited by Michael Holquist. Translated by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: University of Texas
Press, 1981.
Degler, Carl N., 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, vi–xxxv. New York: Harper & Row, 1966.
Fiedler, Leslie. Love and Death in the Ameri can Novel. New York: Dell, 1966.
Fleenor, Juliann, ed. The Female Gothic. Montreal, Canada: Eden Press, 1983.
Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. “Comment and Review.” Forerunner, July 1911.
———. In This Our World. Boston: Small, Maynard, 1898.
———. The Living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman: An Autobiography. New York: Appleton- Century, 1935.
———. Papers. Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA.
———. “Social Darwinism.” Ameri can Journal of Sociology, March 1907.
———. “Woman Suffrage and the West.” Kansas Suffrage Reveille, June 1897.
Hill, Mary A. Charlotte Perkins Gilman: The Making of a Radical Feminist, 1860–
1896. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1980.
Howells, William Dean. “Life and Letters.” Harper’s Weekly, Janu ary 25, 1896.
———. “The New Poetry.” North Ameri can Review, May 1899.
Moers, Ellen. Literary Women: The Great Writers. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1977.
Stetson, C. P. “The Giant Wistaria.” New England Magazine, June 1891.
Treichler, Paula. “Escaping the Sentence: Diagnosis and Discourse in ‘The Yellow Wallpaper.’ ” In Feminist Issues in Literary Scholarship, edited by Shari Benstock, 62–78. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987.
Twain, Mark. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. New York: Webster 1885.
III
Reclaiming and Redefining
a “Woman’s Place”
6
“A Crazy Quilt of a Paper”
Theorizing the Place of the Periodical in
Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Forerunner Fiction
Sari Edelstein
In a 1915 issue of the Forerunner, Charlotte Perkins Gilman published an editorial entitled “Are Love Affairs News?” For Gilman, the answer was a reso-
lute no. She observed, “The papers of Chicago are again filling columns, even pages, with the miscellaneous, and to most people, offensive, love affairs of one man. Our newspapers make loud outcry about their business being to publish ‘news,’ and retain the right of sole decision as to what is news and what isn’t. This sort of story is not ‘news.’ ” The question of what constituted news preoccupied Gilman, who was deeply committed to the necessity for a reliable press; in her words, “We have no social function today more important
than The Press. The very essence of human life, i.e. social life, is in the power of intercommunication.”1 As Gilman saw it, the authority to determine what
the pub lic reads and knows is a major po liti cal power, a responsibility not to be taken lightly or misused.
Deeply committed to journalism’s potential as a vehicle for social reform,
Gilman was concerned with preserving the periodical as a space devoted to
pub lic affairs, not love affairs. I have argued elsewhere that Gilman’s most celebrated story, “The Yellow Wall- Paper,” stages her earliest critique of mainstream newspaper culture in its portrayal of the narrator’s fraught relationship with the maddening wallpaper in her room.2 This fictional scenario protests
women’s entrapment by the media’s invasive techniques and criticizes the aes-
thetic as well as the social problems that Gilman attributed to sensationalism.
Beyond “The Yellow Wall- Paper,” Gilman’s engagement with the press be-
came even more explicit; many of her stories and poems register her artis-
tic, personal, and po liti cal opposition to mainstream journalism. In poems
132 / Chapter 6
such as “The Yellow Reporter” and “Hyenas” she criticized intrusive male re-
porters and libelous papers and lamented the failure of newspapers to deliver the truth. She bemoaned the proliferation of women’s magazines, such as the
Ladies’ Home Journal, which she saw as diminishing rather than expanding women’s lives. Shelley Fisher Fishkin notes, “Gilman knew that many women
were accustomed to allowing their own agendas to be set by publications that
felt that freckle removal was a problem worthy of serious attention.”3 In the face of consumerist propaganda and unchecked sensationalism, Gilman retained her faith in the importance of the periodical, and her concerns about
the deficiencies of the mainstream press ultimately compelled her to found
her own magazine.
Written entirely by Gilman herself, the Forerunner was published monthly from 1909 until 1916. Sold for ten cents an issue, or a dollar for an annual
subscription, the Forerunner never exceeded more than fifteen hundred sub-scribers.4 In her efforts to salvage the civic function of the press, she exerted scrupulous control over all of the content, which ranged from po liti cal essays to short stories, poetry, and serialized novels. She even wrote the advertisements herself until eventually cutting advertising out entirely. With domes-
tic scandals making headlines in daily newspapers, Gilman saw the Forerunner as compensating for the shortcomings of mainstream periodical culture; for her it was a bastion of serious and timely ideas about culture and politics that counteracted the messages disseminated by the dominant culture. The
Forerunner aimed to transform women into active, informed citizens rather than mere consumers and housewives. Indeed, Gilman’s periodical jettisoned
the standard agenda of the women’s magazine and instead featured essays on
suffrage and socialism.
In this chapter I consider the Forerunner not merely as the venue for Gilman’s short fiction but also as a crucial context for its interpretation. That is, her Forerunner fiction should be understood as embedded within and circulating through the periodical that Gilman founded, edited, and wrote herself
for seven years. In emphasizing their status within the Forerunner, I posit that the stories reveal the influence that Gilman attributed to periodical culture as a tool for remapping the world. She understood the profound power of the
media to direct readers and to transform pub lic and private relationships, and she harnessed this power to upset, rather than affirm, existing social geographies. Her Forerunner fiction, in clud ing “Their House,” “Dr. Clair’s Place,”
and “When I Was a Witch” disrupt women’s alignment with the domestic
sphere and unsettle the entrenched divisions between male and female con-
cerns. As a periodical, the Forerunner wielded a kind of portable power, domestic in i
ts invasiveness of the middle- class home yet also pub lic in its distribution of the po liti cal content that corresponded to these ideological goals.
If, as Tim Cresswell writes, “particular orderings of things in the world have a
Edelstein / 133
socio- geographical basis,” then we might read the Forerunner as a tool for disordering society to reveal the constructed nature of both gender and place.5
The Forerunner’s pages revealed Gilman’s commitment to what might be
called an ethos of displacement. The journal repeatedly featured articles about turning kitchen duties into wage labor and making mothering a communal
project—in other words, strategies for transforming the home into a pub lic
space and for bringing pub lic aims into domestic space.6 According to Cress-
well, “The notion that everything ‘has its place’ and that things can be ‘in-
place’ or ‘out- of- place’ is deeply ingrained in the way we think and act,” and the mainstream media regularly reinforces these spatial laws, linking gender
deviance to transgressions of place.”7 Ladies’ Home Journal and Good Housekeeping, with their prescriptive domestic lessons, not to mention their very titles, are prime examples of the mainstream media’s investment in affirming
normative spatial arrangements. In contrast, Gilman embraced the opportu-
nity to disturb normative geographies; indeed, “out of place” is precisely where she wants to put her readers. The Forerunner stories aimed to unsettle women, to move them from the domestic to the public, from the interior to the exterior world, and ultimately from complacence to engagement.
The “place of women” was one of Gilman’s ongoing concerns. On Janu ary
21, 1891, she gave a lecture at the Los Angeles Women’s Club entitled “Our
Place Today” in which she sought to jolt her audience into action: “What is
a woman’s place? By the side of man! . . . It is your city as much as theirs.
How much do you know about it? How much do you know of the city gov-
ernment, the city business, the city sin? . . . If the city government does not properly attend to the city drainage and your home is invaded by disease—
is not that your business?”8
The domestic and the public, according to Gilman, are not inherently sepa-
rate spheres, and women cannot commit to one without making an invest-
ment in the other. As she pointed out, the “city drainage” determines whether
“your home is invaded by disease.” According to Gilman, women have a re-
sponsibility, even an obligation, to know about their communities and to take an interest in pub lic affairs, and she used the Forerunner to encourage women to expand the scope of their concerns, utilizing fiction to dramatize the positive communal and in di vidual rewards that result from focusing their ener-
gies beyond their designated roles and social locations.9
WOMEN OUT OF PLACE
It is not incidental that Gilman’s 1915 story “Dr. Clair’s Place” begins with two women becoming acquainted on a train. The story celebrates female mobility
and indeed sees it as integral to female friendship. One of the women is in a deep depression, and the narrator urges her to visit “Dr. Clair’s Place,” where
134 / Chapter 6
her own depression was successfully treated. Of her new acquaintance, the narrator observes, “There was no air of tragedy about her. She was merely dead,
or practically so.”10 So deeply does the narrator believe in the benefits of Dr.
Clair’s treatment that she pays the other woman’s fare to make the trip. This serendipitous encounter on a train ends up saving the woman’s life, affirming the benefits of female solidarity.
The story of a sanitarium for neurasthenic women, “Dr. Clair’s Place” is an
explicit critique of and alternative to S. Weir Mitchell’s infamous rest cure. Far from being isolated or confined to bed rest, the women who spend time at
Dr. Clair’s Place, known as the Hill, weave baskets, exercise outdoors, and are encouraged to read; education and physical exertion are the key components
of treatment. The story’s title refers both to Dr. Clair’s Place as a physical location and to Dr. Clair’s unconventional place in society as a female doctor.
Indeed, she has a man’s first name, Willy, and has kept her maiden name but
is also married with children, suggesting the beneficial results of disregarding gender mores.
Similarly, the Hill’s verdant physical setting suggests the advantages of blending masculine and feminine attributes. “From year to year, the famousness of
the place increased, and its income also, she built and improved; and now it
was the most wonderful combination of peaceful, silent wilderness and blos-
soming fertility.” Gilman’s emphasis of the “wonderful combination” of “silent wilderness” and blossoms suggests the benefits of fusing masculine and feminine qualities and indicates that Dr. Clair’s method is in keeping with nature rather than resisting it. Indeed, whereas nonconformity to spatial order is of-ten associated with dirt, chaos, or horror, the women’s disregard for normative geographies has regenerative, healthy consequences. The narrator observes, “I can tell you a boarding- place that is as beautiful, as healthful, as exquisitely clean and comfortable, and as reasonable as hers in price, is pretty popu lar.”
Dr. Clair so scrupulously and thoughtfully manages her retreat that women
are actually reluctant to leave after successful treatment.11
Spending time at the Hill enables women to find their places. Once they
are no longer spatially or psychologically limited by gender conventions, the visitors to Dr. Clair’s Place experience themselves as more expansive and alive.
The narrator benefits from a month of what she calls “physical enlargement.”12
The story encouraged the Forerunner readers to restore themselves by finding solace and strength in the outdoors. More than simply an indictment of
Weir Mitchell’s stringent, infantilizing rest- cure regimen, “Dr. Clair’s Place”
is a blueprint for self- renewal and actualization and a call for women to venture beyond the confines of the domestic realm.
Another Forerunner story, published in 1912, “Their House” similarly celebrates a woman who opts out of her assigned place in the home and in the
Edelstein / 135
social world more generally. Unlike “Dr. Clair’s Place,” this story begins with the description of a traditional home with a traditional patriarchal distribution of labor and property: “Mr. Waterson’s house was small, owing to the small-ness of his income, but it was clean, most violently and meticulously clean,
owing to the proficiency of Mrs. Waterson as a housekeeper.”13 It is notable
that the house is described solely as “Mr. Waterson’s,” indicating that his wife has no property or claim to their real estate. His small income determines the size of their house, indicating that perhaps he is not the best businessman,
and the fact that the house is “violently and meticulously clean” implies that Mrs. Water son’s energy might be better utilized in other tasks. In other words, the assigned gender roles in this house are not creating optimal living conditions or material benefits for either husband or wife. Although they are both cramped by the size of the house and by the terms of their marriage, they lack the resources—financial or otherwise—to make a change.
When Mr. Waterson receives a rare opportunity to join a scientific expe-
dition, which will allow him to grow and discover the world, quite literally, Mrs. Waterson agrees to run his dry goods store on her own. It turns out, “to her sincere surprise,” that Mrs. Waterson finds running the business “more
congenial than that of forever recooking similar food and reclearing the same rooms, cloth
es and dishes.” Her husband’s absence enables her to move beyond the parameters that had formerly confined her, giving her the space to
expand herself and to improve both of their lives. After a few months, she
consults with an efficiency expert, enlarges the dry goods store into a department store, opens a laundry, and purchases a hotel. “Her natural energies had now for the first time room for full action.”14 Just as in “Dr. Clair’s Place,”
Gilman redefines “natural,” suggesting that women’s natures are far more ex-
pansive and active than mainstream gender ideology allows. So successful are
Mrs. Waterson’s business establishments that she sells their home, purchases
a vacant lot, and builds a large new house. She simply needed “room” to ex-
ercise her full range of talents; as soon as she had that space, she was able to excel in the real estate business and as an entrepreneur.
When Mr. Waterson returns four years later, he is dazzled by her successes.
Despite the fact the he begins the story “thoroughly imbued with the convic-
tion that woman’s place is the home,” he eventually realizes and delights in
his wife’s entrepreneurial talents. While the mainstream media were insisting that women belong in the home, Gilman suggested that conventional gender
roles are actually “unnatural” and that the Watersons’ marriage was endangered by a blind adherence to such constructed norms. The story’s final sentence—
“This is Our House, John!”—epitomizes its message that collective ownership
and shared responsibility improve marriage and society.15
“Dr. Clair’s Place” and “Their House” resist the naturalized assumptions
136 / Chapter 6
about gendered spaces with which women are indoctrinated and aim to de-
familiarize the messages of mainstream culture. Aleta Cane writes, “In ev-
ery one of the short stories in the Forerunner, Gilman questions the absolute truths that were preached from the pulpit and reiterated in the popu lar media, such as films and magazines like the Ladies’ Home Journal, and that governed so many women’s lives.”16 In other words, the Forerunner was a vehicle for thwarting the messages of more powerful media outlets and urging