Charlotte Perkins Gilman and a Woman's Place in America

by Jill Bergman

  women to unlearn the so- called truths about gender that pervaded the culture.

  Through seemingly simple stories of women “out of place,” the stories re-

  map the possibilities for women’s lives and suggest new ways of being oriented in the world. Sara Ahmed explains, “Orientations shape not only how we inhabit space, but how we apprehend this world of shared inhabitance. . . . In-

  habiting spaces ‘decides’ what comes into view. . . . When we follow specific lines, some things become reachable and others remain or even become out

  of reach.”17 Gilman’s stories highlight the way certain orientations, directions, and normative routes obstruct women, and instead they endorse veering off

  course and out of place.

  Gilman was well aware of how unprofitable, and even unpalatable, these

  ideas were. She established the Forerunner, what she called a “special medium,”

  precisely because she wanted to circulate content that was unwelcome in and

  criti cal of the established periodicals of the day. She wrote, “The difficulties of reaching the pub lic with any charges against the press are extreme; because that press is the chief medium of communication. It has to be done, for the

  most, in minor publications, such as leaflets and pamphlets . . . and in the

  meantime the offender still has the ear of the public, and a range of power

  open to none of the others.”18 The press’s monopoly on pub lic opinion can be subverted only through “minor publications,” and even then, the press maintains its position of social dominance.

  For the remainder of this chapter I want to consider how one Forerunner

  story in particular links the role of the press to the critique of normative gender geographies and celebrates displacement as the basis for reform. Although it seems to be a whimsical tale without much explicit po liti cal critique, “When I Was a Witch” concerns a woman who wants to disorient, invert, and restructure society, and it also addresses the mainstream press’s outsized role in shaping the lives of its readers. The first- person narrator recounts a brief supernatural episode in her life, which she refers to as the “time of witching.”19 As a witch, the narrator suddenly finds herself endowed with the power to eu-thanize animals, improve pub lic services, and enact a range of sometimes bi-

  zarre wish fulfillments through the sheer exertion of her will.

  The story begins when the narrator, who lives in an apartment in New

  York City, heads up to the roof of her building to cool off from “a sultry and

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  thunderous evening.” Frustrated with urban life, the crowds, the “mendacious”

  newspapers, and the spectacle of fashion and status, she notes, “I was in a state of simmering rage—hot enough, even without the weather and the furnace.”

  Shortly after going up to the roof, she sees a carriage driver whipping a tired horse and suddenly “wishes that every person who strikes or otherwise hurts

  a horse unnecessarily, shall feel the pain intended—and the horse not feel it!”

  Upon noticing the success of her wish, she proceeds to wish that all urban

  pets would be “comfortably dead,” since she sees them “leading unnatural lives of enforced celibacy, cut off from sunlight, fresh air, the use of their limbs.”20

  Significantly, the witch is most troubled by the fact that the animals are

  out of place, “cut off from sunlight [and] fresh air,” and her frustration with their “unnatural lives” resonates with the unnatural lives of women in many

  of her stories.” Like urban pets, women are supposedly in the right place in

  the home, limited in “the use of their limbs,” but she denaturalizes the no-

  tion of house pets just as she destabilizes the association of women with do-

  mestic work.

  Delighted with her newfound powers, the narrator improves the food busi-

  ness, pub lic transportation, and corporate culture in general. In accordance with Gilman’s socialist leanings, the witch contemplates exploited workers

  and class inequality: “I bethought me of the remote stockholders, of the more immediate directors, of the painfully prominent officials and insolent employees—and got to work.” Through exerting her powers as a witch, she is

  able to incite a “conscientious revival all over the country”; “in mills and

  mints and railroads, things began to mend” and a “wave of humane feeling”

  swept the city.21

  DISPLACING GENRES

  Gilman’s use of the witch in this story, and the supernatural in general in her work, is generically as well culturally significant. The Forerunner, like most mass- media periodicals, contained multiple genres, mixing news and fantasy,

  the gothic and the comic—refusing to adhere consistently to generic limits

  and conventions. Like places, genres enable certain conditions while prohib-

  iting others. Genre conventions limit the kinds of stories that can be told,

  and we might read Gilman’s generic restlessness as a signal of her desire to re-imagine women’s roles and the world itself, as a grasping for physical and intellectual space, and as a longing for new narrative possibilities.

  “When I Was a Witch” epitomizes the criti cal appropriation and mixing

  of genres that characterized her career. Given the story’s use of a witch as the protagonist and the fact that it takes place on Halloween, “When I Was a

  Witch” initially seems generically aligned with Gilman’s gothic fictions, such

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  as “The Giant Wistaria,” “The Rocking Chair,” or even “The Yellow Wall-

  Paper.” According to Carol Davison, female gothic fiction typically “centers

  its lens on a young woman’s rite of passage into womanhood and her am-

  bivalent relationship to contemporary domestic ideology, especially the joint institutions of marriage and motherhood.”22 Yet even though “When I Was

  a Witch” is certainly interested in gender norms, the story offers a surpris-

  ing reversal of female gothic conventions. Rather than highlighting the hor-

  rors of marriage and domestic space, Gilman focused on the shortcomings of

  pub lic spaces, in clud ing subways, mills, railroads, and even the pub lic sphere of journalistic discourse. These are hardly the tropes or devices that one associates with the female gothic, which tends to address women’s fears of en-

  trapment within the female body and the domestic sphere. Indeed, given that

  the female gothic is of ten interested in domestic confinement, it seems par-

  ticularly striking that the protagonist of “When I Was a Witch” is remarkably mobile. The story begins on the roof of her apartment building, and it later

  follows her onto a streetcar as she goes to her office. The house, that classic gothic symbol, is utterly absent.

  Thus it might be useful then to consider this story in terms of what Janet

  Beer and Avril Horner call the “parodic gothic.” This term applies to “stories in which the idea of the supernatural is used not only to question the values at the heart of Ameri can culture and civilization, but also to draw attention to the politics of representation and narration.”23 In “When I Was a Witch,”

  Gilman gestured toward the gothic but redirected her female protagonist’s at-

  tention from the self to society, and in so doing she exposed the gendered assumptions on which the genre depends. Indeed, we might read the story’s invocation of the gothic as a meditation on the inadequacies of life outside the home.

  In other words, the fact that the story commences on the roof, rather than in the oppressive interior, suggests an orientation above and out side the domestic. The story seems to suggest that women might have (or even should have) anxieties about what goes on beyond their own psychic and inter
ior space.

  Just as “The Yellow Wall- Paper” anticipated and rejected Virginia Woolf’s injunction that a woman simply needs a “room of one’s own,” this story suggests that women ought to have a stake in pub lic spaces and should be troubled

  by inefficiencies and inequalities beyond the home. It was not the home that

  needed improvement, cleanliness, or efficiency, as the women’s magazines sug-

  gested; rather, the Forerunner urged women to treat cities as home and to consider their houses as inherently pub lic and po liti cal.

  Gilman’s decision to characterize this protagonist as a witch clearly signals her embrace of women who spurn gender norms and social conventions in

  general, and the characterization would have had significant contemporary

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  resonances, most notably with L. Frank Baum’s publication of The Wizard of Oz in 1900. According to Marion Gibson, “By 1900 witches had become liberal metaphors for po liti cal dissent and female self- empowerment, pointing the way to a future where traditional delusions were comical and obsolete.”24

  The resurgence of interest in witches at the turn of the twentieth century made sense in light of the rise of the New Woman, a fig ure who overturned many

  of the prevailing assumptions about gender.

  Consequently, since the fig ure of the witch was pervading popu lar culture at this time, it offered a clear cautionary, even disciplinary, representation of independent womanhood. Indeed, a 1909 book by Oliver Madox Hueffer called

  Witches and Their Craft went so far as to link witches to suffragists. According to Linda McDowell, “Women who did not conform or keep to their place

  were constructed as wicked or fallen, forcing them to reconsider their decision to participate in the pub lic sphere.”25 Gilman appropriated this association of witches with new womanhood and suggested the social good that witches, or

  unconventional and powerful women, can do. Her civically engaged witch is

  not wicked; rather, she is able to see wickedness in the existing social conventions and inequalities. And in telling her own story, the witch assumes nar-

  rative authority; no longer the object of ridicule or anxiety, Gilman’s witch undoes and even mocks a persistent stereotype about nonnormative women.

  Just as Gilman parodied the gothic, she also gestured toward realism with-

  out upholding the conventions of the genre. With its commitment to objec-

  tivity, realism was closely aligned with the values and practices of mainstream journalism and the male- dominated literary establishment. In his classic study of Ameri can realism, Michael Davitt Bell notes that William Dean Howells’s

  “notion of objectivity in fiction . . . functions to associate realism, once again, with ‘real’ pursuits, ‘men’s activities.’ ”26 Heavily influenced by journalistic techniques and of ten written by former newspapermen, realist fiction purported

  to represent the truth accurately and without slant. By using a witch as a protagonist, Gilman was refusing to participate in the realist mode, an insufficient form for representing her visions of a more just civilization.

  Although its New York City setting and its interest in urban problems in-

  voke the realist tradition, the story takes a supernatural turn that is fundamentally incompatible with the genre’s commitment to documenting a stable and

  recognizable reality. Realism cannot disorient readers; it can merely reflect a visible and accepted version of reality back to its readers, of ten constructing and stabilizing a world that is actually chaotic. Gilman wanted to undermine

  reality and to upset the belief that social truths are natural and unchangeable.

  By emphasizing the outrageous and the unrealistic, Gilman jars her readers

  into new and unexpected ways of thinking about the world.

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  “THE MERE PRINTING OF TRUTH”

  In conjunction with her refusal to align herself with realism, Gilman dispar-

  aged mainstream journalism, another discourse that was offering a version of

  the world masquerading as fact. Indeed, the story begins and ends with the

  narrator’s complaints about “mendacious” and “salacious” newspapers, which

  serve as the object of the witch’s final and most efficacious reform. After all her other reforms have been enacted, the story offers an explicit denuncia-tion of daily newspapers for their failure to deliver accurate, unbiased information. The witch seeks to ameliorate the corruption of the press through

  a color- coding scheme: “All intentional lies, in editorial, news, or any other column . . . [appeared] Scarlet. All malicious matter . . . Crimson. All careless or ignorant mistakes . . . Pink. All for direct self- interest of owner . . . Dark green. All mere bait—to sell the paper . . . Bright green. All advertising, primary or sec ondary . . . Brown. All sensational and salacious matter . . . Yellow.

  All hired hypocrisy . . . Purple. Good fun, instruction, and entertainment . . .

  Blue. True and necessary news and honest editorials . . . Ordinary print.”27

  The goal of this sys tem of color coding is to make visible the disproportionate amount of untruthful and insubstantial material circulating in the main-

  stream press. The newspaper’s content—the advertising, the hypocrisy, the

  sensationalism—presents itself as trustworthy and objective, but the witch’s

  sys tem illuminates the failure of the newspapers to actually offer any “true and necessary news.” The newspaper, it seems, must be parsed, deciphered,

  and organized by a responsible woman.

  After enacting the color- coding scheme, the witch explains, “There was such

  a change in all kinds of business, following the mere printing of truth in the newspapers. It began to appear as if we had lived in a sort of delirium—not

  really knowing the facts about anything. As soon as we really knew the facts, we began to behave very differently, of course.”28 The description of the previous mode of existence as a “sort of delirium” makes explicit the connection between social and journalistic convention: Journalism determines our behavior

  and our experience of reality. The “mere printing of truth” frees citizens from mental confusion and enables them to live more clearly, more deliberately.

  We might read the witch’s influence on newspapers as a supernatural brand

  of editorial power, a testament to the fact that representation itself is a kind of magic that can effect change in the real world. Reflecting on the newly

  color- coded paper, the witch remarks, “You never saw such a crazy quilt of a paper.”29 By describing the newspaper as a “crazy quilt,” she suggests that her powers have served not only to visually encode the newspaper but also to do-mesticate it. Indeed, by using the language of domesticity to describe the most pub lic of documents, she converts the newspaper into a household object, con-

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  ventionally the product of women’s labor. Read this way, it seems that one of the witch’s powers is her ability to unsettle seemingly entrenched divisions, in clud ing those between pub lic and private, life and death, supernatural and actual, and fact and fancy, revealing their permeable and constructed nature.

  More than a “crazy quilt,” the color- coding sys tem also turns the news-

  paper into a map. Whereas the newspaper readers were once lost in a miasma

  of pseudonews, the witch locates figurative pitfalls and land mines and in-

  dicates the best routes for the readers, distinguishing reliable, “honest” news from “mere bait.” Just as Gilman decried the infiltration of love affairs into the daily newspaper in her Forerunner editorial, so too does this story suggest that social change relies on the reorganization of periodicals. By color- coding the newspaper, the witch illuminates the causal relationship between social

  dysfunction and journalist
ic corruption.

  Given the witch’s success in ameliorating so many social ills, it would seem

  that the story serves as a fantasy about the possibilities for female influence in the pub lic arena. However, “When I Was a Witch” ends on a strange, sobering

  note. At the conclusion of the story, the witch attempts to enlighten and unite women and realizes the limits of what she calls her “black magic.” She explains, “I wished—with all my strength—that women, all women, might re-

  alize Womanhood at last . . . that they might see their duty as human beings, and come right out into full life and work and happiness! I stopped, breath-less, with shining eyes. I waited, trembling, for things to happen. Nothing

  happened.”30

  The witch’s magic cannot unite women or make them cognizant of their un-

  realized potential. Why did Gilman choose this cynical ending for her comi cal story? Why can’t the witch use her supernatural powers to awaken women to their full capacities as human beings? One explanation is that when the witch contemplates the untapped potential of women, her “heart swel ed with something that was far from anger.”31 Whereas all her other reforms are born of

  anger, this final wish stems from something else: a genuine concern for wom-

  en’s humanity and a desire for solidarity. According to this story, the goals of feminism cannot be achieved merely through magic, nor can anger alone

  effect social change. Feminist critics have long considered the expression of anger fundamental to social protest and a potent source of creative energy,

  but Gilman’s story suggests that anger alone is insufficient. Rather, true social change must emerge from positive action.

  Although Gilman claimed to always write for a purpose, her work of ten

  delivers more than a single intended message.32 According to the witch’s own

  color scheme, “When I Was a Witch” would clearly be coded blue, signifying

  “good fun, instruction, and entertainment,” but the story exceeds this categorization. In its ingenious revision of gothic and realist conventions and its astute

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  criticisms of pub lic life, the story operates as a thought experiment on social change. If, as the witch realizes, the majority of women are “blind, chained, untaught, in a treadmill,” then it is only through enlightenment and education that the situation can be remedied.33 These are precisely the offerings of the Forerunner, which provided what Gilman called a “clear, consistent view of human life and how to live it.”34 Her stories enjoin readers to privately consider how they might improve society if they were granted supernatural pow-