by Jill Bergman
then we might also read her rejection of Gerta as a way to dispel the perceived threat of the younger woman whose fertility mocks her own childlessness.
Marion quickly reflects upon her “sentence of instant banishment.” Rising
above her own hurt, she decides not to send the unfortunate young woman
out into the night alone, like Redgrave’s depiction in The Outcast. Rather, Marion achieves a new way of understanding: “As the older, wiser woman
forced herself to understand and extenuate the girl’s misdeed and foresee her ruined future, a new feeling rose in her heart, strong, clear, and overmastering:
156 / Chapter 7
a sense of measureless condemnation for the man who had done this thing.”
The “older, wiser” Marion intuitively knows that Gerta is not a true rival for her husband’s affection; indeed, “he had fairly forgotten Gerta and all that.
Her name aroused in him a sense of rage. She had come between him and his
wife. She had taken his wife from him. That was the way he felt.” Mr. Mar-
roner blames his victim for his own misdeed. However, Marion knows that
Gerta is the victim of her husband, rhetorically reduced to “he,” a generic pronoun, and “the man who had done this thing.”30
“Naming is power,” Yi- Fu Tuan notes, “the creative power to call something
into being, to render the invisible visible.” Marion, in turning her husband
into “the man,” renders him nearly invisible. Mr. Marroner’s position is sud-
denly akin to the defeated patriarch in Gilman’s poem “An Obstacle” (1890)
in which a clever woman defeats “Prejudice” when she has a “sudden inspi-
ration” and “walked directly through him / As if he wasn’t there!” With an
equally “sudden inspiration,” Marion casts off her husband’s name and takes
back her maiden name, Wheeling, rendering her marriage invisible, too. Call-
ing herself “into being,” Marion Wheeling gains rhetorical power by renaming
herself. Martha Cutter’s analy sis of Mrs. McPherson’s transformation in Gil-
man’s short story “The Widow’s Might” (1911) also applies to Marion Wheel-
ing’s own transformation: she “makes the transition from a good domestic
saint to an independent woman with a voice of her own.”31
Marion gains compassion as well as strength of purpose, a “voice of her
own,” and maternal tenderness: “Perhaps having no babies of her own made
her love the big child the more, though the years between them were but fif-
teen.” Does a maternal instinct toward innocent Gerta trigger Marion’s change of heart as she recognizes this out- of- wedlock pregnancy as “ ‘the sin of man against woman. . . . The offense is against womanhood. Against motherhood.
Against—the child”? Gerta, in Marion’s view, “ought, of course, to have re-
sisted temptation; but Marion is wise enough to know how difficult tempta-
tion can be to recognize when it comes in the guise of friendship and from
a source one does not suspect.” Marion also wisely recognizes the politics of social class within the hierarchy of their home: “Where obedience was due,
how could [Gerta] refuse?” In contrast, her husband, who is in a position to
command obedience, “could fully foresee and measure the consequences of
his act. He appreciated to the full the innocence, the ignorance, the grate-
ful affection, the habitual docility, of which he deliberately took advantage.”
Thus, rather than view Gerta as her rival in the sexual triangle, Marion aligns herself with her husband’s cast- off mistress.32
Literary constructions of the sexual triangle, dating back centuries, take a
range of forms. René Girard explores how a “mediator” in a sexual triangle
may actually fuel romance; in this case, the third member, or mediator, has
Golden / 157
no amorous designs but “is there, above the line, radiating toward both the
subject and the object.” Eve Sedgwick alternately explores how the sexual triangle facilitates male homosocial desire in Victorian fiction, asserting that male- male desire can find expression only through a nonexistent desire for
a woman. Heterosexual triangles in nineteenth- and early twentieth- century
fiction typically consist of one man choosing between two women as love in-
terests or one woman choosing between two male lovers. The woman or man
who assumes the upper point of the triangle typically has the ability to choose between two potential suitors at the base points and thus largely determines
the romantic outcome. Phyllis Susan Dee asserts that the female- based sexual triangle with the woman at the upper point choosing between two men at
the base point can allow women to exercise authority: “Though at times the
women in these novels are passive objects of masculine desire, they resist and revise their roles as objects, assume the active position of desiring subject, and struggle to escape the male- initiated bonds of sexual desire.” Romance more
typically ends happily when a male occupies the upper point of the triangle,
as we witness in a work by one of Gilman’s favorite authors, Dickens’s David Copperfield (1850)—but not in “Turned.”33
Gilman proposed a daring variation on all these paradigms that has a pow-
erful feminist spin. Gilman boldly twisted the sexual triangle and the patri-
archal icon of the incriminating letter solely to punish the sender. The two-
timing husband’s letters serve as a vehicle to denounce Mr. Marroner and
exclude him from the sexual triangle altogether. Gilman has allowed one of
the two base points on the triangle—typically not the position of choice—
to achieve female agency, but not to find another partner as Dee describes.
Rather, Marion rejects her former place in the patriarchal home and relocates with Gerta. Living under her maiden name of Wheeling, she returns to the
university town where she lived before her marriage. With her new name to
empower her, Marion resists being an object of Mr. Marroner’s sexual de-
sire in order to help herself and Gerta “to escape the male- initiated bonds of sexual desire.”34
In Gilman’s variation, akin to Girard’s model of mediation in a roman-
tic triangle, the man becomes a nonexistent choice for both women, whose
outcome is sisterhood, although arguably a tinge of same- sex desire rears its head in the closing paragraphs, where Gerta’s “blue, adoring eyes fixed on her friend—not upon him [Mr. Marroner].” Even if these “adoring eyes” hint at
same- sex desire—a point those interested in queering Gilman might readily
explore—both women escape the now poisoned home together. Indeed, Gil-
man’s presentation of the home as a source of economic and sexual oppres-
sion (which which she called the sexuo- economic condition in her 1898 feminist treatise Women and Economics) powerfully anticipated the work of today’s
158 / Chapter 7
feminist geographers like Gillian Rose, who views the home as a place of ne-
glect and abuse in a chapter entitled “No Place for Women.”35
The sexual triangle in “Turned” becomes a means to interrogate the un-
equal dynamics of gender under patriarchy and to allow Marion and Gerta to
find not only a new place to live but also a new way of thinking. In the final paragraphs, before her departure from her former home, Marion leaves a letter with her lawyer cousin to be delivered to her husband in person. The let-
ter simply reads, “ ‘I have gone. I will care for Gerta. Good- bye. Marion.’ That was a
ll. There was no date, no address, no postmark, nothing but that.” Unlike the letters Mr. Marroner posts from abroad, hers leaves no tangible traces for her husband to caress with his eyes or clues to help him find her. The letter reads concisely, almost brusquely, which contrasts to the long love letters Mr. Marroner sends his wife before the epistolary mix- up. It takes “detectives”
and “careful and prolonged work” over two seasons to find Miss Wheel ing.
Entering her parlor, Mr. Marroner becomes nostalgic; he recalls, “All their
years of happiness . . . the exquisite beginnings; the days of eager long ing before she was really his; the deep, still beauty of her love.” He chauvinistically assumes, “Surely she would forgive him—she must forgive him.” But “the
woman who had been his wife” does not forgive her husband as he fervently
anticipates. The use of the past perfect tense (“had been”) signals that the
role of wife is no longer viable for Marion Wheeling. Marion stands along-
side Gerta, “a tall Madonna, bearing a baby in her arms.” Gerta possesses “a
new intelligence,” and “her blue, adoring eyes [are] fixed on her friend—not
upon him.” We still detect a xenophobic attitude in the story, however: the
once ignorant Gerta, under Marion’s care, has become a majestic, “intelligent”
Madonna seemingly overnight.36
From the lenses of material culture and place, the epistolary mix- up in
“Turned” becomes a feminist tool within the sexual triangle. Mr. Marroner’s
love child functions as a “bulwark” between Mr. Marroner and his two objects
of desire, who have both transformed for the better. Mr. Marroner’s traditional home in “Turned” is no longer a tenable place for Marion Wheeling, Gerta
Petersen, or the child they appear to be jointly raising—a situation foretelling of alternative families today. The story ends with the forceful words of
Marion Wheeling, who tells her former husband firmly but “quietly”: “ ‘What
have you to say to us?’ ”37
“Us” includes two women, Marion and Gerta, and excludes Mr. Marroner,
whom they banish from the romantic triangle. Moreover, the plural “us” unites two women who previously occupied separate floors of a home—one location
“soft- carpeted” and the other location “uncarpeted,” one “thick- curtained” and the other “thin- curtained,” one area “richly furnished” and the other “poorly furnished.” Gerta now has “a new intelligence in her face” as well as a new
Golden / 159
place. Mr. Marroner, rather, is rendered “dumb”: “He looked from one to the
other dumbly.”38 A mix- up of mail ultimately prompts two passive objects of
the same man’s desire to unite and transform into empowered women who
reject the domestic sphere and find a meaningful place.
NOTES
1. Tim Cresswell, Place: A Short Introduction (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 2008), 7, 11.
2. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Selected Letters of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, ed. Denise D. Knight and Jennifer S. Tuttle (Tuscaloosa: University of Ala bama Press, 2009). Gilman’s letters offer insight into her theories as well as her relationships and personal demons. The editors, both noted Gilman scholars, have ar-
ranged the letters according to significant life events and the important people with whom Gilman corresponded.
3. Jane Austen, Persuasion, ed. Gillian Beer (1818; repr., Lon don: Penguin, 2003), 222.
4. Gary Scharnhorst and Denise D. Knight, “Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Li-
brary: A Reconstruction,” Resources for Ameri can Literary Study 23, no. 2 (1997): 181–219. The authors list eight of Dickens’s novels and four of Eliot’s novels as well as a book of Eliot’s poems in their itinerary of what works Gilman read or owned.
5. The note reads “August the 4th: Have just heard that B has been dead
more than a fortnight, so his poor children have now lost both parents. I hear she was seen on Friday last near the Strand, evidently without a place to lay her head—What a fall hers has been!” For a fuller discussion of the Egg triptych, see Catherine J. Golden, Posting It: The Victorian Revolution in Letter Writing (Gaines-ville: University Press of Florida, 2009), 188–91. This source also includes a black-and- white reproduction of the first panel.
6. George Landow, ed. “The Outcast by Richard Redgrave, RA. 1851,” Victorian Web, Janu ary 11, 2015, http://www.victorianweb.org/painting/redgrave/paintings/
4.html.
7. Anne J. Lane, ed., “The Fictional World of Charlotte Perkins Gilman,” in
The Charlotte Perkins Gilman Reader (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1980), xxii.
8. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, “Turned,” in The Charlotte Perkins Gilman Reader, ed. Ann J. Lane (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1999), 89, 93.
9. Ibid., 87, 88, 90.
10. Frank Staff, The Penny Post, 1680–1918 (Cambridge, UK: Lutterworth Press, 1992), 125.
11. David Henkin, The Postal Age: The Emergence of Modern Communications
160 / Chapter 7
in Nineteenth- Century America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 34–
36; Golden, Posting It, 197.
12.
Webster’s Ready- Made Love Letters (New York: De Witt, 1873), 9. Advice on letter writing sometimes appeared in etiquette books that gave counsel on courtship, health, and homemaking.
13. Gilman, “Turned,” 89; Perfect Etiquette: Or How to Behave in Society (New York: Hurst, n.d.), 47; see also Golden, Posting It, 215–22.
14. Henkin, Postal Age, 55–56.
15. Edward Bulwer- Lytton, Eugene Aram (New York: Harper, 1832), 61.
16. Gilman, “Turned,” 87, 90; Henkin, Postal Age, 55.
17. Rev. T. Cooke, The Universal Letter Writer: Or, New Art of Polite Correspondence (Lon don: Milner, ca. 1850), vi.
18. Gilman, “Turned,” 89, 91.
19. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, “The Yellow Wall- Paper,” in The Charlotte Perkins Gilman Reader, ed. Ann J. Lane (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1999), 6, 11; Gilman, “Turned,” 91.
20.
Perfect Etiquette, 48.
21. Gilman, “Turned,” 92.
22. Elizabeth Gaskell, “Lizzie Leigh,” in Nineteenth- Century Stories by Women: An Anthology, ed. Glennis Stephenson (Peterborough, Canada: Broadview Press, 1993), 254.
23. Gilman, “Turned,” 93.
24. Cresswell, Place, 110–19; Gilman, “Turned,” 89, 90.
25. Cresswell, Place, 111.
26. For a discussion of Gilman’s racism and ethnocentrism, see Catherine J.
Golden and Joanna Schneider Zangrando, The Mixed Legacy of Charlotte Perkins Gilman (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2000), 11–22.
27. Gilman, “Turned,” 87, 88, 89, 93.
28. Ibid., 87, 89, 90, 93.
29. Cresswell, Place, 11.
30. Gilman, “Turned,” 92, 93, 95.
31. Yu- Fi Tuan, “Language and the Making of Place: A Narrative Descriptive
Approach,” Annals of the Association of Ameri can Geographers 81, no. 4 (1991): 688; Charlotte Perkins Gilman, “An Obstacle,” in The Yellow Wall- Paper: A Sourcebook and Critical Edition, edited by Catherine J. Golden (New York: Routledge, 2004), 41–42; Martha Cutter, Unruly Tongue: Identity and Voice in Ameri can Women’s Writing, 1850–1930 (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1999), 126.
32. Gilman, “Turned,” 89, 93, 94.
33. René Girard, Desire, Deceit, and the Novel: Self and Other in Literary Structure (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 2; Eve Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Colum-
Golden / 161
bia University Press, 1985), 16, 21–27; Phyllis Susan Dee, “Female Sexuality and Triangular Desire in
Vanity Fair and The Mill on the Floss,” Papers on Language & Literature 35, no. 4 (1999): 392. The female in the position of choice may also remain torn between two inadequate objects of desire; George Eliot, another au-
thor Gilman admired, demonstrates this paradigm in The Mill on the Floss (1860), which was included in Gilman’s select library; again, however, this was not Gilman’s purpose for the sexual triangle in “Turned.”
34. Dee, “Female Sexuality,” 392.
35. Gilman, “Turned,” 97; Gillian Rose, Feminism and Geography: The Limits of Geographical Knowledge Polity (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 41–61.
36. Gilman, “Turned,” 95–97.
37. Ibid., 97. Gilman and Grace Ellery Channing, her close friend who mar-
ried Walter Stetson after he and Gilman divorced, also functioned as comothers for Gilman’s daughter, Katharine Beecher Stetson.
38. Ibid.
WORKS CITED
Austen, Jane . Persuasion. 1818. Edited by Gillian Beer. Lon don: Penguin, 2003.
Brontë, Charlotte. Jane Eyre. 1847. Edited by Richard J. Dunn. New York: W. W.
Norton, 2001.
Bulwer- Lytton, Edward. Eugene Aram. New York: Harper, 1832.
Cooke, Rev. T. The Universal Letter Writer: Or, New Art of Polite Correspondence.
Lon don: Milner, ca. 1850.
Cresswell, Tim. Place: A Short Introduction. Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 2008.
Cutter, Martha. Unruly Tongue: Identity and Voice in Ameri can Women’s Writing, 1850–1930. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1999.
Dee, Phyllis Susan. “Female Sexuality and Triangular Desire in Vanity Fair and The Mill on the Floss.” Papers on Language & Literature 35, no. 4 (1999): 391–416.
Dickens, Charles. Bleak House. 1853. Lon don: Chapman & Hall, 1892.
———. David Copperfield. 1850. Edited by Jerome H. Buckley. Illustrated by Hablot Knight Browne. New York: W. W. Norton, 1990.
Eliot, George. Middlemarch. 1872. Reprint. Ed. W. J. Harvey. New York: Penguin, 1976.
———. The Mill on the Floss. 1860. Edited by Gordon S. Haight. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1980.
Gaskell, Elizabeth. “Lizzie Leigh.” In Nineteenth- Century Stories by Women: An Anthology, edited by Glennis Stephenson, 249–83. Peterborough, Canada: Broadview Press, 1993.