by Jill Bergman
Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. “An Obstacle.” In The Yellow Wall- Paper: A Source-
162 / Chapter 7
book and Critical Edition, edited by Catherine J. Golden, 41–42. New York: Routledge, 2004.
———. The Selected Letters of Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Edited by Denise D.
Knight and Jennifer S. Tuttle. Tuscaloosa: University of Ala bama Press, 2009.
———. “Turned.” In The Charlotte Perkins Gilman Reader, edited by Ann J. Lane, 87–97. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1999.
———. “The Yellow Wall- Paper.” In The Charlotte Perkins Gilman Reader, edited by Ann J. Lane, 3–20. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1999.
Girard, René. Desire, Deceit, and the Novel: Self and Other in Literary Structure.
Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976.
Golden, Catherine J. Posting It: The Victorian Revolution in Letter Writing. Gaines-ville: University Press of Florida, 2009.
Golden, Catherine J., and Joanna Schneider Zangrando. The Mixed Legacy of Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2000.
Henkin, David. The Postal Age: The Emergence of Modern Communications in
Nineteenth- Century America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006.
Landow, George, ed. “The Outcast by Richard Redgrave, RA. 1851.” Victorian Web, Janu ary 11, 2015. http://www.victorianweb.org/painting/redgrave/paintings/
4.html.
Lane, Ann J., ed. “The Fictional World of Charlotte Perkins Gilman.” In The Charlotte Perkins Gilman Reader, ix–xliii. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1980.
Perfect Etiquette: Or How to Behave in Society. New York: Hurst, n.d.
Rose, Gillian. Feminism and Geography: The Limits of Geographical Knowledge Polity. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1993.
Scharnhorst, Gary, and Denise D. Knight. “Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Library: A Reconstruction.” Resources for Ameri can Literary Study 23, no. 2 (1997): 181–219.
Sedgwick, Eve. Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire. New York: Columbia University Press, 1985.
Staff, Frank. The Penny Post, 1680–1918. Cambridge, UK: Lutterworth Press, 1992.
Tuan, Yu- Fi. “Language and the Making of Place: A Narrative Descriptive Ap-
proach.” Annals of the Association of Ameri can Geographers 81, no. 4 (1991): 684–96.
Webster’s Ready- Made Love Letters. New York: De Witt, 1873.
The Wide World Letter Writer: Letters with Answers. Lon don: Milner, n.d.
8
Eavesdropping with
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Fiction, Transcription, and the Ethics of Interior Design
Peter Betjemann
“I never could see why people are so fierce about listening. It doesn’t say
in the Bible, ‘Thou shalt not listen.’ I looked, with a concordance.”
Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Benigna Machiavelli (1914)
Charlotte Perkins Gilman avowed a theory of fiction that emphasized didac-
ticism over what she described as the novelistic complexities of “in di vidual character”; in her lifetime, Cynthia Davis tells us, Gilman’s “literary friends accused her of trading aesthetics for homiletics.”1 Given this, what are we to make of the sudden convolutions of character that do appear in the very last paragraphs of many of her novels? Such a dramatic twist can seem to derail
the social argument that the rest of the novel builds.
In Benigna Machiavelli (1914), for example, the teenage protagonist spends the entire novel honing her ability to cleverly manage events for the benefit of women’s economic autonomy, free dom to travel, and liberation from the confinements of domestic labor. But at the very end of the novel she “began to
think” about her marital prospects with a cousin she has only just met, whose
“nice name” (he is called, strikingly, “Home”) turns our sense of Benigna’s independent future on its head.2
In The Crux (1911), an abstinence novel designed to warn young women
about the irreversible dangers of contracting syphilis and gonorrhea, the final section of the final chapter mounts a transformative ending that has all the
marks of Shakespearean comedy. Rather than reinforcing the novel’s hard-
driven lessons about the immutability of lifestyle and sexual choices, the conclusion announces that “all is forgiven” while presenting a marital engage-
ment between a man who is a “relic . . . of the once Wild West” (Mr. Skee
has “grown up in a playground of sixteen states and territories”) and a watchful and scrupulous New England grandmother who has escorted a group of
young women to Colorado precisely to protect them from the seductions of
men who, like her husband- to- be, can boast of a “long and checkered career.”3
164 / Chapter 8
But the best example is the surprise ending of Herland (1915). Readers have long wondered why the shrewd and ever cautious women of Herland would
send Terry Nicholson—the novel’s scheming, lying, and, indeed, criminal
individualist—back to the United States on the basis of nothing more than
his promise not to reveal the location of their country. As in Benigna Machiavelli and The Crux, the last sentence (“with which agreement we at last left Herland”) reposes its trust in customs and conditions that the rest of the novel has taught us to doubt.4
Each of the examples I have offered might be individually explained. Benigna Machiavelli is easily read as an autobiographical text, and Benigna MacAvelly’s ultimate attraction to her Scottish cousin Home MacAvelly thus echoes Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s marriage to her cousin Houghton Gilman. In The Crux the grandmother is well past childbearing age and thus not vulnerable in the same ways as young women, for the novel stresses the dangers of sexually transmitted diseases to reproductive health. So too, the bizarre decision by the women of Herland is vaguely justified by their appeal to Terry as a “gentleman,” a
category that they believe his prideful sense of masculine honor will cause
him to respect.5
But what really interests me here is that, first, Gilman has asked us to do
so much work rationalizing the conclusions, and, sec ond, a certain shred of
justificatory logic applies not to each case but to all the cases. For in each text Gilman yoked the unbelievable final paragraphs to an apparently counter-balancing trust in the power of language to reliably name, promise, or describe.
This is most obvious in Herland, since the very untrustworthiness of the ending turns on the potency accorded to Terry’s vow. A similar pattern, wherein the
language of an unreliable character suddenly becomes convincing, appears in
The Crux. Throughout the novel Mr. Skee speaks in a kind of colorfully evasive, riddling vernacular, saying much but revealing little; his iconoclastic life isolates him where “no one could speak his language.” When he reveals his
engagement, however, his speech becomes straight and to the point. The final
character to speak in the novel, Mr. Skee brings it to a rhetorically grand summation: “namely, and to wit,” he announces after working up to the confession,
“I am engaged to be married to that Peerless Lady, Mrs. Servilla Pettigrew.”6
By ending the novel with a gesture of reliable naming—even as the text pulls
the rug out from under the expectations it has established for its readers—
Gilman anticipated the two- step pattern that appears in the last two sentences of Benigna Machiavelli. There Benigna justifies her sudden attraction to a domestic life on the basis that in this marriage to her cousin she will retain her last name and its signification of her Machiavellian self: “His name was MacAvelly, too!” Benigna realizes. “And I had thought I never could keep it.”7
The drama
of these cases is this: at the moment Gilman forces readers to
Betjemann / 165
confront a sudden shift in narrative, moral, and social circumstances, she also presents a short bit of speech (Terry’s promise, Mr. Skee’s announcement,
Benigna’s last name) as an accurate and viable record. Individuals may be
fickle, the endings of these novels suggest, but certain designations or speech acts cannot be gainsaid. One of Gilman’s very first published stories, “The Unexpected” (1890), establishes just this pattern for her oeuvre: moving toward a sudden revelation (the unexpected occurrence promised in the title), the
story suggests that it thereby proves the “French proverb” that “it is the unexpected which happens.”8 Weaving together the uncertainty of circumstances
and the certainty of the proverb, Gilman seems to have imagined fiction as a
medium that could maneuver the contingencies of human affairs into a reve-
lation about the evidentiary accuracy of a few words.
I am interested in this pattern, in general, because it offers a focal point for what has been a dominant line of scholarly discussion about Gilman’s fiction.
The collective body of criticism on Herland (1915)—the only novel to receive sustained attention—places the elusive qualities of the narrative (exemplified, e.g., by the flashing glimpses readers are afforded of Ellador, Celis, and Alima darting through the trees) in dialogue with the novel’s prescriptive and even authoritarian qualities (exemplified, e.g., by its depiction of a racially purified, deeroticized society in which clarity trumps contingency).9
Similarly, interpretations of “The Yellow Wall- Paper” from every perspec-
tive must negotiate the tensions between the obvious social purpose of the
story and the notorious unreadability of the central text, the wallpaper itself, that the story presents. Barbara Hochman’s essay on the text as a study in nineteenth- century reading practices illustrates the case by showing how Gilman was responding both to the didactic tradition in Ameri can letters, a tradition she identified with her father’s reference book The Best Reading, and to the popu larity of “reading for escape”—a mode amenable to plots that were
as “flamboyant, inconsistent, or outrageous” as the wallpaper’s design.10 Conclusive speech acts of the kind I have identified (i.e., conceived in relation to unreliable narratives) thus appear less eccentric than central to the very tex-tures of Gilman’s fiction, as several decades of criti cal inquiry on her best-known texts have taught us to see that work.
I am particularly interested in this pattern because it can be tracked out-
side Gilman’s best- known works and, I will argue, because it can be extended into the realms of physical place and space. The remainder of this essay details how Gilman frequently invented characters whose clever maneuvering
in complex architectural and decorative environments allows them to acquire
accurate recordings, transcriptions, dictations, and similarly summative texts.
Those recordings, some of them on actual phonographic cylinders and others
in notebooks, typically expose patriarchal privilege and, most important for
166 / Chapter 8
my purposes, operate much like the endings of the novels I have explored—
for just as Gilman opposes an act of clear naming to the sudden collapse of
narrative continuity, she also opposes an acquired recording to an architec-
tural, decorative, and domestic environment that of ten disables clear commu-
nication or disturbs an individual’s secure sense of place and self.
Surveying her oeuvre chronologically, the rest of this chapter considers how
and why Gilman’s reformist politics centered so consistently on fictional in-
dividuals whose good listening and accurate recording offer something of a
stay against a built environment that (like human character itself, as revealed in the inexplicable endings of Benigna Machiavelli, The Crux, and Herland) is anything but univocal or socially, ethically, and po liti cally stable. That the built environment should be honest and stable was a presumption of Gilman’s era, in ways I will explain, and so the ultimate implications of my argument
involve Gilman’s attitudes toward the design theory of her day. In inventing
protagonists whose transcriptions and records bring honesty to homes and
their furnishings—rather than finding honesty intrinsically and already lodged in certain kinds of things—Gilman endorsed early twentieth- century visions
of architectural and decorative authenticity only to the degree that she saw
such authenticity as requiring actualization, vigilance, and activity. To put all of this most briefly: Gilman demands that we stay on our toes—or, to use a
metaphor that will appear more apt, that we keep our ears open. True speech
and accurate language appear as carefully achieved virtues in worlds, both
narrative and material, that offer less intrinsic stability than we might expect.
GILMAN, THE ARTS AND CRAFTS MOVEMENT,
AND THE LANGUAGE OF THINGS
I begin with chairs, which feature in several of Gilman’s works, and in Gil-
man’s era, as central furnishings in dramas of honesty and authenticity. Gustav Stickley’s Morris chair (see fig ure 8.1) is perhaps the most iconic piece of the age. For Stickley, whose magazine the Craftsman (1901–1916) ran at the same time as Gilman’s magazine the Forerunner (1909–1916) and expressed a similarly progressive agenda, such solid pieces were designed to ensure the healthy stability of the interior. Once placed, a chair like this could not easily be relocated. Believing that “nothing so much disturbs the much- desired home at-
mosphere as to make frequent changes in the disposition of the furniture,”
Stickley equated “a favorite chair moved to another place” with the lightsomeness of Victorian bric- a- brac.11
Even more pointedly, Stickley believed that sincerity and honesty were em-
bedded in the very structure of such pieces. Near the bottom of the front legs, notice where a joint cut into the lower apron travels clear through the leg;
Betjemann / 167
Figure 8.1. Gustav Stickley’s Morris chair ( Catalogue of Craftsman Furnishings Made by Gustav Stickley, Eastwood, NY, 1909, p. 47)
the same detail appears on the top of the armrest, near the front, where the
leg projects through the armrest. This joint, known as a through tenon (distinct from a blind tenon, in which the joint is invisibly housed in the wood), makes the structure of the piece visible and thus, as Stickley framed it, countered the dissimulation of applied period details. The peculiar finish that Stickley gave to all his pieces—at least until impending bankruptcy caused him to
reinvent his style near the end of his career—constituted another aspect of
their presumed stability, sincerity, and truthfulness. Rather than applying stain to the surface of the wood, Stickley fumed his oak furniture with extremely
concentrated ammonia vapor. Ammonia, he discovered in a horse stall, re-
acts with the natural tannins in oak, deepening its color while preserving the subtleties of the wood grain. Like the through tenon, ammonia fuming represented style not applied to but drawn from the structure of the piece. Fum-
ing, Stickley wrote, “might be compared to the experiences and trials of an
individual,” for it “discloses unsuspected qualities of beauty previously lying concealed within [the wood’s] heart.”12
The correlation proposed here, between the character- building trials of in-
dividuals and the beauty- revealing process of ammonia fuming, typifies Stickley’s conviction that the authenticity of his style of furnishings, known as
Craftsman, was directly comparable to the honesty that could be expected of
people. His theories ab
out the “influence of material form over mental mood”
168 / Chapter 8
proposed that rectilinear and unornamented furniture (or rather, furniture in which the only ornament “appears to proceed from within outward”) would
promote a corresponding uprightness and sincerity among the individuals
who lived with it. Stickley earnestly believed that square and stable furniture made square and stable people and that seeing the tenon poking through the
post would encourage early twentieth- century citizens (“busy workers,” he noticed, who were “troubled about many things”) to a correlative truthfulness.13
Gilman, like all Ameri cans of her age, knew Stickley’s work and the tenets
of the movement, the Ameri can Arts and Crafts, for which he was the major
spokesman. Indeed, in 1904 Gilman published a critique of the “magpie in-
stinct” for collecting bric- a- brac in Stickley’s magazine the Craftsman and in 1914 wrote a story (“His Record,” considered below) that centers on his Craftsman architecture.14 The material environment of Herland clearly suggests Arts and Crafts aesthetics, as well as the movement’s emphasis on how form follows function as its organic result: the furnishings in Herland are “strong, strong, simple in structure, and comfortable in use; also, incidentally, beautiful.”15
Dressed in tunics and robes for ease of movement and the effective practice
of their trades, the citizens of Herland call to mind the romanticized vision of medieval artisans’ guilds popu larized by the Arts and Crafts movement; one
well- known crafts utopia, Elbert Hubbard’s Roycroft community (founded in
1895), in fact prescribed just such tunics and robes as the ideal dress.
But perhaps the most important point of comparison between Gilman
and the Arts and Crafts movement concerns not the details she incorporated
into certain works but the trajectory of her fiction itself. For the stories Gilman wrote in the early 1890s, just before the appearance of the Ameri can Arts and Crafts style, reveal that Gilman was driven by the same concerns about
honesty and sincerity as those who gave birth to the decorative reform effort.