by Jill Bergman
When Stickley developed his Craftsman style around 1898, he turned away
from an established career as a period furniture manufacturer who counted
the Waldorf- Astoria Hotel among his clients. In doing so, Stickley was reacting not just against the mass- market availability of the imitation styles that he was producing, but also against what many critics saw as the overall illegi-bility of the nineteenth- century interior environment.
As exemplified by Owen Jones’s Grammar of Ornament (1856), the nine-
teenth century classified thousands of decorative details by their his tori cal and geographical origins; whether tagged as colonial, Chippendale, Moorish, or
Persian, the crowded spaces preferred by the Victorians could seem not just
overstuffed but specifically Babylonish, composed as they were of furnishings and bric- a- brac from dozens of traditions. The pressure of this kind of decorative environment drove Stickley’s commitment to honest, identifiable, and
structural design, and the same pressure is easily visible in such works of fic-
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tion as Gilman’s “The Yellow Wall- Paper” (1892), “Through This” (1893), and
“The Rocking- Chair” (1893). The first two stories present straightforward examples of how illegible or overcomplicated environments threaten the viability of human communication itself. Notoriously, the pattern in the yellow wallpaper cannot be accurately described or named even by a narrator who under-
stands the “principles of design,” creating a kind of decorative Gordian knot that is mirrored in “Through This.” The latter story, a narrative of an exhausted wife and mother, opens at dawn with a prismatic burst of rapidly changing
colors on the wall in the narrator’s bedroom, proceeds to describe the excru-
ciatingly minor decorative details of domestic economy (“I wonder if torchon
would look better, or Hamburg?”), and concludes—the crucial fact, for my
purposes—with fatigue so profound that the narrator’s ability to “write a letter” has been entirely sapped. As in “The Yellow Wall- Paper,” where the nar-
rator’s ability to “write a word” is disabled not just by the rest cure but also by the indecipherable pattern, “Through This” yokes the intricacy of the interior environment to the collapse of effective written expression.16
“The Rocking- Chair” offers a more sustained, though more subtle, example
and represents Gilman’s first use of a chair in particular as the epicenter of the drama of legibility, honesty, and communicative sincerity that defined the decorative culture of the age. The story involves a pair of roommates—Hal
and the narrator, Maurice—who inquire about leasing an apartment largely
because they are so charmed with a young woman they see rocking at one of
the windows. Although the chair is “still rocking gently” when they enter but the woman is nowhere to be found, the friends take the apartment in the hope
that she will reappear. She does not, however, except in ghostly glimpses and in the evidence afforded by the chair, which they find still in motion whenever they enter the room. The narrator learns something of the “great brass-
bound” rocking chair from the landlady:
“Is it old?” I pursued.
“Very old,” she answered briefly.
“But I thought rocking- chairs were a modern Ameri can invention?”
said I.
She looked at me apathetically.
“It is Spanish,” she said, “Spanish oak, Spanish leather, Spanish brass,
Spanish—.” I did not catch the last word, and she left the room without
another.17
The narrator’s presumption is correct. Rocking chairs are thought to have originated in the seventeenth- century Ameri can colonies. But the landlady’s cor-
rection of what she sees as a mistaken label (a “modern Ameri can invention”)
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is the keynote of the passage, which presents two additional ways in which
representation fails: the landlady’s apathetic involvement in the conversation gives up little information about the chair’s history, and the uncaught word
concludes the conversation with an incomplete list. In fact, the communica-
tive lacunae here actually strike the keynote of the whole story, which chron-icles how the young men lose their trust in dialogue and in their ability to deal honestly with one another. They are newspapermen by trade, so they should
be able to accurately gather and relay facts. But each believes that the other is conducting a secret relationship with the young woman. Each complains that
he has never “had speech of her” and laments that he has passed “no word”
with her, even while the other must have “seen her day after day—talked with
her.”18 Each repeatedly charges that the other must be lying.
The ghostly love triangle in “The Rocking- Chair” makes this a compelling
story to read for its revelations about same- sex intimacy: the “three- cornered cut” inflicted on the narrator’s “more than brother” by the chair’s leg seems to mark the chaos visited on the men’s relationship once the young woman enters the picture.19 (Bizarrely, Hal is bludgeoned to death by the massive rocking chair at the end of the story.) The plot seems to parallel Gilman’s own
devastation when Martha Luther, most likely her first lover, began to con-
template marriage. Rocking chairs in general suggest the comforts of home: a
mother nursing, a tired worker resting, a grandfather or grandmother rumi-
nating. The divisive ghost- woman and the murderous rocking chair thus dis-
rupt a number of domestic fantasies of intimacy. For my purposes, the story is most interesting for challenging these fantasies by depicting rhetorical breaks, epitomized by the broken communicative links between Hal and Maurice,
between Maurice and the landlady, and even between the material compo-
nents of the chair itself (“Spanish leather, Spanish brass, Spanish—”). Fail-
ures of authentic and complete discourse threaten the idealized appeal, icon-
ically embodied in a rocking chair, of home sweet home.
Like “The Yellow Wall- Paper” and “Through This,” “The Rocking- Chair”
does not offer an alternative to the conditions it depicts. Yet although this triad of decorative stories from the early 1890s reveals the potential mendacity of interior furnishings, by 1914 Gilman—working parallel to Stickley
and the Arts and Crafts movement and undoubtedly influenced by their calls
for sincerity, legibility, and honesty in interior space—had created an astonishingly consistent string of characters whose careful listening and recording appear as explicit alternatives to the communicative fissures of Victorian design and domesticity.
Consider the story “Fufilment” (1914), a kind of companion piece to “The
Rocking- Chair.” “Fulfilment” opens at a hotel, with two sisters rocking and
conversing. One of the two, Elsie, has a “soul affinity to rocking- chairs”; the
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story makes clear that she has sacrificed her independence, her sense of pos-
sibility, and her physical fitness to a conventional role as mother and wife.
The other sister, Irma, has led a self- made life in California, accepting children into a boarding school she has built in the foothills. Irma has no affection for rocking chairs, even though she is rocking at the outset of the story.
Instead, “her air and her garments suggested other seats: desk- chairs, parlor-chairs, and no chairs at all.”20
Most of the moralizing story consists of the dialogue between the women,
in which Irma presents a vivid narrative of her life in the hope of convincing her patronizing sister (who has never cared to hear abo
ut the details of that life) not to view her unconventional choices as a sad and lesser alternative to raising a biological family of her own. Again, as in the earlier story, the rocking chair marks a communicative limit. Elsie’s “soul affinity” to rocking chairs signifies the entire package of her indifference to her sister’s life story and the breakdown in their intimacy, at least until Irma’s insistence on narrating her history forces Elsie to stop seeing her as “poor Irma.” But if the rocking chair thus reveals what it also does in “The Rocking- Chair”—that is, the underbelly of domestic idealizations, in the form of discursive elisions and communicative lacunae—“Fulfilment” features a curious third character whose behavior
could not be more unlike Elsie’s initial indifference to her sister’s narrative.
For a “deep, broad, accurate, [and] relentless” novelist eavesdrops on the entire conversation from a “hard little sofa” positioned behind the blinds of a nearby window. As he listens, he begins transcribing the “invaluable material”
that he hears. He falls in love with Irma and, the last paragraph of the story hints, plans to follow her back to California.21
Although we learn little more about the novelist than what I have related,
he represents the moral center of the tale. His intense appreciation of Irma’s story contrasts with Elsie’s apathy, just as his seat, the hard sofa, differs notably from her rocking chair. Moreover, the novelist’s bit part forces us to reflect on our own reading of “Fulfilment” itself. Calling the novelist “conscienceless”
and “unprincipled” because he collects other people’s words, Gilman scripted
the piece to call such assignations into question: set against Elsie’s passive and therefore poor listening, the novelist’s deep response to what he hears appears anything but conscienceless, and his accurate transcriptions must be seen as
principled stands that differ from the projections and a priori assumptions of Elsie’s interlocutor.22 As in the story of 1893, the rocking chair again appears as the false promise of domestic intimacy and loving communication, but in
this case Gilman offered a truer and more respectful practice of careful lis-
tening and transcribing.
Crucially, for my purposes, that practice is exemplified both by the char-
acter of the novelist in the story and by the work required of us as readers,
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who must see through the narrative red herrings of the story’s own depic-
tion of the novelist’s immorality. To put this another way: the untrustworthiness of the material environment is mirrored by the untrustworthiness of the
narrative environment—and just as in the endings of the novels analyzed at
the beginning of this chapter, Gilman aimed to relocate our confidence to a
short, accurate, and summative text recorded, in this case, by the fig ure lurking on a hard sofa behind the window blinds. The apparently incidental in-
clusion of the minor character is thus precisely the point, for in a story about false projections and poor listening, he stands for the “relentless” quality of narrative brevity itself.
THE CHAIR OF ENGLISH: MATERIAL CULTURE AND
TRANSCRIPTION IN GILMAN’S LATE FICTION
I would not be tempted to make too much of the novelist’s behavior in “Ful-
filment,” nor of the communicative indolence signified by the rocking chair,
if a similar pattern did not recur through out the fiction Gilman wrote after 1910. In this period Gilman urged both her characters and her readers to listen through walls, to hear through the limits of conventional domesticity or patriarchal privilege, by using architecture and décor as conduits for truthful words and accurate transcriptions. Indeed, these conduits are of ten more literally tubelike than the window and blinds through which the novelist re-
cords Irma’s story.
“Mrs. Beazley’s Deeds” (1911) centers on a woman oppressed by a husband
who forces her to sign over her familial property to him, sells the property, and then banks the profits in her name to protect it from his creditors. Her
subjugation is marked at the outset of the story with a familiar image: “she vibrated nervously in [a] wooden rocker.” But she is also shown “listening at a stove- pipe hole” that connects her living room to the mercantile shop where
her husband conducts his business. Through this tube, she learns certain spe-
cifics of his dealings (when he discovers the hole, he claims to have “always wondered at them intuitions of yours”), and by the end of the story, with the encouragement and material aid of a “woman lawyer” who has boarded with
the Beazleys, Mrs. Beazley has used the legal fact of the assets being in her name to reclaim those assets and turn Mr. Beazley outdoors. In this story, authority over space and over verbal and written language are tightly intertwined: Mrs. Beazley recovers her property, in clud ing the home she grew up in, by
learning specifics through the stovepipe hole and then using that knowledge
to insist upon the letter of the law. Mr. Beazley may protest to the local justice that sheltering assets in his wife’s name constitutes a common “matter of business,” but the story as a whole establishes that careful listening and prop-
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erly recorded “deeds”—meaning both legal documents and actions—trump
the conventions of patriarchal authority.23
Benigna Machiavelli, published three years after “Mrs. Beazley’s Deeds,”
presents the same architectural conduit. Benigna listens to her father’s mal-
treatment of her mother through a stovepipe hole in the attic, and here the
record of what she learns appears not after the fact (as when Mrs. Beazley invokes her documented legal rights) but right away: Benigna “used to sit by
the floor and take down [what she heard] in shorthand.” Benigna MacAvelly
fig ures in a number of ways as Gilman’s most adept transcriber, combining
her stenographic skills with a private cipher to create a comprehensive, multi-volume “record of things Father did.”24 Such comprehensive listening and re-
cording enables Benigna to invent and implement a complex plan that tricks
her father into moving to Scotland and her mother into taking a long holiday
on a New York farm; while they are gone, Benigna establishes an enormously
successful boardinghouse business that saves the struggling family from Mr.
MacAvelly’s conviction that he knows best and from Mrs. MacAvelly’s capitu-
lation to all her husband’s decisions.
But the most interesting aspect of Benigna Machiavelli, in terms of practices of transcription, involves the appeal to careful reading (not just pas-
sive recording) that is also visible in “Fulfilment.” In this chapter’s epigraph, Benigna describes a combination of covert listening and a meticulous reader’s interpretation: when she invokes the Bible as justification for eavesdropping (“It doesn’t say in the Bible, ‘Thou shalt not listen’ ”), she also explains that she has checked the entire text with a concordance. Similarly, Benigna’s explication of her cipher draws as much attention to her voracious reading
practices as to her writing: “I learned about substitution codes from [Edgar
Allan Poe’s] ‘The Gold Bug,’ ” she explains, “and in some other books, too.”25
At these moments Gilman has linked the image of Benigna at the stovepipe
hole, listening and recording, with the image of Benigna at her texts, whether the Bible, its concordance, “The Gold Bug,” or the “other books” she invokes.
Like “Fulfilment,” Benigna Machiavelli connects listening with reading, the ethical empowerment of transcribing with a similarly thorough and comprehensive approach to written material. Gilman’s eavesdroppers, hearing through the invidiously gendered power structures o
f the domestic interior, thus model a practice that very much applies to us, as readers of her (or any) texts. These eavesdroppers also appear in their own right not as passive transcribers of the voice but as vigorous interpreters, arrangers, and exegetists. In this Gilman transformed the Arts and Crafts model even as she inherited its emphasis on
the honesty required of the interior. Stickley and other Arts and Crafts artisans offered Ameri cans material things in which honesty and sincerity were
said to be intrinsic. Gilman absorbed the era’s excitement about the ethics of
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space but presumed a much more active role for individuals: truth, for Gil-
man, was channeled through space rather inherently lodged in it.
“The Chair of English” (1913) offers a kind of case study in Gilman’s reac-
tion to the philosophy and decorative style associated with the Arts and Crafts movement. On the face of it, the story’s title refers not to a material object but to a department head in English, an unscrupulous administrator who attempts
to convince a woman, Mona Beale, that her husband, a professor of physics,
is having an affair with the wife of the university president; the chairman, Dr.
Manchester, hopes that the revelation will cause the Beales to accept an offer made to Mr. Beale by a different college, thus opening up that faculty position for a relative of Dr. Manchester’s. English appears to be a fallen discipline in the story. Affecting certain hesitancies, the chairman’s rhetorical slipperiness correlates with his profession: his “scholarly articles of exquisite diction”
have made him a “practiced expert in the use of words” who uses his training, in laying out the false case to Mrs. Beale, for misdirection and subterfuge.26
The title “The Chair of English” is a pun, however, since it also refers to
the physical place where trustworthy English is available: a “big lounging chair that stretched comfortable arms against the background of a richly embroi-dered tall Japanese screen.” This setting evokes the Arts and Crafts style quite clearly, and not just because a large lounging chair with broad arms would
have called to mind Stickley’s iconic Morris chair for any Ameri can in 1913—