by Jill Bergman
the year in which Stickley reached the zenith of his visibility, running a restaurant, a club, a farm school, the magazine, and an eleven- story corporate building and showrooms on Fifth Avenue. The inclusion of the Japanese screen as
a background for the chair pointedly suggests the Arts and Crafts movement.
Article after article in the Craftsman focused on how Japanese design could be integrated with what one such essay described as the “coming Ameri can
style” of Arts and Crafts furnishings; a piece in 1911 focused in particular on Japanese screens for the Ameri can home.27
In “The Chair of English” the Stickleyesque chair next to the Japanese screen is first occupied by the mendacious Dr. Manchester. But as soon as Dr. Manchester leaves, Mrs. Beale immediately telephones Dr. Gates, a “ ‘real doc-
tor’ ” (i.e., a medical one) whose advice she trusts. Seating him in the “same big chair by the golden storks and lilies,” she queries him about the account of the affair and finds that he possesses certain evidence of Dr. Manchester’s dissimulation; Gilman’s identification of Dr. Gates’s medical degree as more
“real” than Dr. Manchester’s academic one is the keynote of a scene that aims to discredit all the language associated with the departmental chairman. Mrs.
Beale in fact then reveals that a dictograph—a recording device using a pho-
nographic cylinder—has been concealed behind the Japanese screen. In a final
showdown in a lawyer’s office, Mrs. Beale uses the recording to force the sup-
Betjemann / 175
posed “master of English” to admit his falsehoods and drives him from his
departmental position.28 By the end of the story, we recognize the “Chair of
English” not as the deposed Dr. Manchester but as the physical item—big,
solid, structural, and clearly tied to the Arts and Crafts aesthetics—where English is held to a higher standard of recorded veracity and where spoken words cannot be disavowed.
As we uncover the pun in the title through out the course of reading the
story, we perform the same operation as Mrs. Beale herself, replacing literary slipperiness (represented by the “extremely learned” departmental chairman
of English) with true speech (acquired in a “chair of English” stylistically associated with honesty).29 That basic pattern, whereby literary prevarication
or uncertainty appears to be stabilized by recorded or otherwise summative
speech, is the one I mean to have drawn out in the opening paragraphs of
this chapter and to have tied to the promotion of more honest interior space
in the first two decades of the twentieth century.
But just as Gilman’s other works require the ability to correctly read the
stories one picks up—whether through stovepipe holes or in the written form
of fiction itself—“The Chair of English” presents the chair and the screen not as intrinsically suggestive of honesty but as its context and conduit. In relying on the dictograph, Mrs. Beale indeed beats Dr. Manchester at his own game
of rhetorical manipulation. She defeats him, that is, not because he has been moved to speak honestly—the formula about more ethical material surroundings articulated by Stickley—but because she has lured him into making cer-
tain absolute and therefore actionable statements, and because she and the
lawyer summon Dr. Manchester to the lawyer’s office by pretending to sub-
poena him in a suit of divorce supposedly initiated by Mrs. Beale. The chair
and screen position Dr. Manchester correctly for the better operation of the
secret device and the consequent empowerment, through the shrewd use of
the recording, of Mrs. Beale’s rhetorical authority.
While Gilman was writing “The Chair of English,” dictographs were very
much in the news, and in a way that suited her own skepticism about the sal-
vific force that the Arts and Crafts movement accorded to the intrinsic hon-
esty of material things themselves. When it origi nally appeared in 1907, the dictograph was conceived not as a recording device but as a two- way instrument for intraoffice communication: a transmitter could be placed in each
of several departments, all of which were connected back to a master sta-
tion in the office of an executive or a foreman. Yet within two years the dictograph had been adapted to clandestine recording. By 1911 dictographic evi-
dence had been introduced in two major, widely reported criminal cases (one
of which placed Clarence Darrow on trial for witness tampering), and the de-
vice’s manufacturer had begun selling a Detective Dictograph to the public.30
176 / Chapter 8
Touting the smaller transmitter that could be concealed, for example, in the
hanging finial of a light in a corporate conference room (so that an execu-
tive could eavesdrop on his employees), the Dictograph Manufacturing Com-
pany offered instructions with every unit for hiding the cord under carpets
or in the cracks of moldings and floors. If the instructions weren’t sufficient, eavesdroppers were invited to call the company’s Detective Service Department for situation- specific advice about channeling, drilling, and perforating the furniture. One might, for instance, route the wires through a “hollowed
table leg” situated directly over a “tiny hole” in the floor. Sensational journalism described dictographs concealed “in walls, under sofa[s] and chair[s], in
[a] chandelier, behind a desk, [or] beside a window.”31
In a general way, the emphasis on recording overheard speech in the era of
the dictograph (1907–1919) applies to many of Gilman’s novels, all but one of which were written in the same period. Benigna Machiavelli’s reams of notebooks, for instance, anticipate the “careful and accurate account of all we told them” kept by the women of Herland. Exemplifying Gilman’s conviction that transcription demands good reading as much as correct recording, this account is sifted into “a sort of skeleton chart, on which the things we said and the things we palpably avoided saying were all set down and studied.”32
In more particularly architectural ways, however, Gilman seems to have
absorbed dictographic examples of furniture as all- hearing and the house it-
self as a swiss cheese network of holes, raceways, channels, and tracks for receivers and wires. Even before one of the characters in The Crux actually drills a hole in the floor of Dr. Hale’s house, for instance, that structure is heavily perforated: it includes a laundry chute, an enormous dumbwaiter, a special
elevator for firewood, and a profusion of what the novel calls “mysterious inner holes.”33 One of the dramas of The Crux involves the fact that Dr. Hale, a male physician, has so much access to information: his house, in addition
to being so porous, has a kind of open- door policy and is frequented by the
townspeople. Yet, even so, he essentially refuses to protect the health of Vivian Lane by revealing to her that her suitor has syphilis. His house thus appears as a potent resource that, unlike the stovepipe holes used by Mrs. Beazley and Benigna or the dictograph concealed by Mrs. Beale, does not fulfill its potential as a way of hearing through men’s deceptions of women. Fortunately for
Vivian, Dr. Bellair, a female physician whose very name connotes open and
permeable space (a point that has been made in relation to her association
with the open landscape of the West but not in relation to architecture and
interior space), knows what to do with the information that she also spies out, collects by telephone, and overhears.
Such surveillance networks might be understood as an admonitory version
of the Arts and Crafts aim of promoting honesty in and through the home.
Betjemann / 177
Porous acoustic spaces demand that individuals attend to the accuracy of their words, even as they (like, I have argued, Gilman’s fictional characters) relocate the stimulus for such honesty from things themselves to the listeners who hear through things. The most sustained example of this appears in the novel Unpunished, completed in 1929 but published posthumously. Unpunished presents the husband- and- wife detective team themselves in terms of dictography: Jim has “a memory like a dictograph,” whereas Bess, a stenographer, records
what he recalls “straight, in sequence,” and with perfect accuracy.34
Moreover, the house in which the murder of Wade Vaughn occurs appears
as porous as Dr. Hale’s home in The Crux, with the differences that here the channels between the rooms are more specifically auditory and here an in-di vidual who lives in the house does not fail to make the most of them. A
speaking tube connects Jacqueline Warner’s room with the upstairs kitchen.
A sec ond device, which she discovers by accident, allows her to listen in on at least two different rooms in the house and to make shorthand recordings
of what she hears; this contrivance, tuned in by making adjustments on the
base, bears a striking similarity to the so- called master station of the origi nal corporate dictograph, through which the operator could communicate with
vari ous departments by pressing different buttons on the base. The master
station is clearly visible on the executive’s desk, with the buttons linked to employees—invariably in clud ing a stenographer—elsewhere (see figure 8.2).
In Unpunished, Jacqueline Warner is both the executive operator of the master station and the stenographer, a powerful double position that allows
her to record Wade Vaughn’s operations as a tyrant and a blackmailer and
thus, ultimately, to reveal his turpitude at the inquest for his murder. Through Warner’s listening and transcribing, Vaughn’s despotically patrilineal powers are publicly exposed: by the terms of his father- in- law’s will, the members of the family receive certain money in trust only if they maintain absolute obedience to Vaughn. Our sympathy, and that of the public, settles not on the
murder victim but on the five individuals who for good reason attacked the
heartless tormentor of his family and community.
But what Unpunished demands of its readers, who listen in on the story of patrilineal authority, appears most clearly when Bess Hunt, the detective
and stenographer, explains to her husband how she has discovered yet another
acoustic conduit in the house:
“I’ve made a clear plan of the house, a regular blueprint, see? Here’s
that side door, the little square entry with the doors into his room and
the dining room and coat closet at the back end. Here’s a china closet
opening from the dining room, with a small sink in it. Over the slide
used to be a slide into Vaughn’s office, as if that was the dining room
178 / Chapter 8
Figure 8.2. The dictograph’s master station (Cover of The
Dictograph—Turner Telephone System, New York: General
Acoustic, 1912)
once. It was all papered over on that side . . . on the closet side the slide was boarded up [with] a chunk of plank . . . [but] with a knife blade
the whole thing comes out!”
“What made you think of trying?”
“My conscientious use of a dust cloth, Jim. I was dusting the frame
of that picture and I happened to notice a sort of streak in the paper
below it, close under the edge, hardly visible, a long level crack.”
“Well, paper does crack sometimes, Bess.”
“Yes, I know it does, and this looked all right except that it was so
straight. So I measured the distance and found it was at the top of that
slide. Then I poked about a bit and out came the plank, and I saw day-
light. . . .”
“How about hearing?”
“ . . . regular sounding board, that thin slide, plus the crack.”35
Betjemann / 179
The revelation of the acoustic crack between the china closet and Vaughn’s office, a “regular sounding board,” begs readers to pay special attention to our own hearing of the novel. First, Bess’s description of her “blueprint” actually confuses the reader’s ear: the floor plan is very tough to imagine, not least because the passage alliterates so many c and s sounds, blending the whole mixture of “side” and “slide,” “coat closet” and “china closet,” into a bewildering description of space. Second, the passage describes speech conveyed not
just between rooms but through Gilman’s oeuvre itself: the long horizontal
streak on the wallpaper has an obvious textual antecedent. In both ways—
presenting a difficult- to- read description and quoting her own best- known
fictional work—Gilman has forced the reader to become an interpreter. Like
whoever listens at the crack, like Jacqueline Warner in her upstairs room, like Benigna Machiavelli, like Mrs. Beazley, and like Mona Beale, the readers of
this passage must listen actively through architectural space, piecing together what we can of the house’s floor plan and perhaps overhearing, as if through
a dictograph, a distant source of these words in a text at the opposite end of Gilman’s career, “The Yellow Wall- Paper.” In that sense the statement in this passage that “paper does crack” may present a double meaning, referring to
the paper pages of books as well as to the wallpaper in the Vaughn house.
Words in Gilman’s corpus are like the spaces presented: acoustically porous,
subject to cracking and piecing together, and demanding that we listen with
close attention to the sounding boards of her fiction.
Gilman’s most radical fictional paradigm thus offers architecture not as a
utopian blueprint (a claim that has been made about texts like Herland and Moving the Mountain), but as a network of cracks, conduits, and channels that must be actualized by clever protagonists and engaged readers.36 If Gilman occasionally described objects of Stickleyesque clarity and intention, like the furniture in Herland, her more nuanced position presented interior space
as permeable and traced the dynamics by which social reform flows from the
ability to hear the truth over—and through—material surroundings.
Nevertheless, the short story “His Record” (1914), with which I will conclude, reveals as clearly as anything in Gilman’s corpus how her notions of architectural honesty did flow from the specific design principles of the Arts and Crafts movement, even as Gilman adapted those principles to emphasize agentive and
active listening- in. “His Record” concerns a young man, Jim Henry, hired as a general aide- de- camp for Polly Marshall and her three children, who are summering on a Maine island. Polly hires Jim because a family friend describes
his impeccable record; he has “taken charge of this” and “managed that,” all
“alone and single- handed.” But Jim proves to be lazy and shiftless, a circumstance that causes Polly’s aged Aunt Selina, traveling with the family, to re-
180 / Chapter 8
cruit other relatives (Polly’s half brother, George, and his daughter Georgina) to come to the island. The question of where to house George and Georgina
has already been handled by Aunt Selina:
“I’ve ordered one of those little Craftsman set- up and take- down
houses,” pursued the old lady. “It’ll be a good thing to have here anyway.
George can put it up—he’ll love to. They’re coming Thursday.”
Mrs. Marshall took it as sweetly and bravely as she usually met life.
“How dear of you, Aunt Selina, to give us a house!” she said with a
little squeal of del
ight. “I always wanted one of those Craftsman’s . . .”
Certain furnishings and fittings came too, to the delighted admira-
tion of the whole family.37
The reference here is to Stickley’s style rather than to the actual products of his company, since the Craftsman architectural department sold only the plans for such houses, not the kits themselves. But the passage remains an explicit reference to the Arts and Crafts movement. Indeed, the very popu larity of kit homes known as Craftsman (the Sears and Alladin companies manufactured
tens of thousands of such structures) marks the widespread appeal of Stick-
ley’s enterprise in Gilman’s America.
More important, Aunt Selina’s choice makes the essential associations visible through out Gilman’s oeuvre: Craftsman style connotes greater honesty, but
that honesty must be proved and shepherded by a protagonist whose activities
of listening and recording drive the story’s development. Once the house ar-
rives, Aunt Selina reveals that she has been keeping a careful log of everyone’s activities. Reading from the log at the end of the story, she details the days on which one of the children teased another, the days on which the daughter behaved splendidly, and, most important, the entire history of Jim Henry’s lazi-ness around camp. Confronted with his actual record, not the false one that
gets him the job, Jim declares that he has “behaved like a chump” and wil reform.38 The moral of “His Record” is overdrawn and the story is not one of Gilman’s best. But a matter of plot exemplifies her triangulation of honest things, eavesdropping protagonists, and accurate records. George and Georgina are
origi nally said to have been summoned to take over Jim Henry’s duties. In the event, however, they appear useful primarily because George enjoys working
on the Craftsman house alongside a local builder. This circumstance is imme-
diately followed by Aunt Selina’s revelation of the record and Jim’s apparent reformation, which, if trustworthy, renders George and Georgina’s presence
no longer necessary. More than the day- to- day help of the relatives, then, the house precipitates the necessary changes.
Stickley published dozens of moralizing tales about architecture and dé-