Charlotte Perkins Gilman and a Woman's Place in America

by Jill Bergman

  new places and spaces for women, where women could earn their economic

  keep, be free of financial control and domination by men, and exercise their

  minds, bodies, and desires. She argued for the reformulation of the home as a work space, a place of industry, and not just an enclosed, routinized, tedious abode set up for social engagements and the care of the stomachs and morals of a husband and children.

  Gilman wanted to revise the geography of the home: get rid of the kitchen

  and hire someone to provide the meals; get rid of the nursery and remake

  it as a room of one’s own; get rid of the men and form a co- op with other

  women. She especially wanted to revise the social and cultural norms, expec-

  tations, and forces that filled each nook and cranny. Just as much, however,

  she wanted women out of the house, able to be active participants in many of the same realms as men. She wanted not the angel but the entrepreneur,

  activist, doctor, lawyer, and teacher; she wanted women to occupy the social, cultural, and po liti cal places, spaces, and jurisdictions appropriate to such professions and talents.

  At this point, before we turn to a consideration of what our in di vidual contributors have to say about place and space in Gilman, we need to address two further matters: First, are place and space synonymous, and what do we mean by them, anyway? Second, what sorts of places and spaces, in particular, do

  our contributors analyze in Gilman?

  In response to the first question, we can say that although place and space are not perfectly synonymous, they can be interchangeable, and rather than

  attempt to resolve the issue, our authors do not seek to delimit the possibilities or suggestive qualities of either term. If by place we usually mean a specific location or a particular site, building, or town—the coffee shop, 2120 Columbia Avenue, or Boston—Bachelard has already demonstrated that places exist

  as more than geometrical shapes or geographical coordinates. Place resonates with all sorts of ideas, emotions, anxieties, and rules that cannot be fixed so easily as, for example, the longitude and latitude of one’s dwelling. Place, we can say, exceeds its own dimensions. In “The Yellow Wall- Paper” we can pretty easily see how a specific place—in this case, the nursery—takes on depths and dimensions beyond the physical measurements of the room: as the narrator

  gazes at the horrible wallpaper, she finds that she sees past the plane of the wall into dark zones populated by creeping, almost human fig ures. The wall,

  Bergman / 5

  a mere surface, seems more and more like a sort of nightmare portal leading

  to or from who knows where. In such an instance, place takes on a kind of

  nonspecific geography, a set of coordinates no longer quite locatable; and as the mansions and castles in tales like Virginia Woolf’s Orlando (1928), Mervyn Peake’s Titus Groan (1950), Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities (1972), and Salman Rushdie’s Shame (1983) amply demonstrate, place can reach toward infinity and exceed the ability of the mind (or a GPS device) to map it. Place, in other words, can easily begin to seem like space.

  By space we probably mean something like the three dimensions enclosed by the walls, ceiling, and floor of a room. Or we might mean something like

  the wide- open spaces of the Ameri can West or the vast reaches of the uni-

  verse. Space seems to imply and require a higher mathematics than place—

  we need three rather than just two lines of measurement—and it may even

  exceed any form of calculation: How deep, how many cubic feet, is the blue

  sky? Space perhaps contains fewer physical limits than place (and therefore

  promises or seems to engage the imagination differently than place), but as

  soon as we take into consideration the human element, space is as brimming

  with desires, hopes, rules, and laws as any specific location. It becomes a sort of almost contained entity to be argued over and controlled. As William Kittredge’s book title asks, Who Owns the West? (1996). Who, in other words, owns the land, but also who owns the idea, concept, or definition of the West?

  Who gets to say what the spaces of the West may be or become? Who gets to

  shape or imagine what sort of life a person may live in the West? Suddenly a

  space seems very much like a place, no matter how vast and difficult it may

  be to measure.

  To turn to our sec ond question, what sorts of places and spaces do our con-

  tributors analyze in Gilman, we can happily say that the authors explore and

  closely read a rather dizzying array of places and spaces in Gilman. In these pages—places and spaces of their own—readers will find considerations of

  Gilman’s representations of California and Colorado; of Herland, a utopian

  realm ruled and occupied by women; and of a patriarchal, close- minded, and

  stagnant New England. In a fascinating approach to place, and especially to

  space, some of our authors analyze the images and worlds presented on a flat

  surface—the canvas—and find all sorts of complexities, depths, and meanings.

  Others investigate the page itself as an intensely contested place and space, and they delve deeply into Gilman’s notion of the news, particularly in the

  form of a periodical aimed at women and progressive readers, as a space dedi-

  cated to pub lic business, politics, and that snow leopard of human affairs, the truth. Still others search the intricate, complex, and sometimes even malevo-lent interiors of the private homes and pub lic buildings in Gilman’s fiction and analyze her representations of the physical objects (e.g., rocking chairs)

  6 / Introduction

  and byways (e.g., ducts and almost- hidden openings in walls) of these intimate places and spaces. One contributor even documents Gilman’s posthumous literary emergence in Rome. As this brief list suggests, the study of place and

  space in Gilman leads to all sorts of fascinating settings and locations and to all sorts of insights into Gilman’s politics, polemics, and literary art.

  Let us now turn to an overview of the book.

  Part I opens with a landmark essay on the intersecting disciplines of Gil-

  man, place, and west ern studies. In chapter 1 Jennifer S. Tuttle and Gary

  Scharnhorst recall that Gilman lived in California for eight years, specifically in Pasadena, Oakland, and San Francisco. These cities provided the locales for her fiction, poetry, essays, and autobiographical writings, but more important, they helped to shape the intellectual underpinnings of Gilman’s reformist ideals: “Gilman associated California (and the West in general) with health, freedom, beauty, and a potential for change; it was the site of a personal and professional transformation, inspiring and enabling her creative and intellectual work.” Offering analyses of the places and cultural and po liti cal values exhibited in such west ern works as The Crux (wherein, they argue, Gilman revises and rewrites aspects of Owen Wister’s The Virginian) and What Diantha Did, Tuttle and Scharnhorst provocatively argue that Herland can and should be read as part of Gilman’s west ern body of work.

  Having opened with Gilman’s west ern experiences and works, we continue

  with biographical inquiry but turn to two sorts of seemingly much more en-

  closed, perhaps even claustrophobic, dominions: the canvas and the spaces

  of the interior self, the latter impossible to measure or gauge yet nonetheless conceivable. In chapter 2 Denise D. Knight examines a number of recently

  recovered images of Gilman produced between 1877 and 1919 and reexam-

  ines a handful of already famous renderings. Noting that portraits of Gilman

  (in a variety of media) have not received their criti cal due, Knight argues that such works give us access not only to the physical spaces that Gilman inhabited at vari ous stages of her life (in clud ing the Ameri can
West) but also, and perhaps more important, to the psychological spaces of moods, emotions, and

  thoughts. Just as we can read Gilman’s antipathy toward domesticity and the

  submission of women to men in her writing, we can see her desire for new

  places and spaces for women through the eyes of those who sought to cap-

  ture her likeness and provide glimpses of her inner self. In a similar manner, the paintings express many of the ideals, themes, and critiques that appear in her poetry and prose.

  Like Knight, William C. Snyder explores the surfaces and depths of the

  canvas. In chapter 3 he offers a canny analy sis of Gilman’s visual performances, exploring how her representations of place and space—especially of the infa-

  Bergman / 7

  mous wallpaper—suggest a number of affinities with innovations in the visual

  arts. He remarks that Gilman employed “verbal- visual constructs that simu-

  late techniques of impressionism, cubism, and abstract expressionism— three

  modernist programs that arose during Gilman’s lifetime,” and he contends that the narrator “paints” the “canvas” of the wall with “emotion, anxiety, and obsession.” Comparing Gilman’s techniques with the work of such masters as

  Claude Monet, Paul Cézanne, Mark Rothko, Georges Braque, and Pablo Pi-

  casso, Snyder explores how and why Gilman reworked her early training as a

  painter into an acutely visual and psychologically powerful modernist verbal

  imagery.

  From geography, biography, and the canvas, we turn to Part II. Both essays

  in this section return to the centrality of the places, spaces, and opportunities of the Ameri can West in Gilman’s work and thought. In chapter 4 Brady

  Harrison draws on diverse debates among philosophers over the possibilities

  of in di vidual free dom: Are we really free to think and act as we wish, or are we overprogramed by histories, forces, cultures, and ideologies beyond our

  control or understanding? He discusses The Crux, a polemic novel about sexually transmitted diseases that compares the plight of young women in the re-

  pressive patriarchal world of New England with the opportunities afforded by

  the open, less patriarchal spaces and possibilities of the West. Harrison, however, finds that while Gilman championed women’s rights and the free dom of

  the West, she perhaps offered a too prescriptive determination of how young

  women should conduct their new lives and thereby skirts a deeper consid-

  eration of what it might mean to be free in early twentieth- century America.

  Chapter 5 provides a contrast to the view of the liberatory places and spaces of the West. Gary Scharnhorst submits that Gilman, like many other American writers, “viewed the Ameri can West in paradoxical terms, as both promised land and howling wilderness.” Taking up and reworking elements of frontier

  mythology and the west ern literary genre, Gilman, in her gothic masterpiece

  “The Giant Wistaria,” countered the certainties of both male- dominated lit-

  erary forms and male forms of narrative closure. Scharnhorst writes that like the narrator in “The Yellow Wall- Paper,” the female protagonist of “The Giant Wistaria” refuses to “submit to the demands of male authority” and instead

  “devises a set of signs that defy patriarchal control.” The tale becomes, in this way, a “type of open- ended riddle rather than a closed authorial monologue,”

  and the West fig ures as a cursed and violent land.

  Part III opens with Sari Edelstein’s fascinating reading of yet another way

  of thinking about our notions of space, in this case the blank page, and about the possibilities that Gilman saw for influencing in di vidual lives, and the lives of women in general, through the periodic journal. In chapter 6 she argues that Gilman was deeply “concerned with preserving the periodical as a

  8 / Introduction

  space devoted to pub lic affairs, not love affairs. . . . She understood the profound power of the media to direct readers and to transform pub lic and pri-

  vate relationships, and she harnessed this power to upset, rather than affirm, existing social geographies.” Focusing on stories that Gilman published in

  the Forerunner, and offering in particular an extended analy sis of “When I Was a Witch,” Edelstein explores how Gilman’s female protagonists battle for

  physical and intellectual spaces in which to survive and even thrive. In “When I Was a Witch,” Gilman attacked mainstream newspapers for what she saw

  as their spurious, even salacious, stories and offers a comic yet ultimately serious means to identify the failure of the press to offer any “true and necessary news.” Through her witchcraft, the protagonist color- codes all the different sorts of lies and hypocrisies, thereby revealing the average newspaper to be a

  “crazy quilt” of bait, fabrications, and outright mendacities. With the magic of an honest publication, Gilman hoped to change the world.

  Like Edelstein, Catherine J. Golden, in chapter 7, finds a sort of magic in

  material culture, this time in the form of a letter. Drawing on postal history, material cultural studies, Victorian iconography and letter- writing manuals, the work of Tim Cresswell, and more, Golden analyzes how two women of

  very different classes—one a well- to- do wife, the other an abused domestic

  servant living far away from her family—seize upon misaddressed letters as a

  means to reshape both their lives and the meaning of home. Home, the wife

  discovers, is not the happily domestic and inviting place she thought it was; rather, it is a space of adultery, male privilege, and violence, so she leaves her husband and takes the servant with her to a new place and space for women,

  for sisterhood, for new ways of being apart and free from the baleful con-

  trol of men.

  In chapter 8 Peter Betjemann, recalling the architectural and decorative

  styles and theories of Gilman’s era, explores how a number of characters in

  Gilman’s stories and novels make use of the architectural environment—

  particularly places or spaces of concealment, screens, apertures or holes in

  walls, pipes, speaking tubes, and telephones,—to spy on and record (on the

  then new and popu lar dictograph) or transcribe the actions and conversations of others. The characters do this in keeping with Gilman’s ideals of free dom and opportunity for women and her concern, as Edelstein demonstrates, for

  truth- telling and accurate reporting as a means “to hear through the limits of conventional domesticity or patriarchal privilege.” Although readers of today might find such spying unsettling—we live, after all, in an age of creeping

  surveillance and the breakdown of in di vidual privacy—Gilman’s female pro-

  tagonists use the physical environment to turn the tables, rather homeopath-

  ically, on male power, secrecy, and the control of place: the duplicity, mal-

  feasance, and power- hungry nature of men can be recorded and broadcast to

  the greater world, particularly women, as a means of raising consciousness

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  and of rebalancing power inside and outside the domestic space. In this way,

  Betjemann suggests, Gilman likewise asked her readers to confront and come

  to terms with patrilineal authority and its play in so many places and spaces.

  Part III, and our collection, closes with chapter 9. Jennifer S. Tuttle studies the his tori cal and cultural forces at play in Italy in the last several years that have enabled, and perhaps even required, the translation of Gilman’s major

  works into Italian and their dissemination in parts of the Italian academy and society. Recounting her keynote at a 2010 conference on Gilman held at the

  University of Rome III, Tuttle
quotes the conference organizers on the pur-

  pose and the timing of the international gathering: “It is particularly timely and appropriate to reconsider Gilman’s analy sis of the social dynamics of

  power, gender, and sexuality today in Italy, given the . . . stereotyped representation of women in Italian culture and their virtual nonexistence in po liti cal and economic institutions.” Moreover, Tuttle draws upon her experiences in

  Rome as a means to meditate on the recovery of Gilman’s work in Ameri can

  culture and on issues concerning women’s health, feminism, and the power

  and ability of women to speak for themselves and be heard by both men and

  other women. What places do we have, in our concluding chapter? Only

  places that are small and easy to grapple with and understand, such as Rome,

  Italy, the United States, and the pages of history—or, to put it another way, so many of the multitudinous sorts of places and spaces explored in our other chapters.

  To close this introduction, we can make at least two observations. The first

  is that our contributors, as concerned as they are with the issues and problems of place and space, do not take up only those issues in Gilman. Rather, as experts in Gilman, Ameri can, and, in some cases, international literary studies, they bring into play a wide range of questions, ideas, and subjects at stake

  in the study of an important, even controversial, intellectual and writer. The chapters take up Gilman’s attitudes toward sexuality and queerness; the complex and evolving (and sometimes disturbing) nature of her views on ethnicity, race, and class; her place in US literary and intellectual history, and much

  more. Our contributors, we are glad to report, do not hit just one or two notes.

  The sec ond observation stems very much from Gilman’s ethos and pro-

  ductivity: our contributors, we hope, have added considerably to the fields of Gilman, place, feminist, and west ern studies, and more, but in good Gilman

  fashion, the work will, and must, continue.

  NOTES

  1. Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, trans. Maria Jolas (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964), 46–47.