Charlotte Perkins Gilman and a Woman's Place in America

by Jill Bergman

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  tential. Although her career eventually drew her far afield from California, she arguably never let go of her desire to associate herself with the West—this

  despite her deep bitterness at her harsh treatment by the San Francisco press and Bay Area society as a result of her very pub lic divorce and the scandal

  over her parenting arrangements. As late as Janu ary 1935, seven months before her death, she wrote Alice Stone Blackwell that “I love California, and this

  beautiful city [Pasadena] is more like home to me than any place on earth.”15

  Gilman’s attraction to the West is evident as well in her tastes as a reader: she was a fan of west ern novels, just as she was fond of detective stories. Certainly she read the west ern writings of Jack Lon don, Hamlin Garland, and

  Helen Hunt Jackson, in clud ing A Century of Dishonor and Ramona. She also read Owen Wister’s bestseller The Virginian immediately upon its publication in 1902, and her copy of the novel survives among her books in the Walter

  Stetson Chamberlin Collection.16 She even references it in her autobiography, where she both highlights the west ern’s masculinist orientation and claims for herself the West’s curative powers that Wister reserved for men (a gesture she had made in her fiction as well). Discussing “a ball” she attended in Utah in 1885—and archly describing the social milieu as one in which “the leading

  lady . . . was the wife of a railroad conductor”—she compares the entertain-

  ment to a similar scene in Wister’s novel: “The bedrooms were all occupied by sleeping babies, as described in The Virginian.” This episode in Wister’s novel is certainly not a crucial moment in its plot, yet Gilman “singles [it] out for special mention.”17 The reason, we believe, may be explained through consideration of its intersections with her own work. In Wister’s novel the hero and his partner, Lin McLean, move around the sleeping babies and dress them

  in each other’s clothes so than none of the families leave with the right children at the end of the evening. Predictably, this infuriates the mothers, who are thirsty for revenge. The hero implicates McLean in this “crime against society,” and a search party sets out to capture him but instead finds a sarcastic and incendiary note that Lin has pegged to a tree: “God bless our home.”18

  What the hero regards as a mere prank becomes nothing less than a threat to

  the sanctity of the domestic sphere.

  Gilman invokes this scene in her trademark superior tone “because, by

  permitting his hero to disrupt a [figurative] kindergarten, Wister mocked the practice of efficient and cooperative child care” that had been growing in popu-larity since the late nineteenth century and that “was a centerpiece of her reform agenda.”19 She had advocated shared nurseries, or “baby gardens,” in such books as Concerning Children (which she had published in 1900, two years before The Virginian appeared) and The Home: Its Work and Influence (1903) and in dozens of magazine articles. There was no reason for her to reply directly to Wister’s antediluvian views in her autobiography (the bulk of which

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  was composed years later, in the 1920s) because she had already responded to

  them many times before in her fiction.

  Although she vacillated on the question of whether to associate herself with

  California literary culture, Gilman undeniably was the author of a sheaf of west ern stories, through which she engaged with the themes and conventions

  of west ern writing at the time. “In her art no less than in her life, . . . Gilman revised the traditional pattern of male flight to the geographical frontier.” This modification of the formula was a constant undercurrent in her west ern fiction. Her heroines, unlike Huck Finn, do not merely “light out for the terri-

  tory” but struggle there for free dom and independence.20 As early as 1891, in

  “The Giant Wistaria,” Gilman related a tale, set in the late eighteenth century, of an unwed mother who escapes censure in England by fleeing west to New

  England. (As west ern historians have long understood, “the West” is a rela-

  tive term. New England was “the West” to British colonists.) The tormented

  mother in “The Giant Wistaria” has landed on the “luxuriant” frontier and

  yearns to walk in the “green fields” of the virgin land, although as the result of her father’s persecutions she ultimately fails to realize the promise of liberty and self- reliance. Instead, she presumably drowns her child and hides in a cellar until she too dies.21

  In the west ern stories Gilman wrote for the Forerunner about twenty years later, her leading women were more successful. It is telling that of all of her west ern stories (and we include Herland in this category), only one was set in a west ern state that had not yet granted women the right to vote: What Diantha Did (1909- 10), origi nally serialized in the Forerunner a year before California became a suffrage state. Of the others, The Crux (1911) is set in Colorado (which adopted women’s suffrage in 1893) and “Girls and Land” (1915) in Wash ing ton (which became a women’s suffrage state in 1910). All the other tales are set in California. Gilman located her west ern stories only in the most progressive

  states in what she believed was the most progressive region in the world: the West was a literal and figurative setting both for Gilman’s own quest for self-determination and for mobilizing her vision of human progress.

  A recurring motif appears in all these tales: the West as a laboratory for social experimentation and women’s concomitant self- realization. These stories are populated by white women, of ten hailing from New England, who travel

  west to find health, independence, and an opportunity to contribute meaning-

  fully to the commonwealth. In 1898 Gilman had forecast this work to Lum-

  mis: “I have been hovering for years over a series of little stories all set in Pasadena— not of the scenery, nor the history, nor the local character, but of the new life which that great country can so well let grow at last.”22 (She set these stories in California, but also elsewhere in the far West.)

  A west ern setting was a key element of her didactic project, in which she

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  urged social reform through literary exemplars. The enterprising heroine of

  What Diantha Did, for example, establishes a restaurant, a cooked- food delivery service, a cleaning service, a cluster of kitchenless homes, and an apartment hotel in the pastoral town of Orchardina in south ern California, mod-

  eled on Pasadena. It is a success story in which Diantha rises, if not from rags to riches, then from maid to manager. Diantha’s California is a land of opportunity, “good for nervous complaints, too.”23

  In “Girls and Land” the heroine grows up in the state of Wash ing ton,

  where she founds a “chain of R[est] & P[leasure] Clubs” for women. “The idea spread,” we’re told. “Tacoma took it up, and Portland, Bellingham, Everett and Spokane.” Similarly, in “Bee Wise” (1913) Gilman depicted a pair of progressive communities in California where, as her heroine declares, “We can make

  a little Eden!” In “Dr. Clair’s Place” (1915) Gilman described a female physician’s treatment for neurasthenia in sharp contrast to Mitchell’s rest cure. At a

  “psycho- sanatorium” situated on the “south ern face of the Sierra Madres,” the doctor prescribes a regimen of work and amusement. Her patients weave, read,

  swim, dance, and garden. In “My Poor Aunt” (1913) the heroine aspires to a

  literary life upon attaining her majority, but her mother and an aunt conspire to marry her to the first eligible suitor who happens along until, at a propitious moment, another aunt who owns a west ern newspaper arrives to offer her a

  job and free dom.24 In “Joan’s Defender” (1916) a nine- year- old girl lives with her aunt and uncle for two years on their California ranch and returns to her east ern home
“a very different looking child from the one who left it so mourn-fully. She was much taller, larger, with a clear color, a light, firm step, a ready smile” and “no shadow of timidity.” And in “Fulfilment” (1914) the self- made heroine immigrates to California at the age of twenty- one and, as she boasts, prospers in the West: “I’m a hundred per cent stronger and more efficient than I used to be. I’ve trained—years and years of it—in sunlight and mountain

  air. It’s not just strength, but skill. I can climb mountains, ride, shoot, fence, row, swim, play golf, [play] tennis, [play] billiards, dance like a youngster—or a professional. I’m more alive, literally, than I was at twenty. . . . I belong to clubs, classes, societies. I’m a citizen, too—I can vote now.” Lest there be any doubt that she has been rejuvenated by moving to the West, the story ends

  as a character asks, “Which is the quickest route to South ern California?”25

  The most telling and most fully developed example of such a plot appears

  in her novel The Crux, wherein Gilman rewrote the formulaic west ern from the east ern belle’s point of view. As Tuttle has noted, seven years earlier Gilman had published an essay that was in effect a concise summary of the novel in

  the Woman’s Journal under the title “Woman’s ‘Manifest Destiny.’ ” In it Gilman echoed Horace Greeley’s purported admonition to the “young man” to

  “go west and grow up with the country”—except that in this case, of course,

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  she urged the young woman to go to the woman- hungry West.26 “Why do

  not the women who really believe that marriage is their mission,” she asked,

  “go forth in bands of maiden emigration to the frontier, where lonely men

  grow hard and bad for lack of ‘women’s influence’?” These women could have

  their pick of suitors—according to Gilman, in the West “intelligent, educated women” could both vote and exercise the prerogative of sexual selection and

  so change the “character of several States and territories. . . . Let the conscientious surplus of women go West,” she concluded. “They would carry benefit

  to the lands adopted.”27

  In The Crux Gilman advanced an alternative tradition of women’s west ern writing similar to that of contemporaries such as B. M. Bower, Willa Cather,

  Caroline Lockhart, and Vingie E. Roe, who also could be said to have adopted

  and subverted the “formula west ern.”28 Just as the generic west ern can be considered “a cowboy novel without cows,” Scharnhorst posits, Gilman writes “a

  west ern . . . without a male hero.” Morton Elder, the character who might have filled that role, is instead a rake and syphilitic coward. Nor does Gilman’s west-ern feature either adventure or a compelling love story, staples of the formula.

  The fair New England heroine, Vivian Lane, like Wister’s Molly Stark Wood,

  has certainly inherited “a store of quiet strength from some Pilgrim Father or Mother.” If Molly is “Wister’s type” of new woman, Scharnhorst argues, “then

  Vivian is Gilman’s. . . . Molly and the Virginian eventually marry” and bring closure to Wister’s plot through their anticipated Anglo- Saxon offspring; however, “Vivian eventually breaks off her romance with Morton Elder when she

  discovers he is afflicted” with a sexually transmitted disease.29

  Her doing so reflects not only her liberated, newly enlightened status but

  also her recognition of her duty to a eugenic ideal in support of which she must save herself for a more suitable mate with whom she may “save the race.” Here and elsewhere in Gilman’s work (and in the pub lic discourse of her time, we

  should add), the term race was ambiguous; there was a certain amount of slip-page, telling in and of itself, between race as in human and race as in white. Gilman biographer Cynthia J. Davis nicely summarizes how this problem mani-

  fests in Gilman studies. Although it is true that when Gilman used the term

  race she “usually meant ‘the human race,’ . . . as the years passed, her notions of both ‘civilization’ and ‘race’ became less abstractly human and more concretely Anglo- Saxon, and her images of the men and women involved grew

  uniformly fairer and more European in feature.”30 By the Forerunner era, especially given her embrace of eugenics, Gilman had begun to shift to the latter scenario. Moreover, she tended to idealize New England in racial and ethnic

  terms: proud of her own “pure New England stock,” she transferred this blue

  blood to many of the heroines with whom she populated her west ern stories.

  Gilman advertised The Crux as “a novel along eugenic lines”; it is no accident,

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  then, that Vivian’s education and reproductive empowerment—and her new

  understanding of her duty in that regard—occur in the West.31

  Certainly both Wister and Gilman presume the white- conquest model of

  Old West history. As Scharnhorst puts it, “Both the Virginian and Vivian are

  agents of ‘civilization’. . . . They even have similar names—both begin[ning]

  with a ‘Vi’ and ending with ‘ian,’ . . . their names are alliterative and they rhyme. Each of them ‘wins’ the West, but in distinctively different ways—the

  Virginian with revolver and rope, Vivian with pencil and pen. Gilman de-

  scribed not a ‘regeneration through violence’ as in the typical male narrative of the period . . . but a ‘regeneration through literacy.’ ”32 Tuttle puts it another way: The Crux is “a middle- class white woman’s answer to the Western”—

  Wister’s in particular. On the suggestion of Dr. Bellair, a female physician, Vivian and a cohort of other women leave New England for Colorado. “Break

  away now, my dear, and come West,” Bellair tells Vivian. “You can get work—

  start a kindergarten, or something.” (Both Molly Wood and Vivian are teach-

  ers. “Come out to Colorado with me—and Grow,” the doctor insists. “You’ll

  have a thousandfold better opportunities in Colorado than you will here.”33

  As the doctor’s surname indicates, the West promises myriad “health bene-

  fits to women, . . . and she diagnoses the medical conditions from which the

  women in New England suffer”: “arrested development” and “arthritis de-

  formans of the soul.” Tuttle argues, “Vivian experiences the kind of personal transformation in the West that Wister had reserved for his male narrator.

  . . . Vivian’s West Cure and new life in Colorado are central to Gilman’s plot and are clear rewritings of Molly Wood’s role in Wister’s West ern.”34 “Dr.

  Bellair’s role as the heroine’s mentor in Gilman’s novel,” Scharnhorst notes,

  “is analogous to the role of Judge Henry in The Virginian.” Whereas Henry runs a ranch and authorizes the Virginian “to lynch a gang of cattle rustlers, however, Dr. Bellair leads women to a peaceful West” hungry for settlement,

  where they establish a flourishing, cooperative community epitomized by the

  boardinghouse.35 Governed by liberated, educated, independent, and healthy

  east ern women, the Colorado boardinghouse models the kind of socialized

  housekeeping that Gilman advocated through out her career, just as Vivian’s

  new career running a west ern kindergarten embraces Gilman’s vision of so-

  cialized child care.

  In keeping with their shared Turnerian vision, Scharnhorst notes, “Wis-

  ter and Gilman depict the West in similarly racialized terms.” Like the male-

  authored west ern, Gilman’s work reinscribes “conventional ideas about race”

  and west ern conquest. “Their Wests are dominated by Anglo- Saxons”—Wister

  once compared cowboys to medieval knights and the gunfight to the joust.36


  Both novels erase the presence of ethnic minorities in the West: Hispanics,

  Af ri can Ameri cans, and Asian Ameri cans do not appear, except for Chinese

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  Ameri can servants in Gilman’s work. The Virginian mentions a couple of Jewish drummers in passing, and there are some offstage Indians who practice

  thievery and worse, but Wister’s West, like Gilman’s, is almost lily- white and nominally Protestant. Tuttle observes that “the reinvigorated ‘race’ of Americans in Gilman’s Edenic West is white . . . and is to be saved and ‘improved’

  by ‘clean’ New England women—the ‘good people’ and ‘best civilization’ Gil-

  man cites in ‘Woman’s “Manifest Destiny.”’ ” As elsewhere in her work, Gil-

  man thus aligned her support of eugenics with her feminist rhetoric. Gilman’s portrayal of the West is intertwined with her belief in Anglo- Saxon superiority and with her project for social reform that was based on that belief.37

  The key to reforming both US culture and the human race, in her view, was

  the reproductive capacity of empowered, educated white women. The west-

  ern setting of The Crux was ideal for this purpose, combining what Gilman saw as a socially progressive milieu in terms of gender and a Turnerian vision of health, progress, and regeneration.

  The model society that Gilman envisions in The Crux, like that in much of her other west ern fiction, can be understood as what Riane Eisler has called a “pragmatopia,” a utopia that is “realizable”: her west ern stories offer a blueprint for achieving, as Gilman promised to Lummis, “the new life which that

  great country [of the West] can so well let grow at last.” Judith Al en has noted that Gilman “of ten locat[ed] her utopian explorations in a treasured topos—

  the West.”38 In looking broadly at Gilman’s reformist fiction, set in the West or elsewhere, Carol Farley Kessler has established that Gilman combines utopian

  and realistic elements in order to inspire readers to enact her feminist reformist goals. In The Crux, white New England women in the West achieve Gilman’s ideal of civilization through sexual and reproductive self- determination—exercising the prerogative of sexual selection to choose as mates those men best suited to yield superior, “clean” offspring. Elsewhere in her work, Gilman advocated a similar vision of maternalist feminism, the best- known example be-