Charlotte Perkins Gilman and a Woman's Place in America
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the Herlanders prevent their escape by encasing their plane in neatly sewn
cloth, to “parody . . . masculine adventure stories” and “subver[t] . . . colonial myths” in which the airplane represents “masculine and imperial values”
that “appropriate[ed] . . . technology by and for patriarchy.” Rather than noting Herland’s likeness to the fair itself, Bennett argues that the land (as part of Gilman’s parody of the men’s “project[ed] . . . fantasies”) is “fig ured as the gigantic body of a woman, fertile, nurturing and unknown and thrilling,” much
as the masculinist discourse of Manifest Destiny relied on a “virgin land” ripe for mastery. As such, Herland “should be read as the antithesis to Hercules[;]
. . . not precisely virgin,” Herland is “a womb- like kindergarten, a gigantic and fertile place filled with women and female children who make a cult of
maternity and celebrate motherhood.”57
Bennett’s analy sis of Herland’s geography and her reading of the novel as
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parody are persuasive and can certainly be understood in tandem with Gil-
man’s appropriation of the formula west ern in The Crux. As Kristin Carter-Sanborn rightly points out, however, the “resistance” of the Herlanders to being colonized by the men belies “an imperializing tendency within the world
of Herland itself,” to which we have alluded here. Carter- Sanborn notes the
close correspondence of Gilman’s utopian aims “to those of Ameri can po liti-
cal discourse during the era of U.S. hemispheric domination, exemplified by
Ameri can interventions in Cuba, the Philippines, and Panama”; “Gilman fully
appropriates the Ameri can ‘masculine’ colonial fantasy for her own tale of the white imperial mother.”58
Like Gilman’s other work on the West, Herland exemplifies white, native-born women’s “double positioning” in relation to conquest and empire: ex-
cluded or objectified by masculinist narratives, such women are nonetheless
implicated in and benefit from the imperial project. Gilman, like other re formers and feminists of her day, mobilized her own such project for the “Mothers of Tomorrow” concretized in Calder, Lentilli, and Roth’s statue The Nations of the West. If, as Moore suggests, the fair’s canal exhibit had a “self- conscious pedagogical function,” inviting viewers “to cast an imperial gaze over the landscape,” then the model society so didactically conjured in Herland surely invites such a vision of the future—to be realized not with Herculean prosthetics such as the rifle or the Bucyrus shovel but through empowered white motherhood
(see fig ure 1.4). Herlanders, having mastered the reproductive technology of parthenogenesis, eschew individualism for the collective good: as “Mother[s]
of a Race that is judged in terms of the racial purity of an Aryan stock,” they are meant to lead the world by eugenic example.59
In the view of many promoters of the PPIE, then, “Ameri cans were des-
tined to remake the world . . . and would do so beginning in California”; Gilman proceeded exactly in this fashion. In Herland and the other Forerunner stories set in the West, Gilman “posed her most detailed visions of new sexual and reproductive arrangements required to anchor the new human world” for
which she advocated. Recognizing the west ern elements of Herland’s setting and reading the novel as part of Gilman’s body of work set in the West are
necessary for a full grasp of the novel’s reformist aims and mechanisms. In
general, reading Herland in this way further illuminates the west ern American exceptionalism that not only fueled Gilman’s utopian and pragmatopian
work but also shaped her role as the “leading intellectual in the women’s movement” at the turn of the last century.60
A typical observation was made by Nora Stanton (Blatch) Barney, the grand-
daughter of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and a 1905 graduate in civil engineering
from Cornell University, who wrote of her “college days” that Gilman’s early
manifesto “ ‘Women and Economics’ was to our young souls like a beacon to a
Tuttle and Scharnhorst / 33
Figure 1.4. Promotional postcard
for the PPIE signaling the imperial
potential of fertile white womanhood
(Jennifer S. Tuttle personal collection)
ship. How far and immeasurably in advance of her times [Gilman] was.” Gail
Bederman writes, “From 1898 to the mid- 1910s, Gilman was the most promi-
nent feminist theorist in America. . . . No woman of her time wrote with
more insight about the very real barriers white women faced in their quest
to participate productively in the world outside their homes. Few proposed
more sweeping and innovative reforms to make that participation possible.
Probably no feminist theorist of her day was more influential or convinced
more Ameri can women to embrace the cause of women’s advancement.” If, as
Rebecca Mead has argued, his tori cal accounts of the US women’s movement
have not accounted for the realities and contributions of the west ern United States, then recognizing how the West shaped and fueled Gilman’s intellectual leadership of that movement will surely be of value.61
Attention to Gilman’s west ern orientation can also contribute to the im-
portant work ahead for critics of west ern literatures. Krista Comer has re-
cently called for feminist scholarship in west ern studies, in clud ing a variety of texts; claiming Gilman for this field will contribute to this effort. How, for example, might we read Gilman alongside the “Anglo expatriate women” whom
Lois Rudnick has argued viewed the West as a land of “utopian promise”?62
Melody Graulich, who has insightfully compared Gilman with Mary Austin,
models in her work how critics might undertake the project that Comer calls
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for: “redirecting a criti cal regionalism informed by gender.” It is noteworthy how Gilman’s writing both appropriates and challenges a west ern masculinist regional orientation—what Comer calls the “Stegnerian spatial field” that has “enable[d]” so many male authors “to conceive of themselves as writers, enable[d] them to write out their own relationships to west ern history, mythology, gender relations, the environment, and, significantly, to national literary culture at large.” Reading Gilman’s utopian writing through a west ern lens may also contribute to recent criti cal efforts in postwest ern studies to “work against a narrowly conceived regionalism . . . that restricts west ern cultures . . .
to some predetermined entity with static borders and boundaries.”63
Within Gilman studies, attention to issues of place might enhance a bio-
graphical interpretation of Gilman’s work for critics who are so inclined. How is it relevant, for example, that Gilman was residing in California—not only
visiting the PPIE in San Francisco but also spending time at Las Casitas re-
sort in the Sierra Madre—in early 1915 when she composed part of Herland ?64
We have attempted here to highlight the importance of the West to Gilman’s
life and work, suggesting, in fact, that reorienting her in this way is necessary for an accurate understanding of her contributions. But place has meaning
beyond the purely geographical; we argue as well for greater criti cal attention to the material and literary contexts of Gilman’s writing. Herland was never published in a freestanding edition during her lifetime; rather, it appeared in monthly installments in the Forerunner. Attending to its placement in that magazine, to Gilman’s understudied short fiction published there, and to the
other work she published in close proximity to Herland—such as her writing on the PPIE and on urban design—restores the novel to its origi
nal placement in print and thereby enables new lines of criti cal interpretation. There is much still to be done on the question of Gilman and place, imagined or real,
geographical or literary—and we hope that our recovery of Gilman’s west ern
orientation will fuel such work in the years to come.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Portions of this essay were origi nally delivered as the keynote address (by
Scharnhorst) and the plenary address (by Tuttle) at the 2011 Fifth International Gilman Conference, “Gilman Goes West,” at the University of Montana, Missoula. Because Tuttle’s address was subsequently published in West ern American Literature as “ ‘New England Innocent’ in the Land of Sunshine: Charlotte Perkins Gilman and California,” there is a small amount of overlap with that
essay, indicated in the notes. Tuttle’s research for this essay was made possible by a research support grant from the Schlesinger Library for the History of
Women in America, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University. The authors are
Tuttle and Scharnhorst / 35
grateful to Hollis Haywood at the University of New England and Amanda
Williford at the Park Archives and Records Center, Golden Gate National
Recreation Area, National Park Service, for their help obtaining the illustrations. Most of all we thank Jill Bergman for her myriad efforts to encourage
new scholarship on Gilman and the West.
NOTES
1. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1935; repr., New York: Harper Colophon, 1975), 181.
2. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, “Woman Suffrage and the West,” Kansas Suf-
frage Reveille, June 1897.
3. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, “Why Nevada Should Win Its Suffrage Cam-
paign in No vem ber,” Out West, August 1914.
4. For a more detailed discussion of Gilman’s use of the West Cure, see Jennifer S. Tuttle, “Rewriting the Rest Cure: Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Owen Wister, and the Sexual Politics of Neurasthenia,” in The Mixed Legacy of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, ed. Catherine J. Golden and Joanna Schneider Zangrando (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2000), 103–21.
5. Gilman, Living, 93–95; Charlotte Perkins Gilman, In This Our World and Uncollected Poems, ed. Gary Scharnhorst and Denise D. Knight (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2012), 85–86; Jennifer S. Tuttle, “ ‘New England Innocent’ in the Land of Sunshine: Charlotte Perkins Gilman and California,” Western Ameri can Literature 48, no. 3 (Fall 2013): 287.
6. Tuttle, “Rewriting,” 112; Gilman, Living, 107; Tuttle, “New England Innocent,” 290.
7. For Gilman’s career launch in the West, see Gary Scharnhorst, “Making
Her Fame: Charlotte Perkins Gilman in California.” California History 64 (Summer 1985): 192–201. Although our focus here is her strong and sustained connection to the West, her feelings about California and her place there appear to have been deeply conflicted. See Tuttle, “New England Innocent.”
8. Gilman, Living, 111.
9. Gilman, In This Our World, 31–32, 47, 70; Tuttle, “New England Innocent,” 295–96. Other poems, too—such as “Our Tomorrow” and “Our Sky,” both
first published in Land of Sunshine—feature a speaker with east ern origins who has manifested her destiny to lay claim to the West.
10. Gilman, In This Our World, 69.
11. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Crux, ed. Jennifer S. Tuttle (1911; repr., Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2002), 130; Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Later Poetry of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, ed. Denise D. Knight (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1996), 170.
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12. Gary Scharnhorst, Charlotte Perkins Gilman (Boston: Twayne, 1985), 11–33.
13. Gilman, Living, 113, 122; Lester Frank Ward, Glimpses of the Cosmos: A Mental Autobiography (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1917), 5: 336.
14. Scharnhorst, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, 27, 30–31.
15. Gilman, Living, 187, 198; Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Selected Letters of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, ed. Denise D. Knight and Jennifer S. Tuttle (Tuscaloosa: University of Ala bama Press, 2009), 294; Charles Fletcher Lummis, “The New League for Literature and the West,” Land of Sunshine, April 1898; Melody Graulich, “Creating Great Women: Mary Austin and Charlotte Perkins Gilman,”
in Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Her Contemporaries: Literary and Intellectual Contexts, ed. Cynthia J. Davis and Denise D. Knight (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2004), 144; Tuttle, “New England Innocent,” 293–94.
16. This is the private collection of Gilman’s grandson in Los Alamos, New
Mexico.
17. Gilman, Living, 93; Gary Scharnhorst, Owen Wister and the West (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2015), 162.
18. Owen Wister, The Virginian, ed. Gary Scharnhorst (1902; repr., New York: Pocket Books, 2002), 105, 107.
19. Scharnhorst, Owen Wister, 162.
20. Gary Scharnhorst, “Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s ‘The Giant Wistaria’: A Hi-
eroglyph of the Female Frontier Gothic,” in Frontier Gothic: Terror and Wonder at the Frontier in Ameri can Literature, ed. David Mogen, Scott P. Sanders, and Joanne B. Karpinski (Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1993), 159.
21. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, “The Giant Wistaria,” in Herland, The Yellow Wall- Paper, and Selected Writings, ed. Denise D. Knight (New York: Penguin, 1999), 154, 155.
22. Gilman, Selected Letters, 248.
23. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, What Diantha Did, ed. Charlotte J. Rich (1909-10; repr., Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), 44.
24. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, “Girls and Land,” in The Yellow Wall- Paper and Other Stories, ed. by Robert Schulman (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 289; Charlotte Perkins Gilman, “Bee Wise,” in Herland, The Yellow Wall- Paper, and Selected Writings, ed. Denise D. Knight (New York: Penguin, 1999), 266; Charlotte Perkins Gilman, “Dr. Clair’s Place,” in Herland, The Yellow Wall- Paper, and Selected Writings, ed. Denise D. Knight (New York: Penguin, 1999), 282; Charlotte Perkins Gilman, “My Poor Aunt,” Forerunner, June 1913.
25. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, “Joan’s Defender,” in Herland, The Yellow WallPaper, and Selected Writings, ed. Denise D. Knight (New York: Penguin, 1999), 295, 296; Charlotte Perkins Gilman, “Fulfilment,” in The Yellow Wall- Paper and Other Stories, ed. Robert Schulman (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 251, 252.
Tuttle and Scharnhorst / 37
26. Jennifer S. Tuttle, ed., “Introduction,” in The Crux, by Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1911; repr., Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2002), 40. Whether Greeley uttered these exact words, and whether he was the first to do so, is a matter of some debate; see Coy F. Cross, Go West, Young Man! Horace Greeley’s Vision for America (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1995), 136.
27. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, “Woman’s ‘Manifest Destiny,’ ” Woman’s Journal, June 1904.
28. Norris Yates, Gender and Genre: An Introduction to Women Writers of Formula West erns, 1900–1950 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1995).
In her forthcoming book, West erns: A Women’s History (University of Nebraska Press), Victoria Lamont argues that recovering more women’s contributions to
west ern literature calls into question the widespread assumption that the west ern genre was exclusively masculinist at all.
29. Scharnhorst, Owen Wister, 163.
30. Gilman, Crux, 202; Cynthia J. Davis, Charlotte Perkins Gilman: A Biography (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010), 272.
31. Gilman, Selected Letters, 56; Gilman quoted in Davis, Biography, 303.
32. Scharnhorst, Owen Wister, 163. For more on Gilman and the discourse of civilization, see Gail Bederman, Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880–1917 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 121–69.
33. Jennifer S. Tuttle, “
Gilman’s The Crux and Owen Wister’s The Virginian: Intertextuality and Woman’s Manifest Destiny,” in Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Her Contemporaries: Literary and Intellectual Contexts, ed. Cynthia J. Davis and Denise D. Knight (Tuscaloosa: University of Ala bama Press, 2004), 127; Gilman, Crux, 110, 113, 117.
34. Scharnhorst, Owen Wister, 163; Gilman, Crux, 109, 114; Tuttle, “Gilman’s The Crux,” 131, 133.
35. Scharnhorst, Owen Wister, 163–64.
36. Ibid., 164. See also Gary Scharnhorst, ed., “Introduction,” in The Virginian, by Owen Wister (1902, repr., New York: Pocket Books, 2002), xvii; and Owen Wister, “The Evolution of the Cow- Puncher,” Harper’s Monthly, Sep tem ber 1895.
37. Tuttle, “Introduction,” 40. See also Dana Seitler, “Unnatural Selection:
Mothers, Eugenic Feminism, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Regeneration Nar-
ratives,” Ameri can Quarterly 55 (March 2003): 81. She notes, “In Gilman’s brand of eugenic feminism . . . it is the duty of white people (male or female) to expand, extend, colonize, and reproduce.”
38. Eisler quoted in Carol Farley Kessler, Charlotte Perkins Gilman: Her Progress toward Utopia with Selected Writings (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1995), 7; Gilman, Selected Letters, 248; Allen, “Reconfiguring Vice,” 176.
39. Kessler, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, 8; Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Herland,
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in Herland and Related Writings, ed. Beth Sutton- Ramspeck (Buffalo: Broadview, 2013), 141; Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, “ ‘Fecundate! Discriminate!’:
Charlotte Perkins Gilman and the Theologizing of Maternity.” Charlotte Perkins Gilman: Optimist Reformer, ed. Jill Rudd and Val Gough (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1999), 205, 207. Gilbert and Gubar make the important point that the apparent idealization of motherhood in Herland is balanced elsewhere in Gilman’s writing by a “generalized horror of the maternal.”
40. Still another possible referent for Herland is the mythological island of California, as imagined by Garcí Ordoñez de Montalvo in Las sergas del muy es-forzado caballero Esplandian (1508). Writing during the age of discovery, Montalvo transforms older myths of Amazons to portray “an island called California, very near to the region of the Terrestrial Paradise,” surrounded by “steep rocks” and inhabited by black women “of vigorous bodies and strong and ardent hearts” who