Charlotte Perkins Gilman's steady burghers: The terrain of herland

Women's Studies

Volumn 12, Issue 3, 1986, Pages 271-292

  Wilson, Christopher P ^a  

^a BOSTON COLLEGE   (United States)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 84928451398     PISSN: 00497878     EISSN: 15477045     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/00497878.1986.9978642     Document Type: Article

References (23)

1. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Herland( 1915; rpt. New York: Pantheon, 1979), pp. 1, 16–17. All further citations in text.
2. The Living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman (New York: Appleton, 1935), p. 284–285. Ann Lane in her excellent introduction to The Charlotte Perkins Gilman Reader (New York: Pantheon, 1980), xvi. Carl Degler also writes in his introduction to Women and Economics (1899; rpt. New York: Harpers, 1966) that “Gilman's poetry, like her prose, was straightforward, lucid, but without much imagery or deep sensibility” (xiii), and that “[djespite her feeling for words and the easy flow oflanguageon paper and tongue, she showed little talent for imaginative writing” (xviii).
3. Myra Jehlen, “Archimedes and the Paradox of Feminist Criticism,” Signs, 6 (Summer 1981), pp. 575–601.1 am also indebted to Jehlen's argument that certain patterns of “victimization” may be embedded in the conventions of the sentimental novel. See also Stuart Cunningham, “Some Problems of Feminist Literary Criticism,” Journal of Women's Studies in Literature, 1 (Spring 1979), pp. 159–178.
4. Ways of Seeing (New York: Penguin Books, 1977) p.84ff. All further citations in text.
5. On “hegemony,” see Raymond Williams, “Base and Superstructure in Marxist Cultural Theory,” in Problems in Materialism and Culture (London: Verso, 1980), pp. 31-49; on “naturalizing,” see Roland Barthes, Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (New York: Hill and Wang, 1979), p. 129 ff.
6. Irving Goffman Gender Advertisements (New York: Harper and Row, 1979).
7. Lewis Hyde, The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property (New York: Vintage, 1983), p. 94. See also his discussion on gender and property, pp. 93–108.
8. For Gilman's skeptical views on art criticism, see “Painting Via Literature,” Forerunner, 7 (July 1916), pp. 186–187, and the poem, “Connoisseurs,” in In This Our World and Other Poems (San Francisco: James H. Barry and John H. Marble, 1895), p. 170.
9. On her R.I.S.D. years, see Living, p. 45 ff.; cf. Mary A. Hill, Charlotte Perkins Gilman: The Making of a Radical Feminist( Philadelphia: Temple Univ. Press, 1980), p. 105. My comments on Gilman's drawings are based particularly on Oversize Folder Number 4, Gilman papers, Schlesinger Library. This folder also contains the R.I.S.D. quiz.
10. For insight into Walter Stetson's style, see Charles C. Eldridge, Charles Walter Stetson: Color and Fantasy (Lawrence: Univ. of Kansas Press, 1982). For this episode, see Hill, p. 138.
11. “Masculine Literature,” Forerunner, 1 (March 1910), pp. 18-22; “Effects of Literature Upon the Mind,” Forerunner, 3 (May 1912), pp. 133–139. See also “The Only Hero,” Forerunner, 2 (Aug. 1911), 209; “With a Difference (Not Literature),” Forerunner, 5 (Feb. 1914), pp. 29–32.
12. On this trend, see my “American Naturalism and the Problem of Sincerity,” American Literature, 54 (Dec. 1982), pp. 511-527; and for another woman author's reaction to this trend, see Gertrude Atherton, “Literary Merchandise,” New Republic, 3 July 1915, pp. 223–224. For Gilman's specific reaction to literature of this type, see her review of Phillips' “The Grain of Dust,” in Forerunner, 2 (June 1911), p. 170.
13. “Masculine Literature.” See also “The Dress of Women,” Forerunner, 6 (April 1915), esp. pp. 102–108 on dress “conventions.” See also the poem comparing prostitution and flirtation, “As a Business,” Forerunner, 3 (Dec. 1912), p.325.
14. On what Raymond Williams calls “that typical interest which preoccupied the nineteenth century middle class imagination,” see his The Country and the City (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1973), p. 174 ff. One might also note that, in “The Yellow Wallpaper,” Gilman locates the action on a decayed estate—broken up, weare told, by legal battles between the heirs and co-heirs. This use of concentric “states” was common in the socialist aesthetics of the era. See Sinclair Lewis' review of H.G. Wells, “The Relation of the Novel to the Present Situation: The Passing of Capitalism,” in The Man from Main Street, ed. Harry E. Maule and Melville H. Cane (New York: Random, 1955), pp. 327–339. Note also that Gilman spoke with Shaw about literary matters; see Living, p. 203.
15. “Her ‘Charms,’” Forerunner, 6 (Jan, 1915), p. 26.
16. Fora book from Gilman's time, see Sir Anthony Van Dyck (London: George Newnes, Ltd., 1904).
17. Cf. “American Naturalism and the Problem of Sincerity.”
18. Ursula K. LeGuin, The Dispossessed (New York: Avon, 1974). See also Lucy M. Frei-bert, “World Views in Utopian Novels by Women,” Journal of Popular Culture, 17 (Summer 1983), pp. 49–60.
19. A Literature of Their Own (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1977), pp. 4–5, 191–2.
20. On these captivity narratives, see especially Richard Slotkin, Regeneration Through Violence (Middletown: Wesleyan Univ. Press, 1973), pp. 94–145.
21. Compare the comments in Robert Daly, God's A Itar: The World and the Flesh in Puritan Poetry (Berkeley: Univ. of Calif. Press, 1978), pp. 79–81.
22. C. Showalter, p. 191.
23. See thelast paragraph of “Masculine Literature,” and “Coming Changes in Literature,” Forerunner, 6 (Sept. 1915), pp. 230–236. See also her comments on the novel with a “purpose,” in “Detective Story,” Forerunner, 4 (Sept. 1913), p. 252.