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Charlotte Perkins Gilman Portrait of Charlotte Perkins Stetson [Gilman] by Charles Walter Stetson, 1891

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Charlotte Perkins Gilman Portrait of Charlotte Perkins Stetson [Gilman] by Charles Walter Stetson, 1891 View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by KnowledgeBank at OSU Charlotte Perkins Gilman Portrait of Charlotte Perkins Stetson [Gilman] by Charles Walter Stetson, 1891. Courtesy of Walter Stetson Chamberlin. Charlotte Perkins Gilman New Texts, New Contexts EDITED BY Jennifer S. Tuttle & Carol Farley Kessler THE OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS · COLUMBUS Copyright © 2011 by The Ohio State University. All rights reserved. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Charlotte Perkins Gilman : new texts, new contexts / edited and with an introduction by Jennifer S. Tuttle and Carol Farley Kessler. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-0-8142-1144-1 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN-10: 0-8142-1144-5 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN-13: 978-0-8142-9243-3 (cd) 1. Gilman, Charlotte Perkins, 1860–1935—Criticism and interpretation. 2. Feminism and literature—United States—History—19th century. 3. Feminism and literature— United States—History—20th century. 4. Women and literature—United States—His- tory—19th century. 5. Women and literature—United States—History—20th century. I. Tuttle, Jennifer S., 1967– II. Kessler, Carol Farley, 1936–. PS1744.G57Z617 2011 818'.409—dc22 2010024754 This book is available in the following editions: Cloth (ISBN 978-08142-1144-1) CD-ROM (ISBN 978-08142-9243-3) Cover design by Larry Nozik. Type set in Adobe Sabon. Printed by Thomson-Shore, Inc. The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials. ANSI Z39.48-1992. 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Contents Acknowledgments vii Introduction Jennifer S. Tuttle and Carol Farley Kessler 1 Part I. BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL OVERVIEWS Chapter 1 “that pure New England stock”: Charlotte Perkins Gilman and the Construction of Identity Denise D. Knight 27 Chapter 2 Looking Backward: Rereading Gilman in the Early Twenty-First Century Catherine J. Golden 44 Part II. NEW TEXTS Chapter 3 The Torn Voice in “The Giant Wistaria” and “The Unnatural Mother” Jill Rudd 69 Chapter 4 An “Absent Mother”: Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Mag—Marjorie, and the Politics of Maternal Responsibility Charlotte J. Rich 85 Chapter 5 Turning “The Balsam Fir” into Mag—Marjorie: Generic Transposition in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Imaginative Economy Frederick Wegener 103 Contents Chapter 6 “The Same Revulsion against Them All”: Ida Tarbell and Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Suffrage Dialogue Aleta Feinsod Cane 122 Chapter 7 Doing It “man-fashion”: Gender Performance in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Unpunished Jill Bergman 140 Part III. NEW CONTEXTS Chapter 8 “There are things in that paper that nobody knows but me”: An Alternative Reading of Neurasthenia Jennifer Lunden 161 Chapter 9 The Yellow Newspaper: Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Sensational Journalism Sari Edelstein 180 Chapter 10 The Madwoman’s Other Sisters: Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Gloria Naylor, and the Re-Inscription of Loss Caroline Brown 200 Chapter 11 Feminist Humor and Charlotte Perkins Gilman Shelley Fisher Fishkin 222 Contributors 251 Index 255 - vi - Acknowledgments The editors would like to thank the Maine Women Writers Collection and the University of New England (UNE) for hosting the conference “Charlotte Perkins Gilman: Then & Now,” June 2006; their support, along with the co- sponsorship of the Charlotte Perkins Gilman Society and the rich intellectual contributions of the conference participants, provided the impetus for this volume. We are grateful for financial assistance provided by UNE’s Depart- ment of English and Language Studies. The Maine Women Writers Collec- tion also gave a much appreciated subvention grant. We are indebted to the librarians who graciously and cheerfully helped us with inquiries and interli- brary loans: Roberta Gray, Cally Gurley, Gay Marks, and Laurie Mathes at the Abplanalp Library on the Portland Campus of UNE; Brenda Austin at the Ketchum Library on the UNE Biddeford Campus; Jean Sphar and Susan Ware at the John D. Vairo Library of Penn State Brandywine; and Diana Carey at the Schlesinger Library. Denise D. Knight also answered several queries from her personal library with astonishing promptness, and Cynthia J. Davis generously helped us to secure the frontispiece image. Special thanks go to Lisa M. Thomas for her quick and thorough editing. On behalf of our- selves and the volume contributors, we would like to express our gratitude to Walter Stetson Chamberlin and Linda Chamberlin; the Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University; and the Women’s History Museum and Educational Center in San Diego, CA for granting us permission to quote from or to print unpublished sources in their hold- ings. Finally, we are grateful to the staff at The Ohio State University Press for their guidance and expertise—particularly Sandy Crooms, who offered unfailing enthusiasm, patience, and support—and to the Press’s anonymous readers, whose suggestions have markedly strengthened the volume. - vii - Introduction JENNIFER S. TUTTLE AND CAROL FARLEY KESSLER A central concern for scholars of U.S. women’s writing has been the recov- ery of lost or unread texts, a process well exemplified by recent work on Charlotte Perkins Gilman. In the twenty-fifth anniversary issue of Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers (26.2 [2009]), critics participat- ing in a roundtable discussion assess the successes and failures of recovery during the past the three decades or so. Recovering the writing of women, through scholarship and through modern editions, has been a central, even generative, component of many academic fields that have proliferated since the 1970s, not only literary criticism and women’s history but also women’s studies, cultural studies, and other cross-disciplinary areas of investigation. While a need for unearthing unknown authors and their texts remains, how- ever, in the Legacy roundtable Sharon M. Harris suggests that today scholars are “in need of new recovery that asks us to interrogate our long-held (or even newly embraced) ideas about women writers in continually expanding ways” (Tuttle, “Legacy Roundtable” 229). Or, in the words of Lisa A. Long, “while the project [of recovery] remains the same, the terms of the conversa- tion have changed dramatically in the past twenty-five years”: we need to “trouble,” rather than to “reify,” our categories and objects of study (Tuttle, “Legacy” 230). The field of Charlotte Perkins Gilman studies mirrors these larger trends. Indeed, more than ten years ago, at the Second International Charlotte Perkins Gilman Conference in 1997, Gary Scharnhorst issued a call for scholars to think differently about Gilman—to look beyond her most acces- - 1 - Introduction sible works and genres to recover her entire body of work, and to resist the temptation to idealize or sanitize it to fit their own agendas. “[A]s scholars,” he urged, “we should read all of her work we can find but read it critically, measuring her achievement on a historical template, situating her not only in our time but in her own” (“Historicizing” 72). This volume takes up that challenge, representing a new groundswell of work in Gilman studies. During her lifetime, Gilman (1860–1935) was a world-famous writer, lecturer, and reformer, whose work was influential and widely celebrated; she has been called the “leading intellectual in the women’s movement in the United States during the first two decades of the twentieth century” (Degler xiii). At her core a social philosopher, Gilman practiced her art and activism in an array of venues, and her interests were numerous, including women’s issues, labor, human rights, ethics, and social reform. As this volume’s second essay demonstrates, criticism on Gilman has undergone a number of transformations since Carl N. Degler and Elaine R. Hedges first began recovering Gilman’s work in 1966 and 1973, respectively. The initial celebration of the rich vein of writing and artwork left to us by this prolific woman was followed by more critical reconsiderations of her life and accomplishments, ultimately leaving scholars in the ambivalent position of documenting Gilman’s “mixed legacy” of ideas both abhorrent and vision- ary (Golden and Zangrando). And contending with this legacy has sparked a new phase of recovery work, which aims both to “read all of her work we can find” (as Scharnhorst put it) and to understand this work in new, more accurately historicized ways. Certainly, we still need to recover previously unknown documents and information about Gilman. Such work brings recently discovered, unfamil- iar, or otherwise obscure sources to the attention of Gilman scholars.1 But beyond filling such obvious gaps, we need to attend to neglected parts of her oeuvre, to other “new texts”—works that we know exist, and are even in print, but that have not yet received adequate critical scrutiny. While a pro- fusion of scholarship on Gilman has been published, until recently much of it has concerned a small number of her most popular prose works, such as “The Yellow Wall-Paper” (1892), Women and Economics (1898), and Her- land (1915). These were among the first of Gilman’s works to be recovered in the present era. This may be due in part simply to their effectiveness as texts: Gilman, writing always “with a purpose,” had mixed success as a rhetorician whose creative work was invariably didactic (Living 121). Yet such evalua- tive arguments having to do with aesthetic appeal are largely subjective, and they unfairly obscure the skill and subtlety with which much of her work was crafted: it may be neither accurate nor fair to say that these texts have been - 2 - Introduction studied most thoroughly because they are her best work. Another factor that obscured much of Gilman’s other work for so long was its lack of availability. For example, most of her fiction appeared in The Forerunner, which had a very limited circulation, and her unpublished work remained in private hands and institutional repositories.
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