{"id":151356,"date":"2021-03-11T12:59:51","date_gmt":"2021-03-11T17:59:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=151356"},"modified":"2021-03-11T12:59:51","modified_gmt":"2021-03-11T17:59:51","slug":"the-trouble-with-charlotte-perkins-gilman","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2021\/03\/11\/the-trouble-with-charlotte-perkins-gilman\/","title":{"rendered":"The Trouble with Charlotte Perkins Gilman"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Charlotte Perkins Gilman, ca. 1900. Photo: C.\u2009F. Lummis. Restoration by Adam Cuerden. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.<\/p><\/div>\n

When I first read \u201cThe Yellow Wall-Paper\u201d years ago, before I knew anything about its author, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, I loved it. I loved the unnerving, sarcastic tone, the creepy ending, the clarity of its critique of the popular nineteenth-century \u201crest cure\u201d\u2014essentially an extended time-out for depressed women. The story had irony, urgency, anger. On the last day of the treatment, the narrator is completely mad. She thinks she\u2019s a creature who has emerged from the wallpaper.<\/p>\n

The rest cure caused the illness it claimed to eliminate. Beautifully clear.<\/p>\n

The unnamed first-person narrator goes through a mental dance I knew well\u2014the circularity and claustrophobia of an increasing depression, the sinking feeling that something wasn\u2019t being told straight. Reading \u201cThe Yellow Wall-Paper\u201d felt like a mix of voyeurism and recognition, morphing into horror. It was genuinely chilling. It felt haunted.<\/p>\n

The story is based on Gilman\u2019s experiences with Dr. Silas Weir Mitchell, late-nineteenth-century physician to the stars. Mitchell administered this cure of extended bed rest and isolation to intellectual, active white women of high social standing. Virginia Woolf, Edith Wharton, and Jane Addams all took the cure, which could last for weeks, sometimes months. Gilman was clearly disgusted with her experience, and her disgust is palpable. <\/p>\n

\u201cThe Yellow Wall-Paper\u201d was not iconic during its own time, and was initially rejected, in 1892, by Atlantic Monthly<\/em> editor Horace Scudder, with this note: \u201cI could not forgive myself if I made others as miserable as I have made myself [by reading this].\u201d During her lifetime, Gilman was instead known for her politics, and gained popularity with a series of satirical poems featuring animals. The well-loved \u201cSimilar Cases\u201d describes prehistoric animals bragging about what animals they will evolve into, while their friends mock them for their hubris. Another, \u201cA Conservative,\u201d describes Gilman as a kind of cracked Darwinian in her garden, screaming at a confused, crying baby butterfly. \u201cSimilar Cases\u201d was considered to be among \u201cthe best satirical verses of modern times\u201d (American author Floyd Dell). It sounds like this:<\/p>\n

There was once a little animal,
\nNo bigger than a fox,
\nAnd on five toes he scampered
\nOver Tertiary rocks.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And so on.<\/p>\n

Gilman is best known for \u201cThe Yellow Wall-Paper\u201d now, due to Elaine Ryan Hedges, scholar and founding member of the National Women\u2019s Studies Association, who resurrected Gilman from obscurity. In 1973, the Feminist Press released a chapbook of \u201cThe Yellow Wall-Paper,\u201d with an afterword by Hedges, who called it \u201ca small literary masterpiece\u201d and Gilman \u201cone of the most commanding feminists of her time\u201d though Gilman never saw herself as a feminist (in fact, from her letters: \u201cI abominate being called a feminist\u201d). Nor did she consider her work literature. In the introduction to the copy I received, Gilman was quoted as saying she wrote to \u201cpreach \u2026 If it is literature, that just happened.\u201d She considered her writing a tool for promoting her politics, and herself a one-woman propaganda machine. Hedges notes in her afterword that Gilman wrote \u201ctwenty-one thousand words per month\u201d while working on her self-published political magazine, The Forerunner<\/em>.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

Rereading \u201cThe Yellow Wall-Paper\u201d in the spring of 2020, when I was asked to write this essay, I was still impressed by its urgency and humor and its eerie quality. It felt deeper and more symbolic than I\u2019d remembered, as if it were about more than it seemed. I hadn\u2019t remembered that the yellow room was a former nursery with bars on the windows.<\/p>\n

I was intrigued to find that Gilman had written a collection of essays called Concerning Children<\/em> (1902, dedicated to her daughter Katharine \u201cwho has taught me much of what is written here\u201d). The first essay in Concerning Children<\/em> is disorienting: the torture and dismemberment of guinea pigs, the printing press, \u201cnerve-energy,\u201d foreclosures, the hypothetical market value of babies<\/em>, are all examples summoned and threaded through with this ideology:<\/p>\n

There are degrees of humanness \u2026 If you were buying babies, investing in young human stock as you would in colts or calves, for the value of the beast, a sturdy English baby would be worth more than an equally vigorous young Fuegian. With the same training and care, you could develop higher faculties in the English specimen than in the Fuegian specimen, because it was better bred. The savage baby would excel in some points, but the qualities of the modern baby are those dominant to-day.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The \u201cif\u201d is a chilling, willful blind spot, considering the history of the United States, and that Gilman, as the niece of the novelist Harriet Beecher Stowe, almost certainly believed herself to be of this better \u201cstock.\u201d I also think it\u2019s clear that by dominant \u201cmodern baby,\u201d Gilman means white baby. This should put all of Gilman\u2019s quests for modernization into very stark light. Looking again, the \u201cif \u201d seems not blind, so much as shockingly coy.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

The majority of Gilman\u2019s short fiction centers around the economic liberation of white women. The main path to security for Gilman\u2019s women was finding, and keeping, a good husband\u2014no matter the sacrifice. Her characters have inherited debts from their husbands, sacrificed their artistic ambitions for their children, been nearly forced out of their homes in widowhood, are in peril of disgrace. Society as it stands in these fables offers no good solutions to these problems. Live with your ungrateful children, leave your home, turn your husband\u2019s mistress to the streets to save your social standing, forget the piano, et cetera. It\u2019s a suffocating world, and Gilman describes its effects with compassion. But unlike, say, Edith Wharton (or even \u201cThe Yellow Wall-Paper\u201d), Gilman attempts to offer solutions. Her protagonists work together, forming day cares, opening their homes to women\u2019s clubs, taking on boarders, empathizing with each other, unprivatizing their homes and lives, making and saving their own money, and working together in harmony. The stories show a smooth, almost comically conflict-free path to solving social problems.<\/p>\n

An interesting example of Gilman\u2019s \u201cproblem-solved\u201d format is \u201cIf I Were a Man.\u201d Mollie (the ideal wife) wishes to become a man at the start of the story, and has her wish granted immediately. \u00c0 la Being John Malkovich<\/em>, she is absorbed into the consciousness of her husband on his commute to work. As she becomes more and more male, she sees the world differently.<\/p>\n

While she\u2019s rhapsodizing over how amazing men\u2019s shoes, pockets, and pants are, Mollie, as a man, sees a woman for the first time and is shocked by the absurdity of women\u2019s hats. \u201cNever in all her life had she imagined that this idolized millinery could look \u2026 like the decorations of an insane monkey.\u201d<\/p>\n

And then in the next moment, when Mollie, as her husband, gets tickled by the feather on a cute woman\u2019s hat (\u201che felt a sense of sudden pleasure at the intimate tickling touch\u201d), she realizes that all hats are made by men for men\u2019s titillation. A great misdeed, a great unfairness, has been done to her when men scold her for wanting hats that they themselves have designed and told her to want.<\/p>\n

By the end of the story, Mollie and her husband exist in a balance of shared temperaments, each learning from the other, and as a result, growing more virtuous.<\/p>\n

I like this story well enough (who among us has not, I guess, marveled at men\u2019s pockets), but it\u2019s tough to swallow. The ease of the solutions in much of her political fiction feels off. The men don\u2019t mind the new order, once they consult their reason. The women are happy to join in, always have been. These are Gilman\u2019s fantasies of the world, as it could be for her and others like her. Describing these clean solutions seems to be her obsession, and she does it over and over.<\/p>\n

In her collection of essays Women and Economics: A Study of the Economic Relation between Men and Women as a Factor in Social Evolution<\/em>, Gilman again lays out her ideas for liberating women. The key step is recognizing marriage as a sexuo-economic bargain, and ridding the culture of the myth of marriage as necessarily natural and born of love. As Gilman sees it, selfishness and stupidity are inherent to the existing household model. The man goes out to make money to bring back to the wife, who is taught to want stupid baubles with no conception of the labor that went into their making, and has no productive or creative outlet of her own. This degrades the mother. The children inherit her degradation both genetically and by observation, and the perpetuation of this cycle is what is keeping \u201cthe race\u201d back. The goal is to financially liberate women so they can exercise their breeding power. Concerningly, Gilman\u2019s proposed liberation goes hand in hand with eugenics. Her fixation on breeding and genetics runs through her fiction as well.<\/p>\n

Herland<\/em>, Gilman\u2019s sci-fi novel about a land free of men, is an example of this. The inhabitants of Herland have no crime, no hunger, no conflict (also, notably, no sex, no art). They exist together in dreamlike harmony. Held one way, Herland is a gentle, maternal paradise, and the novel itself is a plea for allowing these feminine qualities to take part in the societal structure. Held another, we see how firmly their equality is based in their homogeneity. The novel\u2019s twist is that the inhabitants of Herland are considering whether or not it would benefit them to reintroduce male qualities into their society, by way of sexual reproduction. Herland<\/em> is a tale of the fully realized potential of eugenics, and for Gilman, it\u2019s a utopia.<\/p>\n

All of this is especially troubling when you consider that Gilman was a staunch and self-described nativist, rather than a self-described feminist, as the texts surrounding her rediscovery imply. Nativists believed in protecting the interests of native-born (or \u201cestablished\u201d) inhabitants above the interests of immigrants, and that mental capacities are innate, rather than teachable. Put bluntly, she was a Victorian white nationalist. When Gilman is described as a social reformer and activist, part of this was advocating for compulsory, militaristic labor camps for Black Americans (\u201cA Suggestion on the Negro Problem,\u201d 1908). Part of this is pleading for racial purity and stricter border policies, as in the sequel to Herland<\/em>, or for sterilization and even death for the genetically inferior, as in her other serialized Forerunner<\/em> novel, Moving the Mountain<\/em>.<\/p>\n

These ideas of Gilman\u2019s are hard to reconcile with our current conception of her as a brave advocate against systems of oppression\u2014a political hero with a few, forgivable flaws.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

I lie here on this great immovable bed\u2014it is nailed down, I believe\u2014and follow that pattern about by the hour. It is as good as gymnastics, I assure you. I start, we\u2019ll say, at the bottom, down in the corner over there where it has not been touched, and I determine for the thousandth time that I will<\/em> follow that pointless pattern to some sort of a conclusion.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This is the narrator of \u201cThe Yellow Wall-Paper.\u201d She\u2019s looking for her blind spots, searching for a conclusion, as her eyes trace the pattern of the wallpaper over and over, on a nailed-down bed in a derelict mansion. What does it mean? Does it simply condemn the patriarchy? If the story is deeply symbolic, and a meditation on hidden patterns, what are they? We know this story as a condemnation of the barbaric practice of the rest cure, but when we scan it, what else?<\/p>\n

An attempt: The bed is nailed to the floor\u2014the narrator has no control over her role in reproduction. The ancestral home, as a symbol for genetic inheritance (a theme Gilman uses in both her essays and fiction), is in disrepair, because of it. The narrator is lost because her husband won\u2019t listen to her\u2014without collaboration between men and women, the mother is lost, and the cycle of disrepair (she becomes<\/em> the shredded wallpaper) continues. And as for the yellow wallpaper itself ? She wants it whitewashed.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s common to separate out \u201cThe Yellow Wall-Paper\u201d from the rest of Gilman\u2019s work, to place distance between it and her racism and passion for eugenics: it was just the time she lived in. Yes, the time she lived in was squeamish to publish a short story critical of patriarchy, and eager to embrace a cute poem about eugenics. But what about now? What makes us squeamish is an important study.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Yellow Wall-Paper\u201d is a story about hypocrisy, oppression, and legacy. It\u2019s a story about patterns hidden beneath patterns. The wallpaper oppresses the narrator until she starts to see herself in it, to identify with it. She becomes the woman in the wallpaper, becomes the wallpaper itself, and then she escapes, barely\u2014and deeply tainted. If we can learn from the story\u2019s enduring literary idea (the idea that, according to Gilman, \u201cjust happened\u201d), it\u2019s that a half-truth is not an answer. What\u2019s hidden is dangerous. Motives are important. For anyone who has thought of Gilman as a hero of early feminism, I would urge another look. You will find patterns of humanity here, but it won\u2019t be as simple as it seemed.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Halle Butler is a writer from the Midwest. Her first novel, <\/em>Jillian, is a brief account of a medical secretary\u2019s drunken social blunders and callous treatment of her coworker. Her second novel, <\/em>The New Me, is a brief account of a depressed temp worker. She is a <\/em>Granta Best Young American Novelist and a National Book Foundation \u201c5 Under 35\u201d Honoree.<\/em><\/p>\n

Introduction by Halle Butler from a new edition of the book <\/em>The Yellow Wall-Paper and Other Writings<\/a>, by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Introduction copyright \u00a9 2021 by Halle Butler. Published by Modern Library, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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