Economics, Evolution, and Feminism in Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Utopian Fiction
2010; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 39; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1080/00497871003661711
ISSN1547-7045
Autores Tópico(s)Historical Studies on Reproduction, Gender, Health, and Societal Changes
ResumoClick to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1Also a feminist treaty by Gilman, The Man-Made World (henceforth as MMW, first appeared in 1911 as serials in the Forerunner magazine, and later was published in 1914 in book form, New York: Charlton) is an essay collection that reveals many of Gilman's ideas of gender relation and her advocacy for a world of gender equality. 2Cited from Carlyle's 1829 article “Signs of the Times.” Michael Spindler, Veblen and Modern America, 49–50. 3For detailed explanation of the image of madness, see Herndl. In her study of illness, Herndl lists three general ways of reading invalid women: First, as a result of oppression; second, as a resistance to or escape from oppression; and third, as a means to obtain power. In “Writing Cure: Women Writers and the Art of Illness” Herndl argues that unlike Alice James who wrote “herself into her body,” Gilman “writes her way out of it” (132). In the diseased culture, “had the narrator of ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ continued to write despite her fatigue, she might have recovered, like Gilman herself” (145). 4“He is the market, the demand. She is the supply” (Gilman, WE, 86). 5Bellamy's narrator, Julian West, transported from the year 1887 to 2000 in a trance, cross-examines in the novel the competitive capitalist economy of the nineteenth century with the socialist utopia in the twentieth century where collected property system replaces private property system. Bellamy is generally recognized as one of the early leaders of the utopian writing branched forth from the Progressive Reform Movement. By juxtaposing a society stricken by economic panics with another society that liberates the public from the malice of capitalism, Bellamy projects his dream onto the future time. 6A sequel to Herland, With Her in Ourland was first published in 1916 and focuses on how a Herlander views the real world in the early twentieth-century U.S. 7As shown in The Man-Made World, the three features are seen by Gilman as the essential that constitutes masculine attitude toward the world. 8As a representative in the literary wave of utopia, Herland is one of the many works that reflect economic diseases (such as unemployment and poverty) resulting from the alliance between business and government at the turn of the twentieth century. As Jean Pfaelzer says, “writers of late nineteenth-century utopian fiction often share the assumptions of the social determinists; still, they create a realm that assumes the subversion of the present […]. Rebellion is part of the inner logic of the genre itself” (14), for although this historical period is termed Progressivism, economic depressions and strikes afterward were rampant. Utopian writers cast their social programs in the form of literature in the hope to enforce an ideological revolution. 9Man's exclusion is the most extreme and subversive literary design Gilman includes in her utopian fictions, which in fact rarely appears in other utopian stories as those collected in Carol Farley Kessler's Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Most of her stories are located in societies where men are happy to see women work as individuals enriching their family property. To pick “Aunt Mary's Pie Plant” (1908) for example, when the female narrator goes back to her hometown, New Newton, she is much impressed by the way widowed Aunt Mary tears down the belief in the separate economic spheres. There, pie-making has been transformed to factory industry through which “wealth is produced by the application of labor and intelligence to natural materials” (125), and husbands are more than pleased to see their wives work independently and earn more money for families. Another great example is “A Strange Land” (a possible Herland written in 1912) where growth is the supreme concern and traits of industry are highly appreciated. Generally speaking, the biggest difference between this story and Herland is that habitants on the strange island are not only “women”; they are “people,” men and women, working for common prosperity. 10As Bakhtin affirms, only in anti-utopia, the ultimate word of and about the world “has not yet been spoken, the world is open and free, everything is still in the future and will always be in the future” (166). 11Her offensive attitude to private business is also shown clearly in the following rhetorical question: “What else can you call these people who hang like clusters of leeches on the public treasury, who hop like fleas to escape the law, who spin webby masses of special legislation in which to breed more freely, who creep and crawl on every public work that is undertaken, and fatten undisturbed on all private business?” (155). 12 Vested Interests 183. Also named as The Vested Interests and the Common Man in the latter version (New York: B. W. Huebsch, 1923, 445). 14Gilman's “Does a Man Support His Wife?,” 9. Quotation here is cited from Zauderer 163. 13Jane Addams (1860–1935), awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1931, is a very important figure in the reform and peace movements of the Progressive Era. Her influence scattered from women's suffrage, child labor laws, and welfare reform, to immigrant protective law, juvenile research, and consumer study. Inviting women of all kinds to Hull House, Addams provided a socialized domestic space where women were trained to be professional workers and social reformers helping the social marginal. 15See Sandra Gilbert's “She in Herland: Feminism as Fantasy” where Gilbert lists several possible reasons for Gilman's fantasy of woman-parthenogenesis in Herland, such as the autonomous creativity of women and Gilman's rejection of Freud's identification of the penis with power (Coordinates: Placing Science Fiction and Fantasy. Ed. George E. Slusser, Eric S. Rabkin and Robert Scholes. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1983, 139–49). 16One recurrent theme in nineteenth-century women's movement is the issue of “voluntary motherhood” (or self-imposed celibacy), first advocated by Elizabeth Cady Stanton in the 1870s and reinforced later by feminist suffragists and moral reformers at the turn of the twentieth century. As Linda Gordon in her 2002 study points out, “We must discard the twentieth-century association of birth control with a trend toward sexual freedom. The voluntary motherhood advocates of the 1870s aimed to enforce their sexual morality” (“Voluntary Motherhood.” The Moral Property of Women: A History of Birth Control in America. Urbana: Illinois UP, 55–71, at 67). Reasons for sexual abstinence vary from the fear of physical danger and venereal diseases, a wish to reduce men's promiscuous sex instinct, to the concern of eugenics, and attacks against prostitution and artificial contraception. The core, of course, lies in women's desire to pursue professions other than housewives and mothers. When more and more educated women chose not to marry or be mothers, American population saw an intense “infertility crisis” in the Anglo-Saxons. In his 1905 speech President Roosevelt openly linked birth control to “selfish doctrine” and launched debates on the roles of women and mothers. For the speech entitled “On American Motherhood,” see . Another representative argument against the freedom of women is from the Harvard philosopher Hugo Munsterberg that, “the self-assertion of woman exalts her at the expense of the family—perfects the individual but injures society” (Jean V. Matthews's The Rise of the New Woman, 95). 17As Ladies' Home Journal (May 1899) clarifies, maternity is of the body whereas motherhood, the soul. Maternal love is “the love of the animal for her young,” but mother love is universal and goes to all children and “the helpless and suffering and sinful everywhere” (Kate Chopin's The Awakening. Ed. Nancy A. Walker. Boston: Bedford Books of St. Martin's P, 1993, 56). 18For further analysis on the relationship between commodified landscape and women's barbarian status, see my “The Awakening: Chopin's Reading of Leisure-Class Women in Ourland,” where I question Sandra Gilbert's reading of Chopin's Grand Isle as “a sort of Herland” in No-Man's Land. In my view, the Herland-like Grand Isle is “an open platform for woman to perform conspicuous leisure [… .] She does not come to the island for leisure; she works at leisure on behalf of her husband” (142). 19As Sally Ladger points out in The New Woman (New York: Martin's 1997), the cultural New Woman had a multiple identity, “she” was very much a phenomenon reflecting and examining woman's question. Although Gilman named Herlanders “New Women,” she condemned those liberated new women who believed in women's right to sexual gratification, and called them “slaves of fashion and the victims of license as they were before” (His Religion and Hers, Conn: Hyperion, 1976, 54). 20In Discipline and Punishment (1977), Foucault talks about how institutions construct, discipline, and control the human body. As he argues, the panopticon demonstrates how humans are generalized and managed so as to fit the expectations of the regime of power. 21For a discussion on the transformation from production to consumption, see Spindler, who manifests the economic development from 1870 to 1950, cross-examining historical background with literary responses and showing “how these writers' concerns were shaped by industrialism and consumerism, and how family background, class and personal and national ideologies acted as mediations between their experience of society and their literary practices” (7). The book does not include the different receptions of economic development between men and women, but it presents a good analysis of American Literature under dynamic social changes during the turn of the twentieth century.
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