Herstory in Hisland, History in Herland: Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Reconstruction of Gender and Language
[In the following essay, Cutter discusses the feminist meaning of language in Gilman's fiction.]
Charlotte Perkins Gilman is best know for her semiautobiographical text, “The Yellow Wall-Paper” (1892), but she completed numerous other projects. For example, from 1909 to 1916 she published a magazine called the Forerunner. For each monthly issue, Gilman wrote a short story, a chapter of a serial novel, a chapter of a prose work, and miscellaneous essays, editorials, songs, and poems. In the first volume, she even authored the advertisements. Her humorously risqué endorsement of one product—Moore's Fountain Pen—can be used as a general illustration of the changing concerns of early-twentieth-century women writers. Gilman's advertisement describes a woman who wants to write but finds she has problems with her “pen”:
It is all very well for men, with vest pockets, to carry a sort of leather socket, or a metal clip that holds the pen to that pocket safely—so long as the man is vertical.
But women haven't vest pockets—and do not remain continuously erect.
A woman stoops over to look in the oven—to pick up her thimble—to take the baby off the floor—and if she carries a fountain pen, it stoops over too and spills its ink.
Moore's Foundation Pen, however, has a cap that screws on so that the ink does not leak; literally, this pen reconciles women's domestic role with her desire to write.
More interesting, however, is that Gilman's advertisement postulates a theoretical connection between men and pens, one that makes women's writing somewhat difficult. Gilman puns on the connection between pen and penis that numerous feminist critics have observed. Gilman says it is more difficult for women to control pens because, unlike men, women do not “remain continuously erect.” Pens leak when women try to use them, or they “distribute ink where—and when—it wasn't wanted” (31). Gilman's solution is to endorse a redesigned pen, an instrument that does not require women to be “continuously erect.” Gilman praises a product, then, that deconstructs the link between men and “pens,” between a subjectivity as a speaking/writing subject and the masculine phallus. In Gilman's playful advertisement, both men and women can manipulate the pen “with joy, with comfort, [and] with clean hands” (31). No wonder Moore's Fountain Pen is a “constant satisfaction” (31).
With less sexual punning than this, many turn-of-the-century women writers try to undermine the theoretical structures that grant men an articulate subjectivity while envisioning women as silent objects. However, some of their characters find feminine voices that are ineffective because they are finally located outside patriarchal society. Gilman's fiction demonstrates a desire to find verbal strategies that can survive in patriarchal culture, in a world where women must sometimes contend with pens that leak, with ink that will not stay put. Gilman's early work “The Yellow Wall-Paper” depicts the oppression of patriarchal language but presents no way of escaping this subjugation. Her later fictions, however, find more effective ways of reconstructing gender and language. Gilman's feminist utopia Herland (1915) uses a maternal discourse to undermine those binary structures that have created constitutively masculine speaking subjects (such as the phallus as transcendental signifier), but it sometimes gets caught up in new oppositions that undermine this project. Gilman's Forerunner fiction (1909-16), on the other hand, does not postulate that a maternal or feminine voice can be retrieved. Rather, the unruly women in Gilman's most subversive works are metalinguists who strip bare the wallpaper of patriarchal history and create a place for their subjectivity and voice in a renovated discourse.
In The Man-Made World, or Our Androcentric Culture, Gilman begins a chapter by posing and answering a question: “History is, or should be the story of our racial life. What have men made it? The story of warfare and conquest” (216). For Gilman, history is literally his story—a record of the dominance of the masculine subject. And yet, what is the source of history's androcentric bias? As previously argued, Gilman believes that language is “androcentric,” defining women only through a social and linguistic relationship to a male subject. Therefore “herstory in hisland”—women's stories within the structures of patriarchal discourse and culture—will be a record of desperate but failed attempts to escape from the debilitating structures of gender and language, an ambiguous text much like Gilman's own short fiction “The Yellow Wall-Paper.”
As numerous critics have argued, “The Yellow Wall-Paper” concerns women's entrapment within patriarchal language. Forbidden to engage in any intellectual activity, the female narrator resorts to covert writing and then, more and more, to “readings” of the yellow wallpaper. Ultimately these readings reveal a hidden history of feminine suppression, for underneath the paper the narrator sees a woman behind bars, a woman who creeps, a woman who sometimes becomes many women. The narrator determines to free this woman, and she strips the wallpaper off the walls. In so doing, she becomes the other woman; by the end of the story she claims, “I've got out at last … you can't put me back” (36). Paradoxically, the narrator also has a rope to tie the woman, should she try to escape. Finally, the narrator uses this rope to tie herself securely (presumably to the bed, the only object of furniture left in the room). She creeps around the perimeter of the room, fitting her shoulder into a narrow groove that has been worn in the wall by a previous occupant. Claiming to be free (“I've got out at last”), the narrator seems all the more enchained, mechanically rotating on an umbilical cord tying her to the scene of entrapment and oppression, the patriarchal marriage bed.
If we read this story as Paula Treichler does, in terms of a clash between masculine and feminine discourse, it seems to depict a temporary escape from the repressive sentence of authoritative male language:
I interpret the wallpaper to be women's writing or women's discourse, and the woman in the wallpaper to be the representation of women that becomes possible only after women obtain the right to speak. In this reading, the yellow wallpaper stands for a new vision of women—one which is constructed differently from the representation of women in patriarchal language. The story is thus in part about the clash between two modes of discourse: one powerful, “ancestral,” and dominant; the other new, “impertinent,” and visionary.
(“Escaping the Sentence” 64)
And yet, the narrator's escape from “the sentence” does not lead to a permanent liberation: “Her triumph is to have sharpened and articulated the nature of women's condition; she remains physically bound by a rope and locked in a room” (74). According to Treichler, the social and material conditions the narrator has diagnosed must change before she can be free.1
I would also argue that the narrator “escapes” the sentence only through a radical deconstruction of her own self. The narrator is suspended between her husband's precise, rational discourse and the “discourse” of the yellow wallpaper, in which there is “a lack of sequence, a defiance of law” (12): “when you follow the lame uncertain curves for a little distance they suddenly commit suicide—plunge off at outrageous angles, destroy themselves in unheard of contradictions” (5). She is caught between her husband's written schedule for her—his written “schedule prescription for each hour in the day” (4)—and the unscheduled reading and writing of the yellow wallpaper that goes on at all hours because it is ultimately outside the linear structure of time. The narrator is trapped between her own subversive reading of the yellow wallpaper and John's coercive reading of texts to and at her, for when she has bouts of madness her husband, as she says, sits “by me and read[s] to me till it tire[s] my head” (10). Like Chopin, then, in this early work Gilman portrays a conflict between a patriarchal, masculine language that silences women and an alternative feminine speech that seems more liberating.
In depicting this conflict between masculine and feminine discourse, Gilman draws on her own autobiographical experiences. As Mary Hill argues, Gilman's personal writings indicate that she felt a conflict between the “feminine” and “masculine” elements within herself, “between her mother's ‘implacable sense of duty’ and her father's more independent drive” (46). Gilman believed she had to make a choice between these two sides of her personality. In a letter to her first husband she writes, “I knew of course that the time would come when I must choose between two lives, but never did I dream that it would come so soon, and that the struggle would be so terrible” (Hill 99). At first she chose the “feminine” side, suppressing her “masculine” wish for a career in favor of duty to husband and child. The results were disastrous, as Gilman spiraled deeper and deeper into a near suicidal depression. It was not until she abandoned S. Weir Mitchell's prescription of a “rest cure” and resumed her career as a writer and lecturer that she recovered.
Gilman was not destroyed, then, by the conflict between her “male” and “female” sides, between her desire for a voice that was “masculine” and a more traditional women's speech. However, her narrator is not so lucky. Like Gilman she is a writer, but she does not have the option of choosing her “masculine,” independent side over her “feminine,” domestic one. She is explicitly told that if she does not get better (that is, become a better mother), her “sentence” will be increased: “John says if I don't pick up faster he shall send me to Weir Mitchell in the fall. But I don't want to go there at all. I had a friend who was in his hands once, and she says he is just like John and my brother, only more so!” (18-19). The narrator seems to have no way of escaping the oppressive control of male medical authorities (her husband, her brother, and Weir Mitchell) who deny her voice, who attempt to cure her by forcing her back into an outdated model of women's identity and speech.
In the end, this “cure” actually destroys her. Caught between modes of discourse that are figured as binary opposites—the rational and the imaginative, the logical and the illogical, the sane and the insane, the “masculine” and the “feminine”—the narrator's personality splits; she forms two warring psyches that mirror the discursive modes that surround her. Through identification with the wallpaper and the woman in it, she creates a subversive personality that tries to help the woman escape, one that so identifies with the woman in the wallpaper that she becomes her. This subversive “feminine” self bites the mattress, strips off the wallpaper, and ultimately claims, “I've got out at last … you can't put me back” (19). This self works with the woman in the wallpaper to free all women: “I pulled and she shook. I shook and she pulled, and before morning we had peeled off yards of that paper” (17). This self opposes the Law of the Father and her rebellion seems to succeed, at least momentarily. When John sees this subversive self at the story's end, he faints dead away, and the narrator has to “creep over him every time” (19) she completes a rotation of the room.
But in addition to this subversive self, there is one that attempts to “escape” from the tyranny of the oppressor by incorporating the oppressor's views. Prisoners placed in positions of authority will sometimes tyrannize other prisoners more than the jailers; identification with the oppressor becomes a psychological strategy of self-preservation. So while the narrator forms a “feminine” personality matching that of the woman in the yellow wallpaper, she also forms a “masculine” one inculcating patriarchal values. This personality constantly wars with the wallpaper, attempting—and failing—to “master” it, to impose sequence on it: “You think you have mastered it [the pattern of the paper], but just as you get well under way in following it, it turns a back-somersault and there you are. It slaps you in the face, knocks you down, and tramples upon you. It is like a bad dream” (12). This self possessively desires to penetrate the wallpaper, to unveil its hidden meaning: “I am determined that nobody shall find it [the pattern of the paper] out but myself” (14). Finally, it is this oppressor self that agrees to the incarceration of the prisoner in the wallpaper, and to its own incarceration: “I've got a rope up here that even Jennie did not find. If that woman does get out, and tries to get away, I can tie her! … I am securely fastened now by my well-hidden rope—you don't get me out in the road there! … Here I can creep smoothly on the floor, and my shoulder just fits in that long smooch around the wall, so I cannot lose my way” (18). Rather than shaking the bars of the prison, the oppressor self understands the “justice” of her confinement and even treats it as enjoyable: “my shoulder just fits in that long smooch … so I cannot lose my way.” As Linda Wagner-Martin comments, although the later half of the story seems to move toward the protagonist's liberation, this freedom is ultimately false: “The woman … does not dance or skip or fly, common images for the state of freedom. She only creeps, a derogation of the more positive word crawls, which is not itself a very positive movement” (61). The oppressor self accepts her confinement within the house of patriarchy and her creeping, imprisoned, alienated status.
Two selves have thus been made manifest by the end of the story; neither one can be “put back” (19). Perhaps, as Treichler argues, the narrator has gained control of her language but not of the material situation. But perhaps she has lost control of both herself and her discourse. Trapped between the subversive patterns of the yellow wallpaper and her husband's rational discourse, between the “masculine” and “feminine” sides of her personality, she has only formed two incompatible identities that mirror two oppositional discursive modes. Finally, in the warring between these two opposed linguistic modes, her own personality and voice are erased by madness.
The narrator of this story at times attempts to master the subversive, feminine “Other” that emerges in a confrontation with patriarchal discourse. She may also attempt to master the unruly, threatening, racial “Other” that emerges in such a confrontation. In a provocative reading of the text, Susan Lanser wonders whether the yellow wallpaper could symbolize a racial threat: “Is the wallpaper, then, the political unconscious of a culture in which an Aryan woman's madness, desire, and anger … are projected onto the ‘yellow’ woman who is, however, also the feared alien? When the narrator tries to liberate the woman from the wall, is she trying to purge her of her color, to peel her from the yellow paper, so that she can accept this woman as herself?” (429). Certainly, Gilman's views on race were puzzling and contradictory.2 But rather than eliding these views, she structures them into her text. So the yellow wallpaper can symbolize both the narrator's desire to master and enchain a racial “Other” as well as her desire to liberate this racial “Other” who is really not other, her desire to free and liberate all women, whether they be “yellow” or white. Gilman's text articulates what were for her—at this time—unresolvable contradictions, unresolvable oppositions between the “yellow” and the “white,” the “feminine” and the “masculine,” between a language that is freeing and one that constrains. The text is honest in positing these contradictions but presents no solution. Finally, “The Yellow Wall-Paper” depicts the feminine subject's entrapment within masculine and racist constructions of language and identity but finds no way of undercutting the oppositions that create this imprisonment. As a portrait of how women can “escape the sentence,” it is ambiguous at best, despairing at worst.
Herland reverses this plot; instead of telling “herstory in hisland” it tells the history of three men who wander into a world where their gender has no validity and into a language that seems alien.3 Yet Gilman does not merely invert the gender and language politics of patriarchal culture, as some critics have argued. She also attempts to write “the other history” of which Hélène Cixous speaks: “Phallocentrism is. History has never produced, recorded anything but that. Which does not mean that this form is inevitable or natural. Phallocentrism is the enemy. Of everyone. Men stand to lose by it, differently but as seriously as women. And it is time to transform. To invent the other history” (96). In Herland, Gilman invents the history of a nonphallocentric language and culture, and she attempts to move beyond the binary oppositions that have structured patriarchal culture. Not surprisingly, then, the history of Herland is unlike standard histories of adventure and conquest, as the narrator, Vandyck Jennings, recognizes in a chapter aptly titled “A Unique History”: “It is no use for me to try to piece out this account with adventures. If the people who read it are not interested in these amazing women and their history, they will not be interested at all” (49). Instead, the history of Herland undermines standard conceptions of gender and language, and in undermining them throws them open, making them polysemous, fluid, capable of being revised.
Gilman begins by undermining stereotypes of femininity. All three of the men who visit Herland (Van, Terry, and Jeff) have different expectations about women's “essential” nature. Jeff idolizes women and expects to find a country “just blossoming with roses and babies and canaries and tidies,” while Terry has visions “of a sort of sublimated summer resort—just Girls and Girls and Girls” (7). In short, Jeff believes the land will be peopled with domestic saints, while Terry believes it will abound with oversexed New Women. Van tries to take a “middle ground” on the subject of women, yet he “argue[s] learnedly about the physiological limitations of the sex” (9) and says, upon finding evidence of advanced technology: “But … why, this is a civilized country. … There must be men” (11). But Van eventually realizes that in the patriarchal world he inhabits, “femininity” is actually created by masculine conceptions of the feminine: “These women [in Herland] … were strikingly deficient in what we call ‘femininity.’ This led me very promptly to the conviction that those ‘feminine charms’ we are so fond of are not feminine at all, but mere reflected masculinity—developed to please us because they had to please us, and in no way essential to the real fulfillment of their great process” (58-59). Men construct women as deficient, incomplete mirrors of themselves—femininity is “mere reflected masculinity.” So it is no wonder these men believe they can predict what they will find in Herland; as Van says (apparently without recognizing his pun): “we had been cocksure as to the inevitable limitations, the faults and vices, of a lot of women” (81). In fact, where the men expect to find pettiness, jealousy, stupidity, and hysteria, they find instead social consciousness, affection, intelligence and a high “standard of health and vigor” (81). Through these contrasts, Gilman illustrates that the limitations of “Woman” are caused by patriarchal society and by phallocentric (“cocksure”) definitions of the “feminine,” not by some intrinsic psychological or physiological feminine character.
Herland also undermines phallocentric notions of masculinity, illustrating that the “masculine” is a social construction rather than an intrinsic difference between the sexes. Gender boundaries blur in Herland; the women have short hair and wear unisex clothing. Finally, it is only the men's beards that can be clung to as outward symbols of their masculinity: “We began to rather prize those beards of ours; they were almost our sole distinction among those tall and sturdy women” (84). In a patriarchal world, the men's beards would be a crucial mark of social and physiological difference, but in Herland they mean little. Masculinity itself, then, is shown to reside in a facade, an external construction of “difference.” Furthermore, Van begins to question whether this facade actually signifies anything. To Van, Terry Nicholson has always been a kind of hero, a “man among men,” but when placed in a different context Terry's masculinity seems excessive: “At home we had measured him with other men, and, though we knew his failings, he was by no means an unusual type. We knew his virtues too, and they had always seemed more prominent than the faults. Measured among women—our women at home, I mean—he always stood high. … But here, against the calm wisdom and quiet restrained humor of these women … here he was all out of drawing” (75).
Masculinity is contextual; it takes on virtue or vice depending on what it is measured against. In Herland, Terry's “intense masculinity” becomes a caricature of itself, something of which Van is “ashamed” (130). Terry's “intense masculinity” also loses some of its intensity when measured against a culture in which women have aspects of the “masculine” (power, strength, self-determination, short hair, etc.), causing Van to question whether this “masculinity” is a true and irrevocable essence or a contextual, constructed difference. Furthermore, since the Herlanders reproduce parthenogenetically (by means of “virgin birth”), masculinity is not necessary for reproduction, and on a broader level the text indicates that it is also not necessary for social progress.
“History in Herland,” then, presents a critique of patriarchal constructions of masculinity and femininity. In Gilman's text, however, the destruction of gender norms and the construction of a new theory of language are crucially interlinked. Therefore, after demonstrating that the men's theories of identity are disconcerted when they come into contact with women who refuse to play the role of objects in men's dramas of subjectivity, Gilman then shows that the men's language is also disconcerted. The Herlanders speak a maternal language the men must learn. In effect, the men must find their place within an alternative symbolic order. And having once found their place within this mother tongue, they have difficulty returning to the father tongue, to the patriarchal discourse of power. Gilman uses these changes to demonstrate that symbolic language can be overturned by a new theory of language that configures voice as an instrument of dialogue and understanding rather than mastery over others.
The Herlandian language has the ability to enact change partially because it is nonbinary. Binarisms create hierarchies in which women are usually equated with the lesser term, as Cixous explains: “The philosophical [order] constructs itself starting with the abasement of woman. Subordination of the feminine to the masculine order which appears to be the condition for the functioning of the machine” (92). But in Herland, Gilman implies that the “machine” of binary oppositions does not exist; there is no patriarchy, and the Law of the Father cannot be established in a land where fatherhood has never existed, either theoretically or actually. Furthermore, because there is only one gender, there is no sexual binarism, no man/woman dichotomy. Even the presence of three men does not introduce binary differentiation. As Jeff says to Van: “They don't seem to notice our being men. … They treat us—well—just as they do one another. It's as if our being men was a minor incident” (30). In fact, all traces of men have long since vanished; as Jeff exclaims, “we don't see any signs of [men]” (29, my emphasis). Even in literature this is the case; the men can find “no signs of [men] in the books they gave us, or the pictures” (44, emphasis added). Gilman's emphasis on “signs” is not coincidental, for she depicts a world in which both physical and linguistic phallocentric marks of difference have been forgotten. Herlandian civilization establishes itself based on collective action, as Van explains: “they had no wars. They had no kings, and no priests, and no aristocracies. They were sisters, and as they grew, they grew together—not by competition, but by united action” (60). In Herland, then, subjectivity is not founded on the oppression of an “Other,” and sexual difference itself does not exist.
Binary sexual differences, then, do not seem at first glance to exist in an essential way in Herland. The men have penises, but this is a minor incident, not the foundation for a pejorative construction of subjectivity. And yet, it has been argued that it is precisely sexual difference that creates humans' relationship to language. As Julia Kristeva explains: “Sexual difference—which is at once biological, physiological, and relative to production—is translated by and translates a difference in the relationship of subjects to the symbolic contract which is the social contract: a difference, then, in the relationship to power, language, and meaning” (“Women's Time” 196). The question arises, then, as to how one can enter the symbolic in a land where sexual difference does not exist. The question also arises as whether this “language” of Herland can properly be considered a language. The answer to these questions lies in the fact that in Herland, difference does exist, but it ceases to function as a limitation, a perception of lack. Instead, difference becomes a positive process whereby the individual can be both separate and one with the larger community. Difference exists, then, but it is difference with a difference.
Naming practices, for example, reflect not a separation between subject and object, male and female, as they do under patriarchy, but an integration into the community as well as a defining of self. In a patriarchal society, patrilineal naming enforces phallic law, portraying women as objects of exchange between fathers and husbands. Terry argues that his future wife, Alima, should take his name after marriage as “a sign of [his] possession” (118). However, in Herland names do not express ownership; children do not take their mothers' names but rather are given ones that reflect their individual qualities. As Moadine (a teacher) tells Terry: “A good many of us have another [name], as we get on in life—a descriptive one. That is the name we earn. Sometimes even that is changed, or added to, in an unusually rich life. Such as our present Land Mother—what you call president or king, I believe. She was called Mera, even as a child; that means ‘thinker.’ Later there was added Du—Du-mera—the wise thinker, and now we all know her as O-du-mera—great and wise thinker” (75). Through names difference is established, but it is difference that does not exclude or limit, difference that allows for distinction without hierarchy. This type of difference does not separate the world into two categories: subjects who possess their own names (men) and objects who are named and defined as the possessions of others (women and children).
Gilman also uses naming practices to emphasize that difference can be based on individual strengths rather than weaknesses. O-du-mera receives her name not as the result of displacing or replacing others but as a result of her ability to lead and guide. The communal, collective vision of the world guides these women; they are relationally oriented, and they find their differences in how they help each other. And so children find they “were People, too, from the first,” people in a world of connection where what they learn “widen[ed] out into contact with an endless range of common interests”; the things they learn are “related, from the first; related to one another, and to the national prosperity” (100). Although Gilman does not avoid the binarism common to most utopias—the binarism of the utopian world versus the “real” world—within the culture of Herland, Gilman tries to avoid binarism by creating a world based on communal and collective good rather than oppression of the “Other.” Of course, one must wonder whether any society could exist without binary oppositions and whether difference can be present without becoming repressive (a point I will return to at the end of this section). But Gilman's utopia attempts to move beyond the binary through emphasis on the communal; these women find their differences in how they help the collective good rather than in how they oppress a silent, disempowered “Other.”
The women's relationship to language, then, is also construed in this way: it rests not on binary hierarchies but on collectivity. And unlike phallocentric discourse, the language of Herland does not emphasize feminine lack or insufficiency. Generally speaking, psycholinguists mark the oedipal crisis as the point at which individuals make their entry into the symbolic and into language. But as Patricia Waugh points out, both Freud and Lacan fail to investigate “the pre-oedipal period or to examine the mother's position as a subject in her own right. She remains necessarily ‘other’” (61). In fact, some theorists have posited that language may exist in the preoedipal phase; Anika Lemaire observes, for example, that “At the time of [the Oedipus] complex … linguistic communication has already been established … logically, therefore, the complex itself cannot bring about the primal repression which establishes language” (88-89). Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar also question whether language need necessarily be tied to the Law of the Father: “It is possible … that the Oedipal moment functions as a repetitive revision of an earlier moment, and that the power of the father, while obviously representing the law of patriarchy, need not be inextricably bound to the power of language” (“Sexual Linguistics” 96). In Herland, Gilman investigates the mother's position as subject, positing a specifically maternal discourse that does exist, despite the fact that in Herland, there are no oedipal crises, no phalluses, and no “Others” that act as inanimate matter for the existence of the subject.
In a land without a Law of the Father, without a transcendental signifier figured forth by the phallus, language comes to be organized around motherhood. In fact, motherhood has been elevated into an actual religion. The Herlanders have evolved what Van calls a sort of “Maternal Pantheism” that binds and unites them to each other, and to nature itself: “Here was Mother Earth, bearing fruit. All that they ate was fruit of motherhood, from seed or egg or their product. By motherhood they were born and by motherhood they lived—life was, to them, just the long cycle of motherhood” (59). Van has difficulty describing this Herlandian mother-love religion, and he suggests the possibility of a specifically maternal discourse: “It was beyond me. To hear a lot of women talk about ‘our children’! But I suppose that is the way the ants and bees would talk—do talk, maybe” (71). In this preoedipal—in fact, nonoedipal—matriarchal world, the Herlanders evolve a specifically communal and matriarchal discourse, the language of the “ants and bees” in their hives. Like Cooper, Freeman, and Chopin, Gilman retrieves a language of the mother to undermine patriarchal discourse.
Although Gilman's text does not give a detailed illustration of this language, she does go further than these other writers in describing it. It will not be static and monolithic; rather, it will be a hum of sounds, continually growing, evolving, changing. It will also be a process, not a product. The written law of Herland, for example, is continually being revised; as Moadine says: “We have no laws over a hundred years old, and most of them are under twenty.” Laws are not based on an old system of contracts but on the needs of a changing society. Indeed, Herland is always growing, as Van explains, “life to them was growth; their pleasure was in growing, and their duty also” (102). Language thus becomes a fluid instrument of growth, of evolution, of process. The language's style, then, mirrors this concern with growth. Herland speech is musical and heterogeneous; when Van first hears it he notes “a torrent of soft talk tossed back and forth; no savage singsong, but clear musical fluent speech” (15). The talk is a playful, fluid torrent, continually revised and modified as it is tossed back and forth between speakers like a rubber ball. Furthermore, the language of Herland is, at the same time, both old and new, both complicated and simple, both scientific and pure, as Van's description makes clear: “It was not hard to speak, smooth and pleasant to the ear, and so easy to read and write that I marveled at it. They had an absolutely phonetic system, the whole thing was as scientific as Esparanto yet bore all the marks of an old and rich civilization” (31). Simplified, yet still beautiful and rich, the language can accurately record the continually evolving world of Herland. Literature can be “true, true to the living world around them” (103). Rather than the monologic, rigid, hierarchical product that is patriarchal discourse, the musical Herlandian language emphasizes dialogue, transformation, and improvisation. Language truly becomes a heterogeneous signifying process.
This language, this mother tongue, also has the power to undermine patriarchal discourse and, more specifically, the phallus as transcendental signifier. Initially, the men seek mastery of the Herlandian language because they believe this will grant them power over the women. But the Herlanders teach the men their language to make them part of a beneficent social contract: “As soon as we learned the language—and would agree to do no harm—they would show us the land” (44). For the Herlanders, who have no phallic symbol around which to organize the “haves” and the “have nots,” mastery and language do not go hand in hand. “History in Herland” is therefore not a scripting of a narrative of conquest onto the female body of Herland, nor a story of masculine discursive control, as the men originally suppose it will be.4 Instead it is a history of three men who come to understand that mastery of language and mastery of an “Other” need not be inexorably linked.
As the novel progresses, the men also learn that even the phallus is a contextually defined mark of difference, not a transcendental signifier that grants them mastery in all discursive situations. The women of Herland do not understand, as Van says, “the male sex … its special values, its profound conviction of being ‘the life force,’ its cheerful ignoring of the true life process, and its interpretation of the other sex solely from its own point of view” (134). In Herland, the phallus does not grant men the ability to subjugate an “Other.” It is no wonder, then, that Van, Terry, and Jeff find themselves having difficulty with speech in Herland. Lacking a transcendental signifier, as well as the traditional vocabulary of patriarchal society—for in Herland, the words “virgin” (45), “home” (61), “family” (94), “patriotism” (94), and “wife” (118) have no meaning—the men cannot control the discursive situation. The men are urged to give “public lectures” about their country, and Terry revels in the fact that he will be “an Authority” (65) to an audience composed solely of young women. But the men find the women control the production of information, as well as the entire discursive situation: “They had mechanical appliances for disseminating information almost equal to ours at home; and by the time we were led forth to lecture, our audience had thoroughly mastered a well-arranged digest of all we had previously given to our teachers, and were prepared with notes and questions as might have intimidated a university professor” (65). In Herland, then, the men learn repeatedly that they cannot rule with the phallic scepter of power and authority.
Gilman also uses the history of one man in particular—Terry—to illustrate more specifically how the Herlandian language undermines the phallus as transcendental signifier, as well as a commitment to sexual and linguistic mastery. Terry has a habit of engaging in bursts of masculine sturm und drang, but he curtails them because he is—literally—making a spectacle of himself: “At first [Terry] used to storm and flourish quite a good deal, but nothing seemed to amuse [the Herlanders] more; they would gather around and watch him as if it was an exhibition, politely, but with evident interest. So he learned to check himself” (65). Exhibitions of phallocratic language are turned into the object of the gaze and rendered impotent. Terry has always been adept at controlling verbal power, but in the face of this feminine discursive control he begins to stutter: “‘Confound their grandmotherly minds!’ Terry said. ‘Of course they can't understand a Man's World! They aren't human—they're just a pack of Fe-Fe-Females!’ This was after he had to admit their parthenogenesis” (80). Terry, the emblem of phallic power, begins stuttering when confronted with evidence of the women's parthenogenesis, their ability to be self-sustaining. In a world of parthenogenesis, the phallus—as transcendental signifier and as an instrument of sexual and linguistic difference and mastery—lacks meaning and power.
But when Terry's discourse is rendered impotent, he tries to assert phallocratic power in a more direct way. After his marriage, Terry tries to force his wife Alima to have sexual relations with him: “Terry put into practice his pet conviction that a woman loves to be mastered, and by sheer brute force, in all the pride and passion of his intense masculinity, he tried to master this woman” (132). However, Alima will not submit to Terry's mastery. She struggles with Terry until others come to her aid. Alima also strikes out against phallocratic power more directly. As Terry reports to Van, Alima “kicked me. … And of course a man's helpless when you hit him like that. No woman with a shade of decency—” (143). In fact, Terry's attempt to rape his wife is indecent, not Alima's hitting below the belt. Literally, Terry is a phallocrat out of control, focused solely on the “passion of his intense masculinity.” Clearly, Terry equates phallic, linguistic power with the subjugation of a silent, passive, feminine body; he is surprised, then, when this body turns out to be active and resistant. As Irigaray postulates, men are disconcerted when they begin to imagine that the object is not actually an object: “Once imagine that woman imagines and the objects loses its fixed, obsessional character. … If the earth turned and more especially turned upon herself, the erection of the subject might thereby be disconcerted and risk losing its elevation and penetration. For what would there be to rise up from and exercise his power over? And in?” (133). When Terry learns that Alima is not complacent, he has nothing to exercise power over, and in. No wonder, then, that Terry is “sick” (142) of Herland; in more ways than one, his phallic mastery has been deflated.5
Perhaps this is why, before leaving, Terry is willing to renounce his phallic power, at least in relationship to the land of Herland (which he has always conceived of as a feminine body). The Herlanders ask the men, as “gentlemen,” to promise not to betray the location of the country. At first Terry refuses: “‘Indeed I won't!’ he protested. ‘The first thing I'll do is to get an expedition fixed up to force an entrance into Ma-land’” (146). But when Terry hears the alternative—“he must remain an absolute prisoner [in Herland], always” (146)—he does promise. Terry's urge for phallic power, his urge to rape the land and “force an entrance” into Herland, is finally controlled. As Gilman's sequal With Her in Ourland reveals, Terry never does return to Herland, nor does he disclose its location. In the end, the word is stronger than the phallus—especially in Herland, where words themselves are figured as communal agents of truth and freedom rather than elements of destructive and coercive patriarchal power.
Herlandian language transforms the men who enter Herland, inscribing them into an order where they can no longer control the world by controlling the word. Terry is disconcerted when he learns there are limits to phallocratic power, and Jeff, as Van reports, is thoroughly “Herlandized.” Even Van, the middle man, the “everyman” figure of the narrative, changes profoundly: “I began to see both ways more keenly than I had before; to see the painful defects of my own land, the marvelous gains of this” (137). Van and his wife, Ellador, talk until “a common ground” (127) grows between them and Van's “ideas of what was essential” also change (128). Unlike Robert in The Awakening, who only pales before Edna's assertion of an alternative mode of subjectivity and discourse, Van is able to understand and accept changes in women's subjectivity and discourse. Gilman's goal is not only a New Woman but a New Man, and the ideal human society will be a place where both can coexist.
Gilman's utopian vision, then, does try to offer more than an inversion of the language/gender politics of the androcentric culture. By reconceiving the function of language itself, Gilman asks us to reconceive our relationship to “Others.” Language need not be an instrument of coercive dominance; instead it can establish “common ground”—the knowledge of the subjectivity of both genders. Gilman's revisionary viewpoint ultimately encourages the reader to see both “his story” and “her story.” In our land, women are excluded from history, as Van explains:
When we say men, man, manly, manhood, and all the other masculine derivatives, we have in the background of our minds a huge vague crowded picture of the world and its activities. To grow up and “be a man,” to “act like a man”—the meaning and connotation is wide indeed. That vast background is full of marching columns of men … of men steering their ships into new seas, exploring unknown mountains … building roads and bridges and high cathedrals, managing great businesses, teaching in all the colleges, preaching in all the churches; of men everywhere, doing everything—“the world.”
And when we say women, we think female—the sex
(137).
In this vast catalogue of patriarchal history, women are a mere footnote. In Herland, of course, the situation is quite different, and Van and the other men learn that women, too, are part of humanity: “We were now well used to seeing women not as females but as people; people of all sorts, doing every kind of work” (137). The men understand that women can be more than just a preposition in language; in fact, they can be the subject of language, and subjects in their own right. In the sequel to Herland, Van and Ellador return to our land, and Van retains his newfound vision of women as subjects. And Ellador, too, learns to understand men as people.6 It is the discovery of the subjectivity of both genders that Gilman believes will liberate the world. And for Gilman, language is the primary instrument of this discovery.
The language of Herland therefore transforms the men who travel there, but it is also meant to transform the reader's conception of language and gender. When we read the text of Herland we are encouraged to make the discovery of the subjectivity of both genders. While seeming to transport us to another world, the text actually asks us to reexamine our own world and to revise our conceptions of gender and language. Ultimately, then, in Herland Gilman presents a speculative vision of hope. “Herstory in Hisland”—at least as embodied by “The Yellow Wall-Paper”—is a destruction of the feminine subject. But “History in Herland” is meant to be a story of coming to terms with, and understanding, the subjectivity of both women and men. And language is a primary way of effecting this change; the world can change through the word. In her introduction to Herland, Ann J. Lane argues that “it is not the scientist, the warrior, the priest, or the craftsman, but the mother who is the connecting point from present to future” (xxiii). I would argue that for Gilman, it is not the mother but the mother tongue that offers hope for the transformation of our world and our word. The language the Herlanders speak resembles Esperanto—the cognate of which is hope, and like Herlandian society, Herlandian language offers a speculative vision of hope. Herland seeks to revise patriarchal discourse, the Law of the Father, by creating a new form of expression—a language of the “ants and the bees in their hive.” Gilman's text first elevates this maternal language over phallocentric discourse, but ultimately it attempts to move toward a language that allows both men and women to be speaking subjects.
Of course, there are a number of limitations to Gilman's utopian project. For example, in Herland, where motherhood is privileged over everything, some women are deemed unfit for motherhood (82); these women would, of necessity, be devalued, Othered. Furthermore, given Gilman's views on race, one might guess that many of these “unfit” mothers come from a “primitive,” “atavistic,” racial (that is, darker-skinned) stock, rather than from the pure “Aryan” (54) stock of the more “fit” Herlanders. The Herlanders, in short, may practice a form of “negative eugenics” (69) that seems to contradict Gilman's commitment to finding a world in which no one is disempowered. The text might, then, attempt to undermine the masculine/feminine basis of linguistic disempowerment only to construct and maintain another set of oppressive binarisms in its racial politics. But finally, does Herland actually undermine the masculine/feminine basis of disempowerment, the foundation of an empowered subjectivity in the oppression of an “Other”? Perhaps not. After all, Terry, Van, and Jeff will never be mothers, and in a world where motherhood is the transcendental signifier, again, it seems that of necessity they would be (or would come to be) the disempowered, the “opaque matter which in theory does not know itself.”
Although Gilman's achievement in Herland is impressive, then, her utopian vision is flawed by a number of contradictions. But as with “The Yellow Wall-Paper,” Gilman structures these contradictions into her text rather than simply eliding them. After all, once the men come to Herland, the women do not give up their transcendental signifier in favor of one that melds maternity and paternity. To use an analogy, they do not, like Sarah Penn, create a house/barn; neither do they create a womb/penis, a mother/father, or a maternal/paternal language of (for example) the ants and the bees in their hive and the lions and tigers in their den. For Gilman, this might be a way of reconciling a contradiction her text has raised but also eliding it. The power of Gilman's text is actually found in such contradictions, in asking whether it is possible to have a language of the feminine that does not debase the masculine, in asking whether a maternal text of necessity must exclude a paternal subjectivity. It is precisely these questions that late-nineteenth-century writers, and current feminist theorists, return to over and over again. Gilman does not resolve these questions, but she does explore their multiple dimensions through the speculative vision that is Herland.
Herland's utopian framework enables a creative critique of patriarchal discourse, but in the end Gilman's attempt to create a language that moves beyond the binary is flawed by a new set of hierarchical oppositions that the text establishes and maintains. Perhaps this is why Gilman's Forerunner stories are situated in the “real world” of an early-twentieth-century patriarchal society: these stories reflect Gilman's understanding that subversion of patriarchal discourse must occur from within the terms of the discourse itself. In many ways, Gilman's later short fictions therefore have more in common with twentieth-century writers discussed in the final chapter of this book. Texts such as “The Widow's Might,” “An Honest Woman,” “Spoken To,” “Mrs. Beazley's Deed,” “With a Difference (Not Literature),” and “Lost Women” insert an unruly feminine subject into symbolic language. This angry subject breaks apart patriarchal discourse by traversing boundaries, by refusing to silence herself, and by telling metafictions that critique and rewrite the erasures of patriarchal history.7
In “The Widow's Might” (1911) when Mrs. McPherson makes the transition from a good domestic saint to an independent woman with a voice of her own, she begins to challenge the theoretical structures that have maintained her linguistic and social disempowerment. Mrs. McPherson has endured a marriage to a tyrannous man whose own children are not saddened by his death. After Mr. McPherson's death, her children plan to sell their father's ranch and care for their mother, who they believe will be dependent and infirm. Mrs. McPherson's children assume that like a good domestic saint, their mother has no identity outside of her relationship to her husband and family—that she is, in short, a “preposition” defined through others. But Mrs. McPherson does have an independent, self-defined identity, and she decides to assert it: “I have considered Mr. McPherson's wishes for thirty years. … Now, I'll consider mine. I have done my duty since the day I married him. It is eleven thousand days—today … I'm tired of duty” (104). During her husband's illness, Mrs. McPherson has turned the home into a “rancho-sanitarium” where sick people can recuperate. In so doing, she has earned enough money to travel and, as she puts it, “play with” (106). Mrs. McPherson has changed her material conditions; she now has the economic power to do what she wants.
But this economic power would be removed by her children if it were not for another change: she has found a voice that challenges her construction as a silent and submissive object. When her son rebukes her desire to travel, she speaks out emphatically, saying: “I'm going to do what I never did before. I'm going to live!” (105). Mrs. McPherson refuses to be silent in the face of her son James's attempts to use his male authority to control her. For what Mrs. McPherson has achieved, through the long years of suffering, is precisely a voice that refuses the Law of the Father (or son). Gilman makes this clear through the use of a synecdoche in which Mrs. McPherson's voice stands for her whole self. During most of the story, Mrs. McPherson wears a black veil, and because her children cannot see her face, she seems to become wholly voice. For example, when James speaks of carrying out his father's wishes “to the letter” (103), Gilman depicts Mrs. McPherson's response through the voice synecdoche: “‘Your father is dead,’ remarked the voice” (103). As in Alcott's “A Whisper in the Dark,” the paternal will seems to inexorably establish the Law of the Father, but Mrs. McPherson resists this decree through language, through an insistence that she has overturned the Law of the Father: “Your father is dead.” Mrs. McPherson eventually sheds her veil and presents her entire self to her children, saying: “No question of my sanity, my dears! I want you to grasp the fact that your mother is a Real Person with some interests of her own and half a lifetime yet. … Now, I'm free” (106). Mrs. McPherson asserts the rights of a “Real Person,” becoming an active subject with a forceful speaking voice. But it is specifically her refusal of the Law of the Father—her refusal to be a silent object in a masculine drama of subjectivity—that creates her enfranchised identity.
Gilman's story demonstrates a theoretical understanding of feminine linguistic and psychological oppression, but is not very specific about how this oppression can be overturned. Mrs. McPherson finds a voice that challenges the Law of the Father—but how? And where? What is the nature of this voice, beyond its being “defiant”? “An Honest Woman” (1911) is clearer about how women can become metalinguists—individuals who understand, and revise, the theoretical power structures undergirding patriarchal language. The story begins with a conversation that seems to reveal women's secondary status in language and culture. Two men discuss Mary Main, the owner of a successful boarding hotel. While one man—Abramson—talks and talks about Mary, saying, “There's an honest woman if ever there was one!” (75), the other man—Burdock—only feeds him an occasional question. Abramson treats women as if they are public property—some are good and some are bad, but all can be talked about and defined by men:
“I've got a high opinion of good women,” [Abramson] announced with finality. “As to bad ones, the less said the better!” and he puffed his strong cigar, looking darkly experienced.
“They're doin' a good deal towards reformin' 'em, nowadays, ain't they?” ventured Burdock.
The young man laughed disagreeably. “You can't reform spilled milk,” said he. “But I do like to see an honest, hard-working woman succeed.”
“So do I, boy,” said his companion, “so do I,” and they smoked in silence.
(76)
Puffing on his cigar, Abramson uses phallocentric power to inscribe the entity woman with labels of “good” or “bad,” “angel” or “whore.” For Abramson, women are words in men's mouths, and men have the ability to construct them—to stereotype and define them. Indeed, this is precisely how they construct their own identity as subjects—through an othering of women, of the “feminine matter” that in theory does not know herself. Notably, however, Burdock is rather silent; he is aware that some women escape men's categorizations.
As Burdock knows, Mary Cameron Main is not, in actuality, a “good” woman. A flashback in the story reveals that Mary is a “fallen” women who had an adulterous affair and bore a child out of wedlock. After Mary's lover abandons her, she realizes she is “ruined”: “‘I suppose I am a ruined woman,’ she said. She went to the glass and lit the gas on either side, facing herself with fixed gaze and adding calmly, ‘I don't look it!’ … The woman she saw in the glass seemed as one at the beginning of a splendid life, not at the end of a bad one” (82). This moment of mirroring reflects a radical swerve from the patriarchal plot, a metalinguistic moment in which women are encouraged to comprehend the constructedness of the linguistic categories used to define them, and to break from these categories. “Ruined” is an arbitrarily imposed signifier that men would use to define Mary, but it does not correspond in any “true” way to her physical and psychological reality. Mary here realizes the arbitrary nature of the verbal categories used to contain women, as does an attentive reader who has been tricked into a naive reading of Mary's character by the story's opening dialogue, and then tricked out of this naive reading by the character's radical, metalinguistic swerve.
In this moment, Mary also comprehends the rules of her culture's “language game”: men control and manipulate language, authoring women's destiny through their words; women are silent, passive agents within language—created by language rather than creators of it. But at this crucial juncture, Mary Main rejects the rules of this language game and begins using language to author her own destiny. For Wittgenstein, the language game of a society reflects a particular worldview but is also subject to change: “There are … countless different kinds of use of what we call ‘symbols,’ ‘words,’ ‘sentences.’ And this multiplicity is not something fixed, given once for all; but new types of language, new language-games, as we may say, come into existence, and others become obsolete and get forgotten” (11). Mary decides to take advantage of this “multiplicity.” She dresses in black, and when asked about her husband she “press[es] her handkerchief to her eyes and say[s], ‘He has left me. I cannot bear to speak of him’” (83). Literally, she classifies her husband as unspeakable, but on a more metaphoric level, this statement demonstrates that Mary has discerned that she need not be passively constructed by patriarchal words but rather can actively and consciously engage in the linguistic processes that shape how she is received, the language games of her culture. Mary has also obtained a sophisticated awareness of the constructedness of essential categories of “woman,” of the play between truth and untruth in language, and of the means whereby communication becomes distorted and distorting. In short, Mary has become a metalinguist: a person who not only uses language but who also understands and intervenes in its functioning in radical ways.
Mary demonstrates her metalinguistic ability most clearly when her former lover returns and threatens to blackmail her by revealing her “fallen” status to her customers. Like Abramson, Mr. Main believes women are defined by what men say; he claims that he could “shatter [Mary's life] with a word” (85, emphasis added). Mary merely smiles patiently at Main and states: “You can't shatter facts, Mr. Main. People here know that you left me years ago. They know how I have lived since. If you try to blacken my reputation here, I think you will find the climate of Mexico more congenial” (86). Mary takes a calculated risk, asserting that her actions have constructed a world that transcends the linguistic categories that would normally be applied to her. The battle is played over and within language. Mr. Main tries to force Mary to abide by the rules of the old language game, while Mary asserts a new reality in which she is judged by her actions rather than by patriarchal linguistic categories. Mary's confidence in her own abilities as a metalinguist finally convince Mr. Main that her reality is more credible, and he gives up his plan. Furthermore, Mary's new reality is affirmed by the external frame of the story, in which a silent observer—the male character Burdock—overhears the entire story yet does not reveal Mary's secret to anyone (86). Representing the voice of the town, Burdock's final promise to keep Mary's secret demonstrates that she has created not just a possible world but also an actual reality, in which women devise new and more empowering linguistic and social categories for themselves.
The story's final message is that masculine language may claim to construct women but that a metalinguistic understanding of language's functioning gives women the ability to reconstruct themselves and create a supportive community. But women also need to begin a renovation of language itself. In “Spoken To” (1915), Gilman shows how women can create new systems of signification that unite their deeds and language. Lucille, the protagonist of this story, is an independent New Woman. Despite the protests of her mother and aunt, True Women who believe in “the theory of the weakness and dependence of women” (29), Lucille insists on walking alone. The harm her mother and aunt fear, however, seems to be mostly verbal: “You do not know the dangers you so recklessly court. … Why you might—you might be spoken to.” In fact, several times while walking Lucille encounters men who try to use language and phallocentric power against her. One evening a man comes out of a dark side street and stands waiting for Lucille, but she is not frightened: “Lucille, seeing that he wished to speak to her, drew up and turned her friendly face to him. He seemed a little surprised and somewhat lamely asked the way to the best known street in the vicinity” (31). This incident indicates that, like Mary Main, Lucille understands how language is supposed to disempower her, and she consciously refuses this disempowerment. Lucille turns the gaze on the gazer, speech on the speaker, and in so doing undermines phallocentric linguistic power.
Although Gilman was fond of walking, this story does not advocate that women place themselves in situations of evident danger. Instead, it analyzes the way women are confined by a fear of phallocratic discourse. Aunt Marie, who is from Paris, has been frightened of walking alone ever since she was “spoken to,” as she explains: “I was hurrying along, looking at no one … and there stepped up from behind—a man! He was close—almost touching my elbow, and he—spoke to me! He said—I cannot bring myself to tell you what he said! Oh, it was terrible! … Oh, my shame” (32). After this event Marie submits to the fear of being “spoken to,” never walking alone. The man who insults Marie has a notorious reputation in Paris; he lays wagers on his ability to make women blush. Because of his actions, Marie believes that “No young girl is safe in Paris” (32).
When Lucille visits Paris, however, she has a chance to revise this history of feminine disempowerment and to exercise her metalinguistic abilities. Lucille encounters the same man but deliberately misinterprets his words as a plea for money:
And then, of a sudden, a gentleman approached her with studied grace, came close, very close, murmured something in her ear, and swept off his glossy hat with a magnificent air. … A little group of well-dressed men drew near, with meaning smiles, their eyes on the girl's face.
And Lucille?
She halted promptly, as the gentleman spoke, took in his whole impressive appearance with one lightening glance; heard, and fully understood, the unmeasured insult of his whispered words; gazed on him with eyes of unmoved cheerfulness; drew from her pocket one well-gloved hand—and put two cents in his hat.
She passed on, quite undisturbed, as one who has performed a good action.
He stood there, the center of many eyes, of much laughter, and from the edge of his white collar to the top of his bald head the slow color rose—pink—red—purple. If he had never blushed before, he was blushing now.
(33)
Lucille pretends the man is a beggar and gives him a coin, thereby using the signs of class to undermine the gender hierarchy. However, Lucille's gesture can also be read as her invention of a language that expresses her condemnation of this man. To respond in kind—using a phallocentric language of abuse—would only validate this man's use of language. Lucille's gesture speaks her contempt for this man, and overturns his phallocentric dominance.
In “Spoken To,” Lucille's language and actions construct a revisionist history that shows women speaking and gazing, turning the men who have kept them silenced and confined into a spectacle, the object of the gaze. “Mrs. Beazley's Deeds” (1911) is also a metalinguistic story that critiques systems of language that disempower women, but in this text Gilman indicates even more clearly that women's voices can transform discursive structures (such as the system of law), as well as the world around them. The story concerns a woman completely cut off from discourse, so much so that she is reduced to getting information through holes in the floor, as the story's opening vividly depicts: “Mrs. William Beazley was crouching on the floor of her living-room over the store in a most peculiar attitude. It was what a doctor would call the ‘knee-chest’ position; and the woman's pale, dragged out appearance quite justified this idea. She was as one scrubbing a floor and then laying her cheek to it, a rather undignified little pile of bones, albeit discreetly covered with stringy calico.”8 Mrs. Beazley is reduced to a pale “little pile of bones” crouching without dignity before the superior linguistic power of the male. But Maria Beazley is also disempowered in her personal situation, for she is married to a lazy, tyrannical husband who overworks her and beats their children. Mr. Beazley forces his family to live over the store he runs rather than in the more spacious house his wife owns. Mr. Beazley is now on the verge of selling this home, Maria's last piece of property, and Maria is listening at the hole in the floor in a desperate attempt to get information about this transaction.
With the help of a clever female attorney, Maria is eventually able to subvert this transaction, retake her maternal property, and divorce her husband. Yet language is central to her struggle for control, for Maria must overturn both a patriarchal discourse that has been used to silence her and a patriarchal story that has erased her agency. Mr. Beazley is a discursive tyrant who exercises complete control over his wife's access to information and knowledge. He never tells his wife about any of his business dealings until it is too late for her to object, and he pays no attention to her protests. Similarly, Mr. Beazley tightly controls his wife's access to legal documents (to deeds), as this exchange shows:
“You might as well tell me what you're doin'—I have to read the deed anyhow” [Mrs. Beazley says].
“Much you'll make out of readin' the deed,” said [Mr. Beazley] with some dry amusement, “and Justice Fielden lookin' on and waitin' for you!”
“You're going to sell the Rockford lot—I know it!” said she. “How can you do it, William! The very last piece of what father left me!—and it's mine—you can't sell it—I won't sign!”
Mr. Beazley minded her outcry no more than he minded the squawking of a to-be beheaded hen.
(226)
Mr. Beazley refuses to let his wife read the documents, but he also ignores her speech; to him it is not language at all but merely the “squawking” of an imperiled animal. It is no wonder, then, that Mrs. Beazley's “voice rose in a plaintive crescendo, with a helpless break at the end” (226). She has little access to discourse, and language itself seems to be an ineffective means of protest.
When Maria Beazley confides this history to her friend Miss Lawrence (a lawyer), Maria states she is telling “no great story” (228). It is simply the sad tale of her life, a tale full of sound and fury but ultimately signifying little since, as Mrs. Beazley says, “girls don't know nothin'!” (170). And it is not even a unique story, for as Mrs. Beazley says, most of the women she knows are “near dead” (226) from overwork. Yet in telling this story, Maria begins to swerve from the patriarchal plot, the patriarchal language game that insists women remain silent and disempowered. The act of telling her story to a friend (which is, after all, an act of authoring her story) and the act of asking for advice (which is, after all, a way of asking how the story can be changed) destabilize the text's prior construction of Maria Beazley. Like Freeman's Sarah Penn, Maria Beazley makes disparaging comments about women but in the end puts faith in the power of her own voice.9 When Miss Lawrence learns that Mr. Beazley has been putting his property in his wife's name in order to shield it from creditors, she helps Maria take legal action to gain control of it. So one day Mr. Beazley returns from a business trip to find that his store and house have been sold, his wife and children have left him, and his money has been withdrawn from the bank. Most important, Mr. Beazley no longer wields linguistic power over his wife, as Miss Lawrence informs him: “Any communication you may wish to make to her you can make through me” (231). Clearly, this is a legal change, but it is also a linguistic one. And language is the key to Maria's empowerment; becoming the author of her own story is the first step to her freedom, a step that enables all the other steps.
When Maria Beazley comments that she is telling “no great story” (228), she explicitly and metalinguistically comments on how language has functioned within the world she knows to keep women silenced and disempowered. Yet she tries to change this, and in so doing she swerves from the patriarchal plot itself, from a patriarchal story that constructs her as an object. Metatextual commentary, then, by a character within the story functions as a critique of patriarchal stories. Metalinguistic practices by another character—Miss Lawrence—create the possibility of a new story. Miss Lawrence understands that Maria's disempowerment is a product of language (of a legal discourse she does not understand), and she also understands that this discourse can be changed. Miss Lawrence gently prods Maria with questions, encouraging her to take actions that allow her to recuperate her property and her voice. Therefore, the metalinguistic and metafictional aspects of this story are used to rewrite the patriarchal story and to create a new reality in which women are active agents in the creation of stories and in the authoring of their destiny.
Metalinguistic stories (stories about language's functioning) such as “An Honest Woman,” “Spoken To,” and “Mrs. Beazley's Deeds” thus demonstrate that women must develop strategies to take control of language and renovate it; they can then use language to speak themselves rather than merely being “spoken of” or “spoken to.” Yet in all three stories, a female character's speech has the effect of silencing a male character. Gilman's metafictions (her stories about stories) also demonstrate that women can renovate language, for in these texts women refuse patriarchal plots and create their own narratives. However, these stories also move beyond an inversion of the patriarchal plot. “With a Difference (Not Literature)” and “Lost Women” are more closely focused on story making than the texts previously discussed; not coincidentally, they offer a more radical reconstruction of language, narratives, and narrativity.
“With a Difference (Not Literature)” (1914) concerns the seduction and rape of an innocent young girl, Dora Holcomb. The story of Dora's “ruin,” as the narrator states, is a familiar patriarchal tale: “We will begin and run along on the lines so sadly familiar, lines that fairly shine from constant use, like streetcar rails. Now we are off” (29). Dora is her parent's pride and joy, and they carefully guard her innocence. However, after a series of financial setbacks, Dora is forced to get a job in a factory, where she is befriended by a villain who makes it his business to ruin young women. Gilman alludes to what happens next in a way that directly calls upon the processes of reading and interpreting stories: “The sophisticated reader now follows with hopeless sympathy the pathetic tragedy which followed” (30). A sophisticated reader can predict the outcome of this particular story, and Gilman carefully plays into this “sophisticated” reader's assumptions. The villain drugs Dora's grape juice (she refuses to drink wine), takes her to his apartment, and rapes her. Although Dora is innocent, she does understand what has happened: “Innocent as was her mind, she had read in stories vague hints of a fate like this—and so by the light of fiction there suddenly burst upon her the awful Fact! She was ruined!” (30). In this ironic metafictional configuration, stories themselves are used to illuminate a story that the reader is reading, and stories are also used to explain what is happening to the character (Dora), what she is processing within the text through her own readings of texts. Dora is a reader within the story, placed on the same level as the reader of the story; both are trying to decipher events by reference to other narrative frames.
But for the reader (even a sophisticated one), the frames keep switching, as Gilman keeps intruding a voice into the story that unsettles the narratives we are attempting to impose. When Dora's mother hears her daughter's story, she is sympathetic, but Dora's father tells her to leave his home forever. Nat Holcomb's response is typical, but here the text switches abruptly from this typical, patriarchal tale. Gilman draws attention to the radical swerve her text is undertaking both linguistically and spatially—there is an actual gap in the text, and the next passage is separated from the prior one with six dots:
There—that is the old story—so far.
Farther it leads the poor girl down the steps that grow steeper and narrower till she slips helpless into the abyss. The same old story.
But in this story something happened.
Witchcraft—revelations—inspiration—call it what you like; but this is what happened, in this story
(31).
Gilman swerves radically from the patriarchal plot, emphasizing that in this story women take control of their own narratives. She also draws attention to her story's metafictional qualities by repeating the word “story” four times, and through the use of italics.
The effect of this radical swerve is to undermine patriarchal plots in which women are the passive victims of patriarchal discourse. First language itself is reclaimed from the patriarchal father, as both Mrs. Holcomb and her daughter speak up. Mrs. Holcomb reprimands her husband and contradicts his dictates: “You listen to me, Nat Holcomb. … This is my home and my child, and she stays here—with me” (31). Then Dora, no longer silent, begins telling her story: “What have I done—really done—that you should cast me off like this? … If you had told me that there were that kind of men in the world … then I'd have known what to look out for” (31). As Dora explains, she is not to blame, for it is patriarchal forces that conspire to keep women innocent, resulting in physical and psychological ruin of feminine potential. The story as a whole shapes a metafictional text that refuses the old patriarchal masterplot in which “ruined” women are condemned. Instead of dying in disgrace, as in the patriarchal plot, Dora becomes a teacher and redeemer of other women.
The metafictional qualities of the story thus undermine the “sentence” of the patriarchal story, but they also undermine the “sentence” of patriarchal discourse, the sentence suffered by the narrator of “The Yellow Wall-Paper.” Both Dora and her mother find a voice of self-assertion, a voice that expresses their subjectivity, but they are not deemed insane, as is the narrator of “The Yellow Wall-Paper.” This new voice is instead heard by the father, and it undermines his concept of femininity. Dora's linguistic assertion causes a response in Mr. Holcomb, as Gilman sarcastically explains: “Then the father saw a great light” (32). Mr. Holcomb acknowledges that he is partially to blame; specifically, Mr. Holcomb admits to depriving his daughter of sexual knowledge. Furthermore, Mr. Holcomb admits that women's submission and objectification are necessary to patriarchal dominance, that women act, as Irigaray says, as a pedestal for the existence of the subject. This is particularly true in terms of sexuality, as Mr. Holcomb indicates; his fury at his daughter was “pure selfishness and pride” (32) based on the reputed loss of the tabula rasa, the innocent and blank slate, the female daughter. As Mr. Holcomb tells Dora: “Why a man feels that his daughter is a—a sort of ornament and crown of glory, and if anything happens to her—to spoil the glory—he feels himself insulted” (32). Dora was the “opaque matter” which in theory does not know herself, the opaque matter out of which Mr. Holcomb constructed his own glory. This is the underlying tale hidden within the traditional patriarchal plot—a tale of women's objectification and erasure. Gilman reconstructs this tale through the female characters' assertion of their own literate practices of reading and speaking, and through a metafictional narrative voice that disrupts the traditional story, and the traditional reading of stories.
The world that Gilman creates in this work, then, and that the metafictional narrative commentary sustains, presents a more positive fictional pattern in which women reclaim their language, their stories, and their lives. This reclamation does not, however, lead to the silencing or disempowerment of men, as it does in “Mrs. Beazley's Deeds” and “Spoken To”; like the women, Mr. Holcomb finds a story of his own that breaks from the patriarchal masterplot. “With a Difference (Not Literature)” and the next story to be discussed, “Lost Women,” therefore present a discursive universe in which both men and women can learn from each other's stories; male characters in these stories are vocal participants in the metalinguistic and metafictional processes that create a new reality.
“Lost Women” (1912) begins by focusing on an issue that seems, at first, to be only relevant to women: the disempowerment caused by patrilineal naming practices. This is a subject Gilman wrote about extensively in several prose essays. In “Names—Especially Women's” (1911), for example, Gilman argues that women are not seen as needing their names because they are not considered persons: “This is but one of the many invidious distinctions between men and women under an androcentric culture. Men, being persons, had names. They must be distinguished from one another. Women, being female belongings, needed no badge save that of the man to whom they belonged. When they left their father's possession, when he gave this woman to be married to this man, she took the name of her new owner, naturally” (262). On a more metaphorical level, the paternom (the husband's or father's name) reduces women to the status of possessions: “It [the man's name] is something like a collar on a dog, the license tag and name of the master” (263). Women are denied subjectivity through the Name of the Father, through patrilineal and patriarchal language practices.
“Lost Women” also illustrates that patrilineal naming practices deny feminine subjectivity. However, the story uses this specific issue to examine three larger questions: how do linguistic practices (such as wives taking their husbands' names) cause women's oppression? How do fictional practices (such as telling stories in certain, traditional ways) perpetuate feminine disempowerment? And what is the best way to change these practices—to create new stories rather than simply inverting or reversing patriarchal realities? To begin with the issue of how linguistic practices cause women's oppression, in “Lost Women” Gilman uses patrilineal naming as a signifier for both the actual and symbolic erasure of femininity. As the storyteller, Aunt Laura, says to her listener, “Don't you see we obliterate half the names as we go on?” (281). Aunt Laura is referring to specific women whose maiden names are lost, but her statement also suggests a more metaphoric collective destruction. Annabel, her niece and listener, does not catch the significance but merely says “Well, never mind that” (281), and urges her aunt to continue the story. Aunt Laura tells the story of Mary Jernigan, an heiress who never receives her inheritance because descent on the “spindle” (maternal) side is so difficult to trace. Mary is the friend of a wealthy woman, Nellie Clark, and a lawyer named Louis Robinson. Louis falls in love with Mary, but she rejects him because her good friend Nellie is in love with Louis. Louis is also unsuccessful in his professional goal; he has been sent to trace the spindle line of descent of a fortune. Mary Jernigan is the heiress, but Louis does not discover this. (And Aunt Laura never explains how she knows this piece of information.) So Louis returns to New York without having achieved success, either personally or professionally.
The story is highly contrived, but its contrivance does not create resolution; all the pieces are brought together, but they are never allowed to cohere. Annabel, a writer, continually tries to unify the story's subject, but Aunt Laura resists such efforts, as the following conversation illustrates:
“There they all were, together—once—and then they all got separated. I wish I'd known 'em then!” My aunt laid down her rather perfunctory knitting work and looked into the fire. …
“Do go on!” I said. “Which of 'em was the heiress? Mary, I hope.”
She looked at me in some annoyance. “You people that write do drag the vitals out of a story so prematurely! Yes, it was Mary—but much good it did her!”
“You don't mean to say she never got it!” I cried. “Oh, that is horrid—that spoils the story.”
“I'm not making up one of your round, smooth, well-flavored, made-to-order stories, Annabel—this is what happened. And what's more, it's happening all the time.”
(282)
Although Aunt Laura insists that she is telling “what happened” rather than a story, her insistence on telling something that is “happening all the time” suggests that she reads these events metaphorically. She sees her tale as emblematic of the social and linguistic obliteration of women occurring continually in the greater “story” of history itself.
Like Gilman, Aunt Laura insists that what she tells is “not literature”; it is not a smooth, round, literary tale; it is merely “events.” And these events continue in their pattern of noncoherence. Eventually, all three characters lose contact with each other, and because Mary Jernigan has become Mrs. John Smith and Nellie Clark has become Mrs. Thomas Brown, the three cannot be reunited. Ironically, Mary, Louis, and Nellie all live briefly in the same town in Texas; this is where Aunt Laura (who owns a hotel) knows them all—separately. But they never meet. Louis leaves the town, Mary lives on, poor and lonely (her husband has died), and Nellie lives on, wealthy and unhappy.
Annabel is appalled at this tale, and she and her aunt again have an exchange of words over the quality of the narrative, with Annabel calling the story “still-born” and Aunt Laura insisting: “I never said it was a good story. … I'm telling you the facts, and I'll stop right now if you want me to” (283). Eventually, however, Aunt Laura does continue with her narrative, and it does achieve some degree of closure. After the death of her husband, Mary starts a small store under her maiden name. One day Nellie drives by, sees the store's name, and recovers her old friend. Then the women track down Louis; he is easy to find because, as Aunt Laura says dryly, “Men don't change their names” (284). The threesome is finally reunited and—apparently—lives happily after. Except that of course, Mary never gets her inheritance; the fortune cannot be traced to her because “there were too many lost women in between” (284). Only part of women's lives can be reclaimed; only part of their history can be recovered.
On a metalinguistic level, the story demonstrates that patriarchal language practices cause the economic, social, and personal disempowerment of women; both actually and symbolically, these language practices attempt to erase feminine subjectivity, to make all women “lost women.” On a metafictional level, the story criticizes patriarchal literary practices. The main struggle of the story is between Annabel's versions of stories and her aunt's. A writer herself, Annabel wants stories to be smooth and well rounded, to move neatly and quickly toward closure, toward consummation of their narrative patterns. Aunt Laura relies on a colloquial and oral form of storytelling that is open-ended and participatory, rather than on the written, linear, “smooth” form of narration that Annabel favors. Aunt Laura also wants to tell her story in her own way, and to clutter it up with a lot of metafictional commentary (“It would go that way in a story, I suppose …” [284]). And finally, Aunt Laura wants her story to end with an ambiguous meaning rather than with closure and authority. Annabel strives to find a neat moral in the story, but her aunt only informs her that there are no easy resolutions:
“ … The moral of it is that I shall never marry” [Annabel states].
“You'll be a fool if you don't,” said Aunt Laura.
“But then I'll have to give up my name.”
“You'll be a fool if you do,” said Aunt Laura.
“But what can women do, then?”
Aunt Laura rose up and tucked away her knitting: “I'm only telling you a mean story,” said she.
(284)
Aunt Laura tells a story about “what … didn't happen” (284) and then refuses to provide a moral. Women are lost, erased all the time, and the point of Aunt Laura's “mean” nonstory, her metafictional anti-tale, seems to be that there is nothing they can do about it.
And yet the larger context of the story reveals a more positive pattern, one that answers the question of how women can change—rather than merely invert—the patriarchal practices of language and story making that disempower them. One clue is provided by Mary Jernigan's resumption of her maiden name. After Mary Smith returns to being Mary Jernigan, she is no longer “lost”; indeed, she is “found” by her friend and reunited with her lover. The unarticulated point of Aunt Laura's story seems to be that when women reclaim their names, they can begin to reclaim history; history is no longer a record of feminine erasure. Another unarticulated point of Aunt Laura's story is that men, as well as women, suffer because of oppressive patrilineal practices. Louis spends most of the story forlornly searching for his true love, whose social and linguistic presence has been erased under the paternom, Mrs. John Smith, and who is not restored to him until she returns to being Mary Jernigan. On a metalinguistic level, changes in language are portrayed as the key to women's social and economic empowerment, as well as to men's and women's personal happiness. There is also a metafictional point to Gilman's story, clues to which can be found in the character of Aunt Laura herself. Aunt Laura claims that what she tells is merely “events.” But Aunt Laura knows more than she should. According to Aunt Laura, Mary Jernigan is the real heiress, but how does Aunt Laura (who is allegedly only relating what happened) know what Louis, Nellie, and Mary do not? Aunt Laura's knowledge belies the fact that she is merely retelling events and suggests that she is fabricating this story, this story about the creation of stories. There is good reason to believe that Aunt Laura herself is a metafictionalist, a creator of metafictions (of stories about the way stories are built up). Aunt Laura is not only a character within the story she tells—she is also its author.
But Aunt Laura authors her text in such a way that patriarchal linguistic realities are reconfigured. Aunt Laura's metafiction demonstrates that women are lost—silenced, effaced, and minimized—by patriarchal plots and language. However, Aunt Laura's story resists this erasure not through mere inversion. An inversion of patriarchal plots would make the female (Mary) the heroine and the male (Louis) the victim, but Aunt Laura's triangulated story is more complicated than this. All of the characters—Mary, Louis, and Nelly—are realistic individuals, neither completely heroic nor completely victimized, and no one (either male or female) emerges as completely victorious. Aunt Laura's metafictional story overturns patriarchal plots but replaces them with a new story that allows a fuller range of narrative possibilities and characterizations and a broader consideration of the problem of patriarchal discourse. Moreover, although Aunt Laura authors the story, she does not wish to speak in a voice of omniscient authority, and she does not provide a fixed meaning for her tale. Patriarchal naming practices, after all, insist on being authoritative, on fixing women's status. Androcentric language and literature, with its insistence on possession and conquest, must be resisted. Aunt Laura resists the all-knowing authority of the author, and she resists narratizing her story into a smooth, well-rounded tale with a definitive meaning.
Furthermore, Aunt Laura resists telling history—the story of men, conquest, and war. Nor does she simply tell “herstory”: the story of women's erasure. Instead, she tells what I must call, for lack of a better term, “theirstory”—the story of two lost women and one lost man who eventually find their own stories, their own tales that deviate from the patriarchal norm. Aunt Laura also insists on her right to tell a mean tale, a tale that does not fit and that will not cohere, a tale that seems to have no hero or heroine and no ultimate moral. But in the telling of this tale she asserts the tale's right to existence; it may be a mean tale, but it must be told. Finally, Aunt Laura reclaims fiction and language from the androcentricism of the patriarchal world, creating a story that can enunciate the histories of both men and women, an ornery tale that is distinctly her own.
Aunt Laura makes the unspoken spoken, stripping bare the wallpaper of patriarchal discourse to give the silent, lost women (and men) a voice. It may be a “mean” voice—but why shouldn't it be? Why shouldn't this voice be an angry, jagged one? Annabel is an author who writes smooth, well-rounded stories, but given women's dispossessed status, Annabel may have merely adopted patriarchal language. Thematically and formally, Aunt Laura refuses to create androcentric literature. Gilman, too, refuses to tell conventional patriarchal tales in a conventional style. Gilman tells, instead, “not literature”—stories that draw attention to their thematic and aesthetic differences from patriarchal norms. In so doing Gilman finds a voice that resists patriarchal erasure, a voice that transforms both the language and the content of the patriarchal masterplot, freeing women and men from the prison house of androcentric discourse.
This chapter has examined Gilman's attitudes toward women and the “pen,” toward women's ability to create a place for their subjectivity within the phallocentric structures of patriarchal language and patriarchal stories. Like Kate Chopin's writing, Gilman's earliest portrayal of this subject in “The Yellow Wall-Paper” shows a frightening antagonism between a feminine subject and the masculine world of discourse she inhabits. Gilman resided for part of her life in this frightening world, but unlike her protagonist she did not go insane. What saved her was, in fact, writing: the writing of “The Yellow Wall-Paper,” as well as the writing of her later works of fiction. Gilman abandoned the Victorian medical establishment's prescription for women suffering from mental illness and became, in effect, her own physician, prescribing career and an independent life as the antidote to her mental illness.
Gilman's later writings—such as Herland and her Forerunner fiction—show women who attempt, like Gilman herself, to use language to escape the authoritative sentence of male discourse. In this sense, Gilman engages in an intertextual dialogue with her prior works, revising her earlier stance on women and language, a stance that diagnosed the problem of patriarchal discourse without providing a solution. And yet, not all of Gilman's “solutions” to the problem of women's linguistic oppression end up being solutions. Herland inverts the power structures that undergird “The Yellow Wall-Paper,” elevating a feminine, maternal language over the paternal tongue of patriarchy. Herland thus occupies a prominent place in the imaginative process that frees Gilman to revise the history of the “man-made” world, for it allowed Gilman to see that phallocentricism was contextually defined and therefore could be contextually redefined. Yet finally, we must question whether Herland finds a language that moves beyond the binary, one that is viable in the real world of a patriarchal, early-twentieth-century society. Works such as “The Widow's Might,” “An Honest Woman,” “Spoken To,” “Mrs. Beazley's Deeds,” “With a Difference (Not Literature),” and “Lost Women” continue this imaginative process of recreating patriarchal language, but they also move beyond Herland's speculative utopian vision through a renovation of structures of subjectivity and discourse that exist in the real world. Like Gilman herself, Gilman's unruly women finally insist on creating the language that describes the world around them rather than being created by it. In so doing, they engender a revised world where women, as well as men, are not prepositions in language but agents, authors, speakers, and subjects.
Notes
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The ending of “The Yellow Wall-Paper” has generated much controversy. For positive readings, see John Bak, Jean Kennard, Catherine Golden, and Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar (Madwoman in the Attic 82-92). For critics who read the ending as a defeat, see Linda Wagner-Martin, William Veeder, Annette Kolodny, and Jeannette King and Pam Morris. For readings that are neither wholly positive nor negative, see Conrad Shumaker and Paula Treichler.
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Gilman's views on race were contradictory, as Lanser explains: “Despite her socialist values, her active participation in movements for reform, her strong theoretical commitment to racial harmony, her unconventional support of interracial marriages, and her frequent condemnation of America's racist history, Gilman upheld white Protestant supremacy; belonged for a time to eugenics and nationalist organizations; opposed open immigration; and inscribed racism, nationalism, and classism into her proposals for social change” (429). These views pervade some of Gilman's later work, such as Herland and its sequel, With Her in Ourland. Yet Gilman could also assert in “My Ancestors” that all humans are one family (Forerunner 4 [Mar. 1913]: 73-75). In the sequel to Herland, Gilman also repeatedly chastises America for its negative treatment of African Americans, Mexican Americans, and Native Americans. For other discussions of Gilman's views about immigrants, African Americans, and Jews, see Lane (Introduction xvii; To Herland 337) and Carol Farley Kessler (47-48, 76-77).
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In the last ten years, there have been a number of insightful readings of Herland. For critics who feel that Gilman's feminist critique succeeds, see Kessler, Gubar (“She in Herland”), Laura Donaldson, Dorothy Berkson, and Marsha Smith. For critics who believe that the utopia undermines itself, see Kathleen Lant and Thomas Peyser.
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The men read the geography of Herland as a dismembered feminine body. Herland is surrounded by “a desperate tangle of wood and water and a swampy patch” (3); this imagery suggests that the men see the land as a huge feminine orifice that must be penetrated. They carry guns, and sensing danger, they steal forward with their “weapons [i.e., guns] in hand” (13). When the men hear laughter they stop instantly: “We stood like so many pointers, and then used our glasses, swiftly, carefully” (14). The men try to script a narrative of conquest and colonization onto Herland's “feminine” body but find themselves imprisoned and anesthetized.
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According to Kathleen Lant, Terry's attempted rape of Alima is the focus of Herland and this falsifies Gilman's feminist project by making the novel an archetypal masculine plot. However, I see the novel as focusing on the undermining of phallic power.
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It should be clear from this paragraph that I do not believe that Ellador is Gilman's “mouthpiece,” as Lanser states (430), or even that Gilman presents the Herlanders as perfect.
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Most critics dismiss Gilman's short fictions as lacking artistic merit because they were written for a purpose. Shumaker states that they are “the kind of purposeful fiction that could not be misunderstood” (82). Shelley Fisher Fishkin calls them “didactic to the core” but also believes they explore “dimensions of human experience that elude logic and reason” (236).
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“Mrs. Beazley's Deeds,” Forerunner 7 (1916): 225-32; 225. Parenthetical citations are to this printing. Also available in The Yellow Wall-Paper and Selected Stories of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, ed. Denise D. Knight (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1994).
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The similarities with Freeman's “The Revolt of ‘Mother’” are apparent; Beazley, like Adoniram Penn, squeezes his family into a small house, purchases property simply for the sake of buying more property, threatens the family's continuance through his short-sightedness, and ignores his wife's attempts to speak. Like Adoniram Penn, Beazley takes a trip and returns to find a world turned upside down by a mobilization of feminine force. But whereas Sarah Penn's actions heal the rift in the family, for Maria Beazley no healing is possible. The moral of Gilman's story seems to be that Father cannot—or will not—understand what Mother is “set on.” Gilman admired Freeman's writing, but it is not clear which stories Gilman had read.
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Of Metatexts, Metalanguages, and Possible Worlds: The Transformative Power of Metanarrative in C. P. Gilman's Later Short Fiction
Introduction to Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Utopian Novels: Moving the Mountain, Herland, and With Her in Ourland
