Charlotte Perkins Gilman and a Woman's Place in America

Edited by Jill Annette Bergman; Introduction by Jill Annette Bergman

SERIES: Studies in American Literary Realism and Naturalism

University of Alabama Press

A compelling critical investigation into Gilman’s conception of setting and place

Charlotte Perkins Gilman and a Woman’s Place in America is a pioneering collection that probes how depictions of space, confinement, and liberation establish both the difficulty and necessity of female empowerment. Turning Victorian notions of propriety and a woman’s place on its ear, this finely crafted essay collection studies Gilman’s writings and the manner in which they push back against societal norms and reject male-dominated confines of space.

The contributors present fascinating and innovative readings of some of Gilman’s most significant works. By examining the settings in “The Yellow Wallpaper” and Herland, for example, the volume analyzes Gilman’s construction of place, her representations of male dominance and female subjugation, and her analysis of the rules and obligations that women feel in conforming to their assigned place: the home.

Additionally, this volume delineates female resistance to this conformity. Contributors highlight how Gilman’s narrators often choose resistance over obedient captivity, breaking free of the spaces imposed upon them in order to seek or create their own habitats. Through biographical interpretations of Gilman’s work that focus on the author’s own renouncement of her “natural” role of wife and mother, contributors trace her relocation to the American West in an attempt to appropriate the masculinized spaces of work and social organization.

Engaging, well-researched, and deftly written, the essays in this collection will appeal to scholars of Gilman, literature, and gender issues alike.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman and a Woman's Place in America offers an important new set of geographical, material, and textual centers for Gilman studies, and productive, wide-ranging ways to rethink place studies. The essays in this edited collection broaden this focus within and beyond domestic space, diversifying the range of texts for inspection, situating familiar works in new regional and interpretive lenses, expanding work on media and genre, and contextualizing the reception of their works. Bergman's volume invites further engagement with writings that exceed the domestic sphere and provides a range of new insights and directions for both Gilman scholars and place studies.'
—Studies in American Naturalism

'Offering much that enhances scholarship on Gilman, this collection is an important engagement with her place in US literary history. Highly recommended.'
—CHOICE

As a perennial favorite of feminist readers, Gilman makes for an interesting study. Her life and work is explored by the contributors in this collection in a way no other book about her has attempted to address.’
—Martha J. Cutter, author of Lost and Found in Translation: Contemporary Ethnic American Writing and the Politics of Language Diversity

'This uniformly strong collection of essays from both familiar figures and new voices will prove a valuable resource for Gilman scholars.'
—Cynthia J. Davis, author of Charlotte Perkins Gilman: A Biography

Jill Bergman is the author of The Motherless Child in the Novels of Pauline Hopkins and a coeditor of Our Sisters’ Keepers: Nineteenth-Century Benevolence Literature by American Women. She is a professor emerita at the University of Montana, where she taught courses in American literature and women’s studies. Her work on American women writers has appeared in numerous journals and collections.

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Introduction: A Woman’s Place Is Not in the Home

I. Geography and Biography: Places in and of Gilman’s Life

1. Charlotte Perkins Gilman and the US West

2. Artistic Renderings of Charlotte Perkins Gilman

3. “The Yellow Wall-Paper” as Modernist Space

II. Know Your Place: Limits on Women’s Freedom and Power

4. “Perhaps This Was the Opening of the Gate”: Gilman, the West, and the Free Will Problem

5. Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Giant Wistaria”: A Hieroglyph of the Female Frontier Gothic

III. Reclaiming and Redefining a “Woman’s Place”

6. “A Crazy Quilt of a Paper”: Theorizing the Place of the Periodical in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Forerunner Fiction