Coming back around after wrapping the local library's challenge so that I don't leave any books unfinished, so I'm back to Charlotte Perkins Gilman once more, reading the back half of this particular volume that I started last week.
After Herland, the remainder of this book is a selection of short stories and poetry from along the length of Gilman's writing career. The short fiction section sort of comes in two sections, early stories and stories from The Forerunner. There's a 17-year gap between the two groups, and a very clear change in what Gilman's focus is.
The first six stories in this collection all date to the 1890s, including perhaps Gilman's most famous piece, "The Yellow Wall-Paper". There is a clear leaning toward feminist thought on display here; of the five early stories chosen, only one doesn't seem to fit in with the others. "The Unexpected" is a story in four chapters, in which an artist marries a young lady, becomes convinced that she's immediately engaging in an illicit affair, attempts to catch her in the act, and finds that her secret is far more wonderful than he expected. "The Giant Wisteria" begins as a story about Puritans dealing with a daughter who had a child out of wedlock, then jumps a century forward to people staying in the same house, experiencing a haunting, and discovering the fate of the daughter from the start. The outlier, "The Rocking-Chair", features two men taking rooms in a boarding-house after seeing a young girl in the window, and having their friendship crumble as both think the other is hiding having gotten to meet the girl, apparently the daughter of the landlady.
"The Yellow Wall-Paper" is a very clear indictment of Silas Weir Mitchell's methods of treating psychological illnesses, a semi-autobiographical account of the slow decline of a woman's sanity when she is forced to remain in a room with nothing to do but look out the window or study the wallpaper; Gilman had been a patient of Mitchell's and sent him a copy of the story in an attempt to convince him that this was a treatment that did more harm than good. She later wrote in The Forerunner that she had learned the story had the intended effect, and Mitchell stopped using the "rest cure". The other two stories, "The Extinct Angel" and "Through This", are shorter pieces that are more directed, more obviously focused on feminist ideas, dealing with how the traditional female roles in society completely subsume the personality, the purity, and eventually the sanity of women. Gilman is decidedly outspoken even in these early pieces, and you can see the beginnings of her focus on feminist social justice that would eventually culminate in Herland.
The remainder of the stories come from later, and are largely devoted to showing how Gilman's views on a perfect society would potentially work in practice. The women are resourceful, willing to think outside the box when necessary, and more than willing to do what's best for everyone, rather than just themselves. Additionally, there is the continuing theme, as seen in Herland, of motherhood being a sort of sacred duty, and that those who cannot perform that duty well should be willing to pass it to others who are better-suited. Everything seems to just be these perfect little settings where all the ills of the world could be quite nicely sorted out if the women were just allowed to have some say in things instead of being buried under all the stresses of their place in a male-dominated society and...
Yeah, they're very didactic, and very much of a kind with the other material from The Forerunner. While they are well-written and are fun reads, they do begin to feel somewhat the same after a time. The general formula is: female protagonist is wronged somehow, female protagonist either learns of her own ability to effect change or works out the best way to do so, that change is effected, female protagonist ends the story in a much better position. The whole theme is women's empowerment, and the various ways that it is illustrated are enjoyable, but in retrospect, the stories really do kind of start to blend together.
The poetry section is somewhat similar in formatting; early poetry holds more varying topics but a general feminist leaning, while later poetry starts to become more obviously political. While there are a few poems from the period between the early fiction and Gilman's self-publishing, it's a very slim selection, and it's harder to see the development of ideas when they're confined to slim pieces of verse.
This raises perhaps the most important issue I have with the volume I've read here. There's a 17-year gap with very little of Gilman's material on display here, and importantly, much of her writing during that gap was a mix of nonfiction essays and several nonfiction books, showing the development of her ideas into what would eventually become the topics of The Forerunner in general and Herland in specific. And yet, for some reason, the "Selected Writings" on display here have completely missed that arguably-important part of her oeuvre. Not even the piece she wrote on the topic of why she wrote "The Yellow Wall-Paper" made it in, and that story is the first part of the collection's title! It feels like an unusual omission, especially in a collection edited by a scholar with multiple Gilman-themed works to her name.
All this is to say that I certainly see why Gilman belongs on a classics shelf, and while the shape of her ideas is clearly on display in the stories and novel included here, I do wish that the collection hadn't had such a large piece of time left obscured. There is value in seeing the development of ideas, and I would be very interested to have been able to see the evolution from what is on display in "The Yellow Wall-Paper", "The Extinct Angel", and "Through This" to become what was spelled out in Herland and The Forerunner.
No comments:
Post a Comment