The Yellow Wall-Paper and Selected Writings (Charlotte Perkins Gilman, 1884-1916) (Penguin Classics Charlotte Gilman, 2/2)

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.

Herland (Charlotte Perkins Gilman, 1915) (Penguin Classics Charlotte Gilman, 1/2)

 

I think it says a lot for the quality of a book when I can plunge through the whole thing in a matter of hours.  I mean, sure, I'm a fan of well-written utopian/dystopian literature anyways, when a great deal of time is spent exploring the world with some considerable depth, but being able to plunge through a whole novel, even when it's perhaps somewhat short, in a single day, even with interruptions?

Herland is one of the few instances of true utopian literature that I've actually read; the closest thing I can think of is H.G. Wells's "The Country of the Blind", in that the ramifications of the cultural change have been fully explored.  Usually, there's some clear drawback to the society explored; what is Utopia to one is Dystopia to another.  There is some aspect of that in Herland, where one of the 'outsider' characters definitely finds it to be anything but paradise for him, but, well...  I'll get to that.

The central conceit in Herland is that there is a hidden country high in the mountains of... Somewhere; the narrator specifically says he has no intention of making it clear exactly where this country is, but it's about the size of Holland and impossible to reach except by air.  A combination of volcanic activity, slave uprising, and self-defense killings resulted in the complete cutting-off of this land, along with the utter destruction of the entire male gender.  Spontaneously, one of the young women left behind turns out to have the ability to reproduce parthenogenically, which is also passed on to her daughters, and their daughters as well, eventually leading to the country being entirely populated by what is essentially one big family.  Without any outsiders to contend with, the women are able to instead focus on improving the land and their culture for future generations.

Genetic diversity is somewhat handwaved here, but we're in some light fantasy territory so let's just see where this goes.

It's probably most useful to take a moment to consider the author.  Charlotte Perkins Gilman was a prominent feminist writer in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, with a socialist leaning in her philosophies, and a particular focus on the inequalities created by capitalism and the tendency for women to have to rely on men instead of being fiscally independent.  During the early part of the 20th century, she even wrote and published her own magazine from 1909-1916, "The Forerunner", in which she expressed her views to her readership. 

This comes out quite clearly in the all-female culture we see in Herland.  The women have no money, few personal belongings, and little need for anything in their lives.  The population, stated as being around 3 million, is kept steady simply through each woman being allowed one child (with certain exemplars being allowed to have a second if others are considered unsuitable), and once a baby is able to leave her mother's side, her upbringing is in a communal child-rearing environment much like a 24/7 Montessori school where all activities are designed to be educational without the child realizing she is learning.  There is an intense focus on lifelong learning in the culture; while children are expected to choose a profession by which to better the land when they reach their teenage years, this is purely based on their interests.  

This way of choosing a calling is exemplified by the character of Ellidor, one of the first women met in the narrative.  At one point, she describes how she brought a moth she had caught to an "insect teacher" to ask what it was, learned that it was a pest that threatened a particular variety of nut tree and that was actively being eradicated as a result.  The ensuing course of education as she dug deeper and deeper led her to decide to devote her life to forestry.

Spirituality is somewhat passive; the belief is that the Deity lives within everyone, expressed as the feeling of motherhood that drives the culture as a whole, with no afterlife, everything instead being focused on the betterment of society for future generations, with little reverence for the beliefs and laws of the past if they can be made more just and equitable.  Those whose callings lead them to be able to serve as counselors to those who need psychological help spend part of their days in the temples located in each town, so that someone is always there to listen and offer guidance to the troubled.

Into this idyllic country, where the focus of everything is to make the land better than it was before, come the three outsider characters: Terry, a swaggering alpha male sort who is convinced that the legendary "Land of Girls" that they are searching for is sure to make him king because obviously they're all going to fawn over him; Jeff, a romantic sort of man who believes that his one purpose in life is to worship and serve a woman who loves him; and Vandyck, the narrator, who holds a view somewhat in the middle.  All three come in with an essentially androcentric worldview, and while they exoect to find a patriarchal society, they very much don't expect to find a complete lack of the Y chromosome.

The three reach the plateau where this country exists via a biplane, but find themselves quickly captured, imprisoned in decidedly comfortable surroundings, and forced to simultaneously learn the native language (streamlined and made elegant over time so that it is easy to teach and learn) and teach English to the inhabitants (who show little difficulty in learning).  This is quite fine with Van and Jeff, but Terry quickly grows frustrated by the captivity and the fact that the teaching staff and guards are all middle-aged, and talks the others into engaging in an escape.  This works well enough, and they manage to make it all the way back to the plane, only to discover that it has been seen into a gigantic cloth bag to protect it from the elements, and also that their entire escape and flight into the forest has been observed without their knowledge.

The book progresses from there as the three learn about the culture they have dropped into (which all three men find disappointing in certain ways, though only one is unable to come to terms with it), teach the women about the outside world, and slowly find love, of a sort.

And then Terry tries to get overly macho about his unchanged notion of gender roles, attempts to force himself on the woman he loves, is thoroughly and physically rebuffed, and gets himself thrown out.  The last chapter deals with this final part, and the preparations for a return to the outside world.  Van will come along to make sure he gets back to the outside world safely, and Ellidor won't allow Van to leave without being by his side.  Jeff has no intention of leaving; his lover is pregnant with the first two-parent child the country has seen in 2000 years, and he wouldn't dream of leaving her side.

Throughout the book, the injustices and inequalities of the outside world are shown to be problematic, not only when Van is forced to consider them, but also through the reactions when the women are told about them.  The final chapter includes a lot of foreshadowing about how Ellidor reacts when faced with these injustices up close, but only that; it ends with the three who are leaving, well... Leaving.

Herland was originally published in a serialized form in "The Forerunner".  Perhaps unsurprisingly, the very next month she began serializing the sequel, With Her in Ourland.  Unfortunately, the volume I'm reading from doesn't include that novel, instead following Herland with a selection of short stories and poetry from the whole of Gilman's career.  I find myself rather disappointed by this; I rather want to read the sequel now just to see where she chose to look for the contrasts that would surely be offered.