Search Results

This chapter examines Charlotte Perkins Gilman's concept of what she called the “World's Mother”—the selfless, nurturing woman-spirit who loves, protects, and teaches the entire human race. Gilman was known for her involvement in Nationalism, the political movement inspired by Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward. But whereas Carpenter imagined that homogenic lovers could serve as the utopian vanguard, Gilman believed that emancipated women would play that role. According to Gilman, women's independence was a precondition of socialism and argued that once women were liberated from compulsory domesticity, they would be free to bring their unique perspective as mothers into the social sphere. During the early years of the twentieth century, Gilman wrote a series of utopian fictions, including Herland (1915). This chapter first provides a background on Gilman before discussing her utopianism, her gynaecocentric theory, her concept of the kitchenless home, and her views on motherhood, race, religion, and socialism.

According to many recent theorists of utopian thinking, the strength of a literary utopia lies in how the utopian vision is portrayed and not so much in the particular social structure it portrays. Because ideological messages are encoded in narrative strategies and formal devices, the form of the literary utopia is at least as significant as its content. Charlotte Perkins Gilman's 1915 novel Herland, through its formal and structural properties, contributes decisively to its subversive utopian message. In Gilman studies, the current appeal of Herland's self-reflexive narrative strategies has resulted in a critical neglect of her two other utopian novels, Moving the Mountain (1911) and With Her in Ourland (1916). This chapter examines Moving the Mountain to see why Gilman opted to make her utopia function as a blueprint, as well as the ideological implications of such a strategy. It shows that her narrative strategies were deliberately chosen because they mirror her theories about religion, social evolution, the utopian potentials of America, and the nature of utopian change.

As one of the foremost Western feminist theorists and writers, Charlotte Perkins Gilman offered readers new ways of thinking about their society by challenging conservative views about femininity and masculinity. She also deconstructed the nature of the work practices that defined Western socioeconomics in the early twentieth century, theorised the relationship between sex-role stereotyping and work, and recognised the role played by texts in the constitution of society in general and of the individual subject in particular. Gilman uses her writing to (re)position readers as social critics. In her 1915 novel Herland, she reworked the conventions of the utopian romance to produce a feminist text. This chapter examines how, in her journal The Forerunner (1909–1916), Gilman exploited the resources of a wide range of genres in order to construct her feminist utopian polemic. It shows how she disseminated her theoretical message through poems, short stories, sermons, serialised novels, book reviews, articles, commentaries, advertisements, and ‘problem pages’ all of which appeared in the magazine. The chapter also considers Gilman's ideas and arguments about feminism and socialism.

In 1890, Charlotte Perkins Gilman wrote a poem called 'Similar Cases' in which she argues that humankind and the world can be changed for the better. The poem marked the beginning of a reformist career that would last almost five decades. In addition to writing poetry, short stories, and novels, Gilman established a national reputation as an advocate of women's issues and socialism. Herland (1915), Gilman's best-known and critically addressed novel, reflects her utopianism. This book examines the complexity of Gilman's utopian vision by revisiting Herland. It first looks at Gilman's letters to her second husband, Houghton Gilman, between 1897 and 1900, before turning to the ideological implications of utopia as a narrative form. The book then analyses Gilman's work The Yellow Wallpaper, her treatment of the taboo of sexually transmitted diseases, and the theoretical framework regarding domestic labour that underpins many of her utopian stories. It also discusses social ecofeminism and cultural ecofeminism in Gilman's fiction, particularly her 1911 novel Moving the Mountain.

In 1915, Charlotte Perkins Gilman's novel Herland appeared in The Forerunner, almost exactly 400 years since the publication of Thomas More's Utopia in 1516. More wrote his book at a time when utopian narrative was a genre overwhelmingly dominated by men and apparently embodied a distinctively male fantasy: one that reinscribes or even reinforces the patriarchal values of the society which More seeks to change. This chapter examines the ideological implications of utopia as a narrative form by offering a reading of Herland. It analyses the problems that arise when a feminist writer such as Gilman attempts to rewrite utopian narrative in the service of a gender ideology that is radically different from the one typically encoded by such narrative. The chapter argues that Gilman negotiates the ‘ideological minefield’ of utopian generic conventions with mixed success, noting how Herland depicts the Herlanders as domesticated women and fails to avoid the stasis characteristic of conventional fictional utopias.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman challenged, explored, and circumnavigated boundaries. Her writing continually interrogates the restrictive boundaries of patriarchal institutions and of enclosed spaces. Gilman debated the limitations of personal freedom and questioned the ways in which women function outside or beyond them. She considered the possibilities offered by pockets, which she saw as gendered spaces and an example of the boundaries or constraints that women had to deal with. Gilman's interest in pockets articulates her challenge to the boundaries of dress codes. This chapter explores Gilman's metaphors by offering a close reading of her 1915 novel Herland and shows how she redefined and regendered domestic, ideological, and textual spaces. It also looks at The Yellow Wallpaper and shows that is not the only text by Gilman to manifest modernist elements. Moreover, the chapter analyses the way Gilman exploited the literal and metaphorical resources offered by pockets. Finally, it argues that Herland as fictional space can be interpreted as a lesbian ‘pocket’ of woman-identified women.

The majority of Charlotte Perkins Gilman's writing deals with exegeticising the body politic as a sick body, a body that will always be ailing. In particular, Gilman suggests that women are disabled and even diseased by marriage. Both her fiction and non-fiction are permeated with metaphors of infection and sickness. This chapter examines the context in which Gilman depicts disease and sickness in its intimate relationship with marriage through her use of a variety of different genres including the detective story, fantasy, fable, romance, parable, and utopian fiction. It begins with her 1935 autobiography, The Living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, followed by The Yellow Wallpaper (1892), Unpunished, and a number of short stories such as ‘The Vintage’ (1916) and ‘The Unnatural Mother’ (1916), before concluding with a short discussion of Herland (1915). The chapter shows how Gilman's work conveys the message that conventional marriage debilitates women and creates worlds where the organisation sustains women in health rather than sickness. It also illustrates the way the ideal body politic is arranged on the principles of the female body, constructed as science fiction or utopianism in Herland.

In her 1915 novel Herland, Charlotte Perkins Gilman devotes an entire chapter to the religion of her all-woman utopia but offers no clues as to industry and political economy. This creates contradictions and ambiguities, especially with respect to the actual level of industrial development and the nature of governance in Herland. This chapter examines gender and some of the political and economic theories that underpin Herland, along with its depiction of an all-female utopia. It argues that there is an ambivalence towards technology in the novel, as well as teasing gaps and absences in the narrative regarding precise methods of production. To convey her theories of production indirectly, Gilman exploits the literal and metaphorical meanings of forestry, which the chapter suggests is an industry suitable to her political and economic vision.

Coined in 1974 by Françoise d'Eaubonne, the term ‘ecofeminism’ refers to the radical environmentalism that incorporates both ecological and feminist concerns. Emerging from the global feminist movement of the 1970s, ecofeminism has since incorporated a wide range of contexts, from historical and political to religious, literary, ethical, empirical, conceptual, epistemological, methodological, and theoretical. According to Val Plumwood, the theory of ecofeminism results from the application of feminist perspectives to problems of ecology, and is therefore as complex and diverse as feminism itself. This chapter examines modern social ecofeminism (nonessentialist) and cultural ecofeminism (essentialist) in Charlotte Perkins Gilman's utopian 1915 novel Herland. In particular, it discusses the struggle between the ‘forest’ and the ‘desert’ within the novel's utopian vision.

This chapter traces the history of utopian depictions of surveillance before Nineteen Eighty-Four. It argues that we understand Orwell’s novel better when we see it in terms of a long tradition of such works that have from at leas the time of Thomas More in the 16^th century have represented and critically analysed social structures and processes, as well as their relationships to individuals and groups. Inherently, utopias are speculative, testing out good and bad possibilities for readers (and, later, for film goers), enabling them to contemplate the worlds they inhabit and to think about optional ways of being, both individually and socially. Concentrating on this genre, the chapter suggests, uncovers a focused, historically- and imaginatively rich body of works that present a valuable array of depictions and analyses.