Gilman's Herland (1915): Feminist Utopia and Social Critique

Overview of Gilman's Utopian Vision. After “The Yellow Wall-Paper,” Gilman is best known for Herland, a utopian novel published serially in Forerunner. Through Herland Gilman made “a world to suit me” and achieved her vision of “human progress” by creating a utopian world of “highly civilized women” (Herland 25). In Moving the Mountain (Forerunner 1911), an earlier “baby utopia” (as she called it), men and women participate equally in a socialized economy; in Herland there are absolutely no men at all. Motherhood is socialized and desexualized: No longer dependent on two genders for fertilization, women have evolved to reproduce through parthenogenesis (virgin birth), giving birth to girls only; a genuine community of women raises the children of Herland, who have no last names since their identity is collective, not linked to the private home (which Gilman considered a source of oppression). While aspects of the novel, such as parthenogenesis, seem fantastic today, Herland remains a keen social commentary: In it Gilman exposes sexism and attempts to redefine traditional gender roles by showcasing women's capabilities and natural superiority to men.

Narrative Framework and World-Building. Akin to Edward Bellamy in Looking Backward (1888), a book that Gilman admired, Gilman in Herland transports a character of a conventional world into the uncharted territory of an all-female paradise. At the opening three American explorers—the rich playboy Terry Nicholson, the sociologist Vandyck Jennings, and the poet-botanist Jeff Margrave—land their plane and stumble upon a utopian world populated by strong, athletic, calm, short-haired, comfortably clothed women (in typical Gilman fashion, their clothes have pockets, too). The novel is set on the eve of World War I. The location of Herland is never revealed: Gilman describes it as an island with a dense forest and refers to the women as Amazons, leading some to suggest the country is in South America, but she compares the climate and soil to those in California.

Gilman presents the utopia through male eyes: Van narrates the story; as a man of reason, he serves as intermediary between the male chauvinist Terry and the sentimental Jeff, who idealizes women. Impressed by this civilization, the three men declare: “There must be men. . . . Let’s find ‘em” (11). Instead, the Herlanders capture the male intruders and attempt to civilize them. While Jeff totally embraces the humane values of Herland, and Van expands his consciousness to recognize Herland’s merits, the sexist Terry Nicholson sneers at the idea of woman-centered culture.

Societal Structures and Cultural Attributes. The Herlanders possess qualities that, in 1915, were typically associated only with men: power, courage, inventiveness, assertiveness, and physical agility. In giving Herlanders these favored attributes, Gilman wittily queries whether human traits are inherently masculine or feminine or, rather, culturally determined. Their culture is scientifically advanced. The country’s capital looks like a model for contemporary urban planning. There are no wars, no kings, no aristocracy, no criminals, no overpopulation, and no poverty. The country is clean and beautiful. Sickness is virtually unknown to them. The women are highly educated, tall, healthy, beautiful, strong, vigorous, and contented. Their standards are peace, comfort, health, beauty, and progress (68), and they are vegetarians—pacifism extending into their eating practices.

Much of Herland reads as a sociological treatise rather than science fiction. To complete the men’s education about this near-perfect civilization, Gilman describes kinship structures (all Herlanders form part of one cooperative), reproductive and child-rearing practices (only certain eugenically fit women, called “Over Mothers,” bear children, and women gifted in child care raise the children in a kibbutzlike collective), religion (the Herlanders favor a benign, matrilineal religious practice, a maternal pantheism), and education (considered an art and entrusted only to the most skillful).

Utopian Romance and the "Great Change". Herland is also a utopian romance novel. Reversing traditional gender dynamics and courtship rituals, Gilman wittily makes Van, Terry, and Jeff sex objects: They compete for the attention of the beautiful, wise Herlanders, who have no understanding of the term lover, never experience jealousy or bisexual desire, and do not blush or flirt. Conceding that dual parentage might be a higher reproductive process than parthenogenesis, the Herlanders agree to attempt “the Great Change” (89), and each of the men is selected by a partner willing to “re-establish a bi-sexual state for our people” (88). Three marriages ensue—Jeff with Celis, Van with Ellador, and Terry with Alima—but the outcomes vary.

Jeff, who wholeheartedly adopts the views of his new society, treats Celis with a devotion that puzzles her, but they engage in sexual relations for procreation purposes only and remain in Herland, helping to usher in “the Great Change.” Van, a true sociologist, observes the society carefully and undergoes a slow, believable conversion. Van and Ellador experience a friendship in marriage based on mutual respect, rather than passion. However, Terry’s marriage to Alima proves disastrous. Sticking to “his pet conviction that a woman loves to be mastered” (132), Terry is convicted of marital rape and expelled from utopia.

At the end of the novel Van and Ellador, eager to see the rest of the world, accompany Terry into exile, a strategic move that initiates Gilman’s sequel, With Her in Ourland (Forerunner 1916). This sequel, though far less regarded, creates an innovation in the utopian formula by putting a native of utopia into the social confusion of our world on the brink of war.

Legacy and Critical Reception. Herland gained the attention of second-wave feminists after its reprinting in 1979, with an introduction by Ann J. Lane. Gilman’s creation of a humane, peace-loving world that exposes the absurdities and inhumanity of early 20th-century America still resonates today.

For Discussion or Writing.
1. Why does Gilman leave the location of Herland a mystery? What aspects of Herland culture are most appealing to readers today? What aspects are least appealing? Does Gilman seem insensitive to any group of Americans or present ideas considered politically incorrect today? Look up the term eugenics in a reference book.

2. Why do the Herlanders concede that dual parentage is a higher reproductive process than parthenogenesis? Are you prepared for this change, or does it read as a device to move the plot along?

3. If you were to illustrate the novel, what aspects of the utopia would you choose to illustrate? How would you depict the women of Herland? Identify qualities that you would have in your own utopia, and describe them or illustrate them. What would you call your utopia? Does Gilman’s title suit her work?

Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Yellow Wall-Paper": Analysis

Critical Analysis of "The Yellow Wall-Paper" (1892). Although Charlotte Perkins Gilman created a prodigious output of poetry, fiction, lectures, novels, and theoretical works, her literary reputation stands on her best-known and best-written story, "The Yellow Wall-Paper". Ironically, in her autobiography she dismisses this remarkable example of psychological realism as "no more 'literature' than my other stuff, being definitely written 'with a purpose'" (Living 121). Superior artistically to her other, often hurriedly written fiction, "The Yellow Wall-Paper" deftly employs two devices: first-person narration and writing as therapy. The reader follows a diary or journal chronicled by a woman undergoing a three-month "rest cure" for nervous depression, seemingly brought on by the birth of her child, in today's clinical term a postpartum depression. As Elaine Hedges notes in her "Afterword" to the 1973 Feminist Press reprinting of the story, "The story is one of the rare pieces of literature we have by a 19th-century woman which directly confronts the sexual politics of the male-female, husband-wife relationship" (Golden, Charlotte Perkins Gilman's The Yellow Wall-Paper, 89–90).

Narrative Progression and Gender Dynamics. As the 12 diary entries progress, we witness the graphic consequences of women's subordination in patriarchal marriage, driving the female protagonist from neurosis to madness. The narrator, who refers and defers to John in the initial entries, remains nameless in this story, although John condescendingly refers to her as a "little girl" (Golden, Charlotte Perkins Gilman's 138) and "a blessed little goose" (133). Required to rest in a former nursery, the narrator, who very much wants to write, must hide her journal from her physician/husband, John, who "hates to have me write a word" (133), and her sister-in-law, Jennie, who "is a perfect and enthusiastic housekeeper, and hopes for no better profession. I verily believe she thinks it is the writing which made me sick!" (135). In the third entry Gilman names and indicts the eminent neurologist Dr. S. Weir Mitchell, who treated her in his Philadelphia sanitarium: "John says if I do not 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!" (135). Here Gilman blurs the lines between fiction and reality: The friend she mentions is a veiled reference to herself and her dissatisfaction with Mitchell's treatment of her nervous depression.

Symbolism of the Wallpaper and Descent into Madness. At first repelled by the flamboyant wallpaper in the nursery, the narrator grows fond of it and discovers it to be a "palimpsest" with a dominant and muted pattern: The dominant front design takes the form of bars, and a second muted pattern resembles a formless figure at first, then a woman trapped behind the dominant design. Eventually, the narrator tears the wallpaper to free the trapped woman, merging her identity with a figure that is seemingly a product of her own hallucination, arguably a reflection of herself: "I pulled and she shook, I shook and she pulled, and before morning we had pulled off yards of that paper" (143). The pronouns I and we are significant in this passage, as are her subsequent actions of locking John out of the room and crawling on the floor. The fate of the nameless narrator crawling endlessly in circles over her fainting doctor/husband defies a simple explanation. Well over 100 years after its first publication, "The Yellow Wall-Paper" continues to captivate and puzzle audiences today.

Publication History and Early Reception. It might surprise readers to learn that Gilman had difficulty publishing the story with which she is most readily associated. Gilman wrote "The Yellow Wall-Paper" in Pasadena, California, during a heat wave in summer 1890, shortly after she and her first husband, Walter Stetson, permanently separated. Although conflicting versions exist about its publication history and early critical reception, modern critics generally concur that it took about 18 months to place the story. Gilman solicited help from the author and former editor of the prestigious journal the Atlantic Monthly, William Dean Howells: He had written to her in praise of her poems of civic satire, such as "Similar Cases" (1890). After receiving Howells's "unforgettable letter" of June 9, 1890, she "felt like a real 'author' at last" (Living 113). Howells, in turn, sent Gilman's story to the current editor of the Atlantic Monthly, Horace Elisha Scudder; memorable is the second, final sentence of his curt rejection letter: "I could not forgive myself if I made others as miserable as I have made myself!" (Golden, Charlotte Perkins Gilman's 27).

The Path to Print. How did the story find its way into print? In her autobiography Gilman claims that she sent her story to a literary agent, Henry Austin, who placed it in New England Magazine but pocketed the publication fee (he denied this). Conversely, Howells, who reprinted the story in The Great Modern American Stories (1920), states in the introduction to his collection that he "corrupted" Edwin Mead, then editor of New England Magazine, into publishing the story; Mead may well have complied because he was grateful to Howells, who (as husband of Mead's cousin) helped him enter the publishing field. If Howells's story is accurate, did Gilman know of his role, or did she prefer to forget it? Gilman is not always accurate in her autobiography: For example, she lists the story's publication date incorrectly as May 1891.

Original Periodical and Chapbook Editions. The story actually appeared in the January 1892 issue of New England Magazine with three black-and-white illustrations by a staff illustrator, Jo. H. Hatfield. This relatively conservative Boston-based publication featured stories, poems, travel, history, and biography. In 1899 Small, Maynard and Company issued a small chapbook edition of the story without its original illustrations; however, the paper board covers boast a flamboyant sulfur orange-yellow design, making vivid the pattern of the ubiquitous wallpaper. The manuscript, or fair copy, version is also now in print.

Biographical Foundations and Medical Critique. While one must not read any story as a mere reflection of an author's life, "The Yellow Wall-Paper" has invited biographical readings for two reasons: In the story Gilman names and indicts Dr. S. Weir Mitchell, the eminent physician who treated her for neurasthenia (or nervous prostration) after the birth of her daughter. In 1887 Gilman traveled to Mitchell's sanitarium to take his famous rest cure. Second, Gilman based the story on difficulties she experienced during her first marriage, to Stetson, resulting in what we might now call a postpartum depression. Biographers and scholars frequently note the palpable biographical elements underpinning Gilman's story of a forceful husband forbidding his intelligent wife to write and requiring her to rest in a nursery/prison, a symbol of patriarchal marriage. Just as the window in the narrator's room has bars, symbolic of the restrictions on women in 19th-century society, the conventionally minded Stetson limited the vision of his socially minded wife, who longed to contribute to a more "human world." Before they married Stetson had assured Gilman he would not object to her writing and presented her with pens and blank writing tablets to affirm the promise, a promise he did not keep.

In The Living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Gilman records that "The Yellow Wall-Paper" "is a description of a case of nervous breakdown beginning something as mine did, and treated as Dr. S. Weir Mitchell treated me with what I considered the inevitable result, progressive insanity" (118–119). Despite its merits, the Mitchell rest cure had a decidedly punitive edge. Following Mitchell's prescription to live a domestic life, limit her intellectual activity to two hours a day, "and never touch pen, brush or pencil as long as you live" (Living 96), Gilman reports crawling under beds and hiding in closets to escape from a "profound distress" (Living 96). Although Gilman states in her oft-quoted 1913 Forerunner article "Why I Wrote 'The Yellow Wallpaper'?" that she never objected to her wallpaper or had hallucinations as the narrator in the story did, she declares that she "sent a copy to the physician who so nearly drove me mad" (Golden, Charlotte Perkins Gilman's 46). In her autobiography she also states her reason for writing the story: "But the real purpose of the story was to reach Dr. S. Weir Mitchell and convince him of the error of his ways" (Living 121). She attests she avoided madness by rejecting her doctor's "sage" advice.

Critical Reception and Modern Canonization. After its 1892 publication, "The Yellow Wall-Paper" "attracted a cult of readers" as the biographer Gary Scharnhorst notes in Charlotte Perkins Gilman (18). Numerous reviews appeared after the 1899 edition and the tale's subsequent reprinting. Two aspects of the story—its horror and the wallpaper itself (including its possible arsenical qualities common in period wall decorations)—caught the attention of contemporary reviewers, some of whom called for the story's censure. In fact, 19th-century critics who read the story as a gothic thriller or horror tale often likened it to the work of Edgar Allan Poe; this connection continues, leading the tale to be anthologized in collections of gothic horror and suspense. Although many feminist critics of the 1970s and 1980s note that the sexual politics of female subjugation were not appreciated by Gilman's contemporary reviewers, some did remark upon the narrator's restricted lifestyle in a patriarchal society as a significant factor driving the narrator to madness, although these critics did not employ the terms of modern feminist criticism (for period reviews, see Golden, Charlotte Perkins Gilman's 81–87).

Since the 1973 Feminist Press publication, "The Yellow Wall-Paper" has received near-unprecedented international attention and achieved iconic status in feminist circles. Reprinted in European countries including Great Britain, France, Sweden, Germany, and Spain, it is one of the most widely anthologized texts in the English-speaking world. Part of the contemporary canon, it finds its place on syllabuses in literature, history, women's studies, and American studies courses. It is the focus of major publications in respected scholarly journals and the subject of numerous sourcebooks, collections, and doctoral dissertations. Critics in a wide range of disciplines have read the story from numerous theoretical perspectives: feminist, psychological (Lacanian, Derridean, Adlerian, Freudian), sociological, linguistic, historical, reader response, queer theory, and a combination of theoretical perspectives. Scholars have frequently analyzed the themes of madness and regression versus liberation and empowerment, the diary format, first-person narration, symbolism, discourse of diagnosis, the narrator's psychic evolution, and the ambiguous ending.

We must read criticism of any work in relation to its own historical moment. Groundbreaking legislative triumphs for women's rights, such as the Roe v. Wade (1973) decision, and victories in equal opportunity in education and employment may well have influenced 1970s feminist critics to read the story optimistically, sympathetically. Likewise, concerns with political correctness and global feminism—with its attention to issues of color, ethnicity, and social class—have led critics since the 1980s and 1990s to notice repugnancies and prejudiced elements in Gilman's oeuvre, bleeding into the color and odor of the ubiquitous wallpaper, as well as to challenge the story's canonical status. Since the 1990s "The Yellow Wall-Paper" has found a niche in gay and lesbian studies, textual studies, and approaches to teaching. In the early 21st century, interest in the story continues to grow and shows no signs of waning.

Academic Study and Analytical Prompts. The following questions provide frameworks for literary analysis and academic writing.
1. What is the significance of the narrator's namelessness? What do the nailed-down bed and the figure of the woman trapped behind the dominant pattern of the wallpaper symbolize? Why does John insist the narrator rest in a room that was a former nursery? What kind of character is John: Is he a controlling patriarch or villain, or, rather, a well-intentioned and sympathetic doctor/husband simply following the medical wisdom of his time? To support your responses look up "the doctrine of separate spheres" and the "cult of true womanhood" in a reference text. Compare Gilman's view of women's subordination to the views of her American contemporaries, including Kate Chopin and Edith Wharton.

2. How does the narrator's reaction to the wallpaper change over time? Does the color of the wallpaper evoke bodily excrement, feminine sexuality, decadence, and/or the "yellow peril" (at the turn of the 20th century, the color yellow was used to describe undesirable groups, including Italians, Jews, eastern Europeans, and Asians)? Is the narrator, who is denied any other form of paper, reading the wallpaper to figure out its pattern, as she vows she alone can do? In discovering a woman trapped behind the bars of the wallpaper, has the narrator installed herself in the realm of the imaginary? Does the narrator's changing perception of the wallpaper suggest that her neurosis gives way to full-blown psychosis, or does it, alternately, suggest that she is gaining an awareness of the restrictions of her patriarchal world? Is her tearing down the bars of the wallpaper an act of madness or of liberation?

3. Interpretations of the narrator's fate swing widely from liberation to defeat. Has the narrator succumbed to madness, gained a form of higher sanity, or achieved a dubious victory in gaining a more forceful sense of self despite, or perhaps because of, her madness? At the end of the story is the narrator simply trapped in a room that signals patriarchal repression; alternately, in locking John out of the room, has she attained what Virginia Woolf claims all women need: a room of one's own? Is the narrator's creeping at the end of the tale animalistic (is she a groveling beast on all fours)? Is her crawling an act of infantile regression or rebirth, as babies crawl before they learn to walk? The narrator triumphantly declares in the 12th entry: "I've got out at last... in spite of you and Jane! And I've pulled off most of the paper, so you can't put me back!" (Golden, Charlotte Perkins Gilman's 144). But who is Jane? In the 19th century Jennie was a nickname for Jane; is Jane a reference to her sister-in-law, called Jennie throughout the story? Or, is Jane the narrator's hitherto unmentioned name? If so, is Jane the narrator rejecting her traditional Jane self, gaining freedom from her roles of wife and mother?

4. The story unfolds as a diary: How can the narrator finish the tale if she is descending into madness? Do we read the journal entries as an interior monologue, or, rather, do we assume she has recovered sufficiently to conclude the tale herself? How would Jennie or John tell the story? What of John's fate? Is he dead or alive? If John is merely fainting at the sight of the narrator creeping on all fours, what will happen when John revives? Will he lock the narrator away, likening her fate to that of other 19th-century characters filled with madness or rage—of whom Bertha Mason of Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre (1847) is a prime example?

5. In the third illustration the narrator resembles raving Bertha of Jane Eyre. In contrast, in the first image she looks like a respectable Victorian woman presumably writing in her journal the story we are reading. After examining the original black-and-white illustrations by the New England Magazine illustrator Joseph Henry Hatfield (Golden, Charlotte Perkins Gilman's 128, 137, 145), consider how the narrator's visual characterization influences a reading of the ambiguous ending. Do the three illustrations cumulatively suggest the narrator is insane, defeated? Gilman does not indicate a change in the narrator's appearance, but Hatfield transforms the narrator from a respectable-looking Victorian woman, hair tied into a neat bun, into a madwoman, wild hair flowing down her back as she creeps over John. What is the significance of these changes, and how might the illustrations have affected the original line of response to the story as a Poesque tale? Can you identify other features of the story that situate it both in the traditions of gothic horror and of American realism?

6. Alternately to the previous question, do 21st-century readers see an emerging power and freedom in the image of the narrator pressing the swooning John into the floor, her hair unleashed from a restrictive bun? If you were the illustrator of the story, would you choose these same three scenes to illustrate? How would you draw the narrator and the enigmatic wallpaper itself?

7. The story's style is taut, the paragraphs brief, many composed of only one sentence. How do these features and the breaks between diary entries augment the narrator's fragmentation or sense of psychic degeneration? The narrator also appears to be an inventive language user. The timid narrator initially defers to John and refers to herself as "one" (a pronoun the linguist Otto Jespersen calls a disguised I); as the story progresses, she increasingly uses and prominently places the nominative case pronoun in the defiant sentences she authors (for example, "I've got out at last," said I, "in spite of you and Jane."). Look up objective case and nominative case pronouns in a grammar book to consider the significance of these changes. Moreover, how do we read the various spellings of the word wallpaper (wall paper, wall-paper, wallpaper, and paper)? Do these variations reflect Gilman's notoriously inconsistent spelling, or do they signify the profoundly changing wallpaper itself?

8. How do we reconcile the increased authority in the narrator's language with her progressively more crazed actions? Construct two opposing interpretations of the story. To argue that the narrator succumbs to madness, trace how the muted figure of the woman trapped behind the bars of the wallpaper gains more definition (for example, the once "formless sort of figure" becomes a "woman" to her) over time; does the enhanced clarity of the narrator's delusion translate into actions of madness during the final four diary entries when she attempts to free the woman seemingly born of her own hallucination? In contrast, to argue for the narrator's liberation or dubious victory, analyze how her language grows stronger precisely at the point when the narrator dramatically creeps on the floor, tears the paper from the walls, and seemingly condemns herself to madness.