Context
At the time of her death in 1935, Charlotte Perkins Gilman was as famous for
her political and journalistic writing as she was notorious for her unconventional
personal life. In her time, Gilman was known as a crusading journalist and feminist
intellectual, a follower of such pioneering women's rights advocates as Susan B.
Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Harriet Beecher Stowe, Gilman's great-aunt.
Gilman was concerned with political inequality and social justice in general, but
the primary focus of her writing was the unequal status of women within the
institution of marriage. In such works as Concerning Children
(1900), The Home (1904), and Human Work (1904),
Gilman argued that women's confinement to the domestic sphere robbed them of the
expression of their full powers of creativity and intelligence, while simultaneously
robbing society of women whose abilities suited them for professional and public
life. An essential part of her analysis was that the traditional power structure of
the family made no one happy—not the woman who was made into an
unpaid servant, not the husband who was made into a master, and not the children who
were subject to both. Her most ambitious work, Women and Economics
(1898), analyzed the hidden value of women's labor within the capitalist economy.
She argued, as she would throughout her work, that financial independence
for women could only benefit society as a whole.
Gilman's analysis of women's status in society was deeply rooted in her own
situation. In 1886, early in her first marriage and not long after the birth of her
daughter, Charlotte Perkins Stetson (as she was then known) was stricken with a
severe case of depression. In her 1935 autobiography, The Living of
Charlotte Perkins Gilman, she describes her “utter prostration” by
“unbearable inner misery” and “ceaseless tears,” a condition only made worse by the
presence of her husband and her baby. She was referred to Dr. S. Weir Mitchell, then
the country's leading specialist in nervous disorders, who believed that such
postpartum depression was brought by too much mental activity and not enough
attention to domestic affairs. Mitchell's treatment in such cases was a “rest cure”
of forced inactivity. For Gilman, this treatment was a disaster. Prevented from
working, writing, and even reading, she sank deeper into depression, and she soon
had a nervous breakdown. At her worst, she crawled into closets and under beds,
clutching a rag doll. Eventually, Gilman realized that the powerlessness she felt as
a wife, mother, and subject of a male-dominated medical regime was an extreme
instance of the powerlessness all women were made to feel in a culture that refused
to take their thoughts and desires seriously.
Once she abandoned Mitchell's rest cure, Gilman's condition improved, though
she claimed to feel the effects of the ordeal for the rest of her life. She based
her best-known work of fiction, the classic short story “The Yellow Wallpaper,” on
the experience. Leaving behind her husband and child, a decision that made her a
figure of scandal, Charlotte Perkins Stetson (she took the name Gilman after a
second marriage, to her cousin) embarked on her famous career as a journalist,
lecturer, and publisher. She published a monthly magazine, The
Forerunner, writing the contents of each issue herself, down to the
advertising copy. The Forerunner reflected Gilman's wide-ranging
interests in feminism, politics, socialist economics, and history, and Gilman
serialized several works of fiction in its pages. Herland, a
utopian novel in which a trio of modern men discovers a lost country populated
entirely by women, appeared in the magazine in 1915.
Herland is part of a long tradition of utopian fiction, a tradition
stretching all the way back to Plato's Republic. In a utopian work,
an imaginary country, usually one discovered or described by the narrator, serves as
an example of an “ideal” political and social state and is contrasted with an actual
earthly society. The genre takes its name from Thomas More's classic
Utopia (1516), the title of which means “nowhere” in Greek. Many
later fictional utopias are satirical, using the imaginary land to represent the
worst aspects of society. Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels
(1726) is perhaps the best example of such a satirical utopia.
In the twentieth century, an extreme form of the negative utopia appeared,
called the “dystopia,” in which a nightmarish future version of society is shown to
result from certain trends in contemporary culture. The most famous dystopian
fictions are Aldous Huxley's Brave New World (1932) and George
Orwell's 1984 (1948). Toward the end of the nineteenth century, a
great deal of straightforwardly utopian writing appeared, often inspired by
socialist politics. William Morris's News from Nowhere (1890) is
one such leftist utopia, as is Edward Bellamy's Looking
Backward (1896). The science-fiction pioneer H. G. Wells
wrote several similar works.
Herland is one of the most notable examples of this revival of
utopian literature, though it slipped from view after its first publication and was
only rediscovered in the late 1970s. Since then, Gilman's skillful use of the
utopian genre, as well as its humor and sharp feminist analysis, has helped to
solidify her reputation as a major writer. Gilman's work continues to be an
influence on such authors as Ursula K. LeGuin, Marge Piercy, and Margaret Atwood,
each of whom has written fiction in which the conventions of science fiction and
utopian writing are adapted to a feminist critique of society—much as Gilman does so
brilliantly in Herland.
