Charlotte Perkins Gilman's In This Our World and Uncollected Poems

Introduction

xix Introduction C H A R L O T T E PE R K I N S G I L M A N (1860–1935), the most prominent intellectual in the American woman’s movement early in the twentieth century, began her writing career as a poet. Her first collection of verse, entitled In This Our World, was issued in three different editions between 1893 and 1898. While all of Gilman’s later poems appear in her monthly magazine, The Forerunner, (1909–1916) or have been collected in Denise D. Knight’s The Later Poetry of Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1996), complete and accurate versions of Gilman’s early poems are largely inaccessible to modern students of her work. None of the first three editions of In This Our World have been reprinted, and dozens of poems Gilman published have never been collected at all. In This Our World and Uncollected Poems fills this critical gap in Gilman scholarship. • Charlotte Anna Perkins was raised in genteel poverty in Providence, Rhode Island. Her father, Frederic Beecher Perkins, a professional librarian, was the nephew of the Unitarian minister Henry Ward Beecher and the writer Harriet Beecher Stowe. Her mother, Mary Westcott Perkins, was also the descendant of a distinguished New England family. Her parents’ marriage ended in separation and eventual divorce. Charlotte Perkins briefly attended the Rhode Island School of Design in 1878–1879 and while still living in Providence befriended Grace Ellery Channing, the granddaughter of William Ellery Channing, founder of the American Unitarian Church. Though she harbored grave doubts about her adaptability to marriage, she wed the artist Charles Walter Stetson in May 1884. But “something” went “wrong from the first,” as she later allowed.1 The “immutable submission” required of “dutiful house-wives bred rebellion in me.”2 She framed her predicament in the poem “In Duty Bound,” published in the Boston Woman’s Journal, four months before the wedding: xx | Introduction In duty bound, a life hemmed in Whichever way the spirit turns to look; No chance of breaking out, except by sin; Not even room to shirk— Simply to live, and work.3 The marriage became even more complicated with the birth of their daughter, Katharine, in March 1885. Gilman suffered a severe case of postpartum depression. To the duties of wife were added those of mother, and Gilman collapsed under the weight. Her self-reproach was unequivocal: “You were called to serve humanity,” she wrote in her memoir, “and you cannot serve yourself. No good as a wife, no good as a mother, no good for anything. And you did it to yourself!”4 She dramatized her plight in the third part of her poem “The Answer,” printed in the Woman’s Journal in early October 1886: A maid was asked in marriage. Wise as fair, She gave her answer with deep thought and prayer, Expecting, in the holy name of wife, Great work, great pain, and greater joy, in life. She found such work as brainless slaves might do, By day and night, long labor, never through; Such pain—no language can her pain reveal; It had no limit but her power to feel; Such joy—life left in her sad soul’s employ Neither the hope nor memory of joy.5 In the spring of 1887 Charlotte Stetson traveled to Philadelphia to be treated for neurasthenia by the nerve specialist S. Weir Mitchell, renowned for his “rest cure” for women. She was “put to bed and kept there” for weeks, an experience on which she later based her now-famous story “The Yellow Wall-Paper.” The regimen did not work. At the nadir of her illness, as she recalled, “I made a rag baby, hung it on a doorknob and played with it. I would crawl into remote closets and under beds—to hide from the grinding pressure of that profound distress.”6 Finally, in the fall of 1887, Charlotte and Walter Stetson agreed to separate and later to divorce. Gilman eked out a living in California for most of the next eight years and tried to provide for her daughter, Katharine. Her divorce was finalized in April 1894, and the following month she sent Katharine across the continent I N T RODUC T ION | xxi to live with Stetson and his new wife, her longtime friend Grace Ellery Channing . She ever after referred to Grace as her “co-mother,” a “second mother...