Restraining Order: The Imperialist Anti-Violence of Charlotte Perkins Gilman

KRISTIN CARTER-SANBORN Restraining Order: The Imperialist Anti-Violence of Charlotte Perkins Gilman Power is a familiar growth — Not foreign — not to be — Beside us like a bland Abyss In every company — Emily Dickinson <$(£~\7?? see, they had . . . no wars. They had . . . no kings, and JL no priests, and no aristocracies. They were sisters" (Herhnd 61). As sisters, the denizens of Charlotte Perkins Gilman's novel Herhnd ostensibly embody a utopia of non-violence, non-hierarchy, and, as a result, an unparalleled level of cultural fertility and social concord. It should net be surprising that Herland, which had not seen the light of day since its original 191 5 publication in Oilman's self-produced magazine The Forerunner, was instantly canonized by Anglo-American feminists when a 1979 edition appeared. The novel helped to fulfill two of the central desires of second-wave feminism: Utopian maps of worlds free from male violence and Utopian chronologies of feminist mothers and daughters signaling the continuity of the feminist tradition. But the topographies of Gilman's anti-violent agenda, which American feminism has embraced as its own, reveal a different sort of ideal of continuity, one which embraces the logic of American imperial domination , secured through cool maternal violence.1 Gilman's work, and the body of academic criticism it has spawned, participate in a long history of feminist fantasies about power; in fact, the disavowal of the exercise Arizona Quarterly Volume 56, Number 2, Summer 2000 Copyright © 2000 by Arizona Board of Regents issN 0004-1610 Kristin Carter-Sanbom of power at the heart of her enterprise is part of contemporary AngloAmerican feminism's troubling legacy. If Gilman's feminist anti-violence is not American imperial violence's complement or counterpart, we must see it as that violence's "shadow narrative" (Kaplan, "Left Alone" 4). The contours of its will-to-power correspond closely to those of American political discourse during the era of U.S. hemispheric domination, exemplified by interventions in Cuba, the Philippines, and Panama. Gilman, and Herland map the ways in which empire becomes a way of life (Kaplan, "Left Alone" 14)—not despite Gilman's feminism, but because of it. I. FEMINIST NATURE Most readers of Herland and its sequel, With Her in Ourland, have identified Gilman's main tool to be what Susan Gubar calls the "strategy of role reversal that is central to the feminist rhetorical tradition" (194-95). Thus in Herland we are presented with a pure matriarchy, a society which runs on "Human Motherhood—in full working use," its structuring principle "nothing else except the literal sisterhood of our origin, and the far higher and deeper union of our social growth" (67). The comforts of patriarchy, much to the chagrin of Herland's explorers, three adventurers from the United States, are nowhere in evidence. In their absence, a "woman culture" of unparalleled and, at first, unbelievable accomplishment has arisen, in which the so-called "natural" traits of woman—a coquettish "modesty!,] · ¦ · patience, submissiveness [and] that natural yielding which is woman's greatest charm" (99)—have disappeared in a world free of the male pressures that had determined them, and determinedly naturalized them. In Women and Economics, Gilman had already argued that woman's evolution was arrested by enforced economic dependence, which had led her to overemphasize "sex-distinction," or those feminine charms, of which Herland's male explorers nostalgically speak, at the expense of "higher" modes of interaction (30-39). In Herland, all impediments to such development have been removed. That is, men have been removed. In the absence of men, Gilman is able to imagine a series of developments in human nature that ironically return it to its truer, older modes, even as they advance humanity in the name of modern political movements like feminism. This circularity is present from the begin- Charlotte Perkins Gilman ning of Gilman's attempts to theorize human relations. In Women and Economics, for example, the mainstay ofher thesis is a demonstration of the artificiality of female dependency, which she argues must reflect a political and late-arriving—as opposed to natural and original—set of sexual relations. In her search for what lay behind the artificial constraints of femininity, Gilman turned to sociology, then rooted in biology and evolutionary history, to locate a "natural" meaning for feminine and masculine principles in explanations such as Lester Ward's "Gynaecocentric Theory." In her autobiography, Gilman had proclaimed Ward's theory, developed in Pure Sociology, to be "the greatest single contribution to the world's thought since Evolution" (Liwng 187); an early article of Ward's was one of two works she would cite as a source for her own theories in Women and Economics (Living 259).2 The Gynaecocentric Theory is the view that the female sex is primary and the male secondary in the organic scheme, that originally and normally all things center, as it were, about the female. . . . The theory further claims that the apparent male superiority in the human race and in certain of the higher animals and birds is the result ofspecialization in extra-normal directions due to adventitious causes which have nothing to do with the general scheme. . . . (Ward 296) In other words, the biological female is the "race-type," or that which distinguishes and guides human development. Like Ward and many other scientists and social thinkers of her day (conservatives included), Gilman believed in the historical fact of matriarchy existing "sometime before thinking began" ("Growth" 48). As a result, she could argue that the masculine "sex-instinct," with the "concomitant impulse almost equally dominant—the instinct of combat" (49), was "primitive" at the same time that she asserted the existence of a principle even more rudimentary than the "brutal ferocity of excessive male energy" (119). This more original principle, the "true theory of life," Gilman offered, "is that of Growth, a process quite different from Combat . . ." (13). Women, "in their great cultural work of child-rearing" (77) are the most accomplished adherents of the "theory" of Growth; indeed, growth, as opposed to violence, combat, and gratuitous struggle, most purely expresses femininity, and femininity, conflated universally by Gilman with Kristin Carter-Sanborn motherhood, most purely expresses true humanity itself. "Real living" means, then, obeying the "natural law" of growth, the natural law of Womanhood (332). So the citizens of Herhnd "had no theory of the essential opposition of good and evil; life to them was growth; their pleasure was in growing, and their duty also" (103). The controlled experiment of Herland, like the prescriptive essays, exemplifies Gilman's hopes that Growth, "the great uplifting, outreaching Push of Life [covering ] earth with vegetation, a soft, steady, continuous pouring power" ("Growth" 52) can continue unchecked and the "laws of evolution" that recognize the cultural power of womanhood and enthrone it in its rightful place "do not wait for our recognition or acceptance: they go straight on" (Women 146). She hopes that feminism will assist this flow by bringing "into the world in full representation the essential feminine principle, Motherhood" ("Feminism" 187).3 In one important sense the inevitability of feminism's advent calls into question its status as a political movement at all; in Gilman's vision of modernity as a "purely rational" culmination ofhistory (Laclau 279), political and social agency disappears. Donna Haraway's account of a much later manifestation of sociobiological thought is instructive here; she observes that in promising "like all humanisms, human unity, a real togetherness ofnature beneath the merely verbal icing ofculture" (73), sociobiology accounts for will, freedom or agency as a kind of categorical imperative: "in the end freedom is doing what we really want to do, and that is revealed by listening to the voice within, interpreted in the patriline of sociobiology" (74). Gilman consciously intends to break into that patriline of biological imperative with her maternalist fantasy of human production, and indeed, as Haraway has recommended , Gilman intends to refigure the human as a site of production, not reproduction. Yet, Gilman's account of violence finally prevents her from breaking from a traditional account of the imperative and imperial will of scientific humanism's "higher animal." In foreclosing both violence and social agency (each a break with nature), her Utopian human history has guaranteed the identification of the one with the other. The congeniality of this identification for contemporary feminist discourse is both a red flag and an opportunity. On the one hand, it provides an occasion for a systematic acknowledgment of the way power and exclusionary discourse produce and maintain even feminist accounts Charlotte Perkins Gilman of the subject, and on the other, it suggests a new project: the development of what Diane Elam calls "specifically feminist models of power and tradition" (64). II. FEMINIST FANTASIES Many critics have seen liberating potential in Herland's fervent embrace of the natural and moral primacy of the "female," the "once and future queen" (Gubar 192) whose stature refutes men's long-held stereotypes of womanhood. Laura E. Donaldson goes so far as to claim that Gilman's novel is infused with "an anti-canonic spirit which recognizes the arbitrariness and conventionality of all 'normative' patterns," especially those of gender relations (377). Gubar similarly argues that as a "satire of inversion," Gilman's Utopian fantasy "seeks to call into question the idea that there is or can be or should be a single definition of what constitutes the female" (193, 194). And indeed, a great deal of Herhnd is taken up with the identification of the trappings of "false" femininity, including hysteria, petty jealousy and an obsession with worthless ornamentation and constrictive dress. However, many of the same scholars who valorize the deconstructive aspects of Gilman's Utopian vision have also embraced unquestioningly Gilman's articulation of the "feminine" with the "non-violent," and have explicitly associated it with an anti-imperialist bent that they would claim as feminism's own. This critical approach ranges violence, hierarchy, imperialism and masculinity against peace, egalitarianism, nurture, and femininity, and sees in Herhnd a pure example of the latter set ofterms. Carol Pearson, for example, avows that "violence, coupled with a desire to master others, is antithetical to a feminist Utopian vision," and summarizes the plot of Herhnd as follows: "two male explorers see the evil of their ways and embrace a nonviolent, noncompetitive, equalitarian ethic" (Ó4).4 In this reading, Terry's attempted rape of his new Herlander wife Alima, who along with her sisters has not gotten quite used to the idea of heterosexual reproduction, is "an act which represents all the violence, brutality, and abuse of power of the dominant society whose values Terry cannot release" (Berkson 108).5 Gubar suggests that Herhnd constitutes an explicit critique of turn-of-the-century imperialism , arguing that the text cites and confronts the misogyny ofHaggard's Kristin Carter-Sanborn and Kipling's "imperialist romance" (192), and in so doing lays bare the female "dispossession that valorize[s] colonization as a metaphor of female socialization" (199).6 But the acknowledged presence of an imperialist discourse in Gilman 's work raises an interesting problem for her readers, one that has not been sufficiently examined. One of the projects of Herhnd, in correcting our misconceptions about the "normality" of the female, is to naturalize a new pattern of social relations that shares key traits with American imperial relations in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Gilman's "adversarial" feminism is in fact grounded in a historically specific discourse of nativism and "informal empire," which Kaplan describes as the "desire for total control disentangled from direct political annexation" ("Romancing" 662)—a post-continental empire of influence, founded not only on violent but also technological intervention, like that which created the Panama Canal. Many readers have already acknowledged Gilman's peculiar brand of nativism, even before the publication of Susan Lanser's polemical account of the "yellow peril" rhetoric hidden in Gilman's wallpaper. It goes without saying that the nativism itself was not unusual for Gilman 's time. But the muted assertion that her biases "inevitably limit and scar her theoretical work" (Lane 255) is typical of a tendency on the part of Gilman critics to see her feminism as merely weakened, "complicated" or "undercut" by racism, and to insist that we shift our focus onto what is affirmative about her writing, in spite of the "negative " implications of her thinking about race.7 What is typically ignored in this sort of reading is the particular way in which the shape of Gilman's racist attitudes inform her feminist project of civilizing. Following Homi Bhabha, then, I would like to shift the conversation "from the identification of images as positive or negative, to an understanding of the processes of subjectification made possible (and plausible) through . . . discourse" (67). In other words, I want to focus on the connections between Gilman's white supremacist feminism, her particular version offeminist mothering, production, and tradition, and her more general attraction to the forms ofdomination associated with imperialism. Thomas Gait Peyser has begun to explore this attraction, observing that Gilman's racial metaphysics "participate ... in the essentializing of race that underwrote the imperialist ventures of European powers" (10). Gilman's rhetoric is one of the more interesting and complex ex- Charlotte Perkins Gilman amples of the well-documented tendency of "woman movement" advocates to demand entrance into the civilization of men on explicitly racist grounds. In Manliness and Civilisation, for instance, Gail Bederman examines the ways that Gilman's "gynaecocentric" feminism, which positions woman as the originary norm and man as the extra-normal (154), the aberration, is underwritten by a firm sense that the female "race-type" (146) is Anglo-Saxon. Her racial status is made all the more salient by her male counterpart's fall—Gilman does not label men's violence, sexual aggression, and insistence on ostentatious self-expression "primitive" by coincidence. As Bederman observes, it is by association with the atavism of the racial other that Gilman indicts the degeneracy of white men (142-45, 156). I want to take Bederman's and Peyser's analyses a step further, however, and note the ways in which the anti-violent position implicit in this account of degeneracy itself disavows collective and individual will at the same time it rejects violence , a process which allows violence to make a symptomatic, unacknowledged return in Gilman's discourse. The anti-violent vectors of Gilman's feminist fantasy participate in an imperial enterprise that has violence, both discursive and literal, at its core. This violence begins, ironically, with the stillness of Gilman's vision—its self-reproducing homogeneity.8 The magnetic attraction of stasis in Herhnd is the key to our understanding of Gilman's position, for it speaks to her investment in control, order, and a radically disembodied agency. Gilman's work obsessively returns to and then disavows tAvo key figures of physical embodiment: ingestion and expulsion, those life-processes around which so much of her work is implicitly centered. Gilman's uneasy engagement with these processes is necessitated in part by her enmeshment in the discourse of late-nineteenthand early-twentieth-century sociobiology, with its post-Darwinian commitment to a synchronic and diachronic hierarchy ofthe natural world. Her interest in the implications of these hierarchies can be found in work dating from Women and Economics, where Gilman's main point is that the marked "sex-distinctions," or ingrained patterns of female dependency and male dominance noted among the advanced "human animal ," are not in evidence among other "advanced species": herd animals in their natural habitat, for example, or "the breeding salmon," or "higher carnívora" (45). Even "lower animals" like birds do not exhibit this behavior. In fact, the "sex-distinction" maintained by the human Kristin Carter-Sanbom animal, she asserts, is "unparalleled in the organic world" (5); one has to go back into pre-history to find evidence of and use for it. In The Man-Made World, then, Gilman proposes to focus on our human , as opposed to "sexual" characteristics, in order to demonstrate the speciousness of differentiating and judging based on the latter. Delineating a hierarchy of species naturally leads for her to the specification of hierarchies within species—that is, of race-distinctions. In this context , it is worth quoting at length her answers to the question, "In what way is the human species distinguished from all other species?" Our humanness is seen most clearly in three main lines: it is mechanical, psychical, and social. Our power to make and use things is essentially human; we alone have extra-physical tools. We have added to our teeth the knife, sword, scissors, mowing machine; to our claws the spade, harrow, plough, drill, dredge. We are a protean creature, using the larger brain power through a wide variety of changing weapons. This is one of our main and vital distinctions. Ancient animal races are traced and known by mere bones and shells, ancient human races by their buildings, tools, and utensils. That degree of brain development which gives us the human mind is a clear distinction of race. The savage who can count to a hundred is more human than the savage who can count to ten. More prominent than either of these is the social nature of humanity. We are by no means the only group-animal; that ancient type of industry the ant, and even the well-worn bee, are social creatures. But insects of their kind are found living alone. Human beings never. Our human-ness begins with some low form of social relation and increases as that relation develops. Human life of any sort is dependent upon . . . "mutual aid," and human progress keeps step absolutely with that interchange ofspecialized services which make society organic. The nomad, living on cattle as ants live on theirs [sic], is less human than the farmer, raising food by intelligently applied labor; and the extension of trade and commerce, from mere village market-places to the world-exchanges of today, is extension of human-ness as well. (15-16) Charlotte Perkins Gilman Note that what is left out of the "three lines" of modern human development —the psychical, the mechanical, the social—is precisely physical, animal embodiment. Bill Brown's examination of science fiction during the period 1910-1915 might be of some use here in understanding exactly what Gilman imagines her distance from animal and human ancestors to be. Brown's reading of the genre reveals what he calls the "prosthetic" logic of modernity, in which the American masculine body is restored to wholeness by means of imperialist technology , as opposed to colonialist violence. His model for this is the construction of the Panama Canal, which was opened for business just one year before Gilman published Herhnd. The completion of the Canal itself was thought of as resolving an international conflict with clear U.S. hemispheric domination . But this resolution, it should be emphasized, depended foremost on capital investment, the diplomatic system (however scandalous), labor management, and technological knowhow —not the sort of manliness that supposedly characterized the triumph over Spain. With the support of the United States, Panama's revolution had succeeded without casualties; work on the canal succeeded as a triumph of American artifice. ( 141 ) This prosthetic triumph of imperialism, in which global space is artificially collapsed or American interests are artificially expanded (since we're no longer talking about territory, but markets), seems matched to the description of human advancement Gilman offers in Man-Made Worh. For Gilman the social machinery of Herland, technologically advanced as it is, is the prosthesis of a calm, pure, white womanly imperative , an imperative whose somatic incarnation is a sign of evolutionary advancement, not atavistic ties. Embodiment, she implies, is merely a prosthetic extension of the social and intellectual, a substitute tool, as the drill or dredge is for the tooth or claw. Unlike the lower animal orders, that are by this logic reduced to the nomadic and monadic necessities of ingestion and expulsion, humans at their best have evolved into imperial phantasms (quite comfortable ones, with wash-and-wear haircuts and non-binding clothes), minds and wills with bodies that are merely prosthetic, and certainly not animal—although they remain as symptoms of natural law.9 In her articulation of feminism with non-violence, Gilman indulges ??Kristin Carter-Sanbom an imperial fantasy—and not only or even mainly because she makes her claims for non-violence on a racist basis. If, as Gubar argues, Herland 's system of reproduction, parthenogenesis, represents an escape from the historical "pains and pressures produced from motherhood's status as a political institution in patriarchyf, including] male dispensation of birth control and abortion, the economic dominance of the father and the usurpation of the birth process by a male medical establishment " (197), then it is an escape which itself fetishizes control and indeed, dominance over both production ("culture" or "labor," in Haraway 's terms) and reproduction ("nature"). The colonial paradigm is, after all, the scene par excellence ofprosthetic power: a kind offetishized agency, farmed out by the head or state to be enacted by and on the bodies over which that state rules. Gilman's almost obsessive concern with sexual self-restraint, a concern which crops up in many different places in her work, is a useful way into the issue of domination, for the site of restraint can be said to be marked as at once interior and exterior to the national self.10 Furthermore , this concern takes us into a space where will and action collapse into each other at the moment of restraint—a collapse which, again, can be said to be a paradigmatic moment in the process of colonial and bourgeois subjectification, where the technologies of power have become so efficient as to become invisible to both their subjects and objects. With the notion of self-restraint, Gilman begins to map the feminist body, even as she means for her imperialist topographies ultimately to replace that body. Unfortunately for Gilman, the physical body keeps returning to trouble her discourse. Gilman's logic of restraint resolves itself into frozen arrest between ingestion and expulsion. She acknowledges that a body which defies the laws of nature cannot survive; in Women and Economics, she ironically notes that "the power of the individual will to resist natural law is well proven by the life and death of the ascetic. In any one of diose suicidal martyrs may be seen the will, misdirected by the ill-informed intelligence , forcing the body to defy every natural impulse,-—even to the door ofdeath, and through it" (1). On the other hand, the natural outcome , so to speak, of ingestion—excretion or expulsion—distresses her. First of all, it implies inefficiency. A perfect economy, like that of Herland , consumes and converts all resources, with no waste, into productive , energetic, useful people. The bodies of these people, then, are so Charlotte Perkins Gilman1 1 closely allied with natural processes that their embodiment, ironically, disappears, transforming into something like the "fabric" of society, the "principle" of growth, the "spirit" of production. The ideal feminist, then, is a bodiless agent, who disavows her agency by disowning her body, or living in prosthetic relation to it. But obstacles to this prosthetic economy appear—the shit on the sidewalk, so to speak, sign and symbol of an inefficient, imperfect creature , tied to a dark animal history. Even Herland, finally, has to face up to the consequences of ingestion. The thing ingested does obstruct, and something must be expelled; at the end of the novel, the would-be rapist, Terry, is summarily exiled from Herland. This expulsion in some ways provides the only narrative drama of a text that is, after all, really about the careful maintenance of stasis. But it is a costly strategy for Gilman, as it also allows the return of female agency, for which masculine violence and excess is only a symptom. III. FEMINIST FAMILY PLANNING In Women and Economics, Gilman argues that The moral quality of monogamous marriage depends on its true advantages to the individual and society. If it were not the best form of marriage for our racial good, it would not be right. All the way up, from the promiscuous horde of savages, with their miscellaneous matings, to the lifelong devotion of romantic love social life has been evolving a type of sex-union best suited to develope [sic] and improve the individual and the race. This is an orderly process, and a pleasant one. ... (26) The sex-instinct, in her view, should be subordinate to the naturally moral mandate inherent in reproduction. Elsewhere, she rails against the "High Priestess of 'Female' Feminism" ("The Conflict" 291 ), Ellen Key, whose position on the political uses of Motherhood is indistinguishable from Gilman's except on the pivotal point of sexual desire. As Nancy Cott has observed, Key claimed that women's true fulfillment was . . . intrinsically bound to the nurturance expressed in maternity—just as nineteenth -century conventions had it—but she broke through 1 2 Kristin Carter-Sanbom the Victorian separation between motherhood and female eroticism and linked "motherliness" to heterosexual desire, itself sacred and self-validating. She argued that women should be free to form love relationships and should be able to end marriages which did not bring them sexual satisfaction. . . . Key repudiated the concept of illegitimate birth and championed unwed mothers. (46) The logical, if fantastic, end to Gilman's rejection of sexual desire is the parthenogenetic society of Herlanders, whose pure and only pleasure comes from "a fully awakened motherhood" (103)." That awakening , or conception, is described as a "period of utter exaltation—the whole being is uplifted and filled with a concentrated desire for that child" (71). Significantly, the novel lacks for any description of the process by which that child is born. We might be tempted to associate Gilman's principle of Growth, of the great "outreaching Push of Life" ("Growth" 52) with that other early phase of motherhood: the protracted , painful activity of labor and delivery. But parturition seems to take place, in Herland, in a body without resistance, without pain, in defiance of the "Hebrew" Bible's mandates (Herhnd 113). Once out, "from the first memory, [babies] knew Peace, Beauty, Order, Safety, Love, Wisdom, Justice, Patience, and Plenty" (Herhnd 101). In other words, ¡children meet with no resistance, no interdiction, no obstruction in Gilman's ideal feminist world. The true maternal "labor" in this place is the work of educating these happy babies in the wonders of "a wide, friendly world" which they "knew ... for theirs, from the first" (102). The maternal body has disappeared, offering in its place imperial ownership. It should be clear, then, that Gilman's distaste for "the lowering of standards in sex relations," which she feels is "approaching one of the worst periods in ancient history" (LiVing323), goes beyond mere thralldom to Victorian mores. At the same time that it participates in what Laura Kipnis describes as the "long and complicated history" of the affect of disgust, which operates as a "primary mechanism ofclass distinction , and one that play[s] an important role as an ongoing tool in class hegemony" (377, 378), Gilman's opposition to "free love" feminism is consistent with her ideal of teleological social evolution. If femininity is opposed to violence and struggle, it is, as importantly, opposed to ex- Charlotte Perkins Gilman13 cess; the uplifting "Push of Life," even in its "continuous pouring power," is still "soft, steady" ("Growth" 52)—it is orderly, gradual, necessary and sufficient. Its necessity or imperative, indeed, seems to be the source of femininity's power for Gilman. In contrast to this sort of "power," Gilman sets out to prove in Herland, With Her in Ourhnd, and essays such as "Growth and Combat" that masculine violence is vestigial : gratuitous, or worse, adventitious. Expressions of violence are not in keeping with evolutionary mandates, and it follows, are in excess of them.12 Laura Donaldson has argued that Herland "offers a carnivalesque inversion which questions any social structure based on hierarchy or opposition " and undermines what Donaldson identifies as the traditional or hegemonic mode of Utopian writing, that is, "monology" or "extreme narrative stasis" ("Eve" 375, 374). But the sheer orderliness of Herland, perhaps best symbolized by the absolute cultivation of the countryside ("Here was evidently a people highly skilled, efficient, caring for their country as a florist cares for his costliest orchids" [20]) makes the Bakhtinian carnivalesque a particularly inappropriate theoretical paradigm for understanding Gilman's work (except as a way into Gilman's aversion to the "lower" modes of life). Like her careful florists, Gilman methodically re-centers a very narrow and (as she herself would readily admit) a very old notion of femininity—womanhood as motherhood. While she broadens the definition of motherhood to include all civic, educational, and industrial institutions, it is still with an eye toward reestablishing an ancient "Gynaecocentric" imperative. In Herland, this means that the rearing of children organizes all social, emotional and spiritual energy, just as feminism, advancing that "essential feminine principle, Motherhood," will mean a "wider organization of our economic , educational, religious and political life" ("Feminism" 187). As their guide Moadine tells the three male sojourners, "The children in this country are the one center and focus ofall our thoughts. Every step of our advance is always considered in its effect on them—on the race" (67). This motherhood-as-citizenship has resulted in a civilization unparalleled in achievement because all expenditure of effort is constructive and useful; unlike gratuitous violent combat, "culture wastes nothing , and improves all" ("Growth" 77), creating what Bakhtin calls the "classical body"—or what Kipnis describes as "a refined, orifice-less, laminated surface." (376). 1 4 Kristin Carter-Sanborn The Rabelaisian world of excrement, blood, semen, and other effluvia has been left far behind. From the outset, Gilman assiduously distinguishes between the waste-free civilization of Herland and the surrounding South American countryside, which is described variously as a "dark tangle of rivers, lakes, morasses and dense forests" (4), and "a desperate tangle of wood and water and a swampy patch we never should have found our way across alone" (6). Traveling through "marshy" countryside, the three explorers eventually come upon "firmer" ground, as they start up the foothills of the mountain range where they will eventually discover the jewel of Herland hidden (6). In contrast to the swampy jungle, evoked in a vocabulary of illegibility and heterogeneity , Gilman renders Herland itself as "a land in a state of perfect cultivation, where even the forests looked as if they were cared for; a land that looked like an enormous park, only it was even more evidently an enormous garden" (13). The citizens of Herland are so far removed , in their cultivation, from the "savagery of the occupants of those dim forests below" that they "had inferred (marvelously keen on inference and deduction their minds were!) the existence and development of civilization in other places, much as we infer it on other planets " (65). This orderliness is associated with race itself: Van avows that "there is no doubt in my mind that these people were of Aryan stock, and were once in contact with the best civilization of the old world. They were 'white,' but somewhat darker than our northern races because of their constant exposure to sun and air" ( 55-56). The civilization ofwoman, then, has two closely related functions. It is an antidote to the violence and disorderliness of "poison-arrow savages " (144), and it is the source of their connection with orderliness the world over. This connection is a coupling which reproduces colonial power; it is a royal marriage of sorts. As Thomas Peyser notes, it is only because the explorers share an "Aryan" background with the Herlanders that they can make a suitable match witii them (11); even so, Van observes, We did not yet appreciate the differences between the racemind of this people and ours. In the first place, they were a "pure stock" of two thousand uninterrupted years. Where we have some long connected lines of thought and feeling, together with a wide range of differences, often irreconcilable, Charlotte Perkins Gilman15 these people were smoothly and firmly agreed on most of the basic principles of their life; and not only agreed in principle, but accustomed for these sixty-odd generations to act on those principles. (Herhnd 122) The "often irreconcilable" differences to which Van refers are explicated in With Her in Ourhnd by his new wife, Ellador, who comments on America's recent population explosion: "You couldn't wait to grow, you just—swelled. . . . You have stuffed yourself with the most illassorted and unassimilable mass of human material that ever was held together by artificial means" (153). The United States is figured as a goutish body that ingests uncontrollably, with no means ofexcretion— a dark parody of the ethereally pregnant Herlander. Ellador suggests that the cure for American's indiscriminate overindulgence is racial and ideological homogeneity: You go to England, and the people are English. Only three per cent, of aliens even in London, I understand. And in France the people are French—bless them! And in Italy, Italian. But here—it's no wonder I was discouraged at first. . . . Just look! Here you were, a little band of really promising people, of different nations, yet of the same general stock, and like-minded— that was the main thing. The real union is the union of idea; without that—no nation. You made settlements, you grew strong and bold, you shook off the old government, you set up a new flag, and then—! (153-54) Referring to the present influx of immigrants to the United States from southern and eastern European countries, an influx which continued to horrify Gilman to her dying day, Ellador gently scolds Van, "It never occurred to you that die poor and oppressed were not necessarily good stuff for a democracy."13 She goes on to suggest that this is because poverty and oppression may reflect essential racial characteristics: "Why, Van, it is the poor and oppressed who make monarchy and despotism— don't you see that? . . . Surely you see that the general status and character of a people creates and maintains its own kind of government?" (153-54)· Conducted as they travel the world outside Herland, the dialog between Van and Ellador about democracy and assimilation provides a 16 Kristin Carter-Sanborn revealing glimpse into the workings of the feminist imperial machinery that Gilman imagines. Democracy, Ellador announces, "is a psychic relation ," and America's heretofore indiscriminate application of its principles belies the fact that democracy requires the intelligent conscious co-operation of a great many persons all 'equal' in the characteristics required to play that kind of a game. You could have safely welcomed to your great undertaking people of every race and nation who were individually fitted to assist. Not by any means because they were 'poor and oppressed,' nor because of that glittering generality that 'all men are born free and equal,' but because the human race is in different stages of development, and only some [of] the races—or some individuals in a given race—have reached the democratic stage. (155) "But how could we discriminate?" Van exclaims (155)- It appears on the surface that Ellador then "changes the subject" (Lanser 431), for she answers Van, "you people talk a good bit about the Brotherhood of Man, but you haven't seemed to think about the possibilities of a sisterhood of women" (With Her 155). But as an answer to the question, "how could we discriminate," the "sisterhood of woman" is far from a simple non sequitur. Ellador goes on to describe her plan for easing the pains of the foreign influx in explicitly maternal terms: "Legitimate immigration is like the coming of children to you,—new blood for the nation , citizens made, not born. And they should be met like children, with loving welcome, with adequate preparation, with the fullest and wisest education for their new place . . ." (155). Ellador would institutionalize this maternal gesture, to "definitely Americanize the newcomers , to teach them the language, spirit, traditions and customs of the country. Talk about offering hospitality to all the world!" (156).M Significantly excluded from Ellador's hospitality are all those whom she deems completely unassimilable (those "illegitimate" immigrants); the naturalizing machinery Gilman imagines opposes the missionary model that Karen Sánchez-Eppler has demonstrated is coincident with American expansionism, in which "the succor the mission school promises to bring to a half-civilized, homeless, and decidedly alien [population ] is not one that fully extinguishes otherness" (404). It's all or nothing for Gilman; her maternal naturalization service resembles nothing Charlotte Perkins Gilman? ? so much as a macrobiotic diet, administered only after other, perhaps harsher methods—a series of national and nationalist high-colonies?— have cleansed us ofother "detritus," leaving a "waste-free" culture much like that of the homogeneous and ultra-efficient Herland. Gilman's methods for distinguishing the assimilable from the excessive can be gleaned from "A Suggestion on the Negro Problem," published in The AmericanJournal of Sociology in 1908. There, Gilman tries to determine the answer to the question "What can we do to promote the development of the backward race so that it may become an advantageous member of the community?" (178). She points out that We have to consider the unavoidable presence of a large body of aliens, of a race widely dissimilar and in many respects inferior , whose present status is to us a social injury. If we had left them alone in theit own country this dissimilarity and inferiority would be, so to speak, none ofour business. There are other races, similarly distinguished, whose special standing in racial evolution does not embarrass us; but in this case it does. (176— 77) Gilman cheerfully proposes to help the "backward race" achieve a level of evolution by organizing "in every county and township an enlisted body of all negroes below a certain grade of citizenship"—"this proposed organization is not enslavement, but enlistment," she hastens to add ( 1 79). With a program of education and training for labor useful to the state, a level of efficiency will evolve which will pass to the next generation, thus arresting the "lowering process" which would otherwise occur (179). Gilman's understanding of the relationship between social engineering and Darwinism leads her to conclude that "this is not a question of 'equality' in any sense." If society is an organism, it is one that reinscribes hierarchy at the level of every cell: it is not composed of constituents all alike and equally developed , but most diverse and unequal. It is quite possible to have in a society members far inferior to other members, but yet essential to the life of the whole . . . Our special senses are far "superior" to our meat and bones; yet it is quite essential to the body's life that even its least important parts be healthy. (178) Kristin Carter-Sanborn Gilman's desire to maintain hierarchy in this example is consistent with a Utopian vision that is more invested in nativist equilibrium, the establishment of a national character, than with democratic subversion . She must acknowledge "meat and bones," the sweat of physically laboring bodies, but can only do so by secreting them beneath the "special " senses—which are less senses than sensibilities. In distinguishing the "backward race" as an "organ" which can find its rightful, if lowly place in the hierarchy of the American organism, Gilman means to oppose it to other vestigial or untransplantable organs . She favors the example of "the Jew" when discussing these unassimilable "types." Herland briefly addresses the problem of the "Vengeance -is-mine God" in a woman-centered religious order which professes to have evolved beyond a system of "Hebtew" rettibution (113), but With Her in Ourhnd makes the basis of that critique even more clearly a function of Gilman's distaste for what she saw as the excesses of the "primitive." The "Hebrew," according to Gilman, overindulges certain ancient character traits and prerogatives repellent to the general "American" populace, and this overindulgence has made "the Jew" extraneous, unassimilable to a progressive American state, an orderly re-formation of the world. Ellador asserts that the Jewish people are universally reviled not because of religious differences, but because they are the only surviving people "that have ever tried to preserve the extremely primitive custom of endogenous marriage," when everyone knows an exogenous system is "best" (265). This insistence on retaining old forms is in "defiance of natural law" (265). The Jews remain "static," like the older "Oriental" cultures, and Ellador, channeling Herbert Spencer, goes so far as to say that "the Jewish people seem not to have passed the tribal stage . . . they could not maintain the stage of social organization rightly called a nation. . . . And the more definitely organized peoples have, not a racial, but a sociological aversion to this alien form of life, which is in them, but not of them" (265). Moreover, the "spirit of concentrated pride" Jews have retained over centuries "has given a peculiar intensity to the Jewish character—a sort of psychic inbreeding; they have a condensed spirit, more and more so as time passes, and it becomes increasingly inimical to the diffused spirit of modern races" (267). That is, because the Jew claims one kind of order , based on the purity of race lines and the traceability of those lines to ancient dicta, they cannot be assimilated into another, newer order. Charlotte Perkins Gilman19 The key agent of this new world order is calm, pure, white womanhood , which will colonize the hearts and minds of (most of) the world's citizens, Gilman hopes, as it has the citizens of Herland. The underdeveloped differentiation represented by the "endogenous" Jew or the heterogeneous "savage," on the one hand, and the overdeveloped differentiation of "unnatural sex-distinctions," on the other, will succumb, in the presence ofthat woman, to a unity of impulse and intention, the clear-running river of a single race-blood, the possibility of a purely assimilative body: Herland, or in Gilman's dreams, the United States. This new organization of women will match violence with more efficient methods of control. As the women face down Van and his compatriots after one of their failed escape attempts, he admits, "It was no use to fight. These women evidently relied on numbers, not so much as a drilled force but as a multitude actuated by a common impulse" (Herhnd 44). Gilman seems aware that she has happened on a tenuous border between creepy bug armies and well-trained mother-corps when she has Terry and Jeff argue about "the large good will and smooth management which ordered everything" in Herland. "Life is struggle, has to be," [Terry] insisted. "If there is no struggle, there is no life—that's all." "You're talking nonsense—masculine nonsense," the peaceful Jeff replied. He was certainly a warm defender of Herland. "Ants don't raise their myriads by a struggle, do they? Or the bees?" "Oh, if you go back to the insects—and want to live in an anthill—! I tell you the higher grades of life are reached only through struggle—combat. There's no Drama here." (ioo)15 Gilman struggles to make clear that parthenogenesis in Herland has not led to any kind of monstrous devolutionary cloning; the women's appearance is not "as alike as so many ants or aphids"; nevertheless, "physically they were more alike than we, as they lacked all morbid or excessive types" (78). The "lowest types," in fact, have been "bred out" through a process of "negative eugenics," whereby unfit women are encouraged to "renounce motherhood" (83); as a result, where the men "had expected hysteria, [they] found a standard of health and vigor, a calmness of temper, to which the habit of profanity, for instance, was 20Kristin Carter-Sanbom impossible to explain" (82). Physical equanimity slides ineffably into social order, an automatic, naturalized restraint of the body as both imperial subject and object. Ultimately, Van observes that the daughters of Herland "compared with the average in our country as the most perfectly cultivated, richly developed roses compare with—tumbleweeds. Yet they did not seem 'cultivated' at all—it had all become a natural condition" (73). Years of feminine civilization have raised the mean, but narrowed the standard deviation as well. Just as the hierarchy of species that Gilman was so careful to set up begins to collapse with the infestation of "uncanny . . . bug mother[s]" (Zwinger 74), her imperial topography is marred by the annoying persistence of the Jew. What, after all, could be the difference between the "psychically inbred" Hebrew and the racially homogenetic Herlander I just described? A simple answer would be, "the Herlander isn't Jewish." And indeed, Gilman's vision is nothing if not tautological. But what is more interesting to me is the story of modern political agency Gilman ends up telling in this account. Gilman's "Jew" is, to his infinite misfortune , political. His sin is inimicality: a hostility to natural history, a refusal to participate in a teleological unfolding. In Gilman's ideally organized world, where "nothing is wasted," this natural unfolding means that the space between knowledge and action, what we might call politics or agency, has also been narrowed. In fact it has become so naturalized as to nearly disappear: "The Herland religion was like the manners of a true aristocrat, a thing unborn and inbred. It was the way they lived. They had so clear and quick a connection between conviction and action that it was well nigh impossible for them to know a thing and not do it" (With Her 8). The non-violence of the women is directly related to their homogeneity of impulse, which manifests the "full peace of mind" that comes from allowing oneself to become indistinguishable from a force of nature, and is reproduced and narrowed over centuries. Again, action is figured as non-action, as self-exhortation or restraint. As the citizens "lost all interest in deities of war and plunder, [they] gradually centered on their Mother Goddess altogether," eventually settling on what Van calls a "Maternal Pantheism": "Here was Mother Earth, bearing fruit. AU that üSey ate was fruit of motherhood, from seed or egg or their product. By motherhood they were born and by motherhood they lived—life was, to them, just the long cycle of motherhood" (Herhnd 61). The worship and enactment of Mother- Charlotte Perkins Gilman21 hood, the purest manifestation of the Growth theory, leaves no place for violence, as it leaves no place for patriarchy: "You see, they had had no wars. They had had no kings, and no priests, and no aristocracies. They were sisters, and as they grew, they grew together—not by competition , but by united action" (61 ). The women's true nature is not only expressed in their orderly genes, and their orderly behavior, but in their impulse to organize those around them. Ellador's ordering impulse, for instance, provides With Her in Ourhnd with most of its didactic plot. The reader accompanies Ellador on a tour of the world's nations, whose perspective provides the reader with a hermeneutic model lifted from American imperialist taxonomy.16 Of the world's varied populations, Ellador says, "I must get them placed—so that I can understand what each nation is for, what they have done for one another, and for the world; which of them are going on, and how fast; which of them are stopping—or sinking back—and why" (43). Ellador 's "supreme femininity" enables her to "sheer [sic] . . . through the tangled facts with . . . sharp distinction" (69); with the evidence of her own experience she can read the true meanings into events heretofore misinterpreted under the rubric of patriarchal self-interest. IV. THE SECRET AGENT In several essays, including "Growth and Combat" and The ManMade World, Gilman contrasts the homogeneity oforderly impulse with the disorder and confusion resulting from miscegenation. Even more significantly, and consistent with the representation of the Herlander's agency in the above account, she also contrasts the unified impulse with choice itself: People who are mainly of a homogeneous stock, living uninterruptedly in the same environment, taught in succeeding generations the same ideas and convictions, act in a simple and consistent manner without waste offorce. Others ofsharply mixed stock, as Eurasians, those who have been plunged into a strange and fluctuating environment or who have adopted new ideas, at variance with old tendencies, find conduct a matter of more difficulty, requiring choices, and never resulting in full peace of mind. ("Growth" 304) Kristin Carter-Sanborn Gilman has constructed a world in which the difference that results from an insistence on the individuality of embodiment, oferotic choice, can only be read as excess, as "waste." Similarly, in Herhnd, men manifest an unnatural willfulness, unresponsive to reason or "evidence," often resulting in violence. The main representative of this is Terry, whom Gilman characterizes as a man of hasty action and hastier conclusions. When Van, Terry and Jeff are first surrounded by the women of Herland, Terry decides immediately that violent resistance is all that will do. "Now for a rush, boys!" he shouts, "And if we can't break 'em, I'll shoot in the air" (25). Throughout, Gilman has Terry articulate what she has identified as the classic masculine modus operandi, that "life is struggle" and war, "human nature" (With Her 11). Terry's "sex-instinct," as overwrought and uncontrollable as his temper, is a function of this Combat Theory, which sees all the world as conquerable territory. G. J. Barker-Benfteld's reflections on the "spermatic economy" of nineteenth-century définitions of manhood are instructive here: "the way in which a man handled the intimate economic relation between mind and body was seen to be continuous with the way he handled money, specifically debt and expenditure"; the "easiest and most dangerous 'abuse' threatening a young man's energies ," was his masturbatory ejaculation of sperm ( 1 79). As the explorers approach Herland, Van is convinced that "Terry, in his secret heart, had visions of a sort of sublimated summer resort—just Girls and Girls and Girls. ... I could see it in his eyes as he lay there, looking at the long blue rollers slipping by, and fingering that impressive mustache of his" (Herhnd 9). In nineteenth-century gestural symbolism, of course, the stroking of facial hair marks Terry as an onanist; Gilman thus seals his and the voyeuristic Van's fate as the most wasteful of all creatures in her self-restrained universe. Terry's instincts, mastutbatory or otherwise, are excessive, misplaced , and unnatural. Gilman admits that in lower life forms, "the law of sex-combat holds; the males compete, the female selects, and the race is advantaged thereby. Here we have the natural origin, use, and limit of the instinct of combat. It is part of masculinity, a normal and orderly part, quite right and useful in its place. Its limitations are sharply defined" ("Growth" 49). But for our civilized selves, "the instinct and practice of sex-combat is out of date" and should be allowed to evolve away (49). "Since we can all serve ourselves, one another, Charlotte Perkins Gilman23 and posterity in a thousand varied social processes, there is no longer any biological necessity for the cruel waste of masculine life which slaughters the unused drones by thousands" (50). Terry, with his tendency to violence and his oversexed ways, becomes a threat to the teleology of Herland, as we see in Gilman's account of the rape attempt. In reconstructing the circumstances surrounding the incident, which ultimately leads to Terry's expulsion from Herland, Van deems it important to speculate that Alima "had a far-descended atavistic trace of more marked femaleness, never apparent till Terry called it out" (130). With the word "femaleness," he distinguishes that degraded historical state from "natural" womanhood, as Gilman had used the phrase "female feminism" to distinguish Ellen Key's politics from her own "human feminism " ("The Conflict" 291 ). The function of Van's observation is twofold : first, it provides evidence of the dangerous effects of violent masculinity on civilization—it has the potential to "call out" the worst in the healthy system it infects. Second, it provides a specific explanation for Alima's desire to see Terry killed in retribution (132); her "cold fury" qualifies her womanliness, and is evidence itself of taint. The other women, as truer mothers, are more unemotional in their response to Terry's outrage—"stern, grave" (133) in the face ofhis vituperation , they determine merely to expel him from Herland. With this response, Gilman offers "maternal authority exercised as restraint" in the place of "male authority exercised as violence" (Miller 192). The idea of "maternal restraint" contains within it two important variants. It could refer to the restraint of others, as when the men are "seized by five women, each holding arm or leg or head [and] lifted like children, straddling helpless children" (Herland 25), or when the women, after casting the judgment of exile on Terry, "tie hand and foot, and then, in sheer pity for his futile rage . . . anesthetize him" (132). More importantly , this ability to control others non-violently, as the good mother might, stems from the other kind of "maternal restraint" structuring Gilman's Utopian text: self-restraint, seen best in the Herlander's response to the imminent problem of overpopulation: And how did those women meet [the population crisis]? Not by a "struggle for existence" which would result in an everlasting writhing mass of underbred people trying to get ahead of one another—some few on top, temporarily, many constantly 24Kristin Carter-Sanborn crushed out underneath, a hopeless substratum of paupers and degenerates, and no serenity or peace for anyone, no possibility for really noble qualities among the people at large. Neithet did they start offon predatory excursions to get more land from somebody else, or to get more food from somebody else, to maintain their struggling mass. Not at all. They sat down in council together and thought it out. Very clear, strong thinkers they were. They said: "With our best endeavors this country will support about so many people, with the standard of peace, comfort, health, beauty, and progress we demand. Very well. That is all the people we will make." (69) Again, the mothers of Herland are united in both standard and action , for "you see, they were Mothers, not in our sense of helpless involuntary fecundity" (69), but in the sense of "Conscious Makers of People." The figure of the restrained and restraining mother represents something of a contradiction: we are presented on the one hand with the ideal agent, a Kantian scientific humanist dealing her irrefutable will, and on the other hand with just the opposite—a non-agent, an ant or aphid who can only enact the inevitable mandates of the "nature " she is possessed by, almost undifferentiated as a subject from it. But any gap between conviction and action is sutured here by the welloiled systems of community in which the women, an army of insect queens, are locked. It is the logic of colonialism as anesthesiology: to anesthetize one's own body is self-restraint; to anesthetize the other, colonialism; working together, they constitute feminist middle-class imperialism. And what of the violence associated with imperialism, which I implied earlier would make its return? "Most of us believe that violence is right—when justified," writes Gilman in 191 2. The occasion for these reflections is news from England of the latest window-smashing campaign waged by the Women's Social and Political Union ("Should Women Use Violence" 213). Whether the English women are justified in using violence, she argues, is the true matter at hand, not whether women and violence are essentially opposed, as pundits had been asserting . Despite this allowance, we have already seen that violence is antithetical to the Growth Theory which orders Gilman's universe, whether it be Herland or her ideal America. But a return to the notion Charlotte Perkins Gilman of "justified" violence will help us make sense ofeven this: Gilman must see room for a violence that fits into the "order" of things. "Justified," "necessary," "required," "natural"—these are all terms we have already seen Gilman apply to behaviors and "traits" that suit her meliorist notion of human development, in which all "extraneous" and "excessive" elements are dismissed. So, for instance, "among all birds and beasts where fighting is part of the business of life, where the care of the family calls for killing, the female kills as readily as the male—and no one blames her for it" ("Should" 215, emphasis added). In this context, Gilman can attribute the "mystic prohibition of any violence on the part of woman" to the excesses of the male himself: "When and where and how arose this masculine theory that women should never use violence ? Does it find any explanation in the fact that ofall male creatures man is the one who uses most violence against the female?" (215). This, then, is the true violence: male excess, disguised as order.17 Our natural protector has used what violence he pleased, throughout our gloomy history, toward the woman he assumed to have been "given him," for may not a man do what he will with his own? Not only by using his own physical force against hers to compel her to his will, but with the help of the accumulating forces of civilization—law, religion, education, public opinion—he has restrained, coerced, condemned and executed women in private and in public. (215-16) Men insist that whim rather than necessity will organize social relations , and mask the force of violence as the "force ... of civilization." Any violent action on the part of women is dwarfed by this unreasonable and unnatural masculine will-to-power; in the above passage, women's violence and, indeed, women themselves disappear. In any case, Gilman is uncomfortable enough with the militant suffragists' violence that she allows "it would be impossible to expect as great a movement as this, involving a change of status for half of the human race ... to avoid all mistakes"; she ultimately vows to reserve judgment (219). Gilman directly inverts the argument of the antisuffragists who associated female violence with chaos and masculine violence with social order, only countenancing female violence when it is contextualized by male aggression: 20Kristin Carter-Sanborn there is no reason whatever why the female of genus homo should not use violence whenever it is necessary, as much as the female of genus canus, felis, cervus, or any other. If the dangerous negroes of the black belt knew that every white woman carried a revolver and used it with skill and effect there would be less lynching indeed. (217) Lurking behind and within Gilman's sunny Herland utopia, then, is the specter of the white woman armed against the "dangerous negro" rapist. She brandishes a gun here not for violence's sake, but to secure racial order. Thus she makes explicit here what was less obvious in Herhnd: that as women's agency, her inimicality "disappears," a colonial machinery which includes the threat of violence comes into view. The image of the warning gun in the white woman's hand—a convenient prosthesis —inevitably returns us to Brown's account of the technological triumphs of imperialism. Gilman's opposition to violence as a sign of disorganization, of deviance of will from way, allows for violence, but one severed from will and "waste." Refusing to recognize itself as an act, that violence must be identified with the imperial dream.18 The latent imperial violence of this orderly disappearance of will finds its expression most clearly, perhaps, in Gilman's description of the etiology of Herlander civilization. Although Gilman proposes that one of the effects of her experiment will be to do away with violence, that vestige of primitive patriarchy, the experiment itself is predicated on the cataclysmic violence of Herland's birth—a literally violent divide accompanies the paradigmatic one the explorers must cross.19 The Herlanders had been, in their pre-history, a "bi-sexual race," but their population is reduced in warfare, and while the army is off defending Herland 's narrow "mountain pathway," a volcano erupts and fills up the pass behind them. Instead of a passage, a new ridge, sheer and high, stood between them and the sea; they were walled in, and beneath that wall lay their whole little army. Very few men were left alive, save the slaves; and these now seized their opportunity, rose in revolt, killed their remaining masters even to the youngest boy, killed the old women too, and the mothers, intending to take possession of the country with the remaining young Charlotte Perkins Gilman27 women and girls. But this succession of misfortunes was too much for those infuriated virgins. There were many of them, and but few of these would-be masters, so the young women, instead of submitting, rose in sheer desperation and slew their brutal conquerors. (56) The imagery ofthis passage presents a paradigm ofdevelopment that has important implications for Gilman's position on violence, colonial order, and the feminine. The birth of Herland reproduces the opening of the Panama Canal. But unlike that continental cut, which helped to open the world market to the U.S. as never before, and ensured the direction ofthat market's flow just as definitively, Gilman's divide isolates her South American world, its passage to the sea disappearing into insurmountable cliffs, and ensures a different kind of fate. These beginnings would seem to remove the Herlanders from the theaters of power as such, to allow them to take up a distinctly anti-colonial, isolationist position. And Gilman's fantasy of beginnings has much in common with a Fanonian process of decolonization, in which "without any period of transition, there is a total, complete, and absolute substitution" (35). It's possible to recognize, then, the Herlander's violent substitution of a female civilization for the male as an act of radical, indeed, of self-constitutive agency, which achieves "that kind of tabuh rasa which characterizes at the outset all decolonization," and which institutes a "new language and a new humanity" (35, 36).20 But this paradigm ofviolent decolonization casts a weird shadow on Gilman's feminist argument . Her "experiment" in matching human will to the organizing principle ofnature—that is, naturalizing will until will disappears—can only succeed under perfectly controlled conditions. In her examination of James Cameron's 1986 film Aliens, Zwinger observes that the Alien Queen and the human protagonist, Ripley, both "mess . . . up . . . gothic/sentimental, human/animal mother boundaries" in myriad ways (83). The Big Bug is as fierce a protector ofher young as Gilman's canus or cervus; Ripley, for her part, does more than her share of non-maternal ass-kicking in that and the other Alien films. "Does this mean that Mother is a bitch?" Zwinger asks. "That the rescuing, nurturing, protective mom is indistinguishable from the aggressive, raging, fierce, scary Mother? And if the lethal virgin and mother are both in actuality aggressive , bloody, bossy, enraged, enraging, fierce, murderous, how are we Kristin Carter-Sanbom going to get out alive?" (83). Gilman's answer is that most of us won't. The sheerness ofher "bland Abyss," like the absoluteness of the infuriated virgins' outrage, serves as violent guarantee of "scientific" control, ensuring as it does that the experiment which unfolds over the next several centuries will do so in gender purity and isolation. The anticolonial beginnings of the Herland experiment thus mask an imperializing tendency within the world of Herland itself; they propose a wholesale replacement of divergent "racial tendencies" with the unitary impulse of white maternal "telic force." In ultimately refusing agency to this "telic force," Gilman fully appropriates the American "masculine" colonial fantasy for her own tale of the white imperial mother.21 By recuperating violence into order and changing its name to motherhood, she reinscribes a discursive link between violence and agency that American feminism is still hard pressed to break or bend. v. coda: leaving herland behind At the beginning of With Her in Ourhnd, Van and his new wife Ellador hop on a biplane and rise "whirring from the level rock on that sheer edge" (61) that separates Herland from the Rest of the World (Herhnd 144). They take one last glimpse of that beautiful land and head for the States, Ellador determined to test her new belief that the world is better for having both men and women in it (With Her 7). With Her in Ourhnd ends, too, with an aerial view; when Ellador returns to Herland with her new knowledge of the ways and needs of men, she stands atop a "high knoll" with Van, first looking back "through the great boughs, [to] a long vista [which] opened to a bright sunlight on the fields below"; and then forward, to "a surprise. The land dropped suddenly, fell to a rocky brink and ended. Dark and mysterious, far beyond , in a horizon-sweeping gloom of crowding jungle lay—the world" (324). Like the subgenre of science fiction to which Herland and With Her in Ourhnd in part belong, this aerial view could be said to "satisf[y] the imperialist longing for form, infinitely extending [the] boundaries [of nation] while containing and taxonomizing the metropolitan jumble " (Brown 138).22 Significantly, the vertiginous glance over the cliff, not the one back at the Elysian fields of Herland, prompts an expansive outpouring of hopefulness from Ellador: Charlotte Perkins Gilman29 "I always wanted to see—to know—to help," she said. "Dear— you have brought me so much! Not only love, but the great new spread of life—of work to do for all humanity." (193) This is the enthusiasm of the imperialist and the feminist. The Herlanders are excited at the prospect of the "new blood" their male explorers represent, but only so far as they can be entirely incorporated, without waste. Terry, the unincorporable, is ejected, and not much is said about it. When Ellador leaves, she is not so much departing Herland as she is expanding the incorporative boundaries of that socius, and of Hetland's mothers themselves. Ellador will eat and think her way through the world, not overstuffing, but perfectly digesting what it offers, in a process that is at once prosthetic and absolutely voracious. Returning to Elam's observation that we feminists still lack viable models for generational transfers of power (64), I would finally argue that Gilman encodes a model for such transfers that has been embraced uncritically : she imagines that feminist teaching can be a perfect reproduction of power and knowledge, with no exit. This closed system is figured by Herland, even when Herland itself opens its doors to the outside world. Gilman's fantasy of a perfectly regenerated world-motherhood appeals , as I began by saying, to a Utopian desire for a coherent and continuous feminist history. I share this desire, on some level, and I appreciate Gilman's attempt to elaborate a feminist program that has as its goal not the liberation of individual desire but of history itself. And yet as I began this project, my own less-than-continuous critical relationship to Gilman felt strangely familiar to me. It echoed, I finally recognized, my position in relation to prior "generations" of academic feminists, who have gone on record resenting my "generation's" engagement with theory, our rejection of a certain definition of sisterhood , our sense that feminism has yet to arrive at a coherent account of its own exclusionary discourses, its real engagement with the technologies of power. Like Devoney Looser, "I am troubled with the notion of imagining my feminist mentors as 'mothers'" (35). Perhaps I am only being a sullen daughter, the Alima of this story. But a feminism that will remain unchanged by the reforms it imagines is not a movement. In "Feminism and a Discontent," Lidia Yukman compares mothering 30Kristin Carter-Sanborn and teaching in a fictional exploration which concludes, addressing the mother/teacher and daughter/student, "You inhabit violently different rooms, even in your common language. There is noticing to do but go on" (172). I am reminded of a poignant story Gilman tells in her autobiography about the early years of motherhood: Katharine and I were living in the Pasadena cottage. She was four. As a baby in a high chair, her dainty accuracy had been notable. Now she entered on a phase of really offensive messing. I used the usual methods ofreasonable appeal, but the misbehavior seemed a stronger impulse than her reason could master. So I set to work to think out the true causation of the desired conduct, and how to enlist her own desire in acquiring it: "What is the real reason I am so anxious she should have good table manners?" It was not far to seek, without them she would be cut off from good society when she was grown. . . . Somehow I must make good table manner the price of desirable society now. The next time she joyfully indulged in unpleasantness, I said: "Excuse me," rose up quietly, with no emotional stress whatever, took my plate and utensils and retired, leaving a conspicuous vacancy. There was no rebuke, no anger, simply a goneness. (Living 158) Gilman is careful to distinguish her method of child-rearing from "discipline " (158); she has not "made" Katharine do anything, merely opened the way for her child to make a natural adaptation. Katharine quickly mends her manners rather than endure her mother's "goneness ." This is, finally, what she does endure, when Gilman decides to give Katharine up, to be raised by Grace Channing and Gilman's former husband, Walter Stetson, but that is not my point (certainly that was one of the bravest and most painful decisions any woman has ever had to make). My point is this: The pretense of a "simple" goneness masks a haunting disavowal of both power and difference. She and her daughter, at the end of this story, do inhabit violently different rooms, and while we indeed must "go on" from there, it cannot be without pausing to note what has made the difference, and how. Willhms College Charlotte Perkins Gilman31 notes Thanks to John Limon, Shawn Rosenheim, Geoffrey Sanborn, Karen Swann, the late Michael D. Bell, and my colleagues at the Oakley Center for the Humanities and Social Sciences for their suggestions on earlier drafts of this essay. i. For the American Feminist anti-violence agenda, even or especially in full knowledge of its "fantastic" qualities, see Wilson and Cane. Lane is typical in her take on Gilman's Utopian sensibilities: utopias cannot be seen as "blueprints," and must be taken on their literary, not literal value (xxii). 2.The Ward article, "Our Better Halves," appeared in The Forum in 1888. The other text cited by Gilman was Geddes's The Evolution of Sex. Ironically, Conway's summary of Geddes's theories is excerpted by Golden in The Captive Imagination, her case study on "The Yellow Wallpaper," by way of providing "a context for understanding two components of the rest cure treatment which [S.Weir] Mitchell prescribed and Gilman defied in writing 'The Yellow Wallpaper'" (71, emphasis added). 3.These ideas are repeated in The Man-Made World and His Religion and Hers, among others. See Bederman for an analysis of the former. 4."Feminist utopias do away with the division between the inhumane marketplace and the humane hearth. This is not accomplished by moving both men and women out into a brutal public world. Instead, the entire society is patterned after the principles which (ideally) govern the home," Pearson adds (64-65). In a similar vein, Berkson places Gilman's work on a continuum with Harriet Beecher Stowe's, in their shared Utopian vision of a society regenerated by the "values of motherhood" (ioo), which will "maternalize" men to "voluntarily give up the selfish and hierarchical values that rule the dominant culture" (100). Berkson argues that just as the "feminine" ethic of "nonviolen[ce], nurtur[e]. . . compassion . . ." is opposed in Beecher's Uncle Tom's Cabin to the batbaric ethic of slavery (102), so is it opposed in Gilman's utopia to the "poverty, greed, materialism, violence, and selfishness" of "industrial, patriarchal" early-twentieth-century American culture (103). The "underlying structure" of Herland, Berkson argues, "is the education of the thtee men into the maternal and domestic values of the private sphere, which Gilman believes can save decadent America" (108). 5.Even-Lant, who accuses Gilman of "violating her own ideologies" (303) by allowing the prospect of Terry's violence to propel the plot of Herland, can only identify that violence as an "intrusion" of patriarchy into an otherwise pure feminist space. 6.See also Wilson and Cane. 7.Wilson suggests, for instance, that Gilman's "positing of a parthenogenic world" should not be taken as an extension of her "eugenicist paranoia. Rather, [it] may be [a] satiric and symbolic creation, [a] representation ... of an ideal natural order—not [a] lesson exactly," but a provoking image (289). While Gubar acknowledges "the racism associated with the early roots of this movement (and its continued presence)," and inherent in Oilman's notion of "negative eugenics," she 32Kristin Carter-Sanbom fails to note how this might qualify Herland's position on imperialism. In asserting that Herland's practice of "negative eugenics," while it "empowers women, [also] entraps her in the maternal role: she is important not for herself but as the Mother of a Race that is judged in terms of the racial purity of an Aryan stock" (198), Gubar emphasizes the "entrapment" of the maternal role, rather than exploring the implications of Gilman's imperialist maternity. See also Cane, Lane and Golden. 8.Peyser's observation that Gilman's "gynaecocentric" schema leaves intact "the notion of centet itself, of some still point beyond contingency, radiating otder and meaning" (2) is well-taken, although his point here is that Gilman has merely reversed the terms of the binary underwriting the patriarchal order. 9.Gilman's crusade against impractical and confining feminine raiment continued throughout her career. 10.See Sánchez-Eppler. 1 1.Gilman's desexed Herlanders recapitulate the "unholy alliance," as Zwinger terms it in another context, of the ancient Virgin Mother with what Gilman believes to be thé most modern and scientific definition of femininity (78). 12.Bederman argues that male excess in Gilman's work is a figure for the male rapist. This seems backwards to me, for it loses sight ofthe much larger forces ofdisorder Gilman sees at work in modern society. 13.In chapter 20 of The Living, "Home," Gilman echoes Ellador's description of the "defotmities" wrought by a heterogeneous citizenship when she desctibes New Yotk as "that multiforeign city, that abnormally enlarged city, swollen rather than grown " (317), and reflects, "Twenty-two years in New York. Twenty-two years in that unnatural city where everyone is an exile, none more so than the American. I have seen it stated that there are but 7 per cent native-born, of native ancestors, in that city. Othets give a larger proportion, perhaps 15 or 20 per cent. Imagine Paris with but a fifth of its citizens French! London with but a fifth English—Berlin with but a fifth German! One third of the inhabitants of New Yotk now are Jews, and we know of the hundreds of thousands of Italians, Germans, and othets" (316). 14.Compare Gilman's plan to that proposed by Carrie Chapman Catt as part of her announcement of nawsa's suppott for America's participation in the Great War: "A problem unknown to other lands will become accentuated in the event of wan" that is, the difficulty of millions of "aliens" who by "birth, tradition and training will find it difficult, if not impossible" to undetstand America's reasons for entering the war. "War invariably breeds intolerance and hatred and will tend to arouse antagonisms inimical to the best interests of the nation." Catt pledges her organization to help minimize this "danger" by conducting classes nationwide "wherein national allegiance shall be taught, emphasizing tolerance, to the end that the Stars and Stripes shall wave over a loyal and undivided people" (Stanton 5:724)· 15.See Zwingers account of the "uncanny" similatities between Alien queens and nurturing moms. 16.See Brown 142-46. 17.See Bederman for a detailed account of this association of masculine violence with order. Charlotte Perkins Gilman33 18.Susan Lanser has found evidence of this will to order in the narrator's reading of the pattern on the wallpaper in Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper." Faced with an "unreadable text," the narrator finally discerns a single image, a woman behind bars, which she then expands to represent the whole. This is hardly a matter of"correct" reading, then, but of fixing and reducing possibilities, finding a space of text on which she can locate whatever self-projection will enable her to move from "John [the narrator's husband] says" to "I want." (421 ) The narrator of "The Yellow Wallpaper," Lanser suggests, might be going mad "not only from confinement, or from the effort to interpret" the confusing valences of her situation in the wallpapered room, "but also from the effort to repress" the disorderly "Yellow Peril" which Lanser convincingly argues can be seen in Gilman's representations ofthe bulbous, massy forms written on the wall (425-27). She adds that the "Yellow Peril" has racial implications "much btoader than anxiety about a takeover of Chinese or Japanese"; the phrase covered "invaders" from every nonAryan nation of the wotld (427). 19.Gubar can only point to this as an unexplained irony, commenting that "presumably maternal in their respect fot life . . . the women of Herland are presented as innately pacifist, yet their society originated out of war," just as the women's rights movement in this country was "born in the crucible of the Civil War" (198). 20.See Carter-Sanborn, "We Murder," for an exploration of the implications of Fanon's model of decolonization in a different context. 21.Gubar herself reproduces this colonial impulse when she describes the colonial ventures of several Victorian women as a case of feminist liberation; she suggests that in exile, these women have turned "transportation into transport" (200). 22.Kasson extends the populatity of bitd's-eye views of urban landscapes beyond the confines of science fiction. 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