Eavesdropping with Charlotte Perkins Gilman: Fiction, Transcription, and the Ethics of Interior Design

"I never could see why people are so fierce about listening. It doesn't say in the Bible, 'Thou shalt not listen.' I looked, with a concordance."

—Gilman, Benigna Machiavelli (1914)¹

Charlotte Perkins Gilman avowed a theory of fiction that emphasized didacticism over what she described as the novelistic complexities of "individual character"; in her lifetime, Cynthia Davis tells us, Gilman's "literary friends accused her of trading aesthetics for homiletics."² Given this, what are we to make of the sudden convolutions of character that do appear in the very last paragraphs of many of her novels? Such dramatic twists can seem to derail the social argument that the rest of the novel builds. In Benigna Machiavelli (1914), the teenage protagonist spends the entire novel honing her ability to cleverly manage events for the benefit of women's economic autonomy, freedom to travel, and liberation from the confinements of domestic labor. But with less than one hundred words left in the text, she "began to think" about her marital prospects with a cousin she has only just met whose "nice name" (he is called, strikingly, "Home") turns our sense of Benigna's independent future on its head (177). In The Crux (1911), an abstinence novel designed to warn young women about the irreversible dangers of contracting syphilis and gonorrhea, the final section of the final chapter mounts a transformative ending that has all the marks of Shakespearean comedy. Rather than reinforcing the novel's hard-driven lessons about the immutability of lifestyle and sexual choices, the conclusion announces that "all is forgiven" while presenting a marital engagement between a man who is a "relic . . . of the once Wild West" (Mr. Skee has "grown up in a playground of sixteen states and territories") and a watchful and scrupulous New England grandmother who has escorted a group of young women to Colorado precisely to protect them against the seductions of men who, like her husband-to-be, can boast of a "long and checkered career."³ But the best example is the surprise ending of Herland (1915). Readers have long wondered why the shrewd and ever-cautious women of Herland would send Terry Nicholson—the novel's scheming, lying, and indeed criminal individualist—back to the United States on the basis of nothing more than his promise not to reveal the location of their country. As in Benigna Machiavelli and The Crux, the last sentence ("with which agreement we at last left Herland") reposes its trust in customs and conditions that the rest of the novel has taught us to doubt.⁴

Each of the examples I have offered might be individually explained. Benigna Machiavelli is easily read as an autobiographical text, and Benigna MacAvelly's ultimate attraction to her Scottish cousin Home MacAvelly thus rehearses Gilman's own marriage to her cousin Houghton Gilman. In The Crux, the grandmother is well past childbearing age and thus not vulnerable in the same ways as young women, for the novel stresses the dangers of sexually transmitted diseases to reproductive health. So too the bizarre decision by the women of Herland is vaguely justified by their appeal to Terry as a "gentleman," a category that they believe his prideful sense of masculine honor will cause him to respect (143). But what really interests me here is, first, that Gilman asks us to do so much work rationalizing the conclusions and, second, a certain shred of justificatory logic that applies not to each individual case but to them all. For in each text, Gilman yokes the unbelievable final paragraphs to an apparently counterbalancing trust in the power of language to reliably name, promise, or describe. This is most obvious in Herland, as the very untrustworthiness of the ending turns on the potency accorded to Terry's vow. A similar pattern, wherein the language of an unreliable character suddenly becomes convincing, appears in The Crux. Throughout the novel, Mr. Skee speaks in a colorfully evasive, riddling vernacular, saying much but revealing little; his iconoclastic life isolates him where "no one could speak his language" (170). When...