Charlotte Perkins Gilman and a Woman's Place in America ed. by Jill Bergman (review)

In the field of American women's writing, new figures for study are ever emerging, but others remain a constant for the essential role they play in our literary heritage. Such is the case with Charlotte Perkins Gilman, who, since her recovery four decades ago via the striking story "The Yellow Wall-Paper," has revived rigorous attention to her lesser-known fiction as well as her wide-ranging works of social analysis from the turn of the twentieth century. Nonetheless, gaps remain in our understanding of Gilman and her work, especially as new theoretical lenses emerge as means for understanding cultural productions. One such lens is the notion of place, which pairs fruitfully with the rich life Gilman lived on both the East and West coasts and weaves throughout her many fictional portraits of both imagined and real places—especially the American West. Exploration of how Gilman's life and work illuminate "a woman's place in America" provides this collection with a coherent and innovative approach to this important figure in American women's letters.

This newest volume of criticism brings together essays by several established Gilman scholars and a few new voices, and it is structured thoughtfully and edited meticulously by Jill Bergman.¹ Bergman's introduction to Gaston Bachelard's classic framing to establish concepts of places establishes and rightly notes that Gilman "argued for new places and spaces for women, where women could earn their economic keep, be free of financial control and domination by men, and exercise their minds, bodies, and desires" (4). The first three essays, grouped as "Geography and Biography: Places in and of Gilman's Life," start strongly with Jennifer S. Tuttle and Gary Scharnhorst's exploration of "Charlotte Perkins Gilman and the US West." This essay offers an illuminating reading of her utopian novel Herland in relation to Gilman's fascination with the West, particularly California, and mines the significance of its serialization during the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition (PPIE), which Gilman visited. Building on a connection between the novel and the PPIE noted by Bridget Bennett, Tuttle and Scharnhorst's discussion uniquely highlights the similarities between Gilman's imagined utopia and the exhibition, revealing anew how Gilman responded in her fiction to her own social fabric, even as events like the PPIE conveyed racial anxieties or oversimplifications that may be uncomfortable to today's readers.

Denise D. Knight's "Artistic Renderings of Charlotte Perkins Gilman" shares invaluable recovered material in discussing visual representations of the author throughout her life in sketches, paintings, photographs, and sculpture. Relying on archival discoveries such as photographs related to Gilman's 1900 stay at the California sanitarium Las Casitas, Knight reveals how these materials illuminate Gilman's stories such as "Dr. Clair's Place." This discussion importantly underscores the voluminous so-called other side of Gilman's writings beyond the story for which she is best known—namely, her many optimistic narratives of women's regained health and freedom. Knight persuasively demonstrates how the recovered portraits together "are emblematic of Gilman's voyage through life" (63). The final essay of this triad, William C. Snyder's "'The Yellow Wall-Paper' as Modernist Space," turns to Gilman's iconic tale to offer the intriguing claim that it "is a nascent expression of the modernist argument" through the technique of ekphrasis (76). Connecting this highly visual story to a wide range of late-nineteenth- and twentieth-century artworks, Snyder is most persuasive in linking the earlier part of the story's descriptions of setting to the impressionists.

Continuing the collection's focus on movement in Gilman's fiction between East and West, or between settlement and frontier, a pair of essays considers the issue of the "Limits on Women's Freedom and Power" through discussions of Gilman's novel The Crux and her eerie story "The Giant Wistaria." Brady Harrison offers a lively philosophical...