The Awakenings of Charlotte Perkins Gilman

“The sleeper awakes” is a convention of many literary utopias from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Novels by Wells, Morris, and Bellamy famously feature a sleeping modern everyman who awakens to a future where the contradictions of the burgeoning capitalist society have (fitfully or finally) been resolved. Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860–1935) dutifully employed this trope in her first full-length utopia, Moving the Mountain (1911). More important, a general invocation to “Awaken!” runs throughout the entirety of her work. To “awaken” meant for Gilman to waken from: to throw off the inherited habits of thought that mentally hobbled her generation and to rouse oneself from the debilitating fatigue that was a consequence of domestic drudgery. Gilman also called upon women to waken to: to grasp their productive capacity as world workers; to seize their reproductive power as “mothers of the race”; and, finally, to acknowledge their capacity for telesis, that is, for the deliberate improvement of human society. Gilman’s failure to critically challenge the myopia of her own thinking, however, particularly around matters of race, meant that she remained “half-asleep,” or perhaps better, “half-woke.”