The Life of Charlotte Perkins Gilman Through Her Writings

Charlotte Anna Perkins, later Gilman, was born on July 3, 1860, in Hartford, Connecticut. She was the great-niece of 19th-century writer Harriet Beecher Stowe (author of Uncle Tom's Cabin). Her father left her at a very young age, forcing her family to be shifted around among their relations, being referred to as "the poor relatives."

Charlotte studied design at the Rhode Island School of Design from 1878 to 1880 and then sustained herself afterwards by designing greeting cards until 1884 when she married artist Charles Walter Stetson. She had developed neurasthenia, an emotional illness to which a "rest cure" was prescribed for her by the doctor Silas Weir Mitchell. This led her to write the classic short story, The Yellow Wallpaper, a sort of pseudo-autobiography that made sense of her own illness and exposed the "rest cure" as flawed. As she says later in her self-published magazine, The Forerunner: "It was not intended to drive people crazy, but to save people from being driven crazy, and it worked." (1) Eventually, Dr. Mitchell "altered his treatment of neurasthenia" (2) due to reading the story of the patient whom he almost drove to insanity with his former medical doctrine.

Charlotte remarried in 1900 to George Houghton Gilman and continued to write poetry, short stories, essays, and even lengthy non-fiction works, such as Woman and Economics, an early classic encouraging woman to work outside the home and become financially independent. She also began and ran the magaizine, The Forerunner, from 1909 to 1916 and co-founded the Women's Peace Party in 1905 along with fellow activist Jane Addams.

In 1935, Gilman learned that she had terminal breast cancer, and decided to act upon what she called in a final note, "the simplest of human rights [that being the right to choose] a quick and easy death in place of a slow and horrible one. . . I prefer chloroform to cancer." (3) She took her own life on August 17th of that same year in Pasadena, California at the age of 75.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman was a forgotten figure in the American woman's mind until the 1960's when her life and work was revived by the growing feminist movement. Her idealistic works such as Herland, are held up as true classics by feminists today. But I found it interesting to find out that Gilman refused to call herself a feminist, but rather a humanist. She read a large amount of philosophy books in her younger years, and was actively involved in Nationalism, a movement that looked towards the fall of capitalism and the rise of a Utopian state. This is clearly evidence in her poem, The Nation where she writes in her opening verse:

The nation is the unit. That which makes
You an American of our Today,
Requires this nation and its history,
Requires the sum of all our citizens,
Requires the product of our common toil,
Requires the freedom of our common laws,
The common heart of our humanity. (4)

Gilman firmly believed that America must remain united and strong, and that all must sacrifice for the good of the state, thus the good of all, as she writes later in The Nation:

Our liberty belongs to each of us:
The nation guarantees it; in return
We serve the nation, serving so ourselves.
Our education is a common right;
The state provides it, equally to all,
Each taking what he can; and in return
We serve the state, so serving best ourselves.
Food, clothing, all necessities of life --
These are a right as much as liberty!
The nation feeds its children. In return
We serve the nation, serving still ourselves.
Nay, not ourselves -- ourself! We are but parts.
The unit is the state -- America! (5)

This is most certainly a patriotic, Utopian ideology that has inspired such many people and political systems; that the comforts and preferences of the individual are sacrificed for the common good of the people as a whole, or the state. Gilman obviously was embracing this mindset. She even went as far to suggest an almost communist system later enforced in China, where duties such as cooking, laundry, and child care were eliminated from a wife's responsibility by arranging households in clusters of single-family dwellings or multifamily buildings with special personnel to perform these duties. But this revolution had a catch; Gilman saw the women of America leading the nation, even the human race, into its bright future, as she writes in her poem, We As Women:

"There's a cry in the air about us-
We hear it, before, behind-
Of the way in which 'We, as women,'
Are going to lift mankind!" (6)

Not only was it women who were to be the saviors of the human race, but it was men who were the causes of it's many woes:

"We are going to 'purify politics,'
And to 'elevate the press.'
We enter the foul paths of the world
To sweeten and cleanse and bless.
To hear the high things we are going to do,
And the horrors of man we tell,
One would think, 'We, as women,' were angels,
And our brothers were fiends of hell." (7)

One would wonder how much of Gilman's feminist thinking came from a true desire of freedom from the oppression of men, or rather an unconscious bitterness towards them. Looking closer at her life and writings, I can begin to see that this very well might have been the case. Charlotte had been hurt, and hurt breeds bitterness. Her father, someone a girl should count on for comfort and support, left her and her family, a traumatic experience for any child, and caused his family extreme financial distress.

Due to her father's desertion and the indoctrination of feminist thought via her progressive aunts, Charlotte decided that she would never marry, a promise that she later broke when she married her first husband, Charles Walter Stetson. The marriage soon ran into trouble when Gilman began developing her mental illness, and her husband seemed unable to even deal or cope with it, let alone understand it. He hurt her, perhaps even more than her father, by the lack of true care and love that she so desperately craved and indeed needed.

Charlotte felt the overwhelming sense even before she was married when she wrote in her journal:

Perhaps I am not to be of use to others. I am weak. I anticipate a future of failure and suffering. Children sick and unhappy. Husband miserable because of my distress. . . I think sometimes that it may be the other way, bright and happy-- but this comest oftenest, holds longer. But this life is marked for me. I will not withdraw, and let me at least learn to be uncomplaining and unselfish. Let me keep this ambition, to be good and a pleasure to some one, to some others, no matter what I feel myself. (8)

Charlotte herself felt that she was destined to fail as a wife and a mother, but she still so badly wanted to please her husband. She saw purpose in pleasing others, not just selfishly pleasing herself. But the longer she lived and the more she tried her very best to not be selfish, to not please herself, she ended up failing. These personal failings to live up to the kind of person she felt she should be, is what I believe led to her mental illness:

This disorder involved a growing melancholia, and that, as those know who have tasted it, consists of every painful mental sensation, shame, fear, remorse, a blind oppressive confusion, utter weakness, a steady brain-ache that fills the conscious mind with crowding images of distress. The misery is doubtless as physical as a toothache, but a brain, of it's own nature, gropes for reasons for its misery. Feeling the sensation fear, the mind suggests every possible calamity; the sensation shame--remorse--and one remembers every mistake and misdeeds of a lifetime, and grovels to the earth in abasement. (9)

What Charlotte was suffering from went deeper than a mental illness, it was a feeling of inner guilt that she could not shake. She felt incapable of being the person who she truly desired to be. She buried these feelings with her writing, her social and political activities, and her personal, custom-tailored religion shaped from her personal experience and the philosophy she had been enraptured by since she was a young woman. But even all this could not free her from what she truly felt bound by:

What an exceeding rest 'twill be
When I can leave off being Me!
To think of it! -- at last be rid
Of all the things I ever did!

Done with the varying distress
Of retroactive consciousness!
Set free to feel the joy unknown
Of Life and Love beyond my own!

Why should I long to have John Smith
Eternally to struggle with?
I'm John -- but somehow cherubim
Seem quite incongruous with him.

It would not seem so queer to dwell
Eternally John Smith in Hell.
To be one man forever seems
Most fit in purgatorial dreams.

But Heaven! Rest and Power and Peace
Must surely mean the soul's release
From this small labeled entity -- 


This passing limitation -- Me! (10)

The above writing, entitled, Eternal Me, gives me a sad picture of how Gilman could not seem to be free, not of the constraints of a dominant-male society, but of her own self, this person she calls, "Me." I feel sad to think of poor Charlotte, fighting the "varying distress of retroactive consciousness." She did not know that there was a way to be "set free to feel the joy unknown" and "of Life and Love beyond my own" before she passed into what awaited her in eternity. The answer was, and still is, Jesus.

Jesus set us free from the guilt of all the wrong that we have done, all the things that we could never be, and changes us from the inside out, making us new creatures so that we can, through His giving us strength, enable us to live our lives, not according to how we think is best, but how He knows is best. We can try to fix our own problems, bury our own guilt, and patch our wounds the best we can, but it is impossible to fully fix ourselves, forget our guilt totally, and totally heal our own hurts. But in Jesus is the answer! It was prophesied about Him by Isaiah in the Old Testament:

Surely he hath borne our griefs, and carried our sorrows: yet we did esteem him stricken, smitten of God, and afflicted. But he was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities: the chastisement of our peace was upon him; and with his stripes we are healed. (11)

I can not help but wishing that Charlotte Gilman had found that answer, the answer that is in Christ, for she would've found, finally, that fulfillment in life, that healing of her hurt, that rest she seemed to endlessly be pursuing.

Works Cited

(1) Gilman Charlotte Perkins and Julie Bates Dock. Charlotte Perkins Gilman's The Yellow Wallpaper and the History of Its Publication and Reception. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998. 86.

(2) ibid.

(3) Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. The Living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman: An Autobiorgraphy. North Strafford, NH: Ayer Publishing, 1987. 334

(4) The Nation by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. About.com. Apr. 2004

(5) ibid.

(6) Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. In This Our World. Oakland, CA: McCombs and Vaughn, 1893. 40.

(7) ibid.

(8) Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. The Living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman: An Autobiorgraphy. North Strafford, NH: Ayer Publishing, 1987. 84

(9) Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. The Living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman: An Autobiorgraphy. North Strafford, NH: Ayer Publishing, 1987. 90

(10) Eternal Me by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. About.com. Apr. 2004

(11) The Holy Bible: Authorized King James Version. Iowa Falls, IA: World Publishing, 1999. 825.