Abstract
Directed at creating a perfect woman-friendly state, Oilman’s reformist eugenic zeal found an even bigger outlet in three Utopian novels, Moving the Mountain (1911), Herland (1915) and With Her in Our Land (1916). Ideologically, the novels are in equal measure a socialist/feminist response to Utopian ideas of nationalism fashionable among liberal circles as well as eugenically inspired blueprint for a scientifically engineered society. They combine a fascination with the socialist ideas of nationalization of industry and property and insistence on the unavoidability of restructuring of society along feminist lines with belief in the power of eugenics to solve demographic problems. The novels also demonstrate the direction of the growth of Gilman’s reformist project. With her Utopian narratives, the writer moves away from the practical everyday issues of female economic and marital choices to discuss systematic Utopian and eugenic solutions for the whole society. In this way, Gilman gradually abandons the everyday and the local in favor of the general and the abstract.
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Notes
C. J. Davis (2010), Charlotte Perkins Gilman: A Biography (Stanford: Stanford University Press), 300.
V. L. Parrington (1947), American Dreams (Rhode Island: Brown University), 97.
E. Bellamy (1890), Looking Backward: 2000–1887 (New York: Routledge).
C. Perkins Gilman (1999), Moving the Mountain, in M. Doskow (ed.), Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Utopian Novels: Moving the Mountain, Herland and With Her in Our Land (Madison: Farleigh Dickinson University Press), 37.
F. Nietzsche (2010), “On the Use and Abuse of History for Life,” I. Johnston (trans.) (Arlington: Richer Resources Publications).
See Gilman’s letter to Wells of August 4, 1904. In D. D. Knight and J. S. Tuttle (eds.) (2009), The Selected Letters of Charlotte Perkins Gilman (Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press), 253. Scharnhorst and Knight argue that Gilman’s library included numerous books by Wells including a copy of The Food of the Gods.
G. Scharnhorst and D. D. Knight (1997), “Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Library: A Reconstruction,” Resources for American Literary Study, 23, 2, 181–219.
C. Perkins Gilman (1998), Women and Economics: A Study of the Economic Relation between Men and Women as a Factor in Social Evolution (Mineola: Dover Publications), 24.
D. K. Pickens (1989), Eugenics and the Progressives (Nashville: Vanderbilt University), 73–74.
For the idea of “mothercraft,” see M. L. Read (1916), “Mothercraft,” The Journal of Heredity, VII (August 1916), 339–542;
and A. E. Hamilton (1916), “Babies in Curriculum,” The Journal of Heredity, VII (September), 387–394.
Gilman’s ideas of rearing “better babies” are congruous with those espounded by a biologist and eugenicist Luther Burbank in his book on raising children The Training of the Human Plant. Gilman’s application of gardening, with the gardener “weeding-out undesirable plants” bears a resemblance to Burbank. L. Burbank (1907), The Training of the Human Plant (New York: The Century Co.).
L. F. Ward (1883), Dynamic Sociology: or, Applied Social Science as Based Upon Statical Sociology and the Less Complex Sciences (New York: D. Appleton and Co.), 55.
Z. Bauman (2004), Wasted Lives: Modernity and Its Outcasts (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press), 5.
E. A. Ross (1914), The Old World and the New (New York: The Century Co.), 17
L. Darwin (1926), The Need for Eugenic Reform (London: John Murray).
At this point, it has to be stressed that some eugenicists expressed an open resentment if not opposition to the discussion of the possibility of elimination of the “undesirables.” See, for example, E. G. Conklin (1922), Heredity and Environment in the Development of Men (Princeton: Princeton University Press), 292.
C. F. Kessler (2008), “‘Dreaming Always of Lovely Things Beyond’: Living Toward Herland, Experiential Foregrounding,” in C. J. Golden and J. Schneider Zangrando (eds.), The Mixed Legacy of Charlotte Perkins Gilman (Newark: University of Delaware Press), 89–102.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1979), Herland (New York: Pantheon Books), 150.
C. Davis (2003), “His and Herland: Charlotte Perkins Gilman ‘Re-presents’ Lester F. Ward,” in L. A. Cuddy and C. M. Roche (eds.), Evolution and Eugenia in American Literature and Culture, 1880–1940: Essays on Ideology Conflict and Complicity (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press), 73–85.
See J. A. Allen (2009), The Feminism of Charlotte Perkins Gilman: Sexualities, Histories, Progressivism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), 320–323; and Davis, Charlotte Perkins Gilman: A Biography, 339–341, 369–370.
J. B. Salazar (2010), Bodies of Reform: The Rhetoric of Character in Gilded Age America (New York: New York University Press), 117.
C. Perkins Gilman (1935), The Living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman: An Autobiography (New York: Macmillan), 64.
C. Perkins Gilman (1911), “Happiness in Religion,” The Forerunner, 2, 1 (June), 154.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1911), “Wild Oats of the Soul,” The Forerunner, 2, 1 (June), 162.
“Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche,” Popular Science Monthly, October 1900, 668. See J. Ratner-Rosenhagen (2012), American Nietzsche: A History of an Icon and His Ideas (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press).
See W. Kaufmann (1985), Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist (Princeton: Princeton University Press);
A. Nehamas (1985), Nietzsche: Life as Literature (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press);
and L. Call (1998), “Anti-Darwin, Anti-Spencer: Nietzsche’s Critique of Darwin and ‘Darwinism,’” History of Science, 36, 154–197;
and R. Weikart (2004), From Darwin to Hitler: Evolutionary Ethics, Eugenics, and Racism in Germany (New York: Palgrave Macmillan), 48.
See G. Bederman (1995), Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880–1917 (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press), 121–169.
C. Perkins Gilman (1997), With Her in Our Land. M. J. Deegan and M. R. Hill (eds.) (Westport: Greenwood Press), 100, 103, and 138.
C. Perkins Gilman (1908), “A Suggestion on the Negro Problem,” American Journal of Sociology, 14:1 (July), 78–85.
M. Grant (1918), The Passing of the Great Race or the Racial Basis of European History (New York: Scribner’s Sons), 81.
J. A. Allen (2009), The Feminism of Charlotte Perkins Gilman: Sexualities, Histories, Progressivism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), 353.
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© 2015 Ewa Barbara Luczak
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Luczak, E.B. (2015). “Endowment of Motherhood”: Gilman’s Utopian Fiction. In: Breeding and Eugenics in the American Literary Imagination. Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137545794_6
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