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30. A Fighting Platform: Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Epistles

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The Edinburgh Companion to Nineteenth-Century American Letters and Letter-Writing
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46530A FIGHTING PLATFORM: CHARLOTTE PERKINS GILMAN’S EPISTLESJudith A. AllenI have been given unusual powers of expression and I truly hope that my life will count for much good to the world – as Darwin’s did and Galileo and many other blessed souls who have given high place to serve the world . . . But when it comes to the woman of me, my fi tness and desirability for marriage, all this counts against me. By virtue of what I have of greatness I am the less desirable wife.Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Letter to George Houghton Gilman, 22 May 18981Charlotte Perkins Gilman wrote fi erce letters. When it came to what has been called the ‘epistolary pact’ – ‘the call for a response from a specifi c reader within the cor-respondent’s world’ – she was, arguably, a master.2 No wonder. Though her frequent itinerancy meant she ultimately destroyed most of the letters she received, even those of an intimate nature, that same roving life contributed to the fact that she wrote hundreds of letters each year.3 The letter excerpted in the epigraph to this chapter, for example, addressed to the man who would become her second husband, from 1900 until his death in 1934, is just one of the missives – typically twenty to thirty pages long – that she sent to him on an almost daily basis during their courtship. In 1894, divorce had ended Gilman’s decade-long marriage to her fi rst husband, the artist Charles Walter Stetson, from whom she had been estranged since 1888, thus allowing her to try to ‘prove’ – as she told Houghton Gilman – that contrary to Stetson’s beliefs, ‘a woman can love and work too.’4 Indeed, by July 1899, when she wrote these words to her fi ancé, she was already lecturing, writing, and editing for a living. The compari-son drawn between herself and Darwin and Galileo in the earlier letter should have left Houghton in no doubt: if they married, she would jettison nineteenth-century gender norms and embrace the task of ‘serv[ing] the world.’Through her letters, and increasingly so after her divorce, Gilman maintained a complex network of associations, both personal and professional. Such epistolary web-spinning was, of course, undertaken by many public intellectuals traveling and working as Gilman did, some her ancestors, some her contemporaries. Gilman’s cor-respondence, however, raises forcibly the gender specifi cs historically inherent in the identifi er ‘public intellectual.’ For there was no breezy adoption of this position for women of any race, class, ethnicity, age, or sexual identity during the nineteenth cen-tury. Indeed, tensions derived from the dynamics of gender pervaded Gilman’s life, notwithstanding her relative privileges. These included the application of different 4914_Bernieretal.indd4654914_Bernier et al.indd 46528/01/1612:40PM28/01/16 12:40 PM
© 2022, Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh

46530A FIGHTING PLATFORM: CHARLOTTE PERKINS GILMAN’S EPISTLESJudith A. AllenI have been given unusual powers of expression and I truly hope that my life will count for much good to the world – as Darwin’s did and Galileo and many other blessed souls who have given high place to serve the world . . . But when it comes to the woman of me, my fi tness and desirability for marriage, all this counts against me. By virtue of what I have of greatness I am the less desirable wife.Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Letter to George Houghton Gilman, 22 May 18981Charlotte Perkins Gilman wrote fi erce letters. When it came to what has been called the ‘epistolary pact’ – ‘the call for a response from a specifi c reader within the cor-respondent’s world’ – she was, arguably, a master.2 No wonder. Though her frequent itinerancy meant she ultimately destroyed most of the letters she received, even those of an intimate nature, that same roving life contributed to the fact that she wrote hundreds of letters each year.3 The letter excerpted in the epigraph to this chapter, for example, addressed to the man who would become her second husband, from 1900 until his death in 1934, is just one of the missives – typically twenty to thirty pages long – that she sent to him on an almost daily basis during their courtship. In 1894, divorce had ended Gilman’s decade-long marriage to her fi rst husband, the artist Charles Walter Stetson, from whom she had been estranged since 1888, thus allowing her to try to ‘prove’ – as she told Houghton Gilman – that contrary to Stetson’s beliefs, ‘a woman can love and work too.’4 Indeed, by July 1899, when she wrote these words to her fi ancé, she was already lecturing, writing, and editing for a living. The compari-son drawn between herself and Darwin and Galileo in the earlier letter should have left Houghton in no doubt: if they married, she would jettison nineteenth-century gender norms and embrace the task of ‘serv[ing] the world.’Through her letters, and increasingly so after her divorce, Gilman maintained a complex network of associations, both personal and professional. Such epistolary web-spinning was, of course, undertaken by many public intellectuals traveling and working as Gilman did, some her ancestors, some her contemporaries. Gilman’s cor-respondence, however, raises forcibly the gender specifi cs historically inherent in the identifi er ‘public intellectual.’ For there was no breezy adoption of this position for women of any race, class, ethnicity, age, or sexual identity during the nineteenth cen-tury. Indeed, tensions derived from the dynamics of gender pervaded Gilman’s life, notwithstanding her relative privileges. These included the application of different 4914_Bernieretal.indd4654914_Bernier et al.indd 46528/01/1612:40PM28/01/16 12:40 PM
© 2022, Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh

Chapters in this book

  1. Frontmatter i
  2. Contents v
  3. Prologue: Networks of Nineteenth-Century Letter-Writing 1
  4. Introduction: Epistolary Studies and Nineteenth-Century American Letters and Letter-Writing 11
  5. Part I: Material, Social, and Institutional Contexts
  6. 1. From Mind to Hand: Paper, Pens, and the Materiality of Letter-Writing 31
  7. 2. The Business of Letter-Writing 46
  8. 3. Name and Address: Letters and Mass Mailing in Nineteenth-Century America 62
  9. 4. Paper Evidence: Handwriting, Print, Letters, and the Law 75
  10. 5. Nineteenth-Century American Science and the Decline of Letters 89
  11. 6. The Means and the End: Letters and the Work of History 103
  12. 7. Letters, Telegrams, News 119
  13. 8. Dead Letters and the Secret Life of the State in Nineteenth-Century 136
  14. 9. The Spider and the Dumpling: Threatening Letters in Nineteenth-Century America 152
  15. Part II: Travel, Migration, and Dislocation
  16. 10. Longing in Long-Distance Letters: The Nineteenth Century and Now 171
  17. 11. Working Away, Writing Home 185
  18. 12. Letters from America: Themes and Methods in the Study of Irish Emigrant Correspondence 198
  19. 13. The Usual Problems: Sickness, Distance, and Failure to Acculturate in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Emigrant Letters 216
  20. 14. Indigenous Epistolarity in the Nineteenth Century 230
  21. 15. Dueling Epistles: Enslaved Letter-Writers and the Discourse of (Dis)Honor 245
  22. 16. Home and Belonging in the Letters of Sarah Hicks Williams 258
  23. 17. ‘An Oblique Place’: Letters in the Civil War 271
  24. 18. Social Action in Cross-Regional Letter-Writing: Ednah Cheney’s Correspondence with Postbellum Teachers in the U.S. South 287
  25. Part III: Politics, Reform, and Intellectual Life
  26. 19. Founding Friendship: John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and the American Experiment in Republican Government, 1812–26 305
  27. 20. Corresponding Natures: Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Letters 319
  28. 21. ‘This Epistolary Medium’: Friendship and Civil Society in Margaret Fuller’s Private Letters 332
  29. 22. ‘Will You live?’: Thoreau’s Philosophical Letters 347
  30. 23. ‘Frederick Douglass, the Freeman’ and ‘Frederick Bailey, the Slave’: Private versus Public Acts and Arts of Letter-Writing in Frederick Douglass’s Pre-Civil-War Correspondence 362
  31. 24. Old Master Letters and Letters from the Old World: Julia Griffi ths and the Uses of Correspondence in Frederick Douglass’s Newspapers 377
  32. 25. Letters from ‘Linda Brent’: Harriet Jacobs and the Work of Emancipation 391
  33. 26. Abraham Lincoln: The Man through His Letters 405
  34. 27. Between Science and Aesthetics: The Letters of William James 419
  35. 28. ‘My Dear Dr.’: American Women and Nineteenth-Century Scientifi c Correspondence 435
  36. 29. ‘A Chain of Correspondence’: Social Activism and Civic Values in the Letters of Lydia Sigourney 450
  37. 30. A Fighting Platform: Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Epistles 465
  38. 31. ‘The Stamp of Truth’: Historiographical Dissent and Its Limits in the Letters of Jared Sparks 481
  39. 32. Defenses and Masks and Poses in Henry Adams’ Letters 496
  40. Part IV: Literary Culture
  41. 33. The Letters of Charles Brockden Brown: Epistolary Performance and New Paths for Scholarship 511
  42. 34. Publishing and Public Affairs in the Correspondence of James Fenimore Cooper 525
  43. 35. The Transatlantic Village: The Rise and Fall of the Epistolary Friendship of Catharine Maria Sedgwick and Mary Russell Mitford 538
  44. 36. The Literary Professional and the Country Gentleman: The Letters of Edgar Allan Poe and Philip Pendleton Cooke 554
  45. 37. Melville’s Flummery 568
  46. 38. The Epistolary Romance and Rivalry of Sophia and Nathaniel Hawthorne 582
  47. 39. Co-Responding with Walt Whitman 596
  48. 40. ‘Rare Sparkles of Light’: Intimacy and Distance in Emily Dickinson’s Letters to Thomas Wentworth Higginson 612
  49. 41. ‘Soul Friends’: Harriet Beecher Stowe and Lady Byron in Correspondence 627
  50. 42. Louisa May Alcott’s Family Post Box 642
  51. 43. Profanities, Indecencies, and Theologies: Mark Twain’s Letters to Joseph Twichell, William Dean Howells, and Henry Rogers 655
  52. 44. Charles W. Chesnutt’s Letters: ‘The Vaguely Defi ned Line Where Races Meet’ 669
  53. 45. Sarah Orne Jewett’s Foreign Correspondence 682
  54. 46. ‘Too Intimate to Publish, Too Rare to Suppress’: Henry James in His Letters 696
  55. 47. ‘Ill Correspondent’: Stephen Crane’s Trouble with Letters 709
  56. Notes on Contributors 725
  57. Index 733
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https://doi.org/10.1515/9780748692934-032

Chapters in this book

  1. Frontmatter i
  2. Contents v
  3. Prologue: Networks of Nineteenth-Century Letter-Writing 1
  4. Introduction: Epistolary Studies and Nineteenth-Century American Letters and Letter-Writing 11
  5. Part I: Material, Social, and Institutional Contexts
  6. 1. From Mind to Hand: Paper, Pens, and the Materiality of Letter-Writing 31
  7. 2. The Business of Letter-Writing 46
  8. 3. Name and Address: Letters and Mass Mailing in Nineteenth-Century America 62
  9. 4. Paper Evidence: Handwriting, Print, Letters, and the Law 75
  10. 5. Nineteenth-Century American Science and the Decline of Letters 89
  11. 6. The Means and the End: Letters and the Work of History 103
  12. 7. Letters, Telegrams, News 119
  13. 8. Dead Letters and the Secret Life of the State in Nineteenth-Century 136
  14. 9. The Spider and the Dumpling: Threatening Letters in Nineteenth-Century America 152
  15. Part II: Travel, Migration, and Dislocation
  16. 10. Longing in Long-Distance Letters: The Nineteenth Century and Now 171
  17. 11. Working Away, Writing Home 185
  18. 12. Letters from America: Themes and Methods in the Study of Irish Emigrant Correspondence 198
  19. 13. The Usual Problems: Sickness, Distance, and Failure to Acculturate in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Emigrant Letters 216
  20. 14. Indigenous Epistolarity in the Nineteenth Century 230
  21. 15. Dueling Epistles: Enslaved Letter-Writers and the Discourse of (Dis)Honor 245
  22. 16. Home and Belonging in the Letters of Sarah Hicks Williams 258
  23. 17. ‘An Oblique Place’: Letters in the Civil War 271
  24. 18. Social Action in Cross-Regional Letter-Writing: Ednah Cheney’s Correspondence with Postbellum Teachers in the U.S. South 287
  25. Part III: Politics, Reform, and Intellectual Life
  26. 19. Founding Friendship: John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and the American Experiment in Republican Government, 1812–26 305
  27. 20. Corresponding Natures: Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Letters 319
  28. 21. ‘This Epistolary Medium’: Friendship and Civil Society in Margaret Fuller’s Private Letters 332
  29. 22. ‘Will You live?’: Thoreau’s Philosophical Letters 347
  30. 23. ‘Frederick Douglass, the Freeman’ and ‘Frederick Bailey, the Slave’: Private versus Public Acts and Arts of Letter-Writing in Frederick Douglass’s Pre-Civil-War Correspondence 362
  31. 24. Old Master Letters and Letters from the Old World: Julia Griffi ths and the Uses of Correspondence in Frederick Douglass’s Newspapers 377
  32. 25. Letters from ‘Linda Brent’: Harriet Jacobs and the Work of Emancipation 391
  33. 26. Abraham Lincoln: The Man through His Letters 405
  34. 27. Between Science and Aesthetics: The Letters of William James 419
  35. 28. ‘My Dear Dr.’: American Women and Nineteenth-Century Scientifi c Correspondence 435
  36. 29. ‘A Chain of Correspondence’: Social Activism and Civic Values in the Letters of Lydia Sigourney 450
  37. 30. A Fighting Platform: Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Epistles 465
  38. 31. ‘The Stamp of Truth’: Historiographical Dissent and Its Limits in the Letters of Jared Sparks 481
  39. 32. Defenses and Masks and Poses in Henry Adams’ Letters 496
  40. Part IV: Literary Culture
  41. 33. The Letters of Charles Brockden Brown: Epistolary Performance and New Paths for Scholarship 511
  42. 34. Publishing and Public Affairs in the Correspondence of James Fenimore Cooper 525
  43. 35. The Transatlantic Village: The Rise and Fall of the Epistolary Friendship of Catharine Maria Sedgwick and Mary Russell Mitford 538
  44. 36. The Literary Professional and the Country Gentleman: The Letters of Edgar Allan Poe and Philip Pendleton Cooke 554
  45. 37. Melville’s Flummery 568
  46. 38. The Epistolary Romance and Rivalry of Sophia and Nathaniel Hawthorne 582
  47. 39. Co-Responding with Walt Whitman 596
  48. 40. ‘Rare Sparkles of Light’: Intimacy and Distance in Emily Dickinson’s Letters to Thomas Wentworth Higginson 612
  49. 41. ‘Soul Friends’: Harriet Beecher Stowe and Lady Byron in Correspondence 627
  50. 42. Louisa May Alcott’s Family Post Box 642
  51. 43. Profanities, Indecencies, and Theologies: Mark Twain’s Letters to Joseph Twichell, William Dean Howells, and Henry Rogers 655
  52. 44. Charles W. Chesnutt’s Letters: ‘The Vaguely Defi ned Line Where Races Meet’ 669
  53. 45. Sarah Orne Jewett’s Foreign Correspondence 682
  54. 46. ‘Too Intimate to Publish, Too Rare to Suppress’: Henry James in His Letters 696
  55. 47. ‘Ill Correspondent’: Stephen Crane’s Trouble with Letters 709
  56. Notes on Contributors 725
  57. Index 733
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