Phrases 7 | - Freelance Writer
May 03, 2017 | #1
After the Civil War and continuing through the beginning of the 20th Century, many new female authors emerged in American literature. Some, such as Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Louisa May Alcott, articulated explicitly feminist points of view, while others, such as Kate Chopin, were less obviously revolutionary in their intentions but still brought new perspectives in to American literature. Both Gilman and Alcott explicitly described themselves as radicals and women's rights activists, and much of their writing was intended to make a political point. Unlike these children of New England abolitionists and reformers, Chopin was a Southerner, a French Catholic Creole, and supporter of the Confederacy. Even so, the women characters in her fictional work also shared a strong desire to escape from the constraints of Victorian marriage and family life. They were often based on her own experience or that of her mother and grandmother, and sometimes their attempts to win their freedom were successful while at other times they failed. Alcott and Gilman campaigned for woman's suffrage, as well as and educational and employment opportunities. Gilman was known as the most important feminist writer and thinker of her era, and probably would have been surprised that she is now only remembered for "The Yellow Wallpaper" story she wrote in 1892. Today, Alcott is regarded only as a writer of Little Women with her other more explicitly feminist writings and activism largely ignored. Indeed, all three writers suffered from the common fate of being ignored by male academics and reviewers for decades, and only in recent years has the full range of their work been rediscovered.
Kate Chopin was born into a French Catholic Creole family in St. Louis, and later lived in Louisiana with her husband until she became a widow, and most of her fiction work takes place in these locations. Unlike Louisa May Alcott and Charlotte Perkins Gilman, she never explicitly described herself as a feminist or reformer, although the female heroines in her short stories and novels were highly unconventional by 19th Century standards. Her family also supported the Confederacy during the Civil War, though, and Chopin's attitudes toward blacks were hardly sympathetic. In short stories like "Neg Creol", for example, even the freed slaves were always shown as loyal to their former masters, and this is what most white Southerners of the 19th Century would have expected, but not Third Wave feminists of the late-20th and early-21st Centuries. Most of her early biographers also failed to realize that her work was heavily based on family and personal experiences, including the lives of her mother and grandmother. One of these ancestor stories, "Athenaise" was based on her grandmother's unhappy marriage to a man who deserted her and left her in poverty to raise seven children on her own. The fictional story features one of Gilman's ironic reversals, however, and has the wife desert her husband and striking out on her own to live with the Cherokees in Indian Territory.
Today, the fictional work for which Chopin is best remembered, and probably the only one that is widely read is "The Story of an Hour". Like the trapped wife in Charlotte Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper", Louise Mallard is imprisoned in a repressed "stultifying marriage" to a man she does not love, and feels "monstrous joy" and "body and soul free" when she hears of his demise in a railroad accident. Of course, the story ends on an ironic note when the husband walks through the door and Louise drops dead of a heart attack when she sees him, but not from the sheer surprise and happiness of seeing him, as the male characters assume. Chopin's mother Eliza O'Flarity was also called "Elieeza" by her family and close friends, and like the Louise of the story also had a sister named Josephine. Her real father, Thomas O'Flaherty, did die in a railroad accident in 1855, and other characters in the story have similar names or initials to others who died in the same accident-or were at least initially reported to have died. Like Louise, Eliza had married an older man for money and security, not love, in order to help her mother and siblings in their impoverished situation. Unlike Louise, she was left a widow with a large estate; she was free of her husband and never remarried.
Kate Chopin therefore grew up in a household with no adult male relatives, and she returned to live with her mother in St. Louis after her husband died. Simply by luck, and the high death rate from disease and accidents in the 19th Century, Kate and Eliza Chopin "had through widowhood evaded in some ways the claims of family, community, and husbands" (Toth, p. 25). Kate Chopin never remarried after she became a widow, and considered herself liberated to become a serious writer. In Chopin's novel Awakenings, which was set in Louisiana and so widely attacked by male critics and reviewers that she gave up fiction writing completely, the women also favor solitude and rooms of their own over domestic duties and ties to husbands and families, or an escape from Victorian family life. Compared to the unfortunate Louise Mallard, who "dies in the world of her family where she has always sacrificed for others", Chopin found a small niche that freed her from traditional marriage and family values.
Louisa May Alcott has gone down in history as a writer of children's stories, mainly because she is only remembered for Little Women, although in reality she was a very committed and activist feminist and campaigner for women's suffrage. Her parents Bronson and Abby May Alcott were equally dedicated to abolitionism, women's rights and a variety of other reform causes, as were the parents of the March sisters depicted in Little Women. Abby May Alcott also believed that women should have the right to education, employment outside the home and to own property when such ideas were not at all common. Before she became a world famous author, Louisa Alcott wrote a number of thrillers and romances under pseudonyms that featured particularly strong and intelligent feminist heroines, although these stories remain mostly unread and forgotten today.
Her first published work dated from 1862-63 when she was working as a nurse for the Union Army in Washington during the Civil War, under conditions that could only be described as horrendous. In stories like "Pauline's Passion and Punishment", "A Marble Woman" and "A Fate of Forests", she wrote about women who rebelled against the narrow and repressive circumstances of their lives, such as female slaves who were literally at war with their male masters. In Pauline, Alcott created the type of feminist heroine who "seems to have held that women could be not merely the equals of men but their superiors" (Stern, p. ix). Her former lover Gilbert betrayed her by marrying another woman for her money, who he also abuses. He is still in love with Pauline, however, and in the end when he kills her husband and his own wife, "the two leading characters are left in mutually loathing confrontation" (Stern, p. xi). With Virginia Varens in the novella "V.V.: or Plots and Counterplots", the heroine is purely mercenary and opportunistic, using and taking revenge on the men who desire her. Jean Muir in "Behind a Mask" is a cunning and manipulative actress who also desires revenge against men, and travels to many countries in various disguises to destroy the men who fall in love with her. She is hired as a governess for the Coventry family and manipulates the feelings and desires of the sons, but also warns young Gerald Coventry "I am a witch...love me at your peril."
Alcott's support for women's rights and feminism dated back to the time she read the Declaration of Sentiments of the Seneca Falls Convention in 1848. Like Gilman, she grew up in great poverty and had to work at a variety of low-paying jobs in order to survive, such as seamstress, teacher and maid. Therefore she knew from firsthand experience the struggles that most women had to face in the 19th Century, especially young, unmarried women with no economic security or inherited wealth. Even though she was in poor health during the 1870s and 1880s, and died at a relatively young age in 1887, she wrote many articles and gave lectures on behalf of women's suffrage and employment rights, and attended the Women's Congress I Syracuse, NY in 1875. When women in Massachusetts received the right to vote in local school board elections, she was the first to register and pay the poll tax, although she also reported of the other women in Concord that it was "hard to stir them up" (Stern, p. xx).
Charlotte Perkins Gilman was related to the famous Beecher family of reformers, abolitionists and ministers on her father's side. Her great-grandfather was Lyman Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe, the author of Uncle Tom's Cabin, was her great aunt. Yet her father deserted the family not long after she was born and she grew up in conditions of great poverty. Gilman always described herself as a progressive feminist and socialist, and during her lifetime she was far better known for her nonfiction writing and journalism than her short stories. She would probably have been very surprised that today she is best remembered because her 1892 short story "The Yellow Wallpaper" has become part of the literary canon and is considered an early feminist classic. Although almost all of her writing was nonfiction, and even her short stories were not intended to be literary but had a political point, three-quarters of the works published about Gilman concern this single story. This story was based loosely on her first marriage to a cold and unresponsive husband, and her depression during and after pregnancy, in which the main character is basically a prisoner in her own attic and literally comes to believe that she is part of the wallpaper. Of course, her husband, the doctor and the other characters in story cannot comprehend the source of her discontent and seeming irrationality, but Gilman always intended to make a feminist statement with this story and a wife basically imprisoned by marriage, family and society with no hope of escape. Gilman divorced her first husband, though, and learned from personal experience what life was like for a single mother living in poverty during the Gilded Age.
In her lifetime, "The Yellow Wallpaper" passed largely unnoticed compared to her serious sociological and intellectual work like Women and Economics, Human Work and The Man-Made World. She also wrote a utopian novel called Herland and a detective novel Unpunished that was not published until 1997. Although she never held any formal academic positions, she one of the founders of the American Sociological Association and was a well-known activist, journalist and public intellectual, and was considered the most important American feminist in the years 1890 to 1930. She described society as "androcentric" in which women were oppressed because of their gender and denied educational and employment opportunities. Her concept of a socialist and feminist revolution was one that freed women from their prison of marriage and domesticity and allowed them equal participation in political, economic and cultural life. She strongly supported women's suffrage, birth control and voluntary euthanasia, and she committed suicide in 1935 when she learned that she had inoperable breast cancer. More problematic for Third Wave or postmodern feminists were certain ideas that she shared with other white feminists and progressives of this era, such as scientific racism, eugenics, prohibition, nativism and anti-Semitism. As with Kate Chopin and Margaret Sanger, few feminists of the 1960s and 1970s (and afterwards) could embrace her fully or consider her a true progressive in the contemporary sense because of these racist tendencies. Like many white Americans of this time and place, included educated believers in eugenics and Social Darwinism, she simply did not regard blacks, Jews and immigrants as equals and they had little place in her ideal society.
Alcott and Gilman can certainly be placed in the category of feminists and women's rights supporters, at least within their historical context, because that is how they described themselves. They actively campaigned for equal social, political and economic rights for women, carrying on the tradition of New England reform that they inherited from their families. Both of them also understood the extreme economic and social insecurity of women and the fact that many of them were trapped in unhappy domestic lives or low-paying jobs like teaching, nursing and domestic service that were just another extension of women's work. Chopin had personal experience of women's poverty and lack of social and economic opportunities, as well as the widespread feeling of being imprisoned in family and marriage situations over which they had no control. All the characters in her stories hope to escape from these, and sometimes they succeed. Even more so than the March sisters in Little Women, the powerful feminist characters in Alcott's anonymous stories not only find ways of escaping the male world but also taking revenge against it. Gilman's vision of a new socialist and feminist society was the most explicitly radical and political of all, but it can only be found in her long-forgotten writings.
REFERENCES
Allen, J.A. The Feminism of Charlotte Perkins Gilman: Sexuality, Histories, Progressivism. University of Chicago Press.
Essay Chat. Kate Chopin - Annotated Bibliography and Literature Review. Online.
Stern, M.B.. The Feminist Alcott: Stories of a Woman's Power. Northeastern University Press.
Toth, E.. "Kate Chopin Thinks Back through Her Mothers: Three Stories by Kate Chopin" in L.S. Boren and S. de Saussure. Kate Chopin Reconsidered: Beyond he Bayou. Louisiana State University Press, pp. 15-25.
Kate Chopin was born into a French Catholic Creole family in St. Louis, and later lived in Louisiana with her husband until she became a widow, and most of her fiction work takes place in these locations. Unlike Louisa May Alcott and Charlotte Perkins Gilman, she never explicitly described herself as a feminist or reformer, although the female heroines in her short stories and novels were highly unconventional by 19th Century standards. Her family also supported the Confederacy during the Civil War, though, and Chopin's attitudes toward blacks were hardly sympathetic. In short stories like "Neg Creol", for example, even the freed slaves were always shown as loyal to their former masters, and this is what most white Southerners of the 19th Century would have expected, but not Third Wave feminists of the late-20th and early-21st Centuries. Most of her early biographers also failed to realize that her work was heavily based on family and personal experiences, including the lives of her mother and grandmother. One of these ancestor stories, "Athenaise" was based on her grandmother's unhappy marriage to a man who deserted her and left her in poverty to raise seven children on her own. The fictional story features one of Gilman's ironic reversals, however, and has the wife desert her husband and striking out on her own to live with the Cherokees in Indian Territory.Today, the fictional work for which Chopin is best remembered, and probably the only one that is widely read is "The Story of an Hour". Like the trapped wife in Charlotte Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper", Louise Mallard is imprisoned in a repressed "stultifying marriage" to a man she does not love, and feels "monstrous joy" and "body and soul free" when she hears of his demise in a railroad accident. Of course, the story ends on an ironic note when the husband walks through the door and Louise drops dead of a heart attack when she sees him, but not from the sheer surprise and happiness of seeing him, as the male characters assume. Chopin's mother Eliza O'Flarity was also called "Elieeza" by her family and close friends, and like the Louise of the story also had a sister named Josephine. Her real father, Thomas O'Flaherty, did die in a railroad accident in 1855, and other characters in the story have similar names or initials to others who died in the same accident-or were at least initially reported to have died. Like Louise, Eliza had married an older man for money and security, not love, in order to help her mother and siblings in their impoverished situation. Unlike Louise, she was left a widow with a large estate; she was free of her husband and never remarried.
Kate Chopin therefore grew up in a household with no adult male relatives, and she returned to live with her mother in St. Louis after her husband died. Simply by luck, and the high death rate from disease and accidents in the 19th Century, Kate and Eliza Chopin "had through widowhood evaded in some ways the claims of family, community, and husbands" (Toth, p. 25). Kate Chopin never remarried after she became a widow, and considered herself liberated to become a serious writer. In Chopin's novel Awakenings, which was set in Louisiana and so widely attacked by male critics and reviewers that she gave up fiction writing completely, the women also favor solitude and rooms of their own over domestic duties and ties to husbands and families, or an escape from Victorian family life. Compared to the unfortunate Louise Mallard, who "dies in the world of her family where she has always sacrificed for others", Chopin found a small niche that freed her from traditional marriage and family values.
Louisa May Alcott has gone down in history as a writer of children's stories, mainly because she is only remembered for Little Women, although in reality she was a very committed and activist feminist and campaigner for women's suffrage. Her parents Bronson and Abby May Alcott were equally dedicated to abolitionism, women's rights and a variety of other reform causes, as were the parents of the March sisters depicted in Little Women. Abby May Alcott also believed that women should have the right to education, employment outside the home and to own property when such ideas were not at all common. Before she became a world famous author, Louisa Alcott wrote a number of thrillers and romances under pseudonyms that featured particularly strong and intelligent feminist heroines, although these stories remain mostly unread and forgotten today.
Her first published work dated from 1862-63 when she was working as a nurse for the Union Army in Washington during the Civil War, under conditions that could only be described as horrendous. In stories like "Pauline's Passion and Punishment", "A Marble Woman" and "A Fate of Forests", she wrote about women who rebelled against the narrow and repressive circumstances of their lives, such as female slaves who were literally at war with their male masters. In Pauline, Alcott created the type of feminist heroine who "seems to have held that women could be not merely the equals of men but their superiors" (Stern, p. ix). Her former lover Gilbert betrayed her by marrying another woman for her money, who he also abuses. He is still in love with Pauline, however, and in the end when he kills her husband and his own wife, "the two leading characters are left in mutually loathing confrontation" (Stern, p. xi). With Virginia Varens in the novella "V.V.: or Plots and Counterplots", the heroine is purely mercenary and opportunistic, using and taking revenge on the men who desire her. Jean Muir in "Behind a Mask" is a cunning and manipulative actress who also desires revenge against men, and travels to many countries in various disguises to destroy the men who fall in love with her. She is hired as a governess for the Coventry family and manipulates the feelings and desires of the sons, but also warns young Gerald Coventry "I am a witch...love me at your peril."
Alcott's support for women's rights and feminism dated back to the time she read the Declaration of Sentiments of the Seneca Falls Convention in 1848. Like Gilman, she grew up in great poverty and had to work at a variety of low-paying jobs in order to survive, such as seamstress, teacher and maid. Therefore she knew from firsthand experience the struggles that most women had to face in the 19th Century, especially young, unmarried women with no economic security or inherited wealth. Even though she was in poor health during the 1870s and 1880s, and died at a relatively young age in 1887, she wrote many articles and gave lectures on behalf of women's suffrage and employment rights, and attended the Women's Congress I Syracuse, NY in 1875. When women in Massachusetts received the right to vote in local school board elections, she was the first to register and pay the poll tax, although she also reported of the other women in Concord that it was "hard to stir them up" (Stern, p. xx).
Charlotte Perkins Gilman was related to the famous Beecher family of reformers, abolitionists and ministers on her father's side. Her great-grandfather was Lyman Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe, the author of Uncle Tom's Cabin, was her great aunt. Yet her father deserted the family not long after she was born and she grew up in conditions of great poverty. Gilman always described herself as a progressive feminist and socialist, and during her lifetime she was far better known for her nonfiction writing and journalism than her short stories. She would probably have been very surprised that today she is best remembered because her 1892 short story "The Yellow Wallpaper" has become part of the literary canon and is considered an early feminist classic. Although almost all of her writing was nonfiction, and even her short stories were not intended to be literary but had a political point, three-quarters of the works published about Gilman concern this single story. This story was based loosely on her first marriage to a cold and unresponsive husband, and her depression during and after pregnancy, in which the main character is basically a prisoner in her own attic and literally comes to believe that she is part of the wallpaper. Of course, her husband, the doctor and the other characters in story cannot comprehend the source of her discontent and seeming irrationality, but Gilman always intended to make a feminist statement with this story and a wife basically imprisoned by marriage, family and society with no hope of escape. Gilman divorced her first husband, though, and learned from personal experience what life was like for a single mother living in poverty during the Gilded Age.
In her lifetime, "The Yellow Wallpaper" passed largely unnoticed compared to her serious sociological and intellectual work like Women and Economics, Human Work and The Man-Made World. She also wrote a utopian novel called Herland and a detective novel Unpunished that was not published until 1997. Although she never held any formal academic positions, she one of the founders of the American Sociological Association and was a well-known activist, journalist and public intellectual, and was considered the most important American feminist in the years 1890 to 1930. She described society as "androcentric" in which women were oppressed because of their gender and denied educational and employment opportunities. Her concept of a socialist and feminist revolution was one that freed women from their prison of marriage and domesticity and allowed them equal participation in political, economic and cultural life. She strongly supported women's suffrage, birth control and voluntary euthanasia, and she committed suicide in 1935 when she learned that she had inoperable breast cancer. More problematic for Third Wave or postmodern feminists were certain ideas that she shared with other white feminists and progressives of this era, such as scientific racism, eugenics, prohibition, nativism and anti-Semitism. As with Kate Chopin and Margaret Sanger, few feminists of the 1960s and 1970s (and afterwards) could embrace her fully or consider her a true progressive in the contemporary sense because of these racist tendencies. Like many white Americans of this time and place, included educated believers in eugenics and Social Darwinism, she simply did not regard blacks, Jews and immigrants as equals and they had little place in her ideal society.
Alcott and Gilman can certainly be placed in the category of feminists and women's rights supporters, at least within their historical context, because that is how they described themselves. They actively campaigned for equal social, political and economic rights for women, carrying on the tradition of New England reform that they inherited from their families. Both of them also understood the extreme economic and social insecurity of women and the fact that many of them were trapped in unhappy domestic lives or low-paying jobs like teaching, nursing and domestic service that were just another extension of women's work. Chopin had personal experience of women's poverty and lack of social and economic opportunities, as well as the widespread feeling of being imprisoned in family and marriage situations over which they had no control. All the characters in her stories hope to escape from these, and sometimes they succeed. Even more so than the March sisters in Little Women, the powerful feminist characters in Alcott's anonymous stories not only find ways of escaping the male world but also taking revenge against it. Gilman's vision of a new socialist and feminist society was the most explicitly radical and political of all, but it can only be found in her long-forgotten writings.
REFERENCES
Allen, J.A. The Feminism of Charlotte Perkins Gilman: Sexuality, Histories, Progressivism. University of Chicago Press.
Essay Chat. Kate Chopin - Annotated Bibliography and Literature Review. Online.
Stern, M.B.. The Feminist Alcott: Stories of a Woman's Power. Northeastern University Press.
Toth, E.. "Kate Chopin Thinks Back through Her Mothers: Three Stories by Kate Chopin" in L.S. Boren and S. de Saussure. Kate Chopin Reconsidered: Beyond he Bayou. Louisiana State University Press, pp. 15-25.