Academic literature on the topic 'Gilman, Charlotte Perkins, 1860-1935 Herland'

This paper examines how Charlotte Perkins Gilman(1860-1935) depicts the effects of isolation, physical and psychological, on the heroine in her story "The Yellow Wallpaper"(1892). By using the first person narration which is a subjective style of writing, the writer reveals the thoughts and feelings of the narrator as she tries to fight against psychological pressures which she could not cope with. Furthermore, the paper examines the reasons which lead to the woman's breakdown, mainly her isolation from people, her need for communication and the way of treatment she receives from her husband. Her domineering husband looks upon her as a weak and an inferior person. He deprives her of practicing any activity. As the narrator is forced to withdraw from society, she looks for something to occupy her mind with. Gradually, she becomes interested in the yellow wallpaper. She stares at the pattern and finally decides that it represents a woman trapped behind the bars. She begins to peel the paper off the walls to liberate the woman. The writer describes the different stages of the woman's deterioration, exposing the different factors which contribute and lead to her madness. Meanwhile, she gives a message warning women of the results when they do not fight back to assert their individuality. Therefore, the story's value lies in the fact that the writer presents this Timeless subject.

L'étude d'un corpus transgénérique de la fin du XIXe siècle, constitué de The Portrait of a Lady de Henry James, The Yellow Wallpaper de Charlotte Pekins Gilman et d'une sélection de poèmes d'Emily Dickinson révèle l'entrelacs des genres en tant que fondement fictionnel à une rhétorique du sujet. Protéiformes sans toutefois se situer hors catégorie, ils ont recours à une écriture spiroïdale qui est la conjonction parfaite du narratif et du poétique. Leur emploi du féminin et de l'épicène fait apparaître les distinctions de genre linguistique qui avaient été occultées dans les écrits romantiques et réalistes. L'emphase que ces textes mettent sur l'énonciation et leur prise de distance avec les conventions narratives les différencient des textes précédents. Se détournant du cartésianisme, ils proposent une déconstruction du sujet qui n'aboutit pas toutefois à une vision aporétique. Remettant sans cesse en question l'apparente unité de la perception et de la conscience, ils construisent une vision kaléidoscope qui montre le sujet et le réel comme complexes et torturés, rarement absurdes.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman, une femme de lettres du XIXe siècle, a bien failli perdre, complètement et à jamais, sa capacité d'écrire au terme de traitements inappropriés pour sa dépression. Elle rédige un récit autobiographique et dénonciateur qui illustre son combat contre la science et la société de son époque. À la fin du récit, la narratrice, quoique anéantie, refuse de se soumettre et continue désespérément d'aller de l'avant. C'est une fin qui suggère, même au XIXe siècle, qu'elle (la femme, la Nature) avait raison, et que le médecin (l'homme, la Culture) avait tort. Au XXe siècle, Martine Desjardins reprend cette histoire sous forme de fiction. Notre étude comparative des deux oeuvres repose sur l'hypothèse principale selon laquelle Desjardins s'est largement inspirée du récit de Gilman pour rédiger son roman. De fait, les deux oeuvres, La Chambre au papier peint (1892) et Le Cercle de Clara (1997), l'une inspirée d'une histoire réelle et l'autre présentée comme imaginaire mais fort probablement inspirée de la première, racontent sensiblement la même histoire. Pourquoi une femme du XXe siècle a-t-elle choisi de réécrire cette histoire en disant « je » à son tour? En quoi le « je » d'une femme du XIXe siècle peut-il trouver écho chez celui d'une femme moderne? Et, comment, par l'écriture, la femme peut-elle exorciser ses souffrances et reconquérir son identité? Le premier chapitre de ce travail traite de la mise sous silence des femmes au XIXe siècle. Le second dresse le portrait de Charlotte Perkins Gilman et présente son récit autobiographique, puis le troisième porte sur la parole que les femmes ont reconquise au XXe siècle et met de l'avant les ressemblances et les différences entre les textes en mettant l'accent sur la modernité et le féminisme de l'oeuvre de Desjardins. Desjardins a rédigé son roman en hommage aux femmes qui ont donné leur corps et leur âme à la société pour permettre à celles d'aujourd'hui de pouvoir publier. Le « je » individuel de Gilman est donc, aujourd 'hui plus que jamais, collectif. ______________________________________________________________________________ MOTS-CLÉS DE L’AUTEUR : Féminisme, Écriture, XIXe siècle, Hystérie.

“Human/Nature: American Literary Naturalism and the Anthropocene” examines works of fiction from the genre of American literary naturalism that sought to represent the emergence of the environmental crisis known today as the Anthropocene. Reading works by Jack London, Frank Norris, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and Charles W. Chesnutt, I show how the genre’s well-known tropes of determinism, atavism, and super-individual scales of narration were used to create narratives across vast scales of space and time, spanning the entire planet as well as multi-epochal stretches of geologic time. This reading expands existing definitions of American literary naturalism through a combination of literary analysis, engagement with contemporary theory, and discussion of the historical context of proto-Anthropocenic theories of the late-19th and early-20th centuries. Whereas most earlier understandings of naturalism have focused on human nature as it is determined by environmental conditions, I follow the inverse: the impact of collective human action on the physical environment. Previous definitions of naturalism have only told part of the story of determinism, making it impossible to recognize until now the genre’s unusual capacity to aesthetically capture humanity’s pervasive impact on the planet. Each of the dissertation’s four chapters focuses on a single author, a single aesthetic strategy, and a single problematic in Anthropocene discourse. My first chapter argues that Jack London’s late work (1906–1916) balanced his attempts to understand the human as a species with a growing interest in sustainable agriculture, resulting in a planetary theorization of environmental destruction through careless cultivation. But London’s human-centered environmental thinking ultimately served his well-known white supremacism, substantiating recent critiques that the Anthropocene’s universalism merely reproduces historical structures of wealth and power. Rather than the human per se, Frank Norris put his focus on finance capitalism in his classic 1901 novel The Octopus, embodying the hybrid human/natural force that he saw expanding over the face of the planet in the figure of the Wheat, a cultivated yet inhuman force that is as much machine as it is nature. I show how Norris turned Joseph LeConte’s proto-Anthropocenic theory of the Psychozoic era (1877) into a Capitalocene aesthetics, a contradictory sublimity in which individuals are both crushed by and feel themselves responsible for the new geologic force transforming the planet. While London and Norris focus on the destructive capacities of human agency, Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s 1915 novel Herland takes a utopian approach, depicting a society of women with total control of their environment that anticipates conceptions of a “good Anthropocene.” Gilman built on the theories of sociologist and paleobotanist Lester Ward as well as her own experience in the domestic reform movement to imagine a garden world where the human inhabitants become totally integrated into the non-human background. Yet Gilman’s explicitly eugenic system flattens all heterogeneity of culture, wealth, and power into a homogenous collective. My final chapter builds on the critique of the Anthropocene’s universalism that runs through the preceding chapters by asking whether and how the Anthropocene can be approached with more nuance and less recourse to universals. I find an answer in the stories of Charles W. Chesnutt’s The Conjure Woman (1899) and the theory of the Plantationocene, which sees the sameness of the Anthropocene not as “natural” but as produced by overlapping forms of racial, economic, and biological oppression. Registering this production of homogeneity and its counterforces at once, Chesnutt models what I call Anthropocene heteroglossia, juxtaposing multiple dialects and narrative forms in stories set on a former plantation, depicting heterogeneous social ecologies as they conflict and coexist in markedly anthropogenic environments.

This chapter approaches Romantic aesthetics through the “plant horror” of Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849), who had an ambivalent relationship to Romantic vitalism, and studies the way in which his arabesque vegetality travels into the work of later writers, including Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860–1935). Poe’s foregrounding of the eighteenth-century notion of “the sentience of all vegetable things” in “The Fall of the House of Usher” (1839) both responds to and undermines Romantic ideas about human affinities with plants. In “Usher,” Poe follows the Enlightenment analogy of human to plant to its logical conclusion in order to expose its aporias; for him, vegetal sentience cannot be contained within any hierarchy of being. At the same time, Poe destroys the Romantic fusional model—in which humans and plants commune within a shared physical world—by focusing on the destructive and rapacious qualities of the vegetal. The transcendental ideas of beauty and the sublime give way in Poe to a vegetality that invades the human consciousness. He suggests that humans might be horrified, rather than delighted, by the calamity that a vegetal modernity represents, even though (and perhaps because) they have no alternative to it.