The Yellow Wallpaper and Herland by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

My local librarian was so kind to suggest ordering a copy of The Yellow Wallpaper since the previous copy had been misplaced by another library enthusiast presumably, for it would take some kind of foreknowledge of classical literature of the West to become intrigued by a story of a woman locked into an attic room. The library ordered the book and then I received notice of the Macmillan Collector's Library book which i gladly picked up. Macmillan Collectors Library books are petite clothbound books printed in China, small enough to slip into a pocket or to bring along to a day spent in the woods. I currently own more than 20 of these gorgeous books and I ordered the last 4 ones needed to fill my bookshelf, hence completing my series (in case you wondered the once I ordered was: Our man in Havana Graham Greene, For Whom the Bells Toll Heminway, Aeneid by Virgil and The Daughter of Time by Josephine Tey). 

But back to the book, well in this edition there are two stories: The Yellow Wallpaper (can hardly be called a book on it's own, it's a short novella rather) and Gilman's other work Herland. They are in the introduction called as a sort of Western early suffragette feminist swing: One part dealing with dreadful oppression and denial and the other with a sort of Women's paradise. The Y.W. (Yellow Wallpaper) is a kind of gothic story about a man who locks his wife in a attic room because of her alleged "madness" surprise, surprise! (Western) men are not so original, the husband John is similar to Rochester and refuses to suffer a thought to the fact that the structure of the early 1900's surely did their part in making any woman mad. Gilman received inspiration for the novella from her own experiences, her sublime thesis is that a woman, and especially the woman as an artists at a period of mental weakness needs stimuli; people and art! In order to bounce back. To constrain a woman to a room, as in the case of the nameless wife of John, results in deepening madness. The teller of the story sees a woman inside the yellow wallpaper, a woman who "creeps" and only comes out at night time, eventually Johns wife herself becomes this wild, untamed and dangerous creeper. Some suggest that Y.W. is about post-partum psychosis because John and his wife had a small child. Perhaps Gilman had intended it to seem so in order to disguise the fact that her own crisis was much related to art rather than to motherhood. In my view the babe had little to do with the narrators experiences. The only thing I really was left contemplating was why the madwoman was creeping? 

Those with strong social pathos of changing the society we live in (and I include myself in this group of idealists) have to constantly be reminded that though a society can always be made better at the end of the day it's the little things that count, how we treat patients, clients, neighbors, our family members, friend and as Jesus meant: strangers on the street, determines what kind of place this will be for us. Those who believe in Christ know that's there's a world eternal and is to come and is already, it's that perspective we are living towards: eternity. The sufferings of ourselves or those of others can not measure with the world that is to come. 

I remember a quote by Margaret Atwood "Men are afraid that women will laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will kill them" herein lies a great fact, when a woman makes a social mistake it's always a grave one. The beautiful ones always want to be admired whereas the plain ones are called "wallflowers" but both are unable to be human in the sense that she could bare "losing face" a publicly disgraced woman or otherwise scorned outcast is always a mad one out, no longer confined to the attic but often solitary, only few women have had the strength to live the life of a hermit. 

Herland is somewhat longer, it's a story about a small group of silly men who set out to discover a kind of Amazonian society called Herland with obviously, no men. Gilman's idea is not new, I suppose she knew of these type of tribes already then, at the turn of the century, I got the feeling that Herland would have been somewhere in South America. 

In a history book i recently read I was taken aback by one sentence explaining that in human history there has been various matriarchal societies where women ruled and where the paternal role is insignificant as a person with 21th century experience of both motherhood and female solitude, I found this strange and refreshing. Between Y.W. and Herland I found one connecting link, according to Gilman it seems that being impregnated by a man and being bound to that man is the single act of subjugation which oppresses a woman, so the women in Herland become pregnant through parthenogenesis = greek word for "virgin creation". 

At the end of the expedition a few of the men find love among the Herland women and one beloved woman says to her newfound love something along the lines that it's okay for him to knock her up and leave, she'll stay in the perfect Herland utopia with the child and he, the man, is no longer needed in the process. I don't remember the name of the goofy bloke but Gilman records that he was gripped with jealousy towards the imagined heir, and it is in this I find the pettiness of man - Has there ever been a father who is jealous of his child? and the answer is -Yes, and it baffles me. When the goofy men first set out to find Herland, one of them says "Don't expect to find much of sisterhood where there is motherhood" it is this unchristian idea so ingrained in the west that power cannot co-exist, the protestant will not venerate the Mother of God in fear of disrespecting The Father, it's very weird, but I do understand. As I've said before, I am a feminist, but my problems with patriarchy ended when I became a orthodox Christian for the fact that female oppression has never been a part of the original Christianity, but I digress. Power, as the westerner understands it is absolute, but it's always a shame if the absolute is not God. 

I wonder if it's truly so hard to reconcile the world of women with that of the world of men, as Gilman describes in Herland? Are men so different after all? The women of Herland have their own system of belief which is mirrored against western Christian ideas, example the Herland women wonder if the Christian God is unable to resurrect a body if it's burned after death (as their own custom was) and if God should send small children to hell. I have no idea what kind of knowledge Gilman had in Christianity but it's certain to say that she wasn't familiar with the Eastern Orthodox Christian believes that say, nothing is impossible for God, even resurrection of the body from a heap of ash, and as for children, all children regardless of anything, belong to God, the Christian God, that is the Orthodox thought.  

Gilman set's out as a kind of Margaret Mead into utopian fiction, she has a wonderful imagination and I won't dismiss Herland as boring, but I'll say that it's more like the song of a cagebird who never knew the forest. She often describes the differences between Western Patriarchal society and the imagined Herland in a vertical way example: In Herland men love women upwards, they don't push them down under their superiority or governing right and say that is love. A woman in Herland grows down to the level of people instead of exalting herself over them as a boss. Gilman fails to imagine that which Ifi Amadiume discovered in the 1980's when researching the pre-colonial structures of Igbo societies in Nigeria, that power is more like a fisher's net tossed into sea, a person's power is not fixed it fluctuates depending of circumstances and regardless of sex, one might call it a certain kind of dynamic democracy, but one would perhaps want to refrain from using the Greek word "democracy" at all, seeing that it's only ever smoke and mirrors as much now as it was in ancient Greece. 

In Herland women have no cause to be ashamed and hence they are happy. Shame is a serious tool of oppression, if you think about it, especially in our day and time with social media and hyper opinionated and self entitled people canceling anyone who dares to lift their head, but we are still in a time governed by people largely. Western literature recognizes the "madwoman in the attic" as a phenomena (Bertha Mason in Jane Eyre and Wide Sargasso Sea, Y.W. and a myriad of other works) example in the Yale Univeristy Press The Madwoman in the Attic - The Woman Writer and the Ninetheenth-Century Literary Imagination Ed. Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar 1984) but it's one thing to realize this as shard of Western litterature and quite another to pause and reflect that Charlotte Perkins Gilman just as Virginia Woolf too and Sylvia Plath ended their own life. 

The fact that Women's health issues and her distresses are not yet understood in this world, strongly indicate that which James Brown sang "It's a mans world" yeah Baby, unfortunately so.