AN ABSTRACT OF THE THESIS OF

Tami Hotard for the degree of Master of Arts in En lg ish presented on May 28; 1999.
Title: A Literary Discourse on the Evolution of Gender & Sexuality in the First and
Second Waves of Feminism: Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Yelllow Wallpaper"
Deconstructs Established Gender Roles as Willa Cather's "Paul's Case" Reconstructs
Them

Abstract approved:

The two literary touchstones of Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Willa Cather

examined in this thesis anchored a larger discussion of the discourse about gender and

sexuality during the First and Second Waves of feminism in America. "The Yellow

Wallpaper" by Gilman deconstructed the notion of "femininity" manifested at the turn

of the century in America, while Cather's "Paul's Case" reconstructed the notion of

"masculinity." Both Cather and Gilman wrote their short stories at the turn of the

century in America during the First Wave of Feminism yet they resurfaced in

discussions about gender and sexuality in the Second Wave of Feminism. Readings of

both Cather and Gilman's writings have evolved with the First and Second Waves

because their protagonists defied and undercut the established social norms enabling

them to be re-examined much after their publication date. Although their writing styles

are different, Gilman and Cather share a complex understanding of gender and sexuality

that earmark the social position of women in America which can be interpreted by the

most contemporary critics of present date.

During the First Wave of Feminism, women discussed how their ability to

reproduce contributed to unbalanced gender relations, caused middle and upper class
women to remain confined to the household, and economically dependent upon their

husbands. This devaluation of women's participation in valued economic work

sickened many women and left them reliant on their physician's care as well.

Challenging this social structure, Gilman recorded her experience after being diagnosed

with neurasthenia by Dr. Mitchell, ordered to remain in bed for months while

consuming fatty foods and with no support from friends. Meanwhile, Cather expressed

her discontent with the social construction of gender in America by asserting a male

character that reconsidered the established norms for men and women of Victorian

America.

When the Second Wave of Feminism emerged in America, the discussions about

gender and sexuality reread these touchstone texts of Gilman and Cather as flexible

visions of reality but in different discursive contexts depending on the social time frame

in which they reviewed them. In the 1960s, the Women's Rights Movement and the

Women's Liberation Movement generated most theoretical discussions on the condition

of women themselves, the issues pertaining to women's confinement like establishing a

political voice and the "problem with no name." While in the 1970s, discussions about

gender and sexuality concluded that the "sex/gender system," also known as patriarchy,

defeated their purpose toward complete liberation because of its economic structure

aimed at benefiting men. Although they appreciated the notion of a collective voice for

all women, the development of individual voices among women played a more

significant role in the 1970's discourses about gender and sexuality. Because men have

predominantly controlled the medical field, women in the 1970s, who wrote about

gender and sexuality then, also attacked physicians like Dr. Mitchell who diagnosed
women with strange treatments and also worked for the prohibition of the practice of

mid-wifery in America at the turn of the century. Other critics of the 1970s decided that

Cather's life reflected that of a lesbian, so that by the 1980s, literary discourses

involving gender and sexuality began asking questions about the purpose of Cather and

Gilman's writings. If female authors like Cather and Gilman lived such politically

conscious lives, then why did they not create narratives that reflected their political

agendas? After questioning their narratives, some critics decided that Cather and

Gilman carried a "duplicitous nature" or a twofold message in their short yet complex

stories. This duplicitous style of writing explained how that by the 1990s discussions

about gender and sexuality had evolved into the "crafting of characters" that resulted in

"gender performances," and one acting out one's gender.

While First and Second Wavers fought for the elimination of binary gender

divisions and a balance in gender relations that supported the economic development of

all women in America, Cather and Gilman's writings facilitated discussions during both

Waves that contributed to the reasons why the social construction of gender and

sexuality did not result in equal human treatment, and should therefore be reconstructed.

The literature concerning women during the First and Second Waves of

Feminism can be summarized as a tactfully-formulated, continuing rumination on the

question of the nature and genesis of women's oppression and social subordination, and

how to change its effects on the future of the human race. What started off as strictly

constructed and enforced gender roles in Victorian America evolved into gender

performativity in the latter part of this century. This socio-sexuo evolution lies within

the protagonists' discontent and total rebellion in Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper" and
Cather's "Paul's Case," whose stories both surfaced at the turn of the 20th century in

America, when socially-conscious citizens inspected these rigid Victorian ideals, and

whose stories later resurfaced again during the Second Wave of Feminism at the middle

to end of the 20th century, when individuals re-enacted these same socially constructed

gender roles, and deconstructed them.

Lather's "Paul's Case" functions as a touchstone of her short fiction that even

Cather agreed valued notice, since she only allowed it to be reprinted of all her other

stories. With consideration toward conducting future research, a more thorough

examination of say The Professor's House and A Lost Lady as well as My Antonia to

explore more glimpses of Cather confirming this fluctuating, non-conforming, even

elusive authorial approach toward gender and sexuality that has made her reputation

outlast herself, should reveal even a deeper sense of her literary complexities. Gilman's

utopian novels, Moving the Mountain, Herland, and With Her in Ourland, that came

after "The Yellow Wallpaper" deserve a closer look in the same respect as she struggled

to portray the possibilities and barriers facing a woman who attempted to combine love

and work. The movement in Gilman's writing progressively develops the possibilities

and highlights the key barriers for a woman: female resistance to social change and

male incomprehension concerning the necessity for love and work in a woman's life.

She visualized the transition from the present to the future as one of internal conversion

to an egalitarian society. This is a dual process of women awakening to their own

interior power and men renouncing oppressive power structures as individuals and as a

society. Perhaps too this is why Gilman, like Cather, switched to a male narrator in

order to express her utopian vision.

©Copyright by Tami Hotard
May 28, 1999
All Rights Reserved
 A Literary Discourse on the Evolution of Gender & Sexuality in the First &
Second Waves of Feminism: Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper"
Deconstructs Established Gender Roles as
Willa Cather's "Paul's Case" Reconstructs Them

By

Tami Hotard

A THESIS

submitted to

Oregon State University

in partial fulfillment of
the requirements for the
degree of

Master of Arts

Presented May 28,1999

Commencement June 2000
Master of Arts thesis of Tami Hotard presented on May 28, 1999.

lal /
APPROVED:

Ic
Major Professor, representing English

Chair of Department of English

Dean of actuate Sc o01

I understand that my thesis will become part of the permanent collection of Oregon

State University libraries. My signature authorizes release of my thesis to any reader

upon request.
 Acknowledgments

Professor Laura Rice of the English Department deserves to be recognized for

her professionalism and continued support throughout the entire process of my graduate

thesis.

Professor Tracey Daugherty of the English Department and Professor Susan

Shaw of the Women's Studies Program also should be acknowledged for their patience

and for their critical eye that helped me with editing my thesis. Professor Sonia

Anderson of the Bio-Chemistry and Physics Department showed how a Graduate

Representative can prove to be a vital role in the undertaking of a graduate thesis that

covers over one hundred years of discussions about gender and sexuality.

When people ask me how long it took me to write my graduate thesis, I think for

a moment, and almost have to say since I was born, because it seems to me that since

that date my life reflects this entire process. However, over the past year while I did the

majority of the writing of my graduate thesis, certain individuals should be noted for

their support: Teresa Manning, Taylor Heath, David Kellum and Marilyn Kelly.

Without these people I feel my thesis would have been an insurmountable task and one

that involved too many personal reminders that I wanted to forget. Each of these people

contributed uniquely to the completion of my thesis and inspired me in their own unique

way. Thank you.

 TABLE OF CONTENTS

Page

1. Introduction ...........................................................................................................1

H. Gender & Sexuality in the Creation of Characters at the Turn of the

Century in America ...............................................................................................6

Description of Gender Roles for Victorian Men & Women .....................6

Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper" deconstructs "femininity" ..............14
Willa Cather's "Paul's Case" reconstructs "masculinity" ......................21

III. Gender & Sexuality in the First Wave (1850-1930) ...........................................26

Gilman's Women & Economics (1899) .................................................27

Margaret Sanger & America's First Birth Control League (1920).........30
Jane Addams' Democracy and Social Ethics (1907) ..............................33
Willa Cather's On Writing (1920) ..........................................................35

IV. Gender & Sexuality in the Second Wave (1960-1990) ......................................38

1960s: The Question of Sex ....................................................................38

1970s: Feminist Focus on "Sex/Gender System"
as Counterproductive .........................................................................46
1980s: Reconstructing Differences by Questioning Narratives .............59
1990s: The Evolving Role of Gender into
"Gender Performance" ............................................................................ 64

V. Conclusion ..........................................................................................................78

Endnotes ..........................................................................................................................82

Bibliography ....................................................................................................................86
 A Literary Discourse on the Evolution of Gender & Sexuality in the First & Second
Waves of Feminism: Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper" Deconstructs
Established Gender Roles as Willa Cather's "Paul's Case" Reconstructs Them

1. Introduction.

This thesis focuses on the discourse about gender and sexuality during the 20th

century in America, using as literary touchstones two short stories: Charlotte Perkins

Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper" and Willa Cather's "Paul's Case." Because Gilman

and Cather created their stories in the early part of this century, when the First Wave of

Feminism originated, and because their pieces resurfaced prominently in discussions

during the Second Wave of Feminism in America, a discussion of these pieces will

anchor the larger discussion of the discourse about gender and sexuality during the First

and Second Waves of Feminism in this thesis. When establishing an evolutionary

discourse about the history of feminism, the terms "first wave" and "second wave"

engage a notion of resurgence or a continuum that emphasizes a birth, a life, a death,

then a rebirth. This discourse also suggests that these feminist waves occur in cyclical

motion with fluidity. For these reasons, it becomes almost impossible to precisely

pinpoint the beginning and the ending of such feminist waves. Are we in 1999 still in

the second wave? Will the new millenium be a new beginning, or a time of remission,

prior to the next wave? Or, are we already in a feminist "third wave" at the end of the

twentieth century?

For purposes of this graduate thesis, the dates for the "first wave" of feminism

and the "second wave" (give or take a few years) can be determined as the following:

the "first wave" dates are 1850 through the 1930; then the "second wave" 1960 through

the 1990s (Nicholson 1). To designate exact "first wave" and "second wave" dates is
 2

not entirely important, for in doing so, it limits the intellectual discourse and the very

essence of this American literary herstory. Nonetheless, this thesis does not completely

disregard the importance of precision and specific dates but rather sets a time frame that

allows for evolution. It does so to steer away from the phallocentric order of ideas that

reifies ideas within time. I argue that feminist theory, along with its ideology, is a

continuum.

In the "first wave" of feminism, women discussed how their ability to reproduce

was a site for all women's oppression. They also argued against the sexuo-economic

relationship that bound middle and upper class women to the home after giving birth to

numerous children. Further, these women were a reserve capitalistic workforce, second

to men--and, third, if they were women of color or poor. More to the point, women at

the turn of the century debated the unequal structure of our economy where women

were confined to the home and men were allowed to generate revenue through outside

employment. This devaluation of women's participation in valued economic work

affected many women so that some began questioning the male-dominated medical

field that authorized itself to diagnose feminine maladies and to prescribe strange and

unusual treatments for them, while suppressing the practice of mid-wifery. For

example, women like Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860-1935) kept records of their

horrific experiences after having been diagnosed with neurasthenia by Dr. S. Weir

Mitchell and confined to the bed for months with his "rest cure treatment." Gilman as

well as Jane Addams wrote about the restrictive life forced upon women by the sexuo-

economic relation that denigrated women, socially constructing them as a controlled

degenerative species who specialized in sexual functions and the home. After being
 3

heavily criticized for starting America's first Birth Control League, Margaret Sanger

published a compilation consisting of hundreds of real life stories that revealed how

many women, whom she referred to as "breeders," because they had given birth to

several children, had also suffered through multiple miscarriages and multiple

abortions. During this period, Willa Cather(1873-1947) challenged the limited gender

role allotted to women by developing stories using the literary freedom of a male voice.

"Paul's Case" shall be examined here as a touchstone of Cather's work and how female

authors strove to overcome the boundaries set by strict American Victorian ideals.

Likewise, Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper" shall be examined because of its defiant

components that explored why women at the turn of the century in America went

insane, not only because of their confining domestic allotment, but because of the

wrongfully diagnosed treatment forced upon them from within the male-dominated

medical field. Readings of both Gilman and Cather's writings evolved with the First and

Second waves because of the ways their protagonists defied and undercut the
established social norms. These touchstone texts can be classified as flexible visions of

reality and have been reread in different discursive contexts depending on the social

time frame in which they are reviewed.

The "second wave" of feminism returned in the 1960s with the emergence of the

Women's Rights movement. "This was a movement composed of largely professional

women who began putting pressure on federal and state institutions to end the

discrimination that women experienced in entering the paid labor force. This

movement also drew on the dissatisfaction felt by many middle class housewives with

their lot as housewives" (Nicholson 1). In the latter part of the 1960s, another
 4

movement independent of this one emerged out of the New Left, the Women's

Liberation Movement. "It is from the Women's Liberation Movement that most of the

more theoretical works of the second wave have emerged"(Nicholson 2).

By the 1970s, most second wave feminists felt dissatisfied with the feminist

exclusion within their discourse of lesbians, women of color, and working class women,

who argued against many of the texts and demands of the feminist movement. There

were few that acknowledged differences among women. "However, such assertions of

differences were often made in conjunction with assertions of commonalties"

(Nicholson 4). The 1980s discourse about gender and sexuality grappled with the

notion of difference and the significance of uniqueness in the voices among women

who were formerly grouped together incorrectly by the feminist movement. For

instance, Adrienne Rich in "Compulsory Heterosexuality," questioned the historical

assumption that most women are naturally heterosexual. Rather, she suggested that

women's experience can be located on a "lesbian continuum," which "include[s] a

range--through each woman's life and throughout history--of woman-identified

experience, [and] not simply the fact that a woman has had or consciously desired

genital sexual experience with another woman" (135). By the 1990s, the notion of a

common language, the hegemonic messages this universal language sent out, and the

various socio-cultural meanings it symbolized, had been earmarked for gender-related

discussions that disenfranchised language as a dichotomizing and phallocentric socially

constructed linguistic system. Unfortunately, the dissection of our language resulted in

negative interpretations of the notion of "woman," so that the idea of "woman" has

almost shifted over history, and so thus should be re-evaluated.

 5

The issue of significance here in both waves is the fostering of a discourse about

gender balance. At the turn of the century men and women encountered strict rules on

gender; by the 1990s, feminist discourse on gender viewed gender as an act that one

performs from the time they wake up in the morning to put on their clothes until they

get in bed and undress their gender at night. For this reason, "performance" became a

key term and continuing motif in the 1990's discussions of gender and sexuality. After

examining the reception of "Paul's Case" and "The Yellow Wallpaper" in the first and

second waves, it becomes clear that the shift in their critical evaluation suggests that

America's scope in understanding gender and sexuality issues has expanded so that

twenty first century authors, unlike Cather and Gilman, who had to either conceal their

private beliefs for publishing purposes or be critically scrutinized as a result of being

forthright in their fictional challenges, possess more authorial freedom in their literary

creations and choice with regard to style. Theatricality can certainly be unrobed in both

stories, which shall be explored later in Chapter Three of this thesis.

For these reasons, authors like Willa Cather and Charlotte Perkins Gilman who

lived and wrote at the turn of the century in America have resurfaced in the

contemporary discourse about gender, and their writings a central angle to both the first

and second feminist waves. Quite possibly the third. They wrote about the imbalance

in gender relations during their time. Paul's story challenges the defined "masculine"

gender role and reconstructs it. Gilman's rediscovery proves that her heroine's horror

story of hysteria deconstructs the traditional way women were told to act and how they

lived, and how women of today appreciate that effort.

 6

Chapter II: Gender & Sexuality in the Creation of Characters

at the Turn of the Century in America

Description of gender roles for Victorian men and women.

After having been elected to the Presidency in 1882, Theodore Roosevelt's

socially constructed temperament epitomizes the establishment of an American norm

for "manliness." "Early on in Roosevelt's political career, he was ridiculed and even

compared to the infamous Oscar Wilde, who went to trial for sodomy," but once

Roosevelt embraced his "manliness," the American public began to modify their

negative opinions of him from "weakling" to the positive "Cowboy of the Dakotas"

(Bederman 171). "Roosevelt's great success in masculinizing his image was due, in

large part, to his masterful use of the discourse of civilization" (Bederman 171). He

constructed his persona as a strong but civilized white man. "As he saw it, the United

States was engaged in a millennial drama of manly racial advancement, in which

American men enacted their superior manhood by asserting imperialistic control over

races of inferior manhood" (171). Instead of working together to develop America, the

manly solution was to oppress the Other, those they thought were the embodiment of an

inferior race, or gender. "To prove their virility, as a race and a nation, American men

needed to take up the `strenuous life' and strive to advance civilization-through

imperialistic warfare and racial violence if necessary" (172). These were the defining

attributes of the discourse around "manliness." It "was composed of equal parts

kindhearted manly chivalry and aggressive masculine violence" and required "serious

attention and strenuous effort" (172). Roosevelt, like his father and other Victorian
 7

men, embodied this mold of masculinity. "Throughout his life, [Roosevelt] would

cherish this Victorian ideology of moral manliness-strength, altruism, self-restraint,

and chastity-and identify it with both the manful strength of his father and his own

authority as a member of the upper class"(172). Most American men then followed

their lead and adopted their characterization of the male norm.

While men in America, like Roosevelt, were fighting to prove their "manliness,"

women like Gilman were working to revolutionize society by "civilizing" women so

that the future of America would be better. Her social vision was one of a balance

between man and woman, and even the art on the cover of her monthly publication The

Forerunner, which she self-published for nine years, portrayed a woman and a man

mutually supporting a child who stood atop a globe. Ironically, she wrote "The Yellow

Wallpaper" to express her true discontent and real life experience of having been

diagnosed with a "nervous prostration" that confined her to bed for months because of

the ill-directed treatment of Dr. S. Weir Mitchell, a famous nerve specialist at that time

in America.

As Ehrenreich and English describe this historical movement, "sickness

pervaded upper- and upper-middle-class female culture," mostly because of a trend that

developed resulting from "the boredom and confinement of affluent women [which]

fostered a morbid cult of hypochondria-'female invalidism'-that began in the mid-

nineteenth century and did not completely fade until the late 1910s"(E & E 17). They

note Gilman as concluding bitterly "that American men `have bred a race of women

weak enough to be handed about like invalids; or mentally weak enough to pretend they

are-and to like it"'(19). However, Ehrenreich and English recognize that "all women
 8

faced certain risks that men did not share, or share to the same degrees," those being the

risks affiliated with childbearing and tuberculosis, or the "white plague" which was

common in young women in the mid nineteenth century(19). In their earlier Witches,

Midwives and Nurses, Ehrenreich and English observe that "for the doctors, the myth of

female frailty thus served two purposes. It helped them to disqualify women as healers,

and, of course, it made women highly qualified as patients"(23). "So," they conclude,

"it was in the interests of the doctors to cultivate the illnesses of their patients with

frequent home visits and drawn-out `treatments.' A few dozen well-heeled lady

customers were all that a doctor needed for a successful urban practice"(24). By

presenting the medical industry from a feminist perspective, Ehrenreich & English show

how "the upper-middle-class woman was the ideal patient"(24). More specifically,

Mitchell "expressed his profession's deep appreciation of the female invalid in 1888."

Ehrenreich & English cite him as asserting, "with all her weakness, her unstable

emotionality, her tendency to morally warp when long nervously ill, she is then far

easier to deal with, far more amenable to reason, far more sure to be comfortable as a

patient, than the man who is relatively in a like position"(24). Keeping these women

believing they were sick not only perpetuated Mitchell's medical career but also

garnered him national fame.

Finally, they noted how some women could "turn the sick role to their own

advantage, especially as a form of birth control.. .a doctor could help a women by

supporting her claims to be too sick for sex: he could recommend abstinence"(38-39).

Suggesting the notion of theatrics, Ehreneich and English concluded, "so who knows

how many of this period's drooping consumptives and listless invalids were actually
 9

well women, feigning illness to escape intercourse and pregnancy"(39). Margaret

Sanger documented, in a published compilation of hundreds of real life confessions,

how married women at the turn of the century evaded pregnancy because of their

horrifying experiences affiliated with childbearing and marriage, which shall be

discussed later on in this thesis in more detail. Ehrenreich and English's conclusion

seem to describe Gilman's situation seeing that she did not want to have any more

children, once her daughter Katherine was born. Ehrenreich and English also

commented on the power of melodrama to give women a hold over their husbands and

others as they incorporated it into their hysterical symptoms: "As a power play,

throwing a fit might give a brief psychological advantage over a husband or a doctor,

but ultimately it played into the hands of the doctors confirming their notion of women

as irrational, unpredictable, and diseased"(4 1). Even if women tapped into this power

source in order to exercise control over their doctor or husband, the power in the

melodrama of hysteria was only temporary and even worked against them in the long

term. Ehrenreich and English pointed out that performance did indeed establish its

roots in the history of hysteria. However, they did not focus their discussion on

hysteria's male counterpart that also existed at the turn of the century possibly perhaps

because of America's partial denial of its existence.

In contrast to Gilman's short story of hysteria focusing on women, Cather's

"Paul's Case" presents a protagonist, Paul, who exhibits some hysterical traits that

relate to "gender performance" ("his eyes were remarkable for a certain hysterical

brilliancy, and he used them in a conscious, theatrical sort of way, peculiarly offensive

in a boy"[Cather 164]), which has been strictly and intentionally associated with
 10

women's sphere of existence at the turn of the century in America, except for a few

male instances documented in Dr. Jean Martin Charcot's recently translated medical

journals in thel990s. Dr. Charcot, a 19`h century Parisian neurologist who influenced

Sigmund Freud to pursue the psychological causes of and possible cures for hysteria,

examined hypnotic phenomena and studied cases of hysteria while developing the

notion that hysterical symptoms are caused by a brain dysfunction. Citing

approximately 100 male hysteric case studies, "[Charcot's] case studies are as crucial to

understanding the construction of masculinity as his studies of women are to the

construction of femininity"(Showalter 63). Otherwise, hysteria or neurasthenia has

been deemed a female-only disease.

It is interesting to note that, as Elaine Showalter observed, "the cultural denial of

male hysteria is no accident: it's the result of avoidance, suppression, and

disguise"(64). Since the medical field has been predominated historically by men, it is

no doubt that this intentional concealment of male hysteria occurred. Showalter cites

Michael Micale who two years earlier, in Approaching Hysteria, noted that these

hysterical medical documents have been concealed because they reveal "normative

gender representations, encoded ideals of normal and abnormal masculinity that repay

investigation by the social, cultural, and medical historian" (Showalter 64). Charcot's

journals evidence the existence of male hysteria, which in a sense for Victorian society

"proved" a male effeminate, because women were only known to have hysterical

tendencies, and it demeaned the male ego to have evidence that proved that men

suffered from hysteria, too. These hysterical men had added an extra feminine

component to their already established masculine persona, a complicating element

 11

which society had no desire to confront. In his "Introduction," Micale recognized that

"the work of historicians and critics in this tradition shares the view that hysteria may

be read as a kind of metaphor both for women's position in past patriarchal societies

and for the image of the feminine in the history of scientific discourse"(8). Hysteria, and

its history, has been a systematic medical endeavor to create a female-only psychology.

When men happened to exhibit hysterical tendencies, doctors applied a gender-

exclusive treatment program. Furthermore, the treatment of male hysteria is evidence

of the polarization of gender roles as they were constructed at the turn of the century.

"Doctors frequently prescribed the rest cure for neurasthenic women, but not for men.

...With middle-class men the preferred treatment for neurasthenia was travel, adventure,

vigorous physical exercise"(Showalter 66). Women were encouraged to rest and

withdraw from any social activities and were thought to become healthier if they

physically remained in place. Showalter expands on this notion by postulating a far-

reaching cultural and psychological parallelism between the two entities: both feminism

and hysteria, she contends, are "violent reactions against male-dominated societies--

feminism in the world of organized public politics, hysteria in the realm of private

psychopathologies"(85). She proposes that "the movement between feminism and

hysteria was two-dimensional: physicians and laymen often branded voluble members

of the women's movement hysterical while militant sufragettes employed quasi-medical

strategies such as hunger strikes, a sort of willful collective anorexia, in the pursuit of

their political goals"(85). In this way, the role of gender establishes its history in the

disease of hysteria. Further, Micale sees that "it is not surprising that our historical

understanding of the subject should have developed in this way," because he sees,
 12

"hysteria in its everyday meaning denotes excessive or uncontrollable emotionality"

(150). Women have historically been referred to as the emotional gender while men are

the rational ones. `By its nature, it is a highly corporealized pathology in which

psychological anxieties are played out on the stage of the human body"(Micale 150).

Self-dramatization is an inherent part of hysteria, and women are associated with this

theatrical performance.

Perhaps because women have been historically noticed for their emotional

temperament, Micale linked theatricality to hysteria and thus to women. His

observations also signify possibly why women who have been diagnosed as hysterical

have not been taken seriously, as if they were performing their sickness or

uncomfortable allotment in life, and not because they were ever physically ill. Micale

points out that "it is imperative to maintain a distinction between the medicating

hysteria and cultural-historical conceptualizations of the subject," because only the

"most spectacular aspects of hysteria's history" have been portrayed, and thus have

become representatives of the medical malady. These intricate distinctions locate where

women enter the scene, and show how "upper and upper-middle-class women" have

dominated the literary representations of this disease.

Jill Conway's essay in Catherine Golden's 1990 casebook on "The Yellow

Wallpaper," The Captive Imagination, elaborated the negative social effects of Patrick

Geddes's The Evolution of Sex published in 1889 as a scientific theory of sexual

evolution that detailed the social construction of, as well as the medical reasoning for,

treating women differently from men when either one reported hysterical tendencies to

their physician. Conway reminds us how, as a result of doctors like Weir Mitchell, as
 13

well as the social class in which he and Gilman and Cather lived, stereotypes of

femininity as inferior to masculinity have been perpetuated historically: "Conway's

discussion of Geddes's dichotomy of sexual temperaments, particularly his belief that

the `emotional, intuitive female' who must conserve energy for survival, provides a

context for understanding two components of the rest cure treatment which Mitchell

prescribed and Gilman defied"(Golden 71). They include (1) "total and enforced bed

rest for periods of six to eight weeks"; and (2) "excessive feeding" of fatty foods while

being physically restricted to only their bed. The logic in this prescription was that

when these medically diagnostic elements were combined, energy would be restored to

women, and their neurasthenic tendencies gone. However, the rest cure did not stop

there; it also included total social isolation and absolutely no writing, mental or

intellectual stimulation. In other words, women were transformed into infants and

isolated from any support network to "encourage" her recovery. `By making sperm and

ovum exhibit the qualities of male katabolism or female anabolism Geddes deduced a

dichotomy between the temperaments of the sexes which was easily accommodated to

the romantic idea of male rationality and female intuition"(Golden 74). He believed

that "male cells had the power to transmit variation along with their tendency to

dissipate energy, [and that] female cells by contrast had the power to conserve energy,

support new life, and to maintain stability in new forms of life"(Golden 73). In other

words, sex differences should be viewed as arising from a basic difference in cell

metabolism that was innate and inherited.

His scientific study did not lead to the romantic ideas of heterosexual love; his

scientific social theory reinforced it. However, Geddes recognized the possibilities for
 14

an active woman in the future, but she had to somehow maintain her passivity. In fact,

he contended that "the growth of feminine altruism might be arrested if women

abandoned passivity for masculine altruism," because it "placed them in competition

with men [and] would be socially dangerous"(Golden 75). In other words, women

should be controlled in their personal growth potential. Moreover, Geddes believed

women should be confined or forced to remain in their gender allotment, which he

viewed as necessary or natural because of women and men's metabolism. "Once

metabolism was considered as a basic factor determining social structures, it became

clear that the male savage rested to accumulate the energy for sudden bursts of hunting,

while the female merely kept going at routine occupations"(Golden 76). More specific,

he saw, as Conway rightfully observes, "there was injustice in the routine"(Golden 76).

Total and enforced bed rest for periods of six to eight weeks these doctors believed

restored energy to neurasthenic women while excessive feeding increased body volume

and thus provided them with new stores of energy. Conway's essay serves as a

reminder of the theories of sex differentiation and the social position of women in the

late nineteenth century when Gilman wrote "The Yellow Wallpaper."

Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper" deconstructs "femininity."

Although Gilman wrote and published mostly social theory and utopian fiction,

she is most known for "The Yellow Wallpaper," a short but potent tale about the horror

of her real life experiences through the fictional depiction of a female protagonist. After

having been diagnosed with neurasthenia, her heroine was prescribed the rest cure

treatment by a famous "nerve specialist," and she was confined to her bed for months,

as Gilman was. The heroine went insane, but in real life Gilman recorded her terrible
experience with Dr. Mitchell's rest cure treatment that symbolized women's struggles,
 15

not only with gender roles but also with the patriarchal understanding of what

constituted a qualified publishable text, which shall be explained in more detail further

on in this section. Besides serving as a critique of the social construction of gender

roles, Gilman's story has been read as a depiction of incipient insanity as well as a
corrective to the practice of the rest cure. "The Yellow Wallpaper" functions then as a
literary touchstone of the social construction of gender and sexuality at the turn of the

century in America because it crystallizes key issues in the discourse of gender and

sexuality; the rationality for establishing such allotted roles; the biological essence of
such socially constructed roles; and the reality of the performance of such roles,

reflecting turn of the century thinking. From a 21S` century point of view, Gilman's

story earmarks the historical evolution of women's resistance to patriarchal institutions.

In their book The Madwoman in the Attic, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar
discuss Gilman's authorial technique as consisting of traits expressing "anxiety of
authorship": "Since [women] were trapped in so many ways in the architecture-both
the houses and the institutions-of patriarchy, women expressed their anxiety of
authorship by comparing their `presumptuous' literary ambitions with the domestic
accomplishments that had been prescribed for them"(G & G 85). After being ordered
not to by Dr. Mitchell and her husband who was also a doctor, the narrator in "The

Yellow Wallpaper" secretly kept a diary, recording her horrific experience while being
subjected to the inhumane treatment of being confined for months to a double bed

nailed to the floor in a former nursery. "Inevitably, too, [women] expressed their

claustrophobic rage by enacting rebellious escapes"(85). Because the famous nerve

specialist Mitchell prescribed the "rest cure" treatment also called the "Weir Mitchell

Treatment" for the narrator's neurasthenia, which ordered her to complete inactivity,

including not allowing her to write, she defied his treatment with the notion it was more

hurtful toward her than helpful with her condition, and recorded her experience.
 16

Fat and Blood written by Mitchell contains an in-depth and graphic description of the

rest cure. However, it only worked on the symptoms and not the sources.
"The Yellow Wallpaper," which was first published in the January 1892 issue of
the New England Magazine, received mixed reactions because of its elements that

contradicted the traditional roles of a woman and blatantly told of the horrors of them.

In fact, Gilman was lucky it was even released to the public with her name on it.

Gilman had learned that her agent at the time, Henry Austin, had sent it to the magazine

for review and pocketed the forty dollars the publication had intended to pay her.

Austin was not the only one who worked against Gilman's literary success.
Initially, Gilman had sent "The Yellow Wallpaper" to William Dean Howells,

and he, after noticing some of its merit, forwarded it on to Horace Scudder, the then

editor of the Atlantic Monthly, a well known publication in the United States.

According to Gilman's account in her autobiography, Scudder rejected it remarking that

"I could not forgive myself if I made others as miserable as I have made myself'(27).

However, Scudder's criticism did not stop Gilman's pursuit of having her story told.
"In the 1890s, editors, and especially Scudder, still officially adhered to a canon of
`moral uplift' in literature, and Gilman's story," Elaine Hedges posits in her 1973
Afterword, "with its heroine reduced at the end to the level of a groveling animal,

scarcely fitted the prescribed formula. One wonders, however, whether hints of the

story's attack on social mores-specifically on the ideal of the submissive wife-came

through to Scudder and unsettled him?" (62). When he rejected Gilman's story by
openly declaring how it made him "miserable to digest," Scudder also subtly admitted

how he sympathized, even related, to the female protagonist's feelings and the story's

merit. Yet he did not want to take the risk of publishing it.

Once the story was published and reviewed in 1892, the medical profession

received "The Yellow Wallpaper's" clinical content with both positive and negative
feedback. "It certainly seems open to serious question if such literature should be
 17

permitted in print," one doctor wrote in 1892, following its initial publication, in an

article entitled "Perilous Stuff' sent in protest to the Boston Transcript. "The story can
hardly, it would seem, give pleasure to any reader, and to many whose lives have been

touched through the dearest ties by this dread disease, it must bring the keenest pain.

To others whose lives have become a struggle against an heredity of mental

derangement, such literature contains deadly peril." He ended his letter by asking,

"Should such stories be allowed to pass without severest censure?" and signed it only
"M.D." (Gilman 64). In contrast, another doctor, Brummel Jones of Kansas City,
Missouri, wrote Gilman personally, and praised her literary efforts, which Gilman
recorded in her published autobiography The Living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman: An

Autobiography. He wrote, "I was very much pleased with it; when I read it again I was
delighted with it, and now that I have read it again I am overwhelmed with the delicacy

of your touch and the correctness of portrayal." Then, he confirmed Gilman's account
by adding that, "From a doctor's standpoint, and I am a doctor, you have made a

success. So far as I know, and I am fairly well up in literature, there has been no
detailed account of incipient insanity." The insanity that was becoming apparent,
however, to Gilman, was the insanity in the practice of this form of treatment and the

pursuit of a society that perpetuates its constant use of it. Moreover, in Livin , Gilman

acknowledges her "purpose" for inventing "The Yellow Wallpaper" that was "to reach
Dr. S. Weir Mitchell, and convince him of the error of his ways ... I met some one who
knew close friends of Dr. Mitchell's who said he had told them that he had changed his

treatment of nervous prostration since reading `The Yellow Wallpaper.' If that is a fact,
I have not lived in vain" (Dock 24). Identifying by name within the story, Gilman had
decided who her target audience was: Dr. S. Weir Mitchell. Yet I insist her mission
was to reach women also. Unfortunately, "that same year, [Mitchell] wrote to Andrew
Carnegie that he wanted to build a hospital for the `Rest Treatment for the Poor"'(Dock
25). The medical villain had not been reformed and actually attempted to broaden his
 18

practice beyond middle and upper class women to incorporate poor women into his

practice of the rest treatment. A brief discussion of "The Yellow Wallpaper" follows.
In the story, John, a physician, and his wife (name not provided) move for the

summer to stay in the nursery of "a colonial mansion, a hereditary estate" out of town
that has been vacant for years, because her doctor Mitchell (and the forthright Gilman

directly refers to his name within the text on page 18) had diagnosed her with a nervous

condition. Further, he said that she had a "slight hysterical tendency"2 about her and
that she must rest without any type of exercise or work, and was not allowed to write

either. She described the nursery as "a big, airy room, the whole floor nearly, with
windows that look all ways, and air and sunshine galore. It was nursery first and then
playroom and gymnasium, I should judge; for the windows are barred for little children,

and there are rings and things in the walls"(12) The narrator's description of the room
suggests that the room functioned in the past as a type of torture chamber for children.

The narrator provided additional information that proved this: "The paint and the paper
look as if a boys' school had used it. It is stripped off-the paper-in great patches all
around the head of my bed, about as far as I can reach, and in a great place on the other
side of the room low down. I never saw a worse paper in my life" (12). From the
narrator's point of inspection, whoever had previously been restrained in this room
peeled the paper off the walls near the headboard of the bed and had probably been tied
to the bed. The other places where the paper had been peeled back were low to the

ground, which supports the premise that this room functioned as a disciplinary location

in the mansion for a child.

In fact, the controlling way John treats his wife resembles that of a parent with

their child. Her husband John insures that his wife obeys the rest treatment prescription.

"[John] is very careful and loving, and hardly lets me stir without special direction. I

have a schedule prescription for each hour in the day; he takes all care from me, and so

I feel basely ungrateful not to value it more. He said we came here solely on my
 19

account, that I was to have perfect rest" (12). Even though she believed "that congenial
work, with excitement and change, would do me good"(10), she has internalized guilt

for being unappreciative of John's efforts to help her condition. Hence, Gilman created

a heroine's story of how she went insane after being locked up in this one room without
any outside stimulus.

The narrator does however have a few visitors who come to the estate to see her.

One visitor, John's sister Nellie, who assists in the carrying out the treatment, forces the

narrator to have to conceal from her the writing efforts she makes while being confined

to the nursery, because Nellie completely adheres to John's orders. The narrator told of
her: "Such a dear girl as she is, and so careful of me! I must not let her find me writing.
She is a perfect and enthusiastic housekeeper, and hopes for no better profession. I
verily believe she thinks it is the writing which made me sick! But I can write when she

is out, and see her a long way off from these windows" (18). Nellie conforms to the
allotted role for women at the turn of the century in perfecting her housekeeping duties.

Gilman's use of the word "profession" earmarks precisely where women contributed

economically at the turn of the century: in the household as a maid. Any other role a
women undertook could be construed, then, as satanic, masculine, deceptive, and

against the overall primary functions socially allotted to women at the turn of the
century.

As the story progresses, the yellow wallpaper begins to take on life forms and

the narrator's descent into madness is enhanced by that peculiarity. "This wall-paper
has a kind of sub-pattern in a different shade, a particularly irritating one, for you can

only see it in certain lights, and not clearly then. But, in the places where it isn't faded
and where the sun is just so," she decides, "I can see a strange, provoking, formless sort

of figure, that seems to skulk about behind that silly and conspicuous front design"(18).

Gilman's protagonist admits of her private relationship with the wall paper designs that
only she can see. "There are things in that paper that nobody knows but me, or ever
 20

will. Behind that outside pattern the dim shapes get clearer every day. She visualizes

the shapes to be "like a woman stooping down and creeping about behind that pattern"

(22). This woman desires to be released, because as she reports, "the faint figure behind

seemed to shake the pattern, just as if she wanted to get out"(23). This figure in the

nursery interests the narrator so that she secretly watches the women in the wall at night

for further definition of their cause.

While John was sleeping she watched: "He thought I was asleep at first, but I
wasn't, and lay there for hours trying to decide whether that front pattern and the back
pattern really did move together or separately"(25). As she investigates the wall paper
designs, the narrator decides these designs are actually women restrained behind them.

In this instance, Gilman also signified the importance of considering women

individually and with no set pattern. Further investigation revealed to her that from the
reflection of the moonlight, the pattern in the wallpaper "becomes bars! The outside

pattern I mean, and the woman behind it is as plain as can be"(26). Eventually the
figure imprisoned within the wallpaper begins to haunt her and even multiplies. The
narrator confesses, "I think there are a great many women" (30). It soon becomes
obvious that the figure behind the "horrible yellow-wallpaper" is the double of the

narrator herself, which becomes by the end of the story enabled to escape from her own

confinement: "I pulled and she shook, I shook and she pulled, and before the morning
we had peeled off yards of that paper" (32). Likewise, with the narrator, her final words

are "I've got out at last... in spite of you and Jane. And I've pulled off most of the
paper, so you can't put me back!"(36). With these words, John fainted in front of her,
another sign that the gender roles were shifting because only women were thought to
actually faint.

The heroine in "The Yellow Wallpaper" deconstructed the established gender

roles after being prescribed the rest cure treatment and ordered to remain confined to

"rest" for three months. Although Gilman provided the narrator no name, she wore the
 21

face of many women at the turn of the century across America who suffered through

similar medical treatments. In this short story, Gilman confronted these inequities by

publishing her open disgust at the social construction of gender in America. "The
Yellow Wallpaper" is a story of one woman who went insane, yet in Gilman's creating
a story that confronted such political issues, her readers should have wondered: Did

the narrator go insane due to suffering from a nervous condition, or actually, did the

heroine go insane because of her realization of the confined role women held in

society?

With this question and other mysteries about Gilman's writing agenda and her
imagination left unanswered, other female writers adopted a male protagonist, like

Cather did in "Paul's Case," where the issue of women's confinement sent her
imagination into a different direction. Although Gilman focused her writing agenda
toward expressing how women had become historically confined to the home, and in

this instance a room, Cather in "Paul's Case" exhibited how men felt trapped in

different ways because of their gender allotment.

Willa Cather's "Paul's Case" reconstructs "masculinity."

"Paul's Case," the best known of Cather's first collection of short stories, Troll

Garden, came out in 1905, just before she joined the McClure's staff and became a top

editor. Unlike Gilman, Cather encountered no initial publishing problems and only

made one attempt with McClure's where a contract was immediately signed. However,

the critical reception of Cather's first collection of short stories resembled Gilman's

because of the fluctuating reviews "Paul's Case" received. In an article written by

Bessie du Bois in 1905 in The Bookman, the critic's remarks were entirely unfavorable

in declaring that, after reading The Troll Garden, "one feels rather defrauded that the
 22

author has omitted to say what came next; it would have been so easy to go on" (613).

More obviously blatant in her disapproval, she criticized the stories as "a collection of

freak stories that are either lurid, hysterical or unwholesome"(612). Yet, another

reviewer was more concerned with biographical detail than with the author's method of

creating fiction, particularly in "Paul's Case." This 1905 Bookman review, "Chronicle

and Comment," included positive assessments like, "this story, of all the stories in the

book, comes nearest to being based on actual occurrences; so that Miss Cather's

psychology is all the more a remarkable attainment ...Miss Cather herself is a hard-

headed, clear-visioned, straight-forward young woman." It is the only story set in

Pittsburgh, where Cather was writing at the time and its scenes have been noted to be

from an actual experience. It was reported in a section of the Pittsburgh newspaper,

Bookman, entitled "Chronicle and Comment" (1905), that two boys employed by a firm

that managed a large estate ran away with two thousand dollars. They were found at the

Auditorium Hotel in Chicago about ten days later, their money gone, and they were

brought home. The papers were full of the affair for a time, but as one of the boys was

a minister's son, and as the money was refunded, the firm did not prosecute.

Similar to the "The Yellow Wallpaper," Howells chose "Paul's Case" as one of

the anthologized Great Modern American Stories and for many years it was the only

one of the set in The Troll Garden that Cather would permit to be published after its

original release. "Paul's Case" is a story of a young teenage boy, and quite presumably

effeminate, who commits suicide because no one in his life-his teachers or his

family-understand his way of thinking and his approach to life that contradicted his
 23

allotted "masculine" role. The theater where he worked and New York city where he

ran away prior to his death were the only places he felt he could relax and be himself.

In the beginning of the story, Paul is facing expulsion from high school for

disrespecting authority, the underlying cause his total discontent with the whole

educational enterprise. The teachers are not unkind, but Paul's strange demeanor (he

enters "suave and smiling" with a red carnation in his button hole) both baffles and

angers them. 3 At the end of the hearing, they leave feeling "dissatisfied and unhappy;

humiliated to have felt so vindictive toward a mere boy." Paul rushes off to his

ushering job at Carnegie Hall, first going up to the picture gallery in the Hall, where "he

sat down before a blue Rico and lost himself." Later, after helping patrons to their

seats, he falls into a similar dreamy state as the symphony begins ("he lost himself as he

had before the Rico").

After the concert is over, Paul delays long enough to follow the singer's carriage

and watch her enter the hotel: "he seemed to feel himself go after her up the steps, into

the warm, lighted building, into an exotic, a tropical world of shiny, glistening surfaces

and basking ease." A gust of cold wind and rain in his face rouses him, and he takes the

cars to Cordelia Street, "where all the houses were exactly alike." He pictures to

himself his upstairs room, with its "horrible yellow wallpaper, ... and over his painted
wooden bed the pictures of George Washington and John Calvin, and the framed motto

`Feed My Lambs,' which had been worked in red worsted by his mother." He expected

his father, with his endless questions and complaints, to be standing at the top of the

stairs. Paul's mother had died when he was a baby, and Paul lives with his father and

sisters, shadowy girls who barely appear in the story.

 24

When the school principal reports that Paul has not improved following the

faculty hearing, Paul's father takes him out of school and finds a place for him as a cash

boy with a mercantile company Denny & Carson-the first step, as Cordelia Street sees

it, to a solid future. Further, Paul is required to quit ushering, and the doorkeeper is to

see that he does not enter the theater again.

Paul runs away to New York after having stolen almost a thousand dollars in

cash from Denny & Carson, checks into the Waldorf hotel, and goes on an expensive

shopping spree including Tiffany's. It had been "astonishingly easy," and now Paul

looks ahead with relief to a few "precious days" of ease: "This time there would be no

awakening, no figure at the top of the stairs." He luxuriates at the hotel and then goes

out on the town where he meets a male freshman at Yale. "Everything was quite

perfect; he was exactly the kind of boy he had always wanted to be."

On the eighth day, he learned from the newspapers that his theft had been

discovered, and that his father was in New York looking for him: "It was to be worse

than jail, even; the tepid waters of Cordelia Street were to close over him finally and

forever. The grey monotony stretched before him in hopeless, unrelieved years;

Sabbath school, Young People's Meeting, the yellow-wallpapered room, the damp dish-

towels. After staying one more night, Paul takes the ferry to New Jersey, then hires a

horse taxi to drive him into the countryside by the railroad track, where he dismisses the

cab, walks to a high bank, and launches himself before an oncoming train. Before the

story ends and Paul jumps, he takes one of the red flowers he has been wearing on his

coat and buries it in the snow.

 25

In "Paul's Case," Cather created a male character whose lifestyle did not

conform to the established norms of his day. Like Gilman, Cather focused her writing

agenda toward the reconstruction of socially constructed ideologies that confined

gender and sexuality. Cather on the other hand restrained herself from overtly soliciting

her own alternative lifestyle to her writing public by adopting a female narrator like that

of Gilman. Instead, she selected a duplicitous approach by characterizing Paul in

expressing her political concern for the confined role of men and women in society.

After examining both of these touchstone texts of Cather and Gilman, the writing styles

of both authors demonstrate how each of them shared a similar sexuo-political agenda

but why each of them chose a unique writing platform in order to address them.
 26

Chapter III: Gender & Sexuality in the First Wave

1850-1930

During the First Wave of Feminism in America, women writers and political

activists, such as Gilman, Sanger, Addams and Cather, constructed the women's

liberation movement based on gender equality, which women of the Second Wave used

as a backbone to address gender related issues in the latter part of this century. First

Wavers created bodies of written work that primarily focused on arguments for equal

treatment of both genders based upon examining the "sexuo-economic relationship" of

women and men as a factor in social evolution. They also produced written arguments

for the right to birth control among women by working to remove its negative social

stigma and advocating it as a means for women to possess absolute control of their lives

and their bodies; thus it was seen as a route to women's complete liberation. Sanger

accomplished this feat only after having published a compilation of horrifying real life

letters written by other women about their mortifying experiences of the

childbirth/rearing process. Branching off into other directions, First Wavers re-

evaluated the notion of "Democracy" arguing that its actual practice was inconsistent

toward the liberation of women. However, Addams viewed modem education as a

positive factor in the liberation of women because it recognized women apart from the

home, the family and social claims, all of which placed pressures upon females that

resulted in them having a lower self-image than men. In a tactful yet brief essay she

wrote while working as an editor for McClure's, Cather described instances where art
 27

and life unite to explore the social construction of their surroundings, which she referred

to as "escapism." The example she gave was the commitment of 15th century

Southwestern Indian women, who decorated their water jars, carried them up to nearby

streams without even knowing if water was there, to illustrate her idea. Cather also

discussed the practice of novelists intentionally employing themselves at sweatshop

jobs in order to gather their creative writing materials. She saw their "exceptionalness"

as "a willingness to pay the cost instead of being paid for it" (24). In both instances,

Cather illustrated how "escapism" could be used personally to incite one's imagination

and channel it resourcefully without entirely allowing social influences affect one's

vision. First Wavers reconstructed the "sexuo-economic" relationships of the homes in

the early part of the 20th century which also laid the groundwork for the Second Wavers

to reorganize the "sexuo-economic" relationships outside the home.

Gilman's Women & Economics.

The importance of Charlotte Perkins Gilman's social theory stands uncontested

by the vast majority of critics. In Women & Economics (1898), subtitled "Study of the

Economic Relation between Men and Women as a Factor in Social Evolution," she

stated that the fundamental concern for women was work. "Her views on the place and

future of women were sought, commented upon, and avidly discussed in this country

and Europe"(Degler Vi). 4 Carl Degler's 1956 American Quarterly essay "inaugurated

the revival of interest in Gilman's work, and in 1966, Degler brought forth a reprinting

of [Women & Economics]"(Knight 165-166). He further notes in the introduction to

the 1966 Torchbook Edition that "in the first two decades of the twentieth century her

books ran through numerous editions and were translated into half a dozen foreign
 28

languages"(vi).5 Numerous articles by Gilman on social theory appeared in popular and

scholarly journals alike, and as a paid lecturer, she was in great demand in the United

States, England and on the continent.6 On June 8, 1899, The Nation went so far as to

pronounce Women & Economics as "the most significant utterance on the subject [of

women] since Mill's Subjection of Woman" Nation 443). However, since Gilman

wrote very little that was directly concerned with the achievement of the issue of

suffrage, her work possibly was lost from sight because the minds of Americans at the

turn of the century were completely taken up with the struggle for the vote.

Nonetheless, what Gilman's W & E uniquely addresses is that the vote was only a

peripheral part of the revolution she both prophesized and advanced for women.

Moreover, her social theory received a much different reception than her controversial

short story "The Yellow Wallpaper." Why were her economic treatises socially

acceptable yet her gender related literary endeavors ridiculed so heavily? Was this

consequence Gilman suffered a result of coming too close to the real truth of what goes

on behind closed doors that appear so peaceful on the outside surface?

Basing her thesis squarely on the "natural tendency of any function to increase

in power by use," (58) and on the genetic transmission of these adaptations, Gilman

charts the history of humankind from primal homogeneity to the point when "sex

distinction" had become morbid and debilitating(33). She is referring here to the notion

of cultural conditioning and the genetic determinism based upon this notion that

negatively affected women, and benefited men. According to Gilman, the restrictive

life forced upon women by the "sexuo-economic relation" (37) has made them into

what amounts to "a degenerate species specializing in sex functions"(39). The "male of
 29

our species," on the other hand, "has become human, far more than male"(43). Gilman

desired to ground her polemic in biology, leading her to portray cultural conditioning as

genetic determinism. The only reason the female has not withered away completely is

that each "girl child inherits from her father a certain increasing percentage of human

development, human power, human tendency"(69-70). The constant infusion of

male/human genes alone "has saved us from such a female as the gypsy moth"(70).

Gilman's allusion to the gypsy moth relates a woman's nature to the transformed

caterpillar that completely destroys its own environment as it releases pheromones to

attract male gypsy moths to multiply at a rapid rate. Gilman defines historical women,

as opposed to the essential woman, as deviations from the male, "who is a far more

normal animal than the female of his species"(43). By encroaching on the freedoms of

the woman to the point of reducing her to a state of dependency, man assumed the

superior position of provider. "He was not only compelled to serve her needs, but to

fulfill in his own person the thwarted uses of maternity. He became, and has remained,

a sort of man-mother,"(125) who nurtures his child (read: woman) into a state of

complete dependency based upon his preconceived concept of "wife" and/or "mother."

Gilman identifies this social process as "the maternalizing of man"(127), a paradoxical

approach to maternity that has had adverse effects on both women and men, and thus

makes the question of what an ideal human being should be like problematic. Deemed

a leading feminist in her own time, Gilman, ironically, repudiated the term feminist

when it came into use in her later years. Rather, she called herself a humanist. "Her

world was masculinist, men having usurped human traits as their own, and Gilman

wanted to restore an equal gender balance, to emancipate women from `house service'
 30

to promote the best development of society" (Knight 164). Unencumbered by domestic

service, Gilman believed that women could then serve in an industrial society and thus

benefit the world as equals to men. Women needed to tackle their challenge with their

household responsibilities of rearing children, however, before they could enter the

workforce. Someone needed to focus First Wave efforts there first for any real change

could begin.

Margaret Sanger & America's First Birth Control League.

Another female theorist who lived in America at the turn of the century and who

focused on the methodology toward equalizing gender relations centering on the

development of women was Margaret Sanger. Her route however was through birth

control;7 she professed that pregnancy perpetuated the poverty of the family and forced

women into solitary confinement within the household. Parallel to Gilman's Women &

Economics in their vital concern for the liberation of women, Sanger's social treatises

of the 1920s, The Pivot of Civilization (1922) and Motherhood in Bondage (1928),

focus on how women must gain control of their lives and their bodies through birth

control in order to free themselves from the control of their husbands and their doctors.

In The Pivot of Civilization, Sanger defended her work in the Birth Control

League, while addressing criticisms of her passion for more order and awareness

through what they called "Birth Control" or "the idea of modern scientific

contraception"( 12). Rebutting her critics, she demanded that, "Birth Control, therefore,

means not merely the limitation of births, but the application of intelligent guidance

over the reproductive power. It means the substitution of reason and intelligence for the

blind play of instinct"(13). During this time, Sanger notes the league was criticized for
 31

the use of the term "Birth Control" which she saw as "guidance, direction,

foresight"( 12- 13). She attacked the "indifference of the intellectual leaders" who for

centuries "have preached the doctrine of glorious and divine fertility" where "children

brought into this world by unwilling mothers suffer an initial handicap that cannot be

measured by cold statistics"(15-17). It is interesting to note here that in her 1928 book

mentioned earlier, Motherhood in Bondage, Sanger provides her readers with a glimpse

of such cold statistics that will be discussed later in this chapter. "For centuries, official

moralists, priests, clergymen and teachers, statesmen and politicians have preached the

doctrine of glorious and divine fertility" while they remain "the staunching adherents in

their own lives of celibacy and non-fertility"(17-18). Sanger directed her Birth Control

agenda against the teachings of the churches. She argued:

As long as sexual activity is regarded in a dualistic and contradictory

light,--in which it is revealed either as the instrument by which men and
women `cooperate with the Creator' to bring children into the world, on
the one hand; and on the other, as the sinful instrument of self
gratification, lust and sensuality, there is bound to be an endless conflict
in human conduct, producing ever increasing misery, pain and injustice.
(204-205)

More blatant and directed by the end of her treatise, Sanger purported that "the great

central problem, and one which must be taken first, is the abolition of the shame and

fear of sex"(271).

Motherhood is a selection of thousands of horrifying confessional letters

compiled by Sanger from letters sent her by mothers from all parts of the United States

and Canada. These letters "voice," as Sanger notes in her introduction to Motherhood,

"desperate appeals for deliverance from the bondage of enforced maternity"(xi). For

them, Sanger saw herself as a "symbol of deliverance" from their enslaved womanhood
 32

"extending help denied them by their husbands, priests, physicians or their neighbors"

(xi-xii). She offered hope amid the reality of suffering.

Sanger forewarned her readers: "repetition the readers will find, but significant

repetition" that "builds up the unity of this tragic communal experience"(xii). Sanger

offered the American public a gruesome look at the personal lives of many unhappy

mothers in detailed letters and statistics that summarized their horrifying experiences. In

her introduction, it was clearly evident that she grappled with objectifying women in

this manner for the public's review. She notes "an easy and even a pleasant task is it to

reduce human problems to numerical figures in black and white on charts and graphs,

an infinitely difficult one is to suggest concrete solutions, or to extend true charity in

individual lives" (xiii). More to the point, a subject cannot be reduced to an object with

a completely predictable pattern, and Sanger wanted her readers to know she was

concerned with the individual. "Yet life can only be lived by the individual; almost

invariably the individual refuses to conform to the theories and classifications of the

statistician"(xiii).8 After acknowledging her respect for the individual, she reported that

"of all the varieties of experience and humiliation recorded, a definite unity

emerges"(xiv).

Each letter contains the record of a woman caught in the toils of

unwilling maternity, enslaved not only by the great imperative instincts
of human nature-hunger and sex-but hopelessly enmeshed in this trap
of poverty, heredity, ignorance, the domination or the indifference of the
husband, the timid passivity of the family physician, and the ever-
increasing complications of successive pregnancies. (xiv-xv)

It is unfortunate that the unity Sanger noticed can be identified as multiple women

suffering because of their reproductive capacities. Too many mothers reported to

Sanger of the dangers affiliated with childbirth and childrearing, so that she organized
 33

for publication the previously discussed two books detailing the devastating personal

losses that had survived. Meanwhile, other women without children, and daughters

who still lived at home, hurdled obstacles also in order to liberate themselves from the

bondage of their family obligations that kept them linked to the household too. The

First Wavers attacked this area of concern for women because their mission included

the liberation of all women, and not only mothers.

Jane Addams' Democracy and Social Ethics.

In her argument for the liberation of single women, Jane Addams presented

various scenarios where the present form of "Democracy" was in place to impel her

reader to consider a "new form of Democracy" which would lead to an acceptance of

social obligations involving in each instance a new line of conduct. The design for this

redefinition situated the responsibility of this task with her readers in order for them to

question their existing notion of "Democracy."9 She remarked in her opening chapter

of Democracy and Social Ethics(1907), "no attempt is made to reach a conclusion, nor

to offer advice beyond the assumption that the cure for the ills of Democracy is more

Democracy"(12). In other words, she encouraged a reconsideration of the existing

authority in Democracy, and she provided scenarios to elucidate her point.

One example in support of Addam's premise for a reconsideration of society's

notion of "Democracy" she provided was how "the individual often sacrifices the

energy, which should legitimately go into the fulfillment of personal and family claims,

into what he considers the higher claim" that occurs whenever "daughters undertake

work lying quite outside of traditional and family interests"(73). They are met with

opposition. "These parents insist that the girl is carried away by a foolish enthusiasm,
 34

that she is in search of a career, that she is restless and does not know what she

wants"(73). Addams contended the parents believe that, at the cost of the family, the

daughter was unsure of herself, needed unjust personal fulfillment, and only on a whim.

"She was setting up her own will against that of her family's for selfish ends" and "her

attempt to break away must therefore be willful and self-indulgent"(74). Addams

assumed that this was an overbearing family claim on the daughter because "for so

many hundreds of years women have had no larger interests, no participation in the

affairs lying quite outside personal and family claims"(74). Furthermore, "it is always

difficult for the family to regard the daughter otherwise than as a family

possession"(82). Comparing her to her career-minded brother, her parents assumed she

was uninteresting and dumb. Along with her familial obligations, the daughter was an

object that possessed distinct responsibilities to the household. Significantly though,

Addams saw that "modern education recognizes woman quite apart from family or

society claims, and gives her the training which for many years has been deemed

successful for highly developing a man's individuality and freeing his powers for

independent action"(84). Thus, the daughter's independence remains entangled in a web

of "social claims" and "family claims" that is in conflict with her personal growth

outside of this web. "The result is an unhappy woman, whose heart is consumed by vain

regrets and desires"(86). Reminding Victorian America of its selfishness with regard to

its treatment of the daughter, Addams insisted that a daughter's own individual needs

were not significant because the responsibility was not to herself but to the family's

success, and that this maltreatment of her only perpetuated more weak, dependent

women. Because the family unit refused to waive their selfishness to balance the
 35

personal respect that benefited the son with their daughter's needs, America showed

their unwillingness to accept women on their own without men and away from the

home. Women, who like Cather, chose not to get married were forced to consider

alternative ways in order to express their desire for life. Consequently, some chose to

direct their imagination toward art and literature.

Willa Cather's On Writing.

Willa Cather, having focused her writing on fiction rather than social theory in

comparison to Gilman, Sanger and Addams, did however write a brief essay entitled,

"Escapism: A Letter to the Commonweal,"10 which broaches social issues in its

theoretical content. In it, Cather demonstrates the multifaceted usefulness of "a new

term in criticism: the Art of `Escape.' Her initial questions were: "Isn't the phrase

tautological? What has art ever been but escape?"(18). Her answer: "When the world is

in a bad way, we are told, it is the business of the composer and the poet to devote

himself to propaganda and fan the flames of indignation"(18). As the mind mulls over

the term Escape, "implying an evasion of duty, something like the behavior of a

poltroon," the term may at first glance appear negative, but it is actually a rhetorical tool

utilized by people, artists, writers, etc. to express themselves within their surroundings.

Cather gives the example of Southwestern Indian women, before European civilization

had ever come to America, who painted geometrical patterns on the jars in which they

carried water up from the streams, whenever there was water to collect, that is: "These

people lived under the perpetual threat of drought and famine [yet] they often shaped

their graceful cooking pots when they had nothing to cook in them"(19). Cather's
 36

reasoning concerning their curious behavior was that "they sprang from an

unaccountable predilection of the one unaccountable thing in man"(19). That thing is

"his loyalty to a cause"(20). The unusual behavior of the Southwestern Indian women

proved their dedication to the mission of shaping beautiful pottery to cook in with little

chance of rain for anything to grow for cooking in them.

In this same essay, Cather also described her experience when she first lived in

New York and was on the editorial staff of a magazine, how she became "disillusioned

about social workers and reformers" "when they brought in an article on fire-trap

tenements or sweat-shop labor apologetically explained that they were making these

investigations `to collect material for fiction "'(23 -24). Cather could not believe that

"any honest welfare worker, or any honest novelist, went to work in this way"(24).

After further discussion, she came to their reason. "Their exceptionalness, oftener than

not, comes not from a superior endowment, but from a deeper purpose, and a

willingness to pay the cost instead of being paid for it"(24). Then she could relate

because she also possessed unquenchable personal missions. "Since poets and novelists

do not speak in symbols or a special language, but in the plain speech which all men use

and all men may, after some fashion, read," Cather speculated, "they are told that their

first concern should be to cry out against social justice. This, of course, writers have

always done ... This seems to be the writer's natural way of looking at the suffering of
the world"(22). Both of these examples explore the mysterious connection between art

and life. Is this what she was attempting in the depiction of her effeminate character

Paul?
 37

During the First Wave of Feminism in America women writers and political

activists constructed the women's liberation movement based on gender equality. They

created bodies of written work that primarily focused on arguments for equal treatment

of both genders based upon examining, as Gilman first referred to in Women &

Economics, "the sexuo-economic relationship" of women and men as a factor in social

evolution. First Wavers also produced written arguments for the right to birth control

among women by working to remove its negative social stigma and advocating it as a

means for women to possess absolute control of their lives and their bodies. First Waver

Margaret Sanger accomplished this feat only after having published a compilation of

horrifying real life letters written by other women about their experiences during the

childbirth/rearing process. Branching off into other concerns for women during the

First Wave, women such as Jane Addams, viewed modern education as a positive factor

in the liberation of women because it recognized women apart from the home, the

family and social claims, all of which placed pressures upon females. While some

political activists pinpointed for women their challenges in social evolution toward

personal liberation, other women writers, such as Cather and Gilman, found alternative

ways to circumvent their discontent in America's socio-economic system by creating

literary journeys that tested established gender roles, and caused people to reconsider

the social construction of them.

 38

IV. The Evolution of Gender & Sexuality in the Second Wave

1960 -1990

1960s: the question of sex

The Second Wave began with a new intensity in many societies in the degree of

reflection given to gender relations. "The political movements that came into being in

the 1960s meant that a radical questioning of gender roles was being carried out not

only by isolated scholars or marginalized groups, but in front of and with the attention

of many national publics. The consequence has been a major restructuring of

institutions worldwide" (Nicholson 1). Two different movements in America during this

time shaped this change. The Women's Rights Movement, which "drew on the

dissatisfaction felt by many middle class housewives with their lot as housewives" led

women into the paid labor force. Secondly, The Women's Liberation Movement

encouraged "the more theoretical works of the second wave" that "explained the origins

of women's oppression and the means by which it has been sustained over

time"(Nicholson 2). They generated explanations that accounted for the fundamentality

of women's oppression and the economic barriers women faced. While in the 1960s

some women writers, such as Betty Friedan, looked inward for the solution to women's

social challenges in America, other writers like Mary Ellmann and Tillie Olsen,

broadened the scope of the 1960s discussion on gender and sexuality by speculating on

how established gender roles have resulted in an unequal partnership between women

and men. Their literary contributions opened the way for the assessment of and
 39

appreciation for the individual voice of the female gender that women writers soon

confronted in the 1970s and 1980s.

In the 1960s, a trend in literature written by women about women directed the

responsibility of women's unhappiness in America within women themselves instead of

focusing entirely on their uncontrollable external conditions. For example, Friedan's

noteworthy Feminine Mystique (1963) internalized women's suffering. "The problem

that ha[d] no name," Friedan determined, was "the problem [that] lay buried, unspoken,

for many years in the minds of American women"(11). In short, the problems these

women encountered stemmed from their own insecurities, and not any outside force."

"If a woman had a problem in the 1950's and 1960's, she knew that something must be

wrong with her marriage, or with herself '(14, my emphasis). Fortunately, individual

women struggled toward developing a discourse about their unsettled feelings and

gradually they determined "that the problem that has no name was shared by countless

women in America"(15). These countless women, she referred to, the majority of

whom were white, represented the populace of women who could afford to stay home

in their domestic settings. Other poorer and colored women had no choice but to work

and financially support their family and could only imagine the life of a suburban

housewife, while they changed bed sheets and scrubbed floors. Friedan explained, in

her point of view, why it was so difficult for anyone to understand how suburban

women came to be so unhappy with their lot.

The suburban housewife-she was the dream image of the young

American women and the envy, it was said, of women all over the world.
...She had found true feminine fulfillment.... As a housewife she was
free to choose automobile, clothes, appliances, supermarkets; she had
everything that women ever dreamed of. (13)
 40

The suburban housewife, therefore, became the envy of other women when she reached

the social level of an unemployed (by capitalist America's standards) consumer.

Furthermore, becoming envied in this fashion characterized the high point in the

evolution of a "real" American woman. Even if there were some romance to it, if this

were the dream life so many women around the world were desiring, then how could a

doctor like Mitchell have been so popular, when his income was based on the misery of

this exact group of women?12 Friedan also noted that a Newsweek article declared,

"She is dissatisfied with a lot that women of other lands can only dream of ...From the

beginning of time, the female cycle has defined and confined woman's role"(19).13 In

this article, the author assumes that simply because things are more treacherous in

foreign lands that women in America should be content with their own country's form

of domestic torture. Unlike another outspoken French feminist of the period, Simone de

Beauvoir, whom Friedan interviewed, Friedan did not advocate changing the system in

America, but rather simply leaving the system intact and allowing women to enter the

workforce with the same career opportunities as men to achieve the highest paid

positions. Friedan paved the way for future speculation on women's involvement in

American society and their evolution in it as well by starting such organizations as the

National Organization for Women(N.O.W.), yet she advocated heterosexual marriage as

the only life choice for women. De Beauvoir, on the other hand, adopted a more radical

approach and believed that the entire system, including the institution of marriage and

natural childbirth, needed to be thrown away because it worked against women.

A decade later Friedan would find herself interviewing France's most influential

feminist theorist, Simone de Beauvoir,14 at her residence with two interpreters in Paris
 41

and discussing these issues which had caused Friedan to believe that the feminist

movement was at an ideological standstill, and left her perplexed. In Friedan's eyes,

gender issues had changed only minimally, with women still subordinate to men.

Women, to Friedan, were still the nurses and men the doctors; women were still the

secretaries and men their bosses. Consequently, she sought de Beauvoir's guidance

with a "feeling that someone must know the right answer, someone must know for sure

that all the women who had thrown away those old misleading maps were heading in

the right direction, someone must see more clearly"(Friedan, 1975, 391). What she

interpreted from her personal interview was that de Beauvoir had been "professing

publicly to find in radical feminism an ideological blueprint superior to Marxist-

Leninist-Stalinist communism"(392). In short, Friedan met face to face with "an

intellectual heroine of our history" who she thought believed that "one must simply

destroy the system"(392). This solution seemed unrealistic to Friedan because so many

women, including de Beauvoir who shared her life with Jean Paul Sartre, the father of

existentialism, were in committed relationships with men. Friedan believed women

would succeed faster with men on their side and miscalculated de Beauvoir's view on

gender relations. She reflected after her interview with de Beauvoir and wrote, "When

one has lived a whole life in such dependence upon a man as she has-and by flaunting

the absence of legal sanction, made a stronger bond than others do in ordinary

marriage-how could she then advocate that other women renounce the very need to

love and be loved by a man"(393). Friedan wondered why de Beauvoir resented her

own position in the role she played in her personal life with Sartre, and so her

arguments focused on eliminating all relationships with men? De Beauvoir may not
 42

have felt insubordinate to Sartre but Friedan inferred from their meeting that quite

possibly she did. The level of communication between the two women expressed

through interpreters' assistance may have contributed to this confusion, or quite

possibly the medium of communication used to tackle such complexities about gender

and sexuality served as an obstacle because of its own restrictions. Significant to their

discussion, de Beauvoir and Friedan discussed various topics about gender and

sexuality and most definitely held distinct views on each and expressed them

forthrightly.

Friedan suggested in her discussion with de Beauvoir that a minimum wage be

attached to the value of housework. Yet de Beauvoir disagreed altogether claiming that

"it keeps to the idea of women at home, and I'm very much against that"(400). Friedan

rebutted by claiming that "I think you tackle the question of sex by tackling equality,

not by renouncing or urging women to renounce love or sexual relationships"(405). De

Beauvoir believed that a woman would only encounter personal freedom "in a world of

equality" but "while it is not equal she takes a big risk"(405). Even in sex, Friedan

pointed out what de Beauvoir had earlier posited in The Second Sex, that "a woman

feels debased in sex because she has the underneath position"(405). They agreed that

"it is not sex that reduces women; it is society" but that "sex becomes the symbol of

what society does" so that "when we change society, we can choose our

sexuality"(405). De Beauvoir had also directed her political agenda onto class

inequality among women while Friedan was only interested in attaining the right for

privileged white women to enter this class-based, unequal world in positions of

authority. Thus, from her interview with de Beauvoir, Friedan developed her own
 43

sense of existentialism toward the liberation of women that was fundamentally different

from that of de Beauvoir. "I had learned my own existentialism from her," Friedan

wrote. "It was The Second Sex that introduced me to that approach to reality and

political responsibility--that, in effect, freed me from the rubrics of authoritative

ideology and led me to whatever original analysis of women's existence I have been

able to contribute" (Friedan 391). She had located her own existential authority within

herself. Friedan realized that, "we need and can trust no other authority than our own

personal truth" (Friedan 394). The significance of personal liberation had therefore

established its place within 1960's Second Wave dogmas.

In comparison, Mary Ellmann, in Thinking About Women (1968) addressed the

topic of confinement and women in her chapter entitled, "Feminine Stereotypes," where

she contended that "range is masculine and confinement is feminine"(87). In Ellmann's

opinion, "this natural law, repealed in the late nineteenth century, became then a social

axiom instead. The sequence illustrates, in turn, a law of change: when nature ceases

to enforce conditions to which the majority are accustomed or even devoted, these

conditions are artificially prolonged by both sentiment and argument"(87). She

employed Cather to illustrate her argument.

Willa Cather, for example-and for reasons I have never understood-

found much picturesque charm in the sight of men, and particularly of
women, performing heavy labor. When this labor was relieved by the
introduction of farm machinery, she resisted its loss (1) by
sentimentalizing its beauty and (2) by fulminating against the techniques
which replaced it.(87)

While Ellmann agreed with society's replacement of manual labor with machinery,

Cather resisted the implication of such, a possible sign of her own inability to accept

difference or social change, and specifically with regard to gender distributed tasks.15
 44

Cather saw that this type of lifestyle allowed for women to work with men respectively

outside of the home. Cather envisioned the possibility of balance in the family because

in an agricultural family, women may have performed different duties from men, but

everyone shared in the overall preservation of the family unit. In the New Order women

were left confined to the home, whereas men sought work outside the home and

generated revenue from their outside employment opportunities.

Then Ellmann maintained how extreme efforts were exhausted during the

nineteenth century in the continuation of the feminine stereotype of confinement, and its

social attractability. "The narrowness of women is now an abstract sexual judgment;

but it is difficult to know, from statement to statement, whether the characteristic is

obligatory or chosen, or to be certain in which circumstances it is convenient and in

which regrettable. Certainly, as long as it is recommended, it is presumably

desirable"(89). Socially, Ellmann saw that women strove in their perfection of their

confinement roles and that they perfected this confinement in their allotted lifestyles.

"The domestic functions which are strenuously urged upon American women who are

not yet involved in them are precisely the sources of complaint against the women who

are. Many perform these functions too well, and perfection is as risible as

imperfection"(89). Furthermore, Ellmann found "practicality" as a "subdivision of

confinement: most often, it is noticed when the man's theoretic, artistic or spiritual

capacity is at issue"(91). As long as women stick to their confinement role, then the

current establishment with the opposite genders in effect continues. "Women are

incapable of grasping subtle principles of conduct, large aspirations, bold errors, grand

designs. This is a forgivable limitation as long as they shut their mouths and chill the
 45

beer. But unfortunately, many tend to form, and then to express, narrow and hostile

opinions of masculine projects, and some may even prevent their realization"(9 1).

Ellmann concluded that, at times, women's role could be read as a humble slave with

limited tasks that only supplied assistance to their men or worked intentionally against

them. Personal liberation of women, then, also included being confident in their

interpersonal communication and not with their beliefs concealed from other people.

The absence of women's voices prevented the range of individual freedom between men

and women in becoming clear and equal. Eliminating the silence of women too became

part of the Second Wave platform.

In her 1965 book entitled Silences,16 Tillie Olsen observed "the silences I speak

of here are unnatural: the unnatural thwarting of what struggles to come into being, but

cannot"(6). She referred to the struggle women have encountered while attempting to

establish a literary voice for themselves, that has historically been a virtue ascribed only

to men. "The power and the need to create, over and beyond reproduction, is native in

both women and men. Where the gifted among women, (and men) have remained

mute, or have never attained full capacity, it is because of circumstances, inner or outer,

which oppose the needs of creation"(16-17 Olsen's emphasis). Women dedicated and

surrendered their lives to benefit others and have been traditionally conditioned to put

the needs of others first. Being denied a full writing agenda, Olsen believed, has

imprisoned women's creative abilities "lost by unnatural silences" (21). From this

perspective, the context in which Olsen employed "unnatural" implies that the writing

talents of women who desired to freely compose, like Cather and Gilman, were socially

restrained because of male domination within the major writing arenas, so that it is
 46

impossible to retrieve their lost passions. Here, Olsen underestimated the power of

reticence within these texts that Cather has been recognized for, and she neglected to

consider the historical element of these texts significant to their writing styles that

throughout exhibit qualifying uniqueness and contemporary progression. Cather and

Gilman both had unique and cutting edge writing styles for their age.

1970s: Feminist focus on "sex/gender system" as counterproductive.

Although some women desired arriving at unified action with other women, and

although some women recognized the concept of strength in numbers, individuality and

difference became a central issue within discourses regarding gender and sexuality in

the 1970's. As early as 1971, Elaine Showalter had advocated the study of women

writers as a group but with common sense. "Women writers should not be studied as a

distinct group on the assumption that they write alike, or even display stylistic

resemblance's distinctively feminine"(32). She cautioned readers and critics who have

previously misinterpreted or misunderstood the writing agendas of women because of

stereotypes that have confined all women to possessing only a "feminine" style or

approach to everything. However, Showalter further recognized that, "women do have

a special history susceptible to analysis, which includes such complex considerations as

the economics of their relation to the literary marketplace; the effects of social and

political changes in women's status upon individuals, and the implications of

stereotypes of the woman writer and restrictions of her artistic autonomy" (32).

Without completely annihilating past interpretive attempts at deciphering the messages

female authors sent out to their audience, Showalter understood that women, because of
 47

their place within society and its economic structure, could have only been grouped

together in discussions while attempting to locate a common ground, a collective

message. Furthermore, Showalter believed that some women may undeniably possess

common interests, but the individual voice should not be taken for granted or be denied,

especially in a writing environment. Too much collectivism denies room for the

individual female imagination. Moreover, Showalter's view acknowledges unity

without denying the individual difference among women and their writing. Yet she

only touched on the "economics" of women.

When Gayle Rubin published "The Traffic in Women: Notes on the `Political

Economy' of Sex" for the first time in 1975, the feminist focus on the "sex/gender

system" switched from being negative to the advancement of women toward developing

theories that were not grounded in biology, as the central factor in the oppression of

women. This article expanded the discussion of gender and sexuality as well as the

perception of the oppression of women. Rubin pointed to the limitations of Marxism

and claimed that the theorizing it did about women was too narrow: patriarchy. She

also noted that the social whole encompasses at least three domains: the political, the

economic and the sexual-and the first two cannot be discussed in the absence of the

third. While Marx had developed a powerful theory of the economic and the political,

what was also needed was an investigation into the domain of sexuality, or as Rubin

referred to it as "sex/gender system." She preferred the term "sex/gender system" to

"patriarchy," as the latter seemed limited not only to one form of "the sex/gender

system" but even to one form of women's oppression. For this reason, Rubin turned to

Levi-Strauss, who had argued that the exchange of women made possible the institution
 48

of kinship, and for early societies organized around kinship, the construction of society

itself. These insights into Levi-Strauss' ideas explained how, if the exchange of women

were necessary for the construction of kinship, what also would be required would be

the cultural elaboration of sexual differences into gender differences, a societal demand

for heterosexuality and a prohibition against alternative lifestyles within the kinship

group. 17 In her early Second Wave statement, Rubin accounted for the very

construction of gender, its ties to heterosexuality and the incest taboo. "Individuals are

gendered as opposites who are sexually desirable to the others outside their kinship

group in order that marriage be guaranteed, and so thus this social structure reproduced"

(Nicholson 40). She also wrote, "gender is a socially imposed division of the sexes. It

is a product of the social relations of sexuality. Kinship systems rest upon marriage.

They therefore transform males and females into `men' and `women,' each an

incomplete half which can only find wholeness when united with the other" (40).

Further she established that "the idea that men and women are more different from one

another than either is from anything else must come from somewhere other than

nature"(40). On one hand, she recognized a difference and variation of traits in women

and men, and on the other, an overlapping existence of similarities that men and women

possess yet have been forced to repress for the preservation of a binary, heterosexual

system of marital alliances.

Elaine R. Hedges viewed the preservation of heterosexuality as one of the

reasons why Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper" has only been recently discovered

within American literature. In 1973, with the expansion of the women's movement,

The Feminist Press resurfaced Gilman's short story in a tiny paperback edition with an
 49

explanatory "Afterword" by Hedges that detailed the circumstances contributing to its

suppression. Hedges contended that "'The Yellow Wallpaper' is a small literary

masterpiece" that "for almost fifty years has been overlooked, as has its author, one of

the most commanding feminists of her time" (37). Significant to the current discussion

of gender and sexuality in America, Hedges' interpretation of Gilman's neglect revealed

that, if female authors like Gilman created negative portrayals of the established

American Victorian ideal, then their work could be intentionally suppressed by

publishers at the cost of their fame. Furthermore, Hedges claimed, "No one seems to

have made the connection between insanity and the sex, or the sex role of the victim, no

one explored the story's implications for male-female relationships in the nineteenth

century" (41). Yet the message in Gilman's story rests within these relationships.

Within a few years, it became evident that Hedges' efforts opened the door for

more detailed accounts of how the medical field betrayed women. For instance, The

Horrors of the Half-Known Life (1976) and For Her Own Good (1979) were published

and documented the sexuo-economic politics of the medical field and from which

women like Gilman suffered at the turn of the century in America. In one of the

chapters in Horrors, Barker-Benfield addressed the history behind the intentional

maltreatment and suppression of the practice of midwifery by the medical field in

America. "Doctors and obstetricians formulated and inspired two methods for the

elimination of the midwife: propaganda and legislation"(B-B 63). For instance, in the

Flexner Report of 1910, Barker-Benfield noted that "[physicians] set out to make

potential mothers fear midwives by deeming them hopelessly dirty, ignorant and

incompetent, relics of a barbaric past"(B-B 63). Through this propaganda they were
 50

able to eliminate the midwife's market by persuading women that birth was so

dangerous that they had to have obstetricians. "Since birth was unnatural, it was liable

to affect the `patient's' health in any number of unpredictable ways, with which only a

fully trained expert was qualified to cope"(B-B 63). Pertaining to legal action and the

elimination of the practice of mid-wifery, Barker-Benfield makes reference to "the

outraged" Dr. George Kosmak who "refused to train [midwives] in his hospital, and

worked toward legislation for their licensing"(B-B 63-64). In addition to propaganda,

then, obstetricians worked to eliminate the midwife by legislation. Of course, others

joined him in his attack: "One further line of attack on midwives was their

investigation and prosecution by the Legal Bureau of the Medical Society of the County

of New York. Young presents 99 cases of `criminal practice,' the bald outline of which

makes sad reading: `Midwife Problem"'(B-B 317).

In Horrors, Barker-Benfield also condemned Mitchell's "rest cure," that

"developed concurrently with castration (which Mitchell also performed)" and that was

dangerous to all women. His critical analysis of it is as follows:

Mitchell's 'rest-cure' consisted of the patient's descent to womblike

dependence, then rebirth, liquid food, weaning, upbringing, and
reeducation by a model parental organization-a trained female nurse
entirely and unquestionably the agent firmly implementing the orders of
the more distant and totally authoritative male, i.e., the doctor in charge.
The patient was returned to her menfolk's management, recycled and
taught to make the will of the male her own.(B-B 130)

Barker-Benfield was not the only author who, during this decade, ridiculed the medical

practices at the turn of the century and how they were used against women in order to

make them dependent.

 51

In 1979 and in substantiation of Barker-Benfield's arguments, Barbara

Ehrenreich and Deidre English published their For Her Own Good reporting on the past

"150 years of the experts' advice to women" and investigated the results of such

"expertise." In the first part of their book they traced the rise of the "psychomedical

experts," who emphasized medicine as their paradigm for professional authority. Then,

in the second section of their treatise, Ehrenreich and English examined how these

experts used their authority to determine women's domestic activities. Lastly, they

drew out the decline of this "romanticism" between these doctors and the women of

their day that they treated.

Introducing this romantic affair between these middle to upper class women and

their doctors, Ehrenreich & English initially alert their readers to its danger by pointing

out that "the experts wooed their female constituency, promising the `right' and

scientific way to live, and women responded-most eagerly in the upper and middle

classes, more slowly among the poor-with dependency and trust"(4). Because the

wealthier women could afford the money to spend on such medical care, they were

offered the opportunity to try out various medical techniques. Lower class women, in

this instance, did not have the funds to seek out such medical attention; they could not

afford to lay up in the bed, eat expensive fatty foods and miss work for a lengthy

duration. Further, the experts drained more than the pockets of their wealthy female

patients. "It was never an equal relationship, for the experts' authority rested on the

denial or destruction of women's autonomous sources of knowledge: the old networks

of skill-sharing, the accumulated lore of generations of mothers"(4). Ehrenreich &

English are referring here to the Woman Question that arose during the historical
 52

transformation of society from an agrarian society to an industrialized one. "From a

masculinist point of view the Woman Question was a problem of control: Woman had

become an issue, a social problem-something to be investigated, analyzed, and

solved" (4). Ehrenreich and English discussed this period of time as the Old Order as

opposed to the New Order, "when science was a fresh and liberating force, when

women began to push out into an unknown world, and the romance between women

and the experts began"(5). Physicians, like Mitchell, dominated the scene in finding the

answer to the Woman Question. "These men-and, more rarely, women-presented

themselves as authorities on the painful dilemma confronted by Charlotte Perkins

Gilman, Jane Addams, and so many others: What is woman's true nature? And what,

in an industrialized world which no longer honored women's traditional skills, was she

to do?" (4). During this time, Mitchell's rest cure began being practiced in the upper

and middle class with the poor showing most resistance toward his diagnoses. "The

Old Order is gynocentric: the skills and work of women are indispensable to survival.

Woman is always subordinate, but she is far from being a helpless dependent"(8, E &

E's emphasis). With the social transformation to industrialized society, the triumph of

the Market economy dictated the lives of everyone, and Capitalism replaced the

"natural economy" of the Old Order. Ehrenreich & English concur, "it was the end of

the gynocentric order," and they found Capitalism to blame (11). Perhaps Cather

envisioned this whenever she expressed her resistance to the establishment of

industrialization in America. Even though, in an agricultural family, women may have

performed different duties than the men, everyone shared in the responsibility of the
 53

financial success of the household, and women were not confined entirely to the home,

as in the New Order.

The seduction of an alternative lifestyle of pampered seclusion in the home that

science offered to women at the turn of the century in America at first appealed to those

who could afford a new life style. Women saw this opportunity as a risk worth taking,

and they somehow trusted the men who summoned their support. "Science had once

attacked entrenched authority, but the new scientific expert himself became an

authority" (E & E 28). This transformation established a trusting network among the

medical experts, the husbands and their wives who underwent any of their treatments,

because it was a chance to leave the old outdated pseudo-medical regime behind and

forge on to the next age of science. "This was the basis of the `romance' between

women and the new experts: science had been on the side of progress and freedom. To

ignore the dictates of science was surely to remain in the `dark ages'; to follow them

was to join the forward rush of history"(29). Gilman was one of these women who

believed in the progressiveness of science and its representative experts, but only for a

short while. Ehrenreich & English presented the most detailed synopsis of the events

leading up to and following the rest cure treatment that Gilman suffered having been

diagnosed with a nervous disorder by Mitchell.

After Gilman collapsed with a "nervous disorder," a friend of her mother's lent

her one hundred dollars to seek out "the greatest nerve specialist in the country," who

was Dr. S. Weir Mitchell. At this point in his career, he was renowned for his treatment

of female nervous disorders that had led to a marked alteration of character, and he was

fed by "torrents of adulation, incessant and exaggerated"(101).18 Moreover, "his vanity

 54

`had become colossal "'(101). Yet Gilman approached Mitchell "with [the] `utmost

confidence"'(101) and reported to him a complete history of her own case. She told

him how her sickness vanished when she was away from her home, her husband and her

child, and returned as soon as she came back to them. Yet he dismissed her "prepared

history" as "evidence of `self-conceit"'(101). He demanded "complete obedience."

Gilman recorded her reaction to the prescription Mitchell gave to her:

Live as domestic a life as possible. Have your child with you all the
time. (Be it remarked that if I did but dress the baby it left me shaking
and crying-certainly far from a healthy companionship for her, to say
nothing of the effect on me.) Lie down an hour after each meal. Have
but two hours intellectual life a day. And never touch pen, brush or
pencil as long as you live. (E &E 102)

After "some months" of attempting to follow his orders "to the letter," the result in her

own words was that "I came perilously close to losing my mind. The mental agony

grew so unbearable that I would sit blankly moving my head from side to side ... I
would crawl into remote closets and under beds-to hide from the grinding pressure of

that distress (E & E 102). The romance of forging into a new scientific way of life had

died, and Gilman had resolved that she did not want to be married anymore; she wanted

to be an activist and a writer. Three years later, "The Yellow Wallpaper" was published

as a fictionalized account of her own descent into madness as a result of Mitchell's

method of treatment.

Nevertheless, as Ehrenreich & English noted, "thousands of other women, like

Gilman, were finding themselves in a new position of dependency on the male medical

profession-and with no alternative sources of information or counsel. The medical

profession was consolidating its monopoly over healing"(102). Husbands paid for their
 55

wives to be tortured, and women were brainwashed into contributing to this industry by

trusting these medical experts who really were misleading them. Ehrenreich and

English, along with Barker-Benfield, adopted a historical point of view toward the

social construction of the oppression of women, then they thoroughly critiqued the

medical industry that authorized themselves to provide medical treatments that did not

help the women who trusted them. Ehrenreich, English and Barker-Benfield also

specifically attacked medical experts like Mitchell who treated women, like Gilman and

Addams who suffered from nervousness, and prescribed for them strange treatments

that evidenced a gender bias in the diagnoses for men and women. Any woman who

dared to step outside these confines, like Gilman did, might have ended up suffering for

having thought for herself, or for having chosen an alternative lifestyle. The medical

experts, however, were not the only ones on the attack for anyone who stepped outside

the socially constructed confines.

As literary critics examined Cather's lifestyle, from the time she was writing at

the turn of the century until the 1970s, they displayed in their critiques, subtle

innuendoes about the strange secrecy of her life and her "psychology." Nonetheless,

despite the new exploration into feminist issues, it was not until 1975 that a critic, Jane

Rule, pointed out that Cather's alternative lifestyle may have meant she was indeed a

lesbian. Prior to this point Cather critics had attacked her credibility as a writer, because

of the reticence within her writing, but none so boldly deemed her a gay writer until

Rule. "What they want[ed] out in the light of day," Rule determined, "[wa]s her

emotional and erotic preference for women, and, if they [could] not have irrefutable

biographical facts or [could] not use them in print, they [would] distort their reading of
 56

her fiction to make their discrediting point"(Rule 76). Here she is referring to the three

male critics, James Shroeter, Lionel Trilling, and John H. Randall III, who all implied

from their evaluation of Cather that she could not write reliably about heterosexual

relations because of her personal eccentricity. As negative as they were toward her

writing, they only made, as Rule posited, "grossly inaccurate critical generalizations"

about Cather (76).

Once other critics learned that Cather may have been secretly a lesbian, they

immediately turned to her complete body of work and began investigating each piece

for signs of her alternative lifestyle, more specifically her lesbianism. For example,

later in 1975, Larry Rubin wrote an article entitled, "The Homosexual Motif in Willa

Cather's `Paul's Case."' In it, he first established how "with the virtual lifting of social

taboos in the discussion of sex in recent years-a new freedom reflected both in the

creation of literature and in its analysis-we have been getting some highly evocative

(and sometimes highly provocative) reinterpretations of works considered classics of

American literature"(127). What was once invisible was now obvious, especially

regarding literature that possessed underdeveloped issues about gender and sexuality.

Further, he posited that "particularly in the area of homosexuality, this newly unfettered

approach to the libidinous urges of various literary characters has thrown the light of

Freud upon certain dark and previously unmentionable aspects of the psychological

motivation of those characters and even of the overall vision of the authors

involved"( 127). These well-known literary authors concealed their own lifestyle yet

alluded to it, and may have possibly even lived through the literary characters they

created. Of all these classic American authors, Cather and Paul in "Paul's Case" was
 57

one couple Rubin felt worthwhile investigating for such traces of similarities between

the author and her protagonist.

Rubin begins his critical examination of the hidden homosexual elements within

"Paul's Case" by asking, "What, then, are the clues with which Cather has been so

lavish?"(129). Rubin examined Paul's physical appearance for support of his premise

while he considered the actual text to further his point. "Here the most prominent

feature is `a certain hysterical brilliancy in his eyes' as he confronts his bewildered

teachers; `he continually used them in a conscious, theatrical sort of way, peculiarly

offensive in a boy"(129). 1 9 Because Cather provides this information regarding Paul

early on in her story, the second paragraph of it, Rubin saw this as "one of the first links

in a growing chain of evidence of Paul's deviation from what the culture of her day

(and, to a great extent, of our own) would consider the sexual norm"(129). Some other

clues that Rubin focused on that provide evidence that she was cleverly creating a

homosexual central character was "the fact that Paul feels it necessary to keep his bottle

of violet water carefully hidden from his father [which] could almost symbolize his

sense of alienation from a society that has only contempt for what it considers

effeminacy in a young man"(129). Rubin also found notable the relationship between

the "wild San Francisco boy" from Yale and Paul, especially as the critic noticed, "the

frostiness of their parting," which Cather referred to in her story as "singularly cool,"

and which Rubin declares is a "heavily loaded phrase"(130). Albeit Cather never came

right out and stated it, "Cather [wa]s," Rubin concludes, "trying to show us the tragic

consequences of the conflict between a sensitive and hence alienated temperament, on

the one hand, and a narrowly `moral,' bourgeois environment, on the other"(131). In the
 58

end, Paul commits suicide. Rubin correctly assesses Cather's intent when he says,

"does she have to spell it out?" Even if she wanted to, Cather could not because certain

matters were not discussed in 1905 when the original version of "Paul's Case" was

released to the public. Nonetheless, Cather's superb craftsmanship showed that she

could convey such an experience, as Rubin determined, "without violating any of the

literary taboos of her time"(131). The portrayals of the characters in Gilman and

Cather's short stories, who did not abide by the established principles of the "sex/gender

system," provide a worthy comparison for a re-evaluation of the reception of "The

Yellow Wallpaper" and "Paul's Case" and their impact upon the 1970's American

public.

Although historically the American public has wanted to create a "feminine

style" of writing, individuality and difference among women played a significant role in

1970's discourses about gender and sexuality. The "sex/gender system" and the

construction of kinship systems cultivated a social demand for heterosexuality in

America that also contributed to the social construction of gender, which resulted in

opposite genders: male and female. Meanwhile, the rebirth of Gilman's "The Yellow

Wallpaper" contributed to the re-examination of heterosexual relationships in the 19th

century. Her reappearance initiated critical discussions of the sexuo-economic politics

of the male-dominated medical field that mistreated middle and upper class women in

their medical treatments and suppressed the practice of mid-wifery. Dr. Mitchell

became the focus of several critical attacks as the New Order replaced the Old Order

with the establishment of industrialization. The romance between women and their

physicians developed, and then ended. Also, at this time, Cather critics scrutinized her
 59

life while identifying her openly as a lesbian for the first time. This new way of

analyzing her life opened for a new examination of Cather's work for their hidden

homosexual motifs. These new developments in the 1970's prepared America for the

reconstruction of the notion of gender and sexuality, and both Gilman and Cather

participated in this evolution.

1980s: Reconstructing differences by questioning narratives.

Why then, if Cather were gay, did she choose to create in "Paul's Case" these

literary adventures with a male protagonist and not a female Paulette one, who

underwent the same conflicts? Why did she project these complex feelings in the form

of a male, rather than a female character? These questions, rightfully asked, have

perplexed many of Cather's critics and, in the 1980s, some began to question her

credibility, as well as that of other female authors, as a result. Perhaps because of the

work of women in the 1970s who demanded the appreciation and recognition for the

individual female voice, critics in the 1980s began to question the effects of socially

constructing gender and sexuality differently. Women of color, especially, entered the

feminist platform to address their notion of gender and sexuality, which had, in the past,

been unheard. However, most women had only begun to explore this notion of

difference.

For instance, in "Muzzled Women," Marilyn French, an American feminist

critic of the Second Wave, grappled with the lives of women writers that she felt

underdeveloped the portrayals of the lives of their heroines, although, given their own

eccentric lives, they could have done better.20 Cather is one author that French was

bothered by because "she had it all" but "did not create female characters who were
 60

equally gifted"(219). French acknowledges that "it is understandable that in the area of

sex she might not have wanted to use knowledge derived from her own life: she was a

lesbian and could not, at that time, write about sexual fulfillment through a

woman"(220). In her final paragraph, French offered a coy disclaimer, "Perhaps there

are women writers I have not considered, who have granted their characters a scope

similar to their own"(229).21 Gilman is certainly one. Yet, French left her readers

hanging, her argument unproven, because she did not take into consideration women

writers, like Gilman, who forthrightly did in fact write about horrifying real-life

experiences. Although she published at an enormously rapid rate, Gilman received so

much negative criticism that she began her own "utopian" publication, The Forerunner,

in which to vocalize her anti-patriarchal opinions that were not acceptable for

publication in the Howells' editing arena.

Yet, as one of the most popular Cather critics, Sharon O'Brien pointed out,

Cather had reached a "reconciliation of gender and vocation"(213) wherein her

adoption of a male point of view does not indicate "subservience to patriarchal values"

(214). While expressing her discontent with the female experience, she placed the male

consciousness on center stage bearing the onus of failing to confront the truth of their

existence. Moreover, O'Brien remarked, "Throughout her literary career, Cather was

both the writer transforming the self in art and the lesbian writer at times forced to

conceal `unnatural' love by projecting herself into male disguises"(215). O'Brien

declared that in many ways "Paul is a male version of Willa Cather"(283), but a

"backward glance at an earlier version of herself'(110). She shares with him a passion

for the arts, a longing to escape the drab and ordinary, and a rejection of traditional
 61

gender roles, which Paul expresses by abandoning his father's Horatio Alger values

(283). Unable to instantaneously reverse America's "polarization of the sexes," O'Brien

maintained, that Cather "could reject the female role she found limiting only by

continuing to repudiate her sex"(122). The exclusiveness of the intellectual bond

between the men is clear in "Paul's Case." All the while, Cather's writing agenda

broadened the allotted female writing agenda, and in fact, totally changed it forever, as

this thesis sets forth. Some critics have even evaluated the complexity in Cather's

writing agenda that they claim may be observed in what she did not write.

In her third chapter entitled "The Duplicitous Art of Willa Cather," Janis P.

Stout calculated Cather's deliberate attempts to be reserved "as a problem and an

interest inherent in Cather's work," because "it accorded so well with her need to find a

strategy of avoidance and suppression"(67). 22 In all that Cather was not saying, she

held a secret mission. Stout argued that, "the need fueled the theoretical affiliation that

gave it aesthetic respectability"(68). Cather constructed her writing strategy to be

twofold: meaningful and proper. Yet her discipline was not a disguise or a

rationalization of her neurotic need. "Each element," as Stout noted, "has its own

interest, its own importance, and its validity as an explanatory rationale for her fiction.

But they do overlap. And that, in essence, is why Cather is so difficult-much more

difficult than she has generally been regarded. Her narrative is deeply, elusively

duplicitous"(68). More pointedly, Stout resolved that "her purpose in adopting a male

persona, is not, I believe, to deny her female identity but to deny or evade the

conventional femininity"(74). Then Cather's reticence, Stout correctly argued, is

 62

intentional. Nonetheless, Stout admitted that "it is impossible to know, of course, but

the answer has a great deal to do with her old feelings about masculinity of art"(90).

Rather than focusing on specific female authors, as French and O'Brien did with

Cather, Nancy Hartsock questioned the materialistic critique of society they have

written. Hartsock argued that "the power of the Marxian critique of class domination

stands as an implicit suggestion that feminists should consider the advantages of

adopting a historical materialist approach to understanding phallocratic domination"

and establish "a feminist materialism." She compared a woman's experience to that of

the proletarians in Marxian theory and used this for the basis of her theoretical

explanation of the "sexual division of labor:" "Like the lives of proletarians according

to Marxian theory, women's lives make available a particular and privileged vantage

point on male supremacy, a vantage point which can ground a powerful critique of the

phallocratic institutions and ideology which constitute the capitalist form of

patriarchy"(Nicholson 217). For this reason, women must adopt a "standpoint:" "rather

than a simple dualism, it posits a duality of levels of reality, of which the deeper level or

essence both includes and explains the `surface' or appearance, and indicates the logic

by means of which the appearance inverts and distorts the deeper reality" (Nicholson

218). "The concept of a standpoint depends on the assumption that epistemology grows

in a complex and contradictory way from material life," Hartsock determined, such that

"the adoption of a standpoint exposes the real relations among human beings as

inhuman, points beyond the present, and carries a historically liberating role"(Nicholson

218). Historically, women have been confined to not only the home but to the

economic system that governs it-Capitalism.

 63

Like her first wave predecessors, Hartsock also noticed the difference between

women and men's experiences that make life easier for men and harder for women in a

Capitalistic society. She wrote:

First, women as a group work more than men. We are all familiar with
the phenomenon of the `double day' ...Second, a larger proportion of
women's labor time is devoted to the production of use-values than
men's. Only some of the goods women produce are commodities . .
.Third, women's production is structured by repetition in a different way
than men's ...women's work in housekeeping involves a repetitious
cleaning. (Nicholson 224)

This "sexual division of labor" within America's capitalistic structure creates and

perpetuates an imbalance in women/men's responsibilities in and out of the household,

and so therefore affects the power relations within the heterosexual couple. Hence, the

heterosexual bond can be analyzed as yet another social institution that forms a system

of oppression for women, an institution that was explored in the 1980s second wave

feminists, and that further identifies the entrapment female authors faced at the turn of

the century in America as well as in the present.

In an essay originally published in 1980, Adrienne Rich argued that

heterosexuality is imposed upon women and reinforced by a variety of social

constraints, referred to as "compulsory heterosexuality"(138). Her notion of

compulsive heterosexuality has branched off into all sections of society resulting in a

heterosexual hegemonic culture that has evidently influenced the institutions,

relationships, and even the imaginative constructions of literature. Because of their

heterosexual compulsory, female writers like Cather and even Gilman have

presumptively written texts that reflect such normative conditioning, instead of voicing

their true feelings. However, when there is no language, or rather, the phallocentric
 64

language you communicate with works against the construction of such emotions, then

silence results. For this reason, Rich suggests that rather than there being a simple

divide between lesbian and heterosexual women,23 all the experiences of a woman can

be located along a "lesbian continuum,"(135) a term she uses to remove some of the

fear attributed to the notion of being a lesbian because of the deeply imposed

heterosexual hegemonic culture in America. A "lesbian continuum" is based

profoundly on female experience that contradicts the assumption that all women want

and desire to marry a man. Moreover, "lesbian continuum" contradicts the historical

definition of "lesbian" and reconstructs the notion of sexuality that can be identified in

the 1990's feminist wave discourse.

1990s: the evolving role of gender into "gender performance."

Joanna Russ justifiably inquired, what is one to do when you want to write and

you feel the world is against you (Russ 151). Russ saw that within Cather's

presentation of male characters, like Paul, evidence of her own complex sexuality lay.

Russ also purported that Cather's depictions, which she sheltered in a creative literary

fashion, masked her true feelings of sexuality from criticism of the outside world.

While deconstructing the phallic, Cather felt it more appropriate to formulate "Paul's

Case" with a male narrator so as not to have her portrayal be confused with the notion

that she was against women; Cather was a woman. Rather, she was against the feminine

generational hand-me-down, corseted role women modeled in society as well as in

writing. From this mode of critical analysis, the protagonist in Gilman's story can be

interpreted as fighting in her own way against phallocentric thinking. She could not
 65

perform anymore the allotted feminine role assigned to her. She was striving to recreate

herself. Similarly, Russ arrived at this point: "so many of the other male personae of

the books Cather gave us are, in a very precious and irreplaceable way, records not of

male but of female experience, indeed of lesbian experience"(157). But was Cather

masquerading, or playing, with the ludicrous notion that these "romantic friendships"

were "pervert [ed] "(Russ 151) while people wondered? Or both? "If Willa Cather was

masquerading, it was a masquerade she returned to again and again, despite Jewett's

advice, despite reviewers' possible reactions, and despite her own belief, spoke if not

felt, that such a masquerade was silly and presumptuous"(Russ 151). How would

America at the turn of the century have reacted to a counteractive Paul in a female form

who forthrightly expressed her romantic adoration for other women? "The innocent

rightness in feelings of love for and attraction to women that Jewett and her

contemporaries enjoyed was not possible in Cather's generation; the social invention of

the morbid, unhealthy, criminal lesbian had intervened"(Russ 151). It is interesting to

note here how in one generation something is considered "perverted," then the next

"innocent," especially with regard to ownership of sexuality and the discussion around

it. Indeed as Russ points out "Cather's `masquerade' was a necessity," because it

protected her from the unsure, ever-changing views of the world around her. In fact,

her "masquerade" was her shield as she strove toward personal liberation.

In her 1996 PMLA article, "'But One Expects That"': Charlotte Perkins

Gilman's `The Yellow Wallpaper' and the Shifting Light of Scholarship," Julie Bates

Dock addresses this issue. "A study of the textual, publication, and reception histories

of `The Yellow Wallpaper' demonstrates how shifts in criticism from one era to another
 66

cast different light on the evidence surrounding the story"(53). In other words, when

scholars develop their scholarly approaches to a story, they reflect the era and the

textual information that is available to the critical reader. "Hedges' edition," Dock

identifies, "can justly claim to be the starting point for the renewed interest in Gilman

and her work"(53). Hedges' edition, including her forward, is the 1973 Feminist Press

edition that prompted the 1992 casebook. Dock observes, "More recent critics,

beginning with Hedges, seem to imply that `The Yellow Wallpaper' has been read

either as a horror story or as a story of sexual politics, more specifically that the late-

nineteenth-century audience read it as horror but that the enlightened readers of a

century later see it accurately"(59). The temporal relationship between the two eras is

what Dock discusses in her argument, and the significance of this analysis of Gilman, as

well as her story, is that it is as if through time these authorities have been decade after

decade peeling back layers of authorial tricks in order to get to some truth. My

contention is that there is no one single truth, except that temporal element that

distinguishes one generation of reception from another also demonstrates the distinctive

evolution of America's view on gender and sexuality. In her edition, Hedges assesses

that "no one seems to have made the connection between the insanity and the sex, or

sexual role, of the victim, no one explored the story's implications for male-female

relationships in the nineteenth century"(41). However, in answering Hedges' assertion,

Dock points out that "reviews demonstrate that the story's first readers did recognize its

indictments of marriage and of the treatment of women, although these discussions do

not use modern terminology" (Dock 60). In a more recent article that has been

published several times and including in the casebook on Gilman, Hedges identifies the
 67

"wallpaper, as the story's key metaphor, [which] has been read as inscribing the

medical, marital, maternal, psychological, sexual, sociocultural, political and linguistic

situation of its narrator-protagonist" (Karpinski 222). Hedges summarizes "two decades

of feminist criticism" that have analyzed for their own writing purposes, including her

own, the metaphor,

as an image of the situation of the woman writer and hence a way of

understanding the dilemmas of female authorship; revealing the relations
between gender and reading and gender and writing; and as a description
of the problems of female self-representation within both the Lacanian
world of the Symbolic and the capitalist world of [America] in the late
nineteenth century. (Karpinski 222)

Initially, authorities gave Gilman's story back to America, then they analyzed the text
itself, and how the scope of understanding it has broadened over the past 100 years

since its original publication, as if the story itself were a woman, and the protagonist in
it, ever-evolving. It should be mentioned here that, likewise, Cather's metaphorical

"yellow wallpaper" symbolized a male-version of gender entrapment that epitomized

the precise locale where this hegemonic brainwashing originates--the patriarchal home.

Gilman recognized this in her Home too.

Although at this point of her discussion, Dock focuses on three 1899 reviews
that support her contention, she later notes that one of the best-rubbed chestnuts of

Gilman's criticism concerns the hostility Gilman faced from her contemporary
audience, especially from the male-dominated medical community (61). Dock employs
Jean Kennard to illustrate exactly why the 1899 reviewers' approaches to Gilman's
short story should not be denigrated, because to them politically, "the story of a female
writer driven mad, in part by her husband, was a horrifying subject"(60). It still is.

Moreover, Dock sees that "their comments may sometimes gloss over the radical social

commentary of the story, but the evidence indicates that they saw Gilman's feminist

message"(6). Even now more than ever, we can use Gilman's short story as a literary
 68

springboard, along with her earlier critics, to see how the social position of women has
evolved. Dock saw:

There would be scant pleasure in unearthing a nineteenth-century story if

the original audience read it exactly as twentieth-century readers do. The
thrill comes in finding the gem that others have overlooked. Critics must
differentiate themselves from earlier readers, not just for self-
gratification but also to validate the importance of the find. (60)

While we might challenge any idea that Dock finds "truth," perhaps what these "new
finds" do generation after generation is clarify the interaction between women and

social institutions shaping gender and sexuality. In other words, the relationship is
dynamic, thus new insights keep appearing.

Dock challenges the validity of some of these gems. She noted that "even
Berman, whose article about the `unrestful cure' provides well-researched information

about Mitchell's medical contributions, repeats [Gilman's] report that Mitchell changed
his cure"(62). Dock found Berman's information based on the casebook to be false in

this respect. Dock points out that "Mitchell's published letters contain no hint that he
altered his thinking about the rest cure; on the contrary, as late as 1908 he wrote to

Andrew Carnegie that he wanted to build a hospital for `Rest Treatment for the

Poor"'(62). She continues, "far from abandoning his methods, Mitchell proposed to
extend them beyond the middle and upper classes, some sixteen years after Gilman's

story appeared"(62). Gilman would seem to be the one to know this answer, but she

reported information that was actually false. Maybe Dock puts it better when she

warns, "American literature would certainly be the poorer without `The Yellow

Wallpaper,' but an understanding of such stories and of the culture that produced them
requires careful scrutiny of assumptions made by critics and by texts and writers of the
past"(62). I guess, as the title plainly states, one should expect that.

Of the recent critics, Judith Butler presented the most sophisticated analysis of

"Paul's Case" and Cather, in general, of the recent critics. In Bodies That Matter
 69

published in 1993, Butler examined "the workings of heterosexual hegemony in the

crafting of matters sexual and political," which further investigated her efforts in

Gender Trouble published in 1990. To be more specific, she studied the "crafting" of
our bodies to express a certain gender. "Not only did bodies tend to indicate a world
beyond themselves, but this movement beyond their own boundaries, a movement of
boundary itself, appeared to be quite central to what bodies `are.' I kept losing track of

the subject"(Butler ix). She criticized her own philosophical tendencies by saying that
philosophers have tendencies to "sometimes... forget that `the' body comes in

genders"(Butler ix). By introducing "gender performativity" to the discussion of Willa

Cather, Paul in "Paul's Case," and even including Gilman and the protagonist in "The
Yellow Wallpaper," this examination of gender and sexuality can be taken to a higher
level of critical evaluation so that the critical lens is somehow focused more
appropriately than in the past. In a seemingly unexplored literal awakening, Butler
explored the notion that "bodies [are] in some way constructed, perhaps I really
thought that words alone had the power to craft bodies from their own linguistic

substance?"(Butler x, her italics, my bolding). When she intentionally incorporated the

phrase "perhaps I really thought," Butler signaled that she may even have been unsure

of her written determination about the "crafting" of bodies. Because of the abstractness
attached to the extension of the crafted body and the silenced discussion surrounding it,

she stumbled through her own discussion of the embodied gender. To further illustrate
she added, "one woke in the morning, perused the closet or some more open space for

the gender of choice, donned that gender for the day, and then restored the garment to

its place at night"(x). In this way, the sexual agent chooses to perform in such a routine

manner, half asleep probably in this instance, so that one questions the agent's

conscious determination of their role. "Such a willful and instrumental subject, one who
decides on its gender, is clearly not its gender from the start and fails to realize that its

existence is already decided by gender"(Butler x, her emphasis). As she deconstructs

 70

gender, Butler demonstrates how "on" and "by" we actualize its perpetuation because of
social conditioning. Social agents choose to dress a gender that has already been chosen

for them, so that people act out what has already been acted upon for them.

This was not the first time that Butler linked gender with performance. In her

1988 article, "Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology

and Feminist Theory" published in Theatre Journal, Butler examined gender divisions

in terms of a theatrical metaphor. "The acts by which gender is constituted bear

similarities to performative acts within theatrical contexts.. .One is not simply a boy, but,
in some very key sense, one does one's body and, indeed, one does one's body

differently from one's contemporaries and from one's embodied predecessors and
successors as well"(Butler, 1988 521). Butler contends that gender is not invented by
an individual, nor is it the expression of an essential physical and psychological

chemistry that predates an individual's social interaction. Rather, "gender is an act

which has been rehearsed, much as a script survives the particular actors who make use

of it, but which requires individual actors in order to be actualized and reproduced as

reality once again"(526). These gender performances create in effect a reenactment of

other, off-stage portrayals of engendered scripts. Meanwhile, these scripts subvert or
reaffirm conventional binary divisions that in turn provoke audiences to re-examine
their own scripted lives. Binary gender divisions however ignore the significance as
well as the existence of a third option that encompasses components each side of the
binary division. Or, possibly none.

Butler explored this notion of gender performance in her study of Cather's

"Paul's Case." "In Cather's fiction, the name [she chooses for her characters] not only
designates a gender uncertainty, but produces a crisis in the figuration of sexed

morphology as well. In this sense, Cather's fiction can be read as the foundering and

unraveling of the symbolic on its own impossible demands"(139-140). Paul's character

functions as one example where Cather creates a protagonist performing gender under
 71

"the guise of loyalty" to the paternal law. Cather never acknowledged Paul was gay;
she carefully carved out a teenager who challenged the socially constructed gender
norms of his day, that critics have identified linked to homosexuality. Butler later

elaborated on this "guise of loyalty" and the taboos affiliated with Paul's or Cather's
own sexuality. "To read Cather's text as a lesbian text is to initiate a set of
complications that cannot be easily summarized, for the challenge takes place, often

painfully, within the very norms of heterosexuality that the text also mocks"(162). "The

introduction to schoolboy Paul in `Paul's Case' makes clear that he is a figure `under
the ban of suspension "'(162). Although Paul has not been expelled, his conduct has
been noticed as unacceptable by the school officials: "As he is called in front of the
local school authorities, his clothes are described as not quite or, rather, no longer,

fitting the body within, and this incommensurability between the body and its clothes is

recapitulated in the unexpectedly `suave and smiling' demeanor of the body,"(162)

Butler noted. "[This demeanor] suggests `something of the dandy about him,' and in the
`adornments,' including the Wilde-reminiscent `carnation' which `the faculty somehow
felt was not properly significant of the contrite spirit befitting a body under the ban of

suspension "'(162-3). These additive features--dandy, red carnation, suspect attention to

this outward and physical appearance--constitute Cather's construction of an existence

unlike that usually accepted for boys. "Thinking the body as constructed demands a
rethinking of the meaning of construction itself '(xi):

Given this understanding of construction as constitutive constraint, is it

still possible to raise the critical question of how such constraints not
only produce the domain of intelligible bodies, but produce as well a
domain of unthinkable, abject, unlivable bodies? This latter domain is
not the opposite of the former, for oppositions are, after all, part of
intelligibility; the latter is the excluded and illegible domain that haunts
the former domain as the spectre of its own impossibility, the very limit
to intelligibility, its constitutive outside. (xi)
 72

Of course, the latter domain is where Paul's body dwells in his refusal to be reduced to

a singular sexuality, confirming Butler's difficult discussion of understanding and so

interpreting Paul in terms of his sexuality. "Though it appears that the normativizing

law prevails by forcing suicide, the sacrifice of homosexual eroticism, or closeting

homosexuality," Butler correctly predicted that, "the text exceeds the text, the life of
the law exceeds the teleology of the law, enabling an erotic contestation and disruptive
repetition of its own terms"(140).

Butler also incorporated Eve Sedgwick's analysis of Paul into her discussion of
"Paul's liminal sexual and gender status." Sedgwick had posited that Paul's sexuality
could be documented as something more complex than simply male or female,

heterosexual or homosexual. They both hinted at Paul's sexuality being somewhere

across binary gender/sexuality divisions, that mandates what is the sexual and what is
the gender allotted to individuals.24 "If the story is as much about the dandy as it is

about the liminal zone in which the figure of the dandy also carries for Cather the
liminal predicament of the lesbian then," Butler contends that, "we might read `Paul'

less as a mimetic reflection of `boys at the time' than as a figure with the capacity to

convey and confound what Sedgwick has described as the passages across gender and

sexuality" (163 her emphasis). Although she speculates on "Paul's Case" as Cather's
"authorial `passing,"' in this way Butler questions and confirms Sedgwick's approach to
Paul because she agrees that he is shifting, or moving, in this passage between gender
and sexuality but not going "beyond," Cather is not depicting a "fictional

transcendence"(163). "The `ban of suspension' under which Paul appears, then, puts
into doubt to which gender and sexuality `Paul' refers, confounding a reading that

claims to `settle' the question of which vectors of sexuality Paul embodies"(163). What

results in Butler's exploration of the character of Paul and his obvious complexities is a
"transference as well as the impossibility of its resolution into any of the gendered or

sexual elements that it transfers"(163). The impossibility of Paul's transference speaks

 73

of the authorial interjection in creating a character complex enough to raise these

questions about gender that can never be answered possibly because Cather attempted
to communicate how indefinable sexuality really is.

In "Across Gender, Across Sexuality: Willa Cather and Others," Sedgwick

explores resistance in the past in creating a gender/sexuality fusion. She refers to Gayle

Rubin's 1984 article that stated "gender and sexuality represent two analytic axes that

may productively be imagined as being as distinct from each other, as, say, gender and
class, or class and race"(Sedgwick 53). Although Sedgwick "assumes that no issue of
gender would fail to be embodied through the specificity of a particular sexuality," she
argued that "there could be use in keeping the analytic axes distinct"(54) for purposes of

studying and evaluating interlocking systems of oppression that are in indicative

relations to certain distinctive nodes of cultural organization. More specifically,

women may benefit by maintaining that gender and sexuality be kept separate.
Progressing in her discussion of gender and sexuality, Segwick begins resemble
Butler's examination of the theatricality or fluidity around gender performance.

Much feminist reading is moreover richly involved with the

deconstructive understanding that categories presented in a culture as
symmetrical binary oppositions--male/female, as well as culture/nature,
etc--actually subsist in a more unsettling and dynamic tacit relation
according to which, first, term B is not symmetrical with but
subordinated to term A; but, second, the ontologically valorized term A
actually depends for its meaning on the simultaneous subsumption and
exclusion of term B; hence, third, the question of priority between the
supposed central and the supposed marginal category of each dyad is
irresolvably unstable. (Sedgwick 55)
The leap Sedgwick makes here situates her within Butler's sophisticated reading of
Cather as well as of gender and sexuality, offering a futuristic approach to the evolution

of interpretations of the individual, interpretations that connect the two by granting the

significance of each to the other, or the third entity, the sexender or gendrality. These

characters absorb the complexities that their authors possessed. They are in fact what
 74

Cather knew. The challenge, therefore, is creating a reading that would not conceal the

effects either has on the welfare or oppressions of the individual. "The dichotomy

heterosexual/homosexual, as it has emerged through the last century of Western culture,

would seem to lend itself peculiarly neatly to a set of analytic moves learned from this

deconstructive moment in feminist theory"(Sedgwick 55). Indeed this dichotomy

peculiarly situates itself along an axis where our Western culture can investigate the

unstable tendency of them both, thereby allowing for more options on the platform for

discussion in the future. "An essentialism of sexual object choice is far less easy to
maintain, far more visibly incoherent, more visibly stressed and challenged at every

point in the culture, than any essentialism of gender"(Sedgwick 56). Because our
American culture has almost solidified its approach to gender and sexuality, we have

made it difficult to challenge these models of behavior by suggesting a new approach,

and have concealed any alternative to this hegemonic model. "Our culture's
crystallization of gay identities over the past hundred years has persistently been
structured by two conceptual impasses or incoherences, one concerning gender

definition and the other concerning sexual definition"(57). "Paul's Case" is an example

of this willingness for culture to contest these incoherences and create a performance
around them that mocks them.

Relative to his "homosexual" tendencies, in her discussion of "Paul's Case,"

Sedgwick like Butler, analyzed the "hysterical brilliancy [that in a] "theatrical sort of

way [was] peculiarly offensive in a boy." Sedgwick also discusses Cather's "certain
distinctive position of gender liminality" expressed in her attachment to Paul that in the

beginning showed she identified with him: "the identification between Paul's
pathology on the one hand and his insincerity and artificiality on the other is so

seamless that the former is to be fully evoked by the latter, through a mercilessly

specular, fixated point of view that takes his theatrical self-presentation spitefully at its
word"(64):
 75

If Cather, in this story, does something to cleanse her own sexual body
of the carrion stench of Wilde's victimization, it is thus (unexpectedly)
by identifying with what seems to be Paul's sexuality not in spite of but
through its saving reabsorption in a gender-liminal (and very specifically
classed) artifice that represents at once a particular subculture and culture
itself. Cather's implicit reading here of the gendering of sex picks out
one possible path through the mazed junction at which long-residual
issues of gender and class definition intersected new turn-of-the-century
mappings of sexual choice and identification. In what I am reading as
Cather's move in `Paul's Case,' the mannish lesbian author's coming
together with the effeminate boy on the ground of a certain distinctive
position of gender liminality is also a move toward a minority gay
identity whose more effectual cleavage, whose more determining
separatism, would be that of homo/heterosexual choice rather than that
of the male/female gender. (Sedgwick 65-66, her italics, my bolding)

Although she distinguishes Cather's efforts as a progression, Sedgwick continues to

deal with gender and sexuality from a one or the other standpoint, instead of a push

away from such polarizations. Once again, we see the use of forward slashes, "/" as a
dichotomizing distinguisher, for "homo/heterosexual" and "male/female" yet it is that

very forward slash, where the chord to the stage curtain hangs waiting to be pulled for
the real show to begin.

Changing rhetorical garb, or possibly making a rhetorical outfit, from a

"homosexual motif' into a "theatrical motif' brings Philip Page's 1991 article into this
discussion, wherein he proves that Paul's story is "dominated by the metaphor of

theatricality"(553). "Beyond Paul's interest in the theater and numerous allusions to it,
the story's narration incorporates a series of highly dramatized scenes in which the

shifts in Paul's actual and metaphorical roles reflect the unfolding of his `case"'(553).

In comparison, Cather's literal use of the theater in "Paul's Case," coincidental or not, is
fitting for the topic of gender and sexuality at issue in this assessment.

"The Pittsburgh half of the story is built on five such scenes: the `inquisition' at
school, Carnegie Hall, outside the Schenley Hotel, the basement of Paul's house, and
Sunday afternoon on Cordelia Street. Each scene is reinforced by theatrical
 76

elements"(553). As Page analyzes Paul's story from this theatrical framework, he cites
from the story in a progression, the instances where "we see Paul off-stage, in the

dressing room, changing costume and character to be ready for his next role"(553) to

where "after the concert, Paul's theatrical role expands further"(553). Page observes
that "in the earlier scenes the theatrical metaphor is external--Paul acts his role within

the constraints of a situation he does not control--but [standing outside in the rain and

gazing into the lavish interior of the hotel] he internalizes the theatrical metaphor"(554).
Thus, he becomes not merely actor or audience but playwright. "For Paul, Cordelia

Street is not the actual stage of life but a backstage, where he does not live, but only
endures"(554). Page commented on Claude Summers argues that "the integrity of King
Lear's Cordelia contrast ironically both with Paul's weakness and with the conformist
mediocrity of his middle-class world"(554). In so doing, Page intends for Paul an

alternative approach to this monotonous lifestyle. "Despite Paul's brief moments as

metaphoric audience and playwright, his predominant role in this first half of the story

is actor"(555). Although Page acknowledges that the character of Paul is a person, as

expressed in the early part of the story, he concludes that Paul is still performing the

role that someone else has written the script for him to play for the world. He is "split
up between multiple sets on which he acts"(555). However, "just as Paul donned his
costume before the concert, in New York he again assembles his `costume,' clothes that

this time fit perfectly"(555). In the Big Apple, "this is all possible because Paul has
written the script" that "allow[s] him his desired role in his imagined world"(555).
In "Paul's Case," "the [theatrical] motif offers [Cather] a means of dealing with

a difficult subject"(556). Page established that for Paul "in living out this fantasy in
New York, he successfully combines the role of playwright, actor, and audience"(556).

He continued, "In another sense, he is happy because, having found his place and

himself, he no longer has to play a part at all"(556). It is the theatrical metaphor that

Page argues provides Cather the double perspective she requires. "Through it, she can
 77

portray Paul as intimately as she wants, and yet she can remain aloof, withdrawing into

the audience watching [him]"(556). From this perspective, therefore, the metaphor of
theatricality reflected the most contemporary discussions of gender and sexuality in
America.

The most recent critics have noticed that Cather masked her sexuality because in
her generation alternative lifestyles were considered perverted. Texts with male

narrators actually relay female experiences, perhaps lesbian experiences. Dock noted
that criticisms of a text, like "The Yellow Wallpaper," shift as history evolves and new
discussions develop, as if peeling back layers of a text in order to get to the truth which
the newer generation of critics have discovered, or merely "posited." These shifts in

criticism pinpoint how the social position of women has evolved in the heterosexual
hegemonic culture in America. Also during the 1990's, Butler implemented the notion
of "the crafting of characters" by authors within literary texts that result in gender

performances and which contribute to the "theatricality" toward the established gender

roles of the past. Actually, when "one does one's body," as Butler posited, one acts out a

constructed script that perpetuates conventional binary divisions of gender and

sexuality. This theatrical metaphor in Paul's story supports the issue of gender

performance and the gendering of sex; it also supports the notion of eliminating binary

opposites when constructing genders. Thus, Paul's character functions not only as an
actor but a playwright.
 78

V. Conclusion.

The two literary touchstones of Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Willa Cather

examined in this thesis anchored a larger discussion of the discourse about gender and

sexuality during the First and Second Waves of feminism in America. "The Yellow

Wallpaper" by Gilman deconstructed the notion of "femininity" manifested at the turn

of the century in America, while Cather's "Paul's Case" reconstructed the notion of

"masculinity." Both Cather and Gilman wrote their short stories at the turn of the

century in America during the First Wave of Feminism yet they resurfaced in

discussions about gender and sexuality in the Second Wave of Feminism. Readings of

both Cather and Gilman's writings have evolved with the First and Second Waves

because their protagonists defied and undercut the established social norms enabling

them to be re-examined much after their publication date. Although their writing styles

are different, Gilman and Cather share a complex understanding of gender and sexuality

that earmark the social position of women in America which can be interpreted by the

most contemporary critics of present date.

During the First Wave of Feminism, women discussed how their ability to

reproduce contributed to unbalanced gender relations, caused middle and upper class

women to remain confined to the household, and economically dependent upon their

husbands. This devaluation of women's participation in valued economic work

sickened many women and left them reliant on their physician's care as well.

Challenging this social structure, Gilman recorded her experience after being diagnosed

with neurasthenia by Dr. Mitchell, ordered to remain in bed for months while

consuming fatty foods and with no support from friends. Meanwhile, Cather expressed
 79

her discontent with the social construction of gender in America by asserting a male

character that reconsidered the established norms for men and women of Victorian

America.

When the Second Wave of Feminism emerged in America, the discussions about

gender and sexuality reread these touchstone texts of Gilman and Cather as flexible

visions of reality but in different discursive contexts depending on the social time frame

in which they reviewed them. In the 1960s, the Women's Rights Movement and the

Women's Liberation Movement generated most theoretical discussions on the condition

of women themselves, the issues pertaining to women's confinement like establishing a

political voice and the "problem with no name." While in the 1970s, discussions about

gender and sexuality concluded that the "sex/gender system," also known as patriarchy,

defeated their purpose toward complete liberation because of its economic structure

aimed at benefiting men. Although they appreciated the notion of a collective voice for

all women, the development of individual voices among women played a more

significant role in the 1970's discourses about gender and sexuality. Because men have

predominantly controlled the medical field, women in the 1970s, who wrote about

gender and sexuality then, also attacked physicians like Dr. Mitchell who diagnosed

women with strange treatments and also worked for the prohibition of the practice of

mid-wifery in America at the turn of the century. Other critics of the 1970s decided that

Cather's life reflected that of a lesbian, so that by the 1980s, literary discourses

involving gender and sexuality began asking questions about the purpose of Cather and

Gilman's writings. If female authors like Cather and Gilman lived such politically

conscious lives, then why did they not create narratives that reflected their political
 80

agendas? After questioning their narratives, some critics decided that Cather and

Gilman carried a "duplicitous nature" or a twofold message in their short yet complex

stories. This duplicitous style of writing explained how that by the 1990s discussions

about gender and sexuality had evolved into the "crafting of characters" that resulted in

"gender performances," and one acting out one's gender.

While First and Second Wavers fought for the elimination of binary gender

divisions and a balance in gender relations that supported the economic development of

all women in America, Cather and Gilman's writings facilitated discussions during both

Waves that contributed to the reasons why the social construction of gender and

sexuality did not result in equal human treatment, and should therefore be reconstructed.

The literature concerning women during the First and Second Waves of

Feminism can be summarized as a tactfully-formulated, continuing rumination on the

question of the nature and genesis of women's oppression and social subordination, and

how to change its effects on the future of the human race. What started off as strictly

constructed and enforced gender roles in Victorian America evolved into gender

performativity in the latter part of this century. This socio-sexuo evolution lies within

the protagonists' discontent and total rebellion in Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper" and

Cather's "Paul's Case," whose stories both surfaced at the turn of the 20`h century in

America, when socially-conscious citizens inspected these rigid Victorian ideals, and

whose stories later resurfaced again during the Second Wave of Feminism at the middle

to end of the 201h century, when individuals re-enacted these same socially constructed

gender roles, and deconstructed them.

 81

Lather's "Paul's Case" functions as a touchstone of her short fiction that even

Cather agreed valued notice, since she only allowed it to be reprinted of all her other

stories. With consideration toward conducting future research, a more thorough

examination of say The Professor's House and A Lost Lady as well as My Antonia to

explore more glimpses of Lather confirming this fluctuating, non-conforming, even

elusive authorial approach toward gender and sexuality that has made her reputation

outlast herself, should reveal even a deeper sense of her literary complexities. Gilman's

utopian novels, Moving the Mountain,. Herland, and With Her in Ourland, that came

after "The Yellow Wallpaper" deserve a closer look in the same respect as she struggled

to portray the possibilities and barriers facing a woman who attempted to combine love

and work. The movement in Gilman's writing progressively develops the possibilities

and highlights the key barriers for a woman: female resistance to social change and

male incomprehension concerning the necessity for love and work in a woman's life.

She visualized the transition from the present to the future as one of internal conversion

to an egalitarian society. This is a dual process of women awakening to their own

interior power and men renouncing oppressive power structures as individuals and as a

society. Perhaps too this is why Gilman, like Cather, switched to a male narrator in

order to express her utopian vision.

 82

Endnotes

1 William Dean Howells anthologized "The Yellow Wallpaper" in 1920 for one of his
Great Modern American Stories. The Feminist Press republished it in 1973 with an
Afterword by Elaine Hedges, which is when Gilman's feminist perspective on the
socio-cultural situation confronting women in the late nineteenth century came to life
again, and has become the Press's all time best seller having sold more than 225,000
copies.

2
"Hysteria, the disease with which Freud so famously began his investigation into the
dynamic connections between psyche and soma, is by definition a `female disease,' not
so much because it takes its name from the Greek word for womb, hyster (the organ
which was in the nineteenth century suppose to `cause' this emotional disturbance), [but
because it was] thought to be caused by the female reproductive system"(Gilbert and
Gubar 53). See Madwoman for further discussion of hysteria as a form of "patriarchal
socialization"(53).

'When Cather published "Paul's Case" in 1905, the "gender troubled" Paul wore a
"stray flower" a red carnation which critics have suggested offered a veiled connection
to Oscar Wilde who was imprisoned for sodomy. "In the appendix to Wilde's trial it is
ascertained that in France homosexuals wear green carnations to signal their
availability, and Wilde flagrantly allies himself with this practice in the wearing of such
flowers himself'(Butler 160). In 1890, Cather was also noted for having written
newspaper columns and reviews that were about Oscar Wilde and were "unremittingly
hostile" toward his behavior. She despised his aesthetic approach to art, his
"insincerity" and his "driveling effeminacy"(Summers 104). Ten years later she would
create a character that somewhat resembled him. All quotations taken from Cather's
articles on Wilde were taken from The Kingdom of Art: Willa Cather's First Principles
and Critical Statements 1893-1896.

4 W & E first appeared in 1898 after several months of intensive writing; it was almost
immediately republished in 1899. The book attracted wide attention; ultimately seven
editions appeared in the United States and Great Britain and it was translated into seven
languages, including Japanese, Russian and Hungarian.

5 The decade following the publishing of W & E (and her second marriage) was one of
extreme productivity. During this major phase of her literary career, she wrote several
book-length treatises: Concerning Children (1900), The Home: Its Work and Influence
(1903), Human Work (1904), and The Man-Made World; Or, Our Androcentric Culture
(1909-1910). In addition, between 1899 and 1910, she regularly contributed to major
magazines including The Saturday Evening Post, Scribner's, Woman's Home
Companion, and Harper's Bazar. (Knight 162)

6 A very dedicated writer, Gilman was the publisher and sole contributor to each
monthly issue of her independent journal The Forerunner, which was published for
 83

seven years through 1916. "The Forerunner and its cornucopia of [novels, three of them
published serially,] essays, poems, and stories, . . . reflect not only Gilman's private
trials and experiences, but also her immersion in a variety of lively intellectual currents
and personal relationships with a host of nationally prominent scholars, writers and
social activists.... where Gilman defined herself professionally as a 'sociologist."'
(Deegan 9)
7
Following a visit to Europe, Sanger and a small group of women met in her home and
organized the first American Birth Control League declaring it "aims to enlighten and
educate all sections of the American public in the various aspects of the dangers of
uncontrolled procreation and the imperative necessity of a world program of Birth
Control"(28 1). Further, "the League aims to correlate the findings of scientists,
statisticians, investigators, and social agencies in all fields"(28 1).
8
For Sanger's order of classification of her statistical analysis found in the ending pages
of her book, she organized them covering the following eight areas: (1)geographic
distribution, (2) economic status, (3)mother's age, (4) number of children, (5) frequency
of children, (6) family health, (7)pathological conditions at pregnancy, and (8),
miscarriages and stillbirths. From these headings, number eight's grid is presented
partially below and represents data collected from 3,080 women, who they themselves
and she referred to as "typical `breeders"' or "mothers of large families." (446)

Pregnancies Living Miscarriages Fractional Loss

19 12 7 7/19
12 4 8 2/3
9 1 8 8/9

9 Each chapter represented the substance of 12 lectures delivered at various academic

institutions by Addams. The five other areas of focus in her book are Charitable Effort,
Household Adjustment, Industrial Amelioration, Educational Methods and Political
Reform. The section discussed above comes from Filial Relations, the third chapter.
10
Cather's essay was published in letter format within this publication however the
date on the letter is April 17,1936, and in response to an inquiry a Mr. Williams made to
her "about a new term in criticism: the Art of 'Escape "'(18).
11
At the end of this first chapter, Friedan lists things wrong with women, "that have
long been taken for granted among women," of which some I list for you here. She
listed, "menstrual difficulties, sexual frigidity, promiscuity, pregnancy fears, childbirth
depression, the high incidences of emotional breakdown and suicide among women in
their twenties and thirties"(27). The reason why I chose to include them here is because
I feel that more emphasis needs to be placed upon them. Even though these
complications may be true of women, they lead only back to women and not outside of
women toward the root of the causes. Friedan believed women could become CEOs of
companies within the American capitalistic system but she did not consider that this
sexist system could have contributed to the list of complications she constructed
 84

regarding women. (On a significant side note, Friedan was the founder of NOW, the
National Organization of Women.)

12 Ehrenreich and English in For Her Own Good reported that he earned over $60,000
per year "the equivalent of over $300,000.00 in today's dollars"(101). These figures
from 1979 are almost 20 years old, which would average his income much higher in this
day based upon their figures.
13
Newsweek, March 7, 1960 was the date she referenced for her citation.
14
Any thorough discussion about the evolution of America's views on sexuality would
be incomplete without the incorporation of the infamous French feminist and author of
The Second Sex Simone de Beauvoir, who in it traced women's oppression from a
biological standpoint and revealed the misconceptions of gender because of the male-
dominated medical field that has determined women as the Other.
15
Ellmann is referring to "the eloquent denunciation of the cream separator in One of
Ours written by Cather.
16 Her
book reports that she had originally presented this article as a speech at the
Radcliffe institute in 1962, worthwhile to mention because the earlier date almost
situates her views a decade earlier.

17 In this article, G. Rubin also focused on "the Oedipus hex" upon women and the
Electra complex as a variant of the Oedipal complex described for males. Further, she
homed in on Lacan's theory of psychoanalysis and his explanation of the phallus and its
relationship to systems of kinship.
17
Ehrenreich and English relay this information to their readers and note that their
reported information comes from "an otherwise fond biographer" (101).

18 L. Rubin alerts us to which version of this short story he refers to, that is Willa
Cather's "Paul's Case," in Youth and the Bright Medusa (New York, Knopf, 1920),
p.199). He also adds that "all subsequent page references are to this collection"(129).
19
French also criticized George Sand, George Eliot, Virginia Woolf and Edith Wharton
for not creating female protagonists who shared in the same liberties they had and/or
who exhibited the unique lifestyles the authors had.

20 It is interesting to note here that French capitalized on this "breaking the silence"
concept that she expected of the group of authors she wrote about in the aforementioned
article within that same year. In her book Her Mother's Daughter, a daughter breaks the
silence that her mother could not. French adds that the cycle of repetition can be
arrested, if a woman decides to acknowledge the anger and frustration that women
experience.
 85

21 In Strategies of Reticence: Silence and Meaning in the Works of Jane Austen, Will
Cather, Katherine Anne Porter, and Joan Didion(1990), Stout explores the conscious
and unconscious chosen strategies of these authors in their work which manifests
qualities of silence or withholding for effect.
22 "'Compulsive
heterosexuality,"' Rich writes, "was named as one of the 'crimes
against women' by the Brussels International Tribunal on Crimes against Women in
1976" (138).

23
For a thorough comparative discussion of Butler and Sedgwick's approach toward
gender and sexuality turn to Mark Micale's 1995 book Approaching Hysteria: Disease
and Its Interpretations.
 86

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