Approaches to Teaching Gilman's "The Yellow Wall-Paper" and Herland, and: Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Her Contemporaries (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Approaches to Teaching Gilman's "The Yellow Wall-Paper" and Herland, and: Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Her Contemporaries Beverly A. Hume Approaches to Teaching Gilman's "The Yellow Wall-Paper" and Herland. Edited by Cynthia J. Davis and Denise D. Knight. New York: Modern Language Association, 2003. 198 pp. $37.50/$19.75 paper. Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Her Contemporaries. Edited by Cynthia J. Davis and Denise D. Knight. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2004. 251 pp. $55.00/$24.95 paper. The essays collected in these two volumes, edited by Denise D. Knight and Cynthia J. Davis, provide not only useful critical insights but also pedagogical and secondary resources for educators and students with specialized or developing research interests in the writings of Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Although the earlier collection deals explicitly with pedagogical issues in relation to two of Gilman's most discussed literary texts, both collections illuminate cultural and intellectual issues relevant to Gilman scholarship. In Approaches to Teaching Gilman's "The Yellow Wall-Paper" and Herland, part one ("Materials") offers a ten page summary of issues raised by different textual editions, further reading materials for students, which have been successfully used by educators, and suggestions for readings and teaching aids. Part two, "Approaches," is divided into four sections. In the first section, five critics address ideological, interdisciplinary, and pedagogical issues raised by Gilman's works in the classroom; in the next three sections, an additional sixteen authors address such issues in specific relation either to "The Yellow Wall-Paper" or to Herland. The multiple and diverse critical voices effectively reflect the pedagogical and critical approaches that have been taken to these texts. Among the more useful pedagogical essays in the first section are those by Denise D. Knight, who addresses biographical issues relevant to "The Yellow Wall-Paper," and Mark W. Van Wienan, who assesses Gilman's socialism, which [End Page 86] belongs at the center of any classroom discussion of Herland. The other three essays in this section contextualize Gilman in relation to her aesthetics and ideology, to nineteenth-century intellectual debates, and to her short fiction, poetry, and non-fiction, respectively. While these introductory essays offer useful insights, they point, collectively, to a central problem that the rest of the collection attempts to address: that is, the most effective way to contextualize an author such as Gilman, whose ideological complexities and major rediscovered short story, "The Yellow Wall-Paper," continue to challenge and perplex her many readers. The remaining pedagogical essays on "The Yellow Wall-Paper" and Herland offer useful introductory strategies for approaching such issues. Among them are theoretical and pragmatic discussions regarding Gilman's complex use of language, her engagement with psychological, cultural, and political issues, her authorial relation to others in this historical period, and her significance to women's studies, feminist theory, and American literary studies. Moving away from such explicitly pedagogical concerns, Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Her Contemporaries seeks, according to Davis and Knight, to understand Gilman's complex relation to her contemporaries in order to correct past or current misunderstandings about her. In their introduction, the editors cite, for example, the "current critical trend ... to chastise Gilman for her xenophobia and racism," attitudes which they agree are "objectionable ... and indeed were objected to even in her own day" (x). Their stated aim in this collection is to situate Gilman's "views in the context of her times and her own larger systemic philosophy" in order to "complicate" any "reductive judgments" that have been made about her (x). More specifically, these essays explore or reexamine Gilman's conflicted personal relations with Grace Channing and Catharine Beecher, her adversarial relations with Ambrose Bierce, William Randolph Hearst, George Bernard Shaw, and Sigmund Freud, and the influence of William Dean Howells, Lester Frank Ward, Owen Wister, Mary Austin, and Inez Haynes Gillmore on her writing. Collectively, these essays raise provocative critical questions about Gilman's conflicted responses to ideologies of motherhood in her own family, her battles with late nineteenth- or turn-of-the-century misogynist discourse, and her relationship not only to other reformers, but to western regional and utopian writers. Particularly interesting are Monika Elbert's exploration of...