Throughout most of her career, Charlotte Perkins Gilman advocated a race-based nationalism she most clearly expressed in her 1922 poem “The Melting Pot.” The poem uses the analogy between different races and different cooking ingredients to suggest that inter-racial mixing—“when all of the ingredients here should comingle”—will inevitably threaten the nation's social well-being. For what is produced in a melting pot in which the most diverse elements are carelessly combined is surely not a delicious “soup” or a “good cake” but “swill” or kitchen garbage fed to pigs. “The Melting Pot” insists both on the imperative to protect the integrity of distinct races and on the inferiority of multi-racial social communities.1A melting pot has to be made With particular care,And carefully sampled and weighedAs to nature, proportion and grade Are the ores mingled there.Let the metaphor change in your mind To an effort to bake,Of eggs, butter, and flour you will find,With milk, sugar and raisins combined, You compose a good cake.Or, taking salt, pepper and meat, With an onion or two,Tomatoes, and maybe a beet,Fine herbs and some celery sweet, A good soup you may brew.But if all these ingredients here Should comingle at will,Neither cake nor yet soup will appear,There's only one name for a mixture so queer— That is swill.Published in the same year as James Weldon Johnson's seminal anthology The Book of American Negro Poetry and only three years prior to Alain Locke's The New Negro, Gilman's poem affirms an expressivist culture model that, in the early-twentieth century, lent authority to conflicting but ultimately related cultural programs. In its pluralist version, expressivist thought informed larger parts of Modernist ethnic literature, the Harlem Renaissance and the New Negro movements in particular, but also theories of multiculturalism following Horace Kallen's Culture and Democracy in the United States (1924).2 In its primitivist extremes, expressivism became important for promoting nativist positions driven by the anxiety “that some influence originating from abroad threatened the life of the nation from within.”3 We may think here of such books as Lothrop Stoddard's The Rising Tide of Color against White World-Supremacy (1920), prominently referenced in The Great Gatsby (1925), and the novels of Thomas Dixon. Whereas nativists believed that social progress was premised on the racial purity of the nation (hence their rejection of “inferior” or “alien” races), pluralists like Kallen re-inscribed racial hierarchies, hence also the idea of the nation, in the name of cultural diversity.4 What conjoins both camps is the idea that human identity is defined by an innate potential or essence that materializes in culturally specific forms, such as languages, art, or social customs.Gilman's nativist leanings, her consequent advocacy of limited immigration, and her belief in eugenics have been well documented over the past couple of decades.5 Denise D. Knight's extensive editorial work on Gilman's diaries and letters has become indispensable to contemporary Gilman scholarship. Cynthia Davis’ monumental Charlotte Perkins Gilman: A Biography (2010) and Ann Lane's To Herland and Beyond (1997) have additionally sharpened our sense of Gilman's often conflicted private and professional identities. And Gilman's autobiography The Living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1935) is replete with anecdotes that reflect the thoughts of a committed racist who was deeply xenophobic and antisemitic. The purpose of this essay, therefore, is not to reveal Gilman's nativism—a fact well-known—but to revisit her stance on what she called the “Negro problem” in the context of her proto-feminist work as a social reformer and fiction writer. I thus return to a question that has been central to Gilman scholarship of the past four decades: How can we hold on to the merits of Gilman's social reform agendas while recognizing that much of what she thought about social reform was grounded in race-based theories of civilization?In answering this question, I wish to make two related claims. First, Gilman's texts, both fictional and non-fictional, reflect the resurgence of expressivist thought around 1900 in ways that allow us to understand that feminist reform and racial segregation were not mutually exclusive ideologies but that the two depended on one another. Second, Gilman's belated academic reappraisal reveals how the same expressivist logic that enabled her to propose the ethno-racial cleansing of the American nation while campaigning for women's rights in the early-twentieth century has been re-affirmed rather than abandoned in academic literary criticism since the 1970s. Today Gilman's racism continues to provoke controversies as many readers find her denigrating view of African Americans and other minorities hardly compatible with her feminist reform politics. It almost seems as if Gilman's academic consecration could only occur as long as there were arguments to make her racism look bad, as if a commitment to gender equality was incompatible with a commitment to racial segregation. And from a particular institutional perspective, the argument makes sense. Gilman's academic reception—centered around “The Yellow Wallpaper” (1892) and Herland (1915)—began at a time, the early 1970s and 1980s, when “race” and “gender” were turned into the twin siblings of a left-leaning, liberal literary studies world.From yet another perspective, in fact the one I am suggesting here, Gilman's feminism is neither compromised by the fact that she despised African Americans nor discredited by her belief in eugenics. Making this point, I am following the work of Dana Seitler, Alys Weinbaum, and others, who have contextualized Gilman within post-Darwinian biology and anthropology discourses of the later-nineteenth and earlier-twentieth centuries.6 In this context, Gilman's feminism is indeed mostly consistent with the ways in which she defended her primitivist history of civilizations in that both programs rely on similarly expressivist notions of an identitarian self. New Negro artists and intellectuals used expressivist rhetoric in the early-twentieth century as a way of promoting a collective African American subject position, both culturally and socially. “The New Negro's task was to discover and define his culture and his contribution to what had been thought a white civilization.”7 Gilman drew inspiration from the same discourse to insist on a hierarchy of different human life forms as the precondition for her feminist reform endeavors. For Gilman, the social role of women could only be advanced in an ethnically homogenous, Anglo-Saxon world. Thus she relied “on eugenic reproduction to obtain a privileged position for a modern feminist subject within the nation.”8The goal of this essay, then, is neither to make Gilman's racism look better nor to make her feminism look worse, but to show that both positions require theoretical commitments that derive from a similarly expressivist conception of human nature. I begin by contextualizing Gilman within a longer genealogy of expressivist thought, tracing how systematically her sociological work as feminist reformer corresponded with her fictional texts, and vice versa. Then I turn to Gilman's academic reception to show how later-twentieth-century literary criticism wrestled with and thus inadvertently perpetuated Gilman's expressivist legacy. As I argue in my conclusion, criticizing Gilman's racism while at the same time defending her efforts to improve the social position of women is possible, albeit only as long as one looks at racism and social reform as two separate issues: the former requires a particular belief in the centrality of a racialized subject position, the latter requires the belief in the possibility of making society more just—independently of any subject position.The idea of the melting pot became popular through Israel Zangwill's eponymous play (1908) and was then introduced as a sociological category by Horace Kallen in his 1915 article for the Nation, published later as a part of Culture and Democracy in the United States. Unlike Gilman, however, whose poem was a direct response to the article, Kallen envisioned America as a colorful, multi-tonal composite nation, in which difference was the signature of a pluralist universe rather than of a racial hierarchy. “As in an orchestra every type of instrument has its specific timbre and tonality, founded in its substance and form; as every type has its appropriate theme and melody in the whole symphony, so in society, each ethnic group may be the natural instrument, its temper and culture may be its theme and melody.”9 Although Kallen's text cannot be read outside of the immediate context of the 1910s and 1920s, the philosophical framework of the essay continued a much older genealogy of expressivist thought that reaches back at least to the 1770s.Expressivism emerged in late-eighteenth-century Europe as a response to what Charles Taylor once called a “turn to inwardness.” The movement's central idea consisted in the notion that human identity is “the manifestation of an inner power, striving to realize itself.”10 This was the crucial lesson taught by Johann Gottfried Herder and absorbed in the U.S. by a variety of antebellum intellectuals seeking to define the nation in terms of an expressive-identitarian potential.11 For Gilman, expressivist nationalism became crucial, as social and natural scientists in the late-nineteenth century provided arguments to redescribe broadly metaphysical conceptions of cultural identity—we may think Hegel's notion of “spirit” or Emerson's emanation model—as consequences of genetic variation. “By the 1890s, scientific thinkers attempting to explain a wide range of human phenomena such as poverty, crime, racial differences, and imperialism had begun to abandon vague analogies based on the idea of evolutionary development. Experimental biologists now provided enough apparently incontestable knowledge about biological processes so that recourse to purely analogical argumentation was unnecessary.”12The new belief in what William James would call “radical empiricism”13 allowed writers to adopt new strategies of legitimizing their craft by claiming that they no longer merely wrote about reality or identity as such—a broad and eventually insoluble metaphysical puzzle—but instead analyzed and critiqued miniscule portions of the social world as scientists. This is the central claim of Émile Zola's The Experimental Novel (1880), a key text for the majority of American writers identified as naturalists. Zola's notion that literature should be used to further scientific inquiry rather than express artistic exuberance cemented the gateway of European naturalist discourse into the U.S. literary field. Zola insisted that writers become “experimentalists instead of philosophers.” The “experimental method in letters, as in sciences, is in the way to explain the natural phenomena, both individual and social, of which metaphysics, until now, has given only irrational and supernatural explanations.”14 In exactly this sense, Gilman conceived of herself as a socially engaged “scientist,” as she claims in “Human Nature.”15 And in a letter to Caroline Hill, she made it clear that her ambition was never to be a “poet” but a “preacher, whether on the platform or in print.”16In propagating her view on the evolution of human history, Gilman must have drawn on a number of popular studies in anthropology and evolutionary biology recommended to her by her father, in addition to “every issue of Popular Science Monthly she could obtain,” as Cynthia Davis details in her biography.17 Gilman probably knew Charles Darwin's The Origin of Species (1859) and The Descent of Man (1871) as well as Edward Tylor's Primitive Culture (1871) and John Lubbock's The Origin of Civilization and the Primitive Condition of Man (1870). While “she may have read these books,” however, “there is no documentary evidence that she did so.”18 These bibliographical lacunae notwithstanding, the naturalist discourse on human behavior allowed Gilman to fuse earlier theories of evolution centered on principles of heredity with theories based mainly on the idea of social, environmental conditioning. Underwriting Gilman's racial nationalism was the “interactionist nature and nurture paradigm”19 that she and other first-wave feminists relied on as they were “shoring up an evolutionary discourse on white civilized womanhood.”20Gilman insisted on the primacy of the genetic code as the rock-bottom of human identity, which for her meant race above all else. But she also maintained that specific socio-geographical milieus would be more conducive than others to furthering the accomplishments of individual races. Hence, while insisting on the centrality of the bloodline, Gilman maintained that human history could be described as a bundle of “actions that are the result” of “environment and power of adaptation.” “We are men but do not live so. We live willless and brainless, doing what we are told, and what our fathers did before us.” Human nature, she claims, is “not human! Is not natural even! It is the blind pressure of life against conditions unnatural, inhuman, evil and awful in their effects. You cannot fight against them, you cannot escape them, but you can cut them down and dig them up, root and branch.”21 The critical work of exposing the mechanisms by which individuals and groups were subjugated, Gilman claimed, should be carried out by a few specialists within each race who are endowed with the ability to make a change and adapt to their environments not just passively but by providing a practical solution to the most pressing social problems. And what holds true for Gilman within the rather confined frameworks of U.S. society around 1900 is just as true within the world at large; i.e., within a global network of higher and lower forms of civilizations. Some are animal-like and primitive and others have already attained a higher form of life, capable of crafting the most intricate forms of social and economic organization. As Gilman insisted in her autobiography, “the study of the world must take on an understanding of different races and their relative state of advancement.”22In “Personal Problems,” published in her magazine the Forerunner, Gilman couples a culture's receptiveness to notions of gender equality with a racial predisposition reinforced by the characteristics of a geographical region. “The Teutons and Scandinavian stocks seem never to have had that period of enslaved womanhood, that polygamous harem culture; their women never went through that debasement; and their men have succeeded in preserving the spirit of freedom which is inevitably lost by a race which has servile women.”23 For Gilman, feminist reform could flourish only within societies that by virtue of their racial superiority had already attained the insight that equality between different social groups was a necessary prerequisite for a healthy community life. Gilman promoted these views systematically in essays such as “Feminism,” “Our Place Today,” “The New Generation of Women,” and notably “A Suggestion on the Negro Problem.” But the same ideas were also integral to her fictional writings of the same period, nowadays remembered (and celebrated) mostly for their proto-feminism. Her fictional work, in other words, cannot be treated separately from the rest of her writings; it represents the photographic negative to, and thus supports, the ethno-racial essentialism of her sociological and activist work.The utopian dimension of Gilman's novel Herland (1915), for example, derives from the Herlander's adherence to the principle of genetic purity. In that (and many other aspects), it follows Edward Bellamy's utopian romance Looking Backward (1888), a book Gilman knew well and which provided inspiration throughout her career. The inhabitants of the country described in Gilman's novel are of “Aryan stock” and all of them share a genetic lineage with one original “race mother,”24 suggesting that the exceptionality of their state is warranted by a rigid politics of ethno-racial separatism. In order to avoid the possibility of cross-breeding, the Herlanders must remain strictly isolated from the rest of the world. Geographical isolation, the novel suggests, goes hand in hand with racial segregation in that the distinctness of identity is premised on the distinctness of place. A similar line of thought can be found in With Her in Ourland (1916), the sequel to Herland. Here the protagonist Ellador outlines her interpretation of how race and female subjecthood intersect in the following way. A radical feminist, she believes that America's future social progress will only be warranted in as much as women's rights are defended and expanded. Such reformist ideas, she goes on to explain, require special racial-genetic preconditions that are most likely found in North America: Democracy is a psychic relation. It requires the intelligent conscious co-operation of a great many persons all “equal” in the characteristics required to play that kind of game. You could have safely welcomed to your great undertaking people of every race and nation who were individually fitted to assist. Not by any means because they were “poor and oppressed,” nor because of that glittering generality that “all men are created free and equal,” but because the human race is in different stages of development, and only some of the races—or some individual in a given race—have reached the democratic state.25In characteristic fashion, the passage evokes geo-climatic theories of civilization in that it suggests a plurality of historically more and less advanced cultures, whose inherent values (or deficiencies) are a direct consequence of geographical region and genetic predispositions. Note the striking similarities between Ellador's stratified history of human races and Hegel's well-known claim that Africa is “no historical part of the world”: It is “the land of childhood which, lying beyond the day of self-conscious history, is enveloped in the dark mantle of night.”26The arguably more intriguing aspect of Gilman's novel, however, is how methodically genetic cleansing and reproductive control are advocated as technologies to ensure the continued rule of female excellence. Van the narrator chuckles in disbelief and terror as he is informed that “the bad qualities” of some girls would not pose a serious problem for society at large because they could be bred out over the course of a few generations: “If the girl showing the bad qualities had still the power to appreciate social duty, we appealed to her, by that, to renounce motherhood. Some of the few worst types were, fortunately, unable to reproduce. But if the fault was in a disproportionate egotism—then the girl was sure she had the right to have children, even that hers would be better than others.”27 Readers of the novel to this point will not be startled to learn that inter-racial reproductive sex is prohibited for all Herlanders and sanctioned draconically.Herland's fantasy of reproductive control was anything but new. It is the fictional equivalent to an argument that Gilman had begun to develop almost twenty years earlier and discussed in great detail in Women and Economics (1898). Here readers learn in similar fashion that marriage should not be endorsed as long as the bond between man and woman furthered racial cross-breeding. If one adopts the notion that humankind can be divided into higher and lower forms of life, as is reflected in Gilman's discussion of “Oriental” and “Germanic tribes,” then inter-racial breeding must be avoided to protect the integrity of the bloodline and to further civilizational progress.28 For some socially advantageous features can only be attained and honed within advanced civilizations. “Accuracy and punctuality,” for example, “are qualities which were unknown to the savage, because they were not needed in his business. They have been developed in us, because there were required, and so have been gradually assumed under pressure of economic necessity.”29 This connection between social progress, including feminist reform, racial segregation, and genetically purified reproduction is key to understanding what Gilman labeled “race betterment,” a social reform program outlined with great clarity in “A Suggestion on the Negro Problem” (1908).The essay is Gilman's first principled attempt to address comprehensively what she understood to be America's most imminent social problem: the continued presence of African Americans in Anglo-Saxon America. Anyone reading “A Suggestion on the Negro Problem” today will be appalled by how systematically Gilman thought about sanitizing American society by removing African Americans from central areas of life and work. For Gilman, the reasons for the emergent social threat were of a historical nature and related in particular to the history of American slavery. When African slaves were “forcibly extradited from a distant country,” a “lower” class of people received a “compulsory introduction into our” American “economic group,” forcing American society at large to deal with a community of people that were “by heredity”30 strangers in an unknown land.The Negro's alien status presented a problem for Gilman, however, not because his presence signified a gruesome history of cultural displacement, but because he was a real threat to the American economy. And hence for Gilman the most pressing issue was what Americans “can do to promote the development of the backward race so that it may become an advantageous element in the community” (80). Gilman was of course not the only one to think systematically about the challenge of how to integrate former slaves into post-emancipation U.S. society. And Gilman's reform spirit was by no means exclusive to a white intellectual elite. A similarly distinct proposal for the “training of black men” came from W. E. B. Du Bois, who advised that “the inferiority of black men” could be reduced by subjecting former slaves to a rigid educational program. Their “wildly weak and untrained minds” must be met “by the breadth and broadening of human reason, by catholicity of taste and culture.”31 In contrast to Du Bois, however, Gilman would have opted against the implementation of the slave-holding system not because she cared for the well-being of the people forced into the country but because the “transfusion of civilization” (78) would jeopardize the social and economic achievements of Anglo-Saxons.“That so many negroes” have “made such great progress” (79) in the short time that they had to adapt to their new environment, Gilman insists, shows how seriously intellectuals and politicians had already taken the Negro problem. But there was still more to be done, and it was upon social reformers like her to develop potential solutions. For “there is a difference between man and his lower brothers,” as Gilman explains in “Human Nature.” “They find their conditions, and live accordingly. He makes his—at least a large part of them, and therein is the only hope of the prophet and preacher.”32 The solution Gilman promoted in “A Suggestion on the Negro Problem” is well known: each sovereign state must ensure that every county and township establishes a recruiting system to produce “an enlisted body of negroes below a certain state of citizenship” (80). The enlisted cohorts of Negroes would be subjected to a program of “race betterment” which was “compulsory” but should not be mistaken for another form of slavery or a segment of the state's penal system. On the contrary, to be “drafted to a field of labor that shall benefit his own race and the whole community, need not be considered a wrong to any negro.” The program for “race betterment” would guarantee “fullest understanding to every characteristic of the negro race” (84) and it would even involve leisure time activities tuned to the needs and desires of the negro community; race betterment would inevitably help to speed up racial evolution while it would excel in its practical implementation by “careful organization and honorable recognition” of the negro culture (83). Again, the idea of conscripting African Americans to a state-controlled training program is relatable to Bellamy's Looking Backward, in which the nation's economy is administered by an industrial army subdivided into ten ranks of hierarchical order.That Gilman herself was profoundly troubled by the increased presence of African American culture in the 1910s and 1920s is confirmed no only by an abundant number of personal anecdotes collected in her autobiography and diaries but also passages in her later essays. In “Is America too Hospitable?” (1923), for example, Gilman describes Africa as a continent full of “savages” living in countries that are “undeveloped.” Referencing Hector St. John de Crevecoeur's Letters from an American Farmer (1782), Gilman deplores unlimited immigration into the U.S., arguing that the plurality of different races would eventually disintegrate the unity of the American—that is, Anglo-Saxon—nation. To the question “What is an American?” Gilman responded sarcastically that he must be “the only person on earth who invites all creation to crowd him out of house and home.” And even the American, she maintains, “is dimly beginning to wonder” whether he should not better “withdraw his invitation.”33 Characteristically, then, in Gilman's most well-known fictional text, “The Yellow Wallpaper,” the wallpaper was first identified by Susan Lanser in 1989 as a metaphor for the collective immigration anxiety of the American middleclass and their consequent endorsement of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882.34Given how systematically she thought about preventing the influx of foreign races into a white, Anglo-Saxon nation, it may feel somewhat ironic today that Gilman's non-fictional sociological work appeared within an evolving social science field that facilitated exchange with intellectuals later to be crucial for the formation of the New Negro Movement. Again, Du Bois serves as a prominent example. Gilman and Du Bois knew each other, they valued each other's work, and they were active members of the American Society of Sociology and the American Economic Society, both writers publishing in the American Journal of Sociology during the time that Gilman's “A Suggestion on the Negro Problem” appeared there. However, while their institutional affiliations and political interests in the 1900s and 1910s inspired similar social reform initiatives, their interpretation of what Du Bois defined as “the problem of the color-line—the relation of the darker to the lighter races of men”35—were radically different. Du Bois agreed with Gilman that African Americans were on a lower stage of socio-cultural evolution, but he “rejected the predominant (white) sociological theory that blacks were biologically inferior.”36 Gilman, as we have seen, explained the lower-class status of the African American community as an immediate consequence of their genetic deficiencies. Americans, she maintains, needed to “consider the unavoidable presence of a large body of aliens, of a race widely dissimilar and in many respects inferior, whose present status is to us a social injury” (78).Whatever the precise nature of the relationship between Gilman and prominent African American intellectuals like Du Bois, their apparent differences have been additionally reinforced by a more recent readerly sensibility that began to dominate academic literary criticism in the second half of the twentieth century. Following the rediscovery and subsequent publication in the early 1970s of “The Yellow Wallpaper” and other “lost” texts, Gilman was almost logically appropriated in literature departments as an important counter-figure necessary to challenge the predominance of a male-centered literary canon and as a character that helped to institutionalize on a broad scale the practice of literary-historical feminism. As Annette Kolodny recounts in her seminal essay “Dancing through the Minefield,” “For those of us in American literature departments especially” these moments of rediscovery “promised a radical reshaping of our concepts of literary history” and also “a new chapter in understanding the development of women's literary traditions.”37As a consequence, Kolodny and other feminist scholars were “wooed to compose critical introductions, which would find in the pages of nineteenth-century domestic and sentimental fictions some signs of either muted rebellions or overt radicalism in anticipation of the current wave of the ‘new Feminism.’”38 “Although the word ‘deconstruction’ was not yet in currency, these feminist premises inaugurated the first major opposition to both (old) scholarly and (New) critical practices, generating what has become the most widespread deconstructive imperative in the American academy.”39 This new imperative led to the gradual replacement of terms such as “reason,” “disinterestedness,” and “objectivity” by terms such as “perspective,” “subjectivity,” and “experience” (and many more). “An emphasis on universalism and ‘greatness’ was replaced by an emphasis on diversity and difference; the scientific norms that once prevailed in many of the ‘soft’ disciplines began to be viewed with skepticism (though a very rigorous skepticism).”40Lanser's and Kolodny's essays are invaluable documents about how literary feminism came into being and what it entailed in terms of its critical methodology and its politics. These essays and others of the same period are also important because they prove the point that the practice of reading is historically and institutionally specific. There are certain moments in the history of criticism that make a set o