3/28/2014 Domesticity in Turn of the Century Literature<br> by Chopin and Perkins Gilman

Domesticity in Turn of the Century Literature:

A glimpse into the domestic life represented by Chopin and Perkins Gilman

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The majority of readers in the nineteenth century were

women. Literature presented women with choices about what
roles they wished to play in American society. Chopin and
Perkins Gilman presented women with options that were
drastically different from the ones presented in popular advice
literature and art. While neither The Awakening nor The
Yellow-Wallpaper have happy endings, they at least presented
an alternative representation of women and of women's
realities.

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"An indescribeable oppression, which seemed to generate in

some unfamiliar part of her consciousness, filled her whole
being with a vague anguish.

In short, Mrs. Pontellier was not a mother-woman. The

mother-women seemed to prevail that summer at Grand Isle.
It was easy to know them, fluttering about with extended,
protecting wings when any harm, real or imagined, threatened
their precious blood. They were women who idolized their
children, worshiped their husbands, and esteemed it a holy
privelege to efface themselves as individuals and grow wings
as ministering angels."

Kate Chopin, The Awakening

Dramatizations of
Imprisonment and
Escape are so all-
pervasive in nineteenth-
century literature by
women that we believe
they represent a
uniquely female tradition
in this period."

Gilbert and Gubar, The

Madwoman in the
Attic

"The front pattern does move--and no

wonder! The woman behind shakes it!

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Sometimes I think there are a great
many women behind, and sometimes
only one, and she crawls around fast,
and her crawling shakes it all over.

Then, in the very bright spots she

keeps still, and in the very shady spots
she just takes hold of the bars and
shakes them hard.

And she is all the time trying to climb

through."

Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Yellow-

Wallpaper

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History

Regardless of whether you consider The Awakening or The

Yellow Wallpaper feminist texts, it is important to understand
them in the context of their historical period. By the turn of the
century, magazines, art galleries, and novels were flooded with
advice about how to be a proper woman in middle class society.
With industrialization, urbanization, a declining birth rate,
increased divorce rate, the shift away from the home, the
increase in the number of single men and women in the
professional class, a growing non-WASP immigrant population,
and the new freedoms made available by the anonymity possible
in cities, Americans feared that their families would fall apart. As
a result, one of the most significant changes to American culture
in the late nineteenth century was the transformation in the
perception and representation of gender roles due, in large part,
to the evolution of the role of the home.

In addition to the changes in social structures, Americans

experienced profound shifts in the economy. Large corporations
replaced small family businesses and workers were at the mercy
of their employers. The disparity between the wealthy and the
poor drastically increased. These changes created a strong
middle class, while also removing economic power away from
the home and family. This sense of disempowerment resulted in
an understanding of the home as the last refuge for traditional
values for both men and women. However the responsibility for
maintaining the home and the culture of the home was
shouldered solely by women.

Despite the new feminist activism inspired in part by women's

roles in the Abolitionist movement, as well as the Temperance

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and Suffrage movements, women were expected to embody the

traditional values represented by the home. In this way, women
were equated with the home; both were symbols of the morality
Americans hoped to preserve. The home became a female
gendered domestic space in which women, as the guardians of
culture and morality, both gained and lost control.

Exulted as morally superior members of society who would

shelter the family from the evils of commerce and modernity,
women were expected to be pure, charitable, selfless, cultured,
optimistic, supportive at all costs, educated in the proper fields,
and frugal. This construction of womanhood empowered women
to become more educated and manage domestic finances, while
also limiting them through strict rules concerning what they read,
how the home should be designed and maintained, the ways that
they used their time, what families should purchase, how to
behave in public, and all other actions that could be construed as
a reflection of the family's morality. Most importantly, by
relegating women to the domestic sphere, many women were
excluded from the new economy and therefore increasingly
dependent on their husbands for income.

Without the creation of the separate female gendered domestic

sphere, the process of developing a male centered corporate
culture would not have been possible. Too many Americans
were nostalgic for the values that they believed were threatened
by burgeoning urban centers and a growing professional class of
single men and women. In much the same way that Americans
needed to be convinced that abundance was good in order to
cultivate a consumer culture, the creation of the myth of the
moral center in the home was a necessary part of selling
corporate culture.

Domesticity in Literature

Throughout the nineteenth century, domesticity was romanticized

in literature, particularly in literature by women. Harriet Beecher
Stowe, in Uncle Tom's Cabin, politicized the home by making it
central to social action. Many of the pivotal scenes in the novel
(e.g. Mr. and Mrs. Shelby's discussions, Rachel Halliday's
dinner, Cassie in the attic) occur in the home and in most
instances women are a central part of making moral Christian-
based choices. In Catharine Beecher's 1869, An American
Woman's Home, she attempts to elevate women's positions in
the home to the same level as professional men because
according to her, women's work in the home is essential to the
preservation of morality and culture.

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By the turn of the century, women, like Kate Chopin and

Charlotte Perkins Gilman, created novels that defied traditional
women's roles in the home. In each text, the female protagonist
fantasizes about escape and freedom. While many critics argue
about the source of their frustration, the result, women refusing
to maintain the home and play the role of devoted wife, provided
a powerful subversive text to the advice literature that dominated
popular culture by the turn of the century.

If we can understand the proliferation of advice literature and art

as a form of resistance to the threat of losing traditional family
structure and values, perhaps we can also consider the texts by
Chopin and Perkins Gilman as a form of resistance to this
advice.

INTRO. HOMES MOTHER WIFE CULTURE LIT. SITE MAP & BIBLIO.

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