Table Of Contentthe crux
duke
university
press
durham
and london
2003
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
T H E C RU X
introduction by dana seitler
∫2003
Duke University Press
All rights reserved
‘‘The Crux’’ was originally
published by Charlotte
Perkins Gilman in 1911.
Printed in the United
States of America on
acid-free paper $
Designed by R. Giménez
Typeset in Monotype
Bulmer by Keystone
Typesetting, Inc.
Library of Congress
Cataloging-in-Publication
Data appear on the last
printed page of this book.
contents
Acknowledgments, vii
Introduction by Dana Seitler, 1
Author’s Preface, 23
1. the back way, 25
2. bainville effects, 36
3. the outbreak, 50
4. transplanted, 60
5. contrasts, 70
6. new friends and old, 82
7. side lights, 93
8. a mixture, 105
9. consequences, 120
10. determination, 132
11. thereafter, 145
12. achievements, 158
acknowledgments
I am grateful to Cathy N. Davidson and Priscilla Wald, who both
encouraged me to pursue my interests in The Crux and provided
me with helpful tips on how to do so. I am also indebted to Ken
Wissoker for his support and editorial guidance, and to the anony-
mous readers of Duke University Press for their insightful sugges-
tions for contextualizing The Crux in various American political,
cultural, and literary histories. For more than savvy readings of multi-
ple drafts of this introduction and for thoughtful and thought provok-
ing discussions about the subject, I thank Cannon Schmitt.
introduction
L
ike many other women writers of her day, including Kate Chopin,
Sarah Orne Jewett, and Willa Cather, Charlotte Perkins Gilman used
her prose to facilitate social change for women and to enter into the
growing fray of sexual politics—usually by presenting her readers
with guidance and instruction through exemplary characters. In her
original preface to The Crux (1911), she states: ‘‘This story is, first, for
young women to read; second, for young men to read; after that, for
anybody who wants to.’’ Gilman wrote elsewhere that she hoped to
create a genre that would reflect ‘‘the new attitude of the full grown
woman, who faces the demands of love with the highest standards of
conscious motherhood.’’∞ In fact, she considered her body of work as
a remedy for the ‘‘ills of modernity,’’ what she characterizes in Women
and Economics (1898) as a time in which ‘‘human motherhood is
more pathological than any other, more morbid, defective, irregular,
diseased.’’≤ It should come as no surprise that The Crux is filled with
the trappings of these desires, leading some scholars to criticize her
body of work as didactic, or, as biographer Ann Lane puts it, ‘‘as
lessons.’’≥ In her autobiography, Gilman reflected on the challenge
fiction writing posed for her: ‘‘The stories . . . called for composition
1. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Man-Made World, Our Androcentric Culture (New York:
Charlton, 1911), 179.
2. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Women and Economics (1898; reprint, New York: Prome-
theus Books, 1996), 181.
3. Ann Lane, ed. The Charlotte Perkins Gilman Reader (New York: Pantheon Books,
1980), xvi.
and were more di≈cult–especially the novels, which are poor.’’∂ In
the case of The Crux, we might be tempted to agree: the novel is more
of a political accomplishment than an aesthetic one. However, as I
discuss later, The Crux, set within its historical and cultural context,
not only sheds light on Gilman’s social and political concerns, but
also, ungainly as her plot devices may sometimes be, experiments
rather radically with the generic conventions of the era.
First, however, it is important to understand the larger context
within which the recent republication of Gilman’s texts has taken
place. In 1973 the Feminist Press reprinted ‘‘The Yellow Wallpaper’’
(1892), with an afterword by Gilman scholar Elaine Hedges. In the
1970s Hedges played a crucial role in helping to revive Gilman and
other women writers of the nineteenth century, bringing ‘‘The Yellow
Wallpaper’’ to national attention. Earlier, in 1966, Carl Degler re-
issued Women and Economics, which also encouraged Gilman schol-
arship. Mary Hill’s well-known biography appeared in 1980, after
which, in 1985, Gary Scharnhorst wrote a comprehensive and useful
bibliography of primary and secondary sources. In 1989, Sheryl L.
Meyering put out one of the first collections of critical essays on
Gilman, a major e√ort in the feminist critical engagement with her
more well-known texts.∑ Unfortunately, though, Gilman’s extraordi-
nary record of publication has been only selectively recovered for
scholarly and political use. In addition to her more well-known work,
such as ‘‘The Yellow Wallpaper’’ and the socialist-feminist treatise
Women and Economics, Gilman was the author of many other works
of fiction and nonfiction that contributed to the shape and structure
of American politics. Yet while her better-known works have been
granted a particular salience in contemporary feminist criticism, her
lesser-known materials have been largely marginalized.
Thus, despite the e√ort of recovery, The Crux has received little
4. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman: An Autobiogra-
phy (1935; reprint, New York: Arno Press, 1972), 100.
5. Gilman’s popularity with feminist literary critics continued when, in 1990, in collab-
oration with Shelly Fishkin, Hedges founded the Charlotte Perkins Gilman Society.
The formation of the society inspired several conferences focusing exclusively on
Gilman’s work, including the First International Charlotte Perkins Gilman Conference,
held in Liverpool in 1995, and the Second International Conference, held in New York
at Skidmore College in 1997.
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