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Charlotte Perkins Gilman and a Woman's Place in America, edited by Jill Bergman. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2017. 240 pp. Cloth, $59.95; Ebook, $59.95.
The essays in Jill Bergman's Charlotte Perkins Gilman and a Woman's Place in America offer strong, creative perspectives on geographical and textual place in Gilman's writings. The collection is situated firmly within the turn to space and place theory, its interdisciplinary debts clearly highlighted in the introduction. Bergman grounds its work in the ways in which "space and place have become central concerns in the study of literary and cultural production" (1). With several pieces drawn from a 2011 "Gilman Goes West" conference, the volume contributes a productive new territorial focus, though chapters also venture beyond geography. Bergman collects essays that together work compellingly to redefine Gilman's places: as western regions, generic forms, interiors and infrastructures, and sites of reception (2).
Bergman's introduction, "A Woman's Place Is Not in the Home," is eye catching. Gilman's writings are famously attentive to the home, to the contours of the urban apartment and the family home, to the functions and economy of the kitchen, and to imagined and reformed domestic spaces. Bergman, however, highlights the ways in which Gilman argued for "women out of the house" in the professional and social work of the public sphere (4). Yet her introduction contends productively with the domestic center of much of Gilman's writing and reception, returning to the insights of Bachelard's house and the gendered dimensions of "The Yellow Wallpaper." Thus, the collection does not depart for its western, public, and textual spaces without first wrestling with Gilman's desire to reform, remake, and escape the home. Bergman urges a critical balance between Gilman's efforts to "revise the geography of the home" and her work to expand women's political, economic, and cultural spheres. This gesture responds to a robust scholarly tradition exploring Gilman's domestic and social spatial theories, from the work of...