نقد آثار فمينيستي شارلوت پركينز گيلمن

Feminism in the Fiction of Charlotte Perkins Gilman

This article deals with Charlotte Perkins Gilmanʹs (1860-1935) fictional writings in the context of the interplay, at the end of nineteenth century, between gender and family roles on the one hand, and questions of space and domesticity on the other. Gilman understood quite well that confinement to household work did not prepare women to join modern society and that spatial arrangements between sexes are socially created. She believed that when such arrangements provide access to valued knowledge for men while reducing that possibility for women, the organization of space becomes a crucial factor in perpetuating status differences. Therefore the aim of this paper is (1) to demonstrate how Gilmanʹs stories and novels draw from the established tradition of material feminism and create a fictional space in which gender-based separation of a public and private sphere has been abolished;(2) to provide a critique of Gilmanʹs shortcomings as seen from the perspectives of contemporary feminism;(3) to show how her concern with the problem of womenʹs space was to influence a new usage of Utopian feminism in the 1970s and 1980s.