288 Reconstructing, Reimagining: 1865–1900much of an invalid to continue work), and then her son Van and daughter Wait, leave
her little time for her art. In particular, she finds her work on her major project,
a painting of the sphinx, constantly frustrated. Phelps uses a mixture of irony,
incantation, and allusion here to measure the losses of her heroine’s life. There is
irony, for instance, in Phelps’s account of Philip’s obliviousness to his wife’s needs,
his quiet satisfaction in the way he has helped her into being “so comfortable a
housekeeper” as he perceives her to be. There is incantation in the way the narrative
describes how Avis is ground in the mill of domesticity. One such description repeats
the ironic phrase, “it was not much,” while going through the details of Avis’s daily
routine, then concludes: “It was not much, but let us not forget that it is under the
friction of such atoms, that women far simpler, and so for that yoke, far stronger,
than Avis, had yielded their lives as a burden too heavy to be borne.” And there is an
adept use of allusion, as Avis looks at her painting of the sphinx and seems to see
“meanings” in its enigmatic expression, “questionings ... to which her imagination
had found no controlling reply.” The riddle of the sphinx, for Avis, is how to be both
a woman and an artist. It is a riddle she never manages to resolve for herself. Unlike
“other women – content to stitch and sing, to sweep and smile,” she never completes
her masterwork to her own satisfaction. All she can hope for, at the end of the novel,
is that her daughter will not repeat her mistake. Her husband dead, and her son, Avis
moves back into her father’s house, where she will give Wait, she hopes, the training
necessary not to waste her talent as she has.
A similar concern with the waste to which most women’s lives are subject informs
nearly all the writings of Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860–1935). Regarded as the
leading intellectual in the women’s movement around the turn of the century,
Gilman was mainly known during her lifetime for her nonfictional work. In Women
and Economics (1898) she argued that the economic dependence of women on men
hindered the happiness of all. Blending history, sociology, psychology, and anthro-
pology in her analysis of the present and the past, Gilman suggested that “women’s
work” and women themselves should be separated from the domestic sphere. The
work would then be done by trained and paid professionals, and women would be
free to follow the vocation of their choice in the public sphere. The program Gilman
developed here was based on the abolition of the sexual division of labor; as she saw
it, only child rearing should remain the special preserve of women. This program
was publicized in extensive lecture tours she undertook in the United States and
elsewhere. And it was developed in other works of nonfiction. Concerning Children
(1900) and The Home (1904), for instance, proposed further changes to liberate
women to lead more productive lives; while Man Made World (1911) and His
Religion and Hers (1927) anticipated a major role for women in international affairs
and the church. Gilman explored similar or related themes in her fiction, which
received less attention from her contemporaries. Late in her career, for example, she
wrote three utopian novels that offered feminist solutions to social problems: Moving
the Mountain (1911), Herland (1915), and With Her in Ourland (1916). Herland, the
best of these, is typical of all three. It describes a society of women without men,
governed by principles of nurturing and caring in which children are raised by theGGray_c03.indd 288ray_c 03 .indd 288 8 8/1/2011 7:54:24 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 54 : 24 AM