Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Kristin Carter-Sanborn

Critical Essay by Kristin Carter-Sanborn

SOURCE: “Restraining Order: The Imperialist Anti-Violence of Charlotte Perkins Gilman,” in Arizona Quarterly, Vol. 56, No. 2, summer, 2000, pp. 1-36.

In the following essay, Carter-Sanborn argues that Gilman's feminist antiviolence in Herland models American imperial violence.

Power is a familiar growth—           Not foreign—not to be—           Beside us like a bland Abyss                               In every company—

—Emily Dickinson

“You see, they had … no wars. They had … no kings, and no priests, and no aristocracies. They were sisters” (Herland 61). As sisters, the denizens of Charlotte Perkins Gilman's novel Herland ostensibly embody a utopia of non-violence, non-hierarchy, and, as a result, an unparalleled level of cultural fertility and social concord. It should not be surprising that Herland, which had not seen the light of day since its original 1915 publication in Gilman's self-produced magazine The Forerunner, was instantly canonized by Anglo-American feminists when a 1979 edition appeared. The novel...
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