‘Turned’

Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860–1935) has been described by the critic Elaine Showalter as ‘the leading American feminist theoretician and New Woman writer to come out of the 1890s…with the idea that writing itself could be a separate country for women’ (Showalter 2009, p. 221). A social reformer as well as a writer of both fiction and non-fiction, Gilman is best known today for her 1892 Gothic short story ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’, a thinly-disguised account of the dreadful experience she underwent during a so-called ‘rest-cure’ for postnatal depression. As Showalter notes, Gilman’s doctor, Silas Weir Mitchell, believed that depressed women ‘were suffering from a deep resistance to the female role’ and sought to cure them by imposing a regime of ‘dependence, weight gain and inertia’ which involved being put to bed and forbidden to read or write for weeks on end (Showalter 2009, p. 222). Set against the sinister Gothic horror of ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’, Gilman’s later short story ‘Turned’ (1911) seems at first glance to be a much more measured, direct and realistic meditation on the ‘Woman Question’. Despite its apparent straightforwardness, however, it is still more than capable of surprising and challenging the modern reader.

‘Turned’ describes the events that follow wealthy Mrs Marroner’s discovery that her husband has made their young maid Gerta Petersen pregnant. Initially it seems that the narrative will pan out conventionally, with the couple reuniting as the wife’s love and loyalty transcends the errant husband’s betrayal. This is certainly what Mr Marroner expects: ‘Surely she would forgive him — she must forgive him. He would humble himself; he would tell her of his honest remorse — his absolute determination to be a different man.’ Yet because Gilman has effectively silenced Mr Marroner for most of the story by packing him off on an extended business trip, by the time he returns to Boston towards the end of the narrative he has no chance of gaining the reader’s sympathy. Gilman refuses to provide the ‘happy ending’ Mr Marroner himself and the original readers might well have predicted (and found ideologically acceptable). Instead she leaves the narrative poised on a cliffhanger ending that entirely subverts the dominant social norms of the time.