The Giant Wistaria

Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860–1935)
From Charlotte Perkins Gilman: Novels, Stories & Poems

Interesting Links

“Charlotte Perkins Gilman Did More Than Write One Classic Short Story” (Alyson Foster, Humanities)

“Pasadena Dreaming & Charlotte Perkins Gilman” (Elaine Showalter, American Women Writers)

Previous Story of the Week selections
• “The Birth-mark,” Nathaniel Hawthorne
• “Absolute Evil,” Julian Hawthorne
• “An Itinerant House,” Emma Frances Dawson
• “The Oval Portrait,” Edgar Allan Poe

Buy the book
Charlotte Perkins Gilman: Novels, Stories & Poems
900 pages
List price: $45.00
Web store price: $29.25

This photograph from 1894–95 shows a cottage engulfed by wisteria vines and climbing roses on the Carmelita estate owned by Jeanne C. Carr and her husband, Ezra S. Carr, in Pasadena. Charlotte Perkins Gilman lived “right opposite” from 1888 to 1891, during which she wrote “The Giant Wistaria.” The Carrs lived in the cottage until the completion of their three-story, 22-room home in the early 1880s and moved back in 1892, when they sold the larger house and most of the estate. Ezra died in 1896; Jeanne died in Oakland in 1903. (University of Southern California Libraries)

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In The Grove: A Nature Odyssey in 19½ Front Gardens, published earlier this year, the Australian gardener and landscape historian Ben Dark discusses the sinuous and unsettling beauty of wisteria vines:

Budding from seemingly veteran wood gives Wisteria sinensis a uniquely gothic appeal. It has the poet’s ability to play the tortured ancient from youth. The stems bite into each other as they twist. Constricted growth bulges and flattens. Its wood quickly becomes striated, as if the thin bark lies over a mass of knotted tendon and muscle. It is why the wisteria is such a potent symbol of haunting. It is something decrepit and half-ruined but capable of transforming into a being of otherworldly beauty. . . .

Its destructive splendor, Dark adds, explains Charlotte Perkin Gilman’s choice of placing a monstrous wisteria at the center of her story: “only that plant’s roots could embrace the horrific secret at the tale’s heart.”

When she lived in Rhode Island, Gilman certainly would have been familiar with the plant, which had been imported from Japan and China early in the nineteenth century—but when she lived in Pasadena, California, in the late 1880s she would have been surrounded by massive specimens of Wisteria sinensis. She became friends with Jeanne C. Carr, a horticulturist, and Ezra S. Carr, a retired professor of agricultural science, who had moved in the late 1870s to the 42-acre Pasadena estate they called Carmelita. Jeanne became a prominent member of a group of settlers who encouraged the farming of citrus fruit and the ornamentation of homes with enormous, hardy, fast-growing plants that quickly covered gardens and buildings. The region soon became famous for both wisterias and roses—not to mention the orange farms that fueled the local economy. Gigantic Gold of Ophir rosebushes soon dominated the landscape, and the first Tournament of Roses took place in 1890. Brochures touting flower-laden gardens and homes were printed to attract tourists from the East; one widely distributed postcard is a hand-colored print of a photograph dating from 1894–95 showing Ezra Carr himself sitting in front of Carmelita’s wisteria- and rose-covered cottage. The world’s largest blossoming plant is a one-acre specimen of Chinese wisteria planted in 1894 in nearby Sierra Madre. It eventually destroyed the house it was meant to decorate.

In the hope of recovering from depression and ill health, Gilman first visited Pasadena in the winter of 1885. She stayed with her childhood friend Grace Ellery Channing, whose house was within walking distance of the Carrs’ residence. “The Channings had bought a beautiful place by the little reservoir at the corner of Walnut Street and Orange Avenue,” she recalled in her memoir, The Living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman. “Already their year-old trees were shooting up unbelievably, their flowers a glory.” Soon after she returned to Rhode Island the following year, Gilman wrote the ghost story that would become “The Giant Wistaria,” but it was apparently rejected for publication. The manuscript has not survived, however, and we don’t know its title or even if the original version featured a wisteria.

In October 1888, Gilman returned to Pasadena, where for three years she and her daughter lived in a rented cottage “right opposite Carmelita,” as she later put it. Amid wisteria vines, rose bushes, and orange trees, she launched her career. “With Pasadena begins my professional ‘living,’” she wrote. “Before that there was no assurance of serious work. To California, in its natural features, I owe much. Its calm sublimity of contour, richness of color, profusion of flowers, fruit and foliage, and the steady peace of its climate were meat and drink to me.”

Gilman may have been prompted to revise her ghost story when her uncle Edward Everett Hale, editor of The New England Magazine, accepted a short work by Grace Channing for the March 1890 issue. “Have you seen Grace’s story, ‘A Strange Dinner Party,’ in The New England Mag?” she wrote to a friend. “I’ve sent a story there too, my one ghost story, which I think I read you once. It now figures as ‘The Giant Wistaria,’ and has a prelude.” The magazine accepted Gilman’s tale, it appeared in the June 1891 issue under her first married name, Charlotte P. Stetson, and she was paid $14. Seven months later, the same magazine published, apparently without her prior knowledge, her most famous story, “The Yellow Wall-Paper,” for which she received nothing.

“The Giant Wistaria” was largely forgotten until 1988, when Gloria A. Biamonte reprinted it with an introduction in an issue of Legacy: A Journal of Nineteenth-Century Women Writers. Since then, it has received so much attention that it may well be regarded as Gilman’s second-most famous short story. The “prelude” Gilman mentions in her letter sets the story not among the wisterias of Pasadena but in the settlements of colonial New England; the “giant wistaria” has been brought from Europe by an immigrant family whose daughter has become an unwed mother. The remainder of the story takes place in the same house more than a century later.

Eulalia Piñero Gil, a professor of American literature at the Universidad Autónoma of Madrid, echoes many commentators when she points out that Gilman’s story “reelaborates, in a more radical way, the central debate of the paradigmatic novel The Scarlet Letter, as it represents the position of women in Puritan society.” While acknowledging the parallels between Hawthorne’s novel and Gilman’s story, literary scholar Gary Scharnhorst argues that the daughter’s “literary forebear is not so much Hester Prynne” but rather Cassy, the enslaved mother in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. “Lest this point seem forced or contrived,” he adds, “note that Gilman considered Stowe, her great-aunt, ‘one of the world’s greatest women’ and her novel ‘a great book,’ the most popular and influential ‘work of fiction that was ever written.’” To discuss the similarities any further would give away too much of the story, so we’ll leave it to our readers to make the connections to Hawthorne and Stowe.

One aspect that has attracted much attention (and debate) among readers and critics is the mystery of what exactly happens after the scene depicted in the prelude. In a detailed examination of the story, Scharnhorst concludes, “An ambiguous, half-told tale disrupted by silences and ellipses, ‘The Giant Wistaria’ is a type of open-ended riddle rather than a closed authorial monologue. . . . The narrative is, perhaps, all the more terrifying for the questions it leaves dangling.”

Notes: For an overview of Gilman’s complex relationship with her first husband, Charles Walter Stetson, and Stetson’s eventual marriage to Grace Channing, see our introduction to Gilman’s “The Unnatural Mother.”

Wisteria is often spelled wistaria, in part because the genus is believed to have been named in the early nineteenth century after the Philadelphia physician Caspar Wistar. Sticklers will note an anachronism: early American colonists would not have been able to bring over a seedling of wisteria because the plant was not introduced into Europe until the 1810s. An old-fashioned repeater is a watch that can chime hours or minutes. The expression “vide Jack!” translates loosely as “as Jack said earlier.” (Vide is Latin for “see” or “consult.”)

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“Meddle not with my new vine, child! See! Thou hast already broken the tender shoot! . . .” If you don't see the full selection below, click here (PDF) or click here (Google Docs) to read it—free!

This selection may be photocopied and distributed for classroom or educational use.

The Unnatural Mother

Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860–1935)
From Charlotte Perkins Gilman: Novels, Stories & Poems

Interesting Links

“The Trouble with Charlotte Perkins Gilman” (Halle Butler, The Paris Review)

“New Acquisitions Roundup: Charlotte Perkins Gilman Soap Trade Cards” (Kate Collins, Duke University Rubenstein Library)

Previous Story of the Week selections
• “The Yellow Wall Paper,” Charlotte Perkins Gilman
• “Athénaïse,” Kate Chopin
• “Created He Them,” Alice Eleanor Jones

Buy the book
Charlotte Perkins Gilman: Novels, Stories & Poems
900 pages
List price: $45.00
Web store price: $29.25

From 1880 to 1884, when she was in her early 20s, Charlotte Perkins Gilman provided the illustrations for Soapine detergent trade cards (including the one above), which she and her cousin Robert Brown designed for the Kendall Soap Company. Many of the cards depicted women performing various household tasks: laundry, ironing, dusting, etc. (University of Rochester Libraries)
     Two decades later, in her then-controversial treatise The Home: Its Work and Influence (1903), Gilman questioned the traditional housekeeping role for women. “How are the duties of the mother compatible with the duties of the housewife? . . . Hour after hour, day after day, the child sees his mother devoting her entire life to attendance upon these things—the daily cleaning, the weekly cleaning, the spring and fall cleaning, the sewing and mending at all times. . . . Must the child always associate womanhood with house-service?”

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“I’ve just made a fool of myself,” Charlotte Perkins Stetson wrote on Christmas Day, 1899, in a letter to George Houghton Gilman, whom she would marry the following June. “Went across the way to call on some old neighbors, and—I foolishly supposed—friends, and got violently slapped in the face. . . . I’ve been so used of late to friendship—affection—honor; that it was painfully surprising. It’s the ‘unnatural mother’ racket—same old thing.”

She had returned for the winter to Pasadena, California, a place she had lived in the late 1880s with her first husband, Charles Walter Stetson, and daughter, Katharine. In 1890, she and Stetson separated; he moved back East to attend to his ailing mother, and two years later she moved with her daughter to Oakland. Between 1892 and 1895, Charlotte would be widely and publicly condemned in the press and by her neighbors on two counts: first for her divorce from her husband and then for relinquishing custody of her daughter to him.

When Walter Stetson petitioned a Rhode Island court for divorce in late 1892, The San Francisco Examiner, owned by William Randolph Hearst, led the charge against the couple with headlines like “The Wife and the Writer: Should Literary Women Be Addicted to the Marriage Habit?” and “His Wife’s Plans for Bettering the Universe Annoy Him.” Charlotte was attacked as a “muscular” woman with an interest in gymnastics who refused to wear “corsets or even waistbelts.” In his weekly column for the Examiner, Ambrose Bierce wrote, “Apart from her work in literature, she is said to be a very good man.” It didn’t take long for the newspaper’s reporters to discover that, before Walter had separated from Charlotte, he had fallen in love with Grace Ellery Channing, Charlotte’s closest childhood friend. “There Was Another Woman. She Gives Him to Another,” read the Examiner’s headline trumpeting a story with lurid details about a love triangle.

The court in Providence denied Stetson’s petition for divorce in June 1893, but Charlotte’s subsequent petition was granted by a court in California the following April. With the Stetsons’ divorce finalized at last, Walter and Grace planned to marry that summer in Providence—an arrangement Charlotte fully supported.

In May 1894, Charlotte wrote in her diary, “I am about to give up my home, send Kate to her father, and begin new; being now a free woman, legally and actually.” She planned to move that summer from Oakland to San Francisco, “in a place unsuitable for a child,” to take a new job as president of the Pacific Coast Women’s Press Association and editor of its weekly newsletter, which she renamed The Impress. “To hear what was said and read what was printed one would think I had handed over a baby in a basket,” she later recalled in her autobiography.

Since her second mother was fully as good as the first, better in some ways perhaps; since the father longed for his child and had a right to some of her society; and since the child had a right to know and love her father—I did not mean her to suffer the losses of my youth—this seemed the right thing to do. No one suffered from it but myself. This, however, was entirely overlooked in the furious condemnation which followed. I had “given up my child.”

Walter agreed to assume the responsibility for Katharine’s care but requested that her departure be delayed until after the summer, when he and Grace would be married and would have had time to settle into a new home. Charlotte’s father decided to return to the East Coast in May, however, and the availability of a chaperone for her nine-year-old daughter probably seemed too good an opportunity to pass up. So—apparently without any warning—Katharine arrived with her grandfather months sooner than expected. Grace, still working in Boston on the editorial staff of the Youth’s Companion magazine, had to travel to New York to pick up Katharine, who ended up using Grace’s bed, while her future stepmother slept on the sofa. Decades later, when Katharine was 90 years old, she told Gilman biographer Mary A. Hill that Grace “had to come and fetch me because she knew my father could not take care of me in a studio and do any painting.”

Years later, Charlotte wrote to her daughter and indirectly acknowledged her obliviousness. “I did try so carefully not to hurt you, and to love and pet you as I so longed to be loved and petted and never was. But I suppose you were hurt in ways I never knew.” Katharine never quite forgave her mother for (as she put it) “seizing the opportunity to get her freedom by shipping me East to my father because it was ‘his turn’” or for imposing on her future stepmother. “My mother had not the ability of putting herself into the place of another person,” she told Hill.

She had very strong principles and was very honest, which does not mean that she always saw herself as others saw her. . . . And she of course never never would have willingly hurt anyone. I think she did at times, probably, because if you are pretty honest and you do disagree with people there is always a good chance of hurting their feelings.

“By all accounts,” writes Cynthia J. Davis in her biography of Gilman, “Katharine flourished under Walter and Grace’s care”; in 1895, the Stetsons moved back to Pasadena, and eventually the Stetsons and Gilman would share custody of their daughter until she came of age. Gilman remained convinced she had done the right thing. “In the years that followed [Katharine] divided her time fairly equally between us,” she wrote in her autobiography, “but in companionship with her beloved father she grew up to be the artist that she is, with advantages I could never have given her. . . . It would have been of no benefit to her to keep that dear child away from her father and a pleasant home, to drag her over land and sea on lecture trips, or board her with strangers while I traveled. That might have been ‘natural,’ but not good for the child.”

Meanwhile, back in San Francisco, Charlotte was beginning to realize that her social reputation had doomed her prospects for a living. She later reported that Helen Campbell, her fellow editor on The Impress, “made some inquiries as to the rather surprising lack of support, either in subscribers or advertisers, and was answered, ‘Nothing that Mrs. Stetson does can succeed here,’ and, ‘You risk your own reputation in joining her.’” Charlotte’s editorship of the newsletter lasted twenty weeks before she was forced to relinquish her position. “This fiasco was what showed me my standing in that city,” and she left for Chicago to live for several months in Hull House at the invitation of Jane Addams. In the last issue of The Impress, she answered her critics with a short story, “The Unnatural Mother,” which has been included in the new Library of America collection of Gilman’s writings and is presented below as this week’s selection.

The quotes by Katharine Stetson in the above introduction are all from Mary A. Hill’s Charlotte Perkins Gilman: The Making of a Radical Feminist, 1860–1896 (1980). Numerous biographical details for both Gilman and her daughter have been culled from Cynthia J. Davis’s Charlotte Perkins Gilman: A Biography.

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“Don’t tell me!” said old Mis’ Briggs, with a forbidding shake of the head; “no mother that was a mother would desert her own child for anything on earth!” . . . If you don't see the full selection below, click here (PDF) or click here (Google Docs) to read it—free!

This selection may be photocopied and distributed for classroom or educational use.