classicpenguin: In her autobiography, Charlotte Perkins Gilman wrote, “This is a woman’s
classicpenguin:In herautobiography, Charlotte Perkins Gilman wrote, “This is a woman’s century, thefirst chance for the mother of the world to rise to her full place …” In recent years, and given the currentpolitical climate, we’ve come to echo that exact sentiment with t-shirts andpins proudly proclaiming that “the future is female.” With director PattyJenkins at the helm, Wonder Woman is already a box office hit and hasbrought about a revival of the on-screen feminist icon. On the page, however, the worksof Charlotte Perkins Gilman endure and even draw some similarities with themythos of the comic book heroine.In her1915 novella Herland, Gilman cleverlycrafts a utopian society in which only women exist and live peacefully. In theopening paragraphs to this satire, Gilman writes, “No one will ever believe howthey looked. Descriptions aren’t any good when it comes to women, and I neverwas good at descriptions anyhow. But it’s got to be done somehow; the rest ofthe world needs to know about that country.” Meanwhile, Diana Prince, akaWonder Woman, inhabits an all-female land, which was influenced by the mythosof the Ancient Greeks. As far back as Homer, Herodotus, and Plutarch, there is tale of Amazonian women: formidable female warriors that even the Athenianssought to destroy in affront to the idea of their masculinity. While thestorytellers and historians-of-old pegged the Amazons as aggressive “killers ofmen” (androktones), Gilman depictsthe women of Herland as wildlyprogressive. Herland wasn’t Gilman’s onlyfeminist outcry: her well-known 1892 short-story The Yellow Wallpaper details a woman’s harrowing descentinto madness brought about by her husband’s attempts to “cure” her. Gilman inher own right was quite the “wonder woman” of her day, revolutionary in herdesire to dismantle gender-constructs. Both of these iconic tales, along withothers, are included in our Penguin Classics edition. -- source link
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