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Reviews of Books
prescribed by her physician/husband. Told in the rst person, the narrator describes her declining mental state, made worse by her treatment and the hideous yellow wallpaper of her sickroom that seems to haunt and taunt her. Ultimately, in a t of rage and resistance, she tears the paper down. Years later, Gilman claimed the story reected her own experience under the care of Philadelphia neurologist, S. Weir Mitchell, in 1887, and that the storys purpose was to spare others from such treatment. But in Horowitzs study, the story takes on new meaning, as she traces the experiences of the young Charlotte (purposely using her rst name) before she became known as the feminist, Charlotte Perkins Gilman. She examines her life prior to Mitchells treatment, as she struggled with the gender conventions and nancial constraints of the time. Horowitz consults the sources of Charlottes private life, including her daily journals, drafts of poems and essays, and intimate letters, and compares them to the diary accounts of her rst husband, Charles Walter Stetson. She also mines Charlottes diaries for notes on her reading and shows how specic poetry, ction, and popular science shaped her consciousness and understanding of sex and gender, health and illness, emotion and intellect. Horowitz delves inside the mind and private life of Charlotte to explain the very public outpouring of emotion in The Yellow Wall-Paper. As a result, Horowitz makes some bold and compelling arguments. She builds a strong case to show that The Yellow Wall-Paper, in its original form, did not represent a literal protest against Mitchell and his treatment. Rather, it emerged from Charlottes troubled relationship with her husband, Walter, personied in the storys physician. In demanding a traditional wife, Walter denied Charlotte personal freedom, squelched her intellectual energy, and exacerbated her illness. The story, as Horowitz writes, distilled, compressed, and dramatized the destructive power of nineteenth-century marriage and the ideal of true womanhood (p. 209). The Yellow Wall-Paper, she argues, also resulted from Charlottes nancial needs and literary ambitions. Desperate to raise her own money so that she might live independently, and wanting to make her literary mark, Charlotte channeled her mental anguish and marital troubles into a riveting story that pleased publishers and attracted readers. In her gripping analysis, Horowitz brings readers along to experience Charlottes journey, through her times of high hope and down into the depths of mental illness. She helps readers feel Charlottes wild unrest, her personal struggle to resolve two competing sides of herself. On the one hand, she felt pulled toward marriage and motherhood; on the other, she needed autonomy and to be freed from the dictates of sex and gender. Horowitz shows this conict to be both personal and intellectual, as she traces Charlottes theoretical and literary grappling, especially with Herbert Spencer and evolutionary theory. Horowitzs study adds to the literature aimed at com-

sions and, along the way, establishing male aesthetic authority over the form. The Centurys critique of feminine sentiment was part of a broader attack upon the antebellum spirit of humanitarian reform, a second major theme of Noonans study. The Century, arguably, was the literary branch of postbellum liberalism that feared democracy, rejected racial equality, and hoped to restore the power of learned elites over the masses who were made restive by labor conict and civil war. At times, its anti-sentimental aesthetic and its opposition to humanitarian reform were wedded. Southern regionalist ction, Noonan shows, depicted emancipated blacks as gures without reason and incapable of self-government. Romantic, feminine, and sentimental reform, unlike realism, was simply incapable of grasping the world as it is. The Centurys conservative literary and racial politics were, at least in part, shaped by its desire to reach the southern market, even if it did publish dissenters like George Washington Cable who, in the spirit of antebellum reform, called for comprehensive equality in the South. In fact, one of the great strengths of Noonans work is the deft way in which it handles the tension between the magazine or newspapers ideological unity and diversity. A generation of literary theory has taught that meaning is generated, at least in part, intertextually and through the dynamics of reception. Noonan positions the Century ideologically, but notes at the outset that a periodical could be a site of ideological battle[s] and rupture[s] (p. x). The result is an ambitious effort to depict the history of a single magazine, in all its varied intellectual, regional, and historical contexts. Although not every question it poses is answered as comprehensively as one might like, this book deserves an audience among historians and literary critics alike. ADAM-MAX TUCHINSKY University of Southern Maine HELEN LEFKOWITZ HOROWITZ. Wild Unrest: Charlotte Perkins Gilman and the Making of The Yellow WallPaper. New York: Oxford University Press. 2010. Pp. ix, 251. $24.95. Charlotte Perkins Gilmans 1892 novella, The Yellow Wall-Paper, has become a classic in American womens literature. Widely read and taught as a feminist allegory, the story has been seen as a protest against the rest cure and a critique of patriarchal medicine. But this interpretation comes from the vantage point of hindsight, taken from reections in Gilmans autobiography and her mature political writings, as Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz shows in her new book. Horowitz instead looks forward from the events leading up to Gilmans writing of the famous tale. And from this standpoint, she offers new and fascinating insights. Based on Gilmans own struggles with mental illness, The Yellow Wall-Paper is the story of a woman who suffers with nervous disease. She undergoes a version of the rest cure, a regimen of inactivity and isolation

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plicating Mitchell and contextualizing treatments for hysteria. But while Mitchell deserves reconsideration and should not be demonized, he remains a gure at odds with notions of female equality and autonomy. And while Charlotte found more fault with her husband than her physician at the time of Mitchells treatment, she clearly chose to portray a regimen of rest in unattering terms a few years later, and was echoed by other feminists. This book is particularly interesting for its dual biographical dimensions, following two lives in the making, that of a feminist and that of a text. In the process, Horowitz properly historicizes The Yellow Wall-Paper by reconstructing the steps leading up to its composition. Interrogating and cross-checking sources, she writes with a watchful eye to the mythologies surrounding the novella. And yet, she maintains and illustrates the importance of this famed story. Horowitz illustrates how it reected Charlottes most painful mental afictions and deepest gender conicts, painting a vivid portrait of the circumstances that would not let her rest. CARLA BITTEL Loyola Marymount University CYNTHIA GRANT TUCKER. No Silent Witness: The Eliot Parsonage Women and Their Unitarian World. New York: Oxford University Press. 2010. Pp. viii, 344. $29.95. This study of three generations of the rst family of the American Unitarian Association traces William Greenleaf Eliot (18111887), Abigail Abby Adams Cranch Eliot (18171908), and their descendants as they moved the Unitarian Church and its organizations across the West to Saint Louis, Portland, and then back to Boston. In her group biography, Cynthia Grant Tucker focuses on the full throated women who left records of their commitment, courage, and longings in diaries as well as in letters to their kin. Standing at the churchs center of gravitysacricing to keep churches running and rearing the next generation of clergy, these women, Tucker maintains, often felt like outsiders looking in from a parallel universe (p. 3). Tuckers book highlights gendered responses to deaths of infants and children as a crucial spiritual divide in Eliot parsonages. William and Abby had arrived in St. Louis in 1837 when he answered a call to become minister of Church of the Redeemer. Believing that there could not be enough Eliots, Abby gave birth to fourteen children, only ve of whom lived to adulthood. Tucker eloquently captures Abbys searing grief and her sense of dissonance with her husbands determination to return to work immediately after each childs death. Tucker is blunt about the familys class prejudices. Angling to have their children associate with the right sort, most members of the Eliot family shared Social Darwinist attitudes. When the Great Railroad Strike of 1877 spread to St. Louis, Abby felt that Satan . . . in all his glory had arrived (p. 45). Later she confessed to

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Thomas and Henrietta Eliot, her son and daughter-inlaw, that if folks like her cook went to heaven, I dont want to be with em! (p. 46). Not until Christopher Rhodes Eliot, the third surviving son of William and Abby, married Mary Jackson May in 1888 did an Eliot family break free from conventional perspectives on class and gender. A warmhearted, deep feeling partner born with insurgency (p. 176) in her blood, Mary found the answer to her yearning for a joint parish ministry when she and Christopher visited settlement houses in London in 1892. With Marys blessing, Christopher eagerly accepted an appointment at Bulnch Place Church in Bostons West End in 1894. Following Jane Addamss vision of the social settlement as a subjective necessity as well as an objective value, Mary Eliot relished her church work with the West Ends immigrant community and found her heaven on earth by straddling Beacon Hill and Bulnch. Tucker paints a glowing picture of Mary and Christophers two daughters, Martha and Abby, who bolted from Radcliffes secret society of social elites in 1913, chose women as lifelong partners, and followed professional lives. Abby became a kindergarten researcher and teacher. Martha, who described herself as a social doctor, extended to medicine a version of her parents parish ministry. With Yale Professor Edwards Park, who had also grown up in a Unitarian parsonage, she developed a community model for eliminating rickets. Opposed to the fee-for-service practice of medicine, Martha worked with the Childrens Bureau, ultimately becoming its director. A historian may not always feel rooted in time in this book. Tucker, for example, is off by twenty-four years in recording the birth of Thomas Lamb Eliot in the genealogical chart of Abby and Wills family. Readers learn of Martha establishing a scholarship in memory of Mary May Eliot before they are informed of her death. In addition, when certain Eliot female descendants in the 1920s hesitated to open their familys writings to the public, Tucker describes them as women who lived in a false, separate sphere (p. 242). She contrasts them with Abby (the granddaughter) and Martha, who deposited their journals and records with the Schlesinger Library at Radcliffe. As intriguing as the Eliot women are as individuals and as a family, scholars will be concerned that Tucker uses Trinitarians as a foil for Unitarians. She attens other Protestant denominations rather than interpreting their theology as ranging across a spectrum. The reader never knows precisely who the evangelicals are. At times, Tucker uses Trinitarianism to signify evangelicalism and liberal as interchangeable with Unitarian. In reality, the parsonage, manse, or rectoryfrom the home of Martin Luther and Katharina von Bora to the Wesley familys Anglican Epworth Old Rectory and those of a multitude of American denominationsfunctioned as a Protestant semipublic space. In terms of parsonage womens dealing with dissonance between sermon and praxis, grief and hope, belief and

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