Children's Literature and the Rise of ‘Mind Cure' Book contents
- Children’s Literature and the Rise of “Mind Cure”
- Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture
- Children’s Literature and the Rise of “Mind Cure”
- Copyright page
- Dedication
- Contents
- Illustrations
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- Chapter 1 The Inner Child in Frances Hodgson Burnett’s Little Lord Fauntleroy and Sara Crewe
- Chapter 2 Fauntleroy’s Ghost
- Chapter 3 Rewriting the Rest Cure in Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden
- Chapter 4 Sunshine and Shadow
- Chapter 5 New Women, New Thoughts
- Epilogue
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
- Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture
Chapter 5 - New Women, New Thoughts
Millennial Motherhood in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland Trilogy
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 10 December 2020
- Children’s Literature and the Rise of “Mind Cure”
- Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture
- Children’s Literature and the Rise of “Mind Cure”
- Copyright page
- Dedication
- Contents
- Illustrations
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- Chapter 1 The Inner Child in Frances Hodgson Burnett’s Little Lord Fauntleroy and Sara Crewe
- Chapter 2 Fauntleroy’s Ghost
- Chapter 3 Rewriting the Rest Cure in Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden
- Chapter 4 Sunshine and Shadow
- Chapter 5 New Women, New Thoughts
- Epilogue
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
- Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture
Summary
Chapter five examines the work of American writer, lecturer, and feminist Charlotte Perkins Gilman. While not a children’s author per se, Gilman foregrounded motherhood and childcare in her polemical works and her fiction. She also included unexpected borrowings from New Thought in her novels and life writing. For instance, Gilman’s utopian novel Herland (1915), which appeared serially in her self-published Forerunner Magazine (1909–1916), resonates with Mary Baker Eddy’s Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures (first edition 1875). Gilman's all-female utopia, in which parthenogenesis has replaced sexual reproduction, resembles Eddy's imagined future in which “there will be no more marrying nor giving in marriage” and women and men will increasingly resemble one another in body and mind. The Herlanders’ worship of a loving “Mother Spirit,” their reverence for maternity, and their practice of communal child-rearing likewise mirror Eddy's androgynous “Father-Mother God, all-harmonious” and her emphasis on maternal feeling. Herland thus fulfills Eddy's millennial predictions as well as Gilman's feminist ideals.
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- Children's Literature and the Rise of ‘Mind Cure'Positive Thinking and Pseudo-Science at the Fin de Siècle, pp. 155 - 186Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2020