The Crux

By Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Book Overview

Long out of print, Charlotte Perkins Gilman's novel The Crux is an important early feminist work that brings to the fore complicated issues of gender, citizenship, eugenics, and frontier nationalism. First published serially in the feminist journal The Forerunner in 1910, The Crux tells the story of a group of New England women who move west to start a boardinghouse for men in Colorado. The innocent central character, Vivian Lane, falls in love with Morton Elder, who has both gonorrhea and syphilis. The concern of the novel is not so much that Vivian will catch syphilis, but that, if she were to marry and have children with Morton, she would harm the "national stock." The novel was written, in Gilman's words, as a "story . . . for young women to read . . . in order that they may protect themselves and their children to come." What was to be protected was the civic imperative to produce "pureblooded" citizens for a utopian ideal.

Dana Seitler's introduction provides historical context, revealing The Crux as an allegory for social and political anxieties-including the rampant insecurities over contagion and disease-in the United States at the beginning of the twentieth century. Seitler highlights the importance of The Crux to understandings of Gilman's body of work specifically and early feminism more generally. She shows how the novel complicates critical history by illustrating the biological argument undergirding Gilman's feminism. Indeed, The Crux demonstrates how popular conceptions of eugenic science were attractive to feminist authors and intellectuals because they suggested that ideologies of national progress and U.S. expansionism depended as much on women and motherhood as on masculine contest.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0822331675
• ISBN13: 9780822331674
• Release Date: July 2003
• Publisher: Duke University Press
• Length: 184 Pages
• Weight: 0.60 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 5.7" x 9.2"

Customer Reviews

Essential, entertaining reading for Gilman fans

The Crux is essential reading for anyone seriously interested in the writings of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and Jennifer S. Tuttle's is to be commended for bringing it to readers in this excellent edition. After having read most of Gilman's other fiction, I will admit that I put off reading this one because of its reputation as "the book about venereal disease" (sexually transmitted diseases). I feared it would be didactic, heavy handed, and depressing. Instead, it's like the best of Gilman's "optimistic reform" books: it treats its serious subject with a light touch, conveying its important ideas through appealing characters and a strong plot with Gilman's typical "happy ending." (Some readers might argue that the ending is a bit implausible, but that's part of the interest of this set of Gilman's writings.) At times, it is laugh-out-loud funny. Also, it's not entirely accurate to say that the book is "about" venereal disease, for although the last third of the book discusses the dangers women faced from sexually transmitted diseases in the years before adequate cures had been discovered, there is much more to the story. It portrays the opportunities for self discovery open to women who move from the stultifying conditions of New England villages to the open life in a new city in the Colorado mountains. The women characters (on whom the story focuses) range from young unmarried women to a seemingly dried-up old maid, a woman doctor, and one of literature's most delightful grandmothers. My only serious objection to this edition is that University of Delaware Press, for some unaccountable reason, has elected to publish this book only in an expensive hardback edition. The story, along with Tuttle's illuminating introduction and clear explanatory notes, would be highly suitable as a teaching text if the book were available in a reasonably-priced paper edition.