ABSTRACT
Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s regeneration narratives both inhabit and dramatically unsettle the “male” genres intent upon producing masculinity as an index for national regeneration. The concerns over national degeneration in the turn-of-the-century US may seem odd in a cultural climate that tends to be characterized by technological, urban, and economic progress. Gilman’s work embraced these concepts and helped generate them as part of the white feminist progressive agenda. Freedom in the domestic sphere rested on the principle, for Gilman a scientific one, that as mothers women were responsible for the care and regeneration of the race as a whole. In Gilman’s regeneration narratives, this transformation involves suturing women’s sexual choices to a system of social hygiene discourse such that female sexuality can be understood as, to borrow a phrase from Judith Butler, “a regulatory fiction.” In The Crux, a climactic trip in the mountains most fully expresses Vivian’s feminist regeneration, one that is both antimodernist and evolutionist in nature.
