Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Feminist Machiavellian Deception
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 21580183 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Lorraine Krall Mccrary (0000-0002-3819-6120, Wabash College, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2026 |
| Pages | 1-19 |
| Publication date | 2026-07-06 |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Hypatia (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0887-5367 • E-ISSN: 1527-2001 |
| Publisher | Cambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.1017/hyp.2026.10093 |
| OpenAlex | W7167482101 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 9 |
Charlotte Perkins Gilman, best known for “The Yellow Wallpaper” and Herland , brings a colloquial Machiavellian deception to women’s political education in her sorely neglected novel, Benigna Machiavelli . Serialized in her magazine, The Forerunner , which itself is one of Gilman’s attempts to generate social change, Benigna Machiavelli gives us the character, Benigna MacAvelly, triply marginalized—female, a child, from a poor family—who becomes a hidden leader. Benigna, following in the footsteps of Ben Franklin and Machiavelli, and advocating associations as a means to preserve liberty, seeks to cultivate women as social, political, and economic actors. Because the man-made world has malformed women, limiting reason’s effectiveness as a means to pursue social change, Benigna turns to deception. This paper examines Benigna’s—and Gilman’s—uses of deception and imagination, respectively, as tools to create a new world, to generate a democratic polity
Deception · Democracy · Limiting · Politics · Self-deception · History of Emotions Research · Literature: history, themes, analysis · Renaissance and Early Modern Studies
| Highly cited | No |
|---|