Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Feminist Machiavellian Deception

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.