Benigna Machiavelli by Joan Blake

Benigna Machiavelli by Joan Blake

Benigna Machiavelli has never before been published in its entirety in book form. It was first published by Charlotte Perkins Gilman in The Forerunner (Vol. 5, 1914), a magazine which she wrote, edited, and produced every month from 1906 to 1916. The novella was serialized a chapter an issue. The Forerunner cost $1.00 per issue, and was in a 7 x 10, 28-page format. The circulation averaged 1,500 subscribers a year, including many in Europe, also some in India and Australia. Gilman stated she did not aim in the least at literary virtuosity, she was interested in ideas. The main idea expressed in Benigna is the story of a benign Machiavellian girl/woman, a good villain, as Benigna phrases it. Having noted in the stories she read as a child that the villains exerted their intellects to accomplish their goals, while the heroes were mostly very stupid and practiced passive virtues, Benigna decides to apply her precocious mind to become this good villain-all for everyone's good, of course, at least as Benigna sees it. She responds to the sometimes onerous and perplexing life circumstances she observes herself to be in by deciding to take control of her life in highly creative (and manipulative) ways- at a time when women, and especially children, had very little control. Benigna is an intensely insightful child, as was no doubt Gilman herself. How much of this story is based on her own life experiences is difficult to say; however there are many similarities. In her autobiography, The Living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, she recounts the anecdote of the experiment to see what would happen if she broke the oppressive silence of her schoolroom, just as Benigna does (and with the same results). It's likely that much of Benigna's character is based on her own, doubtless with some amount of wishful thinking that she had as successfully taken as much control of her own life. The family portrayed bears little resemblance to Gilman's, with the exception of the mother. Gilman had one sibling, a brother, Thomas A. Perkins, 14 months her senior, with whom she was not close. Her father, Frederick Beecher Perkins, left the family when Gilman was an infant and was infrequently in contact with them. However, her mother, Mary Wescott Perkins, described by Gilman as absolutely loyal, as loving as a spaniel which no ill treatment can alienate, accurately describes Benigna's mother as well. Also similarly, Mary Wescott Perkins was intensely interested in child culture, and had studied the Kindergarten method of child raising. Another direct parallel to Gilman's life is Benigna's happily-ever-after ending, her marriage to her cousin. Gilman married her first cousin, George Houghton Gilman, seven years her junior. Unlike Benigna, this was her second marriage and, by her account, finally a happy one. In her autobiography she wrote, We were married... and lived happily ever after. If this were a novel, now, here's the happy ending. Although at present best known for her short story The Yellow Wallpaper, a fictionalized account of her devastating first marriage, in her time Charlotte Perkins Gilman was known internationally as a lecturer and author of Women and Economics: The Economic Relation Between Men and Women as a Factor in Social Evolution, that went through nine printings from 1898 to 1920. William Dean Howells said of her: The best brains and best profile of any woman in America. As a follow-up to this book, Aurora Leigh by Elizabeth Barrett Browning tells the tale of an orphaned half-Italian girl who rejects marriage to a rich cousin whom she likes very much, in order to make her own way in the world, and does successfully. (www.createspace.com/3812489)

Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860 - 1935) was born in in Hartford, Connecticut. Her father, Frederic Beecher Perkins, was the grandson of the theologian Lyman Beecher and nephew of Henry Ward Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe. Shortly after Charlotte's birth, her father left the family and thereafter provided only small support, thus forcing Charlotte, her mother, and her brother, Thomas, to move frequently over the next several years in search of work and financial help from relatives. After attending the Rhode Island School of Design, Charlotte worked as a governess and as an art teacher.

In 1884, she married her first husband, Charles Walter Stetson, by whom she had her only child, Katharine. Mrs. Stetson, however, could not endure domestic life with an overprotective and patronizing husband, and as a result suffered a nervous breakdown in 1885. Following a separation from her husband (they were divorced in 1894) and a recuperative move to California with her daughter, Charlotte Stetson began to devote herself to women's issues by lecturing and writing. Her powerful short story, The Yellow Wallpaper (1892), based on Mrs. Stetson's own experience, is the tale of a married woman who can escape from her domestic confinement and humiliation only through madness. Charlotte Stetson's feminist writings were influenced by the socialism of Edward Bellamy and the evolutionism of Charles Darwin. In her most influential work, Women and Economics (1898), she argued that the socioeconomic system currently enslaving women was not a natural given but rather a situation that could be rectified by rational and ethical analysis. She criticized the social and economic system that degraded women by relegating them to the status of chattel. The only remedy to this situation was to fit women to be economically independent through a radical reorganization of society based on feminist and socialist principles. Mrs. Stetson's bitingly satirical and profoundly insightful work was an immediate international success; it was praised in the Nation as the most significant utterance on the subject since Mill's Subjectionof Women.

In 1900, Charlotte Stetson married her first cousin, George Houghton Gilman. But she remained resolutely independent, devoting herself to lecturing and writing. From 1909 to 1916, she edited and wrote The Forerunner, a feminist monthly magazine. In her book Man-Made World (1911), Mrs. Gilman described women as essentially peaceful and cooperative, while men were competitive and warlike. Until women claimed their rightful place, destructive male attributes would continue to dominate the world.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman was the leading intellectual of the American women's movement during the early twentieth century. In 1932, Mrs. Gilman was diagnosed with breast cancer. For three years she battled the disease; but once she determined that the cancer was undermining her ability to be useful to society, Mrs. Gilman committed suicide. Charlotte Perkins Gilman's other works include The Home (1903), the novel Herland (1915), His Religion and Hers (1923), and her posthumously published autobiography, The living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1935).

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780942208184
ISBN 10	0942208188
Title	Benigna Machiavelli
Author	Joan Blake
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	Bandanna Books
Year published	2013-04-30
Number of pages	190
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.