Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860–1935) was one of the foremost feminist writers, thinkers, and speakers of her era, prefiguring Beauvoir’s attention to the way that social structures can interfere with women’s development and building on Wollstonecraft’s appeal for women’s rights—albeit with a nuanced view of the role of reason in women’s emancipation. Most well-known today for her utopian novel, Herland, and her short story, “The Yellow Wallpaper,” Gilman was a prolific writer; from 1909 to 1916, she single-handedly composed, from front to back, her monthly magazine, The Forerunner. Through The Forerunner, Gilman imbues her readers with a vision of a better world, inspiring them to create social change. Gilman hopes for a world in which individuals freely join together, working toward the betterment of society. In her magazine she serialized Benigna Machiavelli, a feminist work of political theory that responds to a colloquial Machiavellianism that comes to Gilman through H. G. Wells’s New Machiavelli.Footnote 1 Gilman picks up on Machiavelli’s idea that actions societally understood as immoral are sometimes necessary to create a new social order out of a problematic world, that deception is licit in certain circumstances. Gilman brings deception to a new context—to the need to liberate women from men’s oppression. The novel’s eponymous character, Benigna MacAvelly, whom Gilman first developed over seven short stories and a novella that precede Benigna Machiavelli, escapes and then corrects—at the small scale within her grasp—the malformation of the man-made world.
The novel begins when Benigna is a child, with a domineering, alcoholic father who verbally abuses and controls his wife and children. Benigna seeks to help her mother and her sister Peggy escape the domination of men—both that of her father and, later, Peggy’s lying suitor. Benigna hones her skills as a leader, using deception to free her mother and sister from their abusive father. She deceives people to get them to do what she thinks will lead them to their good and to the common good. Her most striking deceptions occur when she mortgages their family home, owned by her mother, signing the name they both share to the deed, to fund her father’s travels, allowing them space from his domination. She also deceives her sister as to her boyfriend’s faithfulness in order to show her the truth—that he did not intend to marry her. Benigna surreptitiously manipulates the material and social circumstances of the world in order to show her mother and sister that a different role for women is possible, one that allows greater space for their growth. This is a deception that reveals. It is a deception aimed at furthering the good of society as a whole.
In addition to causing the bank and her sister to believe something that isn’t true, there is also a second kind of deception at play in Benigna Machiavelli: Benigna deceives everyone about her role, hiding the fact that she is the one manipulating the situation. Benigna’s hidden control emerges from a place of apparent weakness—she is female, a child, and poor—and so is more able to hide the fact that she wields power through her cleverness. This deception about oneself from the leader, this hiding who one is, I call hypocrisy. The two forms of deception are closely connected, as being able to hide one’s power is essential to continuing to have the chance to use deception effectively.
Deception, according to Gilman, is sometimes a necessary first step to women’s even wanting to exercise independence. Gilman’s overall goal is the transformation of society from a realm of men to a realm of humans; this may require an educator or leader who is able to reveal to women their political and economic capacity, capacities long thwarted by the world men have made. Benigna is such a leader, as is, in a different way, Gilman herself through her Forerunner. In Benigna Machiavelli, Gilman brings Machiavelli’s deception into the modern world as a step toward women’s political education.
An attention to Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Benigna Machiavelli builds on previous scholarly work on Gilman and takes it in new directions. Previous scholars focus on Gilman’s work a sociologist, and specifically as a theorist of social reform movements (Gilman Reference Gilman1914/Reference Gilman2004), as a feminist (Allen Reference Allen2009), and as a humanitarian and reformist socialist, bringing together the women’s movement and the labor movement (Van Wienen Reference Van Wienen2012). Scholars identify Gilman as a feminist pragmatist, bringing to pragmatism an attention to the way women have been malformed by patriarchal society (Hernandez Reference Hernandez2022; Seigfried Reference Seigfried1991, Reference Seigfried2001; Upin Reference Upin1993).
Penny Weiss draws on Gilman as a theorist of childhood who thinks children should learn unconsciously, without even knowing that education is happening (Reference Weiss2021). Like previous scholars, I understand Gilman to be theorizing feminist pragmatist social reform. Benigna Machiavelli specifically explores the question of how to develop agency in women who’ve been malformed by a man-made world; this novel considers how to generate a community of women who are able to create social change. With Weiss, I see Gilman turning her readers’ attention to those who have been marginalized—not only women, but also children—and advocating a veiled teaching where the one learning does not know what is happening. It is a deception toward freedom. I critically engage with Gilman’s insights into generating change; in doing so, I question whether it is possible to be, as Ann Lane characterizes Benigna, a “a good Machiavelli” (1999, p. xxxii).
Before turning to Benigna Machiavelli, I set Gilman’s theories of social change within her overall thought. Turning to the novel itself, I consider it as a work brimming with generative ideas about social change by and for women, a cutting response to H. G. Wells. I take up Gilman’s Benigna in three parts—as a Ben Franklin-esque self-made woman, a benign Machiavellian, and a begetter of democratic associations. Next, I turn to Gilman’s authorship of The Forerunner as a means of stirring up women’s agency without the deception that she, in the novel, argues may be needed and appropriate. Finally, I raise concerns with Benigna’s deception.
1. Situating Benigna within Gilman’s thought
Though I consider Gilman’s contributions to feminism, she resists this characterization. Gilman supports the women’s movement and women’s suffrage as an advocate for what she calls a humanist perspective against an “androcentric” or man-made world (Lane Reference Lane1999, p. xx). For Gilman, the lens of feminism was too narrow—she seeks expansive social change. She argues that the man-made world thrives on conflict, while women’s contributions would facilitate growth (Reference Gilman1909b, 24). Androcentric culture, according to Gilman, seeks to reduce women to their femaleness, especially reproduction, and ignores their humanity (Reference Gilman1910e, 17). This disadvantages not only women, but also men and society as a whole; its effect has been so pervasive that many people, including women, have difficulty recognizing that the malformation even exists (Reference Gilman1910c, 20). Gilman envisions an alternative society in which all individuals are given space to grow, in which all collaborate to achieve the collective good.
While Gilman sometimes constructs utopias that portray aspects of an ideal world, such as in her novel, Herland, Gilman also sometimes theorizes how women might move from the world that they are in to a better world, such as in Benigna Machiavelli. Reflecting on how to take steps toward social change is a key theme in her work, a focus that is shared with other pragmatic thinkers (Upin Reference Upin1993). Carol Kessler identifies this attention to social change in what she calls Gilman’s “pragmatopias,” which offer “attainable alternatives to the present society” (Reference Kessler, Jane and Carol1994, 130). These are not perfect worlds but rather depict women improving the world in which they find themselves. Kessler writes that pragmatopias’ “mode is realistic. They are ‘thought experiments’ that extrapolate possibilities from present day society. They make explicit how Gilman’s readers might go about realizing her utopian visions” (Reference Kessler, Jane and Carol1994, 131). It is this pragmatist utopia that Erin McKenna (Reference McKenna2001) theorizes in what she calls “a process model of utopia.” She sees this as a method of imagining a possible future that we might experiment with, as an answer to a specific set of problems that we find ourselves facing.
Aleksandra Hernandez identifies a real tension between the Gilman who wants to give us the answer to all of our problems and the Gilman who is experimenting through fiction with possible solutions (Reference Hernandez2022). Hernandez writes, “At her most dogmatic, Gilman believed that she had uncovered the solution to all the problems of early twentieth-century America,” but, on the other hand, her utopias may be “merely a plan Gilman devises in response to the social problems afflicting American society in the particular social moment” (Reference Hernandez2022, 85–86). I read Benigna Machiavelli as just this—an experimental, problem-focused utopia that is geared at generating women’s democratic capacities. It is a pragmatopia focused on the problem of how to achieve social change for women who don’t see a way out of their situation—or who may not even see that they are in a difficult situation at all; whether this gives them agency in getting out of their situation is less clear.
2. Benigna Machiavelli
The question Gilman takes up in her neglected novel, Benigna Machiavelli, is how to change a society in which men’s dominance in the world they have built persists, blinding some of those who have been oppressed to the fact of their oppression. While I have found no evidence that Gilman herself read Machiavelli, she is certainly responding to H. G. Well’s New Machiavelli, his semi-autobiographical work that explains his life choices to the world, purporting to model himself on Machiavelli in the process. At the most basic level, Machiavelli’s Prince exhorts the prince on how to take political control, using deception and hypocrisy where necessary. H. G. Wells’s narrator, Dick Remington, views Machiavelli as one who “dreamt of a world of men better ordered, happier, finer, securer,” and describes himself as sharing that same “state-making dream” (Reference Wells1911, 5). He reads Machiavelli as bringing his vices to politics both as a realistic approach and because right and wrong do not exist. Remington describes his book, likewise, as about the intersection of passions and desires with the dream of state-making.
In addition to the two similarities he posits between himself and Machiavelli—state-making and vice—Remington identifies two differences: He sees himself as democratizing Machiavelli by sharing this message not with one prince, but with every person, each of whom holds some power. Remington addresses himself, not to the prince, but to “the socially constructive passion—in any man” (Reference Wells1911, 9). Moreover, Remington sees himself as building on Machiavelli by bringing women into the conversation. Remington highlights sex and love, something that he thinks is separate from statecraft in Machiavelli, while Remington sees them as connected in his own life (Reference Wells1911, 9). Remington brings women into the Machiavellian frame, not as people who could themselves be Machiavellian (which Gilman will do in Benigna Machiavelli), but rather as objects of Remington’s and of men’s desire. Remington describes marrying his first wife, Margaret, to provide him money that will facilitate his entrance into politics and with the institution of marriage that will save him from illicit sex (Reference Wells1911, 222, 236). Then he meets Isabel, who is first his friend, then his lover (Reference Wells1911, 423). There is an intellectual sympathy between them, Remington says; he sees them as equals (429, 434). That made me, and I assume Gilman, laugh—Isabel calls him, “Master,” and he is flattered that she is his pupil (Reference Wells1911, 430). Remington wrestles with his love for Isabel; they try to separate. Remington and Isabel feel pulled in one direction by their duty to the state and to Margaret and in another by their love, which will mean the end of his role as a politician due to the perception of scandal. It is this scandal that results in his step back from politics, which he calls his exile. Remington says he has learned that the world is wrong: “There is no clear right in the world any more. The world is Byzantine. The justest man to-day must practice a tainted goodness” (Reference Wells1911, 477). He describes his new Machiavellian understanding of the world, “This is a dirty world, … simply because it is a muddled world, and the thing you call morality is dirtier now than the thing you call immorality” (517). He leaves Margaret, which he sees is a vicious action, to be with Isabel, which he sees as what he must do. And in choosing Isabel, he chooses a move toward educating people culturally. He describes this move, too, as one that follows Machiavelli:
And so it is I sit now at my stone table, half out of life already, in a warm, large, shadowy leisure, splashed with sunlight and hung with vine tendrils, with paper before me to distil such wisdom as I can, as Machiavelli in his exile sought to do, from the things I have learnt and felt during the career that has ended now in my divorce. (Reference Wells1911, 11–12)
Remington describes himself as, like Machiavelli, moving from public life to engage in social philosophy—to reflect on the change that needs to happen and to capture the imagination of those positioned to make the changes.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman picks up Wells’s project of remaking politics through deception, but she is totally dissatisfied with his treatment of women. She doesn’t want men bringing women in. She wants women to bring themselves into the political conversation. Gilman writes her own novel, Benigna Machiavelli, in response to Wells’s. The novel advocates that women seek control, including by the use of deception and hypocrisy, but only insofar as that is needed for a good end. In her use of Machiavellian deception, Benigna transforms it by legitimizing it only insofar as it contributes to the good of women’s agency.
Gilman, herself a writer and thinker, is itching for activism—in Benigna MacAvelly, she creates a character who acts. Gilman identifies the need for someone who can lead the way to change in her critical review of H. G. Wells’s New Machiavelli: “The social philosopher can see an ordered procession of changes for centuries ahead, but the politician must introduce those changes step by step—with some heat” (Reference Gilman1911c, 169). It takes a woman who has avoided societal malformation—though she understands it—and self-consciously recreates herself to know how to achieve change. She takes issue with Wells’s attempt to position himself as the one with the knowledge to bring women to politics, as well as with the way he wants to bring them to politics.
Gilman, who previously praised Wells as doing “the mighty work of electrifying the world’s slow mind to the splendid possibilities of life” (Reference Gilman1910a), felt strongly that his approach to women’s role was distorted and mistaken. Wells argues for a eugenic political policy that supports women who bear and raise children, called “The Endowment of Motherhood,” in his nonfiction, as well as in The new Machiavelli. He wants to bring women into politics as mothers. Gilman critiques him harshly for this: “He likes them as mothers. He honors them as mothers. He wants to have them salaried, as mothers. But he thinks it quite beyond reason that they should appear as regular members of the working world; their motherhood, to his mind, would prevent it” (Reference Gilman1910a, 28). And in her review of The new Machiavelli, Gilman says that the women of his text are “mercilessly caricatured”; while he calls himself a feminist, “it is only sex in women which he sees, and for which he demands social recognition” (Reference Gilman1911c). Gilman critiques Wells for bringing women into his writing primarily as objects of love and desire and for reducing their contributions to the state to their care for their children. For Gilman, in contrast, women should not be constrained to the home in their contributions to social and political life. Rather, women, like men, should be encouraged to develop their social, political, and economic intelligence in the wider world. Through this engagement with the world, women will develop the skills needed to contribute to the transformation of society.
Benigna Machiavelli is one way that Gilman explores possible methods for social change. In the novel, Gilman traces the life of the character, Benigna, who is born into a poor family with a verbally abusive father. Her mother, also named Benigna, and her older sister are passive and retiring, unable to push back against Benigna’s father’s tyranny. Salvation comes from below—Benigna raises herself, developing the skills she needs to exercise power without being seen. Serialized in Gilman’s Forerunner, the novel reads episodically, recounting fragments in Benigna’s honing of her skills as she learns through experience how to make the world better without anyone knowing that she’s doing it. This starts in her school days where she notices and solves problems at school, at Sunday school, in her neighborhood, and at her grandfather’s house, ever learning in the process.
The novel takes up its prominent drama in the second half—when Benigna’s mother is sick and Benigna realizes that she must get rid of her father. She takes out a loan against her mother’s home by deceptively signing her mother’s name. Her mother has inherited this home from her own father. Benigna uses the money from the loan to get her father to leave for Scotland. She sends her mother away to recuperate and, while she is gone, turns their home into a boarding house to earn back the money from the loan. In the process of all of this, Benigna again uses deception to separate her sister, Peggy, from an unwise romantic match and cunningly sets her up with a good one. Benigna pretends to be Peggy to Peggy’s boyfriend and cuddles up to him when she knows Peggy will see them. Benigna uses this deception to show what she believes is true—that Peggy’s boyfriend does not intend to marry her as he has promised when they elope together. All is well in the end—her mother returns to a situation that allows her economic independence, even including the perfect best friend for her in a boarder intentionally chosen for this purpose by Benigna. And Benigna finds a more appropriate boyfriend for Peggy. Then, Benigna heads off into the wider world; she moves to Chicago and learns many different occupations, continuing her self-formation. The book ends with what Benigna describes as a new beginning—when her father returns home, her mother, educated by Benigna, is able to keep him in line.
In reading Benigna Machiavelli as a story about the possibility of social change, of societal freedom from domination, I push back on Lane’s characterization of the novel as “a model of girl-into-womanhood, a road to autonomy, a system to develop independence and courage, a way to handle difficult parents without irreconcilable tensions” (Lane Reference Lane1999, p. xxxii). Lane maintains, “Benigna Machiavelli is a handbook on survival in the modern world for a girl-woman” (Lane Reference Lane1999, 141). It is not her survival that is central, but her ability to change others and the world. Gilman is showing the women to whom she is writing in The Forerunner a way not only to survive, but to transform the women around them and eventually the world. Gilman’s goal—and Benigna’s—is social change. Benigna’s development is a working out of a child’s intuitions about freedom from oppression. Benigna begins to have a social impact as a schoolgirl, a social impact she continues to have as she gets older. As Weiss argues, Gilman shows us that children have insight and value and should be recognized as able to contribute to the social and political world (2021). Benigna educates and trains herself, in much the same way that Ben Franklin does. But Benigna’s self-making is not a change from selfish child to socially responsible woman; it is, rather, a sharpening of Benigna’s own internal powers. Her self-making is a means to social change.
Gilman’s writing in The Forerunner is more about provoking thought than literary quality. She wrote a prodigious amount and paid less attention to style than to ideas. As Lane writes, “Gilman wrote fiction for the same reason she wrote everything else and for the same reason she spent years on the lecture circuit. She wrote and she lectured in an effort to convert people to her ideas” (Lane Reference Lane1999, p. xi). And later, “Gilman gave little attention to her writing as literature, and neither will the reader, I am afraid. She wrote quickly, carelessly, to make a point … She wrote to engage an audience in her ideas, not in her literary accomplishments” (Lane Reference Lane1999, p. xxii). Gilman’s lack of focus on literary craft does not mean that her work is not worth reading; Lane writes, “Gilman’s fiction is part of her ideological world view, and therein lies its interest and its power” (1999, p. xx). In The Forerunner, we get social and political theory aimed at generating transformation. As Lane writes, “Gilman was determined to package her social vision in ways persuasive to a general audience” (Lane Reference Lane1999, p. xxv). Gilman’s ideas do not remain in the realm of abstraction, but are applied the social situation of her day—she writes with women’s subordination in mind. Sari Edelstein writes that Gilman used The Forerunner as a way to “ditsrupt women’s alignment with the domestic sphere,” aiming “to unsettle women, to move them from … complacence to engagement” (2017, 132–33). Gilman aims to awaken “women to their intellectual abilities and political potential” (Edelstein Reference Edelstein and Bergman2017, 142). Similarly, Kessler observes that Gilman’s understands her own literary work as “‘cultural work,’ [that] can enact social changes, can function as social action, can convey alternative versions/visions of human action” (1994, 127).
The character of Benigna articulates one way toward social change. Gilman, who was frustrated by the “antis,” the anti-suffragettes, knew well that some women would resist her vision (Allen Reference Allen2009, 147–56). Benigna Machiavelli is her deepest dive into why some women might not see that they’ve been oppressed—and in the character of Benigna, Gilman imagines a way to show them. Gilman depicts Benigna as successful in her pursuits, opening to her readers a feminist, Machiavellian possibility for persuading women, like the “antis,” who conform to traditional norms. Gilman is by no means unique in taking up this question of the limits of reason, which we can see throughout early arguments for women’s agency from Christine de Pizan to Sarah Scott’s Millenium hall to Gilman’s own Herland; these authors create imaginary cities of ladies to show women that they are political. From Plato’s myths to republicanism’s paradox of foundings, thinkers in the history of political thought have grappled with how to get men to understand themselves as part of a political community. In Benigna Machiavelli, Gilman tries out deception as a way to get women to see themselves as political, social, and economic actors.
2.1. Ben: self-made
Benigna is a self-made woman, even a self-made child, who identifies and resists her own corruption by the man-made world. While on one side of her family, Benigna was descended from Machiavelli, on the other side, we see an allusion to an American political thinker who was self-made: Benigna’s mother was a Quaker from Pennsylvania, also named Benigna, a lineage that brings to mind Ben Franklin. And indeed, Benigna’s nicknames were “Ben” or “Benny.”Footnote 2 In Benigna MacAvelly, colloquial Machiavellian deception meets the American myth of self-creation.
Like Ben Franklin, Benigna is a conscious creator of her own character (Laschinger and Salenius Reference Laschinger and Salenius2019, 57–59; Koganzon Reference Koganzon2014). She identifies the character traits she needs and works toward them through exercises, beginning with self-control—to develop “the power of one’s own will over one’s own body—and mind” (Gilman Reference Gilman1914/2013, 57–58; emphasis Gilman’s). Lane writes, “Her characters are feminist Horatio Algers, but their aim is not wealth and worldly success; their aim is autonomy and the facility to use their gifts for the social good” (1999, p. xxxiii). Another difference from Alger’s 19th century rags-to-riches stories is that there is no “reliance on luck”; rather, “her characters make their own luck,” which resonates with Machiavelli’s exhortation to seek to limit the impact of fortune (Lane Reference Lane1999, p. xlv). This ability to remake herself prepares her to remake her family—and she intends to build on that experience to remake the world. After setting her own house in order, Benigna goes out into the world. There Benigna learns through experience a variety of occupations, building her skills through each new challenge, preparing herself to hold higher positions, such as “College President, Position in the City Government, Owner of a System of Hotels, Head of a Great School, Manufacturer with Model Factories—things like that. And from each of those, lines ran back to the wider rings where I had arranged the successive smaller undertakings by which I proposed to lead up to the big ones” (160).Footnote 3 Benigna, a feminist Ben Franklin, gains skills through the domestic sphere that enable her to move beyond it.
2.2. The benign Machiavellian
Benigna advocates working through deception, rooted in hypocrisy, in part because she has seen persuasion based in reason fail. Before moving to manipulation in the case of her sister—who is set on marrying a man Benigna suspects of wanting to sleep with, but not marry, her sister—she first tries to change her sister’s mind in conversation, which does not work (Reference Gilman1914/2013, 91). When persuasion fails, Benigna believes that deception is the only option that is left open to her to prevent her sister from fleeing her father’s tyranny with her unreliable fiancé.
Not only does Gilman portray reason as inadequate in Benigna Machiavelli, but she also shows that it can be used by men to abuse women. Benigna is skeptical of reason because it is a tool her father uses to control his wife. Benigna’s father tries to convince his wife, who had inherited the home they live in from her own father, to allow him to mortgage it so that he could use the money for his own, often failing, projects. He argued with her about this, maintaining that man and woman should own things together; that his wife’s father had coerced her to keep the house for the children; that her duty is to her husband; that she is “sinning against both husband and child—defrauding your family of its rightful prosperity” (Reference Gilman1914/2013, 99–101). He ironically characterizes her father, who has used legal means to ensure that his shifty son-in-law can’t take the house he gave to his daughter, as dominating, when Benigna’s father is the one who—through reason—dominates.
Benigna’s mother responds to these arguments with emotion: “Mother wasn’t a bit logical. He would make her admit this and that and the other premise, and then prove his points one after the other, relentlessly, in that dry monotonous voice—and Mother would get all worn out. She’d go back on her admissions and deny his conclusions, and return to her original position after she was, logically, completely driven off it. … And she’d cry” (Reference Gilman1914/2013, 101). When he was drunk, Benigna tells us, her father “didn’t beat Mother with a club, nor jump on her like the British workman, but he would make her listen by the hour to those interminable arguments of his til I have heard her sob and shake for half the night afterward” (Reference Gilman1914c, 180). Gilman writes: “I believe that people can be as brutal to each other’s minds as they used to be in old times to their bodies.” (Reference Gilman1914/2013, 30). People’s reason can be cramped and brutalized. It is not surprising that, seeing reason be both ineffective and used to dominate, Benigna might pursue other means to effect change.
Through Benigna, Gilman tries out the idea that deception, not otherwise justifiable within pragmatism, might be needed as a step toward some women being able to shake off the man-made world that prevents their growth. This is a first step for women to understand themselves as social and to step into the deliberation that pragmatism affirms. Gilman enriches pragmatism by showing that women have been excluded from the community of pragmatist practice.
Political deception—deliberately causing people to believe something false—and hypocrisy—misleading people about oneself especially when one has power—have been acknowledged as a necessary part of politics most famously by Machiavelli, who sees the political leader as needing to use deception and hypocrisy in addition to other so-called vices in order to disrupt and then reform the existing order (Machiavelli 1532/1994). Later writers apply Machiavelli’s insight to democratic politics somewhat more circumspectly, often identifying the political leader’s guilt at their deception and hypocrisy as positive—Rochefoucauld’s idea that “hypocrisy is a form of homage that vice pays to virtue” or Michael Walzer’s problem of dirty hands (Rochefoucauld Reference La Rochefoucauld1678/2007; Walzer Reference Walzer1973). Judith Shklar understands hypocrisy to be just an ordinary vice that makes political persuasion possible (Reference Shklar1984); Ruth Grant maintains that moderate hypocrisy is necessary due to our dependence on others (Reference Grant1997). David Runciman finds hypocrisy or mask-wearing to be a fact of life also present in the liberal tradition, something we should evaluate in terms of its ends, rather than censuring it as a problematic means (Reference Runciman2008). Gilman applies deception and hypocrisy to women: Gilman articulates a benign use of deception not just to gain or solidify power, but rather to deploy that power to develop the capacity for political action in others. Gilman takes Machiavelli’s deception and turns it toward a different end. Benigna confidently justifies her deception; there is no embarrassment or regret about her “dirty hands.” Benigna uses hypocrisy to hide her influence, which allows her space to manipulate the world and gives those manipulations a chance to work.
Here Gilman contributes to the complicated relationship between feminism and Machiavelli, which in the contemporary sense took off with Pitkin’s groundbreaking monograph on Machiavelli through the lens of gender, which draws out his ambivalence about manhood through an attention to autonomy in his work (Pitkin Reference Pitkin1984). Political theorists and feminists were inspired to explore Machiavelli’s treatment of gender, at times to critique it and at times to find something to build on (Falco Reference Falco2004; Castro and Fabián Reference Castro and Fabián2019). Some theorists find Machiavelli to be rejecting women in politics (Elshtain Reference Elshtain1981, O’Brien in Falco Reference Falco2004); others see his ideas as breaking down gender dichotomies (Saxonhouse in Falco Reference Falco2004; Spackman Reference Spackman and Najemy2010); some see him doing both (Brown Reference Brown1988). Gilman, together with Mary Astell, a much earlier feminist who also critically engaged with Machiavelli, constitute another approach: Astell notes that Machiavelli was not “over complaisant [i.e., pleasantly disposed] to the Ladies” and then critically engages with his thought (Broad Reference Broad, Wallwork and Salzman2011, 23). Jacqueline Broad suggests that “Astell out-Machiavellis Machiavelli: She uses his ideas to show that ordinary women are capable of embodying all the virtues of strong and effective political leaders” (23). Gilman is doing something similar—only she is working through Wells’s view of Machiavelli, which adds another layer. Gilman points out Wells’s error in how he brings sex and gender to Machiavelli; like Astell, Gilman points out that ordinary women, such as Benigna, can be strong and effective political leaders.
In the story, Benigna is a descendant of Machiavelli through her Italian grandmother and also through her Scotch grandfather (so he claims) whose surname is “MacAvelly.” Benigna identifies as a Machiavellian: “I’m a Machiavelli, and proud of it. The Scotch name I have to wear outside, like a sort of raincoat, but my real name I always feel is Machiavelli, Benigna Machiavelli” (Reference Gilman1914/2013, 14). Benigna’s goal is to become a good villain who is effective—who can “make things move their way” (Reference Gilman1914/2013, 10-11). “In books things happen. In life you have to make them happen” (Reference Gilman1914/2013, 59). Benigna’s aim is to get power and use it for the good of all: She says she wants to use her powers “to straighten things as far as I can” (Reference Gilman1914/2013, 156). Gilman presents Benigna’s actions as leading to a better and happier life for everyone—for women who are more independent and fulfilled, and who can better understand the collective good when they have experience contributing directly to it; for the children who will be raised by more humane mothers; and for the husbands who will be married to happier and more fulfilled women.
Like Machiavelli, Benigna sees the need for leaders to sometimes make choices that contradict societal understandings of ethical action. In Gilman’s view, though, this is to benefit the growth of all. She says, when opening and reading letters that were not addressed to her:
What if it is a prison offense? It doesn’t say anything against it in the Bible. Anyhow, it seemed to me right, and what I think is right I mean to do, law or no law. These laws people make, they unmake as fast as they make ’em—always having new ones and altering old ones or repealing them. And they don’t even pretend to have revelation or anything. Besides, some are made on purpose by rich men, and the lawmakers paid to do it—I’ve read about that. (1914d, 237)
Here Benigna says she sees no reason to obey laws that contradict her own sense of what is right, of what will get her mother and sister to a better place. Laws are made and changed at a dizzying speed, Benigna notices, by mere mortals, and sometimes corruptly in the interests of the rich; she sees herself as acting in the interests of all—including the poor and marginalized. Her appeal to biblical morality isn’t absolute. She is willing to violate the Bible in order to improve the world:
Of course I know the commandment “Honor thy father and mother,” as a means to longevity. But if your father drinks, and isn’t any earthly use, and abuses your mother, can you honor that? I couldn’t, and I’m willing to die sooner, if that’s the consequence. (Reference Gilman1914/2013, 113)
Benigna dismisses laws and religious teaching when they hamper her ability to reveal to women to their own capacities.
Benigna distinguishes herself from Machiavelli not only by the good end she aims at, but also by deciding not to lie. While Machiavelli tells the prince that being limited by traditional virtues will keep him from doing what he needs to do in order to gain power, and while Benigna largely follows this advice, she declares that she will not lie, which she identifies as a challenge for herself (Reference Gilman1914/2013, 128): “Lying is not necessary. I always tell the truth—when I tell anything; nothing but the truth. As to telling the whole truth, nobody can do that—we don’t know it” (Reference Gilman1914/2013, 61). She applies this thinking when she signs the deed to their house with her name, which is the same as her mother’s, who is its owner, taking out a loan against it. She says, “It’s no crime to sign your own name, that I know of!” (Reference Gilman1914/2013, 111). Benigna challenges herself not to lie, not because Gilman believes that lying is always wrong, but because she sees it pragmatically as an especially important “social virtue”: “truth is essentially between people; it is a virtue of transmission” (Gilman Reference Gilman1914/Reference Gilman2004). In Social ethics, a work of nonfiction serialized alongside of Benigna Machiavelli in The Forerunner, Gilman argues for a social ethics that facilitates growth and development (1914/2004, 105). In Benigna, Gilman shows us a deception without lying that gets closer to the truth than the man-made world does.
Benigna uses deception as a way to promote her mother’s and sister’s growth away from situations that she sees as harmful. Her mother cannot escape from Benigna’s father by herself, nor does she even want to. Benigna writes, “Mother never did know when she was well off” (Reference Gilman1914/2013, 117). And “I had been studying Mother all my life, more or less, and had a theory as to what would make her happiest” (Reference Gilman1914/2013, 113). Benigna sets herself up as knowing better than her mother does what is good for her mother. She sets about “educating Mother into some degree of independence” through the practical experience of running a boarding house (Reference Gilman1914/2013, 144). Similarly, she says of her sister’s relationship to her fiancé, “I didn’t think Ned was the right man for her,” and “I knew she didn’t really love him” (Reference Gilman1914/2013, 88). Benigna believes that Peggy cannot make a good choice about who to marry when she is pursuing marriage in order to escape an abusive home life. Benigna deceives people in order to get them to take different paths that she thinks will benefit them. Deceit can certainly be used to restrict judgment, but, Gilman asks the reader, can’t it also be used to create the conditions for independence and judgment to exist at all?
In her work to change her family, Benigna deceives people about herself; following Runciman, I call this political hypocrisy—putting on an act, pretending to be what she is not. Benigna does not want anyone to know the extent of her power (Reference Runciman2008). She seeks to gain power, but appear innocent, reminding the reader of Machiavelli’s exhortation: “But it is essential to know how to conceal how crafty one is, to know how to be a clever counterfeit and hypocrite” (54). Benigna takes Machiavelli’s point to heart—she is determined to learn to be clever without anyone knowing that she is clever: “My ambition is to be, to seem to be, that is, just like other people, and to do things, wonderful things, without ever being suspected of it. That’s fun!” (Reference Gilman1914/2013, 38). Her ambition is to be knowledgeable, strong, with “an armory of concealed weapons” (referring to her skills) and then, “Play with people. Do things with them, and for them. And never be known!” (Reference Gilman1914/2013, 46). Benigna intentionally masks the role that she is playing in influencing the course of events. This is a form of hypocrisy, though it is different from what we often identify as hypocrisy—pretending to be more moral than one is. Instead, Benigna pretends to be less powerful than she is, using her marginalized position to her advantage. Her marginalization not only motivates her action as she observes abuse and informs her action with the knowledge that comes from experience, but her marginalization also allows her to hide her action, thereby giving her room to work her manipulations. The indirect power that she uses is used by those who do not have access to direct political (or, in Benigna’s case, familial) power due to marginalization, as Havel argues in The powers of the powerless (Reference Havel1985) and Janeway argues in Powers of the weak (Reference Janeway1980). Keeping this indirect power hidden will allow its influence to persist. Gilman’s young, poor, female protagonist is a hidden Machiavellian.
Hidden power has two advantages: First, it keeps the people from ostracizing their leader. Here she appropriates Platonic wisdom: As Plato’s allegory of the cave and Socrates’s death reminds us, people who see a reality that others do not will not be popular among them. Hiding the power that one holds is one way to escape this ostracism. Second, hidden power veils the origins of the transformations that Benigna introduces. This makes Benigna’s mother and sister less likely to resist or question those innovations, giving them a chance to work. Hidden power allows Benigna to innovate without generating a backlash of discontent from those whose lives she is disrupting. If people do not know that they are being manipulated, they are less likely to perceive their ability to act as being compromised. This allows Benigna to use manipulation as a way to generate the possibility of political action rather than decrease it.
Perceiving women as having unacknowledged power over men due to their differences from men, including their weakness, is a gendered trope in the history of political thought, present in Rousseau and Tocqueville, among others (Bloom Reference Bloom and Lawler1992; Mitchell Reference Mitchell1995, 137). This position in Rousseau is critiqued by Wollstonecraft, who insists that women, through reason cultivated by equal education, can be equal partners to men. Gilman takes a slightly different tack. To get to the goal that she shares with Wollstonecraft of men and women who are equally human, women must first use their marginalized position to hide their power—reason alone will not be sufficient to persuade; first, the world needs to be remade. Wollstonecraft makes a reasoned argument for women’s reason; Benigna invisibly remakes the world so that women can experience their capacity for reason.
Benigna’s deception and hypocrisy are deployed in order to reveal to women—who have been deceived about their abilities and malformed by androcentric society—the wider possibilities that can and should be open to them. Unless women’s situation is changed for them, Gilman believes that the majority of women may never seek change for themselves: “We will admit that at present the majority of women are not consciously desirous of any extension of their political rights and privileges” (Reference Gilman1910d, 10). She continues, “It is a sociological impossibility that a majority of an unorganized class should unite in concerted demand for a right, a duty, which they have never known” (Reference Gilman1910d, 11). If the system of power is perverting the development of women’s powers, then secretly changing aspects of the oppressive material and social world will help women learn through experience the range of things of which they are capable. She deceives in order to undeceive—to show women that they are capable of more than society has allowed and to show the rest of society that it will be happier if women are given space to develop a fuller expression of their humanity that includes their social, political, and economic contributions, rather than only domestic contributions. This is Gilman’s feminist contribution to pragmatist thought, which was not previously attentive to the way that the structure of society had impacted women (Upin Reference Upin1993; McKenna Reference McKenna2001; Hernandez Reference Hernandez2022). She makes this contribution in Benigna Machiavelli through an adapted generic Machiavellianism.
At the end of the novel, we see Benigna’s Machiavellianism is justified when her mother withstands the great test she faces when Benigna’s father returns from Scotland. The growth at which Benigna was aiming is realized in her mother: “Mother had room to exercise her faculties: that strengthened her … I could feel the change coming over her, showing in all her letters—the increase of assurance, of hope, of courage” (1914/2013, 170). Benigna’s role is legitimized at the end by her mother’s ability to overcome the biggest challenge she would face—to advocate for herself to her husband in ways that were inconceivable before Benigna set up a new situation in which her mother could feel and exercise her own capacities, becoming strong and capable.
When Benigna’s father returned from his sojourn in Scotland, he told his wife that he wanted the boarding-house experiment to end immediately (Reference Gilman1914/2013, 178). Benigna’s mother explains calmly and clearly that she will continue with the boarding house—that it makes money; that it is “legal and proper” for her to run it; that it is consistent with her duty to her husband (Reference Gilman1914/2013, 178–79). “You come home to a somewhat different woman from the poor thing you left. I truly think, my dear, that you will be happier with me now than you were then” (Reference Gilman1914/2013, 179). Benigna’s mother is able to reject the attempts of her husband to restrict her actions. Benigna recognizes that her work is finished.
2.3. Begetter of democratic associations
In addition to using deception to make her mother and sister into women who are independent from the tyranny of Benigna’s father, Benigna also uses associations to sustain women’s independence from men. This is a goal that resonates with Tocqueville’s observations about the American character; it only obliquely resonates with her Machiavellianism insofar as Benigna sometimes hides her role in creating the associations. As a child, Benigna works to bring together students to form an association to buy a new watch for their teacher after a student breaks the teacher’s watch; she cleverly masterminds the effort and hides the fact that she is the leader of the collaboration. Benigna explains, “First I formed a Society, a Secret Society, to get teacher a Christmas present. I got Lucy elected President and myself Treasurer” (20). They gather the money for the watch, and still Benigna’s role is hidden: “Teacher was so pleased when Lucy gave [the watch] to her. ‘From her loving pupils’—Minnie Arnold made a nice little speech; Minnie was the best orator we had. And Lucy presented the watch, because she had broken the other. I just sat in my seat and smiled” (22). Benigna remains the hidden organizer of the action. Benigna also sees the small association of friendship as essential to the rehabilitation of her mother. She finds a friend for her mother in Miss Windsor, a friendship that she believes will (and indeed does) benefit her mother: “Dear mother broadened and strengthened, and grew in Mary Allen Windsor’s companionship, more than she realized herself; more than any of us realized” (175). While Machiavelli’s ideal founder is independent and cuts himself off from even his family (Pitkin Reference Pitkin1984), Benigna embraces associational life. Rather than cutting herself off from her family, she takes as her task transforming those from whom she originated. She becomes the begetter of those who have begotten her.
The associational aims of Benigna are also apparent in her other appearances in Gilman’s work. Gilman writes Benigna Machiavelli, the fullest depiction of the character of Benigna MacAvelly last, though it is the story of Benigna’s youth. In a series of seven earlier short stories and one novella, Gilman writes about Benigna in adulthood as “Mrs. MacAvelly.”Footnote 4 Throughout these stories, Mrs MacAvelly cleverly and indirectly works to support the economic, intellectual, social, and creative independence of women she encounters, freeing them from the control of men and, occasionally, from overbearing women. But independence is not Gilman’s end goal—Mrs MacAvelly promotes and participates in collaborative, mutual care among women through friendship (“An innocent girl” Reference Gilman1912b; “A coincidence” Reference Gilman1910d), in clubs (“Mrs. Potter and the clay club” Reference Gilman1911a), and through shared creative and economic endeavors that resist the domineering power of men (“Martha’s mother” Reference Gilman1910b; “Maidstone comfort” Reference Gilman1912e).Footnote 5 Mrs MacAvelly herself, because she operates through example and suggestion and subtle social manipulation, as well as through associational practices, differs from men who operate through force and economic, political, and marital power.
Benigna’s work in generating associations and clubs reflects Gilman’s hopes for The Forerunner. She notes with apparent delight in one issue of The Forerunner that there is news of a “Gilman Circle” in Tacoma, Washington, “devoted to the discussion of vital subjects, largely economic” (1914b). She continues, “There is in more than one city a similar group called, ‘The Forerunner Club’ … This is a very great pleasure to the author, who takes this opportunity to thank all the warm friends she cannot meet and has no time to write to. To be useful in helping people to think is an honor and a joy” (1914b). And Gilman herself participated in associations and clubs, as she describes in her autobiography (1935, 314–15) and as Joanna Scutts explains in Hotbed (Reference Scutts2022).
Benigna understands the power of associations and relies on these to help women gain and maintain their social, political, and economic independence. These associations are places in which women can work together, exercising their agency to improve the world. But before this pragmatic process can begin to work for all women in Gilman’s day, some women need the enlightenment—the push to engage—that Gilman and Benigna can give. There is a non-democratic moment, a moment where deception may be acceptable, according to Gilman, that might need to precede this pragmatic, democratic association.
3. Gilman as Benigna sans deception
Gilman’s Forerunner sought to generate social change and cultivate women’s agency, a shared goal with Benigna. Just as Benigna shapes her mother and sister, so Gilman wants to open her readers’ eyes to the possibility of another way of life so that they can help her bring it into being. Through The Forerunner, Gilman imagines an alternative world and how to get there. She seeks to shake women out of their patriarchal world by writing fiction that immerses her readers in a different reality and by writing non-fiction that argues that her social vision is best. For Gilman, working toward social change requires pragmatic experimentation with different methods. Benigna zooms in on one method—deception—that Gilman thinks may need to be used on women who have been so oppressed and stultified by men that they cannot see women’s true capacities.
Through her fiction, Gilman gives women the ability to imagine an alternative life; she creates the possibility of social change by allowing women to imaginatively experience new worlds. She is a creative genius overflowing with a cornucopia of approaches that could be tried to break women free of the constraints of the androcentric world—in so doing, she generates the agency of her readers, inspiring them to be involved in the process of seeing what works. She does not assume that the move toward social change will have one face, but many.
According to Gilman, it is philosophy that allows humans to envision an alternative way of life. Philosophy shows us that we, unlike animals, can change our environment and so opens new possibilities for human action. In her poem, “The rabbit, the rhinoceros and I,” the Spirit of Philosophy gives animals the ability to speak. The animals explain the difference between animals and humans: to animals,
Environment … is fate—
But you [humans] can always change the slate,
And make the things that make you good and bad.
(Reference Gilman1912c) As a result of her encounter with the Spirit of Philosophy, the narrator is happier:
I saw a heaven in sight and wanted some.
If our conditions make us sad—
And new conditions may be had—
What hinders us from making Kingdom Come? (Reference Gilman1912c)
Philosophy lets us see a world different from our own—heaven, in this poem. This opens the possibility of remaking our environment in the image of that vision. Gilman instills in her readers a sense of political agency by showing them that they have the ability to change their own fate and by painting a picture of a utopia worth pursuing. Gilman uses literature—reaching women in private, relational, domestic spaces—to generate the political actors who can change the world. Gilman expresses this when she states the purpose of The Forerunner: “[The Forerunner] is to stimulate thought; to arouse hope, courage and impatience; to offer practical suggestions and solutions, to voice the strong assurance of better living, here, now, in our own hands to make. … It is about … the personal and public problems of today” (Reference Gilman and Ceplair1991, 195).
4. Concerns with benign deception
The aim of Gilman’s literary imagination—to generate political agency in women—is praiseworthy. However, it is worth engaging critically with Gilman’s Benigna, with the idea that political deception is an appropriate tool for social change. If deception may be used on women in Gilman’s day who see no problem with the role men have assigned them, then deception may be used on those who stand outside of social movements today—for instance, Black people who critique Black Lives Matter or people with disabilities who critique Disability Justice. The problem that Gilman identified—that social movements are not homogeneous—persists today.
This means that the deception Benigna practices will perpetually be needed. Gilman seems to allow for the use of deception in a limited way—during the transition to a society in which the possibilities for the growth of women are open. It is conceivable that, once women’s agency is recognized, Benigna’s deception will no longer be necessary. Indeed, Benigna watches her mother advocate for herself and then slips away. Yet it is not the case that once women are recognized as fully human, all people will be recognized as fully human. Social and political circumstances will still limit the possibilities for growth in other humans; political deception will still be needed. Though Gilman might present the need for deception as a temporary need in the transition to a new world, our persistently imperfect world means that manipulation will be a long-term project.
A question about deception as a means to social change is: Who decides whether any particular deception is benign in Gilman’s sense, whether it is aimed at the good of the one being deceived? According to Gilman, it is appropriate for Benigna to use deception to educate people who have not consented to such an education. We know that no leader nor thinker is without error, despite how Benigna is presented by Gilman as never wrong in her goals, though she may need to learn to refine their implementation through trial and error. Benigna’s flawless goals, unmarred by self-interest, pretend perfection is possible. Were Benigna to use her cloaked power to manipulate people even inadvertently in the wrong direction, not to mention purposefully in a self-interested direction, a flaw of Gilman’s argument would be revealed. No one can understand the good of others, as well as the collective good, and aim for it and accomplish it as perfectly as Benigna does. Perhaps more imagination could solve this problem: Gilman could have shown Benigna’s view of the good to be flawed or even inadequate, requiring adjustment to the insights of others.
While it makes sense that Benigna deceives her father, who wields tyrannical power over her and who has repeatedly refused to reason with her, Benigna’s conception of the good itself ought to be open to democratic contestation by her mother and sister. Though Benigna’s mother has been tyrannized by reason and so is not apt to trust it, and Benigna’s sister Peggy imagines that she does not need to engage with her little sister in dialogue, still Benigna could focus on rehabilitating their reason, rather than evading it through deception. Gilman’s conception of the good is admirably open to democratic contestation. However, if The Forerunner’s readers follow Gilman’s Benigna in using deception as a tool of social change, as I believe Gilman invites them to do, they at least temporarily close off the possibility of critical engagement with the women they are deceiving. Because Benigna manipulates her mother and sister from a position of hidden power, her actions evade interrogation and questioning from the ones who are impacted by those actions. Benigna’s deception and hypocrisy shield her from the need to convince others.
The contemporary reader can see flaws with Gilman’s own conception of the collective good that should give readers pause about attempts to remake the world, particularly in ways that attempt to escape criticism: Most strikingly, Gilman’s explicit embrace of eugenics reveals the danger that arguments can be employed from marginalized positions in non-intersectional ways. Gilman, while able to recognize and work to remedy women’s exclusion, would perpetuate and increase the exclusion of people with disabilities from political participation and perhaps even from existence. The example of eugenics shows that deception as a tool of social change depends on the wisdom of the one wielding it, in the same way that Gilman depicts reason when she shows Benigna’s father using—or misusing—reason as a way to dominate his wife. For Gilman, the tools—reason and deception—are not inherently right or wrong; rather, the ends they are aimed at are good or bad. A beneficial use of deception for creating the possibility of growth depends on a wise user, on which I argue we cannot rely.
Another question about Benigna’s approach: What might be the unintended negative consequences of Benigna’s deception on the ones being deceived? Gilman’s story ends somewhat naively with the complete happiness of the deceived. They begin to see the light, growing as humans who contribute to the political, economic, and social order and so become connected to the collective interest, rather than only to their own self-interest. But deception itself is not an acting with or acting among others, but an acting on others. There is a threat in incorporating Machiavellian deception as one tool in Gilman’s pragmatist toolbox: It may allow the fragile fusion between the individual and the collective that Gilman envisions to be trampled. Gilman opens the door for power—even the power needed to move toward individual growth—to be valued more than a discussion over foundational questions. Women’s preferences may be steamrolled on the way to a society that Gilman argues is good.
But not all deception is unwilling: Reading fiction involves, as Samuel Taylor Coleridge famously put it, the “willing suspension of disbelief.” The reader of fiction agrees to enter the imaginative realm. In fiction, deception and judgment can come together—the reader is invited to join the writer in exploring and interrogating an alternative reality. Gilman’s fiction shows us the possibilities of imagination and invites philosophical engagement with Benigna’s approach.
5. Conclusion
Women’s escape from androcentric tyranny, pursued pragmatically by whatever means work, must precede the creation of a good society. Gilman shows ways to work within the constraints of the existing world to move, step by step, toward the better one that she believes is possible. In The Forerunner, Gilman herself experiments with many different genres as a way to meet women where they are and convince them to change the world, both through arguments and through a compelling vision of an alternative world. And in Benigna Machiavelli, Gilman gives us a picture of a young girl who can lead the way—including through deception—toward social change. Gilman’s feminist revision of Machiavelli seeks power not for its own sake, but to allow women space to grow. Gilman encourages women who read The Forerunner to consider using any means necessary to remake the world so that women who see no problems with the lifestyle handed down to them by the preceding generation may be open to other ways of living. But this means that the end is closed off from debate; it is to be undemocratically implemented by the wise ones who know the good. This separation of deliberative philosophical reflection and its pragmatic implementation is a separation that does not call women deeply enough into conversation over the good itself—a debate for which Gilman finds some women unprepared. If Gilman’s recognition of the limits of reason led her toward political restraint or even toward more thoroughgoing democratic dialogue, her position would be more consistent and defensible. Gilman’s big-picture practice in The Forerunner of argument through a plethora of genres that invite the reader to reflect themselves is better than the specific take she espouses in Benigna Machiavelli—that not all people and not all women are currently capable of that reflection.
Acknowledgments
I am grateful for responses to drafts of this article from Mary Jo MacDonald and Torrey Shanks when I presented it at APSA and from Frank Lovett, Wynne Moskop, and Penny Weiss, among others, when I presented it at the Workshop on Politics, Ethics, and Society at Washington University in St. Louis. I’m grateful for the comments of the anonymous reviewers of this piece. And for the very origins of these ideas, I’m grateful to my sister, Kathryn Stejskal, who herself is a kind of benign Machiavellian and has defended Gilman’s ideas to me before she even read the book.
Lorraine Krall McCrary is an associate professor of political science at Wabash College. She writes about women in the history of political thought, as well as on disability and is attentive—in both areas—to communities of care and to the relationship between literature and politics.
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