Jennifer Tuttle gives keynote at International Charlotte Perkins Gilman Conference
Jennifer Tuttle, Ph.D., Dorothy M. Healy Professor of Literature and Health, delivered the keynote address at the Sixth International Charlotte Perkins Gilman Conference, which was held on June 13, 2015, at the Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University. Her talk was titled "Activism in the Archives: Rethinking Recovery in Gilman Studies."
Combining her expertise as a literary scholar and authority on Gilman with her experience directing a women's archives (the Maine Women Writers Collection) and editing a scholarly journal, Tuttle argued that scholars should move beyond the "primal scene" of researcher and primary source that shapes so much thinking about archives-based work recovering women's texts from unmerited obscurity. Using Gilman as a case in point, she argues that if recovery is a form of activism, then it is also collaborative, and feminist scholars work in concert with equally committed archivists and book publishers to bring "lost" women writers to the public's attention.
The scene of this conference is particularly significant because the Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America holds the largest collection of archival papers related to Gilman and was instrumental in preserving (and recently, digitizing) those materials, which otherwise might have been lost.
In addition to delivering her keynote address, Tuttle also presented a paper titled "Gilman and the Imperial Pacific," which offers a new interpretive framework for Gilman's best known novel, the utopian Herland, arguing that it should be read as part of Gilman's body of work about the American West.