An Obstacle

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1884

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Summary

Background

Poem Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Background

Historical Context

The turn of the 20th century brought dramatic social changes. Perkins Gilman became deeply involved in the women’s suffrage movement and saw women nationally gain voting rights during the last few years of her life. This era also witnessed the later stages of industrialization—a process reflected in Perkins Gilman’s many poems about labor conditions and unionization. Her move to California was at the end of the large gold-fueled migration west, notable in many of her poems about San Francisco and other west coast locations.

As a Californian, Perkins Gilman contributed to utopian and progressive publications. She also advocated for socialist and humanist causes in lectures across the country. The poems that follow “An Obstacle” in Gilman’s 1893 book In This Our World directly “subvert patriarchal ideals, challenge female subjugation, and argue for equal rights,” according to Catherine J. Golden in Charlotte Perkins Gilman: Optimist Reformer. This lends weight to the reading that the (male-gendered) prejudice faced by the speaker in “An Obstacle” is sexism.

Literary Context

Perkins Gilman integrated technical skill and a love of free verse in her poetry. She clearly studied masters of formal poetry; she used traditional structures—like sonnets, sestinas, ballads, and many more—in her own work. Also, Perkins Gilman admired free verse poets like Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman, calling the latter “America’s greatest poet” in her lectures, which are catalogued online by the Radcliffe Harvard Institute.

In the 21st century, Perkins Gilman’s prose is far more famous than her poetry. According to the Radcliffe Harvard Institute, Perkins Gilman is “known more for ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ than any other work.” This semi-autobiographical story explores mental health issues of 19th century women and is considered, posthumously, to be a feminist work. While alive, Perkins Gilman identified as humanist, rather than a feminist, and there is some modern discussion about her work not being feminist, nor intersectional (that is, some of Perkins Gilman’s writings are not favorable towards groups who faced oppression due to ethnicity or other confounding identity attributes).

In longform fiction, Gilman’s utopian novel Herland is often discussed alongside other canonical utopian writings, including Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward and Ursula Le Guin’s Dispossessed. The editors of Perkins Gilman’s 2012 edition of In This Our World & Uncollected Poems compare Perkins Gilman to Herman Melville and Thomas Hardy, saying that these authors are also more known for their fiction than their poetry, and “Gilman was not a mere poet by avocation any more than they were” (xxvi).

Perkins Gilman’s poems that are catalogued by 21st century organizations devoted to the accessible study of American and English language poetry mostly focus on women’s rights and the conditions in which women live. For instance, both the Poetry Foundation and the Academy of American Poets feature Gilman’s poems “The Anti-Suffragists” and “To the Indifferent Women,” which center the experiences of women.