Vernon Lee and Charlotte Perkins Gilman: The Anglo-American Alliance on the ‘Woman Question’

In 1902 Vernon Lee reviewed Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Women and Economics for The North American Review arguing that women must change their cultural identities. The aim of this study is to verify in which way the writer represents linguistically women’s economic dependence. Following the tradition of Genre Analysis and Critical Discourse Analysis, we will investigate the discursive practices and strategies in the review “The Economic Dependence of Women” trying to identify the recurrent features of persuasion. Thus, a pragmatic comparison between the source text and the target text will allow to identify the linguistic and rhetorical elements used to promulgate the writer’s thinking on the topic of women’s roles. By bringing to light the intertextual and interdiscursive elements which come out of the comparative linguistic investigation, this study explores how the issue of “Woman Question” is recontextualised in a different genre through the use of various verbal strategies documenting Lee's notions about gender. The study aims to verify if the use of rhetorical strategies becomes an instrument of political propaganda to support Lee’s “radical” ideas. Writing for Lee is not a monologue but another form of conversation, so this research aims at showing how the review may help not only to inform and stimulate “Anglo-Saxon readers” (Vernon Lee, 1902: 71) to read Gilman’s book but also spread her “radical” politics and publicize her views as widely as possible.