Unpunished: A Mystery

What is particularly interesting about this novel, in this light, is that it was written toward the end of [Charlotte Perkins Gilman]'s life, shortly before she turned seventy. With a few exceptions -- Gary Scharnhorst and Ann Lane, among them -- too little attention has been paid to the end of Gilman's career and her continuing ambivalence about the possibility of women's relations with men, whether they were husbands, fathers and brothers, editors (like Howells), or publishers. [Unpunished], with its half-parodic and half-serious treatment of "overkill," reveals some of her life-long obsessions, including those she articulates in her essay "Parasitism and Civilised Vice," published in the 1931 collection of predictions for "New Women" and their future in America called Women's Coming of Age. Gilman argues here that women's "sex dependence" on men must end, that sex itself is the problem for women in patriarchy. Or as Vernon Lee puts it in a 1903 explication of this idea in Gilman's writing, rather than depending on their intelligence, strength, or honesty, women depend mainly upon their sex; they appeal to men, dominate men through the fact of their sex (qtd. in Karpinski 96). Justifying "overkill," then, is the excessive sexuality patriarchy mandates for women.