Herland

Hard on the heels of finishing the course on utopias and dystopias, I decided to tackle Herland, a book I'd been intending to read for decades. To my delight it wasn't nearly as earnest and didactic as I would have expected a feminist utopia of the early 20th to be. Rather it was gently humorous and even-handed, suggesting that it is not so much a utopian vision, but a suggestion that in the relations between the sexes we can do a whole lot better without going to extremes.

The story has a classic utopian structure of outsiders "discovering" a previously unknown country where everyone lives in peace and prosperity. Three men, who represent specific types, hear about this land of women and resolve to find it. There's the narrator, Van, show more who is a social scientist, and who approaches women as equals, Southern gentleman, Jeff, who puts women on pedestals, and the "man's man" (read jerk) Terry, whose increasing anger and frustration at not being able to "master" these women leads to an intolerable act of violence.

Gilman's utopian vision is classic also in the sense that the country is far from perfect, and that much of the second half of the book is taken up with the romance between Van, and Ellador, one of the women of Herland, suggests that in the end, utopia is finding someone who completes you, challenges you, supports you, and who is as interested in you and your world as you are in theirs. show less

if i had read this in the 90s i probably would have fallen over myself with how much i loved it. as it is it feels a little all over the place for me - parts of it still hit just right, parts of it are too on the nose, parts of it don't go far enough. of course i see what she was doing and the need for a book like this when she wrote it (and when it came out) but wow i wish some of this was done differently. (the pairing up with the men being the biggest thing. i really wish she'd been able to imagine that. although maybe she was trying to imagine a more inclusive utopia, even as they weren't.) anyway, it got to be a bit much by the end but i liked the concept.

I like Herland even more than 1911’s Moving The Mountain, and almost as much as “The Yellow Wallpaper,” which I think is one of the finest short stories. Although Gilman is famous for being a feminist, I don’t think she gets as much credit as she deserves for being a speculative fiction writer.

Three male explorers hear of a country that consists only of women, so they decide to check it out, and with great trouble make their way in. Jeff is a tender soul who glorifies motherhood and believes in being a perfect gentleman to women. Terry is a handsome man about town, kind of rapey and full of himself, and he thinks women should be pretty and serve him. The narrator, Vandyck Jennings, is sort of in-between these two and in general show more presents a “rational” point of view.

They are amazed to discover a beautiful utopia populated only by women, with wildly different customs from their own. In this country they don’t have poverty, they raise their children communally, they wear comfy clothes, etc. Long ago, a volcanic eruption and slave uprising led to a group of women who were cut off from the rest of the world. A few of them were miraculously able to reproduce as the result of sort of an exalted mental state, and this ability was passed down through the generations. There are so many novels about all-female societies where this happens—Ammonite by Nicola Griffith and Jane Fletcher’s Celaeno series spring to mind—but Herland must be the first.

The women the three explorers meet are all strong, intelligent, athletic, good teachers, and able to get things done. They confound the explorers’ expectations at every turn because they have no idea how to “behave like women.” Gilman takes the gender binary away and everyone becomes a person; however, she certainly has a rosy view of how nice an all-female society, or any society, could be.

The three explorers each fall in love and insist on marrying their sweethearts, which the women agree to in order to humor them, although marriage is a meaningless concept to them. All this time there has been no romantic love in the country because, well, when the men are gone, it’s just impossible! But they haven’t been missing it.

Terry and his wife Alima don’t get along. He attempts to rape her, but she kicks him in the balls and summons help from her friend in the room next door. Terry is put on trial, and the local Over Mother sentences him to be sent back to the outside world, with his word as a gentleman not to tell anyone about their country. At first Terry is obstinate.

“The first thing I’ll do is to get an expedition fixed up to force an entrance into Ma-Land!”
“Then,” they said quite calmly, “he must remain an absolute prisoner always.”
“Anesthesia would be kinder,” urged Moadine.
“And safer,” added Zava.
“He will promise, I think,” said Ellador [Jennings’ wife.]
And he did.

(This part reminded me of Houston, Houston, Do You Read? by James Tiptree, Jr.)

So Terry leaves, with Jennings and Ellador to escort him. Next year is the sequel! From Gilman’s Wikipedia page I learned a lot of things that I didn’t know about her, including the fact that she married her first cousin, and that when she was diagnosed with incurable breast cancer she “chose chloroform over cancer” (her words.) show less

Oh, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, if we were in Herland with six doughty Herlandians (Herlandettes? Herlanderinnen?) to help us, I never would have missed connecting with my friend tonight and waited around in the cold, or had a gun pulled on me on Friday, or fought with my girlfriend on the Great Wall, or developed a stomach problem, would I?

No, I mean, you can't review this like a proper book, just because it's lived on in such a way that its reputation precedes it and you're unlikely to be approaching it without some foreknowledge of how silly it really is - Aristasia with less sexy times and consumerism and more weird big love for eugenics. But it is less devoid of literary merit than "The Sun Grows Cold," (which I think is still my show more lowest-rated book on this thing) and of course it's interesting to see the weird different way this eternal trope gets expressed by a WWI-era suffraggette as opposed to Thucydides or whoever first wrote about the Amazons - or, as mentioned above, the Aristasians (if I put it in twice maybe you'll google it and be as happy knowing these things exist as me). It was also somehow gratifying to know that Gilman's 1915 take on women as a whole, their development and destiny, was just as reductive as - indeed, identical to - mine at 19, in 1999. We truly have come a long way, baby. show less

Esse livro está há tanto tempo na minha estante que vieram e foram novas traduções dele e ainda não tinha o lido, finalmente o peguei por conta do fenômeno Barbie e um texto que li relacionando esse livro ao filme.
É um livro excepcional na construção utópica de um mundo sem homens, um matriarcado puro, tão utópico que soa irreal demais (exatamente como a Barbieland), várias vezes me peguei pensando que daria meu dedinho para que Freud o tivesse lido e escrito as maiores bobagens sobre ele só para que eu pudesse rir, hahaha.
O livro acaba quando essa mulher da sociedade perfeita sem homens finalmente vai conhecer o patriarcado e se depara com as monstruosidades cometidas pelos homens, o que só veremos na continuação show more 'With Her in Our Land', notou a semelhança com o filme da Gerwig?
Só não dou 5 estrelas para esse livro porque Gilman comete alguns pecadilhos de sua época como mencionar arianismo e frenologia, para uma mulher tão inteligente não escapar dessas bobagens é desabonador. show less

Herland was a curious read. Perhaps if you're making a study of feminist literature over the past 100 years it might be something worth reading. As something fun to read, I'd say don't bother. Part treatise for Charlotte Perkins Gilman's vision for a feminist utopia, where for various reasons men no longer exist and women have evolved to reproduce by parthenogenesis, and part Boy's Own Adventure with a bizarre fixation on the usefulness of garments with many pockets, I was bored by most of it. I didn't share Gilman's ideal, particularly not one where there exists a form of eugenics that prevents those deemed 'unfit' from bearing children or, if they are permitted to reproduce, from raising their offspring in order to prevent their show more 'unfit' traits being normalised. In some ways the writing was quite clumsy and I had to remind myself of when it was written, how different women's lives were 100 years ago, and the broader point Gilman was trying to hammer home. In other ways, it was clever - the switch in perspective so that the three adventuring men who try to enter the matriarchal society have a similar experience to that of the women trying to break down the gender barriers of American patriarchal society at the time Gilman was writing, and the way they become increasingly fixed on their appearance as a way of asserting their masculinity, having been robbed, as they see it, of their natural male authority. Gilman did a reasonable job of inhabiting the minds of the male characters, even if they were a little broadly sketched. Terry is utterly unlikeable, a misogynist pig of the highest order. Van, the narrator, is a social scientist and therefore tries to approach everything rationally. Jeff is the eager to please, optimistic one, always looking for the good in everything, always trying to give people what he thinks they want. The men are like something out of a Ripping Yarn, though, and I wonder whether Gilman tried to create male characters that men would want to read, in the hope that her allegorical tale would then open their eyes to the lot of women. Some things left a bad taste - the eugenics I've mentioned, but also the attitude to people of different racial heritage, all described as savages, all portrayed as simple and child-like. I read up on Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Yeah. Bit of a white supremacist. It both horrifies and confuses me that people who see themselves as a minority in terms of gender or sexuality can still view the colour of their skin as a symbol of superiority. Even setting those misgivings aside, the book was preachy, blinkered and not to my taste. I am a feminist. I believe that all humans are equal and therefore women should have equal rights and equal access to the same opportunities in life as men, and should be judged on ability and not on looks or some twisted idea of what is or isn't feminine behaviour. I think Gilman believed that, too. Where she loses me in this book is in advocating for a world where equality is achieved by eliminating everyone who doesn't fit a central idea of perfection. show less

An audio book that kept my mind focused while I worked, I enjoyed entertaining the notion of a land inhabited only by women.

After reading The Yellow Wallpaper in grad school, I felt drawn to this novel-length work. The reader made the narrative engaging, but the adventurous storyline merely served as a framework for a less-nuanced (though humorous, and occasionally insightful) examination of the differences of men and women.

Several times during story the I longed for a book club discussion. How well did the writer understand the thinking of men? Would she hold motherhood as the highest possible calling for women if she wrote the story today? Why does the story end so abruptly?

A worthy diversion when the mind tends to wander.