Review: Herland

Herland by Charlotte Perkins Gilman
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

There will be one major spoiler in this review.

"Herland" is a feminist utopian novel, and a satire of both gender norms and early sci-fi/adventure novels. Charlotte Perkins Gilman is perhaps better known for "The Yellow Wallpaper," a quasi-biographical story of a woman who is diagnosed as insane by her doctor husband, confined to a room, and denied access to writing and reading materials. "Herland" builds upon Perkins Gilman's experiences, widens their scope, laughs at them, all in the guise of a serious adventure novel. The narrator is a young explorer and sociologist, traveling with his two friends (one a mechanic and rich explorer who is known to be *successful* with the ladies, and the other a poet/doctor who idolizes women from afar), when they find what is rumored to be an all-female society hidden in remote mountains. They are almost immediately captured by the women, but not as dangerous prisoners - as the first men the women have encountered in 2000 years, the women want to see whether they can successfully reintegrate with men and become a "bi-sexual" society. None of the men can actually believe that there are no men in this society. It takes a surprisingly long time for them to accept that (and if this hadn't been billed as an "all-female utopia" I probably would've had a hard time believing, too), but the women eventually explain that when almost all of their men died in a war/natural disaster/uprising that also cut off the only passage out of the mountain range, one woman spontaneously developed parthogenesis, and all of them are descended from that woman.

That premise provides a particularly interesting backdrop for their society. They can all reproduce as often as they please, and they grew from a society that didn't think it would ever have children and so value motherhood, but they have very limited resources. What results is a tightly controlled and incredibly productive civilization. Every woman is allowed to have one child (with rare exceptions in both directions for those who are deemed unfit, don't desire motherhood, or have particularly valuable skill sets). Every bit of available land is planted with the most fruitful combination of trees. And the highest concern of every citizen is making the world better for their children and their children's children, and so on. The only downside is that without war or conflict between the sexes, their art and media are supposedly strange and uninteresting, at least from the narrator's perspective. It really is a utopia - for everyone except the men, who are unsettled, to say the least.

And that's where a lot of the humor comes from. The three men provide a kind of Goldilocks range of reactions to Herland. The poet thinks it's wonderful and far better than the world they come from, the rich Casanova thinks it's suffocating and strange and that all of the women are rude (since they don't react well to his "charm"), and the sociologist holds a middle ground. Even before they reach Herland, they project their beliefs about women onto what they think the society will be like.

I loved the humor in the story. There are some wonderfully satirical one-liners. My favorite went something along the lines of "These women were frustratingly reasonable." I also liked the value that Herland placed on education as a life-long process, one that doesn't happen in classrooms but in every facet of life. They don't leave it up to chance, though; every bit of their development is carefully planned, with even nursery rhymes and children's games crafted and readjusted as times goes on to better teach the children. And although I should have expected it, I was both surprised and intrigued by the climactic event of the novel (SPOILERS): after each of the men marry, they find sexual relations difficult as the women don't really know what sex *is* after all this time, and when the rich explorer has had enough waiting, he attempts to rape his wife. The rape is unsuccessful, and he is asked to leave. I loved that in a society that hasn't experienced sexual violence in 2000 years, the reaction was swift, severe, and completely calm. His wife fights back and calls for help, he is subdued, and while perhaps the expected reaction of the society may be to call for blood or rise up in anger, they simply decide that there's no room for such behavior and he has to leave. It's foreign and scary, but they don't react in fear or anger, just out of the best interests for their future and survival. Overall, this is a story about women working together to do what is best for themselves and their children, and even in this case, they hold to that.

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