Herland Read online

  In Moving the Mountain men and women learn to live together in a humanist-socialist world. In Herland women have created a utopia without men at all. Again this world is unfolded through male eyes and a male consciousness, not in the traditional manner of a dialogue, but through the dramatic confrontation that occurs when three American men stumble on an all-female society. Most utopias create worlds that are elevating but bland, a paradise without sparkle. Moving the Mountain creates such a place, but Herland soars. Gilman romps through the game of what is feminine and what is masculine, what is manly and what is womanly, what is culturally learned and what is biologically determined male-female behavior. Her belief in the power of humans to alter their societies and to control nature in their own interest is carried out literally in Herland, where parthenogenic births producing only girl children demonstrate that where there’s a will, there’s a way.

  The focus of the new society is the New Motherhood, children being the central most important fact. As in Moving the Mountain, child-rearing is an honored profession permitted only highly trained specialists. Women like Gilman herself, who had difficulty with mothering (though she loved her daughter), could live comfortably in such a place. In the mother-daughter relationship, as it is examined in Herland, Gilman demonstrates how the marketplace notions of individualism distort the most intimate human relationships; she offers instead a world in which a genuine sense of community triumphs and is expressed in richer, more gratifying human relations. The women of Herland have such an all-encompassing community that the “limitations of a wholly personal life were inconceivable.” Their children do not have surnames, for example. (In the transitional state in Moving the Mountain, the daughters take their mothers’ names, the boys their fathers’.) Artists sign their works of art but not their children because “the finished product is not a private one.”

  The sentimentalized home, which Gilman saw as a prison from which children and women must flee, is blithely eliminated in Herland. Instead, there is real privacy for the individual, and there is genuine community. (Gilman’s views on home as the socializer of inequity and inhumanity still elicit more fury than any of her other heretical ideas.)

  Herland opens with its three male adventurers in full agreement that such a superior society inevitably presupposes men. With a characteristic mischievousness, Gilman makes the man of reason, Vandyck Jennings, a sociologist by profession. Van uses his scientific knowledge to argue “learnedly” about the well-known physiological limitations of women. It is Van who says, at the start, “This is a civilized country …. There must be men.” Noting the agility of the women scampering up trees, he establishes the absolute truth: “inhabitants evidently arboreal.” So much for Gilman’s belief in both the neutrality and the wisdom of science. Van’s conversion is almost complete by the end of the story, when he admits that he is now “well used to seeing women not as females, but as people; people of all sorts, doing every kind of work.”

  The women of Herland have no way of relating to the men other than as friends. They do not understand the words “lover” or “home” or “wife,” and the process by which they learn the meanings of these concepts is filled with good humor. Three women become deeply fond of these men and agree to “marry” them, though they have no sense of sexual love or passion. “Two thousand years of disuse had left very little of the instinct …. ‘We are not like the women of your country,’ the men are told. ‘We are Mothers, and we are People, but we have not specialized in this line.’” Indeed, the women have no interest in the men sexually except as potential fathers, which distresses the men. Sexuality is subjected to the same treatment as are all other social values, as part of our primarily cultural, not biological, package.

  With wide-eyed innocence and simple reason, the Herland women expose the hideousness of much that to us is commonplace. The possibilities for cavorting are unending, and Gilman delightfully ridicules much conventional wisdom through the twelve chapters. The women of Herland do not understand why someone else’s name should be taken after marriage; why dead bodies should be put in the ground to decay; why long hair is considered womanly by men when only male lions and male buffaloes have manes and only men in China wear queues; why loved pets are imprisoned on a leash and why they are allowed to bite children and why they are permitted to leave their wastes on streets where people walk; what women in the outside world do all day long if they do not work; why women with the fewest children seem to have the most servants; why a God of love and wisdom has left a legacy of sacrifice, the devil, and damnation; why God is personalized at all—they do not believe in a Big Woman somewhere but rather a Pervading Power, an Indwelling Spirit, a Maternal Pantheism; why people who are emotionally ill, such as criminals, are punished, when people who are physically ill are not; why ideas from thousands of years ago should be cherished and honored.

  The men find it odd being treated not as men, but as people; and we realize, by contrast, how much of human behavior is sex-oriented. In their “marriages,” the men miss not sex so much as the sense of possession. Terry, the super-macho exploiter of women, complains that even the young and beautiful women are unfeminine because they lack qualities of deference, girlish charm, and fragility. To Van also these women are without seductive appeal, because femininity, he realizes for the first time, is a creation meant to satisfy men’s wishes. He discovers that his life is without sexual tension, although he is constantly surrounded by women, because they are not in any way provocative in manner or dress. Sexual tension, which is the backdrop for male-female relations, even ostensibly nonsexual ones, has no reality in Herland.

  With time and some pain, Van discovers that the comradeship and intimacy he establishes with Ellador does indeed reduce the mystery of sexual allure. When their relationship is finally consummated, their love is so deep that sexual pleasure becomes simply a part of their larger feeling. Gilman was not alone among feminists in asserting that the strategy of sexual freedom led to another form of female subordination.

  With Her in Ourland, the sequel, follows Van and Ellador as they tour our world just after the outbreak of the Great War. She, with her disarming logic, causes Van, and presumably the reader, to see the world afresh. But where Herland skips and sprints, Ourland trudges. Didacticism often seems inevitable in the genre of utopia. Still, as a vehicle for Gilman’s opinions, Ourland is interesting.

  Many of Van’s cherished beliefs are laid bare, as this bit of dialogue illustrates:

  “But Ellador,” I protested, “why do you say—‘the male Scandinavians continually indulged in piracy,’ and ‘the male Spaniards practiced terrible cruelties,’ and so on? It sounds so—invidious—as if you were trying to make out a case against men.”

  “Why, I wouldn’t do that for anything!” she protested. “I’m only trying to understand the facts. You don’t mind when I say ‘the male Phoenicians made great progress in navigation,’ or ‘the male Greeks developed great intelligence,’ do you?”

  “That’s different,” I answered. “They did do those things.”

  “Didn’t they do the others, too?”

  “Well—yes—they did them, of course; but why rub it in that they were exclusively males?”

  “But weren’t they, dear? Really? Did the Norse women raid the coasts of England and France? Did the Spanish women cross the ocean and torture the poor Aztecs?”

  “They would have if they could!” I protested.

  “So would the Phoenician women and Grecian women in the other cases—wouldn’t they?”

  I hesitated.

  Ellador observes that democracy is not possible in the United States so long as class inequities are tolerated: “What united action can you expect between Fifth Avenue and Avenue A?” she asks. The socialism of Herland, she quickly points out, is, however, of native origin. “No German-Jewish economist” was needed to explain in “interminable and … uncomprehensible prolixity … why it was better to work together for [the] common good.”

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nbsp; On the home: “A man does not have to stay in it all day long in order to love it; why should a woman?” As for the women, “the poor, dragging, deadweights … you had manufactured,” she says to Van, “they must be turned into world-building people by being freed from their demeaning domestic position. Motherhood is venerated in your world, as it is in Herland, but with you it is used to confine women and children, not help them grow.” Ellador observes authoritarianism in many guises and she muses on its long history: “God says so—the King or the captain says so—the Book says so—and back of it all, the Family, the Father-Boss.”

  One might wonder what prompted Ellador to leave her home in the first place. Her mission was twofold: eventually, to spread news of the “local exhibit” that Herland represents; more immediately, to educate Herlanders about what they call the “bi-sexuality” of the outside world. “It must be best or it would not have been evolved in all the higher animals,” reasons Ellador, with unfaltering Darwinian logic. The women of Herland have “made a nice little safe clean garden place and lived happily in it.” But it is the men of the outside, driven by greed, lust, and aggression, who have nevertheless built, explored, discovered, and “gone all over the world and civilized it.” When both strains—the male and the female—are balanced properly, then truly will the world be a glorious place.

  Gilman’s views of immigrants, blacks, and Jews, however typical of her time and place, are sometimes unsettling and sometimes offensive, though characteristically clever. The Jewish people, Ellador explains to Van, “seem not to have passed the tribal stage,” as demonstrated by their inability to establish a separate nation. Their consequent alien position makes them distrusted and disliked. They also cling to the notion of being a chosen people, making them even less lovable as a group. Since their special cultural talent is in literary expression, they were able to give permanent form to their belief in their own superiority. Finally, intermarriage, which has sustained the Jewish community, has given a “peculiar intensity to the Jewish character—a sort of psychic inbreeding.” Jews are a “world-people,” who can “enrich the world with their splendid traits,” says Ellador, if only they are willing to drop the “long-nursed bunch of ancient mistakes.” Ultimately, Ellador feels, assimilation is probably the best solution. As for the “race prejudice” to which Jews are subjected, Ellador tells Van that “you will have to bring up your children without that,” just as the Jews will have to eliminate their characteristics which the whole world dislikes.

  On the matter of immigrants, Gilman is just this side of xenophobic, and sometimes her foot slips badly. Genuine democracy will not be achieved in the United States, Ellador comments, on the basis of an “ill-assorted and unassimilable mass of human material,” not immigrants, “but victims, poor ignorant people scraped up by paid agents, deceived by lying advertisements, brought over here by greedy American ship owners and employers of labor.” From a reasoned objection to the exploitation of unskilled immigrant workers, Ellador moves to a notion of stages of development, suggesting that “only some races—or some individuals in a given race—have reached the democratic stage.”

  Ellador’s hope for America’s future rests with the “swift growing” women’s movement and labor movement, which will ultimately lead the people to socialism, “the most inclusive forward-looking system.” Gilman’s Utopian fantasies are addressed not only to the population at large, but to the socialist and women’s movements in an attempt to persuade each to alter its strategy to encompass the goals of the other.

  While Van’s conversion is a major theme in Herland and its sequel, even Ellador, splendid as she is, grows with new experiences. By the end of Ourland, Ellador proudly announces: “At first I thought of men just as males—a Herlander would, you know. Now I know that men are people, too, just as much as women are.”

  Several utopias have espoused the rights or exposed the plight of women—Charles Brockden Brown’s Alcuin, published in 1798, is an early example—but few utopias were written by women. Even those few rarely view women’s situation in any special way. For instance, San Salvador (1892)3 by Mary Agnes Tincker is a conventional Utopian romance concerning a colony of Christian idealists who maintain their perfection by isolating themselves from the rest of the world. M. Louise Moore, in Al-Modad (1892), describes her protagonist’s adventures among slave traders and Africans, and includes the inevitable shipwreck that carries him to a “fertile twilight land, peopled by bouyant, blue-eyed youths.” Zebina Forbush, in The Co-opiltan: A Story of the Cooperative Commonwealth of Idaho (1898), examines a fictional community in operation from 1897 to 1919, whose model of a successful nationalist experiment inspires the rest of the nation to follow its example, but there is nothing particularly feminist about her world. Carolina A. Mason, with a sad but more realistic story, A Woman of Yesterday (1900), describes a typical failure of a Utopian community, but again without any particular emphasis on women.

  Mary Griffith’s Three Hundred Years Hence, published in 1836, has many qualities that Looking Backward was to incorporate fifty years later. Edgar Hastings is buried after a volcanic eruption and remains in suspended animation until he awakens in Philadelphia three hundred years later. Griffith’s utopia is unusual because she describes the much improved status of women in the new Philadelphia, women having been responsible for the major social reforms. Unhappily, Hastings discovers the new world was all a dream.

  Mary E. Bradley Lane’s Mizora, published in 1890, is the only self-consciously feminist utopia published before Herland that I have been able to locate. It is an utterly preposterous story. An all-woman world of blond, physically powerful women, who appear to have been fashioned after Brünhilde, was created when the discovery of “the Secret of Life” made it possible to eliminate all men. It is a thin-lipped, well-bred, upper-class world where the women adorn themselves with jewels and highly decorative clothing, and dinner is prepared and served by servants in private homes that are large and magnificant. The author’s claim that this world is without class privilege, that intellect is the only standard of excellence, that “the benevolent and ever-willing Science” is the “goddess who has led us out of ignorance and superstition; out of degradation and disease,” is something less than convincing, even as an imaginative creation.

  The Utopian novel as a literary form seems to be going through a rebirth as a uniquely feminist expression at the present, with such books as Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time (1976), Joanna Russ’s The Female Man (1975), Ursula Le Guin’s The Dispossessed (1974), Dorothy Bryant’s The Kin of Ata Are Waiting for You (published in 1971 as The Comforter), and Mary Staton’s From the Legend of Biel (1975). Many of the ideas in these books are reminiscent of notions expressed in Herland: class equality; some kind of communal child-rearing; absence of privilege by sex; freedom from fear of male violence; elimination of sex-linked work; the mother-child relationship and the idealized home as models for social institutions; and the use of persuasion and consensus to maintain social order. But the contemporary fictional worlds are so much in the arena of the fantastic, in the genre of science fiction, that as a new kind of feminist expression they are in important ways not comparable to the classic Utopian form.4

  Whatever the differences in style and substance among classic utopias, they seem to follow, more or less, one of three models: Plato’s Republic, Thomas More’s Utopia, or Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis. Plato’s ideal state improves vastly, from his perspective, upon a world that was exceedingly familiar in its premises and hierarchical structure. His Republic, created in a time of social disintegration that followed the Peloponnesian War, runs on strict principles of discipline and justice. Except for a reserve of women who provide the basis of communal marriage, there is little in Plato’s world that is especially unusual. Major human flaws, such as avarice and indolence, are gone, and people work without compulsion in their assigned place in a class system composed of rulers, warriors, and workers; but the external world in which Plato l
ived is re-created remarkably as it was. Both More’s Utopia and Bacon’s New Atlantis attempt to alter society greatly, to create fresh institutions and relationships, and introduce entirely different habits. More’s Utopia, created some two thousand years after Plato’s, projects a glorious vision of a place in which our natural inclinations and virtues flourish. More introduces paradise fashioned in harmony with nature, good being defined as that which is natural. Bacon’s New Atlantis uses science to resolve social problems, and technology to provide the basis for a good life. It is not difficult to place Samuel Butler’s satiric Erewhon, which is a commentary on English life designed more to exasperate than to uplift; or H. G. Wells’s A Modern Utopia, which, for all its imagination, projects an unusual note of reality with its disciplined class system, in the tradition of Plato; or William Morris’s News from Nowhere, with its central concern of work as a creative act; the sentimentalized Lost Horizon; or other pastoral visions in the second tradition. Bellamy’s Looking Backward is typical of nineteenth-century utopias and twentieth-century science-fiction works that seek progress through technology. There should also be some miscellaneous category for anti-utopian utopias like Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and George Orwell’s 1984; if More’s word is to mean both “nowhere” and the “ideal place,” their bleak notions of what is to come are a grim challenge.

  However, Gilman’s Herland does not quite fit any category, and it may be profitable to look briefly at some of the qualities—aside from her feminism—that distinguish her Utopian aims. The mission of a utopia is to provide a speculative vision of the desired goal of human existence. Most utopias create new social structures to embody those ends. Gilman’s concern, however, is primarily with human consciousness—what the people will look like and do, how and why they are different and better. The physical world is a natural creation of these new people.