Timeless Reflections: Gender, Otherness, and the Legacy of Herland

Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland, originally published in serial form in her magazine The Forerunner between 1915 and 1916, stands as one of the first English language utopian texts to lay gender identity, inequality and women’s rights at the center of discussion. Set in an isolated society made up solely of women, the reader follows three male explorers as they stumble upon this hidden civilisation and are forced to reevaluate their own world views and initial skepticism over what an all-female universe may entail.

Utopia with a wink

Utopian narratives, rather than presenting an ideal society, develop parodic universes to criticise our own understanding of human structures: they stand as the dichotomous companions of dystopias. And though dystopia essentially means “bad place”, utopia, by its Greek derivation, signifies “no place” or “nowhere”. In other words, to count as a utopia, an imaginary place must be an expression of desire; it will intrinsically manifest fear. We see this in Herland, where Gilman focuses less on the perfections of her utopian world and more on the glaring inadequacy of the male visitors’ response once they bump into this isolated community.

Gilman provides insights into her own society’s faults by presenting a different alternative and focusing more explicitly on the shortcomings of her own world than most utopian narratives at the time, curiously portraying a closer example of Thomas More’s original work (Utopia, 1516). The focus is not on how Herland is set up, but on the flaws of the three main characters’ nation, standing in as a reflection of their patriarchal society as a whole. Gilman’s creative power lies in her ability to utilise many societal and literary ideas and conventions from the early twentieth century and rewrite them into Herland so as to challenge their norm.

A looking glass

Most conspicuously, by having men carry the readers through the narrative, Gilman provides a space to explore a world with no real reference to men, as a commentary on a world run predominantly with no real reference to women. Gender equality has never fully existed, so it must be imagined if it is to become a subject of conscious thought and discussion, calling for a construction of an utopian model where three men must be uniquely surrounded by women for them to candidly communicate with them. The novella stands not as a practical alternative to society, but rather highlights the issues of contemporary reality by an offering up a completely different alternative to be discussed; the absurdity of Herland’s dialogue, exclusive to women, is a looking glass into that of patriarchal societies.

What is more, the “peculiar imprisonment” in which the three visitors find themselves after arriving to Herland, where they experience an overbearing imprisonment and monitoring, bespeaks of the experience of women of Gilman’s social class at the start of the twentieth century, where they are not tied down per se, but have no concrete agency (after all, what’s peculiar about the imprisonment is in fact their experience of it as men); here, a direct allegory towards Gilman’s universe is seen, where the narrator relates that they found themselves “much in the position of the suffragette trying to get to the Parliament buildings through a tripe cordon of London police”. This further stands as a direct attack on the infantalisation of American women at the time, where rest cures for mentally ill women involved confining them to bed, feeding them, and banning any form of mental stimulation, reconciling them to their normative gender roles as wives and mothers, a clever ring to her more popular work, The Yellow Paper.

Adventurism and colonial mapping

Gilman rewrites the trope of adventurism and colonial mapping celebrated in early twentieth century literature and established as utopian convention, where explorers find an undiscovered state (or, rediscovered by people foreign to its nature), their alienation from their country allowing for its criticism. A form of patriarchal egocentricism is introduced as the three explorers translate and compare Herland as an excision of their own experiences. Terry –the character that most disrupts the society and a representation of the more polarised version of their patriarchy– jokingly nicknames the nation Herland, innately following a colonial system of signification where explorers must claim something for themselves, imposing a name that is, in its use of the possessive pronoun, allusive, for it continues the practices and systems of private property and of possession men have come to expect.

We never find out what the women call their own community, or even if they have a set name for it, for country-naming in this sense poses a colonial venture a nation with no exposure to other societies would have no need for. By using English in its naming, the visitors translate Herland’s culture into their own understanding of society, following an orientalist sense of ownership and discovery where everything is measured against the standard of the West and anything else is immediately categorised as inferior –it seems that they only way the men can comprehend human practices is through an established systematic hierarchy, something so utterly foreign to Herland’s community. Perhaps because of this Herland’s inward-looking science, where they are curious not in a colonial sense where they wish to dominate the men’s civilisation but in ways they may use the example to improve their own system, seems so antithetical.

There must be men

On a similar note, the visitors’ prejudices are shown through their “idle speculation” where the three characters, originally presented as different from one another in their nature and disposition, are here united in not being able to imagine a society run by women, as conversations focus on setting up Herland in opposition to the status quo, showing how limited their views and imagination (despite their educational background and knowledge) are –”why, this is a civilized country! (…) There must be men”. The dismissal of any other culture different to a dominant norm as something “awfully primitive” directly reflects the gender inequalities and faults of their own nation, where even their conception of a possibly developed community is that of a “nunnery”, where within a hierarchy this female habitat would still ultimately be led by a man.

Pockets of freedom

Throughout the novella there is great focus on the physical description of women, curiously directed towards the freedom of their movement. All described clothing is practical, dedicated to liberate and ease their movement, shocking and surprising the visitors enough to be a repeated commentary throughout the narrator’s retelling of his adventures. Ample descriptions of pockets as a practical aspect of clothing anchor this idea and take on a symbolic meaning: pockets become gendered spaces, where the lack of such suggests the boundaries which operated upon women. Standing in direct juxtaposition, women’s fashion in the 1910s, aside from being designed to accentuate the figure and please the male gaze, severely restricted movement and slowly deformed their ribcages, hindering their physical fitness and acting as another form of imposed control and imprisonment from patriarchal customs and standards. Faced with this idea, we are brought to question the way in which clothing is so tied to unquestioned conventions–clothing in the men’s world was something completely dependent on class, where restrictive clothing acted as a status symbol, a foreign concept not only in Herland, but also in the lower echelons of twentieth century society.

Humble in the Face of Our Own Darkness

The three visitors, once united in their inability to imagine a society not just run solely by women but more scientifically developed and curated than theirs, conclude their journey with a shared dismay over their home country, despite their differences and previous reactions to the all-female community. Through their exploration of Herland, all they find are the grave faults of their system (“as I looked into these methods and compared them with our own, my strange uncomfortable sense of race-humility grew apace”; “none of us were willing to tell the women of Herland about the evils of our own beloved land”). All in all, the beauty of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland is not the utopian female community, but rather the focus it brings upon the inequalities of the narrator’s own patriarchal society; the protagonists’ masculinity allows the reader to explore the world with foreign and, most importantly, critical eyes.

By Gadea Vega Andión