Feminists

demmiblue

(37,849 posts) Mon Jan 2, 2017, 02:58 PM Jan 2017

Im With Herland

Source: Good

In 1915, five years before women in the United States won the right to vote, American author Charlotte Perkins Gilman published Herland, a sui generis piece of steampunk speculative fiction about a fantasy feminist utopia. When I discovered the all-but-forgotten novel when it was reissued in 2014, I expected an unintentionally funny, naively futuristic throwback to a bygone time. Instead, I discovered a scorchingly relevant Victorian take on the narrative roots of patriarchal oppression, which became, unfortunately, even more relevant post-election.

The story begins with narrator Vandyck “Van” Jennings, a smug gentleman-adventurer who joins a far-flung expedition to bring “civilization” to “savages,” because it’s the late 19th century, and that’s what all the cool kids are doing. Van has tagged along with his old school friends, Terry O. Nicholson and Jeff Margrave, an investor/explorer and a doctor, respectively, who like him were brought up on thrilling tales of manifest destiny and cultural imperialism. When their native guides allude to a mythical land populated only by women, the trio break off from the group to go find it, each envisioning a world that reflects their individual idea of “womanhood” and their particular brand of sexism: hostile, benevolent, and ambivalent.

Terry, a misogynistic, narcissistic bully whom Van describes as “rich enough to do as he pleased,” expects a country of beautiful, acquiescent, sexually liberated young girls, free enough from societal constraints to have fun with, but not so free as to be equal. Jeff, a cartoonishly idealistic Southern gentleman doctor “born to be a poet or a botanist,” imagines a land full of gentle, doe-eyed angels with cherubic babies bouncing at their sides at all times. Van, meanwhile, sees himself as the most “scientific” of the three, arguing “learnedly about the physiological limitations of the sex.”

All three expect what they've begun referring to as “Herland” to be “uncivilized,” an untamed, Arcadian expression of women’s inborn nature—whether sexy girl, saintly mommy, or fascinating, if vaguely repulsive, biological “other” to be studied and classified. If there’s one thing the men can all agree on, it’s that there will be nothing rationally, functionally, technologically, morally, or politically superior about a society made up only of women and girls. “We seemed to think that if there were men we could fight them, and if there were only women,” Van describes in the book, “why they would be no obstacle at all.”

The novel begins as a mansplaining epic: an exegesis about an ancient race of self-reproducing, parthenogenetic women, mothers all, who evolved over 2,000 years to produce one baby girl apiece, as authoritatively explicated by a guy who literally just met them. The first people Van, Terry, and Jeff encounter upon arriving in Herland are three lithe, flirtatious, teenage girls swinging from the trees. Ellador, Celis, and Alima are nothing like the girls back home; they are “erect serene, standing sure-footed and light as any pugilist.” The men follow them into town and soon find themselves surrounded by a cadre of older women—“old Colonels,” Terry calls them—who nonviolently block their path and escort them to their rooms. (“We found ourselves much in the position of the suffragette trying to get to the Parliament buildings through a triple cordon of London police,” Van says.)