The following is a draft of a little interpretive essay I have to do on Charlotte Perkins Gilman's 1915 feminist novel
Herland. I approached this with a fair amount of trepidation, as the subject matter is way outside my comfort zone. My last exposure to feminist thought was a "psychology of women" class back in 2005. It's crazy to realize that was seven years ago. Anyway, even there we certainly weren't talking about the feminism of the progressive era. So I freely admit that I don't really know what I'm talking about. But hopefully it's not too obvious.
In approaching the
text of Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Herland, we cannot assume
that we as modern readers have a good sense of her perspective simply
by knowing that she wrote a utopian feminist novel. A long distance
separates us from 1915. We are much more likely to be familiar with
feminism of a more recent vintage, one that is different from
Gilman's in important ways. It is not enough to know that Gilman is a
feminist and assume, because we know something of the 1970s, that we
understand her. While her novel certainly anticipates changes that
would come to American life in later decades, it also goes in some
surprising directions that are distinct from later feminist thought.
We must let it stand on its own terms, as a document written in 1915,
for a 1915 audience. Think of the flavor of the time: The Great War
had begun, D.W. Griffith's enormously popular racist epic The
Birth of A Nation was released that same year, and women were
still seeking the right to vote. Gilman wrote at a time in which
ideas we now find distasteful, from patriarchy to imperialism to
racism, were not just accepted but taken for granted.
Thus a fantasy
novel was an ideal device for Gilman, allowing her to upend the
assumptions of her readers through the less confrontational means of
storytelling, adventure, and humor. And make no mistake: the
assumptions she challenges were all too real. The three men in the
story appear to us as caricatures, though they were surely less so in
1915. In Terry, we see a “man's man,” one to whom women exist for
his pleasure, to be exploited. In Jeff we see a “tender soul” who
idolized women and sought to serve them. In Vandyck we have a logical
thinker, a social scientist who nonetheless carries numerous implicit
biases and assumptions about women and their place in the world. In
presenting these three archetypes, Gilman no doubt felt she had
covered the large majority of male opinion in the United States. And
as the men ponder what they might find in a land of females, their
assumptions surely echo what many an incredulous American male must
have thought about the idea of an all female society. Terry is
certain the country will be “awfully primitive,” since women
alone could not possibly build a complex civilization. It will be a
place so full of jealousy and infighting that Terry will “get
myself elected king in no time.”
Jeff imagines a “harmonious sisterhood...like a nunnery,” which,
Gilman makes clear, is in important ways as limiting and
condescending as Terry's more upfront sexism.
As for Van, with his sociological pretension, he believes that
perhaps the “primeval customs” of a group of women have survived
and warns that women of “that stage of culture are quite able to
defend themselves,” despite the obvious “physiological
limitations of the sex.”
In thus presenting
the basic assumptions of the day, Gilman is poised to turn them on
their head when the men arrive in Herland. The most baffling thing
for the trio of men is that while the people of Herland are
manifestly women, they do not seem to be properly feminine. They are
female, but they are not female in a way that the men readily
recognize, understand, or accept. They are strong, physically and
emotionally. They are capable and independent, yet united in
collective action. This leads to one of the central questions of the
book: why are these women this way? How is it that these people with
female bodies are so lacking in feminine charms? How is it that they
came to occupy a space so far outside the gender roles of 1915
America? Is it because the women of Herland, without the level-headed
influence of men, somehow managed to construct a twisted, artificial
environment that distorted women? Not at all; indeed it is precisely
the opposite. American society,
Gilman implies, is the artificial construct. American society does
the distorting and twisting.
This is a utopian
novel, but Gilman is not simply arguing for the remaking of society
as we see fit, for building an artificial construct that will be more
favorable to women. Rather, the utopia is achieved by not
constructing. It is achieved by allowing women to develop their
natural abilities. The women of Herland are the way they are because
they exist in a natural setting, not an artificial one. They are free
from the constraints of an artificially constructed patriarchy. For
the three men, patriarchy is natural. For the women of Herland (and
Gilman sides with them) equality is natural. What the men take to be
unchanging truths about human nature are, to Gilman, results of
women's subordination in American society, a subordination that is
itself an artificial edifice.
The contradiction
and hypocrisy of 1915 America, the basic unnaturalness of it, is
everywhere exposed and challenged. Terry, in exasperation says “these
women aren't womanly,” but Van concludes that the alluring
feminine graces “we are so fond of are not feminine at all, but
mere reflected masculinity – developed to please us because they
had to please us, and in no way essential to the real fulfillment of
their great process.”
When Jeff tells Celis she ought not carry anything, she looks out
over the fields of women working, at “the nearest town with its
women-built houses; down at the smooth, hard road we were walking on;
and then at the little basket he had taken from her,” and the utter
irrelevance of Jeff's chivalrous notions to a natural setting like
Herland are made plain.
And the threat to manliness, to patriarchy, could not be missed. For
what could these self-sufficient women need a man? Gilman has Van
say, “When a man has nothing to give a women, is dependent wholly
on his personal attraction, his courtship is under limitations.” In Gilman's view, it is not so much limiting the man as putting him
on a level playing field with women. Elsewhere when the men explain
that, of course, women wear frilly hats and take the man's name upon
getting married, the women of Herland simply ask if the men do the
same. The foreignness of these customs and simplicity with which the
women of Herland reject them put into powerful relief how arbitrary
and unnatural they are.
In Herland,
everything is utilitarian. The clothing is simple and comfortable,
their hair is short and practical. They breed cats, but only to take
care of the mice population. There is no sense of consumerism, for
they have everything they need, and what is the use of having more?
Rather than consumerism, there is a conscious effort to make
progress, to improve both oneself and the society at large for the
next generation. The women of Herland are efficient and strong, at
the very center of a sustainable drive toward progress. The women of
America, in contrast, are ornaments, appendages to a man's world of
competition and industry. With devastating simplicity, Gilman argues
that there is nothing natural or utilitarian about shunting to the
side half the population and consigning them to the home sphere. In
America there are “two life cycles: the man's and the woman's. To
the man there is growth, conquest, the establishment of his family,
and as much further success in gain or ambition as he can achieve. To
the woman, growth, the securing of a husband, the subordinate
activities of family life, and afterward such 'social' or charitable
endeavors as her position allows.” In Herland there “was but one
cycle, and that a large one.”
But perhaps there
is a point on which the three visitors and the women of Herland can
agree. What, after all, is more natural than motherhood, both in 1915
America and in Herland? Gilman presents motherhood as the defining
feature of Herland, but it is of a quite different sort than what
the men are accustomed to. Gilman has Van present a searing critique
of American motherhood and then contrasts it with the motherhood of
Herland: “They were Mothers, not in our sense of helpless
involuntary fecundity, forced to fill and overfill the land, every
land, and then see their children suffer, sin, and die, fighting
horrible wars with one another; but in the sense of Conscious Makers
of People. Mother-love with them was not a brute passion, a mere
“instinct,” a wholly personal feeling; it was – a religion.”
This religion rejected a patriarchal, vengeful God for a “Mother
Goddess” that we are told morphed into a sort of “maternal
pantheism” that made sense of their experience. “Here was Mother
Earth, bearing fruit. All that they ate was fruit of motherhood, from
seed or egg or their product. By motherhood they were born and by
motherhood they lived – life was, to them, just the long cycle of
motherhood.”
Thus they lived in a world without religious hierarchies, war,
competition, and aristocracies.
The motherhood
Gilman imagines is an organizing principle of the whole culture, so
that nothing is done without thinking of the children of the society.
It is not petty or provincial; it is cooperative and all encompassing
(indeed, so cooperative that only those considered fit are allowed to
give birth). Such a motherliness was foreign to Americans of 1915.
Gilman portrays the usual idea of motherhood as narrow, emotional,
and self-absorbed. But “A motherliness which dominated society,
which influenced every art and industry, which absolutely protected
all childhood, and gave to it the most perfect care and training, did
not seem motherly” to the visitors, Gilman says.
Gilman argues that precisely this sort of motherhood is natural. It
has only been obscured by the artificial constructs of a male
dominated society. A telling moment occurs toward the end of the book
as Van interacts with his new wife. He finds that “under all our
cultivated attitude of mind toward women, there is an older,
deeper, more 'natural' feeling, the restful reverence which looks up
to the Mother sex” (italics mine).
This emphasis on
mothers is an obvious critique of American patriarchy and motherhood,
but it is also an indictment of American capitalism. The mothers of
Herland are defined by their cooperative efforts to build up “the
race” (tellingly, Gilman makes sure to inform us that the women of
Herland are of Aryan stock) and make the land better for their
children. And as the men get to know the country better, it becomes
clear how well this cooperative approach has succeeded. The forests
are perfectly preserved and cultivated to produce food. The
infrastructure is solid and sustainable. The towns are clean and
picturesque. The women admit to having had criminals, but it was some
six hundred years ago. There is none of the environmental degradation
and social dislocation that, Gilman believes, competition produces.
The concept of private property is very limited. The men try to
explain that competition produces “stimulus to industry,” and
without it there would not be progress.
The women point out that surely a mother will provide for her
children without needing the spur of competition. Terry grants an
exception for that case, but argues that “the world's work was
different – that had to be done by men, and required the
competitive element.” But as they stood there in Herland, the evidence of progress, of the
“world's work” being done, was all around them.
In contrast to her
critique of patriarchy, which exposes the double-standards and
absurdities of 1915 America, Gilman is less sure-footed in her
promotion of cooperation as opposed to competition as the organizing
principle of labor in society. Certainly the abuses she notes are
real. The men are forced to admit that what they consider to be a
natural law of competition has led to war, poverty, child labor,
environmental damage, and more. The women of Herland can hardly
imagine these outcomes, much less believe them to be natural. Gilman
understood that competition could destroy. What good was competition
that drove men to heights of industry if the land was left unusable
for the next generation? So surely 1915 America was in need of a more
cooperative approach, one that thought more of future generations and
less of getting ahead at any cost. But Gilman appears to eschew
competition entirely, while making it a completely gendered
phenomenon. Men are competitive. Men have made the world an
unnatural, competitive place. Herland, freed from the influence of
men, has become collectivist and cooperative. But Gilman simply
asserts that cooperation works, without explaining how. Perhaps the
most optimistic of thinkers in 1915 could find this believable. But
in our post-soviet, post-collective farm era, it is more than a
little dubious to think that those cooperative efforts failed only
because they were infected with patriarchy, and not because of some
basic flaws in the practice of cooperation itself.
In our
post-imperial (for the most part) world, it is easier to see the
potency of Gilman's critique of social imperialism. For when major
powers like the United States pursued competitive practices, they did
not stop at their borders, and the consequences for smaller states
could be devastating. Gilman pointedly notes that when faced with
problem of overpopulation the women of Herland did not “start off
on predatory excursions to get more land from somebody else, or to
get more food from somebody else, to maintain their struggling
mass.”
This is a perfect summation of what the great powers of the day were
doing. One of the causes was a callous, chest-thumping patriotism.
She criticizes patriotism as Americans understood it, saying,
“Patriotism, red hot, is compatible with the existence of a neglect
of national interests, a dishonesty, a cold indifference to the
suffering of millions. Patriotism is largely pride, and very largely
combativeness. Patriotism generally has a chip on its shoulder.”
The women of Herland, in contrast, had a love of country that sought
the good of everyone in it, without infringing on those beyond its
borders.
Gilman's critique
is at its most potent when discussing the implications of marriage.
When the three men each marry a women of Herland, problems
immediately arise. Despite being in Herland for months, the men still
approach their marriages with the expectations of 1915 America. One
could argue that in the developing consumer culture of the United
States, these expectations dictated that women were just the most
valuable consumer item. Early in the book Van says, “'women' in the
abstract is young, and, we assume, charming. As they get older they
pass off the stage, somehow, into private ownership mostly, or
out of it altogether” (italics mine).It describes a dynamic hardly different from the latest consumer
product with its short life span. When asked what exactly a wife is,
Terry responds that “A wife is a women who belongs to a man.”Van relates the universally understood idea of what happens upon
getting married: “He goes on with his business, and she adapts
herself to him and to it.”But why should it not be the other way around? Van concludes that
much of their difficulty stemmed from having “no sense
of...possession” over their wives.Gilman clearly reveals the double standard and has nothing but scorn
for a marriage structure in which men cannot feel satisfied without a
sense of entitlement and ownership within the relationship.
In reading Herland,
a broad question arises that may at first seem obvious or silly but
is actually at the heart of Gilman's argument. In writing her utopia,
why did Gilman make it all female? She makes it abundantly clear that
Herland is a society in which men are not needed. Does that mean that
Gilman believes the world would be a better place without men? Not at
all. Rather, in making Herland all female Gilman intends to present a
mirror image of 1915 America. Consider Van's reflections at the end
of the book:
When
we say men, man, manly, manhood, and all
the other masculine derivatives, we have in the background of our
minds a huge vague crowded picture of the world and all its
activities. To grow up and “be a man,” to act like a man” –
the meaning and connotation is wide indeed. That vast background is
full of marching columns of men, of changing lines of men, of long
processions of men; of men steering their ships into new seas,
exploring unknown mountains, breaking horses, herding cattle,
ploughing and sowing and reaping, toiling at the forge and furnace,
digging in the mine, building roads and and bridges and high
cathedrals, managing great businesses, teaching in all the colleges,
preaching in all the churches; of men everywhere, doing everything –
“the world.” And when we say women, we think of female
– the sex.
So it is not quite
right to think of Herland as a country without men. In a literal
sense, of course it is true that men are not there. But the larger
point is that Herland is a country in which men are invisible and
unnecessary, as 1915 America is a country in which women are pushed
to the side and not needed. In the end, what Gilman wants is to move
beyond this dehumanization, this marginalization where “woman”
simply means female, wife, feminine. She envisions a world in which
the word “woman” connotes full personhood, a full range of life
potential and possibilities. Much has changed in the decades since
Herland was written. One imagines that if Gilman could glimpse
the present day she would find cause for both celebration and
disappointment.