It's Always Sunny in Herland
a book review by Ruben Schaer
Overview
"Herland", written in 1915 by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, tells us the story of three male explorers on a peculiar expedition. The explorers discover a secluded and undisturbed country inhabited by an ancient, all-female civilization. Invited to stay, the men slowly assimilate into the novel culture of Herland, but not without effort.
The general theme of the book revolves around the traditional male perspective on femininity clashing with a culture comprised of strong, independent women that evolved without having to define their identity in relation to another sex. As much as the women of Herland are different from their contemporaries, so are their cultural institutions. The nature of both Herland's religion and educational philosophy are clearly at odds with their respective counterparts in the Victorian West.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman practices tasteful but potent social criticism by presenting us this inspiring alternative world that still contrasts strongly with the world we live in. Her vision of the strong, independent woman is a rousing reminder that power comes from within before it is granted by others.
About Herland
The country of Herland is described as geographically isolated, about the size of Holland, and populated by 3 million women. Gilman sets the stage for the perfect civilization with a lot of "perfect" preconditions. The geography, flora and fauna, climate and weather provide an abundance of resources in absence of competition or environmental challenges. The civilization inhabiting Herland has eradicated poverty, disease, war and crime. Herland is scientifically advanced, but without much visible technology: industrial parks with factories and smokestacks are nowhere to be found.
Herland is pristine: "a land in a state of perfect cultivation, where even the forests looked as if they were cared for, a land that looked like an enormous park, only it was even more evidently an enormous garden." [quote, Herland, p.11]
The people of Herland are parthenogenetic: the women reproduce without a man fertilizing the ovum, and have been doing so for 2,000 years. The women are a united, egalitarian sisterhood without traditional family units. Their religion is described as a form of "maternal pantheism": worshiping a holy cycle of transcendental motherhood; to love and nurture their natural world and all the children born in it. No vengeful god, eternal damnation or commandments written in stone.
The society is highly organized: education, industry, agriculture, even childrearing, are all managed by specialists. Herlanders, very literate in "the scientific method", aim for resource optimization and efficiency and constantly try to improve their methods in all respective fields. Driven by that desire for progress and perfection, the women apply social engineering and eugenics to create ever better citizens. For example, children are not raised by their biological mothers, but by skilled expert mothers. The intent is to negate the risk of inexperienced mothers hampering the ideal development of their children.
Noteworthy from an anthropological perspective: societies that emerge in isolated areas with little competition for resources and little environmental challenge or change, tend to stay static in their technological and social development. The kind of desire for efficiency and resource optimization ascribed to Herlanders is a trait more commonly found among cultures that emerge in areas where essential environmental factors are unpredictable, resources are limited and competition assured.
Education in Herland utilizes the children's natural curiosity and playfulness: all toys and games are designed as teaching devices. Knowledge is made available, but is not force-fed. Much of the education takes place outdoors where the children organically acquire the skills and knowledge necessary to eventually become productive citizens. Once children enter their teenage years, they start training under a specialist. The specialist prepares the young women to enter the work force in an area most suited to their specific interests and abilities.
The women brought forth by this culture can be described as super human: all intelligent, well educated, possessing any number of skills, all healthy and of great physical prowess. The women field all the traditional virtues: honesty, loyalty, patriotism, selflessness, strength, beauty, industriousness, curiosity, self-esteem, integrity; the list goes on. Certain passages of the book mention that there have been isolated cases of imperfect women, or imperfect behavior, but such occurrences are kept low by their "superior understanding of psychology" and by encouraging women with undesirable traits to not reproduce. The greatest social challenge to Herland is overpopulation, which they avoid through a one-child policy and a form of mentally induced birth-control.
Despite Gilman being a passionate feminist, she doesn't take to judging and criticizing "man" outright: she creates the impression that the women of Herland are fascinated by the three men and the prospect of returning their society to include both sexes. Gilman lets her women frequently state how much better and more whole the world outside must be, having both genders and all the people of the world to draw on for social and cultural progress. Even as Herlanders do come to know the less admirable reality of the world surrounding them, the women Gilman envisions do not lower them selves to petty judgmentalism.
Instead of being argumentative, the author elegantly uses the male lead character, Van, as her truth-bearer: he narrates the entire story and illustrates to the reader the stark contrast between the paradisical Herland and the oppressive Victorian West, underscoring the evident disparity between the worlds ruled by each gender.
Through Van, Gilman describes the outside world as a multitude of divided, competing cultures; all countries suffering from social inequality, unemployment, corruption, poverty, violence, crime and war; that the women of the West are property of their husbands, their life reduced to getting married, managing the house and birthing children; that the men are the dominant gender and entitled to all women and their services. Such is the experiential reality that informs the three explorers' initial attitude towards the women of Herland. The reader gets to observe the three protagonists as they slowly adapt to the foreign culture and become "better men" in the process of it.
Sexuality
A lot less radical and very much in accordance with Victorian values is Charlotte Gilman's account of sexuality in Herland, namely the absence there of. The idea that there is any point to sexuality beyond reproduction, much less mutual pleasure, is utterly discounted. The story attempts to reform the men, each eventually marrying a Herlander, to be content and satisfied with a transcending, platonic love, that somehow makes up in spiritual value what it lacks otherwise.
Interestingly, the author does document the men's initial resistance to the sex-less nature of their new relationships, but explicitly denies that the women had any sexual desires of their own. It would appear that sexual desires are among the blacklisted character traits of Herland's eugenics doctrine: female-female sexuality, too, is nowhere to be found, not even subtly implied.
The Explorers
The three men, Van, Terry, and Jeff, each of a distinctly different character, experience their time in Herland in equally different ways with equally different outcomes. On a scale measuring their "bigoted maleness", Van would be our moderate, Terry the conservative extreme, and Jeff the progressive extreme. Each of them has their own struggles: Van is challenged by Herlands superior social and economic structure, leaving him hard pressed to defend the "great achievements" of humanity as he once knew it. Jeff integrates into Herland surprisingly fast and finds himself more at conflict with Van and Terry than anything else. Ultimately, Terry, a man's man, can not reconcile his notion of femininity with the women of Herland. Fueled by severe sexual frustration, Terry tries to have his way by force. The story ends with Terry being expelled, Jeff becoming the first "father" in Herland in two millenia, and Van taking his wife back to explore and experience the outside world. That reversal is documented in the sequel to Herland that Gilman published one year later: With Her in Ourland.
Conclusion
I think the strength of this book is in Gilman's vision of the female. Her empowered woman is not just empowered in relation to a male counterpart, the woman of Herland is empowered fully and wholly in her own right. To tell of this kind of woman and the culture she represents in the year 1915 is not just a powerful, but a radical statement. Even now, a century later, Herland is relevant in reminding all genders and races that we can only have as much power as we grant ourselves, and that waiting for someone else to grant us any power is ultimately still an act of submission.
It would be easy to reduce the book's message to: "The world would be better off without men", but more than a mere critique of men the book was an incisive critique of the contemporary culture and the Victorian power dynamics at large. Many of the gender and social issues are still current, albeit today often cloaked in a complex and seemingly diverse social culture that makes ill-balanced power dynamics much harder to spot. That, how ever, is a story for another time.
Notes From Windward - Index - Vol. 71
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