Herland

4.5 stars, Metaphorosis reviews

Summary
Three diverse men go to explore a fabulous hidden ‘land of women' and find a remote society that has existed without men for thousands of years through parthenogenetic reproduction.

Review
For years, I've been confused between Carolyn Ives Gilman and Charlotte Perkins Gilman. I read CI Gilman's Halfway Human many years back and thought it very good. I downloaded Herland by CP Gilman a while later, and was very confused as to why it seemed to be in the public domain. So, I finally settled down to read the latter to set things clear in my own mind.

Halfway Human (CI Gilman) is a novel about a member of a neuter and asexual ‘servant' class who breaks away from her environment. Herland (CP Gilman) is a pointed (but clever) utopian parable about gender roles. So there is not only some similarity of names but of theme. Neither author did or has (CIG is alive and well) published extensively.

Herland posits an isolated community of women that has lived without men for 2,000 years, reproducing parthenogenetically. They've formed a near perfect society focused on personal development and motherhood. Everyone's happy. Three American men (one a macho womanizer, one who puts women on a pedestal, and one practical intellectual) come to the country and have to face up to their own society's many shortcomings.

Since Gilman's purpose is to critique the modern real world, she doesn't put a lot of effort into credibility or unfortunate human nature. Instead, it's simply a given that, with two thousand years and limited resources, a whole country descended from one woman has changed so greatly that what we might see as basic human nature has been moderated and channeled into productive, positive behaviour.

I liked much of what's presented. Through the guise of her narrator (the philosophical man), Gilman carefully (and often relatively subtly) critiques the many flaws and excesses of a culture formed for, around, and by men – the prevalence of crime, disease, inequity, prejudice, poverty, etc. I didn't take it that her premise was literally ‘women would run things much better' but ‘there's a much better way to do things' as demonstrated by the women in her story. The fact that their society is not entirely credible is beside the point.

The flaw, for me, was her insistent reverence for Motherhood as the crowning achievement of a woman's life – revered and exalted (with some women forbidden to give birth and others permitted multiple children). Counterbalancing that was that, while giving birth is sacred, the other aspects of ‘motherhood' are much less so.

I found the book very well presented and considered, and many of the points valid, but Gilman stumbles occasionally. Aside from the maternalist theology, she doesn't really handle the question of sex well. She is, of course, faced with the mores of the early 1900s in writing about it, so while she does take a stab at sex, there's a great deal of euphemism and obfuscation that makes her point a little hard to follow. One line of it, though, seems to be that with other interests and foci, sex becomes less of a focal point. Indeed, the women of Herland seem to do without it entirely (and there appear to be no lesbians). And the three men, though driven by sexual desire, apparently have zero interest in women over 40.

There is no real ending to the book. There's a gesture toward resolution, and then the book just stops, in a fairly jarring manner.

In any case, I do now have a much clearer distinction between the two Gilmans, and I'm glad to have read this. While not perfect, it is a clever and thoughtful critique of society, both when it was published and now – sadly, not that much has changed.

Surprising lack of female character development.

From a historical perspective, I can understand why this book is important. Gilman's satirizing of gender roles and gender essentialism were no doubt cutting edge in 1915; likewise, her critique of how patriarchy, capitalism, and colonialism are intertwined was pretty insightful. The problem is that a lot of her critique has become accepted reality in 2018, so it makes her commentary seem obvious and at times trite.

This wouldn't be a problem if the protagonists were anything more than the blandest WASPs that ever wasped. They're not, however, and the lack of strong protagonists for the story to hang from makes this more an interesting bit of trivia than a compelling read in my opinion.