Imagine a country that needs no saving: Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s ‘Herland’

Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s sci-fi novel, ‘Herland’, created a template that no one has since adapted — of a women’s utopia that’s neither fragile nor threatened

July 27, 2019 04:00 pm | Updated July 28, 2019 01:45 pm IST

We seem to be discovering women-centred sci-fi with the web series on The Handmaid’s Tale . And yet Atwood is not the first writer to have imagined the possibilities. One of her most remarkable literary predecessors would be the American author Charlotte Perkins Gilman, born this month 159 years ago. Although we remember Gilman mostly for her haunting short story, ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’, she had blazed a trail for women’s sci-fi with her novel, Herland, published in 1915, about an ideal society composed entirely of women who have done away with the need to have men in their lives — The Handmaid’s Tale in reverse, apparently.

Herland is so masterfully written that it can hold its own in any age of sci-fi — nascent to golden to post-modern. However, it assumes particular resonance when you examine the social and literary context it stems from.

Through the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Gilman’s fierce fiction was part of the tectonic forces powering the First Wave of Feminism — the fight for voting and equal contract and property rights — that first search for identity beyond that of Adam’s rib. ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’, her devastating short story, is a blow-by-blow account of a woman’s post-partum slide into insanity, but it’s also a rebellion against a medical system that was frustratingly patronising of women’s psychological illnesses.

Fighting the male gaze

And as far as sci-fi of that time goes, the bar was set by the definitive works of Jules Verne and H.G. Wells, who wrote furiously from the 1860s well into the 90s. A rash of leading authors of the day, including Arthur Conan Doyle and Rudyard Kipling, also dipped their toes in the genre.

Sci-fi, even in its more cerebral forays, has always been an extension of man, well, an extension of manhood. The perspective, the conundrums, the intergalactic crises have all been reflections or exaggerated extrapolations of society as it was at the time of writing. Gender is either redundant, or used as narrative upholstery.

Published five years before the 19th Amendment which granted voting rights to women in the U.S., Gilman’s Herland punched way above its weight. Not only as feminist literature that dared to exist, but also as sci-fi that brought a fresh perspective to the increasingly weird and wonderful visions of an otherworld.

Gilman brilliantly caricatures the response of the contemporary man by stereotyping him in three of the lead characters. One idolises womankind. One is a pragmatist, a man of balance nonetheless trapped by generations of conditioning. And the third, the spearhead of the expedition, is the alpha male of the late 19th and early 20th century — unsurprisingly similar to his 21st century counterpart.

He finds it improbable that women could overcome or behave in a manner other than what he knows to be their nature, their biological limitations, their allure. The details of how Herland functions as an all-woman country, told from the viewpoint of the trio, are incomplete and narrow. Despite a scientific and/ or exploratory disposition, what else could the male gaze be capable of, Gilman seems to ask.

Unadulterated utopia

Another aspect that sets Herland apart is that it is an unadulterated utopia. There is no hidden rot to be uncovered, no sudden scandal or crime. The arrival of the three men, though of huge significance, does not throw the everyday out of whack. The women of Herland do away with even the biological necessity of the male and with it, the need for sex. In other words, they do not need men, and they do not need saving from anything.

Herland captured the tough optimism of the First Wave of Feminism. And it is fascinating that the Third Wave was championed (not exclusively, of course) by a chilling dystopia viscerally conjured by Atwood in The Handmaid’s Tale.

In some ways, The Handmaid’s Tale is a black mirror of Herland . In both worlds, motherhood is the raison d’etre for the woman. However, while the Gilman brand of motherhood fuels greater individual pursuits towards a common good, Atwood’s women are ‘vessels,’ no more.

Both authors make their work all the more effective by placing their worlds within reach. Herland offers solutions for mankind’s ills in greater social cooperation, equal education and equal treatment for children of both sexes. And Atwood says we’re on our way to The Handmaid’s Tale , we just need to continue to do nothing.

If we stepped back from the feminist point of view and looked at utopias and dystopias — and not just in print — with a slightly unfocused eye, there are some fun patterns hiding in plain sight.

Power corrupts

First, let’s rattle off some dystopias off the cuff: Nineteen Eighty Four, Brave New World, Brazil, V for Vendetta. Or post-apocalyptic worlds like the Resident Evil series, Mad Max: Fury Road, The Hunger Games, Divergence, The Maze Runner , and so many more. All these stories carry a common denominator. Either a malevolent force radiates outward and consumes all, or crushes the rights of ‘other’ people. The individual loses all agency. The force controls the dominant class as much as it subjugates the underclass.

Both destruction and the sudden voiding of rights are symptoms. The cause, at the risk of spoiling every dystopian story ever, is this — a toxic concentration of power.

Power in the hands of one person or a very specific demographic or entity. It could be an omnipotent state, a mad king, a power-hungry corporate, or an AI that attained sentience. A pathogen wipes out humanity in Oryx and Crake ; the corporate that did it had absolute control over the distribution system. The Republic of Gilead in The Handmaid’s Tale chokes its world in a vice-like grip because it holds the reins of the military, economy, mobility and media.

And the fixes to this are all typically ‘clean slate’ protocols, where the status quo needs to be reduced to ash for the future to rise like a phoenix. The galactic empires — of Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series or of George Lucas’ Star Wars — crumble. They must, so that a new order can rise. And fall again to warrant another trilogy. Utopias rarely fare better.

Guns & glory

Geek alert. See Star Trek — The Next Generation ; Season 1, Episode 8, titled ‘Justice’. The Starship Enterprise disembarks on a utopian (yawn) world, where everyone is fit and fetchingly polygamous. A young crew member inadvertently breaks a greenhouse boundary line and, according to local law, is sentenced to humane lethal injection. How Captain Picard resolves the dilemma, and also wields diplomacy against a celestial entity that oversees the planet, forms the rest of the plot.

Why is it that even if things start well, even if a story begins in a utopia, it all goes sideways? Let’s face it — utopias are boring. There is no struggle, there is nothing to overcome, no victory at the end of a journey. A world which has resolved all conflict and is engaged in nurturing harmony must either be child-like, thumb-sized ( Gulliver’s Travels ) or populated by milksops (every civilisation that begs starships or superheroes to save it).

At the same time, highly developed civilisations — from the dynasties of Jupiter Ascending to Asimov’s empire — must crumble into chaos and conflict. And red-blooded stories demand guns and glory and good old-fashioned capitalist, patriarchal enterprise. Unless, of course, we’re talking about Herland .

Simply better

One realises that Gilman opened up a template which no one has since adapted. She wrote of a utopia that was affected, but not disturbed, by contact with the new. One that was in no way innocent or gullible. It was not powerless against attack.

It countered barbarism and violence with intelligence, strength, patience and pragmatism. And at no point did it lose its humanity. It was not a more advanced people. It was simply better.

The feminist ideologies in Herland — particularly the linking of female identity so completely with motherhood — might not have aged particularly well, but the space-time Gilman occupied, and the caveats she built in (motherhood is the honour, but it is also a choice), more than exonerate her.

Best of all, as we read the story, it reads us too. Three kinds of men went in and did what they did. What kind of man are you and what would you do? For the male reader, it is not an easy question.

In us all, there are elements of the brash patriarch who was exiled, the hopeless romantic who discarded his own identity for a place among them , and the balanced pragmatist who a Herland er decided to accompany on the journey back home. The trio was not ready for Herland.

The legend was weighed down by the considerable exposition that 20th century men needed to get their bearings. If a trio were plucked out from among us today, 104 years after the book was written, and sent to Herland , it is difficult to say if we would be ready for it either. Until we are, we will continue to wallow in memories of dystopic futures and failed utopias.

The former journalist works as a consultant in fintech and crypto-economics.

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