Back to the Future, Victoria, With a Vengeance
Herland, a nearly-lost feminist Utopian novel by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, a hundred years later, is still an absolute romp.
The nut-shell synopsis:
The era is Victorian. Three gallavanting, adventurous men, one with a small fortune, a gadget collection and an ego that will remind future generations of James Bond minus the day job, stumble upon a lost nation composed entirely of women that the trio cheekily nickname Herland. Herland was suddenly cut off from the rest of human civilization over a thousand years prior in the midst of a civil insurrection and a landslide that deprived the early city-state of it’s men. Those first women managed to survive when one of the women experienced spontaneous parthenogenesis, a literal virgin birth. And Voila, the world is gifted with a true Mother Country.
This is heady material written by a real Victorian feminist agitator (who also ran her own newspaper and authored several other critical texts). Yet it’s also a comedy written in the classic satirical style of Enlightenment writers like Voltaire and Jonathon Swift.
Only here, as opposed to using a naive and wide-eyed outsider along the lines of Voltaire’s Candide or the Ingenue, Gilman has created a whole nation of naive and sincere outsider women to act as a cast of straight-ladies who ask disturbing and only somewhat artless questions of our visiting Victorian gentlemen. For instance, if women shouldn’t work why is it that, in the outside world, over 3/4’s of the female population are employeed in paying labor? Is poverty meant to be a statement on individual worth? Who does marriage benefit and what is it’s true purpose? There are real comic gems in our explorer-narrator’s hapless responses.
But the most intriguing questions Gilman asks are the ones she never actually puts into words — what would happen to our world if we valued nurturing over competition or insight over personality?
