Herland by Charlotte Perkins Gilman
(Random House Edition, 1979)
Guest blogger, Lindsay Gehring
Charlotte Perkins Gilman is most famous for her short story “The Yellow Wallpaper,” but she also wrote a slew of other books, including a utopian novel called Herland. The plot of Herland centers around three male explorers who hear about a mysterious all-female society hidden deep in the shadowy interior of some unnamed tropical rain forest, and who decide to look for it, certain they will be received like kings. These three characters, Terry, Jeff and Vandyck, each embody a slightly different aspect of traditional Western masculinity.
Terry is brash and boastful, and takes it for granted that women will always defer to him. He’s also the member of the trio who is most openly contemptuous of women. As soon as the native guides start telling the three explorers about this isolated “Woman Country” from which no man had ever returned, Terry seizes on the idea of going there. The idea of an all-woman society borders on unthinkable for him.
If Terry represents the chest-thumping, brutish aspect of Western masculinity, Jeff embodies its more genteel strain: Vandyck (the narrator) describes him as “full of chivalry and sentiment,” and as someone who “idealized women in the best Southern style.” For him, women are sweet, gentle creatures whose virtue primarily lies in passivity. He can easily imagine a whole nation of women living peacefully and happily together, but he does not imagine them doing anything.
Finally, in Vandyck we have a specimen of liberal, “enlightened” sexism, who might blush at Jeff’s old-fashioned chivalry or Terry’s pompous posturing, but who still can’t quite bring himself to consider women his equals because of the “physiological limitations of the sex.” This sounds ludicrous to a modern reader, not only because of the Victorian notions, but also because Vandyck is not a biologist or a doctor; his training is in sociology. So he’s arguing “learnedly” about something he is not, in fact, learned in. He’s mansplaining!
None of these men are the slightest bit prepared for what they encounter in the women of Herland. Its citizens are bold, inquisitive, and capable, with every girl and woman dressed in sturdy, practical clothes that allow for a full range of motion, and all their hair cut short. They’ve built a complex, stable society centered on the communal rearing of children, and a gentle, nonviolent value system centered around motherhood. Yet, for all their maternal qualities, it is their lack of femininity that arrests the attention of their male visitors.
Terry especially seems unwilling to concede that the older women whose job it is to teach them the language, culture and history of Herland even are women, as they make no attempt at coquetry and are matter-of-fact rather than deferential.
“ … [T]hese women aren’t womanly. You know they aren’t.”
That kind of talk always set Jeff going; and I gradually grew to side with him. “Then you don’t call a breed of women whose one concern is motherhood—womanly?” he asked.
“Indeed I don’t!” snapped Terry. “What does a man care for motherhood—when he hasn’t a ghost of a chance at fatherhood? And besides—what’s the good of talking sentiment when we are just men together? What a man wants of women is a good deal more than all this ‘motherhood’!”
…
As to Terry’s criticism, it was true. These women, whose essential distinction of motherhood was the dominant note of their whole culture, were strikingly deficient in what we call “femininity.” This led me very promptly to the conviction that those “feminine charms” 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. But Terry came to no such conclusion.
That same crucial misunderstanding keeps hindering Terry’s attempts to socialize with the Herlanders; he keeps mistaking the set of learned behaviors making up middle-class Victorian femininity for the essential nature of all women, and he gets angry when his expectations are confounded. He blames the women, calling them unnatural, while his companions come to the understanding spelled out in the passage quoted above.
It’s no accident that Vandyck and Jeff adapt to their new surroundings much faster than Terry does, and begin to establish friendships with individual women.
The following passage details Terry’s confusion as he struggles to interact with women who have not grown up, as he has, in a society where there is such exaggerated polarization of the sexes:
I could see, just in snatches, of course, how [Terry’s] suave and masterful approach seemed to irritate [the girls]; his too-intimate glances were vaguely resented, his compliments puzzled and annoyed. Sometimes a girl would flush, not with drooped eyelids and inviting timidity, but with anger and a quick lift of the head. Girl after girl turned on her heel and left him, till he had but a small ring of questioners, and they, visibly, were the least “girlish” of the lot.
The girls of Herland find Terry’s performance of masculinity annoying because they aren’t used to it, and have no corresponding scripts of their own to follow. It’s clear to them that he’s playing a role, and it annoys them that he can’t just tell them what they want to know without all the rigmarole. Indeed, the quality of Herland’s women that most impresses Vandyck is their absolute, unflinching forthrightness. Much of his astonishment undoubtedly comes from the fact (alluded to a few paragraphs earlier) that femininity is designed to flatter, so that a man accustomed to Victorian (or, for that matter, contemporary American) gender roles could be expected to find a direct, outspoken woman somewhat jarring, and Vandyck found these women, with their practical, down-to-earth candor, even more outspoken than the men of his own culture.
The above passage explains how that might be: even though masculinity allows for a lot more “brutal honesty” and brusqueness than femininity does (the tending of other people’s feelings being women’s work), there is still a lot of social kabuki involved in upholding masculinity. You have to disguise your own ignorance, incompetence, uncertainty or fear, and you have to be mindful of your own position in relation to the other men in the room, and you have to maintain the right tone in your interactions with women. Open up to them too much, and you’re gay or a sissy, but shun them entirely and you’re not a real man, because one measure of manhood is one’s ability to impress women. Interactions between a masculine man and a feminine woman are more like an elaborate ballet dance (albeit inverted; the woman supports the man in conversation and allows him to rise up and wax eloquent on whatever subject while she keeps the conversation going) in which the complementary roles play off one another than an exchange of information. Terry tries to give his customary virtuoso performance only to find that none of his would-be pupils are willing to cooperate.
There’s another detail that complicates this somewhat: it’s clear that none of the characters think of the women of Herland as being masculine, because the terms they use to insult them —“The Maiden Aunts,” “old maids,” keepers of a “dame school,” “Grandma”—are all gendered female. (The notable exception is Terry’s favorite term for the older women who guard them: “The Colonels.”)
Not only do they use female-specific language to disparage their captors, they also describe their own predicament as being like that of little boys caught at some mischief by some forbidding matron. That role—schoolmarm, mother, governess—is every bit as traditional, and familiar to the three protagonists, as the roles of the coquette or the submissive wife that they find so conspicuously absent from Herland.
I’m not completely sure how this observation fits in with any of the above analysis; I just find it interesting that none of the men—not even Terry—made the assumption that “unfeminine” women were necessarily “masculine.” For instance, when Terry denounces the Herlanders angrily at the end of the book, when he has been expelled from Herland for violence against a woman, he does not accuse them of unbecoming virility or mannishness, but of lacking a sexual dimension altogether.
Lindsay Gehring is an autistic woman with degrees in biochemistry and English literature from the University of Kansas. She is unemployed and lives with her parents and three cats in a suburb of Kansas City, Kansas. Her passions include literature (particularly science fiction, feminist literature and the classics), art, neuroscience, fashion, weightlifting, permaculture, sustainability and envisioning a society that is better at including, supporting and making use of the talents of those on its margins. She blogs at http://autistscorner.blogspot.com/ and sells her handmade jewelry at http://www.etsy.com/shop/shardsofelegance; her writing on scientific research can also be found at http://www.researchblogging.org/blogger/home/id/801.
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Lindsay: Thanks for a great post! It is quite interesting that while a woman was considered “unfeminine,” she was also not described as “masculine.” When I think of terms that describe being feminine, they are not necessarily traits to which I aspire, unless they are also traits I would consider as part of what I would consider a “real man.” For example, we recently talked about defining “feminine” and “masculine” in our household. My husband and almost-fourteen year old son felt the traits that make one “masculine” are also traits they find attractive in women, self-confidence being an example. At the same time, they found traits usually identified as feminine, such as caring, to be equally important aspects of true masculinity. It seems that in our household at least, these terms are losing ground as defining anything. This is what I find equally interesting as you did when the male characters in the text found the women unfeminine, but also never called them masculine.
I found this website after I’d already submitted my draft of this post, but I thought I’d share it anyway.
It’s a guide to Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s writing, life and time, and includes the full text of both “The Yellow Wallpaper” (plus her essay “Why I Wrote The Yellow Wallpaper”) and Herland. The text of Herland is broken up by chapters, with an index page linking each chapter.