Herland

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Herland is a utopian novel by the feminist author Charlotte Perkins Gilman from 1915. It describes an isolated society consisting entirely of women who reproduce through parthenogenesis (asexual reproduction). The result is an ideal social order: free from war, conflict and domination. The novel was first published in 1915 as a monthly series in The Forerunner , a magazine published by Gilman himself between 1909 and 1916. Gilman's sequel to the novel, With Her in Ourland, followed the end of Herland . Herland is often considered the middle volume in their Utopian trilogy , with Moving the Mountain (1911) being the first and With Her in Ourland (1916) being the last. Herland was first published in book form in 1979, and in 1980 in German translation.

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The story is told from the perspective of Vandyck “Van” Jennings, a sociology student who, along with two friends, Terry O. Nicholson and Jeff Margrave, embarks on an expedition through the jungles of South America to discover a society made exclusively by women and has had no contact with the outside world or with men for 2000 years. The three friends do not quite believe the rumors because they cannot imagine how procreation would be possible without men. They speculate about what a society of women would look like. Based on their different stereotypes of women, they envision society differently: Jeff sees women as something to be cared for and protected; Terry sees them as something to be conquered and won.

After the explorers have reached their destination, they first camouflage the double-decker in which they arrived and try to explore the surrounding forests as undiscovered as possible. However, they are quickly spotted by three young women who watch them from the treetops. After trying unsuccessfully to catch the girls using several lists, the men pursue the young women in the direction of a settlement. The women there easily escape them and disappear between the houses, which Van observes are exceptionally well-crafted and beautifully built. After meeting the first inhabitants of this new land (which Van Herland calls), the men proceed with a little more sensitivity, noting that the women of Herland are unusually strong, agile and completely fearless. Their caution was not unfounded, because when the men enter the city where the girls had disappeared, they are surrounded by a large group of women and led to a kind of government building. The three men try to escape, but are quickly and easily overwhelmed by the women and finally drugged.

When the men wake up again, they find that they are trapped in a fortress-like building. However, you get comfortable living spaces, clean clothes, and food. The women assign a mentor to each man who will teach the men the language and customs of the country and who will be available to answer any questions. Van makes a lot of notes about the country and the people, noting that everything from clothes to furniture seems to be designed according to two equal ideals: pragmatism and aesthetics . The women themselves appear intelligent and shrewd, fearless and patient, with a remarkable lack of temperament and seemingly limitless understanding of their prisoners. They are very keen to see the world outside their home and eagerly ask the men about all sorts of things. Van often finds it difficult to justify the practices of his own society, such as milking cows or the accumulation of property, in response to critical inquiries from women; after all, he is confronted with the seeming utopia that women have built up without such practices.

After being held for several months, the men break out of the fortress and flee across country until they get to their biplane. However, they find that their plane is stuck in a large fabric cover that prevents their further escape. Resigned, they are taken back into custody by the women. Nevertheless, they are treated well during their time under arrest and the men soon learn that once they have mastered the women's language and shown that they can be trusted, they can move about freely. Van notices Terry's difficulties in dealing with women, who persistently refuse to live up to his expectations of women's behavior, imported from the homeland of men. Jeff, on the other hand, is completely enthusiastic about the women and their friendliness.

Van finds out more and more about women's society over time and discovers that most men were killed 2,000 years ago when a volcanic eruption buried the only pass to and from Herland. The other men were mostly slaves who intended to kill the sons of their dead masters and the old women in order to take control of the country and thus also the young women. However, the women resisted and killed the slaves. After a period of hopelessness about the imminent end of their race, cut off from the rest of the world and without men, one woman among the survivors became pregnant and gave birth to a female and four more female children. The five daughters of this woman in turn gave birth to five daughters. This process quickly restored their population and made motherhood a high priority in their society. After the survival of their community was assured, women devoted themselves to improving their intellectual abilities, working together, and raising their children; the teaching profession is therefore one of the most revered and respected professions in the country.

As the men are given more freedom, they each begin a relationship with their respective mentor, assigned upon their arrival: Van with Ellador, Jeff with Celis, and Terry with Alima. Since women's society has not known any men for 2000 years, the women there have no experience and no cultural understanding of romantic love or sexual intercourse. Accordingly, the budding relationships between the couples are initially bumpy and with many explanations. Terry in particular has a hard time getting used to a relationship with a woman who, in his opinion, is not a real woman, whether or not her behavior. Ultimately, all three couples are "married", although the women largely lack the sense of such a ceremony. Since they have no specific religion, the ceremony is more pagan than Christian.

Their marriages make the men reflect a lot; the women she married have no idea what it means to be a woman or even to be feminine. Van finds this frustrating at times, but ultimately he is grateful for his wonderful friendship with Ellador and the intense love he feels for her. Terry is not that wise and out of frustration he tries to rape Alima. After Terry was forcibly handcuffed and drugged again, he had to answer to the court and was ordered to return home. The other men disapprove of Terry's actions, but see them as impolite rather than criminal. Van explains to Ellador that he's holding the word crime too harshly for Terry's act. After all, Alima Terry's wife.

Van finally realizes that he has to go home with Terry in the double-decker, but Ellador won't let him go without her. In the end, both Terry and Van Herland leave with the promise not to reveal the existence of this utopia until Ellador has returned and the opening to the world has been discussed. Jeff decides to stay behind and live in Herland with his now pregnant wife, Celis. Van tries to prepare Ellador to return to his world, but is very afraid of what she will find there.

Motifs

Gender

The central theme of Herland is how gender is socially constructed and how roles are viewed as immutable by both sexes. The idea of ​​defining gender begins when the men first meet the women of Herland. Compared to the women from their homeland, the women of Herland appear boyish to the three men, they have more masculine physical characteristics: practical short haircuts and no feminine curves. The women are physically strong and show this by building huge buildings in their country. In addition to the masculine features - as the outside world perceives them in the form of men - Jeff is again in a certain way feminine, even though he is a man. Jeff's gender creates a conflict of interest with the men he travels to Herland with. His feelings reflect the feelings of the women of Herland and not those of the men. At one point, Van feels betrayed by Jeff's emotional reactions and agreements that are in line with those of the women.

When the three male characters are locked up by the residents of Herland, they let their hair grow long. This symbolizes the connection with the world of women. In the course of the novel, Gilman reverses the stereotypical gender roles: women have short hair, men long; the women teach while the men learn; the women are physically stronger than the men etc.

Gender roles

As a feminist writer, Gilman offers a look at women and their roles in their time. It not only shows the possibility of equality between men and women, but also conveys in places that women can be superior to men. Unlike the world they came from, the men feel weak compared to the women of Herland. The women are portrayed as being kinder and smarter.

Motherhood and Reproductive Rights

Another central theme of the novel is motherhood. Herland's all-female society is primarily about raising children. The women even developed and modified their language over time to make learning as easy as possible for children, with education being one of the most important aspects of their culture. Every mother literally soaks her child with love and the affection of the whole community in the first two years of life. After the first two years of life, the most suitable women take the child under their wing for further training. The men are surprised to hear that the women leave their children to someone else's care, but the women explain that children are the responsibility of the entire community, not just the biological mother.

Gilman's writings are valued by feminists for their similarity to contemporary feminism. Gilman supports feminism with its emphasis on the reproductive rights of women regardless of the opinion of men. For example, the women of Herland emphasize the value of motherhood, as they reproduce through parthenogenesis, a symbol of their independence and women's own abilities. Although feminism still enjoyed a negative reception at the beginning of the 20th century, Gilman spoke openly of feminism.

Eugenics

The women of Herland demonstrated their intelligence by ensuring their survival after being cut off from the rest of the world. Parts of nature, if they represent a burden for their society, “bred” them away as well as human characteristics that cause defiance and non-virtuous behavior.

Individuality and family

In Herland, each child is given a unique first name without a surname. The residents of Herland keep a detailed ancestry history and see no reason to claim ownership of their child by imposing their own name on this child, as is customary in the homeland of men. Women are able to love openly and without an imposed hierarchy, which does not exclude their own offspring. The self-image as a large family is also justified by the fact that very few women survived after the volcanic eruption, which means that all women in Herland today are descended from a few “primordial mothers”.

Community

The book also highlights the issue of community, which is essential to an all-female society. Women retain their individuality while at the same time deriving their ideals from consensus with the majority of the population. The community makes decisions about procreation with reference to eugenics . The women's community sorts out those who are considered incompetent and / or less attractive.

education

Education is the "highest art" in Herland and is described as the reason for the country's boom.

analysis

In Herland , the natural economic dependence of women on male sole earners is being dismantled. The "elimination" of men by a volcanic eruption leads to economic freedom for women. In the novel, Gilman translates ideas from her theoretical work Women and Economics into a utopia. She designs an economic model that is focused on social reproduction. The transfer of female housework from the private to the public sector is, according to Gilman, the only way to ensure fair wages for women. In her article The Waste of Private Housekeeping she wrote: “The principle waste in our 'domestic economy' lies in the fact that it is domestic.” (German for example: The basic waste in our 'domestic economy' 'lies in the fact that she is domestic.) In contrast to other forms of economic policy as defined in industrial capitalism, her book shows a society in which the production system includes the "production" of children; therefore, mothers are not discriminated against in the workplace, but respected for the preservation of the population. The novel mocks the fact that the intensive work of childcare does not fit into the work system of the male world. When Terry says that in the US the majority of women stay at home and don't “work”, the women of Herland wonder what he means by saying that women don't work - after all, caring for children is work too.

There is an undertone of racism and praise for eugenics in the book. Gilman calls the warlike people who live in the world outside (and below, because the land is on a plateau ) Herland, again and again as "savages" because they are for war. This is seen by some as racist. As for eugenics, Gilman seems to believe that character "flaws" could be bred out of humanity as she repeatedly declares that only the most virtuous women are allowed to receive the gift of motherhood. The book describes a women-based utopia in which women could build an extremely egalitarian civilization. The arrival of the three explorers is still seen as a blessing that enables the citizens of Herland to return to a two-sex society.

meaning

Herland is considered to be the “first classic women's utopia” that was rediscovered by the women's movement in the 1960s. The novel is important for the feminist canon of literature because, according to Richard Saage, it uses the genre of the utopian novel to sketch in a thought experiment “what potentials a woman has when she develops in a society that owns her not hindered in their development, but on the contrary promotes ”. Gilman's novel has become classic "because of the questions he asks, not because of the answers he offers".

On the occasion of Charlotte Perkins Gilman's 150th birthday in 2010, the literary critic Rolf Löchel wrote about the novel: “Perkins Gilman's ideal women's society is still impressive today in many ways, not least because the author did not come up with a closed utopia incapable of further development Has. Rather, women expect their children to “develop beyond us”, just as they have developed beyond their mothers and foremothers. A few decades later, the feminist political scientist Barbara Holland-Cunz showed that precisely this is a characteristic of feminist utopias, which she does not distinguish from all but from the vast majority of male utopias. "

Feminist criticism since 2011

Although Gilman's ideas of separatist feminism are aimed at empowering women in the workplace, they also extend to maintaining “ white ” feminism, which neglects the particular problems of Women of Color , according to Kristen R. Egan . Gilman's talk of eugenics , racial purity and "servants" indicated a system of white supremacy in which the various struggles of working class women of color would not be addressed.

In an attempt to undermine the male-dominated system, Gilman inadvertently translates submission to men into another form of submission, according to Lynne Evans: the excessive focus on children evokes a system of submission similar to patriarchy. In a society that forbids abortion and where all aspects of social, economic and political life revolve around the production of children, the inhabitants of Herland, whether they like it or not, are still bound by their biological role as mothers.

Publication history

After being published in The Forerunner in 1915 , Herland and its sequel With Her in Ourland were largely forgotten by the mid-20th century. In 1968, all editions of The Forerunner were reprinted in facsimile by Greenwood Reprints as part of the Radical Periodicals in The United States, 1890-1960 series . But it was not until Gilman's short story The Yellow Wallpaper was reprinted in 1973 that her work began to receive greater scientific attention.

In 1979, Herland was republished as a stand-alone novel by Pantheon Books, with a detailed introduction by scholar Ann J. Lane , who placed it in contemporary feminist discourse and subtitled it A Lost Feminist Utopian Novel . Lane was also the first to suggest a "Utopian Trilogy" of Gilman's novels in its introduction, including Moving the Mountain (1911), Herland, and With Her in Ourland , all of which had been serialized in The Forerunner .

expenditure

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Clute and Nicholls: The encyclopedia of science fiction . 1995, p. 496 .
  2. ↑ Alys Eve Weinbaum: Writing Feminist Genealogy: Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Racial Nationalism, and the Reproduction of Maternalist Feminism . In: Feminist Studies . tape 27 , no. 2 , 2001, p. 271 , doi : 10.2307 / 3178758 .
  3. ^ Kristen R. Egan: Conservation and Cleanliness: Racial and Environmental Purity in Ellen Richards and Charlotte Perkins Gilman . In: WSQ: Women's Studies Quarterly . tape 39 , no. 3-4 , 2011, ISSN  1934-1520 , pp. 77-92 , doi : 10.1353 / wsq.2011.0066 ( jhu.edu [accessed October 22, 2019]).
  4. ^ Women and Economics. Retrieved October 24, 2019 .
  5. ↑ Charlotte Perkins Gilman: The Waste of Private Housekeeping , in: The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science , Vol. 48 / July 1903: The Cost of Living , pp. 91–95 ( full text )
  6. ^ Katherine Fusco: Systems, not Men: Producing People in Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "Herland" . In: Studies in the Novel . tape 41 , no. 4 , 2009, ISSN  0039-3827 , p. 418-434 , JSTOR : 29533951 .
  7. ^ Gilman, Charlotte Perkins: Herland . Dover Thrift, 1998, pp. 83 .
  8. ↑ Thomas Schölderle: Geschichte der Utopie , UTB, Stuttgart 2017, 2nd revised and updated edition, ISBN 978-3-8252-4818-5 , p. 148
  9. ↑ Martin D'Idler: The modernization of utopia. On the change of the new man in the political utopia of the modern age , Lit Verlag, Berlin / Münster 2007, ISBN 978-3-8258-0729-0 , p. 138
  10. ↑ Martin D'Idler: The Modernization of Utopia , p. 30
  11. ↑ Richard Saage: The first “classic” woman's utopia. On Charlotte Perkins Gilmans Herland, in: ders .: Utopische Profiles, Volume 4: Contradictions and Syntheses of the 20th Century, Lit Verlag, Münster u. a. 2003, ISBN 978-3-8258-5431-7 , p. 78
  12. ↑ Richard Saage, p. 95
  13. ^ Rolf Löchel: This Land is Ourland, That Land is Herland , in: Literaturkritik, No. 7 / July 2010
  14. ^ Kristen R. Egan: Conservation and Cleanliness: Racial and Environmental Purity in Ellen Richards and Charlotte Perkins Gilman . In: WSQ: Women's Studies Quarterly . tape 39 , no. 3-4 , 2011, ISSN  1934-1520 , pp. 77-92 , doi : 10.1353 / wsq.2011.0066 ( jhu.edu [accessed October 24, 2019]).
  15. ↑ Lynne Evans, “You See, Children Were the Raison D'être”: The Reproductive Futurism of Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Herland . In: Canadian Review of American Studies . tape 44 , no. 2 , January 2014, ISSN  0007-7720 , p. 302-319 , doi : 10.3138 / cras.2014.S10 .