Problems with Utopias: Babies and Bathwater, Part II

There's a lot of good stuff in Herland by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. 

The best way to understand Herland is to understand one of Gilman's most famous stories, "The Yellow Wallpaper," which tackles conflict and arc entirely through show-don't-tell narration. The purpose or theme works because it isn't thrown at the reader as MESSAGE.

The purpose--which also shows up in Dorothy Sayers' works--is a refutation of the idea that a woman in crisis should be forced to sit in a quiet room, waited on by servants, without outside stimuli. 

Every age has fretted about the impact of art on its "weaker" citizens, namely women and children. Currently, everybody is at risk from comedians. Video games, Dungeon & Dragons, television, and radio have also made the list. (Of course, once the "danger" is passed and assimilated, it becomes nostalgic and wholesome, like radio.) 

A hundred years ago, the risk was novels--to youth and to women. In many ways, the alarm over romance novels in the 1980s was a hold-over from this far earlier fear. 

Gilman (and Sayers) thought this fear was dumb beyond belief. 

"The Yellow Wallpaper" reflects Gilman's own experience. When she suffered post-partum depression after the birth of her daughter, she was sequestered, her books and writing implements removed. Such things were (non-feminine) stressors (or "triggers," to use modern parlance). 

For someone like Gilman--and I can agree with this--reading and writing WAS therapy. Being denied those activities nearly drove her off the deep end. 

She ended up divorcing the husband at that time for a variety of reasons. They bore no grudges, and he married one of her friends. She married a man much more suited to her temperament. 

But the pure horror of being denied personality in the effort to save her never departed her mind. 

In contrast to Gilman's negative experience, Herland puts women to work. And they do anything and everything. Terry correctly points out that in an open society, women will incline towards careers focused on people and language. Alim, however, is fairly indifferent to Terry's argument. He grew up in a society where women farm and administrate and write and hunt and build roads and garden and teach and forest--it simply doesn't occur to him to put women into boxes. He doesn't care if they go into STEM; he doesn't care if they don't. 

Van & Ellador's romance is
presented sincerely.
This is Gilman's influence, and I agree with her. Her feminism is more rugged than Victorianism (which she was partly fighting and which still lingers). To Gilman, women are people, and people behave like people. 

Granted, Gilman is also making the argument that the women in Herland have no wars, etc. But she is primarily invested in proving that women CAN make-do, rather than arguing that women are superior to men. The leaders in Herland are perfectly happy for Van and Jeff to stay, and Terry only gets kicked out because he crosses the ultimate line--or tries to. (In my narrative, I put the men at slightly more risk and make Terry less reprehensible.)

The "good for society" stuff pales--I will address such stuff in another post--but Gilman was ahead of her time regarding education and still is, oddly enough. 

Gilman perceived education as exploration. For Anne of Green Gables lovers, Miss Muriel Stacy, the new teacher who inspires Anne to sit for her boards, is a great example of what Gilman argues for in Herland. Even Terry admits that allowing children to explore is better than having them learn by rout. And Alim confesses that although Terry's world attracts him, "his description of public and private schools, despite the sports, made my skin crawl."

Even Herland's resistance to jewelry, which resistance Terry criticizes, originates in a desire by Gilman to free women from what we would now refer to as performance art. I have at least one of my young women make this point to Terry--there is freedom in not having to constantly perform or preen. (Though I'm not sure wealthy elitist American society has ever grasped this idea.)

In fact, Gilman's argument is not too different from the argument that I make regarding Lucy and Susan from the Narnia books. 

The problem, of course, lies in assuming that women preen only for men. And assuming that jewelry and fashion, like cooking, don't offer a disciplined, artistic side. Hey, what about Babette's Feast!?

Nevertheless, Gilman's vision has much going for it. Her women, in complete contradiction to her class and time period, dress in comfortable clothes with lots of pockets. They move with physical ease. The young women exercise. They climb trees. There is freedom in Gilman's utopia that must have appeared quite refreshing to her readers. 

As mentioned above, Gilman was also not anti-man. She falls back on "people" more often than she does on "women." In accordance with Gilman's view, I made sure the mentors advocating for Alim focus not only on the decent feminist he has become; they equally don't want him to be bamboozled into regretting his nature or person-hood. They choose Terry as his mentor for precisely this reason. And protecting person-hood is a powerful ideal.

Here is where Golding (who went to British public schools) is not entirely correct. Humans want these ideals, with or without infrastructures. Just--without infrastructures, they may not be possible, not without creating--for instance--Reigns of Terror. 

People will pursue them anyway. Hence, the plethora of utopias in human literature.

Chapter 10

His in Herland or Astyanax in Hiding

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