Review: Herland and With Her in Ourland
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
120 pages (Herland), 117 pages (With Her in Ourland)
The Forerunner (1915-1916)
Read this if you like: Mark Twain, Gulliver’s Travels, utopias
tl;dr summary: Women do things better, and that includes building a civilization.
See Herland on Bookshop
See With Her in Ourland on Bookshop
Utopias are fairly rare in fiction—and with good reason. As a rule, stories need conflict to give them energy, and by definition there isn’t much of that in a utopian landscape. Gilman overcomes this problem in Herland with her smart choice of first-person narrator, and the way she builds the world through his eyes makes this book a great study if you want to play with utopias in your fiction. Herland is framed as the writings of Vandyck Jennings, an explorer who, with his friends Terry and Jeff, stumbles on an isolated all-female civilization that has developed parallel to humanity in an unspecified corner of the world. And these men do a great job of bringing the conflict into this otherwise idyllic society.
The tone and voice Gilman sets from the outset also help to draw the reader in. She positions the POV as a close third on Van, creating in him and his two companions a kind of three bears of problematic masculinity. On the one side there’s Terry, the “man’s man” who believes women want to be conquered and is frustrated and befuddled by the Herlanders’ insistence on being independent, self-sustaining individuals. The reader repeatedly sees Terry refuse to understand concepts the Herlanders patiently explain to him, then get mad at them when they live according to these principles rather than conforming to his picture of what a woman should be. The other extreme is Jeff, who sees women as objects of worship, giving him a different kind of difficulty at first with viewing the Herlanders as flesh-and-blood humans.
Narrator Van takes the “just right” position in this spectrum, but while he does have the most logical, well-reasoned view of Herland, it still takes him most of the first book to fully accept the society for what it is. He is too deeply swaddled in his bias to even recognize it’s there when he first arrives. These preconceptions are stripped away layer by layer over the course of the two books until, by the end of With Her in Otherland, he has nearly as impartial a view of the world as his Herlander wife.
It is an impeccable character study, and the realism and internal consistency of Van’s voice are, to me, the most compelling aspect of these novellas. It must have been downright painful for Gilman to write some of the things Van thinks early on, both because they’re so anaethemic to her own views and because she must have been all too aware that it was really the way many of her contemporaries thought. What’s maybe most impressive, though, is that she balances Van’s sincere and consistent belief in the things he says with a narrative undercurrent that lets the astute reader see where Van is being blinded by assumptions or stereotypes. It helps that the story is framed as reflections in hindsight, after the team has returned from Herland, letting him occasionally comment on the way he sees things differently now.
The evolution in Van’s perspective provides a narrative arc for Herland and the three men’s journey, captivity, and eventual departure provide a plot frame for the thought experiment to hang on. It’s still a loose frame, and there are extended passages that read more like a field guide than a narrative, especially once the characters start exploring Herland and see deeper into how their society functions. The humor of the voice and novelty of the world keeps these sections entertaining, though, particularly for readers with an interest in worldbuilding.
Conversely, With Her in Ourland lacks even the gestures at the traditional ingredients of a narrative found in the first book. It starts off with a premise: Van is taking his new wife, Ellador, on a tour of the world. After, she’ll report back to the Herlanders and help them decide if it’s safe to make themselves known to other nations. This sounds interesting enough, except the reader doesn’t really see them actually doing anything while they’re traveling the world. There are a few descriptions of war-torn Europe, a smattering of observed customs and landscapes, and a couple of conversations between Ellador and other travelers, but these never really coalesce into real plot, settings, or characters. Where Herland reads like an allegorical fable, With Her in Ourland is a social critique with a thin veneer of fiction. It was still interesting to read, but I’m not sure I’d say it was always entertaining from a modern reader’s sensibility.
These books were originally serialized in monthly installments over the span of two years in Gilman’s self-published magazine The Forerunner, which goes a long way toward explaining how something this subversive managed to see the light of day in 1915. Reading them over a hundred years later is a somewhat depressing experience, because it still feels unfortunately relevant. From race relations and women’s rights to education and food storage, a significant portion of the problems Ellador points out are still problems, and if we’ve made some progress she’d no doubt shake her head sadly at seeing how little.
In terms of the overall reading experience, Herland is smooth, fun, and goes down easy. With Her in Ourland is about the same length but took me twice as long to finish. It’s densely packed with back-and-forth conversations about all the world’s big problems, jumping from topic to topic with sparse connective tissue that often feels like a throw-away. The tone at times veers a little preachy, and a others a little cringe-y, but it’s a fascinating snapshot of what forward-thinking minds in the early twentieth century saw as the biggest problems of their day, and the ways we might start to fix them.
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