Title: The Herland Trilogy (Moving the Mountain; Herland; With Her in Ourland)
Originally published: 1911; 1915; 1916
Dates read: 2/5/18-2/1/18; 2/12/18-2/19/18-2/25/18
Back to the Classics category: 20th Century Classic
Find out more about the Back to the Classics 2018 reading challenge HERE.
Read my other book reviews from the challenge HERE.
Author: Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Charlotte Perkins Gilman was born on July 3, 1860, and committed suicide on August 17, 1935. She had a difficult childhood and was raised by a single mother. Gilman was a social activist, both as a feminist and a socialist. She was married in 1860, but they divorced 10 years later and she left their daughter with him. Her first marriage is believed to be the inspiration of her best-known short story "The Yellow Wallpaper." She also published several forward-thinking, feminist non-fiction books. In 1900, she married her cousin and they got along well. He passed in 1934 and, soon after, Gilman discovered she had inoperable breast cancer, which led to her committing suicide. (source)
Plot summary:
Moving the Mountain - John is unexpectantly reunited with his sister Nellie. He is so shocked at seeing her that he passes out and hits his head on a rock. This causes him to lose his memory of the last 30 years. The book is set in New York City (mostly) in 1940, but his mind is in 1910 [the book was published in 1911]. He is told through speaking with his sister and others about how much the world has changed in the 30 years he has "lost."
Herland - Three male explorers from America discover a secluded society where only females have lived for the last two thousand years. This nation is a utopia named Herland and they have had no contact with outside cultures in all that time. The women teach the men their language and the men teach them English. Once the language is known well enough, they educate each other about their respective societies and culture. The story takes place about 1913/1914 and lasts a little over a year.
With Her in Ourland - This is a direct continuation of "Herland." Van and Ellodor, his wife from Herland, travel the world together. Ellador is sent as an ambassador to learn all about the world and how having two genders to work with is better than just having one. Unfortunately, she discovers many appalling things about the world, specifically America, and gives many suggestions about how it could be improved. The story takes place a few months after WWI has started and lasts a little over 2 years.
Favorite quotes:
"Ideas can be changed in the twinkling of an eye."
-Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Moving the Mountain
"Women 'woke up' to a realization of the fact that they were human. Before, they were only female beings; a little human, but mostly female. Now they are mostly human. It is a great change." -Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Moving the Mountain
[Referrring to a society of all women, from the perspective of men] "Here you have human beings, unquestionably, but what we were slow in understanding was how these ultra-women, inheriting only from women, had eliminated not only certain masculine characteristics but so much of what we had always thought essentially feminine. 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 and in no way essential to their fulfillment." -Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Herland
"It looks to me as if the contempt of the rich for the poor was a lineal descent of that of the conqueror for the vanquished. A helpless enemy, a slave, a serf, an employee, and the state of mind coming along unchanged." -Charlotte Perkins Gilman, With Her in Ourland
"I noticed that Ellador and her sisters always said 'she' and 'her' as unconsciously as we say 'he' and 'his.' Their reason, of course, is that all the people are shes. Our reason is not so justifiable." -Charlotte Perkins Gilman, With her in Ourland
*More great quotes below!*
Review:
The trilogy, as a whole, is more of a feminist utopian manifesto than an actual story. The first and third books are very expository and mostly consist of various conversations of how the society around them is run. Herland has elements of this too, but it has much more of a story arc and the character development is deeper and more complex.
There are many topics Gilman talks about multiple times in all three books:
The improvement/development of the roads and travel in general; food/agriculture industry (should be mostly vegetarian); as well as renewable energy sources and less pollution. Economics and politics should be more Socialist. She was against most religions, specifically Judaism and Christianity. She redefined marriage and wife/mother - Gilman was appalled that all the cooking and housecleaning was women work only. She was also appalled by poverty and prostitution; under education; long hours at work and poor wages; and lies in the news/press. She was horrified that there were such beings as female anti-suffragists.
She believed that work should be viewed as a social service, and not be about providing for yourself. This would change the attitude about work from negative to positive. Gilman also believed women should be just as much a part of the "normal" workforce as men. Since women would be working outside of the home, education (preschool or daycare) should be offered at a much younger age for children. She highly supported the Montessori way of teaching through games and personal interest. Education should start very general and get more and more specialized as students become older. As far as raising children, she was a full supporter of "nurture over nature" and "it takes a village."
The main topic she spoke of, more than anything else, was the role of women in society and how that can and should be changed. Gilman challenges us to change our thinking; we should not see women just as females, but as human - as people. This means redefining what 'feminity' is, what 'masculinity' is, and what it means to be 'human.'
"Women 'woke up' to a realization of the fact that they were human. Before, they were only female beings; a little human, but mostly female. Now they are mostly human. It is a great change." -Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Moving the Mountain (book 1)
"We were now well used to seeing women not as female but as people; people of all sorts, doing every kind of work." -Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Herland (book 2)
"Wherever men had been superior to women we had proudly claimed it as a sex-distinction. Wherever men had shown evil traits, not common to women, we had serenely treated them as race-characteristics." -Charlotte Perkins Gilman, With Her in Ourland (book 3)
Also, the third quote listed in "Favorite Quotes" above and the closing quote of the review below are on this same topic. Overall, her view of people is that they are naturally good - they just need to be given the right conditions to live that goodness out.
In book 1, Moving the Mountain, there are several comments throughout about how men should have to deal with what women want because women have put up with what men wanted for thousands of years. I have an issue with this because this is just making a "women's world" to replace the "man's world." The point should be equality and balance, not women taking the place of men.
Book 2, Herland, is the most well-known out of the 3 books in the trilogy. I think that's because there's much more story to it. It is very interesting because you have extreme perspectives in the explorers who discover Herland, an all-female society. First, you have Terry; he is a "man's man," very dominating, and a womanizer. Second, you have Jeff; he is a "women worshipper," a poet, and a bit of a push-over. Then you have Van; he is a sociologist and the middle ground between the other 2. Jeff pretty much loves Herland from the beginning, Terry never gets used to the place and doesn't like being there. Van, whose perspective the story is told through, has many reserves in the beginning but changes his attitude to a positive one by the end. In fact, Van actually gets married to Ellador, a Herlander.
I normally wouldn't give something like that away, but all of book 3, With Her in Ourland, is about Van and Ellador traveling the world together. This is the first time anyone from Herland has left to discover what the rest of the world is like. Ellador, in the beginning, repeatedly says things like, "Surely, two sexes working together is better than just one!" She said that thinking, since we have both female AND male, our world would be even better than their female-only utopia. She soon discovers that not to be the case.
"The reason we Herlanders had so little trouble in building a great society is that we had no men, I'm sure of that. The reason you have made so much progress is because you have had men, I'm sure of that too. Men are splendid, but the reason you had so much trouble is not because of the men, but because of this strange dissociation of the men and women."
-Charlotte Perkins Gilman, With Her in Ourland
"A democracy is a game everybody has to play, else it is not a democracy. And here you people deliberately left out half!" -Charlotte Perkins Gilman, With Her in Ourland [It will not be until 4 years after this book is published that women are granted the right to vote in America.]
In book 3, With Her in Ourland, the main story is Ellador's perspective of the world and how things could so easily be changed for the better. What I enjoyed was how Ellador and Van's marriage would occasionally come up. It was a deep marriage and their relationship became closer and closer throughout the book. The thing is, even though their relationship is a secondary part of the story, it was still a presence. In so many books, especially in "female books," there tends to be a lot of romance and relationships... but there was so much told in their relationship in the little text that was given to it. I came to get some warm fuzzies in the end, which I didn't expect because of how much Gilman had written about how horrible marriage is.It was as if she, Gilman, was saying, in a much subtler way than her usually just blatantly telling us, that, 'even though marriage needs to be redefined, it is still a good thing. Marriage should only be part of your life, though, there's still the whole world to learn from, to work on, and to improve - even after marriage.' [Just to be clear, that's my interpretation, not an actual quote.]
The trilogy is very eye-opening, even today. Gilman was ahead of her time in thinking and many of the improvements she mentions are normal in today's society. There are other problems, that she suggested solutions to, that we are still dealing with. Herland (book 2) is this sort of magical utopia, where only females live. With Her in Ourland (book 3) is a direct continuation of Herland and is a Herlander's perspective on how our society could be improved. Moving the Mountain (book 1) is decades in the future from the other books and the reader gets to see what our society looks like with all the improvements made. I think The Herland Trilogy a good read and would suggest that you actually read them in this order: Herland (book 2), With Her in Ourland (book 3), and Moving the Mountain (book 1).
There is so much more I could say about this trilogy [and many more quotes I could list], but, honestly, I'd rather be reading another book... and seen as though a review should be more about the author of the book than about the writer of the blog, I will let Gilman have the last words:
"Women are People and they are People because they are women, not in spite of it. Men are People too, just as much as women are." -Charlotte Perkins Gilman, With Her in Ourland
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