The Utopian Imagination of Charlotte Perkins Gilman: Reconstruction of Meaning in

"Herland"
Author(s): Kim Johnson-Bogart
Source: Pacific Coast Philology , Sep., 1992, Vol. 27, No. 1/2 (Sep., 1992), pp. 85-92
Published by: Penn State University Press on behalf of the Pacific Ancient and Modern
Language Association (PAMLA)

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/1316715

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 The Utopian Imagination of Charlotte Perkins Gilman:
Reconstruction of Meaning in Herland
Kim Johnson-Bogart
University of Washington

As in other literary utopias, the strategy for achieving perfection in

Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Herland appears to be based primarily on
eliminating one partner in various pairs of terms where the excluded
partner is seen to be the locus of the ills of society. In Looking Backward,
Edward Bellamy eliminates "poor" from the dichotomy rich v. poor
while preserving the notion "rich" to accomplish a world of economic
equality and well-being for everyone. As well, in Mark Twain's A
Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, Hank Morgan attempts to
eliminate what he perceives to be superstition and irrationality in the
Arthurian world to make his notion of reason ubiquitous.
Operating in these texts are deep assumptions about the nature of
meaning based on the binary structure of language which produces an
abundant network of paired terms whose meanings are one another's
opposites-masculine/feminine, public/private, good/evil-and so
on. What is masculine is not feminine, what is public cannot be private.
That good cannot be evil seems to reduce this logic to tautology. Many
utopian writers have employed this notion to create more perfect
worlds, and so have emptied out half the engendering language, leav-
ing the residuum without any anchoring relation, unable to measure
difference. The language of utopian genesis becomes meaningless for
that supposedly new world, for it is still the meanings and values of the
old world, if only "half"of them, which define the utopia. And while
that language can describe what the utopia is not, it cannot positively
describe a new world. In The Shape of Utopia, Robert C. Elliott notes the
absence of subject in utopia, the difficulty of describing an only perfect
world. "Except at the most primitive level," he says, "we lack a lan-
guage and conventions for depicting man in a happy state... " (What
this implies by omission about primitives and women seems hopeful!)
"Our imagination of the good life," he continues, "is as barren as our
imagination of the bad is rich" (120). To maintain their utopias, then,
writers who employ this strategy of elimination must also maintain the
worlds they seek to eliminate as their only means to give meaning to
their purportedly new worlds. Perfection becomes residuum of, and
the strategy undermines the project it is employed to achieve.

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 86 Kim Johnson-Bogart

This same exclusionary dualism

Herland, for it presents us with a
knows no war, no killing or other
ship, disease, poverty, crying, or f
but "a half-country." Further, Gi
events, she has eliminated the very
events into being leaving no trace
exactly?" Alima demands. And so
this elimination strategy to its e
initiates her project with this strate
into the target of her argument
meaning implicit in our dualistic n
to reconstruct the basis of meanin
one another.

In "The Antithetical Sense of Primal Words," Freud discusses an

essay of the same title by the philologist K. Abel, who points out the
antithetical double meanings of our oldest root terms. To explain this
phenomenon, Abel notes that:
Were it always light we should not distinguish between light and
dark ... Since every conception is thus the twin of its opposite, how
could it be thought of first, how could it be communicated to others
who tried to think it, except by being measured against its opposite?
... Man has not been able to acquire even his oldest and simplest
conceptions otherwise than in contrast with their opposite; he only
gradually learnt to separate the two sides of the antithesis and think
of the one without conscious comparison with the other. (Freud, 47)

The notion that meaning resides neither in a term nor its opposite, but
in the relation between the two is precisely Gilman's point. Though the
world is filled with men and women, for Gilman their meaning lies in
their humanity, the term of which both are a part and through which
both relate to and are included in one another. As Gilman says: "to be
human, women must share in the totality of humanity's common life.
.. Women are not undeveloped men, but the feminine half of humanity
is undeveloped humans" (xi).
The story of Herland begins in men's territory and language. Terry,
Jeff and Van, the three adventurers, are in possession of this portion of
the story, and are equipped to possess the territory, both physically
through conquest, and representationally through mapping and nam-
ing. By claiming "This is our find" (5) and naming it "Feminisia" (7),
Terry assumes appropriation of this as yet imaginary world into the
law and property of his language. Further, they define it into existence
in their own language before exploring it. Yet these consuming claims

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The Utopian Imagination of Charlotte Perkins Gilman 87

are made against Van's ambivalence: his quiet confession that unfor-
tunately his notes are written from memory, then his assertion of the
authority of his written notes which, however, are lost, and his further
confession that "Descriptions aren't any good when it comes to
women" (1). Such unconscious self-contradiction suggests that his
language may not have the totalizing power to name and own these
men desire. Nevertheless, they persist in their efforts at linguistic
conquest, and it is Van who responds to his first view of Herland with
"There must be men" (11), simply assuming that all things-including
the unknown world of Herland--coincide with meaning as constructed
by his language. Gilman begins, then, by containing the unknown
world of Herland in the men's terms, yet she frames the entire text in
Van's destabilizing asides.
Contact with the women of Herland immediately initiates disloca-
tions and reversals in the men's language, reflecting disruptions in their
expectations about meaning. They experience the oxymoronic as they
are impressed "by the sense of quiet potency which lay about" (18) and
they suddenly begin to call themselves "boys" (21), reflecting the
reversal of men/girls into women/boys. Further, the shift to "boys" is
a shift out of control, both socially and linguistically, and parallels the
experience of women (girls) in men's language. The knowledge that
they are to begin their education in Herland by learning its language
adds erasure to the impotence suffered through role inversion with
their discovery that men have disappeared, physically and figuratively:
"It isn't just that we don't see any men--but we don't see any signs of
them... They don't seem to notice our being men" (29-30). Because
their notion of manhood is tantamount to their notion of self, the three
boys experience their imprisonment in a language without men as an
impossible erasure of their being. Meaning no longer coincides with
experience.

Gilman then subjects the boys to an intensification of her strategy by

exploring the notion of balance that the logic of dualism implies while
also betraying: namely, that for every term there is a counterpart with
equal value. Exploiting this logic in a humorously innocent tone,
Gilman simultaneously explodes it. In response to Zava's query about
the term "virgin" which is unknown in Herland, Jeff responds that
"Among mating animals, the term 'virgin' is applied to the female who
has not mated," and Zava follows with: "Oh, I see. And does it apply
to the male also? ... Is not each then-virgin-before mating? And tell
me, have you any forms of life in which there is birth from a father
only?" (45-6). By now, Jeff, who's hung his manhood on women's
virginity, wishes he'd never heard the term. By bringing such pressure

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 88 Kim Johnson-Bogart

to bear against binary pairs, Gilman

in language based on exclusionary
definition.

Intensive repetition of this strategy finally brings Van to the under-

standing that:
When we say men, man, manly, manhood,... we have in the back-
ground of our minds a huge vague crowded picture of the world
and all its activities ... of men everywhere, doing everything--"the
world."

And when we say women, we think female-the sex.

But to these women ... the word woman called up all that big
background ... and the word man meant to them only male-the
sex. (137)

But this understanding still limits Van to a sense of either/or alterna-

tives that exclude one another.

In order for her project to progress, Gilman must shift from examin-
ing notions about pairs of terms to a multiplying focus on single terms,
enabling her to locate opposition and opportunity within a term. She
is again aided by the disruptive deployment of oxymorons which
undermine the assumption of a single meaning in each term. Van
describes the Herlanders as "infuriated virgins" (55) and notes that
"They were inconveniently reasonable" (55). The result is a destabili-
zation and multiplication of meaning for both terms of each pair. This
effect Gilman pursues relentlessly in completing her project.

As Van gains a sense of the multiplicity and divergence of meanings

within a single term, he moves toward comprehending apparent
paradoxes by shifting the level at which he constitutes meaning. In his
perception that, "They had no theory of the essential opposition of good
and evil; life to them was growth" (102), Van shifts his focus from the
assumed opposition and exclusion between good and evil to a notion
of growth which focuses on life as a learning process rather than a
judged product, hence the absence of punishment and emphasis on
education in Herland.

Ellador's desire to return with Van to his world reflects the fact that
Gilman is not content to rest her reconstructed basis of meaning in
utopia, for she well knows it is "like jewels in the big blue sea" (136),
but a tiny and isolated mirage, and she fully intends to assert the
possibility of actualizing her project in this world. Still, Gilman agrees
the world may not be ready for the transformation she envisions, and
she is fully aware of the difficulty with which we change the way we

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The Utopian Imagination of Charlotte Perkins Gilman 89

think. But because Gilman's notion of meaning has been reconstructed

from within our language, she sees it as a viable possibility.

As much as the revolutionary nature of Gilman's reconstructive

project points forward, it is basically recuperative. Drawing her possi-
bilities of meaning from within the language, Gilman recovers the more
encompassing character of terms in antiquity as documented by Abel,
and brings the history of language development he describes full circle.
Little wonder, then, that from the point of view of his reconstructed
meaning, in loving Ellador Van experiences "the stirring of some an-
cient dim prehistoric consciousness ... it was a sense of getting home"
(142). Further, the possibility that Gilman's project is recuperative as
well as innovative casts upon the question of cultural "readiness" to
receive her vision the same multiple focus on a single term which she
has developed within the text of her story. In effect, Gilman under-
mines the assumption that the world she offers is so Other and improb-
able to realize. Instead, she suggests that it is the world as it is which
is improbable though realized.
Ultimately Gilman's utopian project asserts an Other that is always
and necessarily within, and points to her vision of a better world
achieved through the integration, hence rethinking, of polarities. As a
project in meaning, Gilman's is a project requiring a reworking within
language, rather than any delusory exclusion into an externalized
Other, as the possibilities and limits of meaning exist for her within this
world. And so her story begins in this world and concludes by pointing
to a return to this world, which however, we now see in a new light.

Gilman's reconstructed basis of meaning also offers insight into our

notions of history and story. Commenting on Herland's history, Van
notes that in Herland "There were no adventures because there was
nothing to fight" (49), and Terry asserts that "Life is a struggle, has to
be... If there is no struggle, there is no life... " (99) Similarly, Robert
C. Elliott claims that because utopian projects eliminate conflict and
opposition, they also eliminate the process by which history occurs, and
instead achieve stasis. The problem here for Van, Terry and Elliott is
that their notion of historical process is based on an understanding of
change constituted at the level of meaning which Gilman has so thor-
oughly deconstructed. Not conflict, not opposition and exclusion, but
integrative growth is the Herlanders' motivating principle.

There does remain a problem in all utopian constructions from

which even Gilman's strategy does not seem to rescue her project. It has
been argued that literary utopias fail to come to terms with notions of
individual will so central to the self because they are contingent upon

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 90 Kim Johnson-Bogart

a totalizing system. To maintain the

compromise freedom. This occu
Herlanders' definition of themsel
observes:

I understand that you make Motherhood the highest social ser-

vice--a sacrament, really; that it is only undertaken once, by the
majority of the population; that those held unfit are not allowed
even that; and that to be encouraged to bear more than one child is
the very highest reward and honor in the power of the state. (69)

Strict control over the individual is also extended to child rearing, as

Somel explains to Van: "the more we love our children the less we are
willing to trust that process to unskilled hands--even our own" (83).
This seems a drastic invasion of individual autonomy when compared
with our society's values.
What is instructive in this claim about the limits of utopias, however,
is not so much that it serves to critique utopian constructions, but that
it brings into sharp relief assumptions underlying our notions about
the self and society. And whereas this dilemma remains unresolved
within the limitations of most utopias, Gilman's strategy clarifies and
reworks some of our most deeply embedded assumptions about the
self. As Owen Barfield notes in his History in English Words:
Self-consciousness, as we know it, seems to have first dawned
faintly on Europe at about the time of the Reformation... Practically
all philosophy since [Descartes'] day has worked outwards from the
thinking self rather than inwards from the cosmos to the soul.
(170-71)

Thus the notion of an independent, authorizing, and willing self is

relatively recent. Whereas the notion of autonomy originally referred
to states and societies, it has only been applied to individuals since th
end of the eighteenth century (Barfield, 198). And that application has
only become possible with the gradual divergence of terms reflecting
the inner and outer worlds, a distinction which is itself relatively new.
The location of the self has shifted from the now outer world of society
into that recently emerged inner world which has grown larger and
more distinct to accommodate what once resided in the cosmos. As a
consequence, the sense of authority which grounds both power and
will, has differentiated and divided its locus between the state and the
individual. What we find in the contemporary mind then, is a notion
of self that separates it from and even pits it against society, a result of
the very same exclusionary logic Gilman has so thoroughly critiqued.
For that very notion of self is ultimately derived only from existence
within society, or cosmos.

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The Utopian Imagination of Charlotte Perkins Gilman 91

Gilman's notion of "Home" recuperates this older notion of the self

as created, not only defined, by its existence in society. So critics who
charge that she conservatively restores women to the 19th century role
of domesticity in the home fail to perceive the implications of her
recuperative effort, missing altogether that "domestic," the contempo-
rary realm of women, and "domain," the contemporary province of
men, both refer back to a common Latin source which encompasses the
notions of master and house, be it a cottage or a kingdom. Far from
incarcerating women in their 19th century prison gardens, Gilman
restores the original coincidence of household and marketplace, domi-
cile and kingdom, but without the notion of property upon which
mastery and autonomy are based in our society. Instead, she gives us
the self as membership.

Our problem, which appears initially as the problem of utopias, is

not that there are such consistently unsatisfactory limits to individual
will and the autonomous self in literary utopias, but that our dualistic
habits of thinking have enabled us to believe in such a separate being
even in the conditions of the most "free" of actual societies as we
perceive them. In sum, it makes as much sense to Gilman to talk about
an autonomous self as it does to Terry to talk about male virginity. As
a project in language which aims at a reconstruction of the terms
meaning, the most valuable contribution of Herland is its ability to ope
up the current reader's most deeply held assumptions, thereby en
abling us to perceive the limitations of our own constructions of mean
ing with the possibility of exploring new alternatives. Instead of
pointing to a well defined hermetic solution as many utopias do,
Herland points to the process that initiates our own explorations into a
rethinking whose end is not specified and therefore not contained.

Works Consulted

Auerbach, Nina. "Why Communities of Women Aren't Enough." Tulsa

Studies in Women's Literature. 3 (1984): 153-7.

Barfield, Owen. History in English Words. West Stockbridge, MA: Lindisfar

1985.

Elliott, Robert C. The Shape of Utopia: Studies in a Literary Genre. Chica

London: U of Chicago P, 1970.

Freud, Sigmund. Character and Culture. New York: Collier/Macmillan, 19

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92 Kim Johnson-Bogart

Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. Herland.

Jung, C.G. Memories, Dreams, Reflecti

Clara Winston. New York: Random

Lane, Ann J. The Charlotte Perkins G

Treichler, Paula A. Escaping the Sen

"Yellow Wallpaper." Tulsa Studies in

Walker, Nancy A. A Very Serious Thing

Minneapolis: U Minn P, 1988.

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Literary Humor from Colonial Times t
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