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PALGRAVE STUDIES IN LITERATURE,
SCIENCE AND MEDICINE
Women, Science and

Fiction Revisited
Second Edition
Debra Benita Shaw

Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine
Series Editors
Sharon Ruston
Department of English and Creative Writing
Lancaster University
Lancaster, UK
Alice Jenkins
School of Critical Studies
University of Glasgow
Glasgow, UK
Jessica Howell
Department of English
Texas A&M University
College Station, TX, USA
Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine is an exciting series
that focuses on one of the most vibrant and interdisciplinary areas in liter-
ary studies: the intersection of literature, science and medicine. Comprised
of academic monographs, essay collections, and Palgrave Pivot books, the
series will emphasize a historical approach to its subjects, in conjunction
with a range of other theoretical approaches. The series will cover all
aspects of this rich and varied field and is open to new and emerging topics
as well as established ones.
Editorial board:
Andrew M. Beresford, Professor in the School of Modern Languages and
Cultures, Durham University, UK
Steven Connor, Professor of English, University of Cambridge, UK
Lisa Diedrich, Associate Professor in Women’s and Gender Studies, Stony
Brook University, USA
Kate Hayles, Professor of English, Duke University, USA
Peter Middleton, Professor of English, University of Southampton, UK
Kirsten Shepherd-Barr, Professor of English and Theatre Studies,
University of Oxford, UK
Sally Shuttleworth, Professorial Fellow in English, St Anne’s College,
University of Oxford, UK
Susan Squier, Professor of Women’s Studies and English, Pennsylvania
State University, USA
Martin Willis, Professor of English, University of Westminster, UK
Karen A. Winstead, Professor of English, The Ohio State University, USA
Debra Benita Shaw
Women, Science and

Fiction Revisited
2nd ed. 2023
Debra Benita Shaw
Department of Architecture and Visual Arts
University of East London
London, UK
ISSN 2634-6435 ISSN 2634-6443 (electronic)

Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine
ISBN 978-3-031-25170-2 ISBN 978-3-031-25171-9 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-25171-9
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2023

This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of
translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on
microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval,
electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now
known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this
publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are
exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information
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This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature
Switzerland AG.
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank my students at the University of East London who,

over the years, have helped to sustain my enthusiasm for all things weird
and out of this world. My most effusive thanks go to fellow sf fan and criti-
cal friend Professor Stephen Maddison for his appreciative reading of the
manuscript and his insightful suggestions which helped enormously in the
final edit.
v
Contents
1 Introduction: The Nearly Silent Listener 1
2 Herland: Charlotte Perkins Gilman and the Literature of

the Beehive 13
3 Swastika Night: Katharine Burdekin and the Psychology of

Scapegoating 41
4 ‘No Woman Born’: C. L. Moore’s Dancing Cyborg 67
5 The Left Hand of Darkness: Ursula Le Guin and the Haploid

Heart 91
6 The Handmaid’s Tale: Margaret Atwood and the Politics of

Choice113
7 The Power: Naomi Alderman and Archaeologies of Gender135
8 The City We Became: N. K. Jemisin and Posthuman

Urbanism155
Index177
vii
CHAPTER 1
Introduction: The Nearly Silent Listener
I have been announcing myself as a feminist for some forty years but I still
remain uneasy about what the term implies, how my interlocuters receive
it and what it means for them. Feminism has no straightforward interpre-
tation. As these things are periodised, we are now in a ‘fourth wave’: a
resurgence of gender politics which has in common with other ‘waves’ a
demand for rights, a claim for autonomy and a denouncing of masculine
behaviour through which males achieve status by claiming possession of
women. All this has happened before and will (to quote Battlestar
Galactica) happen again (Larson 2004–2009). Or will it?
I have been struck by the violence of the debates between the feminist
old guard, who came to consciousness in the 1970s and 80s, and their
granddaughters in the new generation as well as between a cadre of cis-
gendered activists and the trans-women whom they denounce. The ques-
tion of who or what is a ‘woman’ and who is authorised to speak for and
to women seems to be overwhelming the more important work of chal-
lenging the patriarchal social structures which, fundamentally, have defined
these terms in the first place.
During these debates I have been engaged in revising my first book for
republication. This is a book about science fiction (sf), the women who
write it and have written it and how they imagine gender in some future
time, other place or re-imagined past. Not all would explicitly claim to be
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

Switzerland AG 2023
D. B. Shaw, Women, Science and Fiction Revisited, Palgrave Studies
in Literature, Science and Medicine,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-25171-9_1
2 D. B. SHAW
feminists. Some used male pseudonyms to gain publication in a very mas-

culine-dominated publishing fraternity. Most were, and are, fascinated by
how science writes the world and how it might be written differently, from
another perspective or with a different kind of knowledge. All, of course,
are beneficiaries of what, in the original version of this book, I called the
Frankenstein Inheritance—the legacy of Mary Shelley who dared to exper-
iment with a body given form by other than heterosexual desire.
Re-reading the book that started as my doctoral thesis at the end of the
twentieth century and that was published at the turn of the millennium,
what strikes me is that, in some sense, all the stories and novels that I sub-
jected to analysis are, in one way or another, describing the world that we
now live in. This is not to claim that sf is prophetic or that these women
are clairvoyant. What it does suggest is that the concerns of these texts
remain acutely relevant, as is demonstrated by the fact that novels from the
early twentieth century are still in print and too that I discuss here have
been adapted for radio and TV. Also, as sf critics well know, the genre,
even in its most utopian form, is never really about the future but about
opening gaps in time and space through which we might peer back at our
own time and view it as if we were visiting an alien planet. The big ques-
tion of sf is ‘what if?’, a question that is always addressed by employing
scientific knowledge as what Ursula Le Guin calls a ‘heuristic device’ (Le
Guin 1979, p. 163). So these writers ask: what if there were no men? Or
no gender? Or if sexuality were fluid? What if advanced prosthetics could
furnish a brain with a new body? What if a robot could be designed to be
a much better lover than any human male? They have even asked: what if
there were no women (or none that we would recognise as such)? What if
race were no longer a source of conflict in the world? And what if women
were to develop a form of defence against masculine power that meant
that they could no longer be raped?
My point here is that all these questions are germane to contemporary
concerns, but all the texts to which they refer were written across a span of
roughly one hundred years. There are no ‘waves’ in feminist- or gender-
oriented science fiction, just a constant rehearsal of the questions that have
obsessed people who identify as human females for centuries, looked at
through the perspective of what might become possible, given a set of
contingent circumstances.
My original intention, when I published the first version of this book,
was to make explicit the scientific subtext of the works I had selected for
analysis. My aim was to demonstrate that women given the opportunity to
1 INTRODUCTION: THE NEARLY SILENT LISTENER 3
imagine new worlds based on known scientific ideas could be read as

responding to their own marginalised position by challenging the tired
gender stereotypes of the traditional genre. I gave myself the freedom to
ignore the intentions of the author in favour of a reading that located the
text within the cultural preoccupations of the time of writing. I wanted to
explore science fiction as an enabling form; as a genre that, in requiring
subtextual reference to specific ideas, provided the opportunity to chal-
lenge the way that gender is assumed in the practice and application of
science. I followed Brian Aldiss (1988) in accepting that Shelley probably
inaugurated the genre but I also wanted to establish Frankenstein as the
first sf novel concerned with the effects of scientific innovation specifically
on the lives of women.
In her introduction to the 1831 edition of Frankenstein, Shelley
described how she was motivated to write the novel. In the summer of
1816, she and Shelley ‘visited Switzerland, and became the neighbours of
Lord Byron’ (Shelley 1969, p. 6). Also present was Byron’s secretary,
Polidari. The weather being particularly bad, they spent much of their
time reading ghost stories and agreed that each would attempt a story of
their own. Mary was lost for ideas until a particular night when a discus-
sion between Byron and Shelley fired her imagination:
Many and long were the conversations between Lord Byron and Shelley, to
which I was a devout but nearly silent, listener. During one of these, various
philosophical doctrines were discussed and among others the nature of the
principle of life, and whether there was any possibility of its ever being dis-
covered and communicated. They talked of the experiments of Dr [Erasmus]
Darwin … who preserved a piece of vermicelli in a glass case, till by some
extraordinary means it began to move with voluntary motion. Not thus,
after all, would life be given. Perhaps a corpse would be re-animated; galva-
nism had given token of such things; perhaps the component parts of a
creature might be manufactured, brought together and endued with
vital warmth.
Shelley then goes on to describe how, once in bed, she ‘did not sleep,
nor could I be said to think. My imagination, unbidden, possessed and
guided me, gifting the successive images that arose in my mind with a
vividness far beyond the normal bounds of reverie’ (pp. 8–9).
What struck me here was Mary’s silence; the fact that she took no sub-
stantial part in the discussions on the fateful night but that she
4 D. B. SHAW
nevertheless contributed and in such a way that she, although she obvi-
ously did not know it at the time, founded a literary genre. I was also
struck by the fact that she seems to almost want to relinquish responsibil-
ity for the tale. She claims that it is a gift of her imagination, rather than a
product of conscious thought, as if she could not possibly be responsible
for such an audacious proposition. This, for me, exemplified the position
of women in relation to the subject matter of science fiction.
When I published the first edition of this book, it was still possible to
argue for a distinction between sf and fantasy where sf could claim to be a
literature of scientific realism. Fantasy, on the other hand, was understood
to be more akin to myth and more invested in inventing worlds than in
extrapolating new futures for this one. However, as my final chapter for
this edition illustrates, this now seems like a naïve point of view in that it
not only assumes a shared reality which the extrapolation exposes or
explores but privileges a literary technique founded in the methods and
claims of Western science. Nevertheless, the fact remains that, for much of
the historical period that I have been examining, women in the West have
continued to occupy Shelley’s position of the ‘nearly silent listener’ in
debates about the social effects of new technologies and the political
implications of new descriptions of the physical world. The result has been
some extraordinary fiction that, like Frankenstein, has not only stood the
test of time but has become increasingly relevant as new technologies and
ideas have impacted how we understand the world. While I agree that the
division between sf and fantasy is limiting in the sense that it tends to privi-
lege a particular story told about Western science and its effects in the
world, what remains crucial is to appreciate the very different stories that
have emerged from the position of the nearly silent listener and their rel-
evance as documents of feminist thought applied to science and technology.
Similarly, although what counts as ‘science’ in any given historical
period needs to be interrogated, what remains relevant is that these are
examples of imaginary worlds developed from the unique point of view of
those with a great deal at stake in the future but who have largely been
excluded from the debate. So, although Herland (Chap. 1) offers some
difficult propositions about the future of eugenics, it is nevertheless an
extraordinary document in terms of the way in which it utilises the theory
of evolution to question the gender binary. And, given that we are now
living in a period of global precarity in which a particular form of insecure
masculinity threatens national security on all levels, Swastika Night (Chap.
2) should, I think, be required reading. Because these two chapters are
only slightly shortened versions of the originals, I have included addenda

at the end of each to contextualise them within contemporary debates.
For similar reasons, I have largely re-written my chapter on C L Moore’s
‘No Woman Born’ (Chap. 3) to further emphasise the way in which it
appears to anticipate much later arguments about gender as a culturally
conditioned performance rather than an innate attribute of bodies. Equally
remarkable is the way in which it extends the debate to question the rela-
tionship between what it means to be human and the technological inter-
faces through which we experience the world. Although Moore ends her
story by casting doubt on whether Deirdre will be able to continue to
maintain relationships with her human friends, this seems to me to be an
unnecessary coda, perhaps added as a sop to the pulp readership that she
was writing for. The most enjoyable part of the story is Deirdre’s perfor-
mance where she explores the aesthetics of cyborg ontology through a
dance that goes beyond the range of human movement. What Moore
seems to be suggesting is that it is not only the performance of gender but
also the performance of human that limits what we can imagine both in
the realm of art and in the realm of politics.
These first three chapters are the only ones that have survived from the
first edition. I have made the decision to omit four of the original chapters,
largely because the novels and short stories that they discuss are out of
print and also to make room for some important texts that were either not
yet published when I wrote the first edition or that I ignored at the time
because they were already well covered in the critical literature.
The most notable of these is, of course, Ursula Le Guin’s The Left
Hand of Darkness (Chap. 4). I was motivated to include it in this edition
largely because of the 2015 BBC Radio adaptation which sent me back to
the novel with a new perspective. I had always read LHD as an extrapola-
tion from the methods of anthropology, as a reflection on the masculine
bias of the so-called human sciences. What the radio adaptation made clear
is that it is equally a novel about communication and about the media
through which meaning is translated. It is also, of course, about extreme
weather and thus, under current conditions of global heating, asks us
urgently to examine how climate governs social structures. This chapter
also enabled me to re-introduce some of my discussion of James Tiptree
Jr’s ‘Your Haploid Heart’ from the first edition. Both Tiptree and Le Guin
were children of anthropologists, and there are some interesting similari-
ties in the way that they approach extrapolation. For both, the question of
human ontology and its relationship with gender categories is paramount.
6 D. B. SHAW
Similarly, I was motivated to include an analysis of Margaret Atwood’s

The Handmaid’s Tale (Chap. 5) following the extraordinary MGM/Hulu
TV adaptation that premiered in 2017 and is in receipt of, currently, fif-
teen Emmy awards. What particularly interested me was the way in which
the narrative easily translated to a contemporary setting, as if Atwood had
anticipated the world of social media and the way in which it has exposed
the violence at the heart of gender relations. The handmaid’s costume, a
symbol of both restriction and high visibility, has been a gift to women in
movement against increasingly draconian restrictions in the US, particu-
larly as related to abortion and the right to choose. The power of the novel
then is in the meaning that it has lent to a simple red cloak and white bon-
net. It stands alongside Swastika Night as one of the most uncompromis-
ing feminist dystopias. It not only proposes that, under the right political
conditions, women who congratulate themselves on their autonomy and
freedom could find themselves stripped of citizenship and enslaved but,
again like Swastika Night, it emphasises the potential for women ourselves
to collude with an oppressive regime.
This is also emphasised in Naomi Alderman’s The Power (Chap. 6), a
title which alludes both to the genetic mutation which gifts women a
weapon to protect themselves against assault and to the political changes
this enables and through which certain women become dangerously pow-
erful. The Power is very much a novel for a post-truth world, directly ref-
erencing the form of digital communication as consequential in the
dissemination of damaging popular mythologies and demonstrating the
ease with which new power makes use of old discourses. Like LHD, The
Power is framed by a report from a future world in which we are disap-
pointed to find that old power imbalances still pertain but, this time, the
genders have simply swapped positions. Alongside this, the text performs
a skilful critique of bias in the scientific method, introducing ‘ancient’
artefacts (some of which are consumer products from our current time),
the uses of which are surmised on the basis of gendered historical assump-
tions. There are similarities here with Herland in that Alderman has fun at
the expense of her future scientists, gravely pronouncing that an iPad has
something to do with serving food in the same way that Gilman obviously
enjoyed confronting her explorers with women who had no concept of
romantic love. In both cases, the world of the text functions to interrogate
scientific realism, but whereas this allows Gilman to expose her Herlanders
as utopian ‘new’ women, Alderman employs the technique to expose how
ideology structures power relations beyond the gender divide. As women
have gained the advantage in physical power so, the text illustrates, they
have gained the power also to determine what stands as truth.
Both THT and The Power feature reflexive voices speaking to us from
far futures in which the time of the narrative has become ancient history.
Notably, in both cases, the future world is a thinly veiled version of the
time of the novel’s production. These voices have a dual function. They
both allow for an exposition of the critique that the text performs and for
a reflection on historicity, particularly as it relates to sf. As Sherryl Vint
points out, ‘[t]he rhetorical conflation of technological innovation with
progress writ large emerged alongside genre sf’ (Vint 2021, p. 33). The
result is that it has generally been read as future history concerned with
the social effects of innovation. But postmodernity has put an end to con-
fidence in the future trajectory of history, essentially also closing off the
future as the space which authors could imaginatively occupy in order to
gain perspective for a critical evaluation of their own time. Nearly all the
major theorists of postmodernity at some point turn to sf to emphasise the
way that, in David Harvey’s words, ‘the future has come to be discounted
into the present’. Harvey suggests this is marked by a ‘collapse of the cul-
tural distinctions between … “science” and “regular” fiction’ (Harvey
1990, p. 281); Fredric Jameson suggests, similarly, that ‘science fiction …
turns into mere “realism” and an outright representation of the present’
(Jameson 1991, p. 286). And, for Jean Baudrillard, writing for Science
Fiction Studies in 1991, the conquest of space marked a turning point at
which ‘the era of hyperreality ha[d] begun’. What he calls the ‘panto-
graphic exuberance which made up the charm of SF [is] now’, as he says,
‘no longer possible’ (Baudrillard 1991, p. 311).
Aside from the fact that we now live in the future that sf predicted and
it is proving less than utopian, popular culture is now so thoroughly satu-
rated with sf imagery that our world is largely experienced through repre-
sentations drawn from the way the future was imagined in the past. ‘Daily
life’, according to Vint, ‘can … at times seem like visions from the pulp sf
of the 1920s and 1930s’ (Vint 2021, p. 1), and sf writer Kim Stanley
Robinson, in an article for Nature, offers that ‘[w]e are now living in a
science fiction novel that we are all writing together’ (Robinson 2017,
p. 330). As Vint suggests, one of the functions of sf has been supposedly
to ‘prepare us for the future’ (Vint 2021, p. 53) but, in contemporary
culture, ‘advertisers embrace sf imagery to make their products seem to
usher in the world promised by technophilic stories’ (p. 13). In other
words, the genre’s speculative orientation and its association with the
8 D. B. SHAW
promise of modernity has been hijacked to prepare us for the future of

consumer capitalism.
Vint also points to the fact that sf has become important for securing
research funding for new products (p. 47) and that it has increasingly
influenced design. This is particularly evident in the devices that we now
use in everyday life which seem to have first appeared in early series of Star
Trek. If you are designing, for instance, a personal communication device,
it would seem sensible to mimic a model that Star Trek has already made
highly desirable (the flip phone). Similarly, if you want to design a device
that captures valuable data and, to that end, encourages people to com-
municate with it frequently (smart speakers), it makes sense to produce
and market something that has already captured consumers’ imaginations
and that feeds the desire for the kind of future that Star Trek offered.1 We
don’t yet have flying cars but we do have replicators (3D printers) and, as
computer games become more sophisticated and incorporate VR, we are
on the way to a full-blown version of TNG’s holodeck.
The sf of the early to mid-twentieth century, from which most of these
devices are derived, was characterised by what Patricia Monk has called
‘the androcentric mystique … a literary mystique characterised by gad-
getry, adventure and androcentric thinking’ (Monk 1980, p. 16). The
inheritance of this is gender bias built into the technologies that we now
rely on to manage our home, work and social lives. This is alluded to in the
TV adaptation of The Handmaid’s Tale which incongruously features a
laptop computer that, it is suggested can, in the world it depicts, now only
be used by certain privileged men (see Chap. 5). And, in both The Power
(Chap. 6) and The City We Became (Chap. 7), contemporary communica-
tions devices are the channels through which particular forms of insidious
evils make their way into the world.
Furthermore, as Liz W. Faber discovered in her analysis of the com-
puter’s voice, acousmatic computers in the early twenty-first century have
been almost exclusively gendered female, largely because computers in sf
have been represented as ‘both houses and wives/mothers—literal house-
wives’ (Faber 2020, p. 142). As she notes, films like Spike Jonze’s Her
(2013) in which the central character falls in love with a female voiced
computer are not science fiction because they are created for ‘an audience
that [already] has access to voice-interactive software’ but they neverthe-
less ‘use the same narrative and conceptual techniques as previous SF texts
by situating acousmatic computers into preexisting gender and narrative
contexts’ (p. 166). So, we could say that, in general, what we might call
gadget-oriented sf can no longer be read through extrapolation. What we

are left with is a form of fiction that, like Her, might be called critical real-
ism but which nevertheless fails to question the persistence of the andro-
centric mystique.
Similarly, sf criticism has, somewhat belatedly, recognised the tacit
acceptance of Western imperialism which is a structural property of the
majority of sf texts. As Gerry Canavan puts it, ‘the imperial-turn critics of
SF excavate the racist and colonialist assumptions about difference that are
not only evident in early entries in the genre but continue to structure
creative production in the genre to this day’ (Canavan 2017, p. 5). It may
indeed be no accident then that a culture which seems to be attempting to
live in the future imaginary of sf is one in which social media has provided
space for expressions of both racism and misogyny that would not have
been out of place in Swastika Night. As Jonathan Crary has argued ‘the
internet complex … disperses the disempowered into a cafeteria of sepa-
rate identities, sects and interests and is especially effective at solidifying
reactionary group formations’ (Crary 2022, p. 11). As I suggest in
Chap. 6, this is the subtext for The Power which is, ultimately, an argument
for the impossibility of social change in a world that provides for the end-
less circulation of simulated models of power in a claustrophobic space
which prohibits the imagination of an outside from which change might
come. It is, in effect, an sf novel which employs extrapolation to model the
end of the genre.
My claim then is that the time of sf is over. What I mean by this is not
only that the concept of linear time on which it has traditionally depended
is now thoroughly compromised but that the criteria that distinguished
the genre and which governed the mode in which extrapolation func-
tioned are now no longer sustainable. The long debates over what is and
what is not science fiction now seem to belong to the time of colonialist
assumptions and to be part of the taxonomic ordering of the world which
structured scientific imperialism. The City We Became, as my final chapter
suggests, comes under the description of the Black Fantastic but it also
falls under the conventions of the New Weird and Urban Fantasy. What it
is not is science fiction and it is also not feminist science fiction. Although
it features women as independent central characters, it fantasises the ten-
sion between the everyday and the extraordinary as also a tension between
a world in which gender makes sense and one in which a form of posthu-
man becoming makes nonsense of the categories through which we tradi-
tionally police both gender and race. And it demands that we understand
10 D. B. SHAW
the parameters of genre as established under the same divisive epistemol-

ogy that has governed the boundaries of the human under the terms of
modern science.
I would suggest, in fact, that all the texts that I examine here ultimately
offer a similar challenge. All in presenting gender as problematic also ques-
tion how we define what counts as human in the context of imagined
worlds where scientific epistemology is also questioned. Although most
evince a feminist politics, what they ultimately expose is the way that cat-
egories of knowledge both structure and are structured by the artificial
divisions through which social worlds are organised. Although I do not
claim to offer here an overview of all sf written by women during the cen-
tury from 1918 to 2022, what I do offer is a selective history which dem-
onstrates the political value of imagining other worlds from within the
margins of this one and which charts a gradual change from the confident
extrapolation of Herland to the emergence of a new hybrid genre more
suited to interrogating the fractured world of the twenty-first century.
Along the way, I suggest ways of reading that emphasise the way in which
they challenge conventions of both genre and gender. The time of sf might
be over but its critical function, particularly in the way that it is able to
expose the lingering effects of the androcentric mystique and offer alterna-
tives that are not caught in repetitions of tired binaries, is as vital as ever.
Note
1. In a famous scene from Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (1987), set in the late
1980s, Scottie (James Doohan), who is used to simply talking to computers,
tries to wake what looks like an early Apple Mac by addressing it verbally.
When he gets no response, Dr. McCoy (DeForest Kelley) hands him the
mouse which he, again, tries to use as a verbal communication device. The
scene is hilarious but is also prophetic. Now, of course, I can ask my com-
puter to, for instance, play my favourite music, without even being in the
same room.
References
Aldiss, Brian with David Wingrove. 1988. Trillion Year Spree: The History of
Science Fiction. London: Grafton.
Baudrillard, Jean. 1991. Trans. Arthur B. Evans, Simulacra and Science Fiction.
Science Fiction Studies, Vol. 18.
Canavan, Gerry. 2017, March 29. Science Fiction. In Oxford Research

Encyclopedia of Literature (online). https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/
9780190201098.013.136
Crary, Jonathan. 2022. Scorched Earth: Beyond the Digital Age to a Postcapitalist
World. London and New York: Verso.
Faber, Liz W. 2020. The Computer’s Voice: From Star Trek to Siri. Minneapolis and
London: University of Minnesota Press.
Harvey, David. 1990. The Condition of Postmodernity. Cambridge, MA and
Oxford, UK: Blackwell.
Jameson, Fredric. 1991. Postmodernism Or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism.
London and New York: Verso.
Jonze, Spike (dir.). 2013. Her. Annapurna Pictures, Stage 6 Films.
Larson, Glen A. 2004–2009. Battlestar Galactica (TV Series), BSkyB, David Eick
Productions, NBC Universal Television.
Le Guin, Ursula. 1979. The Language of the Night. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons.
Monk, Patricia. 1980. Frankenstein’s Daughters: The Problem of the Feminine
Image in Science Fiction. In Other Worlds, ed. J.J. Teunissen. Canada: Mosaic.
Robinson, Kim Stanley. 2017, December. 3D glasses on reality. Nature 552.
Shelley, Mary W. 1969 [1818]. Frankenstein: Or, the Modern Prometheus. Oxford
University Press.
Vint, Sherryl. 2021. Science Fiction. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
CHAPTER 2
Herland: Charlotte Perkins Gilman

and the Literature of the Beehive
Charlotte Perkins Gilman was perhaps best known in her own time for
Women and Economics, published originally in 1898, which anticipated
much later critiques of patriarchal economics and the assumption that
domestic labour should be excluded from calculations of wealth creation.
She wrote at a time when the ideas of Darwin were giving rise to much
discussion—‘feeding an extraordinary range of disciplines beyond its own
biological field’ (Beer 1983, p. 17). Gilman, as both a socialist and a femi-
nist, was committed to the belief that evolutionary theory indicated the
need for social evolution to be planned in accordance with ideals that
would ensure ‘improvement’ for the human race. What she saw as the
prime directive in establishing a more evolutionarily viable society (and
she believed the current state of the society in which she lived to be indica-
tive of a morbid degeneration of the species) was the role of the mother in
educating her children, a role that she believed the women of her time
were poorly adapted to fulfil.
Gilman was supremely aware of the masculine bias of fiction and was
concerned that women, ‘new to the field, and following masculine canons
because all the canons were masculine’ (Gilman 1911, p. 105), should
grasp the opportunity presented by a burgeoning women’s movement to
stake a claim for a literature of their own which would reflect the new
freedoms that she saw as offered by a rapidly changing social environment.
Against the ‘preferred subject matter of fiction … the Story of Adventure,
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 13

Switzerland AG 2023
D. B. Shaw, Women, Science and Fiction Revisited, Palgrave Studies
in Literature, Science and Medicine,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-25171-9_2
14 D. B. SHAW
and the Love Story’ which ‘do not touch on human processes, social pro-
cesses … but on the special field of predatory excitement so long the sole
province of men’ (pp. 97 & 98), she proposed a new literature that would
give a ‘true picture of woman’s life’ (p. 105)—the life that she believed
women would evolve, once released from their economic dependence on
men. Herland is her attempt to write the new literature; to show how the
conventions of the Story of Adventure and the Love Story must necessar-
ily be subverted by the introduction of themes which derive their emo-
tional impact from motherhood as the determining influence on the
future, rather than from the emotions of what she called ‘an assistant in
the preliminary stages’. This chapter will explore the ‘literature of the bee-
hive’ (p. 101), Gilman’s attempt to popularise these ideas and present an
alternative to what she called ‘the Adventures of Him in Pursuit of Her …
[which] stops when he gets her. Story after story, age after age, over and
over, this ceaseless repetition of the Preliminaries’ (p. 99). Herland was
first serialised in Gilman’s own fortnightly magazine The Forerunner,
which she published between 1909 and 1916, writing every word herself,
including the advertisements, as a direct response to the reluctance of the
publishing paternity to accept her more radical work. In her own words:
Social philosophy, however ingeniously presented, does not command wide

popular interest. … If one wants to express important truths, needed yet
unpopular, the market is necessarily limited. As all my principal topics were
in direct contravention of established views, beliefs and emotions, it is a
wonder that so many editors took so much of my work for so long. (Gilman
1935, pp. 303–4)
Herland, like all sf writing, is a product of its time, conditioned by pre-

vailing trends in both scientific and social development, and should, I
think, be read as such. The narrative begins with three male explorers
discovering clues to the existence of Herland on an expedition to explore
and document the surrounding country. In a spirit of adventure, they
return to the scene in the hope of realising their dream of a country full of
willing virgins who would welcome their ‘civilising’ influence. The reality,
of course, is quite different and as Bartkowski comments, ‘Herland main-
tains its humour through the constant and repeated exposure of the men’s
preconceptions about what a world of women would or could be’
(Bartkowski 1989, p. 28).
2 HERLAND: CHARLOTTE PERKINS GILMAN AND THE LITERATURE… 15
The three explorers are representative of three specific male attitudes.

Terry O. Nicholson is described as ‘a man’s man’ (Gilman 1979, p. 9)
who believed there to be only two types of women, ‘those he wanted and
those he didn’t’ (p. 21), Jeff Margrave is a romantic who ‘idealize[s]
women, and [is] always looking for a chance to “protect” or “serve” them’
(p. 89), while Vandyck Jennings, the central protagonist and narrator, was
more than likely intended to represent the sociologist Lester Frank Ward,
for whom, as Mary A. Hill writes, Gilman held ‘a lifelong hero-worshipping
respect’ (Hill 1980, p. 265).
Gilman’s social philosophy needs to be understood as a reaction to, and
a consequence of, the paradoxes that Darwinism presented to nineteenth-
century intellectuals as it was absorbed into ever more varied disciplines.
For instance, the essentially theistic view that evolution was merely the
playing out of a pre-designed course initiated by a divine creator could
answer the question of how a benevolent God could allow suffering by
pointing to the fact that the laws of nature had been designed to weed out
the ‘unfit’ so that the divine purpose would be seen to unfold along the
lines of Darwin’s ‘survival of the fittest’. Nevertheless, evolutionary the-
ory, which proved the earth to be much older than could be calculated
from the story of Genesis and which denied the separate creation of spe-
cies, could not be reconciled with a fundamentalist reading of the Bible.
Similarly, the planned evolution debate promoted ‘negative eugenics’, on
the one hand, and co-operative effort to raise all members of a society to
the level of ‘the fit’, on the other.1 Brian Easlea reports that Darwin him-
self vacillated between denying the value of social support for the weaker
members of a society and an exhortation that all members of a society
should feel compassion and sympathy towards ‘the unfit’ (Easlea 1981,
pp. 154–5). Indeed, the American John Fiske believed altruism to be ‘the
guiding feature of human evolution’ (Bowler 1984, p. 215), whereas
William Graham Sumner’s philosophy was summed up in his own words
as ‘root, hog, or die’ (p. 271). But in all these arguments, the fundamental
question remains that, if natural selection favours only the fittest, then by
what criteria do we determine fitness?
Early thinkers influenced by Darwinism were easily able to offer the
tenets of evolutionary theory as a justification for capitalism.
Accordingly, ‘the survival of the fittest’ was interpreted to legitimate
the laissez-faire economy. Natural selection supposedly favoured the
‘captains of industry’ with power naturally accruing to moneyed fami-
lies who instructed their children correctly in the management and
16 D. B. SHAW
maintenance of wealth—progress being commensurate with economic

prudence and privileging those who engaged all their energies in the
competitive process. In the words of Sumner, a leading proponent of
this system of thought, ‘millionaires are a product of natural selection,
acting on the whole body of men to pick out those who can meet the
requirements of certain work to be done’ (Hofstadter 1959, p. 58). It
was assumed that natural selection necessarily tended towards progress,
despite the fact that, as Bowler points out, ‘in a truly Darwinian uni-
verse there was no guarantee of progress’ (Bowler 1984, p. 209).
Evidence for progress was offered in the distinction between the less
technologically advanced and socially sophisticated races and the so-
called civilised and superior white, industrialised races. Bowler reports
that it was ‘even suggested that women represented a stage of growth
lower than that of men’ (p. 286). Darwinism thus also provided the
foundation for feminist arguments and it is a version of evolutionary
theory that provides the subtext for Herland.
Male Efflorescence
Gilman is an inheritor of the system of thought instigated by the publica-
tion, in 1792 of Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Women,
which ‘argued for reason as the basis for women’s equal part in society and
politics’ (Rowbotham 1992, p. 23), although, like Wollstonecraft, Gilman
is ‘inclined to be complacent about the inherent progress and superiority
of Western civilisation’ (p. 24), the collectivity which she advocates and
the socialist utopianism upon which Herland is based were recurrent
themes in the feminism of the period, and a number of thinkers believed
domestic reform to be a necessary step in the move towards a more egali-
tarian society. Gilman’s radicalism echoes that of other social reformers
like Marie Stevens Howland who ‘became convinced that not only should
housekeeping be cooperative but that children should be brought up
communally’ (p. 89). Nevertheless, she was primarily a eugenicist who
believed in these changes as a way of influencing the course of evolution.
When Gilman published Women and Economics, with its strong bias
towards planned evolution in freeing women from ‘pitiful dependence’
(Gilman 1966, p. 19), Lester Frank Ward, whose gynaeococentric theory
of evolution she called ‘the most important single percept in the history of
thought’ (Gilman 1924, p. 57) had yet to publish Pure Sociology (1903) in
which the theory was fully expounded, and his first book, Dynamic
Sociology (1883), was as yet largely ignored. Ward ‘was the first and most
formidable of a number of thinkers who attacked the unitary assumptions

of social Darwinism and natural-law laissez-faire individualism … he
replaced an older passive determinism with a positive body of social theory
adaptable to the uses of reform’ (Hofstadter 1959, p. 76). His response to
the theory of evolution was to argue that human evolution should be
brought under conscious control. Like most post-Darwinist social scien-
tists, Ward makes use of analogies from the animal kingdom to give a
biological basis to his social theory, and it is this that informs his argu-
ments for a gynaeococentric basis for evolution. Gilman’s own work is
largely an extension of this theory, relevant as it is to the status of women.2
According to Ward, sexual reproduction is the next evolutionary stage
to parthenogenesis, which ‘is not usually classed as another step in the
series but rather as a backward step from a more advanced form’ (Ward
1903, p. 306). ‘The female’, he writes, ‘is the fertile sex, and whatever is
fertile is looked upon as female….
It therefore does no violence to language or to science to say that life begins

with the female organism and is carried on a long distance by means of
females alone. In all the different forms of æsexual reproduction, from fis-
sion to parthenogenesis, the female may in this sense be said to exist alone
and perform all the functions of life including reproduction. In a word, life
begins as female’. (p. 313)
Ward saw the development of sexual reproduction as necessary to facili-

tate adaptation of the species to a changing environment, but the male, in
its first evolution as a separate organism, was merely a fertilising agent and
had no life function other than this. However, the female, having the
power of selection, would choose to benefit her offspring, favouring the
largest and strongest of the available males with the result that the male
evolved proportionately in strength and size. Or, as Gilman herself depicts
the scenario, early males were ‘very tiny, transient, and inferior devices at
first, but gradually developed into fuller and fuller equality with the female’
(Gilman 1966, p. 130). The result, according to Ward, was what he called
‘male efflorescence’:
The time came in the development of the race when brute force began to
give way to sagacity, and the first use to which this growing power was put
was that of circumventing rivals for female favour. Brain grew with effort,
and like the other organs that are so strangely developed through this cause,
18 D. B. SHAW
it began to be more especially characteristic of the sex. The weaker sex

admired success then as now, and the bright-witted became the successful
ones, while the dull witted failed to transmit the dullness. There was a sur-
vival of the cunning. (Ward 1913–18, Vol. 4, p. 134)
So the human female is the victim of an evolutionary irony. She has

been displaced in her ‘natural’ function as selector of the most suitable
mate to benefit her offspring in the race for survival, simply by selecting
too well.
Ward and Gilman seem almost to compete in their condemnation of
the male. What for Gilman was an ‘inferior device’, for Ward was ‘a mere
afterthought of nature’ (Ward 1903, p. 314) and bees and spiders are
frequently brought into the argument to ‘prove’ the natural position of
the male to be one of inferiority. The ‘tiny male’ of the common spider,
who ‘tremblingly achieves his one brief purpose and is then eaten up by his
mate’ (Gilman 1966, p. 130) is Gilman’s example of a well-adapted sexual
relationship, and both she and Ward were delighted to find parthenogen-
esis among certain varieties of plant lice3 although Gilman points out that
‘when conditions grow hard, males are developed, and the dual method of
reproduction is introduced’ (p. 131). As Mary A. Hill points out, Ward
provided the ‘kind of intellectual ammunition’ that ‘many suffragists
thought they needed’ (Hill 1980, pp. 269–70) and what may seem to the
modern reader like an argument for reducing the male to a kind of ambu-
lant germ-cell or disposing of him entirely after a ‘short period of func-
tional use’ (Gilman 1966, p. 131) was, for Gilman and her contemporaries,
authoritative scientific support for metaphorically, rather than literally, cut-
ting him down to size.
It is central to Gilman’s argument that women have become slaves to
their secondary sexual characteristics, ‘those modifications of structure
and function which subserve the uses of reproduction ultimately, but are
not directly essential’ (p. 32). In other words, the physical characteristics
which women have developed, in the course of evolution, to sexually
attract the male of the species, have taken precedence over other faculties
due to the fact that the female must ensure, by her sexual attractiveness,
that the male will also be inclined to feed and clothe her. This is what
Gilman calls the ‘sexuo-economic relation’ (p. 94), the condition of mar-
riage in her time which dictated that the female develop only those ‘facul-
ties required to secure and obtain a hold on [the male]’ (p. 62) so that she
becomes little more than a decorative domestic servant, performing only
those duties necessary for her husband’s comfort and thus being ignorant
of the ‘knowledge of the world’ (p. 189). She has thus developed, not as
the best kind of mother, but merely as the best kind of mate for the male—
‘over sexed’ (p. 141), economically dependent and a threat to the contin-
ued development of the species. ‘The female’, she writes, ‘segregated to
the uses of sex alone naturally deteriorates in racial development, and
naturally transmits that deterioration to her offspring’ (p. 183). Therefore,
in order to assist evolution effectively, woman must be freed from the
‘artificial position’ (p. 317) in which she merely competes for male atten-
tion and is excluded from co-operative effort as the man is excluded by
‘the increasing weight of economic cares. … [C]hildren come to be looked
upon as a burden’, she suggests, ‘and are dreaded instead of desired by the
hardworked father’ (p. 169).
Although it seems that both Ward and Gilman are arguing for a parthe-
nogenetic world, neither would dispute that evolution has, of necessity,
provided for dual parentage, and at one point Gilman stresses that the
‘sexuo-economic relation’
was necessary to raise and broaden, to deepen and sweeten, to make more
feminine, and so more human, the male of the human race. If the female had
remained in full personal freedom and activity, she would have remained
superior to him, and both would have remained stationary. Since the female
had not the tendency to vary which distinguishes the male, it was essential
that the expansive forces of masculine energy be combined with the preser-
vative and constructive forces of feminine energy’. (p. 132)
So what does Gilman think went wrong? Her argument rests on the
proposition that evolutionary adaptation can have negative as well as posi-
tive possibilities. We should not assume that evolution is, in itself, a guar-
antee of survival but should be aware that we have evolved the faculty of
reason precisely for the purpose of assessing our chances for survival and
directing our social evolution accordingly. But she also believed the growth
of ‘the “women’s movement” and the “labor movement”’ (p. 138) in her
own time to be indicative of ‘a sharp personal consciousness of the evils of
a situation hitherto little felt’ (p. 139). Nevertheless, she was despairing of
the greater mass of women who did not recognise their duty to ‘develope
[sic] a newer, better form of sex-relation and of economic relation there-
with, and so grasp the fruits of all previous civilizations, and grow on to
the beautiful results of higher ones’ (p. 142). ‘This is the woman’s
20 D. B. SHAW
century’, she writes, ‘the first chance for the mother of the world to rise to
her full place, her transcendent power to remake humanity, to rebuild the
suffering world—and the world waits while she powders her nose’ (Gilman
1935, p. 331).
Both genders then are handicapped by the ‘sexuo-economic relation’
(Gilman 1966, p. 94) and its attendant specialisation of function. Female
passivity inheres in a social order which privileges the male as the active sex
only because of his biological adaptation, through natural selection, to the
tasks that he has appropriated as ‘masculine’, following the demands of
‘male efflorescence’. The effect has been to reduce the demands of moth-
erhood to an inferior position.
The Literature of the Beehive

In Women and Economics, Gilman explores the paradox inherent in the
attitude that women should necessarily be dependent for the sake of their
progenitive role. ‘In spite of her supposed segregation to maternal duties’,
she writes, ‘the human female, the world over, works at extra-marital
duties for hours enough to provide her with an independent living, and
then is denied independence on the grounds that motherhood prevents
her working!’ (Gilman 1966, p. 21). Hence, in compiling the literature of
the beehive, Gilman was committed to revealing the absurdity of a social
order that could support such a paradox while also demonstrating the
value, in terms of evolutionary development, of motherhood released
from the restrictions of the sexuoeconomic relation. Herland offers the
proposition that, without the presence of men to hinder their develop-
ment, women will evolve a social structure that privileges the needs of
children—a form of co-operative motherhood where the needs of the
community become those of the individual and ‘conscious improvement’
(Gilman 1979, p. 78) is the driving force behind their development.
But, unlike more recent feminist utopias, Herland does not propose life
without men as the ideal for women but instead makes the argument that
men who allow themselves to be directed by reason will themselves see the
value of a society organised around motherhood, as will women who allow
themselves to think beyond the terms of the romantic ideal. So Herland
provides a scenario which allows Gilman, as Frances Bartkowski puts it, ‘a
great deal of space in which to play’; to invent a society that ridicules the
‘man-made world’ while offering a formula for change.
Bartkowski believes that Gilman’s choice of a male narrator ‘is one

which might make male readers of The Forerunner more comfortable by
giving them the privileged place of observer or storyteller’ (Bartkowski
1989, p. 28) but, while this may be true, a female narrator would not have
allowed her to demonstrate that men also have the potential to evolve. As
Dale Spender points out, she refused to describe herself as a feminist (a
term which she interpreted as representing the ‘other’ side of masculinist
values), preferring instead to claim ‘humanity for herself’ (Spender 1983,
p. 516) and believed in ‘the full social combination of individuals in col-
lective industry’ which would lead to ‘a union between man and woman
such as the world has long dreamed of in vain’ (Gilman 1966, p. 145).
I believe it is essential to Gilman’s purpose that we recognise Herland
as a frozen moment in a potential evolutionary history, a moment in
which, as the female regains the power of selection, the ‘man’s man’ and
the ‘romantic’ become redundant. For Gilman, Jennings represents the
future when ‘men and women, eternally drawn together by the deepest
force in nature, will be able at last to meet on a plane of pure and perfect
love’ (p. 300). For this reason, it is Jennings and his Herland ‘wife’,
Ellador, who are selected to spread the message to the wider world and
who continue their adventures in a sequel (With Her In Ourland).
Nicholson is banished, having attempted to rape his ‘wife’, Alima, and
Margrave is similarly ‘written out’ by being left behind in Herland. So,
while the later essentialist utopias propose parthenogenesis as a device to
demonstrate the liberation of women from all male influence and to depict
the future of cultural development in female terms alone,4 in Herland it
allows Gilman to rewrite evolutionary history, as both she and Ward saw
it, to eliminate the ‘mistake’ of male efflorescence.
The arrival of the three men finds Herland quietly prosperous, well
organised and abundantly fruitful, with the women ‘tall, strong, healthy
and beautiful’ (Gilman 1979, pp. 77–8). The explorers discover that
Herland was originally populated by both sexes, but a series of wars had
greatly reduced the male population. When a volcanic eruption effectively
blocked the pass from the mountains and the remaining men had died, the
women had found themselves alone. They had then developed a co-
operative social structure that, following the first ‘miracle’ (p. 56) birth,
was devoted to what Terry Nicholson’s Herland teacher, Moadine, calls
‘Human Motherhood—in full working use’ (p. 66).
Gilman saw motherhood as primarily educative in function. ‘A right
motherhood’, she writes, ‘should be able to fulfill this great function
22 D. B. SHAW
perfectly’ (Gilman 1966, p. 188). ‘Right motherhood’ is what she later

terms ‘wider maternity’ (p. 289) which she contrasts to ‘the feverish per-
sonality of the isolated one-baby household’ (p. 288). Children reared
communally, she believed, ‘would unconsciously absorb the knowledge
that “we” were humanity, that “we” were creatures to be … fed …
watched … laid to sleep … kissed and cuddled’, fostering an immediate
identification of the individual with the wider community and giving the
mother ‘certain free hours as a human being, as a member of a civilized
community, as an economic producer, as a growing, self-realizing indi-
vidual’ (pp. 289–90).
Gilman’s argument, then, is primarily against the patriarchal family,
which, while enslaving women, breeds an ‘inordinate self-interest’ (p. 277)
in the next generation, thus creating women who live vicariously through
their husbands and children and men who demand domestic service from
their wives, who are thus cut off from the means to fulfil themselves both
as women and as mothers. According to Gilman, ‘[t]he human mother
does less for her young, both absolutely and proportionately, than any
kind of mother on earth. She does not obtain food for them, nor covering,
nor shelter, nor protection, nor defense. She does not educate them
beyond the personal habits required in the family circle and in her limited
range of social life. The necessary knowledge of the world, so indispens-
able to every human being, she cannot give, because she does not possess
it’ (p. 189).
The women of Herland have thus developed a religion based on mater-
nal epistemology. Gilman believed that, ‘[t]o the death-based religion the
main question is, “What is going to happen to me after I am dead?”—a
posthumous egotism. … To the birth-based religion the main question is,
“What must be done for the child who is born?”—an immediate altru-
ism. … The first is something to be believed. The second is something to
be done’ (Gilman 1924, pp. 46–7). The first parthenogenetic mother of
Herland had thus inaugurated ‘the Temple of Maaia—their Goddess of
Motherhood’ (Gilman 1979, p. 56). As Jennings explains ‘[t]he religion
they had to begin with was much like that of old Greece—a number of
gods and goddesses; but they lost all interest in deities of war and plunder,
and gradually centered on their Mother Goddess altogether’ (p. 59). The
women thus have no understanding either of Christianity or of the family,
or of the economic principles of capitalism, allowing the narrative to pres-
ent numerous ironies as the men attempt to instruct them as to the value
of their ‘civilisation’. The question of surnames raises some confusion,
with the women puzzled as to why they should need to ‘sign’ their chil-
dren (p. 76), and they are rather less than honoured by the men’s desire
to bestow their surnames on the Herland women that they ‘marry’, a
custom that Alima pronounces to be merely ‘unpleasant’ (p. 118).
While being forced to account for the apparent inadequacies of their
system, the men are brought to question their own role, with the result
that, as the narrative develops, Nicholson’s defensive and therefore resis-
tant stance is brought into increasingly sharp contrast with Jennings’
developing sympathy and admiration. The third man of the party, Jeff
Margrave, described as having ‘a poetic imagination’ (p. 25) (and actually
the most annoying character in the novel), displays a subjective reverence
for the women which again is contrasted with Jennings’ considered, objec-
tive viewpoint, mediated by his ‘scientific imagination’, which, he flatters
himself, is ‘the highest sort’ (p. 26).
The first chapter, ‘A Not Unnatural Enterprise’, reveals their disparate
personalities as they consider a country of only women. Even Jennings’
‘scientific imagination’ can see no further than the survival of a ‘primeval’
matriarchy, while Jeff, ‘a tender soul’, imagines ‘roses and babies and
canaries and tidies, and all that sort of thing’ and Nicholson, ‘in his secret
heart, had visions of a sort of sublimated summer resort—just Girls and
Girls and Girls’ (p. 7). All three imagine a form of conquest to be the
outcome of the ‘enterprise’, and so the easy acceptance of their arrival and
the casual use of chloroform to restrain them puts them at an immediate
psychological disadvantage. Margrave is prompted to comment, ‘It’s as if
our being men were a minor incident’ (p. 30).
The Herland women, secure in their own autonomy, present a psycho-
logical challenge to the three men and, through them, to the reader. The
challenge is threefold. Assumptions regarding the role and character of
women are held up to question and ridicule, the accepted structure of
family life is questioned with regard to its effectiveness for the continued
growth of society, and the concept of love between the sexes is brought
into conflict, as an ideal, against the absorbing passion of the Herland
women for co-operative motherhood. Furthermore, the growing divisions
between the men can be read as a conflict between potential narratives:
narratives that present, on the one hand, distinct responses to evolution-
ary theory and, on the other, the attempt to write a masculine ending
against a conclusion which would deny that such an ending is inevitable.
24 D. B. SHAW
Newbolt Man Meets His Match

Writing in Play Up and Play the Game: The Heroes of Popular Fiction,
Patrick Howarth discusses a figure who ‘[c]ast in the role of hero … domi-
nated a large area of English literature, which may be loosely described as
popular fiction, for about a century’ (Howarth 1973, p. 14). Howarth’s
title is telling, in that the adventure stories that he describes appear to
derive their narrative from the game of cricket, the hero being the ultimate
sportsman and notions of ‘fair play’ informing the outcome of the adven-
ture. The title is, in fact, from a poem by Sir Henry Newbolt, a poet of
dubious talent but extraordinary popularity who wrote at the turn of the
century and whom Howarth believes to be the blueprint for what he terms
‘Newbolt Man’, the archetypal hero whose childhood he discovers in Tom
Brown’s School Days, and whose growth he traces through adolescence in
the stories of Henry Rider Haggard and his contemporaries to adulthood
as Sapper’s Bulldog Drummond.5 Newbolt Man was bold, brave and not
particularly bright: ‘[h]is philistinism served to widen a largely unneces-
sary gulf between athlete and aesthete, manliness and art, and so impover-
ish life. His attitude to women was a curious compound of fear and
self-distrust, causing him at one moment to elevate women on to a rather
chilling pedestal, at the next to regard them as a kind of permanent second
eleven, one or two of whom might in an emergency be allowed to field as
substitutes’ (p. 175).
The evidence for Terry Nicholson as a parody of Newbolt Man is per-
suasive. ‘Fear and self-distrust’ are obvious in his treatment of the
Herlanders, and his apparent inability to relinquish values that he believes
incontestable is tantamount to Newbolt Man’s insistence on bringing the
values of the cricket field to a variety of diverse situations in which he is
commonly shown to triumph. The world of Newbolt Man is fraught with
adventure and physically challenging situations, but, immured within the
rules of ‘the game’, he is able to create a narrative in which he is indestruc-
tible. It is a narrative of Christian values, white imperialism and male,
upper middle class supremacy in which a mystery must always be solved by
the hero. It is just such a narrative that Terry Nicholson tries desperately
to create. Indeed, in the opening chapter, all the elements for ‘a ripping
adventure yarn’ are present—secrecy, a mystery to be solved and three
potential heroes with the social status and material means to deliver them
safely into the plot.
Nicholson differs from Newbolt Man in that, for him, women are the
prizes in the game rather than merely peripheral players, but there is nev-
ertheless a sense in which he attempts to adhere to the Newbolt Man
scenario by requiring them to play by the rules. This is illustrated by the
scene in which, announcing that he has come ‘prepared’, he produces ‘a
necklace of big varicolored stones’ which he intends to use as ‘bait’
(Gilman 1979, p. 16) but remains undeterred when his quarry refuses to
be ‘caught’, confidently announcing that ‘They expected it. Women like
to be run after’. This then is ‘fair play’ as far as he is concerned. It is not
the reticence of the women that has him at a disadvantage but the nonap-
pearance of the opposing team. When, after they have given up chasing
the women through the forest, he observes, with obvious delight, ‘The
men of this country must be good sprinters!’ (p. 17) he is clearly anticipat-
ing the appearance of worthy opponents. It is when the worthy opponents
turn out to be women that his confidence begins to suffer.
When his companions show signs of being won over, having learned
the history of Herland, Nicholson attempts to engage their complicity in
opposition by invoking the safe stereotypes that have structured the men’s
experiences in their home culture: ‘[i]t’s likely women—just a pack of
women—would have hung together like that! We all know women can’t
organize—that they scrap like anything—are frightfully jealous’ (p. 58).
When his stated goal of becoming ‘king of Ladyland’ (p. 10) is thwarted,
his frustration manifests itself as anger and he is openly abusive, declaring,
‘They aren’t human’ and ‘The whole thing’s deuced unnatural’ (p. 80).
His anger provides the motivational drive to reassert his ‘superiority’ in a
manner unacceptable to the Herlanders although, as Jennings points out,
‘in our country he would have been held quite “within his rights”’, as
Alima’s ‘husband’. For a contemporary reader, it is unsurprising that
Nicholson emerges as a rapist, given that he represents precisely the kind
of entitled straight masculinity identified by, for instance, Laura Bates in
Men Who Hate Women (2020). However, in light of Gilman’s project to
expose the limitations of the popular literature of her time, the evidence
for Nicholson as Newbolt Man in the wrong adventure is persuasive. As
Jennings comments, ‘here he was all out of drawing’ (p. 74).
While it is quite possible that Gilman was familiar with the Newbolt
Man style of hero, it is also true that he only functions adequately in the
context of British upper class culture. Gilman was an American, writing for
an American audience where, traditionally, the frontier provided the nec-
essary challenge for a hero to prove himself. So, if Terry Nicholson can be
26 D. B. SHAW
read as Newbolt Man, urgently trying to forge his identity through a nar-
rative that refuses to adhere to ‘the rules’, then the ‘Not Unnatural
Enterprise’ is a similar archetype identified by, among others, Nina Baym
as a myth associated specifically with American literature. In essence,
Nicholson is Newbolt Man liberated from the mores of British culture and
let loose in ‘the wilderness’. The wilderness represents the pioneering
spirit which fosters individuality. ‘[T]he essential quality of America’,
writes Baym, ‘comes to reside in its unsettled wilderness and the opportu-
nities that such a wilderness offers to the individual as the medium on
which he may inscribe, unhindered, his own destiny and his own nature’
(Baym 1986, p. 71). Discussing ‘the entramelling society’ and ‘the prom-
ising landscape’, Baym finds them to be a constant source of tension in
American literature, while both being ‘depicted in unmistakably feminine
terms’ (p. 72):
the encroaching, constricting, destroying society is represented with partic-

ular urgency in the figure of one or more women. There are several possible
reasons why this might be so. It would seem to be a fact of life that we
all—women and men alike—experience social conventions and responsibili-
ties and obligations first in the persons of women, since women are entrusted
by society with the task of rearing young children. Not until he reaches mid-
adolescence does the male connect up with other males whose primary task
is socialization; but at about this time—if he is heterosexual—his lovers and
spouses become the agents of a permanent socialization and domestication.
Thus, although women are not the source of social power, they are experi-
enced as such. And although not all women are engaged in socializing the
young, the young do not encounter women who are not. So from the point
of view of the young man, the only kind of women who exist are entrappers
and domesticators. (p. 73)
The opposition that Baym proposes between female society and male
individuality is revealing for a criticism of Herland which posits the discov-
ery of a wholly female co-operative society as the achievement of the quest.
In The Adventures of Newbolt Man women either do not appear at all,
appear as prizes for the ‘victor’ or exist ‘between the lines’ as necessary but
dispensable (in terms of narrative) vessels of genealogy. Similarly, in the
American stories of escape into the wilderness, ‘the role of entrapper and
impediment in the melodrama of beset manhood is reserved for women’.
In both cases, women are merely marginal to the text or represented as
obstructions. The quest for self-definition involves an escape from
‘entramelling history’ into a new history that the hero may write for him-
self. Whether, within the narrative, women represent a threat or a promise,
they as individuals do not write history. They are important only insofar as
they represent what the hero must either escape, conquer or win in order
that the writing of history may proceed. Baym, following Annette Kolodny,
suggests that ‘the hero, fleeing a society that has been imagined as femi-
nine, then imposes on nature some ideas of women which, no longer sub-
ject to the correcting influence of real-life experience, become more and
more fantastic. The fantasies are infantile, concerned with power, mastery,
and total gratification’ (p. 75).
The ‘mythic landscape’ of Herland as the subject of such fantasies is
suggested by Jennings when he explains, ‘There was something attractive
to a bunch of unattached young men in finding an undiscovered country
of a strictly Amazonian nature’ (Gilman 1979, p. 5) and the tabula rasa
promise of the ‘feminine’ wilderness is perhaps echoed in Nicholson’s
assertion that ‘[t]hey would fight among themselves. Women always do.
We mustn’t look to find any sort of order or organization’ (p. 8). That the
intention is to impose ‘order and organization’ where they expect to find
none is obvious as is the desire for mastery and the expectation of submis-
sion, all of which combined would satisfy the need for Newbolt Man’s
predictable narrative while also allowing for the pioneering spirit to tri-
umph. It is also worth pointing out that Nicholson’s attempted rape of
Alima, in the context of nineteenth-century social imperialism and the
attendant imperative to subordinate women for the sake of maintaining
colonial power, would have been not only acceptable but also unremark-
able. Nevertheless, Nicholson’s fantasy narrative is thwarted so that
Vandyck Jennings, with his ‘rational’ approach and more constrained sex-
uality can emerge as an alternative ‘hero’.
Romance and the Scientific Imagination

Brian Easlea believes that ‘[i]f Gilman had been able to write the story in
the 1970s she surely could have safely included lesbian loving between the
sisters of Herland without compromising the affection and solidarity felt
between all the sisters, and made the presence of the three male explor-
ers—who constantly thought about returning to “penetrat[e] those vast
forests and civilizing—or exterminating—the dangerous savages”—as
unambiguously unwelcome as it was menacing’ (Easlea 1981, p. 270). But
this, I think, is to miss the point. Lesbian love could only have been
28 D. B. SHAW
included as part of the phase of transition that Herland represents rather

than as a political statement (as is the case with the later utopias).6 For
Gilman, it was necessary that the far more important issue of effective
motherhood and planned evolution should not be eclipsed by attention to
what she would have considered to be superfluous details. So, as Jennings
reports, the Herlanders ‘hadn’t the faintest idea of love—sex-love that is’
(Gilman 1979, p. 88). Instead, the men present them with the possibility
of ‘making the Great Change … of reverting to their earlier bi-sexual
order of nature’ (pp. 88 & 89). What Gilman wants to stress is that the
evolution of the male is not a ‘mistake’ but a successful adaptation, nur-
tured through its early stages by the sexuoeconomic relation but now in
need of a new direction in order to be a continuing success. The men are
welcome in Herland because it is for just such an intervention that the
women have been preparing.
This, as I have indicated, requires a new form of love story—a narrative
which derives tension not from the vicissitudes of a patriarchal economy
with woman as the spoils of victory but rather from the endeavours of a
unified social organism striving for mutual benefit. But, in demonstrating
how the literature of the beehive might be shaped, Gilman needed to
acknowledge accepted narrative forms and, indeed, needed to subvert
them in order to demonstrate the value of her thesis in fictional form. Her
awareness of this need is aptly summed up by Jennings, who, in discussing
the drama of Herland, comments that it was ‘to our taste—rather flat. You
see, they lacked the sex motive and, with it, jealousy. They had no inter-
play of warring nations, no aristocracy and its ambitions, no wealth and
poverty opposition’ (p. 99). Without these oppositions, there is no place
for the traditional characters of fiction, still less for the style of narrative
which produces popular heroes or romantic heroines. The emotive force
which characterises the traditional love story is abrogated by the lack of
overt sexual polarity as well as by the criteria which determine the basis for
sexual selection. The Herlanders are ‘strikingly deficient in … “feminin-
ity”’ (p. 59), ‘all [wear] short hair’, run ‘like marathon winners’ (p. 30),
are ‘not provocative’, (p. 128) and ‘their only perception of the value of a
male creature as such [is] for Fatherhood’ (p. 124).
Equally, selection on the basis of individual choice with standards dic-
tated by social position is replaced by considerations as to how the race
may benefit and is a matter for community decision. The sisterhood takes
the place of the individual so that the men’s relationships with the indi-
vidual women are presented as insignificant in comparison to the wider
issue of ‘bi-sexual’ generation, which concerns the whole society. Hence,

the emotional emphasis and the true ‘love story’ of Herland is based on
an examination of the values accruing from collective effort and public
‘service’. This, and the absence of cultural artefacts associated with court-
ship, places the men at a disadvantage from which Jennings is forced to
re-evaluate his views on the status of women and the status of the men as
potential suitors:
You see, if a man loves a girl who is in the first place young and inexperi-
enced; who in the second place is educated with a background of caveman
tradition, a middle-ground of poetry and romance, and a foreground of
unspoken hope and interest all centering upon the one Event; and who has,
furthermore, absolutely no other hope or interest worthy of the name—
why, it is a comparatively easy matter to sweep her off her feet with a dashing
attack. Terry was a past master in this process. He tried it here, and Alima
was so affronted, so repelled, that it was weeks before he got near enough to
try again.
Gilman’s oblique references to sexuality are at times, for a modern

reader, difficult to decipher, but it becomes clear that she intends her read-
ers to understand that Alima does not find the idea of sex itself to be repel-
lent but is rather affronted by Nicholson’s assumption that she is ready to
succumb whenever he demands. Jennings and Ellador talk ‘it all out
together’ so that they have ‘an easier experience’ during ‘the real miracle
time’ (p. 93). Again here Gilman’s strategically vague references to sexual
intercourse make for a rather confused reading. While a modern reader
may initially construe the ‘miracle time’ to be Jennings’ initiation into a
sexual relationship with a woman who knows what she wants and insists
that her sexual needs are satisfied, later revelations make it clear that the
‘miracle’ is Jennings’ ability to accept what Ellador most definitely does
not want. As Frances Bartkowski notes, ‘Gilman’s late Victorian sexual
ethics are apparent in all her writings’ (Bartkowski 1989, p. 31) so it is
with difficulty that we appreciate her insistence on sex as an activity to be
restricted to reproduction and Ellador’s surprise that ‘when people marry,
they go right on doing this in season and out of season, with no thought
of children at all’ (Gilman 1979, p. 127).
But while she ‘has not come to grips with speaking of sexual pleasure’
(Bartkowski 1989, p. 31), Gilman makes clear her belief, as she states it in
His Religion and Hers, that ‘[i]n normal motherhood, sex use will be
30 D. B. SHAW
measured by its service to the young, not its enjoyment by the individual’
(Gilman 1924, p. 208). Sexual pleasure, then, is deferred in favour of
work and ‘social service’ as the Herland women ‘voluntarily defer’ moth-
erhood by deflecting the ‘deep inner demand for a child’ into ‘the most
active work, physical and mental’ (Gilman 1979, p. 70) on such occasions
as the potential overpopulation of the country demands it.7 Here, subli-
mation of instinctual drives is, for the Herlanders, a positive indication of
the use of reason in directing social evolution. This is not repression in the
Freudian sense8 but a conscious postponement of individual desires for the
greater good of the community. However, despite the difficult (and,
frankly, comical) discourse on sexual relationships, what is clearly estab-
lished is that it is the women who exercise control and the men who sub-
mit (Nicholson, of course, is denied the relationship altogether) and
Jennings finds that ‘an apparently imperative demand had disappeared
without my noticing it’ (Gilman 1979, p. 128).
In Bartkowski’s view, ‘Gilman replaces religion with sacred mother-
hood and eliminates sexuality’ (Bartkowski 1989, p. 32) but I think it is
more accurate to say that she eliminates sexuality as a constant factor in
male/female relationships, replacing sexual desire and its association with
creativity, with desire directed towards co-operative effort in ‘service to
the young’. Hence, the Herlanders’ ‘drama … dance, music, religion and
education were all very close together’ (Gilman 1979, p. 99) and all
prompted by allegiance to an ideal of motherhood, replacing ‘the sweet
intense joy of married lovers’ as the ‘higher stimulus to all creative work’
(p. 127). It is thus Gilman’s intention to demonstrate the untapped cre-
ative potential that she believed would accompany the evolution of human
beings from sex-driven individuality to propagation-driven co-operation.
Nevertheless, Gilman must retain the sex drive in order to bring her three
pairs of lovers together, and it is here that she encounters some difficulty.
While the women of Herland display none of the overt sex-distinctions
of their American sisters, Jennings is moved to speculate as to their capac-
ity for sex attraction. ‘Two thousand years’ disuse had left very little of the
instinct’, he suggests, ‘also we must remember that those who had at times
manifested it as atavistic exceptions were often, by that very fact, denied
motherhood. Yet while the mother process remains, the inherent ground
for sex-distinction remains also; and who shall say what long-forgotten
feeling, vague and nameless, was stirred in some of these mother hearts by
our arrival?’ (p. 92).
The arrival of the men thus effectively produces an evolutionary regres-

sion which is difficult to justify in the terms that Gilman proposes. What
she is apparently proposing is that the reawakening of sexual desire in the
women emulates the seasonal mating habits of species unaffected by the
sexuoeconomic relation—a selective atavism operating to exclude the
women’s more recent ‘harem-bred’ (p. 56) racial memories. This sugges-
tion of atavism becomes highly problematic in the context of a narrative
that is concerned to present what Gilman called ‘the attitude of the full-
grown woman, who faces the demands of love with the high standards of
conscious motherhood’ (Gilman 1911, p. 107). As Beer writes, the ‘qual-
ity of latency in the experience of physical growth makes it a possible meta-
phor for all invisible process[es] …. The particular organisation implied by
evolutionary theory and determinism borrows the idea of irreversible
onward sequence from the experience of growth. It can’t run backwards,
though it may include equally convergence and branching. Nor can it stay
still. Recrudescence is also not a concept easily assimilable to evolutionary
ideas’ (Beer 1983, pp. 107 & 108).
Similarly, to the nineteenth-century mind, atavism spoke clearly of
degeneration and as Beer documents the attendant assumptions:
The idea of development harboured a paternalistic assumption once it was

transferred exclusively to human beings, since it was presumed that the
observer was at the summit of development, looking back over a past strug-
gling to reach the present high moment. The European was taken as the
type of achieved developmental pre-eminence, and other races studied were
seen as further back on the chart of growth. The image of growth was again
misplaced from the single life cycle, so that whole races were seen as being
part of ‘the childhood of man’, to be protected, led and corrected like chil-
dren. (p. 119)
There is nothing to suggest that Gilman resisted these assumptions.

The Herland women have developed their ‘anthropology’ partly on the
basis of ‘the knowledge of the savagery of the occupants of those dim
forests below’ (Gilman 1979, p. 64) with whom, as Jennings reports later,
‘they had no contact’, making for a high level of assumption in the use of
the word ‘savage’. And, during a conversation in which Terry is at pains to
point out the virtue of decoration in a woman’s dress, he makes a distinc-
tion between ‘men’ and ‘Indians … Savages, you know’ (p. 94) who, it is
clearly implied, are to be considered as demonstrably inferior by the fact
32 D. B. SHAW
that they, unlike ‘civilised’ men (but like their women), find it necessary to
wear feathers.
So if the Herlanders are ‘full-grown’, the three women singled out to
become lovers to the three men are, by implication, less highly developed
than their sisters. This, in the context of Jennings’ remark that ‘atavistic
exceptions’ were ‘denied motherhood’ (p. 92), makes for an awkward fit
between the Herlanders’ project of ‘race improvement’ and the romantic
narrative which brings the three couples together. If the arrival of the
three men has caused three of the women to respond with atavistic desires,
then the advantage gained by curtailing the reproduction of such traits
must surely be threatened. There is thus a conflict which is not easily
resolved between Gilman’s attempt to write the literature of the beehive
and her need to re-introduce heterosexual love in order to project her
evolutionary narrative beyond the time and place of Herland. The intro-
duction of a recrudescent theme does damage to the project of demon-
strating the Herlanders’ achievements in terms of growth towards a
‘higher’ form of civilisation. We are left to wonder whether the ‘full-
grown’ woman should have need of the male at all and, indeed, if the lit-
erature of the beehive can be written in a heterosexual world.
It would seem then that the scientific imagination is not easily recon-
ciled with romance, and I would suggest that Gilman’s problem lies pri-
marily in the absence of social conditions that lend tension to the traditional
love story. According to A. O. J. Cockshut, love ‘as traditionally conceived
by poets, is private, intimate, intense, even ecstatic’ (Cockshut 1977, p. 9)
but, in the novel, private feelings are necessarily brought into conflict with
the public sphere. The novelist ‘writes of love in terms of time and society’
(p. 10). In other words, the ‘intense moments’ of private love must be
presented in the context of their relation to ‘religion, to duty, to society or
to work, money, recreation and friendship’ (p. 9), and tension is produced
primarily by the interaction between the demands of (private) love and the
equally insistent demands of convention in the public world of cultural
norms. But the Herlanders live primarily within the public sphere, and
Gilman’s concern was to show the smooth integration of personal love
with the Herlanders’ social duties, rather than to show the two in conflict.
Jennings explains that they had ‘not the faintest idea of that solitude à deux
we are so fond of’ (Gilman 1979, p. 125) and Somel tells him, ‘this new
wonderful love between you. The whole country is interested’ (p. 104).
Thus heterosexual love in terms of the Herland society takes on the char-
acter of a general election. The ‘limitations of a wholly personal life’ being
‘inconceivable’ (p. 97) to the Herlanders therefore make for an absence of

tension, and because tensions and satisfactions normally associated with
the love story are missing, so too is the necessary involvement of the
reader. The three relationships seem, at least, improbable, and Celis’ preg-
nancy remarkably so.
Nevertheless, at least one traditional character of romantic fiction is
brought in to emphasise the lack of equality in the traditional ritual. Most
obviously this is Terry Nicholson, as the unsuitable suitor, who must be
rejected in favour of a more appropriate match, but the excessively chival-
ric Jeff Margrave, in terms of nineteenth-century morals a more ‘suitable’
replacement, is here upstaged by the ‘new man’, Vandyck Jennings, whom
Somel describes as ‘more like People … more like us’. By contrasting the
two, Gilman is able to present her ideal of androgyny. Margrave is progres-
sively ‘feminised’ as the novel proceeds in that in his ‘exalted gallantry’
(p. 89) he displays a passivity which is brought into increasing contrast
with Jennings’ developing conscious appreciation of the Herlanders’
achievements. For Jennings, Nicholson is ‘a stray male in an ant-hill’,
while Margrave is ‘a stray man among angels’ (p. 123)—a relevant meta-
phor in an age when the ideal woman was an ‘Angel in the House, con-
tentedly submissive to men, but strong in her inner purity and religiosity,
queen in her own realm of the Home’ (Showalter 1977, p. 14). In the
sphere of the home, she was the keeper of men’s morals, the earthly rep-
resentative of Christian ideals and the social representative of her hus-
band’s status. A ‘fallen’ woman relinquished her angelic status and became
unmarriageable. As Jennings reports, Margrave ‘accepted the angel the-
ory, swallowed it whole’ (Gilman 1979, p. 123) the implication being
that, lacking Jennings’ rational curiosity, he is happy to accept the appar-
ent perfection of Herland as the natural result of a land inhabited by
angels, rather than the achievement of social planning.
If Herland is read as a frozen moment in evolutionary history which is
concerned to offer a paradigm for the future, then Margrave’s remaining
happily in this ‘eternised’ moment, rather than, like Jennings, proceeding
beyond the narrative, marks him, like Nicholson, as redundant in terms of
the continuing evolutionary narrative. However, this is to reckon without
Celis’ pregnancy, which marks him also as a seed of change within Herland
itself. But this, of course, serves to highlight the fact that Ellador and
Jennings must forego procreation in order to pursue their mission, con-
firming Gilman’s dictum that postponement of desire is, ultimately, to the
greater good of humanity. There is also a sense in which the environment
34 D. B. SHAW
of Herland can be equated with the home, a place of security for mothers
and children which also, in Gilman’s view, sheltered woman from taking
up responsibilities in the world which would prepare her to be a better
educator for her children. Margrave, an inadequate educator, remains ‘at
home’, confirming further the impression of femininity. While, as I have
already described, Nicholson’s response to the restrictions on sexual activ-
ity is to attempt to use force and Jennings, while initially impatient, is
subdued by the use of reasoned argument, Margrave takes ‘his medicine
like a—I cannot say “like a man”, but more as if he wasn’t one … there
was always this angel streak in him’ (pp. 123 & 124). The angel metaphor,
applied to Margrave himself, together with the aspersions cast on his mas-
culinity amount finally to an ironic suggestion that the romantic hero, in
his passive acceptance and, indeed, adoration of the excessively feminine
woman, effectively feminises himself and is thus an inadequate partner to
(and perhaps an inadequate lover of) the burgeoning new womanhood.
This, of course, makes Celis’ pregnancy doubly questionable (and a forced
conclusion), but it is undoubtedly the case that, having sent Ellador with
Jennings to an uncertain future in the ‘strange, unknown lands’ (p. 144),
Gilman had need to ensure that the next stage of evolution be seen to
begin in the ‘nursery’ (p. 94) of Herland.
So Jennings is Gilman’s new hero. Neither intensely masculine nor
feminised by a poetic imagination which limits his vision, he thus pro-
motes scientific objectivity as the source for a revision in human conscious-
ness. But Gilman’s difficulty was in presenting the literature of the beehive
as a viable alternative to the ‘Adventures of Him in Pursuit of Her’ while
adhering closely enough to the rules of popular fiction to attract her read-
ership, and the question remains as to whether she fully achieved her aim.
Herland is a ‘not yet’ world where a better future is glimpsed but held
in check by forces which militate against the full realisation of utopia. The
Herlanders have need of the drones to complete their beehive world but
are disappointed to find them largely inadequate. As Jennings and Ellador
prepare to leave, they are told, ‘we are unwilling to expose our country to
free communication with the rest of the world—as yet … it may be done
later—but not yet’ (p. 145). And it is made clear that the rest of the world
is not ready for Herland, rather than the reverse. So it is perhaps inaccurate
to say that Herland is the literature of the beehive. Rather the novel, like
Herland itself, marks a point of evolutionary transition. If Jennings finds
the drama of Herland to be ‘flat’ it is because he, like the world for which
Gilman was writing, has not yet developed the necessary aesthetic
sensibilities to fully appreciate the literature of the beehive. For Gilman,

that time had yet to come, as it would when the novelist who ‘is forced to
chronicle the distinctive features of his time’ (Gilman 1966, p. 151) writes
as a participant in utopia, rather than, like Jennings, as an observer.
Addendum
It is now over a century since the first publication of Herland and although
it is anachronistic in its coy references to sexuality and assumptions of
racial hierarchy in other ways, it is more relevant to contemporary debates
than it was when I first encountered it in the late 1970s. Certainly, its
engagement with planned evolution presents difficulties in a world that
has experienced the excesses of Nazi Germany. On the other hand, and for
the same reason, we need to re-examine how we understand what evolu-
tion means and its relationship to concepts like ‘progress’ and ‘develop-
ment’. Although Ward and Gilman’s assessment of ‘male efflorescence’
and its effects remains somewhat fanciful, the implication that overdevel-
oped heterosexual masculinity is a threat to the survival of the species still
resonates in feminist argument, as does the claim that the survival of the
corresponding feminine subject provides the necessary conditions for its
perpetuation.9
Gilman’s re-visioning of sexuality may have stopped short of imagining
same-sex relationships but, nevertheless, she does address the de-
sexualisation of women’s bodies as a necessary political move for feminists
committed to radical change in gender relations. This seems singularly
apposite at a time when, alongside a re-vivified feminist politics, there has
been a corresponding resurgence of what has been termed ‘toxic’ mascu-
linity.10 Indeed, the type represented by Terry Nicholson—the male that
harbours unshakeable assumptions about the nature of women and is pre-
pared to rape to ‘prove’ them is not only prevalent in contemporary cul-
ture but is offered as a learned performance which can be purchased as a
solution to a perceived failure to attract ‘high-quality’ women.
In Rachel O’Neill’s research into the seduction industry, she discovered
a group of men willing to pay substantial sums to attend seminars and
‘boot camps’ (O’Neill 2018, p. 160) run by PUAs (Pick Up Artists)
apparently well versed in feminine psychology, as well as male grooming
and masculine self-presentation. There is a suggestion throughout that the
women approached by these men are often coerced into sex and, although
O’Neill doesn’t use the word, the spectre of rape haunts the often
36 D. B. SHAW
tragi-comic scenarios that she witnesses. Steeped in the discourse of evo-

lutionary psychology which justifies men’s predatory behaviour in terms
of evolutionary imperatives, what O’Neill calls the ‘seduction community’
(p. 123) essentially thrives on masculine insecurity and entitlement, driven
by the logic of commodification. As O’Neill points out ‘evolutionary nar-
ratives have much in common with neoliberal rationalities, as both pro-
mote a logic of individualism centred on profit maximisation’ (p. 127). In
the case of commodified seduction, the investment of considerable sums
of money in ‘training’ to appropriate women for sex heightens the sense
of entitlement such that the response to perceived failure is often expressed
as the kind of outrage that, Gilman suggests, prompts Terry Nicholson to
attempt rape (p. 142). This same affective matrix of fear, pride and disdain
is, in fact, what motivates the Nazi males in Swastika Night which I will
discuss in the next chapter. It is also what has recently driven self-defined
‘incels’ (involuntary celibates) like Elliot Rodger and Jake Davison to
murder women by whom they feel rejected (and also kill themselves).11
Under these circumstances, the alternative evolutionary narrative that
Gilman offers bears further consideration, not least as a counter to the
discourse which promotes an unachievable performance of masculinity at
the expense of women’s lives.
Notes
1. First put forward by Darwin’s cousin, Francis Galton, who believed that
the ‘worst elements of the poorer classes, those presumed to have subnor-
mal mentalities, would have to be physically prevented from passing on
their infirmities’, that is, prevented from having children (Bowler 1984,
pp. 212–13).
2. Gilman dedicated her book, Man Made World: or, Our Androcentric
Culture (1911) to Ward. The dedication reads as follows: ‘This book is
dedicated with reverent love and gratitude to Lester F. Ward sociologist
and humanitarian, one of the world’s great men; a creative thinker to
whose wide knowledge and power of vision we are indebted for a new
grasp of the nature and processes of society, and to whom all women are
especially bound in honour and gratitude for his gynaeococentric theory of
life, than which nothing more important to humanity has been advanced
since the theory of evolution, and nothing more important to women has
ever been given to the world’.
3. For a discussion of the plausibility of parthenogenesis in humans, see de
Carli and Pereira (2017).
4. See, for example, Sally Miller Gearhart’s The Wanderground (1985) and
Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time (1979).
5. Richard Usborne, who has made a study of Sapper’s Bulldog Drummond,
finds him to have had ‘a strong interest’ in pretty girls’. No entanglements.
But he … knew enough … to look … at their feet to see if they were thor-
oughbreds’ (Usborne 1983, p. 153).
6. Gilman herself had at least three close female friends during her lifetime,
with two of whom she actually set up home. However, as Mary A. Hill
points out, ‘Close and intimate friendships between women were common
in the nineteenth century, as were hugging, kissing, commiserating, com-
muning, unashamedly sleeping together in one another’s beds. Whether
such relationships were sexual is often impossible to know’ (Hill
1980, p. 82).
7. The Herland process of selective breeding gives primacy to parcenary con-
siderations. As Somel explains to Jennings: ‘If the girl showing the bad
qualities had still the power to appreciate social duty, we appealed to her,
by that, to renounce motherhood. Some of the few worst types were, for-
tunately, unable to reproduce. But if the fault was in a disproportionate
egotism—then the girl was sure she had the right to have children, even
that hers would be better than others’. ‘I can see that’, I said. ‘And then
she would be likely to rear them in the same spirit.’ ‘That we never allowed’,
answered Somel quietly (Gilman 1979, p. 82). It would seem that Gilman
had need to reconcile her interpretation of socialism with her commitment
to democracy which, as she says, ‘means, requires, is, individual liberty’
(Gilman 1966, p. 145).
8. Gilman had little sympathy with psychoanalytic theory and refused to be
‘psyched’ by the ‘mind-meddlers’ when Freudian psychoanalysis came to
New York (see Gilman 1935, p. 314).
9. See, for example, Cordelia Fine’s Delusions of Gender (2010), Angela
Saini’s Inferior (2017) and Sarah Banet-Weiser’s Empowered: Popular
Feminism & Popular Misogyny (2018).
10. See Gilchrist (2017).
11. See Kelly et al. (2021).
References
Banet-Weiser, Sarah. 2018. Empowered: Popular Feminism & Popular Misogyny.
Durham and London: Duke University Press.
Bartkowski, Frances. 1989. Feminist Utopias. Lincoln and London: University of
Nebraska Press.
Bates, Laura. 2020. Men Who Hate Women. London, New York, Sydney, Toronto,
New Delhi: Simon & Schuster.
38 D. B. SHAW
Baym, Nina. 1986. Melodramas of Beset Manhood. In The New Feminist Criticism,
ed. Elaine Showalter. London: Virago.
Beer, Gillian. 1983. Darwin’s Plots. London: Routledge.
Bowler, Peter J. 1984. Evolution: The History of an Idea. Berkeley, LA and London:
University of California Press.
de Carli, Gabriel Jose, and Tiago Campos Pereira. 2017. On Human
Parthenogenesis. Medical Hypotheses, Vol. 106, September. https://doi.
org/10.1016/j.mehy.2017.07.008.
Cockshut, A.O.J. 1977. Man and Woman: A Study of Love and The Novel,
1740–1940. London: Collins.
Easlea, Brian. 1981. Science and Sexual Oppression. London: George Weidenfeld &
Nicholson.
Fine, Cordelia. 2010. Delusions of Gender: The Real Science Behind Sex Differences.
London: Icon Books.
Gearhart, Sally Miller. 1985. The Wanderground. London: Women’s Press.
Gilchrist, Tracy E. 2017. What Is Toxic Masculinity? Advocate, December 11.
https://www.advocate.com/women/2017/12/11/what-toxic-masculinity.
Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. 1911. Man Made World: Or, Our Androcentric Culture.
London: T. Fisher Unwin.
———. 1924. His Religion and Hers. London: T. F. Unwin.
———. 1935. The Living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman: An Autobiography.
New York: D. Appleton Century.
———. 1966 [1898]. Women and Economics. New York: Harper & Row.
———. 1979 [1914]. Herland. London: Women’s Press.
Hill, Mary A. 1980. Charlotte Perkins Gilman: The Making of a Radical Feminist
1860–1896. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
Hofstadter, Richard. 1959. Social Darwinism in American Thought. New York:
George Braziller.
Howarth, Patrick. 1973. Play Up and Play The Game. London: Eyre Methuen.
Kelly, Megan, Alex DiBranco, and Julia R. DeCook. 2021. Misogynist Incels and
Male Supremacism. New America, February 18. https://www.newamerica.
org/political-reform/reports/misogynist-incels-and-male-supremacism/.
O’Neill, Rachel. 2018. Seduction: Men, Masculinity and Mediated Intimacy.
Cambridge, UK and Medford, MA: Polity Press.
Piercy, Marge. 1979. Woman on the Edge of Time. London: Women’s Press.
Rowbotham, Sheila. 1992. Women in Movement: Feminism and Social Action.
New York and London: Routledge.
Saini, Angela. 2017. Inferior: How Science Got Women Wrong … and the New
Research That’s Rewriting the Story. London: 4th Estate.
Showalter, Elaine. 1977. A Literature of Their Own. Princeton University Press.
Spender, Dale. 1983. Women of Ideas (and What Men Have Done to Them).
London: Ark Paperback.
Usborne, Richard. 1983 [1953]. Clubland Heroes. London: Hutchinson.
Ward, Lester Frank. 1903. Pure Sociology. New York: Macmillan.
———. 1913–18. Glimpses of The Cosmos. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons.
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The Project Gutenberg eBook of Abraham
Poppius
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Title: Abraham Poppius

elämäkerta ja runot
Author: A. H. Bergholm
Abraham Poppius
Release date: November 24, 2023 [eBook #72218]
Language: Finnish
Original publication: Helsinki: Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden Seura,

1899
Credits: Tuula Temonen
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ABRAHAM

POPPIUS ***
ABRAHAM POPPIUS
Elämäkerta ja runot
Kirj. ja toim.
A.H. BERGHOLM
Helsingissä, Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden Seura, 1899.
Tahdon täten esiintuoda kiitollisuuteni professori Kaarle

Krohnia kohtaan, joka sekä on esittänyt minulle tämän
aineen että sitten työni kuluessa aina ystävällisesti
neuvoilla minua avustanut.
Helsingissä 20/1 1899.
A.H.B.
SISÄLLYS:
I. ELÄMÄKERTA.
II. RUNOT.
Esi-puheeksi. a. Laulu. b. Vuoro Laulu. Rengin Virsi Horjutessa.

Runo. Laulu. Lapsen Virsi. Kukkaisen Taivas. Asko ja Walpuri.
Kantele ja Huilu. a. Rakkauuen Synty. b. Rakkauden Synty.
Kuuloitus a. Punnittu Amor. b. Punnittu Amor. a. Perhoisen Synty. b.
Perhosen Synty. c. Perhosen Synty. Sala-itku. a. Laurin tuomiset. b.
Laurin tuomiset. c. Laurin tuomiset. Naurajoille. Onnen toivotus. a.
Uusi huomen laulannoilla. b. Laulun huomen. a. Lohdutus
talvipakkasessa. b. Lohdutus talvipakkasessa. Vaikutus valistuksen.
»Missä mieleni…» Jos ma laulaja olisin. Varpunen. »Jos
kunniaksi…» »Niinkuin narri…»
ELÄMÄKERTA
Poppius-suvun (1) jälkiä voi seurata aina 17 vuosisataan asti.

Loppupuolella tätä vuosisataa kuoli suvun vanhin tunnettu jäsen
Abrahamus Nicolai Padasjoen kirkkoherrana. Hän ei itse Poppius-
nimeä käyttänyt; vasta hänen poikansa tuntemattomasta syystä sen
itselleen omistivat. Lieneekö tällä suvulla mitään yhteyttä Virossa
löytyvän samannimisen suvun kanssa, siitä ei ole tietoa. Pari
vuosisataa Abrahamus Nicolain jälkeläiset vaikuttivat pappeina
yksinomaan Keski-Savon pitäjissä; Juvan kirkkoherran virka oli toista
vuosisataa tämän suvun hallussa. Yksi pojista kolmannessa
polvessa kantaisästä lukien oli Pieksämäen kirkkoherra Abraham
Poppius, joka kuoli v. 1768. Hänen poikansa Johan hylkäsi vanhat
sukutraditsionit antautuen sotilasuralle. 1788 —90 vuosien sodassa
oli hän mukana ja samaten 1808—09 vuoden taisteluissa, vaikka nyt
enimmmäkseen kommissariatissa palvellen. Vielä sodan kestäessä
sai hän eron palveluksesta luutnantin arvonimellä ja eli loppuikänsä
Partalan tilalla Juvan pitäjässä. Täällä hänen vanhin poikansa,
Abraham jonka elämänvaiheita on aikomukseni esittää, oli syntynyt
lokakuun 30 p:nä 1793. Pojan runolliset taipumukset olivat ehkä
perintöä äidiltä Katarina Elisabet Cygnaeuselta, jonka suvussa
rikkaat luonnonlahjat eivät olleet aivan harvinaisia.
Lapsuuden aika kului rauhallisesti useitten siskojen ja
leikkikumppanien parissa. Jo tältä ajalta johtuu se ystävyys Abraham
Poppiusen ja erään toisen, sittemmin kuuluisan Carl Axel Gottlundin
välillä (2), joka sitten pysyi läpi heidän elämänsä huolimatta
jälkimäisen oikullisesta ja usein ärtyisästä luonteesta. Vaikka
Gottlund olikin lähes kolme vuotta nuorempi ja samanikäinen
Abrahamin nuoremman veljen kanssa, olivat he kuitenkin paljon
yhdessä. Uima- ja metsästysmatkoilla käytiin ahkerasti jo pienestä
pojasta alkaen.
Elämä maaseudulla tämän vuosisadan alkupuoliskolla oli

monessa suhteessa aivan toisenlainen, kuin nykyään maassamme.
Tarkoitan tässä etupäässä herrassäätyläisiä. Seuraelämä heidän
kesken oli vilkkaampaa, ja luonnollisista syistä. He asuivat kaukana
muusta maailmasta ja olivat verrattain harvoin missään yhteydessä
sen kanssa. Ulkonaiset olot siten jo pakoittivat virkamiehiä ja
kartanojen omistajia kullakin seudulla tyytymään toistensa seuraan,
keskinäisestä seurustelusta hakemaan henkistä ravintoaan ja
huvitustaan. Ystävien syntymä- tai nimipäivät ja muut vuoden
merkkipäivät muistettiin tarkoin ja yhdyttiin peninkulmien päästä niitä
ilolla ja tanssilla viettämään. Ja silloin ei tyydytty yhteen iltaan tai
yöhön, vaan päivät ja illat myöhään yöhön huviteltiin pari kolme
vuorokautta, niin paljon kuin vaan syömisen takia ennätettiin.
Seuraelämällä oli niin sanoakseni runollisempi leima, jota eivät
taloudelliset huolet ja maanviljelyksen huonot tulokset voineet
himmentää.
Tällainen oli elämä säätyläisten kesken myöskin Juvalla Abraham

Poppiusen nuoruuden aikana. Nuorta väkeä löytyi kosolta täällä
silloin. Abraham itse oli vanhin kuudesta lapsesta ja rovasti
Gottlundin ja kappalaisen Vinterin perheissä löytyi useita
samanikäisiä. Kun Poppius vuonna 1810 (3) ja hänen nuorempi
veljensä sekä C. A. Gottlund pari vuotta myöhemmin olivat lähteneet
Porvoon lukioon, muodostuivat erittäinkin joulut ilon ja pitojen ajaksi
nuorten veikarien saavuttua kotiin kaupungista. Porvoossa Poppius
ei näy paljon seurustelleen Gottlundin kanssa, vaikka he tietysti,
ollen saman pitäjän miehiä, joskus kävivät toistensa luona.
Korkeammalla luokalla ollen, kuin Gottlund, oli Abrahamilla toiset
toveritkin.
Kevätlukukaudella vuonna 1813 matkusti Abraham Poppius

Porvoosta Turkuun suorittaaksensa ylioppilastutkinnon ja kirjoitti 1
p:nä maaliskuuta (4) nimensä yliopiston matrikkelin. Luultavaa on,
että hän nyt jo oli päättänyt antautua teologiselle uralle, vaikka
hänen harras lukuintonsa saattoi hänet ensin kohdistamaan lukunsa
kandidaattiarvoa varten. Historia, erittäinkin isänmaan, ja suomen-
kieli olivat hänen lempiaineensa, ja niin paljon, kuin hän vaan muilta
varsinaisilta tutkintoluvuiltaan ennätti, harrasti hän maansa
muinaisuuden tutkimista. Isän tulot olivat verrattain pienet ja perhe
suuri, niin ettei Abrahamille tarpeeksi riittänyt varoja kotoa, vaan
täytyi hänen luultavasti jo Turussa ollessaan kotiopettajana ansaita
lisää.
Kesät 1813, 1814, 1815 ja 1816 oleskeli Poppius kotona Juvalla

(5). Jolleivät Poppius ja Gottlund, joka v. 1814 oli tullut ylioppilaaksi,
Turussa varsin paljon seurustelleet, olivat he loma-aikoina maalla
sitä enemmän yhdessä. Sattuipa joskus, että Gottlund silmittömästi
suuttui Poppiuseen, kun hän oli ennättänyt ennen pyytämään jonkun
pitäjän kaunottarista tanssiin tai Gottlund muuten Poppiusen tähden
tunsi itsensä syrjäytetyksi hienohelmaisten joukossa.
Turussa seurusteli Poppius varsinkin Antti Juhana Sjögrenin
kanssa, joka Porvoon lukiosta oli tullut ylioppilaaksi samana vuonna,
kuin hänkin. Porvoossa jo olivat he paljon olleet yhdessä. Samat
harrastukset ja osaksi samat luvut veivät heidät edelleen yhteen;
heidän välilleen syntyi luja ystävyys, jota yhtäläisyys molempien
luonteitten hienoudessa vielä vahvisti. Sjögrenissä oli keväällä 1813
(6) sattumalta herännyt ajatus Suomen kansan muinaisrunojen
keräämisestä ja suomenkielen tutkimisesta. Hän esitti tuumansa
Poppiukselle, joka siitä suuresti innostui. Molemmat päättivät heti
seuraavana kesänä ryhtyä työhön, kukin tahollaan. Jo ensimäisestä
ylioppilaskesästään asti keräsikin Poppius kotiseudullaan runoja ja
sananlaskuja. Että tämä esimerkki paljon vaikutti myös Gottlundiin ja
enensi hänen intoaan samanlaiseen työhön, on epäilemätöntä,
vaikkei Gottlund muistiinpanoissaan sitä suorastansa tunnustakaan.
1816:n vuoden alussa oli Poppius kirjoittanut isälleen kirjeen (7),

jossa sanoo aikovansa heti lähteä Porvoosen vihityttämään itseänsä
papiksi. Että hän nyt jo oli päättänyt tehdä sen ja siis jättää lukunsa
ainakin ajaksi, siihen vaikuttivat luultavasti leipähuolet. Mahdollista
on myös, että, niinkuin Gottlund luuli, satunnainen alakuloisuus
jonkun vastoinkäymisen tähden luvuissa oli saattanut Poppiusta tälle
tuumalle. Kirjeessä Juvalta koettaa Gottlund selittää Poppiuselle,
kuinka kerrassaan epäedullinen hänelle tämä askel olisi.
»— ty Du vet ej ordet af förrän Consistorium Venerandum skjutsar

Dig åt helvetet, upp till Kiuruvesi eller d. m. Och tänker Du framdeles
undergä promotion, får du procossa med Biskopen allt till Keijsaren
som Gustafsson i Sveaborg. — — Och skrifver Du till Borgå sä låf ei
vist koma, kanske du kunde få bättre villkor derigenom».
[»— sillä ennenkuin tiedätkään, lähettää Consistorium
Venerandum sinut helvettiin, Kiuruvedelle asti tai muuanne yhtä
pitkälle. Ja jos aijot tulevaisuudessa antaa promoveerata itseäsi,
saat käräjoidä Piispan kanssa aina Keisariin asti kuten Gustafsson
Viaporissa. — — Ja jos kirjoitat Porvoosen niin elä lupaa varmasti
tulla, ehkä' saisit paremmat ehdot sen kautta.»]
Jos lie tämä vaikuttanut, tai Poppius muutenkin päätti tällä kertaa
jättää papintuumansa, lopputulos on, että hän edelleenkin jäi
Turkuun lukujansa jatkamaan ja tuskinpa ensinkään kirjoitti Porvoon
konsistoriumille.
Vuonna 1816 olivat Poppius ja Gottlund viimeisen kesän yhdessä

kotona Juvalla. Jälkimäinen valmisteli nyt matkaa Upsalan, jonne
suomalaisten ylioppilasten vielä tähän aikaan oli tapana lähteä
harjoittamaan opintojaan. Päättäen eräästä Gottlundin kirjeestä (8),
jonka hän myöhemmin kirjoitti Poppiuselle Turkuun, oli nyt myös ollut
kysymys, että Poppius lähtisi mukaan. Syystä tai toisesta katsoi
tämä kuitenkin paremmaksi toistaiseksi jäädä kotimaahan, vaikka
hänellä olikin isänsä suostumus matkaan. Syksyn alussa hän siis
taas lähti Turkuun. Heti ensi kirjeessä (9), jonka hän täällä sai
Gottlundilta Upsalasta, kehoittaa tämä häntä tulemaan sinne, koska
siellä muka elatuskin oli paljoa halvempi kuin Turussa. Marraskuun
alussa (10) kirjoitti Poppius siihen vastauksen suomeksi kertoen
omista pyrinnöistään ja Turun oloista. Tähän asti oli heidän
kirjeenvaihtonsa käynyt ruotsiksi, mutta nyt Poppius ensimäisenä
vaihtoi sen kansansa kieleen. Innostuneena tästä ja isänmaallisista
tunteistaan siellä muukalaisten joukossa vastaa (11) Gottlund myös
suomeksi puhuen Savon korvista »jossa pyyt vihelevät, ja peipuiset
vingertavat». Sentehden, jatkaa hän, »sine tiet oikein kuin, kuin sine
ett häjtet unouxen sen kallin kielen joka nyt on poleuxen alla, nin
myös minekin, vajka nyt tässä täutyn olla, muihen sekkan
suljettunna, omasta maasta, — —». Että hän tässä tarkoittaa.
muutakin kuin kirjeitten kirjoittamista suomeksi, on selvää. Poppius
oli luultavasti kertonut runoistaan, joita hän suomenkielellä oli
alkanut sepitellä ylioppilasaikanaan. Muussakin suhteessa on tämä
kirje mieltäkiinnittävä. Hän jatkaa nimittäin:
»Se [Atterbom] on yxi ajvan hiljainen miesi, ja emine taidan

ymertä, mitenkä hän on nin sauret kiäntymyxet (hvälfningar) Ruotsin
laulamuxessa (Poesie) matkan saatana. Hän on pannuna kumaxi,
ette ne ej Turussa ovat pitänä pareman huolen, oman maan asiojsta,
vajka ne kylle joka vuosi kirjuttavat disputationit Saxan ja Graekan
kielen välillä, nin ej hyö millonka antavat, omasta kieleste tiedon.
Vaan tähä myö liiton ette ej suomen maan tietymys (Litterat.) mejäen
syyn kautta, pitä hävittämän, vaan piteme me ajkana myöten, nin
paljoin kuin mejden voimassa on, site julista ja ylösvalista.»
Lopussa hän taas kehoittaa Poppiusta seuraavana keväänä

tulemaan Upsalaan, jotta he paremmin yhdessä voisivat panna
tuumiaan toimeen ja koska siellä, huomauttaa hän taas, oleskelu
tulisi helpommaksi; jos vielä Abraham Poppiusen veli Yrjö, joka
myös oli ylioppilaana Turussa, tulisi mukaan, asuisivat, ehdottaa
hän, he »kajkki Savon sangarit yhessä linassa.» Nämät uudistetut
kehoitukset ja Gottlundin innostuttavat kirjeet tietysti eivät jääneet
vaikuttamatta, vaikkei vielä seuraavana keväänä tullutkaan mitään
matkasta.
Eräästä Gottlundin kirjeestä (12), jonka hän tammikuussa. 1817

kirjoitti isälleen, saamme tietää, mitä Poppius siihen aikaan puuhaili.
Gottlund kertoo nimittäin, että Poppiusella oli tekeillä väitöskirja »de
paroecia Juva in Savonia sita» (13). Ei ole tietoa, tuliko tästä
koskaan mitään valmista; ei Gottlundilla ollut paljon toivoa siitä,
koska aineksia löytyi kovin vähän.
Suomen yliopistossa Porthanin henki, hänen innokkaat

kehoituksensa ja isänmaalliset aatteensa vielä tähän aikaan
tuntuvasti vaikuttivat. Nuorten tiedemiesten ja ylioppilasten joukossa
olivat ne saaneet kannattajia, jotka nuoruuden innostuksella päättivät
noudattaa hänen esimerkkiään ja antautua työhön suomalaisen
isänmaansa hyväksi, sen kielen ja kansallisuuden korottamiseksi.
Näitä miehiä olivat Linsén, Tengströmit, Arwidsson, jotka Aura-
seuran perustivat ja vuosina 1817 ja 1818 painosta toimittivat Aura-
nimistä aikakauskirjaa. Jonkunmoisen seuran (14) olivat keskenänsä
perustaneet myös nuoremman polven miehet: Poppius, Sjögren, G.
Fr. Aminoff, Alex. Blomgvist, I. Ilmoni ja ehkä muutkin. Näyttää siltä,
kuin he osaksi oppositsionista auralaisia vastaan (15), jotka muka
olivat liian laimeita ja sovittavaisia isänmaallisuudessaan, olivat
liittyneet yhteen ja tosityössä tahtoivat näyttää isänmaallisuuttaan.
Että he jyrkemmin olisivat tahtoneet kannattaa Ruotsin
kirjallisuudessa silloin vallitsevaa fosforistista suuntaa, kuin
Auralaisetkaan, tuskin voi sanoa. Jos entisen emämaan silloisissa
kirjallisissa virtauksissa tahtoo tähän löytää vertauksia, saattaa
sanoa, että näitten nuorten harrastukset enemmän ehkä kävivät
samaan suuntaan, kuin göötiläisen seuran, ja Aura taas enemmän
edusti fosforistista suuntaa.
Sitä henkeä, mikä tässä seurassa vallitsi, ilmaisee kirje, jonka

Poppius vuotta myöhemmin (16) kirjoitti Sjögrenille:
»Äfvenledes skulle jag vela rätt ljufligen kunna visa Herrar

Aurarister att om de och vi alla nånsin skola vinna utlänningars
aktning, så skola vi vara oss själfva och icke allting h.e. nihil; vi skola
ej gå att bygga på andras litteratur, som nog har byggmästare till
öfverflöd, icke med förnämhet förkasta allt eget och ofira
krokodiltårar ät Balder och Brage».
[Samaten tahtoisi oikein ihanasti voida näyttää Herroille

Auralaisille että jos he ja me kaikki voimme koskaan voittaa
ulkomaalaisten kunnioitusta, täytyy meidän olla oma itsemme eikä
kaikkea t.s. ei mitään; meidän ei pidä olla auttamassa rakentamaan
muitten kirjallisuutta, jolla on yllin kyllin rakennusmestaria, ei
ylpeydellä hyljätä kaikkea omaa eikä uhrata krokodilinkyyneleitä
Balderille ja Bragelle.]
Mitään yhteistä julkaisua heiltä ei ole ainakaan jälkimaailmalle

säilynyt, mutta jokainen osaltaan on kyllä voimiensa mukaan
näyttänyt, ettei hänen innostuksensa ollut aivan tyhjää
suunpieksimistä. Heidän yhteiset keskustelunsa kai juuri innostuttivat
m.m. Poppiustakin kirjoittamaan kertomusta kotipitäjästään.
Kohta kuitenkin muutamat seuran jäsenistä, nimittäin Poppius ja

Aminoff jättivät Turun yliopiston muuttaen ajaksi Upsalaan.
Vähitellen näkyvät kokouksetkin käyneen aina harvemmiksi ja
1818:n vuoden alussa oli Poppius kuullut Upsalaan, että koko seura
oli hajoomistilassa. Sen johdosta kirjoitti hän Sjögrenille (17):
»Högst ledsamt vore om sällskapet skulle upplösas. Du bör arbeta

emot det. Där skall ju hafva uppkommit en psalmkommité. Herre
Gud hvad det vore ljuft att genom vår morgonrodnad uti sällskapets
äteruppblomstrande fä anledning att föreställa sig en ännu större
dager. Att genom Porthans återupplifvade anda hoppas intresse för
vår historie, för vårt national språk, pä det våra efterkommande icke
må blifva en indifferens af Rysse och Svensk ett noll, utan en
själfständig nation pä förnuftets och själens områden, då de i politiskt
afseende icke någonsin kunna blifva det!»
[»Hyvin ikävää olisi jos seura hajaantuisi. Sinun täytyy vastustaa

sitä. Siellähän kuuluu syntyneen virsikomitea. Herra Jumala kuinka
olisi ihanaa seuran uuden kukoistuksen aamuruskossa saada syytä
kuvailla mielessään vielä suurempaa päivänvaloa. Kunpa saisi
Porthanin jälleenherätetyn hengen kautta toivoa syttyvän innostusta
historiaamme, kansalliskieleemme, jotta meidän jälkeläisistämme ei
tulisi Venäläisen ja Ruotsalaisen välinen olento, nolla, vaan
omantakeinen kansallisuus järjen ja sielun puolesta, koska he
valtiollisessa suhteessa eivät koskaan voi siksi tulla.»]
Poppius ei kuitenkaan enään saanut tilaisuutta suoranaisesti

vaikuttaa seuran elähyttämiseksi ja sen muutkin jäsenet hajosivat
vähitellen Turusta eri tahoille.
Kesällä 1817, jonka Poppius oleskeli kotona maalla, oli hän

lopullisesti päättänyt muuttaa Upsalan yliopistoon. Hän lähti sen
tähden syyskuun lopulla Turkuun, missä hänen oli yhdyttävä
muutamiin muihin tovereihin, jotka myös olivat aikeissa purjehtia
Pohjanlahden toiselle rannikolle. Matka oli suoritettava n.k.
sumpissa, verrattain pienessä, puoliavonaisessa saaristoveneessä.
Semmoiseen astui 26 p:nä neljä nuorta suomalaista tiedemiehen- ja
kirjailijan-alkua (18), nimittäin A.I. Arwidsson, L.H. Prytz, Abraham
Poppius ja G. Fr. Aminoff lähteäksensä entiseen emämaahan
täydentämään opintojaan sen korkeakoulussa. Tavallisissa oloissa,
kuin ilma oli kaunis ja tuuli suotuisa, suoritettiin matka Turusta
Tukholmaan muutamassa päivässä. Mutta nyt sattui nousemaan
tavaton pohjoismyrsky, joka painoi tuon pien aluksen oikeasta
suunnastaan aina Gottlandin rannikkoa kohden. Heidän onnistui
viimein monen kovan ottelun jälkeen ja kärsittyään kylmää ja märkää
päästä maalle pieneen Fårön saareen Gottlandin pohjoispuolella.
Matka oli ollut sitä vaikeampi, koska heidän oli täytynyt pelastaa
sumppiinsa kaikki matkustavaiset ja miehistö eräästä toisesta
sumpista, jonka he matkalla olivat tavanneet ajelehtivan
haaksirikkoisena, masto myrskyn katkaisemana. Tänne Fåröhön
heidän sitten täytyi jäädä melkein pariksi viikoksi odottamaan
sopivaa tuulta. Loppumatka kävi onnellisesti ja 28 p:nä lokakuuta
saapuivat he viimein Upsalaan siellä olevien suomalaisten ja
tuttaviensa suureksi iloksi ja hämmästykseksi.
Kaikki olivat täällä nimittäin jo varmaan luulleet heidän hukkuneen

(19). J.J. Pippingsköld, joka Tukholman kautta 11 p:nä lokakuuta oli
tullut Upsalaan Turusta, oli kertonut, että he jo viikkoa ennen häntä
olivat lähteneet Turusta ja että laivurit arvelivat heidän joko
hukkuneen tai ajelehtineen Liivinmaan rannikolle. 15 p:nä oli
Gottlund kirjoittanut kotiin sisarelleen pahoin pelkäävänsä, että se
laiva, jossa Poppiusen piti matkustaa, oli hukkunut; ja 17 p:nä
kirjoittaa hän päiväkirjaansa saaneensa varman tiedon, että sumppi
matkustavaisineen päivineen oli joutunut aaltojen uhriksi. »Minä
surujn nin nijte, ette olin itkesilmein ja murheinen kaiken päjvä, eikä
osana teke mitä», sanoo hän päiväkirjassaan. 22 p:nä kirjoitti hän
Sjögrenille ja Yrjö Poppiuselle Abrahamin ja hänen toveriensa
kuolemasta. Seuraavana päivänä tuli Upsalaan kuitenkin N.G. af
Schultenin kautta sanoma, että kaikki olivat pelastuneet, vaikkei
tiedetty miten eikä missä; mutta kun ei tullut mitään kirjettä, ei
Turusta eikä Tukholmasta, sammui toivo taas. Vasta 28 p:nä
pääsivät he epävarmuudestaan, kun he odottamatta tapasivat
Arwidssonin ja Prytzin kadulla ja ja myöhemmin Poppiusen ja
Aminoffin majatalossa. Illalla sitten vietettiin suuri riemun ja yleisen
veljestymisen juhla Urbergin kahvilassa.
<tb>
Tähän aikaan oleskeli Upsalan yliopistossa harvinaisen suuri

joukko suomalaisia, enemmän kuin koskaan ennen tai jälkeen (20).
He muodostivat eri maakunnan omine kuraattorineen ja
inspehtorineen. Juuri syksyllä 1817, muutama päivä Poppiusen tulon
jälkeen, syntyi suomalaisten kesken tuo kuuluisa riita, joka vasta
seuraavana keväänä saatiin asettumaan. Arwidsson tietysti heti
joutui tässä päähenkilöksi, vaikka tällä kertaa ehkä tahtomattansa.
Poppius ei näy innokkaammin ottaneen osaa näihin kiistoihin.

Arwidssonin puolta hän kyllä piti ja kirjoitti Gottlundin, Pippingsköldin,
Aminoffin ynnä muitten kanssa nimensä uusien sääntöjen alle
huhtikuussa 1818 (21). Poppius oli hiljainen luonne, joka ei tahtonut
esiintyä ja herättää huomiota. Silti hän ei suinkaan ollut
välinpitämätön asiain menosta tai laimea mielipiteissään. Sen
olemme kyllin nähneet jo niistä muutamista kirjeenotteista, joita yllä
on mainittu. Sattuipa välistä, että hän hyvinkin innostui hetken
tunnelmasta, jopa kiivastuikin» (22). Hänen luonteensa
perusteellisuus ja hänen hieno, niin sanoakseni runollinen
käsityksensä kammoksui kaikkea vaan ulkonaisesti loistavaa kuorta
ja taistelujen räyhäävää elämää.
Sekä syys- että kevätlukukauden asui Poppius yhdessä Aminoffin

kanssa. Hänkin oli savolainen, kotoisin Rantasalmelta, jonne hänen
isänsä, majuri, vanhoilla päivillään oli asettunut asumaan.
Luonteiltaan hyvin samanlaisina viihtyivät he erinomaisesti toistensa
seurassa.
»Jag och Germund hafva hela vintern som kött och blod varit
oskiljaktiga contubernaler, lefvat och arbetat under ett tak, såfvit i en
säng och spelat under ett täcke, så att hvad jag i alla möjliga
afseenden säger om mig, gäller och till alla delar om honom.»
[»Minä ja Germund olemme koko talven kuin liha ja veri olleet

eroittamattomia asuintovereita, eläneet ja työskennelleet saman
katon alla, nukkuneet samassa sängyssä ja saman peitteen alla, niin
että mitä minä kaikissa suhteissa sanon itsestäni tarkoittaa myös
kaikin puolin häntä.»]
kirjoittaa Poppius Sjögrenille (23). Samat isänmaalliset aatteet

innostuttivat molempia. Kansansa kielen ja kirjallisuuden
korottamista Aminoffkin haaveili ja harrasti. Aminoff står i ljusan låga
af detta fosforos [Aminoff on ilmi tulessa tästä fosforoksesta]
(kansallisuudenaate), kertoo Poppius seuraavassa kirjeessä
Sjögrenille (24). Häntä lähinnä oli luonnollisesti Gottlund Poppiusen
paras ystävä. He eivät suinkaan tuon yhden vuoden eronaikana
olleet vieraantuneet toisistaan. Niinkuin jo olemme nähneet,
kirjoittivat he jokseenkin ahkeraan toisilleen ja kirjeitten ohessa oli
Gottlund lähettänyt Poppiuselle Ruotsin kirjallisia uutuuksia, milloin
vasta ilmestyneet numerot »Svensk Literaturtidningia», milloin
»Poetisk Kalenderia» tai Bruzeliusen »Kalender för Damer» j.n.e.
Sitä enemmän tulivat he täällä Upsalassa olemaan yhdessä, koska
Gottlund kevätlukukauden 1818 asui samassa talossa, kuin Poppius.
Jokapäiväiseen seuraan kuuIui myös Pippingsköld, johonka Poppius
nähtävästi vasta täällä lähemmin tutustui.
»Han är mera original än Arvidsson, är mindre vigilös och äger

kanske mera gvickhet än han. För karrikature har han en afgjord
fallenhet»,
[»Hän on enemmän alkuperäinen kuin Arvidsson, vähemmän

huikentelevainen ja hänessä on ehkä enemmän sukkeluutta.
Pilkkakuviin hänellä on kieltämätön taipumus»,]
arvelee Poppius edellä mainitussa kirjeessä Sjögrenille. Gottlundin

kautta pääsi Poppius nyt Ruotsin huomattavampien kirjallisten
kykyjen kanssa tuttavuuteen. Atterbom oli siihen aikaan ulkomailla,
mutta siinä seurassa, jonka keskuksena Palmblad oli, kävi myös
suomalaisia, niinkuin Arwidsson, Gottlund ja joskus Poppiuskin.
Kuitenkaan Poppius, niinkuin sanottu, ei näy vilkkaammin

ottaneen osaa ylioppilaselämään, joka tähän aikaan ei suinkaan ollut
hiljaisinta laatua, eikä kirjallisiin keskusteluihin suuremmissa
piireissä. Hän viihtyi paremmin kotonaan lähempien ystäviensä
seurassa ja kirjojensa ääressä. Joskus oli hän kutsuttu päivällisille tai
illallisille professori Romanssonin luo (25), joka osasi suomea ja joka
aina suomalaisia kohtaan oli erittäin ystävällinen ja auttavainen.
Historiaa ja filosofiaa lueskeli Poppius nyt ja kuunteli näissä aineissa
luentoja, joita Geijer ja Grubbe pitivät (26). Hänen totuutta
harrastava, tutkiskeleva mielensä ei tahtonut tyytyä puolinaisuuteen;
elämän suurissa kysymyksissä tahtoi hän päästä sopusointuun ja
perustettuun, filosofiseen vakaumukseen. Kandidaattitutkinto hänellä
edelleen oli lähimpänä maalina. Syyskesällä (27) kirjoittaa hän
Sjögrenille:
«Min största force vore nu att jämte praesterande af

Candidatexamen, ändtligen hafva kommit pä någon säker grund i
filosofien som kan förvirra en människa på alla möjliga vägar till
döds, — —.
[»Suurin pyrintöni olisi nyt, että sen ohella kuin olisin suorittanut
Kandidaattitutkinnon, samalla viimeinkin olisin päässyt varmalle
pohjalle filosofiassa, joka voi eksyttää ihmisen kaikellaisilla teillä
aivan kuolluksiin,» — —.]
Grubben luennoista uskonnon filosofiassa toivoi hän paljon ja
Geijeriin oli hän aivan ihastunut: »Man kommer alldeles ånyo född
från hans timmar». [»Tulee ihan uudestasyntyneenä hänen
tunneiltaan».]
Että isänmaallisuus ja suomalainen kansallisuudenaate edelleen

oli vireillä Upsalassa oleskelevissa suomalaisissa, siitä ovat
todisteina sekä heidän silloiset lukuharrastuksensa että kirjeet, joita
he kirjoittivat kotimaassa oleville tovereilleen. Siinä kirjeessä
Sjögrenille helmikuulta 1818, josta otteita jo ennen on mainittu,
kertoo Poppius, kuinka Pippingsköldin oli tapa tehdä pilkkaa
ruotsalaisten nurinpäisistä käsityksistä Suomesta ja Venäjästä;
näiden arvostelun mukaan ei muilla ollut mitään arvoa, kuin Ruotsilla
ja Saksalla. Poppiusen mielestä tämä on suurta kiittämättömyyttä.
Suomea kohtaan ja hän jatkaa:
»Därför kan ingen ärlig finne älska detta otacksamma, slappa,

enerverade, fattiga, genom sina partier sig själf sönderslitande, med
sina förfäders storverk skrytande och därpå förlitande Sverige. —
Helt annat är Jalo Venäjä och vår frihet och välstånd under
Alexander»,
[»Sentähdon ei kukaan rehellinen Suomalainen saata rakastaa

tuota kiittämätöntä, velttoa, hermostunutta, köyhää, puolueittensa
kautta itseään raatelevaa, esi-isiensä suurtöistä kehuvaa ja niihin
luottavaa Ruotsia. — Aivan toista on Jalo Venäjä ja vapautemme ja
hyvinvointimme Aleksanterin hallitessa,»]
ja seuraavassa kirjeessä:
»Vi skulle åtminstone vela visa Svenskarne att vi kunna umbära

deras språk och seder ja till och med deras Thor och Odin, som de

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Women, Science and Fiction Revisited

2nd Edition Debra Benita Shaw

Women Negotiating Feminism and Science Fiction Fandom:

Arabic Science Fiction 1st ed. Edition Ian Campbell

The Routledge Companion to Gender and Science Fiction

The Origins of Science Fiction Michael Newton (Editor)

Contemporary European Science Fiction Cinemas 1st ed.

Voices of the Void: A Science-Fiction Anthology Leitzen

After Violence Debra Javeline

McGraw-Hill handbook of English Harry Shaw [Shaw

Women, Science and

Debra Benita Shaw

Women, Science and

ISSN 2634-6435 ISSN 2634-6443 (electronic)

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2023

Cover illustration: marc zakian / Alamy Stock Photo

I would like to thank my students at the University of East London who,

1 Introduction: The Nearly Silent Listener 1

2 Herland: Charlotte Perkins Gilman and the Literature of

3 Swastika Night: Katharine Burdekin and the Psychology of

4 ‘No Woman Born’: C. L. Moore’s Dancing Cyborg 67

5 The Left Hand of Darkness: Ursula Le Guin and the Haploid

6 The Handmaid’s Tale: Margaret Atwood and the Politics of

7 The Power: Naomi Alderman and Archaeologies of Gender135

8 The City We Became: N. K. Jemisin and Posthuman

Introduction: The Nearly Silent Listener

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

feminists. Some used male pseudonyms to gain publication in a very mas-

imagine new worlds based on known scientific ideas could be read as

only slightly shortened versions of the originals, I have included addenda

Similarly, I was motivated to include an analysis of Margaret Atwood’s

promise of modernity has been hijacked to prepare us for the future of

gadget-oriented sf can no longer be read through extrapolation. What we

the parameters of genre as established under the same divisive epistemol-

Canavan, Gerry. 2017, March 29. Science Fiction. In Oxford Research

Herland: Charlotte Perkins Gilman

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 13

Social philosophy, however ingeniously presented, does not command wide

Herland, like all sf writing, is a product of its time, conditioned by pre-

The three explorers are representative of three specific male attitudes.

maintenance of wealth—progress being commensurate with economic

formidable of a number of thinkers who attacked the unitary assumptions

It therefore does no violence to language or to science to say that life begins

Ward saw the development of sexual reproduction as necessary to facili-

it began to be more especially characteristic of the sex. The weaker sex

So the human female is the victim of an evolutionary irony. She has

The Literature of the Beehive

Bartkowski believes that Gilman’s choice of a male narrator ‘is one

perfectly’ (Gilman 1966, p. 188). ‘Right motherhood’ is what she later

Newbolt Man Meets His Match

the encroaching, constricting, destroying society is represented with partic-

Romance and the Scientific Imagination

included as part of the phase of transition that Herland represents rather

issue of ‘bi-sexual’ generation, which concerns the whole society. Hence,

Gilman’s oblique references to sexuality are at times, for a modern

The arrival of the men thus effectively produces an evolutionary regres-

The idea of development harboured a paternalistic assumption once it was

There is nothing to suggest that Gilman resisted these assumptions.

1 Introduction: The Nearly Silent Listener 1

2 Herland: Charlotte Perkins Gilman and the Literature of

3 Swastika Night: Katharine Burdekin and the Psychology of

4 ‘No Woman Born’: C. L. Moore’s Dancing Cyborg 67

5 The Left Hand of Darkness: Ursula Le Guin and the Haploid

6 The Handmaid’s Tale: Margaret Atwood and the Politics of

7 The Power: Naomi Alderman and Archaeologies of Gender135

8 The City We Became: N. K. Jemisin and Posthuman