Complete Works of Charlotte Perkins Gilman

by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

  Our teaching about the rest of the world has given them all a sense of isolation, of remoteness, of being a little outlying sample of a country, overlooked and forgotten among the family of nations. We had called it “the family of nations,” and they liked the phrase immensely.

  They were deeply aroused on the subject of evolution; indeed, the whole field of natural science drew them irresistibly. Any number of them would have risked everything to go to the strange unknown lands and study; but we could take only one, and it had to be Ellador, naturally.

  We planned greatly about coming back, about establishing a connecting route by water; about penetrating those vast forests and civilizing — or exterminating — the dangerous savages. That is, we men talked of that last — not with the women. They had a definite aversion to killing things.

  But meanwhile there was high council being held among the wisest of them all. The students and thinkers who had been gathering facts from us all this time, collating and relating them, and making inferences, laid the result of their labors before the council.

  Little had we thought that our careful efforts at concealment had been so easily seen through, with never a word to show us that they saw. They had followed up words of ours on the science of optics, asked innocent questions about glasses and the like, and were aware of the defective eyesight so common among us.

  With the lightest touch, different women asking different questions at different times, and putting all our answers together like a picture puzzle, they had figured out a sort of skeleton chart as to the prevalence of disease among us. Even more subtly with no show of horror or condemnation, they had gathered something — far from the truth, but something pretty clear — about poverty, vice, and crime. They even had a goodly number of our dangers all itemized, from asking us about insurance and innocent things like that.

  They were well posted as to the different races, beginning with their poison-arrow natives down below and widening out to the broad racial divisions we had told them about. Never a shocked expression of the face or exclamation of revolt had warned us; they had been extracting the evidence without our knowing it all this time, and now were studying with the most devout earnestness the matter they had prepared.

  The result was rather distressing to us. They first explained the matter fully to Ellador, as she was the one who purposed visiting the Rest of the World. To Celis they said nothing. She must not be in any way distressed, while the whole nation waited on her Great Work.

  Finally Jeff and I were called in. Somel and Zava were there, and Ellador, with many others that we knew.

  They had a great globe, quite fairly mapped out from the small section maps in that compendium of ours. They had the different peoples of the earth roughly outlined, and their status in civilization indicated. They had charts and figures and estimates, based on the facts in that traitorous little book and what they had learned from us.

  Somel explained: “We find that in all your historic period, so much longer than ours, that with all the interplay of services, the exchange of inventions and discoveries, and the wonderful progress we so admire, that in this widespread Other World of yours, there is still much disease, often contagious.”

  We admitted this at once.

  “Also there is still, in varying degree, ignorance, with prejudice and unbridled emotion.”

  This too was admitted.

  “We find also that in spite of the advance of democracy and the increase of wealth, that there is still unrest and sometimes combat.”

  Yes, yes, we admitted it all. We were used to these things and saw no reason for so much seriousness.

  “All things considered,” they said, and they did not say a hundredth part of the things they were considering, “we are unwilling to expose our country to free communication with the rest of the world — as yet. If Ellador comes back, and we approve her report, it may be done later — but not yet.

  “So we have this to ask of you gentlemen [they knew that word was held a title of honor with us], that you promise not in any way to betray the location of this country until permission — after Ellador’s return.”

  Jeff was perfectly satisfied. He thought they were quite right. He always did. I never saw an alien become naturalized more quickly than that man in Herland.

  I studied it awhile, thinking of the time they’d have if some of our contagions got loose there, and concluded they were right. So I agreed.

  Terry was the obstacle. “Indeed I won’t!” he protested. “The first thing I’ll do is to get an expedition fixed up to force an entrance into Ma-land.”

  “Then,” they said quite calmly, “he must remain an absolute prisoner, always.”

  “Anesthesia would be kinder,” urged Moadine.

  “And safer,” added Zava.

  “He will promise, I think,” said Ellador.

  And he did. With which agreement we at last left Herland.

  WITH HER IN OURLAND

  With Her in Ourland was serialised in twelve parts in The Forerunner in 1916, but was not published in book form until 1997 by Greenwood Press. The novel was the last work of Gilman’s to be featured in her magazine, before it ceased publication at the end of 1916. The third in the author’s utopian trilogy, though not as popular as Herland, the novel is a well-known text for feminist and utopian scholars and has received critical attention over the past fifteen years since its republication.

  The novel continues from where Herland ended: Van, his wife Ellador, and Terry leave the all-female country and venture back into other societies. The trio are onboard a ship headed for the US East Coast when they are beset by a rough storm. The travellers escape and instead of arriving in America, they head towards Europe. They arrive in the continent during the First World War and Ellador is horrified at the destruction, cruelty and carnage of the conflict. She attempts to process patriarchal society and when they travel to Asia she dedicates herself to understanding and critically reflecting upon the organisational, political and power structures of ‘Ourland’. Van increasingly becomes uneasy at having to acknowledge the failures of the ‘Real World’ societies.

  The adventurers eventually find their way to America, where Van hopes to restore his wife’s faith in ‘Ourland’, but Ellador quickly turns her attention to observing and examining the inadequacies and inequalities of the culture. She expresses her ideas about the need for radical social, economic and political transformation in the country. A particularly interesting incident is when she encounters a man from the South and challenges his overt racism, which was prevalent in the US during that period. However, she also voices strong anti-immigration views and links a lack of happiness, fairness and equality to allowing poor and oppressed people to settle in America. She also echoes the language of nationalist or even fascist discourse about internal and external enemies when she speaks of the country being weakened and bloated by ‘parasites inside and out’.

  The text was not published in book form until 1997

  CONTENTS

  SYNOPSIS OF HERLAND

  1. THE RETURN

  2. WAR

  3. A JOURNEY OF INSPECTION

  4. NEARING HOME

  5. MY COUNTRY

  6. THE DIAGNOSIS

  7. IN OUR HOMES

  8. MORE DIAGNOSIS

  9. DEMOCRACY AND ECONOMICS

  10. RACE AND RELIGION

  11. FEMINISM AND THE WOMAN’S MOVEMENT

  12. CONCLUSION

  SYNOPSIS OF HERLAND

  Three American young men discover a country inhabited solely by women, who were Parthenogenetic, and had borne only girl children for two thousand years; they marry three of the women. Two of the men and one woman leave the country of Herland to return to America; Jeff Margrave remaining with his wife, Celis, a willing citizen; Terry O. Nicholson being expelled for bad conduct; and Ellador electing to go with her husband, Vandyck Jennings

  1. THE RETURN

  The three of us, all with set faces of high determination,
sat close in the big biplane as we said good-bye to Herland and rose whirring from the level rock on that sheer edge. We went up first, and made a wide circuit, that my wife Ellador might have a view of her own beloved land to remember. How green and fair and flower-brightened it lay below us! The little cities, the thick dotted villages, the scattered hamlets and wide parks of grouped houses lay again beneath our eyes as when we three men had first set our astonished masculine gaze on this ultra-feminine land.

  Our long visit, the kind care, and judicious education given us, even though under restraint, and our months of freedom and travel among them, made it seem to me like leaving a second home. The beauty of the place was borne in upon me anew as I looked down on it. It was a garden, a great cultivated park, even to its wildest forested borders, and the cities were ornaments to the landscape, thinning out into delicate lace-like tracery of scattered buildings as they merged into the open country.

  Terry looked at it with set teeth. He was embittered through and through, and but for Ellador I could well imagine the kind of things he would have said. He only made this circuit at her request, as one who said: “Oh, well — an hour or two more or less — it’s over, anyhow!” Then the long gliding swoop as we descended to our sealed motor-boat in the lake below. It was safe enough. Perhaps the savages had considered it some deadly witch-work and avoided it; at any rate save for some dents and scratches on the metal cover, it was unhurt.

  With some careful labor, Terry working with a feverish joyful eagerness, we got the machine dissembled and packed away, pulled in the anchors, and with well-applied oiling started the long dis-used motor, and moved off toward the great river.

  Ellador’s eyes were on the towering cliffs behind us. I gave her the glass, and as long as we were on the open water her eyes dwelt lovingly on the high rocky border of her home. But when we shot under the arching gloom of the forest she turned to me with a little sigh and a bright, steady smile.

  “That’s good-bye,” she said. “Now it’s all looking forward to the Big New World — the Real World — with You!”

  Terry said very little. His heavy jaw was set, his eyes looked forward, eagerly, determinedly. He was polite to Ellador, and not impolite to me, but he was not conversational.

  We made the trip as fast as was consistent with safety; faster sometimes; living on our canned food and bottled water, stopping for no fresh meat; shooting down the ever-widening river toward the coast.

  Ellador watched it all with eager, childlike interest. The freshness of mind of these Herland women concealed their intellectual power. I never quite got used to it. We are so used to seeing our learned men cold and solemn, holding themselves far above all the “enthusiasm of youth,” that it is hard for us to associate a high degree of wisdom and intellectual power with vivid interest in immediate events.

  Here was my Wife from Wonderland, leaving all she had ever known, — a lifetime of peace and happiness and work she loved, and a whole nation of friends, as far as she knew them; and starting out with me for a world which I frankly told her was full of many kinds of pain and evil. She was not afraid. It was not sheer ignorance of danger, either. I had tried hard to make her understand the troubles she would meet. Neither was it a complete absorption in me — far from it. In our story books we read always of young wives giving up all they have known and enjoyed “for his sake.” That was by no means Ellador’s position. She loved me — that I knew, but by no means with that engrossing absorption so familiar to our novelists and their readers. Her attitude was that of some high ambassador sent on an important and dangerous mission. She represented her country, and that with intensity we can hardly realize. She was to meet and learn a whole new world, and perhaps establish connections between it and her own dear land.

  As Terry held to his steering, grim and silent, that feverish eagerness in his eyes, and a curb on his usually ready tongue, Ellador would sit in the bow, leaning forward, chin on her hand, her eyes ahead, far ahead, down the long reaches of the winding stream, with an expression such as one could imagine on Columbus. She was glad to have me near her. I was not only her own, in a degree she herself did not yet realize, but I was her one link with the homeland. So I sat close and we talked much of the things we saw and more of what we were going to see. Her short soft hair, curly in the moist air, and rippling back from her bright face as we rushed along, gave the broad forehead and clear eyes a more courageous look than ever. That finely cut mobile mouth was firmly set, though always ready to melt into a tender smile for me.

  “Now Van, my dear,” she said one day, as we neared the coast town where we hoped to find a steamer, “Please don’t worry about how all this is going to affect me. You have been drawing very hard pictures of your own land, and of the evil behavior of men; so that I shall not be disappointed or shocked too much. I won’t be, dear. I understand that men are different from women — must be, but I am convinced that it is better for the world to have both men and women than to have only one sex, like us. We have done the best we could, we women, all alone. We have made a nice little safe clean garden place and lived happily in it, but we have done nothing whatever for the rest of the world. We might as well not be there for all the good it does anyone else. The savages down below are just as savage, for all our civilization. Now you, even if you were, as you say, driven by greed and sheer love of adventure and fighting — you have gone all over the world and civilized it.”

  “Not all, dear,” I hastily put in. “Not nearly all. There are ever so many savages left.”

  “Yes I know that, I remember the maps and all the history and geography you have taught me.”

  It was a never-ending source of surprise to me the way those Herland women understood and remembered. It must have been due to their entirely different system of education. There was very much less put into their minds, from infancy up, and what was there seemed to grow there — to stay in place without effort. All the new facts we gave them they had promptly hung up in the right places, like arranging things in a large well-planned, not over-filled closet, and they knew where to find them at once.

  “I can readily see,” she went on, “that our pleasant collective economy is like that of bees and ants and such co-mothers; and that a world of fathers does not work as smoothly as that. We have observed, of course, among animals, that the instincts of the male are different from those of the female, and that he likes to fight. But think of all you have done!”

  That was what delighted Ellador. She was never tired of my stories of invention and discovery, of the new lands we had found, the mountain ranges crossed, the great oceans turned into highways, and all the wonders of art and science. She loved it as did Desdemona the wild tales of her lover, but with more understanding.

  “It must be nobler to have Two,” she would say, her eyes shining. “We are only half a people. Of course we love each other, and have advanced our own little country, but it is such a little one — and you have The World!”

  We reached the coast in due time, and the town. It was not much of a town, dirty and squalid enough, with lazy half-breed inhabitants for the most part. But this I had carefully explained and Ellador did not mind it, examining everything with kind impartial eyes, as a teacher would examine the work of atypical children.

  Terry loved it. He greeted that slovenly, ill-built, idle place with ardor, and promptly left us to ourselves for the most part.

  There was no steamer. None had touched there for many months, they said; but there was a sailing vessel which undertook, for sufficient payment, to take us and our motor-boat with its contents, to a larger port.

  Terry and I had our belts with gold and notes; he had letters of credit too, while Ellador had brought with her not only a supply of gold, but a little bag of rubies, which I assured her would take us several times around the world, and more. The money system in Herland was mainly paper, and their jewels, while valued for decoration, were not prized as ours are. They had some historic treasure chests, rivalling those
of India, and she had been amply supplied.

  After some delay we set sail.

  Terry walked the deck, more eager as the days passed. Ellador, I am sorry to say, proved a poor sailor, as was indeed to be expected, but made no fuss about her disabilities. I told her it was almost inescapable, unpleasant but not dangerous, so she stayed in her berth, or sat wrapped mummy fashion on the deck, and suffered in patience.

  Terry talked a little more when we were out of her hearing.

  “Do you know they say there’s a war in Europe?” he told me.

  “A war? A real one — or just the Balkans?”

  “A real one, they say — Germany and Austria against the rest of Europe apparently. Began months ago — no news for a long time.”

  “Oh well — it will be over before we reach home, I guess. Lucky for us we are Americans.”

  But I was worried for Ellador. I wanted the world, my world, to look its best in her eyes. If those women, alone and unaided, had worked out that pleasant, peaceful, comfortable civilization of theirs, with its practical sisterliness and friendliness all over the land, I was very anxious to show her that men had done at least as well, and in some ways better — men and women, that is. And here we had gotten up a war — a most undesirable spectacle for an international guest.

  There was a missionary on board, a thin, almost emaciated man, of the Presbyterian denomination. He was a most earnest person, and a great talker, naturally.

  “Woe unto me,” he would say, “if I preach not this gospel!” And he preached it “in season and out of season.”

  Ellador was profoundly interested. I tried to explain to her that he was an enthusiast of a rather rigid type, and that she must not judge Christianity too harshly by him, but she quite reassured me.