Early Feminist Utopias, From Gilman’s Herland to Rokeya’s Sultana’s Dream
Thomas More first coined the term utopia with his eponymous work in 1516, launching a thread of speculative fiction dedicated to imagining the world as it could be. There’s some controversy over whether “utopia” translates as “good place” or “nowhere.” Since the perfect place is probably impossible, both feel accurate. Utopias (and their converse, dystopias) have long since been used as tools in science fiction, imagining alternate social and cultural arrangements, both good and bad.
Of course, whether a particular social arrangement is a utopia or a dystopia often depends on your perspective. Though The Handmaid’s Tale is presented as a dystopian story of a world in the grip of abusive patriarchy and religious oppression, there will probably always be plenty of people who would be perfectly happy to see that world come into being.
Since the late nineteenth century, feminist writers have used the tool of speculative fiction to envision both dystopias—like the world of The Handmaid’s Tale—as well as utopias free of gender-based oppression. In fact, stories such as these were among the earliest works of science fiction.
One example is Herland, a 1915 novella by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Gilman is best-known for her short story “The Yellow Wallpaper” (1892), a perennial favorite of English teachers and students. A weird classic, “The Yellow Wallpaper” remains a genuinely creepy and unsettling tale; its power has not diminished with time. Told in journal entries, the story centers on a young woman who is suffering from mental health problems, or in the parlance of the day, “hysteria.” For her “treatment,” her husband, a doctor, confines her to one room upstairs, where she has nothing to do but rest . . . and inspect the wallpaper. Unsurprisingly, this stint in solitary confinement does not improve her mental health.
What’s most shocking about this story is how relevant it still feels, as the male-dominated political establishment still frequently tries to exert control over female bodies while simultaneously neglecting the real concerns of women’s health.
Having established her feminist bona fides with “The Yellow Wallpaper,” Gilman went on to write Herland, her vision of a world with only women. The story is initially told from the perspective of three men, intrepid explorers who set out to “discover” this long-forgotten civilization. In the Guardian, feminist essayist and activist Lindy West writes, “[They] are such perfect, brutal caricatures of masculinity, they feel fresh and relevant enough to populate any sarcastic modern-day feminist blog post.”
When they reach Herland, they find a peaceful paradise, free from violence and poverty and all the typical problems of modern life. The culture centers fully on the joys and responsibilities of motherhood. Everyone wears super-comfy yet attractive and androgynous tunics (see this page for more on feminist utopian fashion). Also, everyone is vegetarian.
While this vision of a socialist utopia run by women was radical in its time, it is also highly problematic in many ways. “Being a product of its time, Herland is also excruciatingly antiquated—rife with gender essentialism, white supremacy, and anti-abortion rhetoric,” writes West. Today, many women would find the idea of a life lived in service of maternity to be the opposite of empowering. And like the white suffragettes of the day, Gilman’s brand of feminism was decidedly not intersectional.
Five years after the novella’s publication in 1915, the Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was ratified, granting women the right to vote. Considering that in 1915—and even in 1920—the idea of women voting was extremely controversial and offensive to many, it’s easy to see why imagining a world where they ran the whole government is radical, provocative, and inspiring. But despite its groundbreaking nature, Herland is not a particularly impressive piece of science fiction, lacking the subtlety and skill of “The Yellow Wallpaper.” Which perhaps explains why it is not so well-known today.
Herland was one of a handful of similar stories published in the Western world during this very early era of women’s lib. Others include New Amazonia (1889) by Elizabeth Burgoyne Corbett and Millennium Hall (1762) by Sarah Scott—both equally proto-feminist and equally problematic, if not more so.
But British and American writers were not the only ones to produce such narratives. In 1905, ten years before Gilman’s Herland, the feminist thinker Begum Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain published Sultana’s Dream, her own vision of a feminist utopia.
Like Kepler’s Somnium, Sultana’s Dream is presented, unthreateningly, as a fanciful dream. The sultana falls to snoozing in her chair and dreams of a world called Ladyland. She’s given a tour of this amazing place, where men are confined to the home while women are given the run of the world, managing society and building a better future.
How did this state of affairs come about? Almost fatally wounded by a war they couldn’t win, the men agreed to retreat and let the ladies have a try. The women won the war with a clever scientific contraption that concentrated the rays of the sun and blasted all its heat and light onto the enemy’s battlefield. They then set to building a futuristic, progressive society fueled by innovations such as a floating balloon that draws water from the atmosphere above the clouds and pipes it directly down to earth, and repurposed the sun-capturing instrument as a renewable source of heat and energy.
Concept art from Sultana’s Dream, an animated feature film directed by Isabel Herguera. The film is in preproduction as of 2019.
In the highly segregated society of the early twentieth century—not just in India, where Hossain wrote, but in the West as well—women were mostly confined to the home. In India, this space was called the zenana and the segregation was referred to as purdah. Hossain skewers the irony of the fact that women are told they’re confined indoors for “their own protection”—from men, of course. If men are so dangerous, perhaps it is they who should be confined?
The story reverses the concept of traditional purdah (isolation between the sexes), and men are confined to mardana, an inversion of the female space zenana. Hidden out of sight, the men are content to tend to their homes and do the domestic chores. In some ways, this is less of a utopian fantasy and more of a satire, arguing that what’s good for the goose is good for the gander.
Inseparable from Hossain’s critique of patriarchy is her critique of colonialism. As editor and critic Mahvesh Murad writes for Tor.com, “Hossain is also very aware of living under colonisation—and not just that of women by men but that of nations.” At the core of Sultana’s Dream is the insistence that intelligence is more powerful than brute force, and none of us should submit to oppression simply because our oppressors appear to be larger and stronger than we are. “A lion is stronger than a man,” says the sultana’s guide through Ladyland, “but it does not enable him to dominate the human race.”
Hossain’s backstory is fascinating, perhaps even more so than the story itself. Her father was an orthodox Muslim, and enforced purdah when she was growing up in the 1880s, permitting the women of the family to learn only to recite the Quran. But Rokeya and her sister Karimunnesa were rebellious types, and they secretly studied Bengali and Persian, with the support of their better-educated brothers. One brother, Ibrahim Saber, also taught Rokeya some English when she was quite young, secretly tutoring her by candlelight after their parents were in bed.
The film Sultana’s Dream follows a Spanish film director’s journey across India as she grapples with global gender inequality in the present day.
Karimunnesa shared Rokeya’s affinity with language. She was a talented poet, and Rokeya admired her deeply. Karimunnesa’s support remained one of Rokeya’s most potent motivations throughout her life, and she dedicated one of her books to her, writing “I learned to read the Bengali alphabets only because of your affectionate care.”
Rokeya married at sixteen, but her own husband—originally a friend of her benevolent older brother—was extremely supportive of her ideas and her work as a feminist activist. In fact, she wrote Sultana’s
Dream in English in part to impress him with her command of the language, which she’d been studying while he was away on a trip. She presented it to him on his return; he read the whole thing in one standing (he didn’t even sit down) and was duly impressed, calling it “a splendid revenge.” He also supported her work financially, saving money so that she could establish a school. The institute she founded is still one of Kolkata’s most popular schools for girls.
The “Timeless Green Kingdoms” of George MacDonald
George MacDonald (1824–1905) is one of speculative fiction’s most influential figures; some even consider him the father of modern fantasy. Yet while his work influenced a veritable who’s who of twentieth century fantasists, his own reputation has faded into undeserved obscurity.
Born in Scotland to an upper middle class and strongly religious family, MacDonald rejected his parents’ more extreme version of the faith, but continued to value his Christianity. He studied Moral Philosophy and Sciences at a well-established university, where he honed his abilities as a thinker and scholar. Choosing between becoming a chemist or a clergyman, he chose the cloth, but his career as a minister was short-lived, as he was forced to resign because his liberal and eccentric ideas soon had him accused of “heresy.” Still, as he turned to writing, his work continued to draw heavily on his Christian faith, which inspired his sense of the numinous and sublime. He went on to write more than fifty books including novels, stories, essays, and poems.
With MacDonald’s body of work now considered somewhat obscure, not many fans of fantasy literature have read even his best-known books, Phantastes (1858), At the Back of the North Wind (1871), and The Princess and the Goblin (1872). To present-day audiences, these works can be inaccessible. But they were hugely influential for a generation of fantasy authors whose names are much better known today, including C. S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, Madeleine L’Engle, and Ursula K. Le Guin.
At the Back of the North Wind tells the story of a young boy named Diamond, a sickly child from an impoverished family. The North Wind wants to whistle around his drafty bed at night; he prefers it doesn’t. They strike up a friendship, and Diamond travels—“at the back of the North Wind”—far and wide, taking in sights and experiences in a meandering story that is weak on plot. But it’s also a beautiful and heartbreaking tale, especially as it eventually becomes clear that the North Wind is a metaphor for death.
The Princess and the Goblin is a somewhat easier tale to digest. The titular princess, Irene, one day climbs up a mysterious staircase, and in true fairy-tale fashion, finds an old woman spinning yarn at a wheel—whom apparently only Irene can see. Irene’s friend Curdie is working class and a miner’s son (though possibly descended from royalty). The miners, with their time spent underground, are particularly well-placed to eavesdrop on goblins, and find out about their evil plans. Together, Irene and Curdie navigate the goblin conspiracy . . . that the adults still deny. In her review on Tor.com, fantasy author Mari Ness writes: “The core of the book—made clear shortly after the goblins reappear—is about faith, about holding to your beliefs when you know you are right, even if others, and especially others who matter to you very much—keep telling you that you are wrong.” The Princess and Curdie is a follow-up to this book, and focuses primarily on Curdie’s adventures as he tries to stop a plague from turning a city of humans into beasts.
These works made a particular impact on C. S. Lewis. Much like George MacDonald, Lewis was a Christian whose spiritual sensibilities deeply informed the sense of awe and reverence for the sublime that infused his work. C. S. Lewis once said that reading The Princess and the Goblin made a difference to his “whole existence.” Indeed, one of the most extensive Websites on George MacDonald is fatheroftheinklings.com, a reference to the writing and conversation club anchored by Lewis and Tolkien (see this page). An article on the site has the following to say on MacDonald and C. S. Lewis:
Lewis persistently acknowledged his debt to MacDonald, whom he called his ‘master.’ . . . Both in his autobiography and throughout his writing career, Lewis emphasized that George MacDonald was the most significant impetus in his own spiritual pilgrimage. MacDonald’s writings can thus be seen as the spiritual soil out of which the faith of C. S. Lewis emerged.
Much like C. S. Lewis’s famous works, MacDonald’s books evoke the magic of hidden worlds, portals, and doors; they take for granted a world with princesses, fairy godmothers, and goblins; they idolize goodness and an appreciation for the sublime.
C. S. Lewis is far from the only famous author to count MacDonald as an influence. Another is Madeleine L’Engle, best known for her beloved novel A Wrinkle in Time, recently made into a feature film directed by Ava DuVernay, starring Oprah Winfrey, Mindy Kaling, Reese Witherspoon, and Chris Pine. In a thoughtful essay on L’Engle for the Los Angeles Times, professor and author Jonathan Alexander writes: “MacDonald, like L’Engle, was fond of the concept of mythic time, and he enjoyed detecting and reading eternal verities and spiritual truths in the present mundane world. His influence is evident in A Wrinkle in Time, which uses the time and space bending tesseract as a plot device to suggest the interconnectedness of all things across different planets.”
Celebrated illustrator Ruth Sanderson provided magical new artwork for a 2016 publication of MacDonald’s classic fairytale The Golden Key (1866).
Another MacDonald fan: Ursula K. Le Guin, one of our greatest contemporary writers. In an introduction to The Princess and the Goblin, published by Puffin Classics in 2011, Le Guin wrote of MacDonald’s “timeless green kingdoms of legend and fantasy”: “We learn about those kingdoms early. Our guides are the authors who began writing stories for children just about the time the timeless green world began to vanish, to become the world of the past—outside time—the country of ‘There was once a little princess . . .’ George MacDonald was one of the first of those authors.”
By writing about working-class children who glimpsed, and grabbed at, the magical, MacDonald shephereded and developed a concept that is now essential to contemporary fantasy—the porous boundaries between worlds and the intrusion of the uncanny into the everyday. We all deserve our journeys to those timeless green worlds.
Robert W. Chambers, Lesser-Known Father of Weird Fiction
CAMILLA: You, sir, should unmask.
STRANGER: Indeed?
CASSILDA: Indeed it’s time. We all have laid aside disguise but you.
STRANGER: I wear no mask.
CAMILLA: (Terrified, aside to Cassilda.) No mask? No mask!
—THE KING IN YELLOW, ACT 1, SCENE 2
These lines represent what is perhaps the most terrifying known excerpt of a play that doesn’t, technically, exist. This play—The King in Yellow—wields a distinct and horrible power: the power to drive its readers insane. Somehow, the beauties or horrors or existential truths contained within its second act are a kind of incantation with the power to haunt or possess. “. . . the writer has cursed the world with this beautiful, stupendous creation, terrible in its simplicity, irresistible in its truth—a world which now trembles before The King in Yellow.” Once read, it cannot be unread. Governments try to ban it. Friends warn friends. Copies are seized and destroyed. And yet this forbidden fruit is all too tempting: “. . . All felt that human nature could not bear the strain, nor thrive on words in which the essence of purest poison lurked. The very banality and innocence of the first act only allowed the blow to fall afterward with more awful effect.”
The King in Yellow by Vicente Valentine (a tribute to the creation of Robert W. Chambers).
This play was imagined by Robert W. Chambers (1865–1933). He didn’t write it (or at least he didn’t publish it). He simply wrote about it. In a series of four linked stories, the reader is given glimpses of a world much like our own, except for the fact that a play exists with the power to break the human brain and eventually the world itself. The play is often mentioned only obliquely throughout these stories, yet the horror it represents seems to
saturate everything.
In these linked short stories published under the title The King in Yellow (1895), Chambers reveals only the barest outlines of the play, excerpted in bits and fragments, and seen in silhouette through the haunted thoughts of those who read it. What emerges is a vision of dim Carcosa, a cursed city that feels stranded outside of space and time, black stars hung above it, the moon rising impossibly against its dark towers. A place called Hastur and the Lake of Hali. A Yellow Sign, rendered as a character in an unknown and alien language, that comes like a badge of corruption and marks its wearer for death. A stranger, who appears to wear a pallid mask—but does he? And the terrifying King in Yellow, who brings destruction, who answers to no one. “It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God.”
One of the first genre authors to be influenced by The King in Yellow is also one of its best known: H. P. Lovecraft, who read the work in the late 1920s. His story “The Whisperer in Darkness” includes several references to signifiers such as the Lake of Hali and the Yellow Sign; it’s also one of the foundational texts of the Cthulhu Mythos, a shared fictional universe with an ever-expanding pantheon of beings, creatures, and malevolent gods.
Lovecraft was well-known for all the creepy made-up words that pervaded his work, presaged by mythical and vaguely threatening terms from Chambers such as Hastur, Yhtill, Hyades, Aldebaran. Beyond that, Lovecraft perhaps drew inspiration from Chambers’s method of keeping the true face of terror lurking just behind the curtain; consider the infamous Lovecraftian move of citing a horror simply too heinous for words to describe. Lovecraft’s oeuvre is also threaded with tomes of mystery, arcane volumes, dangerous yet pivotal books: The Book of Azathoth, The Seven Cryptical Books of Hsan, and most enduringly, The Necronomicon. Many authors who worked within the Cthulhu Mythos—Robert Bloch, August Derleth, Lin Carter, Ramsey Campbell, Clark Ashton Smith, and others—added their own occult volumes and powerful grimoires to the pile.
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