Week 2: Gilman and Herland

In this week's blog I'll be tackling five topics, two left over from last week and three related to this week's readings:

1. Is the "Utopian impulse" a universal law of human psychology, as Bloch argues?

2. Do utopias reflect "our own incapacity to conceive them," as Jameson contends?

3. In light of Topic 2 above, how do I read Herland?

4. What thoughts come to my mind in reading the various critiques of Herland?

5. How is Herland analyzable according to Elisa's framework of utopian/dystopian characteristics?

I. The Utopian Impulse

Jameson (2007) writes, "To see traces of the Utopian impulse everywhere, as Bloch [1961] did, is to naturalize it and to imply that it is someone how rooted in human nature" (p. 10). Here Jameson counters Bloch by noting that utopian projects "have been historically more intermittent" and suggesting we must distinguish between "daydreams" and "fantasy production."

In my view Jameson is on the right track here, in a way that is important for our studies this semester. Let me cite two reasons. First, are we to say that every idle daydream or conjecture is a "utopia"? If so, we would universalize the term "utopia" to the point of meaninglessness as an analytical construct.

Second, while I might concede to Bloch that imagination is a human trait, I would also bring in my own studies in intercultural communication. Researchers (e.g., Hofstede, 1980; Kluckhohn & Strodtbeck, 1961) in that discipline have developed typologies by which to analyze cultures.

These researchers agree that cultures differ widely in their attitudes toward the future and the relationship of individuals toward it. Some cultures (e.g., United States) are highly future-oriented, while others (e.g., Mexico) put a higher value on living spontaneously and in the moment. Some cultures are oriented to long-term thinking and others to short-term thinking. Some cultures have a "doing" orientation toward activity (i.e., humans are actors) and others have a "being" orientation (i.e., humans are acted upon).

So I argue here against Bloch, believing insteasd that it's important for our studies this semester not to "see traces of the Utopian impulse everywhere" lest we lose the integrity of the construct.

II. Our Capacity to Conceive

Is novelty possible? Jameson opines that utopias reflect "our own incapacity to conceive [them] in the first place" (1975, p. 230; quoted in Fitting, 1998, p. 9) since authors can only build their imaginary worlds from extant cultural materials "of which we are all in one way or another prisoners" (1982, p. 153; quoted in Fitting, 1998, p. 10).

I see a good deal of truth in this. As I blogged last week, I believe we can tell much about a culture by what it regards as idyllic or hellish, or by the futures it imagines. And I am also compelled by the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis which holds that different language patterns produce different though patterns. In other words, the thoughts we can think are somewhat constrained by the language we have to express those thoughts.

But the dystopian extreme of the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis is Orwell's 1984 and its portrayal of a despotism that seeks control over language so that it becomes impossible for residents to think unapproved thoughts. In Newspeak, for example, the concept bad is eliminated; residents of Oceania can only conceive of good and ungood.

I've long wrestled with this issue of cultural determinism and last year wrote a paper on it. I took issue with Goldhagen (1996) who argued that the Holocaust happened because Germans could not ideationally escape the antisemitism of their national culture. I countered that ordinary Germans, when confronted with the wholly novel knowledge of state-sponsored genocide, were compelled to rhetorically invent a novel belief in its legitimacy in order to keep their cognitive world in homeostasis.

Anyway, this is a good question for our class: Are literary utopias simply reflections of the authors' culturally constrained ideational tools? Or can utopias be wholly novel, creations that can't be inferred from previous ideas?

III. My Reading of Herland

Surely everyone noted the feminist and socialist aspects of Herland since, after all, it was Gilman's intent to make these arguments explicit.

What struck me most, however, were the taken-for-granted assumptions of her utopia. All is clean and tidy. The roads are straight and smooth. The land is a tended garden; even the wild forest was uprooted, each tree replaced, and pests eliminated. The technology is contemporary. Husbandry and economy are perfectly rationalized; no need even for a profit motive. Education is progressive. Population is controlled. The people are generous and wise; they are natural psychologists. Human relationships are satisfyingly platonic. The most sympathetic character, Van, is a humane sociologist and man of science.

This is a profoundly modern utopia. Despite the strenuous efforts of contemporary feminists to claim Gilman (a claim which is, in the main, justified), her underlying cultural assumptions and her very ontology are thoroughly Modern. Gilman's socialist utopia is just as Modern in its way as, say, the modernity of Wells in Things to Come (1936).

And yet, and yet . . . I wonder if Gilman herself really sees Herland as a utopia. Yes, she constructs Herland as a vehicle to illustrate the possibilities for women who can develop without preconceived biases. But toward the end of the novel Van and Ellador engage in discussion about sexual union.

To my reading, Gilman treats sympathetically Van's argument that sexual love can go beyond mechanistic procreation and be a motivator for good. Or at least, Van and Ellador leave open the possibility of establishing a sexual relationship in a way that implies: Van is not wrong in his desire; such a relationship will, in fact, occur someday; and, when it does, sexual love will deepen a bond which was built first on mutual respect rather than physical attraction.

I wonder if this is the real utopia that Gilman proposes; that is, a "bi-sexual" society in which women and men can develop their potentials with no preconceptions and where sexual love is the completion, rather than raison d'etre, for their relationships.

IV. Critiques of Herland

Now that I've been expatiating awhile, let me end with some quick comments about the various articles which critique and interpret Herland.

> Murphy ("Considering Her Ways") puts Herland in a group of four matriarchal utopias that, she argues, instantiate an ethic of the collective hive. Further, because insects are the most Other to humans in our taxonomic boundaries, the hive metaphor serves to defamiliarize readers.

In the case of Herland, however, I think this (otherwise insightful) reading may be a stretch. Murphy takes two stray remarks made by the character Jeff and builds a whole case on them. But I would not agree that the insect or hive metaphor is explicit, implied, or in any way important in Herland. You could just as well point, as a counterexample, to Ellador's rapturous description of the childhood incident that led to her life's vocation as she basked in the praise of helping exterminate a noxious moth.

> Jones ("Evolving Rhetoric") offers a helpful distinction between "traditional" utopias such as Gilman's that function didactically as apologues, and more recent feminist utopias that are "implicitly rhetorical" by using the interplay of literary elements to "dissolve the generic boundaries" and "produce new models of women's individual and social experience."

> Arnold ("Utopian Cognitive Mapping") is not convincing in her joining of Jameson's cognitive mapping concept and Turchi's writing-as-mapping metaphor. She merely uses these concepts as convenient devices to provide a garden-variety recap of Herland. The theorizing of utopian cognitive mapping is underdeveloped and, indeed, not really attempted to any degree. I've published a couple of articles on cognitive-cultural models and schema theory, and found the social science literature in that area to be more illuminating.

> Berkson ("So We All Became Mothers") offers some nice historical background about the generations of Stowe and Gilman, which helps me put Herland in its context. By contrast, several other readings this week attempted, with uneven results, to place Gilman within the lineage of contemporary feminist writing.

> Deegan and Podeschi ("Ecofeminist Pragmatism") were, to my mind, the least successful among the articles we read this week. There are rather severe "incongruencies" between their thesis and Gilman's writings, which to their credit they recognize in the penultimate section of the article.

But these incongruencies are merely sidestepped as possible results of Gilman's publishing schedule, her depressive illness, or her generation's low ecological knowledge. In other words, things which don't fit Deegan and Podeschi's thesis are swept under the rug. This article is a rather transparent attempt to give ecofeminist pragmatism, which most trace to the 1980s, a longer pedigree and thus more academic legitimacy.

> Miller ("The Ideal Woman") compares Gilman's feminist utopia of 1915 and Charnas's of 1978 as a way of illustrating how different generations create victorious heroines (as compared to the frustrated heroines found in realistic fiction) with meanings for their own times. But this seems to me self-evident. The article could use more theorizing, such as an analytical matrix (like the "Utopian/Dystopian Characteristics" matrix on Elisa's website) we could use to compare utopian heroines from different generations.

> By the way, where would I place Gilman within Garrard's taxonomy of ecocritical positions? How about Gilman-as-social-ecologist? Though we've always got to be careful in projecting today's categories into the past, I might venture that Gilman could fit within Garrard's description of social ecologists who "promote exemplary lifestyles and communities that prefigure a more general transformation and give people practice in sustainable living and participatory democracy" (p. 30).

V. Utopian Characteristics of Herland

> Causality: accident of nature, leafing to violent revolution

> Cosmology: on earth and in historical time

> Maintenance: stability through social engineering

> Physical Characterisics: semirural garden; isolated; climatic

> Social Organization: specialization of labor; religious norming; crime eliminated; decision-making and judicial procedures unspecified but appear to be collective; population voluntarily controlled

> Economic Organization: maternity replaces profit as economic motivator; residents choose own labor specializations; economic activity is primarily pastoral; no money or private property

> Attitude Toward Science: technological level comparable to outside world; useful technologies admired; education highly valued

> Gender: women only; reproduction via parthenogensis

> Family Life: communal responsibility for child rearing; childcare is professionalized

> Epistemology: reason and rationality are central

> Metaphysics: central myth is first Mother; central symbol is Maaia, the God Mother