Herland by Charlotte Perkins Gilman5/12/2023 The men are of the opinion that the females have very short hair and do not look feminine. The narrator says that ‘Here you have human beings, unquestionably, but what we were slow in understanding was how these ultra-women, inheriting only from women, had eliminated not only certain masculine characteristics, which of course we did not look for but so much of what we had always thought essentially feminine. Since a woman gives birth to her daughter bearing her sole genetic makeup, there is a risk of mutation or abnormality. The single-sex culture of Herland makes women ‘parthenogenetic women, founding a new race’. They have learned many new facts by using a new language, English, to communicate with the men. They are quite shocked at the commentaries from the men about rearing cows for milk and meat. For instance, the females in Herland are all vegetarians because they claim that they lack land to rear domestic animals for meat. But they were bent on understanding our kind of civilization, and their lines of interrogation would gradually surround us and drive us in till we found ourselves up against some admissionswe did not want to make.’ (Gilman 46). It was not just curiosity-they weren't a bitmore curious about us than we were about them, if as much. The story’s narrator Vandyck says that ‘I wish I could represent the kind, quiet, steady, ingenious way they questioned us.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |