Herland

Charlotte Perkins Gilman

I always found it odd that Gilman, a prolific writer during her life, had become so obscure less than a century later as to be remembered for only a single short story, The Yellow Wallpaper. Now, having had the distinct displeasure of having read a second piece of Gilman's writing, I have to wonder if that obscurity isn't well-deserved.

Herland is everything that 'The Yellow Wallpaper' is not. It is boring, overly expository, dry as dust, and most importantly, didactic. It is didactic in the same way your history teacher who spoke in a monotone is didactic; you end up hating the delivery so much that whatever's being said gets tuned out along with the noise. It doesn't help that Herland is a vastly inferior knockoff of such nineteenth-century fantastic-journey novels as Poe's The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, James DeMille's A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder, or Doyle's The Lost World. All three of those novels had the same generally socially conscious bent as does Herland, and held up a dystopian land to our own to show us where our own civilization is lacking. But all three of them (even Poe, who despised the novel form and never wrote in it again) had a basic understanding of the structure of the adventure novel and how to keep things moving while passing along their message about what's wrong with society. Gilman lacks this facility, and what's worse, she's of that strip of author who feels that, in order to make sure the message is clearly heard by the reader, she must go out of her way and add a clarifying sentence. After all, the reader is far too stupid to pick up on inferences.

The popularity of The Yellow Wallpaper and the obscurity of Gilman's other work cannot, of course, be dismissed as understood after reading only one of her other works. But Herland certainly doesn't have me straining at the leash to go looking for anything else Gilman wrote. Uniformly awful.