Herland: The first gender plague novel?
Examining the troubling implications of this subgenre of speculative dystopian fiction in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s novel, Herland.
Becca Masker
Corot, Jean-Baptiste-Camille. Une matine. Las danse de des nymphes (A Morning. The Dance of Nymphs). 1850, Musée d’Orsay, Paris.
The gender plague novel is defined as a subgenre of speculative dystopian fiction where one gender has disappeared or been made inferior through disease, natural disaster, or magic. While the genre isn’t new, this last decade has seen it skyrocket in popularity. While they are examples of worlds where women die or disappear- such as Sleeping Beauties by Stephen and Owen King—the genre disproportionately focuses on worlds without men. Key examples are The Power by Naomi Alderman where women gain mysterious powers which they use to upend the social order; in Christina Sweeney-Baird’s The End of Men, we follow a doctor getting to bottom of a mysterious virus that’s killing men; and Sandra Newman’s The Men where all men just vanish to a barren hellscape. Brian K. Vaughn’s comic series Y: The Last Man following the sole male survivor of a gender plague was adapted for television in 2021 and Amazon is releasing a TV series based on The Power in 2022.
However, the violent fantasy of a world without men is not new. One of the earliest examples of the gender plague novel is Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland published in 1915. Herland in contrast to its modern counterparts is not dystopian but is instead a utopian novel where three men encounter a perfect society of women who have existed for 2000 years. Gilman, most popularly known for her short story “The Yellow Wallpaper” was an early feminist writer and advocate for social reform, specifically regarding economic and reproductive freedom for women. Gilman was also a racist and eugenicist, who openly stated, “I am an Anglo-Saxon before anything.” Gilman’s early myopic feminism and pro-eugenics beliefs appear throughout Herland, and they cast a long shadow that can be seen throughout the rest of the “gender plague” genre.
Herland follows three men explorers who each embody a masculine caricature: the narrator is the Vandyck “Van'' Jennings a condescending “both sides'' devil's advocate type; Terry, an open misogynist constantly engaged in the pursuit of sexual gratification, and “nice guy” Jeff who puts every woman he meets up on a pedestal. The three men discover a world Herland, a hidden country where most of the men were killed two centuries in a volcanic eruption, and the few surviving males were slaves who attempted a revolt and were killed by the women, ostensibly in self-defence. One woman suddenly develops the ability to reproduce asexually, and her offspring share this adaptation, resulting in a country of only women who descend from then. They develop what Gilman perceives as a utopian society over the millennia where women are in leadership roles, hold jobs, and where motherhood is valued above all else. She describes them as having “no wars…no kings, and no priests, and no aristocracies.” The narrative follows the three men as they gradually explore the country and fall in love with (and subsequently marry) three of these “ultra-women”, and struggle to integrate into an all-women society. The novel ends with Terry being exiled for attempting to rape his wife, with Van being tasked with delivering him back to the world, while Jeff stays behind with his newly pregnant wife.
Gilman emphasises the concerns of first-wave feminism—specifically suffrage, and marital rape, which would not be made illegal in the United States until 1993. However, this first wave of feminism focused only on suffrage for white women in America; their complicity in the crimes of the 19th century, specifically the enslavement and murder of black people, are ignored. Gilman’s narrative mirrors this as well, with the murder of the male slaves during the founding of Herland remaining unchallenged by the narrator, who takes its history as fact.
Similarly, the modern equivalents of the gender plague novel are influenced by the feminist thinking of their eras, with the newest novels drawing from third-wave feminism, particularly “girlboss” feminism. These novels put emphasis on women taking the top jobs, with nearly all of them involving key plotlines about the first female president of America. They also focus on women not having to deal with sexual harassment and sexual assault, either being free from it due to the lack of men or using their newfound powers over men to prevent it. However, this again largely ignores the power and violence the affluent white western women, who are the predominant narrators of these novels, would already possess prior to the gender plague.
Gilman’s racism is explicit as she describes the women in her utopian society are “Aryan” and different from the “savages” in the surrounding lands, which she alludes to as being in South America. They engage in eugenics practices such as not allowing women who possess undesirable traits to reproduce and “effectively and permanently limit the population in numbers.” All the women are described as incredibly beautiful with a “complete absence of facial hair” and “tall, strong and healthy”, even if they eschew the beauty practices of 20th-century women. There are no old or disabled people, as the narrator comments that it is a mystery what they do with “their criminals, their defectives, their aged.”
The women also obsessively control the environment within which they live, exterminating animal species that they deem to be “unconducive” to the environment. This is a chilling parallel to the way Gilman, and many of the authors of “gender plague” novels, view men. Like Gilman, the authors of the current raft of “gender plague novels” engage in racist and even eugenicist thinking, though it is slightly less overt than in Herland. The novels previously listed are all written by white women, with beautiful white cis mothers as the predominant narrator. In a genre of novels so focused on gender, this implicitly places the white cis experience of womanhood as the norm. Alderman’s The Power paints a very regressive and racist picture of gender politics in the Middle East and South Asia; Alderman takes a very Western worldview that because women in these countries have faced violence, they would immediately subject men to the same violence given the chance. Her view directly mirrors Gilman’s dismissiveness towards “savages.”
The women lack “sex motive”(and one mindedly focused on being a mother, which they “value above everything.”) Throughout the novel, “Mother-love” is framed as the reason for which the utopia is achieved, with Gilman suggesting the women are the superior sex merely due to the possession of a womb. From the organ, “reasonableness” stems. This could generously be read as a reaction to the idea of the “wandering womb” originating in ancient times, where a woman’s womb would move around the body and cause medical issues. In the 18th and 19th centuries, it was often associated with the catchall diagnosis of hysteria which resulted in many women being forcibly detained in asylums. However, Gilman most likely wasn’t responding to this, as by the early 20th century, the “wandering womb” diagnosis had been debunked, and hysteria was no longer a common diagnosis due to new research in the field of psychology at the time. Gilman is ultimately a gender essentialist, as all the women are depicted as fertile, with many of them expressing shock when the narrator reveals that many women outside Herland do not have children. Gilman equates motherhood with womanhood.
This gender essentialist thinking can also be found in modern gender plague novels though they have replaced the obsession with the womb with the chromosomes instead. Most of these novels do not have trans women as characters, with the fate of trans women who possess ‘Y’ chromosomes either being completely ignored or hand waved away carelessly. In Newman’s The Men trans women are banished to a hellscape alongside all the men because they possess a ‘Y’ chromosome which Newman’s characters rationalize as trans people being “fucked by God”. This disturbing view suggests that Newman views the attribute of being trans as inherently tragic and unfortunate rather than reckoning with the material conditions, such as lack of access to medical care and the violence trans people face in greater society which results in trans people being oppressed, having higher mortality rates compared to cis people. Alderman introduces an intersex character but does nothing to explore the implications in her world of chromosomal-based powers. There is also a parallel between the emphasis on chromosomes being the totality of gender and the transphobic and TERF rhetoric, which can be found in modern-day feminist discourse.
These feminist "gender plague" novels can only envision a world where women are either equally or the majority represented due to violence and catastrophe happening to 50% of the population. Why does representation of women, though it is predominantly white women, need to result in the deaths of so many? Including the implied deaths of vulnerable communities such as trans women or people living in the global south?
It is, in my opinion, lazy writing where the author can only explore different states of gender, specifically womanhood, by suddenly vanishing or disappearing another. It speaks to a complete lack of imagination. There are many other novels where gender is explored more sensitively and in a more compelling way, such as Ursula Le Guin’s Left Hand of Darkness which explores an alien planet where no fixed gender exists. Ultimately, reading the 118-year-old ‘Herland’, and seeing that its issues are still evident in its modern predecessors are proof that this genre refuses to evolve and perhaps should be retired.
Becca Masker is a London-based writer who loves science fiction novels, Studio Ghibli films, and going on long walks. She occasionally posts on her TikTok account @booksn0b.
