女性主義科幻小說中的母性: 論《她鄉》,《時間邊緣的女人》和《他,她,和它》

Graduate Institute of Foreign Languages and Literatures College of Liberal Arts

National Taiwan University Master Thesis

Motherhood in Feminist Science Fiction:

Herland, Woman on the Edge of Time, and He, She, and It

Jia-ying Wu

Advisor: Hui-chuan Chang, Phd

June, 2008

國立台灣大學文學院外國語文學研究所 碩士論文

女性主義科幻小說中的母性:

論《她鄉》,《時間邊緣的女人》和《他,她,和它》

吳佳盈

指導教授: 張惠娟博士

中華民國九十七年六月

Table of Contents

Abstract...ii

Acknowldegments ...iv

Introduction...1

Chapter One. Herland: A Motherland...22

Chapter Two. Woman on the Edge of Time: Mothers in Futures and the Present ...44

Chapter Three. He, She, and It: Multiplicity of Motherhood ...64

Conclusion ...87

Bibliography ...91

Abstract

Feminist science fiction is the genre in which feminist discourse and

technological discourse intersect. This thesis focuses on an issue in this intersection:

motherhood, intending to analyze how motherhood is represented in different ages and influenced by social values as well as technological practice. I choose three works for my analysis: Herland, Woman on the Edge of Time, and He, She, and It. I consider Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland as a precursor of feminist science fiction and in which a utopian society constituted of women alone is depicted. This society, while supportive of mothers, presents a unitary conception of motherhood with their strict employment of eugenics. Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time depicts the time travel of a Chicano mother. With the antithesis of time frames, Piercy is able to

criticize patriarchal ideologies of the contemporary society as well as imagine a better future, enabled by the adoption of artificial reproduction technologies, for mothers.

He, She, and It, another work by Piercy, questions the identity of being human as well as conception of “natural motherhood.” With the metaphor of cyborg, Piercy not only challenges the demarcation of gender identities but also points out that motherhood, as a practice, differs according to personal choices as well as social values. Her

conception of motherhood in this text, although failing to incorporate biological males in the practice of motherhood, defies the stereotypical ideal of mothers as nurturers and child-rearers in patriarchy.

Keywords: Motherhood, feminist science fiction, reproduction technologies, Herland, Woman on the Edge of Time, He, She, and It.

摘要

女性主義科幻小說通過女性主義論述以及科技論述所產生的文本較之傳統 科幻小說更專注於女性議題，本論文便是以三個女性主義科幻小說文本:《她

鄉》、《時間邊緣的女人》、以及《他、她、和它》討論女性主義論述和科技論述

同時關心的議題—「母性」。《她鄉》作為女性科幻小說的前驅，以「母性」為基

本原則構建了一個只有女性的理想社會，但這女性互助互愛的社會一方面挑戰了 父權社會對女性的控制與刻板印象，另一方面卻也是壓迫性的、缺乏個人意志的

社會，在此文本中，優生學也被用於控制各種動植物以及人類的種類。《時間邊

緣的女人》承繼了《她鄉》對理想社會的描寫，但這理想社會鼓勵個人發表自我 意見並且勇於溝通以調和紛爭，而此理想社會起源於採用人工生育而棄絕生理性

的繁衍行為。《他、她、和它》則採用了九零年代電腦叛客和人機複合體的元素，

不僅挑戰了人類自我定義的界線，更試圖證明，所謂「母性」並非是一種單一的、

生理性的本能，而是受到各種社會價值和科技應用的影響，在不同的社會架構之 下會擁有不同的面貌，因而鼓勵女性依照個人的意願，突破父權社會的框架，建 立真正自由平等的理想社會。

關鍵詞:女性科幻小說、母性、《她鄉》、《時間邊緣的女人》、《他、她、和它》

Acknowledgments

As a child growing up with the company of Japanese animations featuring gigantic robots, time as well as space travel, and cyborg figures, I am always deeply fascinated with science fictional texts. However, it is the encounter with feminist science fiction texts that makes me realize that other than providing entertainment or reading pleasure, science fiction could be thought-provocative as well. Thus

completing this thesis is like a dream realized for me. For this project I would like to express deep gratitude to Professor Chang Hui-chuan, without whose constant instruction and encouragement it would be difficult to accomplish this work. I would also like to thank Professor Liu Yu-hsiu and Professor Li Hsin-ying for their valuable suggestions. I would like to thank Professor Lin Ying-chin, who kindly alleviates my financial problems and offers me the opportunity to join the study group in which inspiring conversations between brilliant youngsters often occur. I would like to thank my parents who grant me my life and give me supportive brothers. I would like to thank Pi-chuan, Ming-ling, Nicole, and other friends who tolerate my grumbling when I felt over-pressured. I would like to thank my dear Jedi, but for whom this life, this world, would be overwhelmed by blinding darkness still.

Introduction Feminist Science Fiction

As woman and science fiction occupy a marginal place either in literary or in social structures, the emergence of feminist science fiction is not surprising. Feminist science fiction is considered a “twice marginalized field” by Marleen S. Barr since it is a subgenre of science fiction, which is excluded from canonical literatures (2).

Since science fiction texts often appear to be male power fantasies, feminist science fiction texts present “revisionary” female power fantasies, which “range beyond patriarchal reality”(Barr 3). In other words, just as Barr remarks, feminist science fiction not only depicts “artificial handicaps,” the ideologies used by patriarchal society to manipulate women’s behavior, but also “enlarges patriarchal myths in order to facilitate scrutinizing these myths”(4). It could be said that feminist science fiction as a genre explores various feminist issues and depicts imaginary social structures other than patriarchy. Those imaginary worlds depicted in feminist science fiction not only reveal the patriarchal ideologies hidden in the real society but also provide liberal environments for women to resist such ideologies and to construct their subjectivity. As Raffaella Baccolini observes, these writers interrogate universalistic assumptions of gendered identities, tackling issues such as “the representations of women and their bodies, reproduction and sexuality, and language and its relation to identity”(16). Writers of this genre continually depict societies where gender norms of contemporary society are obsolete. Furthermore, these societies are founded upon principles of egalitarianism and cooperation instead of capitalism and masculinist competitiveness. But these societies, rather than presented as historically inevitable or securely static, are often threatened either by external forces or by other alternative futures that seek to replace or accommodate the oppositional forces contained in these utopian communities. The resistance of ideological closure results in fragmented texts

which also resist narrative closure. Thus the narrative structure is often circular, switching among multiple narrators or time frames. Such an emphasis upon

indeterminacy, multiplicity, and alternative power structures all manifest the critical stance of feminist science fiction and its aim to encourage the reader to reform.

In late 1960s and early 1970s, feminist science fiction tended to be utopian, producing what Tom Moylan termed as “critical utopia,” which pursues better worlds for women, such as Anarres in Ursula LeGuin’s The Dispossessed, the community of hill women in Sally Gearhart’s The Wanderground, Mattapoisett in Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time, and Whileaway in Joanna Russ’s The Female Man (30).

As Nan Bowman Albinski comments, in this period, the resurgence of feminism in science fiction brings about texts that present better societies and question gender norms in contemporary society (7). Texts of this period interrogate canonical utopias and the sociopolitical reality they depict. Canonical utopian texts are static, whose internal literary structures attempt to establish a normative statement as historical inevitability. In other words, what they proffer is the mimetic description of an ideal society in totality, namely, a teleological blueprint for the future. Nevertheless, feminist science fiction in this period produces a utopian impulse which furthers “the processes of ideological critique, consciousness-raising, and social dreaming/planning that necessarily inform the practice of those who are politically committed to

producing a social reality better than, and beyond, the one that currently oppresses and destroys humanity and nature” (Moylan 82). As these texts often stress the conflict between the original world and the utopian imagination, the process of reformation becomes the main plot. Thus, as Moylan remarks, these new texts

“deflect utopian’s own drift into ideological containment to keep its processes of critique and change alive and healthy”(84).

These texts, as Russ records, depict societies or communities that share several

characteristics: they are mostly communal, classless, sexually permissive, and with ecological consciousness in contrast to the patriarchal, heterosexual society (72).

These societies, instead of being totalizing, are liberal and without strong

governments. In other words, they are anarchic in the sense that cooperation, rather than competition, is the principle of such societies (Sargent 4). For example, the hill women in Gearhart’s story live in small groups and there is no hierarchy in their community. They are psychically connected to each other as well as to the natural world. This emotional attachment to nature characterizes writings in this period. In Woman on the Edge of Time, for example, the harmonious relationship with nature is constantly emphasized in Mattapoisett. Another example is the hill women, who could even communicate with as well as through the forest. Technologies are either deployed discreetly, as in Mattapoisett, or considered the epitome of masculine aggressiveness, as in The Wanderground. Sexual permissiveness is another characteristic. Heterosexuality and monogamy no longer dominate these societies, where all forms of sexuality are acceptable. In The Dispossessed, the marriage

institution is even obsolete. Most people have multiple lovers simultaneously and they are encouraged to establish bisexual rather than heterosexual relationships. Few people adhere to monogamy, forming nuclear families and setting up the boundary between the private and the public and, thus, separating themselves from the rest of the community as the boundary. It is apparent that these texts stress an alternative set of values other than those in the contemporary industrial society. The social structure is represented as web-like rather than the alienated nuclear family system. Without racism, sexism, and class discrimination, the members are equal in status and

respected. Human communication is valued as every one is free to voice out his or her opinion. Decision making is done not by few people but by all members of the

community. Thus these texts could be deemed as “reactive,” revealing the

insufficiency in reality for women (Russ 81). They are utopian in terms of feminist concerns since the worlds they present not only reflect what women in reality desire but also provide goals that readers in realty could struggle for.

Nevertheless, in 1980s, as Peter Fitting comments, “this utopian moment seems to have ended” and there appeared a bunch of female writers who produced texts that proffered “depressing images of a brutal reestablishment of capitalist patriarchy”(142).

“The shift from utopia to dystopia” generates texts in which the future world no longer provides women freedom (Fitting 143). The dystopian future, as Albinski observes, is characterized by “militarism, patriarchal hierarchy, and the repression and exclusion of women in an aggressive, materialistic society”(7). For example, in The Handmaid’s Tale, sexuality and fertility are regulated by the state, which means that the traditional values of nuclear families are reestablished, and heterosexuality triumphs over homosexuality. The protagonist Offred, a handmaid, serves as a walking womb, whose role is to bear children for the master of the house. In the rigid state of Gilead, she has no right over her own body. As a result, women are again alienated in the domestic sphere, serving as mothers and nurturers. Another example is that, in LeGuin’s Always Coming Home, the Condor community “demonstrates a retreat from an earlier feminist utopianism”(Fitting 152). The patriarchal, militaristic Condor people are portrayed in contrast to the liberal, pastoral Kesh people. The protagonist North Owl (who later records her story in the name of Stone Telling) enters Condor society to live with her father, intending to pursue an exciting, romantic life. She is disappointed as she finds that what waits for her is domestic alienation and loss of autonomy, like other women of Condor society. She is silenced, enslaved in her marriage and domestic life. Nevertheless, both protagonists of these two tales do not resign to their fate but struggle for freedom. Offred reacts and flees from the state;

North Owl also returns to her mother’s people, Kesh, and in this community she could

say what she wants to say and write down her life story. Thus, such pessimistic depictions of women’s life, for Fitting, are “intended ideally to push the reader to action”(142). The nightmarish description of women’s life is to warn the reader that dreaming a better future alone could not transform the reality and to emphasize the urgent need for present action to determine the future.

Baccolini also holds a positive view toward dystopian works of this period. For her, dystopian texts of this period in fact open “a space of contestation and opposition for those groups (women and other ‘eccentric’ subjects whose subject position

hegemonic discourse does not contemplate) for whom subjectivity has yet to be attained”(18). At the level of form, these texts still retain utopian hope in two aspects.

Firstly, the open, ambiguous endings of these novels represent the failure of those totalitarian, dystopian societies to silence the individual. Although they suffer repression in those rigid societies, the protagonists are still capable of leaving their own accounts in various ways. Secondly, the blending of different generic

conventions in these texts also makes them sites of resistance. For example, in The Handmaid’s Tale, Atwood resorts to the conventions of the diary and the epistolary novel to record Offred’s life. As women in the Gilead regime are not allowed to read and to write, Offred composes her personal history with imaginary letters and audio tapes. Within her mind, her constant reminiscence of the past and her lost family signifies “struggle against the obliteration of individuality the regime

enforces”(Baccolini 22). Although it is not clearly stated whether Offred escaped Gilead successfully, her audio tapes are rediscovered in the future, probably a utopian one, and her story is published in a conference. Such a tendency to borrow convention from other genres, for Baccolini, “represents resistance to hegemonic ideology and renovates the resisting nature of science fiction and makes the new science fiction genre also multi-oppositional”(18). With the open ending and the blurring of genres,

these dystopian narratives preserve utopian hope for women to construct their subjectivity and to retrieve their language as well as power.

Furthermore, in 1990s, feminist science fiction was infused with the elements of cyberpunk as well as cyborg writing under the influence of postmodernism,

discussing human-machine interface and provisional human subjects. According to Jenny Wolmark, “cyberpunk explores the interface between human and machine in order to focus on the general question of what it means to be human; feminist science fiction has also explored that interface, but in order to challenge those universal and essentialist metaphors about ‘humanity’ which avoid confronting existing and unequal power relations”(110-11). In this way, both cyberpunk fiction and feminist science fiction are confrontational as to the existing definitions of gender as well as identity. A powerful metaphor utilized by both cyberpunk fiction and feminist science fiction is that of cyborg, which signifies the erosion of boundaries that has been differentiating men and woman, human and non-human, as well as self and other. For example, Marge Piercy’s He, She, and It, with the metaphor of the cyborg, portrays “the increasingly fluid borders between reality and simulation”(Wolmark 127). The

gradual dissolution of boundaries results in uncertainty about identity. In Piercy’s text, the central question is whether the cyborg, Yod, could be defined as human. Although Yod defines himself as a human being, he is still constantly recognized as a machine rather than a person. This conflict in defining human identity, for Wolmark, is “a strategy that enables the question to be raised of the way in which the subjects is constituted in culture”(128). In other words, what Yod represents is not only a cyborg/impure identity but also the impossibility to construct a coherent,

unproblematic human identity. As Yod signifies the difficulty to draw a line between what is human and what is not, the definition of gender identity is also interrogated.

As Wolmark remarks, Yod “occupies a contradictory position in the narrative, and

Piercy uses his developing consciousness to question the way in which social and sexual relations are shaped by conventions and definitions that are thought of as fixed and natural”(132). Although Yod’s physique is constructed as a male one by his maker Avram, he is programmed and socialized by two women, Malkah and Shira. Thus Yod transgresses the boundary of gender as his relationship with Shira is distinct from what is typical in the heterosexual society and his awareness of the self constantly conflicts with Avram’s command. Such subversion of traditional sexual and social relations, for Wolmark, is one of the main themes of the cyborg texts, which “contain a critique of the masculine hegemony of cybernetic systems which examines their impact on gender and identity, and asks whether those systems are capable of sustaining other sets of relations and meanings”(138).

In fact, no matter utopian or dystopian, feminist science fiction is characterized by resistance against enclosure and self-reflexivity. As Wolmark asserts, the

fragmented narrative form, in conjunction with multiple protagonists, disrupts “the familiar discursive practices of science fiction in a playful and witty way” and enables the author to experiment with alternative composition of subjectivity and relation between self and other (21). Highlighting female desire and interpolating conventions from other genres, feminist science fiction blurs the boundaries between genres and challenges the generic convention which subordinates women’s desire to dominant ideologies. Wolmark argues that feminist science fiction, with exploration of the future, suggests that “the construction of subjectivity and identity is a process, and as such is always incomplete”(22). Thus feminist science fiction not only resists genre hierarchy but also the notion of a unified, integrated subject. In this way, feminist science fiction provides “a space in which subjectivity and experience, gender and identity, can be re-imagined in opposition to, and in recognition of, the dominant gendered discourses”(Wolmark 23). In other words, the space feminist science fiction

creates not only enables the subversion of totalizing subjects but also allows the subversive representation of gender identity. Likewise, Baccolini also asserts that feminist science fiction, as it positions critically, proposes to “negate static ideals, preserve radical action, and create a space in which opposition can be articulated and received”(17). What feminist science fiction proposes are myriad ruptures of

male-dominated culture and power structure: alternative construction of subjectivity and gender identities, various possibilities of sexual relations and family structures, and communities without hierarchy. Feminist science fiction writers come to

recognize that an ideal utopia is fraught with the danger of developing into a totalizing social structure that co-opts the impulse that motivates reformation. To evade this impasse, their works stress the importance of revolutionary process and seek to initiate in their readers the consciousness to resist dominant ideologies actively.

Feminist Discourse on Motherhood

Motherhood has always been an important part of women’s life as human

biology decrees that only women bear children. Moreover, the practice of motherhood has extended beyond physiological phenomena and is encoded with social meaning. It becomes a standard to evaluate a woman. A good mother is a good woman and a good woman is a woman who could bear a lot of healthy children. Women are expected to be mothers and, more importantly, expected to desire to be mothers, which

psychologists term as the maternal instinct. Therefore, motherhood turns out to be an important issue for feminist discourse. Feminist theorists tackle the issue of maternity mainly from three perspectives: Nancy Chodorow explores the psychic experience of mothers of modern age, Adrienne Rich and Ann Dally approaches this issue from social and historical aspect, and Anne Balsamo focuses on how reproduction technologies affect the maternal body.

Chodorow articulates how gender norms are internalized in children through maternal care in modern nuclear families. Psychoanalytic theories indefatigably assert maternal influence on the formation of individual subjectivity. The mother, for

children, is the first love object, which must be renounced if the subject is to enter the social system and to develop as an individual. This perspective, while advocating the importance of the mother, also reinforces the patriarchal ideology that women alone should shoulder the responsibility of caring for children. In The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender, Chodorow criticizes the heterosexual, nuclear family system in which mothers alone take the responsibility of child-care. The maternal care of sons and daughters constitutes an asymmetrical sexual relation in the male-dominant society. In their family life, children are trained and socialized to their sexual roles. Although both sons and daughters would often choose the mother as the primary love object and would experience symbiosis with the mother during pre-Oedipal period, gender difference triggers dissimilar paths of personality development. As the boy grows up, he surrenders to his father’s authority in the competition for his mother to avoid punishment. As a result, he identifies with his father to become the one who gives punishment and is masculine and superior. On the other hand, “a girl develops important oedipal attachments to her mother as well as to her father”(Chodorow 127). Although she might turn to her father, thus

constituting heterosexual orientation in terms of love and authority, she does not abandon her pre-Oedipal attachments to her mother. Girls, according to Chodorow,

“have normally remained externally and internally in relationships with their Pre-Oedipal mother and have been preoccupied with issues of separation, identification without merging mitigation of dependency, freedom from

ambivalence”(140). A daughter, thus, is never fully separate from her mother and shares her mother’s desire of mothering and caring for children. The result is that in

such families, “women, as mothers, produce daughters with mothering capacities and the desire to mother”(Chodorow 7). In this way, the parenting arrangement of nuclear family system successfully reproduces gender roles and inculcates mothering roles in the daughter.

On the other hand, Rich in Of Women Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution analyzes the domestication of the mother and children as a life style as well as a social myth created by the social and economical situation in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century. Rich points out that motherhood, instead of a natural situation, could be a practice enforced on women through patriarchy, which defines ideal

mothers and ideal motherhood. According to Rich, the home defined as a purely private place is “a creation of the Industrial Revolution, an ideal invested with the power of something God-given, and its power as an idea remains unexpunged

today”(49). After the industrial era, the line between public sphere and private sphere is set clear. Men work outside their home, while women stay home taking care of children. Thus, motherhood, in a modern nuclear family, becomes the main

responsibility, or function, of women, who alone shoulder the responsibility of raising children, socializing them to expected gender roles. Moreover, after the two world wars ended, the jobs that were once held by women in the war time had to be open for the men who returned from the battle field. The image of a warm home with the mother caring for children not only comforts soldiers but also has its own economic values. This ideal emphasizes maternal love as essential to children and the

deprivation of it equates great loss for children’s physical as well as psychological development. As time goes by, this ideal becomes firmer and “the image of the mother in the home, however unrealistic, has haunted and reproached the lives of wage-earning mothers”(Rich 52). The ideal motherhood that carries images of warm,

domestic, and sacrificing mothers thus is a fantasy constructed out of patriarchal ideologies that deny women independence. Furthermore, patriarchy dictates what kind of women could bear children, for what social system these children are born, and how these children are born and reared. Women are expected to mother children only in the hetero-sexual marital system. Single mothers and homosexual mothers suffer discrimination and have to struggle if they desire to have their own children. Under such situation, both mothers and children are alienated from the public sphere, playing familial roles and relying on men.

Dally, judging from historical and sociological evidences, also argues against the idealization of motherhood, which she deems as a result of the transformation of social as well as economic structure of modern era. Dally in Inventing Motherhood:

The Consequences of an Ideal discusses the development of the conception of childhood and motherhood as a particular phenomenon in the modern era. Dally points out that the family structure shifts fundamentally from the kinship system in Middle Ages to the nuclear family of the industrial era. Before the industrial

revolution and urbanization, societal ties are not limited to the family but expanded to

“the wider group, village, community, as kin with ancestors, living relatives or future generations”(Dally 52). Economic adversity, lack of food provisions, and primitive medical treatment all explain the rise of the kin system, which aims at survival. As a result, children are treated as small adults, assuming responsibility and work quite early. Because of high mortality rates, the emotional ties between children and parents are not so close as they are in the modern family. Mothers do not stay with their children all day long but have to help field jobs or share economic burden. Moreover, low life expectancy shortens the period of marriage to less than twenty years¹.

Remarriage and combination of families are not uncommon. The society in this age is

1 The average time a marriage lasts, according to Dally, is about “twelve to seventeen years”(53).

composed of such kind of “open, unemotional, authoritarian and materialistic” family (Dally 53). It is not until the industrial era that the family structure gradually changes to the private and closed nuclear family, which shapes the domestic sphere and differentiates itself from the public sphere. This shift in family structure directly brings about the idealization of maternity, which changes life of women in the modern era. Designating the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century as “the age of

idealization of motherhood,” Dally asserts that the emphasis on mother love as well as mother-infant relationship serves as an excuse for the government not to invest in the social care of children (92). In the war time, women are drafted to jobs and obtain some extent of economic independence. As the war ends, men return and they need the jobs and their wives to attend to children and home again. Thus idealization of mothers, including advocating the importance of family, the conception of home as a warm site for repose against the busy public world, and the caring mother who spends all her time with her children, takes place after the war ended. Moreover, unlike the virtually ignorant attitude toward infants in the medieval ages, almost “every mother’s manual and magazine article of this period assumed that the baby in question was wanted, loved, and had two loving and relatively well-off parents”(Dally 102).

Children are no longer deemed as adults-to-be but precious gems of parents and every mother is expected to love her infants naturally.

It is apparent that the locale of modern motherhood, the nuclear family system, is identified as the source of mother’s suffering. The alienation of women and children from the public sphere is deemed as a way to render women passive and take away women’s right of choice and independence. According to Chodorow, “women’s mothering reinforces and perpetuates women’s relative powerlessness”(31). As mothers are excluded from the power structure of public sphere and as they reproduce

the maternal desire in their daughters, their subordinated position remains. For Rich, in the patriarchal family, the mother is not only “domesticated and confined within strictly defined limits” but “remains an object of mistrust, suspicion, misogyny in both overt and insidious forms”(126). Such alienation of mothers could result in maternal violence. Mothers, under conditions such as lack of economic or emotional support, might commit acts of violence toward their children. For Dally, maternity in the nuclear family system could impose great problems on both mothers and children as the children have no others but their mothers to depend on and the mothers are cut off from the outside world, thus gradually losing self-confidence and unable to return to it² (202). The domestication of mothers and children in the nuclear family, therefore, signifies a mother-children relationship full of difficulty and anxiety rather than intimacy or warmth. To change this situation, it is necessary to revise existent parenting arrangements for in this way children are allowed to “be dependent on people of both genders and establish an individuated sense of self in relation to both”(Chodorow 218). Rich likewise asserts that “until men are ready to share the responsibilities of full-time, universal child-care as a social priority, their sons and ours will be without any coherent vision of what nonpatriarchal manhood might be”(211). Evidently for these critics the reformation of family structure helps to reform the gender inequality of patriarchy.

Besides the nuclear family system, women suffers passivity in the scientific field as well. Balsamo in Technologies of the Gendered Body discusses the relationship between modern technologies and body politics, especially how the ideology hidden in the development, invention, and application of technologies shapes our perception and assumption of gender norms. Balsamo articulates the social consequences of

2 Doris Lessing’s “To Room Nineteen,” to an extant, illustrates Dally’s theory. Her protagonist Susan, after being alienated from the society for too long, could not face her husband’s infidelity and return to her professional career.

technologies, revealing that instead of the proclaimed objectivity, the technological discourse influences gender norms and is in turn influenced by such norms. Gender is a product of social as well as cultural practice, rather than a natural given. The

material body, especially the female body, is encoded within the social structure.

Science, as well as technologies, rather than liberating the material body from such inscription, enhances it through the process of observation and definition. For example, as the female body, instead of being a neutral object for analysis, is associated with nature, sexuality, and reproductive capacity, the womb also

“continues to signify female gender in a way that reinforces an essentialist identity for the female body as the maternal body”(Balsamo 9). Balsamo thus criticizes that science is in fact permeated with gender biases, taking the female body as the primary object of analyses. The discourse of science, like the discourse of politics, is pervaded with power relations and gender ideologies. Gender ideologies also contribute to the demarcation of culture and nature as man, representative of culture, assumes his role to be the conqueror of nature. In setting up this hierarchy, the gendered body, with its interaction with technologies, attests to “ideology-in-progress, where new

technologies invested with cultural significance in ways that augment dominant cultural narratives”(Balsamo 10). The ideology of gender norms directs the practices and research of technologies, whereas the application of the new technologies in turn shapes and enhances the ideology behind social norms.

Balsamo further analyzes the relationship between the technologies obstetrics use, such as imaging technologies and reproduction technologies, and the female body.

The technologies deployed by obstetrics, mostly taking the fetus as the primary patient, insinuate the tendency to objectify as well as fragment the female body to be the container of the fetus. The pregnant body is thus de-naturalized, periodically

investigated, and subjected to medical authority. As Balsamo argues, “protection of the fetus is often offered as a commonsensical and, hence, ideological rationale for intervention into a woman’s pregnancy, either through the actual application of

invasive technologies or through the exercise of technologies of social monitoring and surveillance”(89). Pregnancy becomes a unique phenomenon which simultaneously attests to the unruliness of and the social control over the female body. The womb, especially the fetus, triggers the desire of observation as well as control. As a result, visualization technologies, commonly deployed to observe the fetus, “leads some obstetricians to claim that the fetus is actually the primary obstetrics patient”(Balsamo 90). The fetus, as well as the womb, is dissected from the female body, rendering the female body to be the maternal body, where values lie in its physiological health and potential for pregnancy. Furthermore, the appearance of new reproduction

technologies, such as in vitro fertilization, sex-choice technology, and genetic

engineering, as well as issues related to such technologies, like surrogate motherhood and cloning, furthers the rationalization of reproduction, which renders pregnancy as a mechanical process. The process of human reproduction is divided into separate stages of reproduction technologies: egg production, fertilization, implantation, feeding, and laboring. Just as Dally criticizes, in the modern medical system, labor is made “a highly technological process and many mothers experience the ‘factory belt’

system” and the clinical and scientific atmosphere in such a system is dehumanizing (39). In the modern society, pregnancy is no longer a mere biological, thus natural, act but a technical production that depends on subjugation and fragmentation of the female body.

Likewise, Rich associates child-birth with women’s role of “passive suffering” in human society (129). In the course of pregnancy, women are subjected to the

authority of obstetricians, who not only help them survive child-birth but also direct

the whole process with medical technologies like forceps and anesthetics. The vivid image Rich describes of a woman in labor in a modern hospital, “sheeted, supine, drugged, her wrists strapped down and her legs in stirrups,” demonstrates how medical inventions, established with masculinist values, take the will of mothers for granted and have their body in control in the disguise of help (171). Thus pregnancy and delivery are no longer biological acts but social practices within which women’s body is inscribed since “the value of a woman’s life would appear to be contingent on her being pregnant or newly delivered”(Rich 169). To be a good enough woman, one could not refuse one’s duty of bearing children, no matter psychologically or

physically, and must give birth to children, who are legitimate, healthy, and most of the time preferably male. Motherhood, in this way, is taken as an institution in which patriarchy has control over women’s lives.

Motherhood, for feminist discourse, thus is considered as a site where women suffer suppression and powerlessness under patriarchy and needs reformation. These thinkers support economic as well as physical autonomy of women, thus pursuing the mother’s right of option and the control over her own body. For them, truly preferable motherhood would emerge once the institution of motherhood enforced upon women by patriarchy is abolished. Thus, they call for revision of family structure as well as gender relations. Unsurprisingly, the ideal situation would be that “women would choose not only whether, when, and where to bear children, and the circumstances of labor, but also between biological and artificial reproduction”(Rich 174-75). Women have to obtain the right to choose freely. She can choose at will the style of pregnancy, labor, and life as a mother, if genuine sexual autonomy is to be achieved. In feminist science fiction, such critical thinking articulates the portrayal of communities in which women are no longer domesticated, child-care is often shared by both sexes,

and technologies are employed to enhance women’s power.

The Structure of the Thesis

In feminist science fiction there are rich and various representations of motherly figures and motherhood. To name a few, Charlotte Perkins Gilman in Herland describes a woman-only country where women mother female children through self-will rather than being forced into motherhood. In The Handmaid’s Tale, female bodies are exploited as walking wombs, subdued to non-ceasing pregnancy when they are fertile and dirty jobs when they are sterile. In Angela Carter’s The Passion of New Eve, there is a Great Mother who castrates the male protagonist and tries to make him bear his own children, a state not unlike Julia Kristeva’s pre-symbolic symbiosis. In Ursula LeGuin’s The Dispossessed, the protagonist Shevek’s mother leaves him in his father’s care and pursues her own career. In The Left Hand of Darkness, another novel by LeGuin, the androgynous Gethenians are fathers and mothers at the same time. In these works, the authors delineate maternal problems women encounter in reality and imagine various worlds where women could or try to live and have their children live freely.

Undeniably, motherhood is a major issue in both feminist discourse and feminist science fiction. Many issues that concern feminist thinkers are represented in feminist science fiction, such as the revision of the nuclear family structure, the

mother-children relationship, and consequences of reproduction technologies.

Invariably, these themes trigger the utopian imagination of feminist science fiction: an egalitarian community where nuclear families are either eliminated or revised and mothers as well as their children are not alienated and silenced. With these alternative social structures feminist science fiction writers are capable to imagine new

mother-children relationships that are distinct from the one controlled by patriarchy.

Furthermore, technologies, especially reproduction technologies, are no longer taken as tools to manipulate women’s body. Instead, in these imaginative societies,

reproduction technologies bring the liberation of women from the biological destiny of maternity. This thesis attempts to tackle the issue of motherhood in feminist science fiction, focusing on three specific texts: Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland, Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time, and He, She, and It, another novel by Piercy. These three texts represent the genre in various stages and offer various representations of maternal presence as well as conceptions about free motherhood.

They, like other feminist science fiction narratives, touch two aspects of motherhood:

pregnancy, including reproduction technology and medical regulations on expectant mothers; and the rearing of children, such as socialization of children and

mother-children relationship. These texts also examine the nuclear family system, the locus of modern motherhood, and difficulties single, lesbian, or non-white mothers encounter. In their analyses, they expose motherhood as an institution imposed on women by patriarchy and explore the possibilities of free motherhood within their imaginary worlds.

Chapter one focuses on Herland, a pioneering work written in 1915, which presents a society founded upon the principle of maternity. The society is consisted exclusively of white, middle-class women who are either mothers or daughters for men have long disappeared due to a natural calamity. Ridded of masculinist restraints, Herland prospers. The society is depicted as an extended family, for the boundary between public sphere and private sphere no longer exists and the members are no longer enslaved to motherhood like women in the industrial era since motherhood is deemed as a professional affair. The result is that the members are as strong, agile as men, and still retain feminist traits such as carefulness, sensitiveness, and delicacy.

Such a mode of separatist societies flourishes in later feminist science fiction, such as The Female Man and The Wanderground, in which women form cooperative and nurturing communities to fight against patriarchy. However, Herland is criticized as repressive, though lauded as revolutionary³. The society of Herland is like a

disciplined army without any dissenting views as every member embraces the belief of motherhood. The members are allowed to choose profession freely and according to their talents. But in the aspect of motherhood, there seems no choice: they all love to be mothers. In this way, Herland could be repressive as dissidents are either assimilated, like Van and Jeff, or expelled, like Terry. There is no space for opposition. Although Gilman precedes contemporary feminist thinkers, her text presents various issues that still concern contemporary feminist discourse. The women who do not conform to patriarchal gender norms reflect Chodorow’s argument of the reproduction of gender roles in the nuclear family. As the nuclear family as well as patriarchy is abolished, women could achieve autonomy and enjoy motherhood. Furthermore, the communal motherhood presented in Gilman’s text also corresponds to Dally’s proposal of social resources. In this alternative social structure, mothers and children are not isolated and dependent upon men, but play a major role in the society.

Chapter two analyzes Woman on the Edge of Time, which portrays the story of a destitute Chicano mother, Connie, who encounters a utopian community, Mattapoisett, in the future where nuclear families no longer exist and a technical breeder, rather than women, bears children. Connie’s predicaments in the reality is that she fails to be a qualified mother, a concept that resembles what Rich and Dally terms as ideal

3 For example, Jennifer Hudak analyzes the relationship between racism and gender in Herland. She argues that “scientific discourses, specifically the discourses of evolution and eugenics, enabled Gilman to deconstruct and de-essentialize gender; at the same time, however, they allowed her to fix gender in a rigid network that also strictly classified people according to race and class”(456). For Hudak, the parthenogenesis of members of Herland not only signifies resistance against masculine aggression but also the gesture of purification of the whole race.

motherhood. Instead of providing Connie help, the society deprives her of her daughter and incarcerates her in a mental hospital. The contrast between Connie’s reality and her visit to Mattapoisett constitutes critique of the patriarchal society: the ineffectualness of social welfare system, social workers, and medical system.

Comparatively, Mattapoisett is a preferable future to the reality, for in this community reproduction technology successfully liberates women from the biological destiny of pregnancy and leads to the revision of the idea of motherhood, which is shared by both sexes. Apparently, the concept that motherhood is not the mother’s duty alone corresponds to Dally’s advocacy of father’s participation in rearing children.

Furthermore, Mattapoisett, unlike Herland, is a community tolerant of dissonance.

There is still war going on and often argument when deciding public affairs. This work also invites comparison with other utopian fiction such as Ursula K. LeGuin’s works since they are alike motivated by the utopian drive of 1970s.

The third chapter features another work by Piercy, He, She, and It, written in an age when the utopian imagination is gradually replaced with dystopian imagination.

In this work Piercy contrasts the repressive, patriarchal multinational corporations with marginal, egalitarian enclaves. This opposition actually symbolizes the contrast between patriarchal culture and a more nurturing, equal one. The enclave Tikva produces unconventional mothers such as Malkah, Riva, and Shira, all of whom bring up their children in their non-patriarchal family. Furthermore, they symbolize

resistance against patriarchal ideologies, first against Avram, who creates the cyborg Yod according to his masculinist notion, then against corporations which intend to invade and subdue Tikva. Their success in fighting back the aggression, although based upon the sacrifice of Yod, to some extent represents the possibility to form a new, free, and healthy mode of motherhood that is distinct from the traditional one. In this text, technologies play an important role in the presentation of human as well as

gender identity. On the one hand, as Balsamo claims, technologies, especially image technologies, often objectify the female body (9). In the multi Y-S, most pregnant women choose to alter genetically the fetuses and operatively remove the fetuses around eight months. These fetuses, as well as their parents, are considered by the patriarchal Y-S as mere property rather than human beings. On the other hand, technologies, once controlled by women, could also be utilized to resist patriarchal oppression. For instance, Riva advocates artificial reproduction technologies as well, but she chooses these technologies to relieve herself of inconveniences of pregnancy and to carry out her duty in fighting against the multis.

These three texts illustrate how feminist science fiction tackles the issue of motherhood and maternity. What the writers pursue is that, in Carol Pearson’s and Katherine Pope’s words, “the mother is not dependent on a father, but is a free, independent person”(269). Furthermore, although the mother-children relationship is quite intimate, children are not deemed as owned by parents but independent persons.

Although the ideal societies are quite different in each text, it is evident that they attempt to portray the emancipation of modern mothers from the domestication of nuclear family system and to depict the future as capable of being transformed through deliberate efforts.

Chapter One Herland: A Motherland

Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland is one of the first utopian texts that center on feminist concerns of gender and identity¹. The women-only society, separated from the outer world by an earthquake, which also killed most of the men, two thousand years ago, is visited by three male explores, Terry, Van, and Jeff, each of whom represents a different attitude toward women and this peculiar society. Terry, the main supporter of the exploration, represents typical masculinity that seeks to conquer and objectify women. Van, characterized by scientific objectivity and artistic sensitivity at the same time, narrates the story from the perspective of sociological observation and admiration. Jeff, with his naïve idealization of women, happily succumbs to the society developed by women. As Herland is written in 1915, its linear literary structure unquestionably resembles traditional utopian texts, as Christ Ferns

comments (176). And yet, the conflict between patriarchal ideologies represented by the male visitors and the alternative feminist thoughts embodied in the Herland society constitutes “dialogical feminist utopianism” asserted by Laura E. Donaldson (374). It might be said that Herland anticipates later feminist science fiction for it offers a model of a women-only society, which explores various feminist issues, such as gender equality, family system, and social structure. Among these feminist issues, motherhood is the central one of Herland as it is the fundamental principle of the alternative society. However, I would like to suggest that, as Herlanders could construct a nurturing society based on the principle of motherhood, they are, at the same time, bounded to this profession wholeheartedly. Thus what Herland embodies is an ambivalent narrative that, although depicting a better social structure than the

1 Herland is often characterized as a text of feminist utopia instead of feminist science fiction.

Nevertheless, as this utopian society employs eugenics extensively in shaping its environment, I would consider it, at least, as a precursor of feminist science fiction and include this text in my analysis.

contemporary one, still leaves the conflict between maternity and patriarchy unresolved. The reversal of gender roles in Herland, to some extent, reiterates the heterosexual social structure that Gilman seeks to reform in her narrative. Undeniably, motherhood in Herland society is represented as a practice not founded upon personal choice as well as multiplicity, but upon uniformity. Indeed, as Ann J. Lane in her introduction to Herland observes, “Gilman seems to assume that the desire for motherhood, though not the ability to be a good mother, is inherent in the female condition”(xiii). Indeed, it seems that, for Gilman, the possibility that a woman might not want to be a mother does not exist. Furthermore, what Herland embodies is a universalized conception of motherhood. Surely Herland is a utopian society where everyone is taken care of. But its members hardly ever question their own practice of motherhood or challenge the priority of motherhood. However, this controversial stance, perhaps influenced by traditional utopias, still sheds light upon constituting better societies for women as those shaped in later feminist utopias. As a feminist text, Herland still occupies a revolutionary place that not only rebels against patriarchal oppression that domesticates women but also inspires various texts that focus on themes of motherhood and femininity, such as The Wanderground, The Female Man, and The Left Hand of Darkness.

Feminist Utopianism

A utopian text often involves two societies, the hometown of the traveler and the ideal society that the traveler introduces to the reader. The contrast between these two societies not only offers a fantasy for the reader to escape the imperfect present but also engages the reader to think critically about his/her own society and even to reform. Utopia is a unique genre which sees the interplay of political theory, fictional fantasy, and historical possibility. Conflict arises as utopian texts, by depicting utopia

as absolute perfection, diminishes the revolutionary power they seek to exert on the reader. A utopian text is fundamentally torn between the revolutionary tendency to create a better world than the reality and the tendency to draw a blueprint for a perfect world. The former impulse signifies emancipation and freedom, while the later

insinuates static boredom which, in some way, is not unequal to repression. This conflict exists in feminist utopias as well. As Angelika Bammer comments, there are conflicting impulses “to enable change by disrupting given orders and to create peace and calm by establishing order” in feminist utopian texts (15). The revolutionary power is clearly in conflict with the tendency to retain order. The conflict between the momentum of reforming reality and the impulse of constructing a perfect society results in the tension between “the impulse to create predictive utopias and a

process-oriented belief in the emancipatory but unpredictable, outcome of unregulated utopian impulses”(Bammer 48). Such opposition between static imagination and the reformative drive in utopian narratives, for Donaldson, pinpoints the difference between masculinist utopianism, which “relies upon the inculcation of apriori principles to accomplish its goal of absolute perfection” and feminist utopianism, which “creates truth between people collectively searching”(374). Describing masculinist utopianism as “monologic,” Donaldson criticizes “the diseased stasis of masculinist utopianism, whose eternal and unchanging nature prevents even the most private subversion of its highly-wrought structure”(375). Traditional utopian texts are static, whose internal literary structures attempt to establish a normative statement as historical inevitability. Male utopia is the mimetic description of an ideal society in totality, namely, a teleological blueprint for the future. In contrast to monological masculinist utopianism, dialogical feminist utopianism affirms “kinesis, process, and dialogue”(Donaldson 378). Questioning patriarchal ideologies, feminist utopianism discards the conception of utopia as a finite, unchangeable truth. Instead, it “not only

offers women’s experience as a profound challenge to patriarchal conceptions of gender and genre, but also shatters traditional utopian structure”(Donaldson 378).

The conjecture toward the future, thus, divides into two streams, the telos or the process. Thus a new utopian trend, although still providing a goal to dream for, shifts its emphasis to being experimental and speculative, proposing “a politics of change cast in the subjunctive instead of the imperative mode” in feminist utopian works (Bammer 51). This new utopianism, stresses utopia as an open-ended, continuing, and indeterminate process, although aiming at a better-off world. Feminist utopian

imagination, according to Jean Pfaelzer, produces texts that stimulate “a cognitive revision of historical process in the mind of the reader”(193). In the same vein, Ellen Peel praises feminist utopia for its great potential to “disturb” readers as they “may be encouraged to give more critical scrutiny to personal or societal relationships in their own world”(41). Instead of representing the future as historical inevitability, these texts take the future as undetermined, myriad possibilities and urge the reader to participate in creating alternative possible worlds. They thus mark the transition from totalized representation to a democratizing action. By emphasizing utopia as process, feminist utopian texts are potentially capable of blurring “the distinction between fictional fact and historical possibility”(Bammer 16). This “radical utopianism”

allows authors to state “the need to change things radically” and the impetus to design

“an alternative future” within the structures of patriarchy (Bammer 54). This new utopianism, thus, attempts to incite the reader to reform and act in the reality by the momentum proffered in their representation of perfect worlds. Here utopianism and feminism intersect as both “envisioned a transformation of patriarchal culture so all-encompassing that not only the political, economic, and ideological structures, but the structures of human identity, relationships, and language—of consciousness itself—would be fundamentally reorganized”(Bammer 53-54). Like utopianism,

feminism articulates itself as “simultaneously situated in the (historical) Now and the (utopian) Not-Yet”(Bammer 57). Proposing women’s culture as well as feminist consciousness, feminist movements explore gender differences and tend to see the future as a possibility, to enable the change of the political present. Thus, utopia for feminists no longer functions merely as a literary form but exemplifies political significance. Writing utopia, thus, breeds “the deconstruction of the ways in which woman within patriarchy had been written”(Bammer 61). The combination of feminism and utopianism, proposing to rethink the definition of gender identity, inevitably questions the established orders in the given political structure. By writing the possibility of women’s future, feminist utopian texts potentially presents the possibility of transforming the present.

Herland could be seen as a work that manifests the tense relationship between masculine utopianism and feminine utopianism. Surely Gilman presents her feminist agenda and counters patriarchal ideologies throughout the text. As Ferns remarks, the isolation of Gilman’s all-female society is almost “a precise mirror-inversion of the male utopian fantasy of masculine appropriation of the womb” and the “womb-like environment” Gilman imagines excludes the male forever (177). Moreover, the visitors’ response toward Herland differs from that of typical utopian visitors, whose passivity and unquestionable acceptance of utopian didacticism are anticipated, thus resulting in monological narratives which preach the utopian blueprint. The

interaction between the male visitors and Herlanders underscores the fact that gender is the crucial issue of this society and that gender difference, instead of a biological fact, is in fact culturally constructed. Thus Herland is a dialogic narrative, which dialectically presents two sets of values and “encourages what most utopian fictions seek to suppress: an active critical participation on the part of the reader”(Ferns 179).

In this dialogue “not only do the visitors undergo a painful process of learning to

acknowledge the virtues of utopia, the utopians themselves reveal an unusual degree of openness to change”(Ferns 182). The three men each mark a different attitude toward gender and femininity: Terry the conventional chauvinist, Jeff the romanticist, and Van the objective observer. Not all of them are convinced of the supremacy of Herland values and Terry despises them all the way. The schematized characterization of the visitors, for Ferns, represents not only typical masculine attitudes toward women but also “radically different possible interactions between the values of utopia and those of the outside world”(183). In fact the male visitors are a threat to the order and security of Herland (and Terry indeed disrupts the order), although Van and Jeff in the end accept the values wholeheartedly. However, instead of eliminating potential threats, Herlanders instruct these visitors and this interaction certainly represents the confrontation of two sets of values: the patriarchal ones and Herland ones.

Taking traditional utopian texts as masculine, Donaldson likewise contends that Gilman’s witty utopia “introduces the dialogic text of Herland to the monologic book of hisland, and in the act of their meeting, helps to neutralize the patriarchal

script”(375). Masculine utopianism, as present in traditional utopias, produces texts which stress given social ideology and static perfection, denying possibilities of revolution as well as transformation. In contrast to such texts, Gilman’s novel, equipped with “an anti-canonic spirit which recognizes the arbitrariness and conventionality of all normative patterns, questions generic conventions as well as authoritative ideologies (Donaldson 377). Feminist utopianism embodied in Gilman’s novel, with the imagery of web and emphasis on human relations, questions gender and genre conventions, thus producing dialogical texts which affirm the definition of utopia as a revolutionary process rather than static perfection. The inversion of gender roles in Herland, for Donaldson, illustrates that “the classical oppositions of

master/slave and male/female do not connote peaceful coexistence, but rather, a

violent hierarchy in which the first term always forcefully subjugates the second”(379). Therefore, Herland, with its web-like social structure, “mounts a profound assault upon patriarchy’s stratified social and semantic patterns”(Donaldson 380). What Herland presents thus is an alternative social structure and this new structure is designed to arouse the reader’s critique of patriarchy.

Libby Falk Jones similarly defines Herland as “a thesis about the real world, rather than an internal action”(117). Other than being merely a literary text, the narrative intends to influence the reader’s attitude toward social conventions. Rather than proposing the elimination of men, the women-only society of Herland tackles with possibilities of women’s development as human beings once they are ridded of patriarchal yokes. However, Herland is similar to most traditional utopias in

presenting a largely static society since “the excitement, the dramatic tension, of Herland lies not inside the fictional work but outside, as the gradually revealed strength, harmony, intelligence, and resourcefulness of the Herlanders stimulate us to create a twentieth-century society which releases these qualities in real women”(Jones 118). Thus, rather than advocating war against men, this narrative proposes war against patriarchal ideologies, such as male reason represented by Van, aggressiveness embodied by Terry, and naïve idealization from Jeff. The conflicts between the

gender-free Herland and patriarchal values represented by the male visitors aim to incite the reader to question the familiar social structure and gender norms through the unfamiliar society of Herland.

The Maternal Society

Herland symbolizes women’s survival and independence. According to Jill Rudd, the whole country is situated in “a hidden spot of our own contemporary world,” thus highlighting the historical feasibility of Herland (470). As the male characters travel

in the society, its customs and social structure are disclosed to the reader. The society of Herland, as Rudd remarks, emphasizes on “clean, simple living and straight talking,” reflecting “the desire for openness” that underpins Gilman’s vision of a better world (467). Unlike women in the male-dominated society, the women the explorers encounter are athletic, efficient, and energetic. They are diligent workers and manufacturers. In Herland, every woman is mother and daughter at the same time.

But the possessiveness of mother-daughter bondage that is often a characteristic of male-centric society is eliminated: the responsibility of educating children is entrusted to those gifted and everyone has her own private living space. Thus Herland is a community capable to “foster genuine independence and confidence in each person while also inculcating in automatic assumption that everyone will both desire privacy and individual integrity and expect it in others”(Rudd 473). In Herland, everyone could exert her talents to the full instead of being domesticated and exhausted by the maternal responsibility. The gynocentric community, for Carol Farley Kessler, reveals

“a world of possibilities and potentials available to women as a sex”(69). As men disappeared in Herland, the nuclear family system of traditional society was also replaced with the whole community of women where women have full control over their body as well as life, thus capable of disengaging themselves from “sex

parasitism”(Kessler 70). Herland women are not typical housewives that the male visitors are used to. Thus the utopian Herland for the male visitors represents “a liminal state, one of ambiguity and transition”(Kessler 71). In Herland, “the tradition of men as guardians and protectors had quite died out. These stalwart virgins had no men to fear and therefore no need of protection”(Gilman 57). In a way, the women are freed from sexual characterization they are often subjugated to in patriarchy. The male visitors thus have to confront the absence of sexual roles which are present in their society and this confrontation allows them as well as the reader to re-consider the

gender norms of patriarchy. In the first encounter with the three girls of Herland, the three male visitors could not understand the culture of Herland and take the girls as games or barbarians, signifying the de-humanizing attitude toward women.

Interestingly, the hunters are hunted, confined and educated with Herland’s history. In Kessler’s words, this imprisonment is “a variation of the so-called therapeutic

confinement of a neurasthenic woman” and symbolizes the reversal of gender-roles (72). Before the male visitors could describe and analyze Herland as an object of scientific quest, they are explored and observed by Herlanders first.

Dorothy Berkson argues that Gilman’s utopia, with its fundamental principle of motherhood, replaces the traditional society with the egalitarian community, which intends to “change or maternalize men so they will voluntarily give up the selfish and hierarchical values that rule the dominant culture”(100). Therefore, the trip to Herland could be deemed as the rite of passage of the three travelers. Only when they are re-educated and capable of accepting the maternal culture of Herland could the patriarchal culture be changed. Although the re-education of Terry fails and he is exiled, the other two men, with their partners, maintain the possibility to create a truly androgynous culture where both men and women are treated equally. Berkson

advocates the radical potential of Herland since the community Gilman creates

suggests that “the suppressed should become the dominant, the marginal should move to the center”(102). Berkson remarks that “the society of Herland is an imaginative version of the female wild zone completely cut off and removed from the dominant culture; there is nothing but woman’s culture in Herland”(107). As a wild zone, women in Herland get rid of patriarchal culture and develop their own. In this culture, the separation of public and private spheres in traditional industrial society is

abolished and “the sentimentalized home, which Gilman saw as a prison from which children and women must flee, is blithely eliminated”(Lane xiv). There is no more

nuclear family, thus there are no more patriarchs, but the whole community is a big family where everyone is sister, mother, and daughter simultaneously. The

hierarchical social structure is discarded and what remains is “circular and weblike”

connective relationship (Berkson 104). Moreover, Gilman also attacks the

logo-centrism of science. As Donaldson remarks, “the confinement of first-person narration to the boundaries of one’s own perspective reduces the objectivity of the scientific imagination to ‘i-centricity,’ whose emphasis on interpretive consciousness not only erodes masculine authority, but also imbues Van with the individualism and immanence formerly ascribe to the feminine”(381). However, it is such difficulty for absolute objectivity that allows the male intruders the possibility of transformation, which symbolizes the dialectics between two sets of values: masculine ones and feminine ones.

Gilman offers Herland a historical origin rather than a mythical creation. In contrast to an omnipotent Father who creates Adam and Eve, Herland is given birth by a mother, who bears only daughters. As Somel proudly claims, “We are all

mothers—all of us—but there are no fathers”(45). After an earthquake and a war kill off all the men of the country, the history of Herland begins with a mother, as

one of these young women bore a child. Of course they all though there must be a man somewhere, but none was found. Then they decided it must be a direct gift from the gods, and placed the proud mother in the Temple of Maaia– their Goddess of Motherhood—under strict watch. And there, as years passed, this wonder-woman bore child after child, five of them—all girls. (56)

This historical fact not only explains the origin of Herland society, it also insinuates how the society works. Procreation is no longer deemed as a personal affair but one that deserves public attention and support. Furthermore, this change of reproductive method in fact brings forth a different social structure:

There you have the start of Herland! One family, all descended from one