• “No Exact Analogue”: Alternative History and the Boundaries of “Home” in Herland
• Justin Chandler (bio)

In the final moments of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s 1915 novel Herland, our narrator, Van Jennings, reflects on the peculiarities of his new marriage with his Herlandian comrade Ellador ahead of their return to “the Rest of the World.” Van writes that the women of Herland “were right somehow . . . this was the way to feel. It was like—coming home to mother.”¹ He quickly clarifies: “I don’t mean . . . the fussy person that waits on you and spoils you and doesn’t really know you. I mean the feeling that a very little child would have, who had been lost—for ever so long. It was a sense of getting home” (139). While surprising for him, this sense of Herland as both startlingly new and perfectly familiar permeates Van’s reminiscences. On the question of agriculture, education, religion, and intimate relationships, Van repeatedly feels that for all its differences, for all that’s missing, Herland is closer to the ideal that humanity has been striving for all along.

Though scholars have argued that Herland is the culmination of a utopian impulse running throughout Gilman’s career,² the novel’s dynamic of character and setting—in which the jarring aspects of a new world simultaneously feel not just superior, but deeply familiar—marks a departure from the framework Gilman commonly employed in her fiction. Works from the 1890 poem “Similar Cases” to the dozens of short stories published from 1909 to 1916 in The Forerunner dramatized characters at odds with their environment and seeking escape, and Gilman’s sociological work repeatedly called on women to leave the domestic sphere. But the country of Herland, appearing fundamentally alienating, grows increasingly fulfilling over the course of the novel. What’s more, it does so through appealing to relationship and power dynamics rooted in domestic sentimentality, a cultural framework Gilman persistently critiqued. [End Page 199]

It is my contention that this sense of paradox is best understood by reading Her-land as an alternative history that recuperates the affective, relational logics of domestic economy and sentimental fiction within the context of a world-system wholly divorced from the operations of industrial capitalism. While there is precedent for reading Herland and utopian novels as alternative histories,³ it is my contention that more time spent attending to the past(s) that Herland recuperates reveals unique insights into Gilman’s fraught navigation of the complex landscape of sex, class, and race.

In what follows, I argue that the practices espoused in Catharine Beecher’s treatises on domestic economy and sentimental literature’s tropes of personal and interpersonal fulfillment together offered a vision, however unrealistic, of the domestic sphere as a space exempt from the chaotic and exploitative operations of industrial capitalism. Beyond exemption, the domestic sphere also figured as a site of resistance, providing alternative formulations of power, selfhood, and relational bonds. Though the enterprise of domestic sentimentality has been critiqued by scholars as being largely ineffective against the encroachments of industrial capitalism, and even as complicit with its racialized, imperialistic logics, I argue that Gilman’s novel provides a vision in which the historical contingencies of capitalism (separate spheres ideology, scientific management, and exclusionary markers of sexual, economic, and racial difference) never occurred; where, for that matter, industrial capitalism itself never occurred.⁴

Herland thus figures the capitalist world-system, well in operation by the dawn of World War I, for the contingency it was: a thing that could have been otherwise. In its absence, Herland recuperates a past that was largely aspirational and fictive, existing less in reality than in the pages of treatises on domestic economy and sentimental novels. In an attempt to make that past real, Herland figures “home” as no longer a space exempt from industrial capitalism, but as a totalizing force that reimagines selves, social bonds, and institutional practices—and by extension, conceptions of autonomy, ownership, debt, and power—within the framework of a communal ethos akin to, but necessarily distinct from, domestic sentimentality. This essay ends with a consideration of the biopolitical roots of the domestic sphere and the limitations of...

• “没有精确的类比”：另类历史与赫兰德“家”的界限
• 贾斯汀·钱德勒（个人简介）

在夏洛特·珀金斯·吉尔曼 (Charlotte Perkins Gilman) 1915 年出版的小说《赫兰》的最后时刻，我们的叙述者范·詹宁斯 (Van Jennings) 在返回“世界其他地方”之前反思了他与赫兰同胞埃拉多 (Ellador) 新婚姻的特殊性。范写道，赫兰的妇女“在某种程度上是正确的……”。。。这就是感觉。这就像——回到母亲身边。” ¹他很快澄清道：“我不是说……。。。那个挑剔的人伺候你、宠坏你，但并不真正了解你。我指的是一个很小的孩子会拥有的感觉，他已经迷失了很长时间。这是一种回家的感觉”（139）。虽然令范感到惊讶，但这种对赫兰既陌生又熟悉的感觉渗透到了范的回忆中。在农业、教育、宗教和亲密关系的问题上，范一再感到，尽管有种种差异，尽管有种种缺失，赫兰德更接近人类一直以来为之奋斗的理想。

尽管学者们认为《赫兰德》是贯穿吉尔曼整个职业生涯的乌托邦冲动的顶峰，²小说中人物和背景的动态——其中一个新世界的不和谐方面不仅让人感觉优越，而且非常熟悉——标志着一种背离吉尔曼在她的小说中常用的框架。从 1890 年的诗歌《类似的案例》到 1909 年至 1916 年《先驱者》中发表的数十篇短篇小说，作品都戏剧化地描绘了与环境格格不入并寻求逃避的人物，吉尔曼的社会学著作一再呼吁女性离开家庭领域。但赫尔兰德的国家从根本上看来是疏远的，但随着小说的发展，它却变得越来越充实。更重要的是，它通过诉诸植根于国内情感的关系和权力动态来实现这一目标，而吉尔曼一直批评这种文化框架。[完第199页]

我认为，这种悖论的最佳理解方式是将《她的土地》解读为另类历史，在完全脱离工业资本主义运作的世界体系的背景下，恢复国内经济和感伤小说的情感、关系逻辑。 。虽然有将赫兰和乌托邦小说作为另类历史来阅读的先例，^{3我的观点是，花更多的时间关注}赫兰所恢复的过去，揭示了吉尔曼对性别、阶级和复杂景观的令人担忧的导航的独特见解。种族。

接下来，我认为，凯瑟琳·比彻关于家庭经济的论文中所倡导的实践和感伤文学中个人和人际成就的修辞共同提供了一种愿景，无论多么不现实，家庭领域是一个免受工业混乱和剥削运作的空间。资本主义。除了豁免之外，家庭领域也被视为抵抗场所，提供了权力、自我和关系纽带的替代表述。尽管国内感伤的事业被学者们批评为对工业资本主义的侵蚀基本上无效，甚至与其种族化的帝国主义逻辑串通一气，但我认为吉尔曼的小说提供了一个愿景，在这个愿景中，资本主义的历史偶然性（单独的）意识形态、科学管理以及性别、经济和种族差异的排他性标记）从未发生过；就此而言，工业资本主义本身从未发生过。⁴

因此，赫兰认为，资本主义世界体系在第一次世界大战爆发前一直运行良好，但它是偶然的：事情本来可以是另外一种情况。在它缺席的情况下，赫兰恢复了一段很大程度上是理想和虚构的过去，它在现实中的存在程度不如国内经济论文和感伤小说中的存在。为了使过去成为现实，赫兰将“家”视为不再是一个不受工业资本主义影响的空间，而是一种重新构想自我、社会纽带和制度实践的整体力量，并由此延伸出自治、所有权、债务和权力——在类似于但又必然不同于家庭情感的公共精神框架内。本文最后考虑了国内领域的生命政治根源和……的局限性。