Studies in American Fiction

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...