Literary Analysis Of Herland
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Herland written by an American feminist author Charlotte Perkins Gilman is a utopian novel published in 1915. It first appeared as a serial in The Forerunner, a magazine edited and written by Gilman (1909-1916). The book Herland is the middle volume in her utopian trilogy, it was preceded by Moving the Mountain (1911), and followed by a sequel With Her in Our Land (1916). Herland is a feminist science fiction. In this novel Gilman has covered all the aspects of an individual FEMALE society.
It is a humorous utopian novel about an ideal world in which women are free to express their personal and cultural identities. Herland is a novella which describes an isolated society full of women, who reproduce via parthenogenesis (asexual reproduction). It means that there is virgin birth, in which growth and development of embryos occur without fertilization. The society being full of women does not have any men and they did not know the meaning of sex so there is virgin birth. It is a kind of miracle. Herland begins with three American men exploring through an unknown continent where they go in an adventurous tour for some scientific expedition and during their travels they hear of a land where only women, female children and babies live and where men go and never come back. These three do not believe it and think that it must be a rumor. It is impossible to have a land without men. It was situated high in the mountains, but it was not known to anyone, it is a hidden land. The three