Herland: Blog #4

Charlotte Perkins Gilman's recreation of a society with no men and money-driven inhabitants examine the contrast between the society of the modern day world and the world without those two factors, maybe serving as an indicator of the desire to change the society which she had lived in. The men in Herland are beginning to question the horrific wrongs of their own society and are convinced that Herland is filled with only innocence and beauty. A connection I found to realism is when the women are appalled by the milking of the cow and the process of which the calf is stripped of it's full possession of the mother cow's milk. "It took some time to make clear to those three sweet-faced women the process which robs the cow of her calf, and the calf of its true food; and the talk led us further into a further discussion of the meat business." This recalls to my memory Upton Sinclair's book, The Jungle, in which it portrays the harsh and unsanitary living conditions in the industrialized cities in the early twentieth century, exposed the horrors of the filthy meatpacking industry. I studied this book in my history class when we were learning about the birth of Progressivism and the aim towards preserving moral values while altering the nation's ills. 

I also found an association with Frank Norris's McTeague: a Story of San Francisco. With the emergence of big-time trusts such as Rockefeller's Standard Oil Company and Carnegie's Steel Company, the spirit of the nation had been deeply submerged in the obsession over power and wealth. This brings me to think about the persona of Trina McTeague and how unbelievable it was that what she coveted the most was eating at her bones in terms of her sanity as well as her body physically. Her obsession prevailed over anything else, which convinces me that Gilman wrote Herland in order to teach her society that money isn't necessary to attain happiness since almost every person around her was a Trina. The discussion that the men have with the women about dogs being held as "prisoners" and "kept shut up, or chained" reminds me of the canary, the representation of McTeague caged in his guilt.

Herland: Blog #3

My regards towards Herland and McTeague contain a similar mannerism towards each other. The restrainment on McTeague's society is the greed in which they nourish. I could see McTeague trying to escape this restrainment on himself as he goes back to his old bachelor ways as he departs from his marriage. This similar restrainment is seen in Herland as Terry, Vandyck, and Jeff are examining different schemes to escape. Both Norris and Gilman present a realistic depiction in which a society is enclosed towards experimentation and dignity. They both encapsulate the idealized form of how a society should behave, similar to Romanticism as well as a smattering of Rationalism. 

The altering views between the three main characters in Herland strike me. Every opposing view seems to deal with women, and every view is a differing view from each character. Terry, the rich, absent-minded, and outspoken character, view women as possessions, or better, as fruits - to take a bite out of and leave to rot. He always has to speak out first. Jeff, on the other hand, carries a completely contrasting discernment about women. He believes women are perfectly capable of successfully establishing a civilized society and views them as competent human beings, not as little women - the "weaker sex." He always speaks after Terry. These two are representations of the different kinds of men in the world today: the type to treat women as inferior, or the type to think highly of them. Vandyck, the narrator, seems to be the between the two and carries a rationalistic point of view on women. Gilman's purpose of this is really unclear to me, but I have an idea that it might represent the society as a whole, how the middling person always will speak up only after both opposing sides are through addressing their opinions. This type of writing is one that I haven't seen in any of the pieces of writing which I have studied prior to reading Herland. 

Herland: Blog #2

At the start of Chapter 3, titled as "A Peculiar Imprisonment," the first line reads, "From a slumber as deep as death, as refreshing as that of a healthy child, I slowly awakened." This line reminds me of two different stories, one of which we have previously read in class and discussed. The other book, "Looking Backward" by Edward Bellamy, was mentioned in my history class. In Irving's
Rip Van Winkle," Rip falls into a deep sleep and wakes up in a completely different time period set after the American Revolution. The fantasy of escaping from reality through sleep is also shown in Bellamy's "Looking Backward." It subsumes the attempt to portray a perfect human society, which is a common motif seen throughout Romantic literature. Herland contains this same idea of not a utopian or dystopian society, but a truly different world in which readers of the time period have not been much exposed to.

The title of Chapter 3 in Herland, "A Peculiar Imprisonment," reminds me of the stripping of American colonists' rights before the Revolutionary War. Because Jeff, Terry, and Vandyck are stuck in a completely different realm consisting of entirely women, they feel trapped and "imprisoned." The line, "We have been stripped and washed and put to bed like so many yearling babies by these highly civilized women," (22) prompts the Declaration of Independence and Paine's "Common Sense." With all of these influences from prior years, Charlotte Perkins Gilman uses the ideas of liberty and freedom from before to ironically prove that women are capable of their own personal independence, also. 

Herland: Blog #1

Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "Herland," although having been written and published 1915 in the Modernism period, contains many distinctive traces of other periods of American literature, mainly of Realism and Modernism. Attributes of the Modernism period include an aim towards explaining the different facets of society and its behaviors, physically as well as psychologically. I have noticed that Gilman provides a glimpse of the way men viewed women - the stereotypical view of women's inferiority - with her trying to redefine the boundaries of gender roles and speak up for women. This had been a pretty radical idea, considering how women were accustomed to not having an active voice in the public. "Most men do think that way, I fancy. "Woman" in the abstract is young, and, we assume, charming. As they get older they pass off the stage, somehow, into private ownership mostly, or out of it altogether."" (17.) He introduces the perception of how women had been viewed by standards of her society.

Gilman's bold experimentation with atypical writing styles is demonstrated throughout the first three chapters of the novel. She drifts away from the emphasis on poems as it had been in the Puritanism period, the patriotic pieces of the Rationalism period, the reprimanding critiques of the wrongdoings of society in the Romanticism period, and the importance of being one with an individual's intuition and nature during the Transcendentalism period. She includes such an analytical, distinctive voice which is so completely different from the typical writing style of third person omniscient and uses a personal first person in Herland.

Roethke's Snake: an Analysis

Within the poem "Snake" by Theodore Roethke, he may be referring to himself as the young snake who reaches out for acceptance of his society in his naturally occurring or atypical state. However, it seems as if he is constrained: "limp on a stone, a thin mouth and a tongue stayed, in the still air," unable to talk or act out in society. I find that this correlates with American literature as it supports a component of what McTeague provides - the idea of the lack of an identity, similarly to McTeague, which obstructs a person from having any particular influence in a society filled with money-hungry, greedy people. The idea of the poem is that a new person is trying to emerge out of his previous "skin" and live the way he desires to; however, his attempts are overshadowed by the criticism around him, which disallows him from committing towards his objective. In the visual attached to the poem, the snake looks pretty confident and has nothing surrounding him besides what looks to be a string of plants in the background. This also may be tying into social darwinism which is an overwhelmingly influential element in American literature as it enabled the substandard classes of society to articulate how they felt about the money imbalance (such as Marcus in McTeague).