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.