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.