Abstract
The fictional world created by Margaret Cavendish and the sanctuary for women proposed by Mary Astell show us the joy and intimacy that are possible in all-female communities. Like Christine de Pizan’s City of Ladies, Moderata Fonte’s walled garden in Venice, or even Marjane Satrapi’s dining room in Tehran, Cavendish’s Convent of Pleasure and Astell’s “Happy Retreat” offer a refuge for women who wish to withdraw from a world dominated by men. But in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland, published in 1915, and Doris Lessing’s The Cleft, published almost a hundred years later, in 2007, we see something quite different. For the first time in our reading, we see an alternative version of women’s worlds, not as places where women have secluded themselves from men but as entirely separate spheres where men are unknown. In these two novels, we glimpse a prelapsarian world at the very moment before “paradise” is lost—and we witness not the fall of man but the fall of woman.
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Chapter 5 Notes: Suggestions for Further Reading
The continuation of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s story of Herland is available in Mary Jo Deegan and Michael R. Hill’s accessible With Her in Ourland: Sequel to Herland (Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers, 1997), but it is not easy to find the twenty-four installments of Gilman’s Herland story in one continuous narrative. Minna Doskow’s Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Utopian Novels: Moving the Mountain, Herland, and With Her in Ourland (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1999) is now out of print, but a new edition of Herland, edited by Beth Sutton-Ramspeck (Peterborough, Ontario [Canada]: Broadview Press, forthcoming), will contain selections from With Her in Ourland.
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© 2011 Sharon L. Jansen
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Jansen, S.L. (2011). Paradise Lost: Men in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland and Doris Lessing’s The Cleft . In: Reading Women’s Worlds from Christine de Pizan to Doris Lessing. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230118812_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230118812_5
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-29314-8
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