This Land is Herland

The opening line of the novel Herland by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, “This is written from memory, unfortunately. If I could have brought with me the material I so carefully prepared, this would be a very different story,” immediately sets the story up as being told from the perspective of unreliable narrator Vandyck Jennings (Perkins). Due to the fact that Gilman’s novel is partially satirical and fully feminist, the idea of the male narrator as unreliable holds implications further than the typical unreliable narrator story. On a surface level analysis, Perkins’s utilization of the unreliable narrator trope goes so far only to support the idea that this “Herland” society could and would be largely dismissed by the men to whom the protagonists relay their experiences; however, the context in which this story is situated means that this device has other ramifications.

In her article “The cult of the unreliable female narrator must be stopped,” Stephanie Merritt discusses the notion that “for centuries the testimony of women has been held up to scrutiny and frequently dismissed on the grounds that our biology makes us prone to neurosis, hysteria, irrational subjectivity, and that our judgment can’t be trusted,” as well as the claim that It’s also a favourite cliche of fiction and drama” (Merritt). With this in mind, we can observe how Perkins reasserts the “female hysteria” archetype and applies it to the main man of the story, just as men so commonly and easily deem women as irrational creatures and thus perform a type of testimonal injustice against them. Testimonial injustice, as defined by Miranda Fricker in her text “Epistemic Injustice: Power and Ethics of Knowing,” is a “credibility deficit owing to an identity prejudice in the hearer” (28). We see in Perkins’s Herland, “The Yellow Wallpaper,” and in various other historical texts that testimonial injustice, which is closely linked to gaslighting, has been most frequently perpetrated by men against women in order to discredit their claims and ideas.

These notions culminate into my claim that Perkins’s use of Vandyck as an unreliable narrator is more significant in the context of his identity politics as well as well as the context of the novel. This subversion of the trope, although prevalent in other works of fiction such with male narrators such as Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby and Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, holds greater significance when applied to a man in the realm of a feminist lens, as even Perkins’s literary devices aim to bolster the feminist nature of her novel. In addition to the aforementioned ideas, the establishing of Vandyck as the guide to the world of women that is Herland is important in that men seem to be proficient in mansplaining concepts that apply directly to women. Even in his admittance of unreliability throughout the first paragraph, it is likely that even so, the men to whom he tells this adventure will regard his word as correct and accurate solely because Vandyck is a man.