Halfway Through Herland

Fresh off an amazing weekend that featured the Mets signing Johan Santana, the Giants winning the Super Bowl, and a Lupe Fiasco concert it was finally time to sit down and do some reading. Herland is a very interesting book, and caught me quite off guard. I was told it was a feminist novel, which it is, but it kind of reads like an Indiana Jones movie in my opinion. Three men, Terry, Vandyck, and Jeff, stumble across a remote island inhabited by only women and decide to do some exploring. They fall captive to the women and both the males and females begin to learn from one another. This is where the Indiana Jones portion of the novel ends and the central themes begin to come out.
Herland is clearly a Utopian society. A Utopian society is one that is ideal and perfect. The women have created a society in which all the women are strong, fast, and climb well. They have adapted to their surroundings. They survive on greens and things grown from the trees that line the island. The women are highly educated, they have created their own language as well as record books for the past. The thing the stuns the three men the most is that these women with no help from the outside world were able to come together, put their differences aside and unify to create this perfection. I am not familiar with a lot of novels or stories that deal with Utopias but The Giver by Lois Lowry is the first novel that comes to mind. The society in The Giver is controlled. There is only sameness, no war, no pain, no emotional depth to characters. The women of Herland only differ looks wise through mutations over their 2,000 years without men. How they reproduce is coming up in the next paragraph. The women emotionally are all the same. They all have short blond hair, wear similar clothes, never get mad or angry, are extremely reasonable, all have a thirst for knowledge. They do not break from their traditions set before them.
The biggest of these traditions is the birth of children due to parthenogenesis, which is asexual reproduction. Childbearing is the greatest honor of the women’s lives, as well as their highest duty. The novel it self so far has been an interesting read, are women, or any one capable of maintaining a society like this one? It hasn't been done yet, but that is not to say in the future any Utopian society is not possible.
My only problem with the novel so far and what I have read is Perkins depiction of the women as Aryans. She uses the novel as vehicle for her unconventional views about men and women and depicts the Utopia through Aryan separatism (Conner). As the novel progress I know I will begin finding her portrayal as the male characters as a problem as well. She has set the males up to try to destroy the perfection due to jealousy. I can see it happening. Terry, who is unhappy in Herland, is going to rebel and be squashed. Perkins will write about how males are always the ones that can't live in peace and are always unhappy. If that is indeed what happens next weeks entry will be entertaining.