From Herland to #MeToo: Utopia or Dystopia?

Abstract

Abstract Some of the impetus of the #MeToo movement may derive from feminist imaginings of utopia—popularized recently in films like Wonder Woman (2017). One hundred years before the #MeToo movement, a feminist utopia was envisioned in the novel Herland (published serially between 1910–1916) by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, a first-wave American feminist novelist and sociologist. This article explores the tropes of #MeToo’s parallel mythological construction of shaming and exclusion of male characteristics in a literary scope. It suggests that Gilman’s Herland reflects archetypal blueprints for the feminist impulse driving #MeToo. The conclusion of the article argues that there are some weaknesses to this scope, in light of examples of heterosexual encounters in other artistic forms, through the lenses of social theory and theology’s views of sexuality.