Paradise Lost: Men in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland and Doris Lessing’s The Cleft

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.