Herland (1915) and With Her in Ourland (1916) By Charlotte Perkins Gilman

 

Charlotte Perkins Gilman is an author I was completely unfamiliar with until I picked up an 833-page collection of her works published in 2022 by the not-for-profit Library of America. Gilman (1860 – 1935) is often categorized as an “utopian feminist” writer.  She’s an excellent read.

The LOA collection contains most of her novels, short stories, and essays. Her works remain thought provoking today, and were clearly revolutionary when written. At times her works crossed over to science fiction. Finding a publisher for Gilman’s early works was difficult.  Many appeared first in a magazine Gilman founded expressly to bring them to print.

The novel Herland commences when three adventure seeking men go exploring in what is presumably the Amazon basin.  On the trip they hear about a lost civilization run by women, but they can’t find it.  They dubbed it Herland and return a year later determined to find it, and do.  They are captured and at first held under house arrest.  The story of how these very different men (one a chauvinist, another a “good” guy, and the third a sociologist) get along in a matriarchal environment is an intriquing analysis.

They eventually learn from their captors that 2,000 years ago while all the men were off on their nonstop warfare, a catastrophic geological event occurred causing their homeland to be cut-off from the rest of the world (think Journey to the Center of the Earth without the dinosaurs). Left to themselves, the women create a utopian society without warfare, famine, disease and even learn how to reproduce without men.

Eventually Van, the sociologist who narrates much of the book, will pair with a studious woman named Ellador.  The leaders of Herland agree to help him and her get to the outside world with the stipulation they must never reveal Herland’s location.

Gilman’s next novel With Her in Ourland is a sequel detailing Ellador’s trip to the outside world. With charm and clearly defined logic, Ellador discovers the patriarchal political and religious worlds are a poorly run disaster.  Her commentary is biting and on target. Van tries to justify the actions of the world but must acknowledge her superior arguments.

Gilman’s writing in parts is compelling, and in its intensity reminds me of Ayn Rand’s book Atlas Shrugged, though while their intensity is similar, their political ideology is not even remotely similar … other than acknowledging that “mankind” has made a mess of everything.

In addition to these two novels, the LOA collection includes:

·        27 short stories, with both the original of Gilman’s classic The Yellow Wallpaper and also its heavily edited (sanitized) version published without her approval of the edits.

·        over 100 poems; and

·        17 short stories written by Gilman in “the style of other authors” including Mark Twain, Louisa May Alcott, Charles Dickens, and Nathaniel Hawthorne.  These are excellent.

One final interesting thing about Gilman:  she is a niece of Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of the American literary classic Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

Recommendation:  Yes, all of it.

Nights of Plague (Turkish 2021, English 2022) By Orhan Pamuk

 

I am a big fan of Turkish author Orhan Pamuk, a winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature. I’ve just finished reading his latest novel Nights of Plague, an English translation of which was published at the end of 2022.

Nights of Plague is fiction, very thinly disguised fiction.  Some names and places have been changed to “protect the innocent,” though there aren’t many of those to worry about. It is set in 1901 during an outbreak of the plague on the island of Mingheria, a state of the Ottoman Empire which has already entered its final decades. Mingheria, like many islands in the Eastern Mediterranean, has a population which is nearly evenly split between Greek Christians and Muslims who do not like or even trust each other.  That Mingheria looks and sounds like Cyprus and/or Crete, is a part of the thinly disguised fiction.  

The novel has a complicated plot, or should I say plots. Pamuk tells his story from the perspective of a historian researching the plague.  His primary source materials are the letters written by Princess Pakize (the daughter of the deposed Sultan, and niece of the current Sultan) to her sister.  Princess Pakize is married of to a doctor, an arranged marriage that actually works out well. He is what we today would refer to as an epidemiologist.  The Sultan sends them off to Hong Kong, to study the plague outbreak there. Once onboard ship however they are rerouted to Mingheria where the Sultan’s chief epidemiologist (a Christian) has just been murdered. The Princess and her doctor husband are protected by a bodyguard, “the Major,” who plays an outsized role in this story.

Pamuk continues the story splitting it into multiple plots.

First of course is the plague itself which has begun to spread wildly on the island as both Christians and Muslims routinely resist all efforts to quarantine.  The similarities between the spread of the plague in 1901 and the resistance to quarantine during the Covid pandemics in 2019 are real, as is the economic impact of both.  Keep in mind that Pamuk started this book in 2016, before the Covid pandemic was even known. 

Second, and vintage Pamuk, is the political intrigue taking place in the Sultan’s family, and the ever-worsening decline of the Ottoman Empire, as international powers prepare to move in for the “kill” enacted at the end of World War I.

And the third major plot is the murder mystery aspect of the story which remains just somewhat unresolved at the end of the book, without enough evidence to be certain. Pamuk’s references to the “Sherlock Holmes” method of solving mysteries are great, as is the teasing “Chapter 51” from Alexandre Dumas’ The Count of Monte Cristo.

Recommendation:  Absolutely, though a knowledge of Ottoman and Turkish history is almost a requirement.