A-Z Reading Challenge 2021 - Introduction and Progress Tracking

Penguin has this kind of wonderful-looking line of hardcovers that they call Drop Caps, where they have selected books from the across the Penguin imprints (though mostly from Classics and Modern Classics) from authors whose names start with every letter in the English alphabet.  This post is not about that line.

One of the things that is driving me to read so many classics right now is knowing just how much literature I've never read, despite having been reading since before I can remember.  Some books, I may have read in the past but wasn't mentally prepared to fully appreciate (The Turn of the Screw stands out especially, but also the works of Homer, and even though he's one of my favorite authors, some of Ray Bradbury's works that I haven't revisited since high school), while others may have simply been avoided because they seemed unapproachable, or simply outside my interests, as it were.

Even just focusing on Penguin Classics and the associated lines, there's a vast selection to choose from.  My shelf finally reached the point where I have authors for every letter of the alphabet now, so I decided that my summer reading is going to largely focus on making use of that and reading through the alphabet, in order.  Maybe I can make an annual thing of it, though I suspect that certain letters may require some fudging of the rules in the future. (especially looking at Q here)

For this year, though, I can do authors, like Penguin did with the Drop Caps line.

A: Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen (started 5/12/21, completed 5/18/21)

B: A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess (started 5/20/21, completed 5/21/21)

C: The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer (started 5/22/21, completed 6/28/21)

D: A Journal of the Plague Year by Daniel Defoe (started 6/28/21, completed 7/5/21)

E: Praise of Folly by Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam (started 7/5/21, completed 7/12/21)

<Break #1 - Uprooted by Naomi Novik> (started 7/13/21, completed 7/18/21)

F: The Autobiography and Other Writings by Benjamin Franklin (started 7/18/21, completed 7/25/21)

G: Faust by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (Part One started 7/26/21, completed 7/27/21; Part Two started 7/28/21, completed 7/30/21)

H: Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse (started 7/30/21, completed 8/1/21)

I: The Cheapest Nights by Yusuf Idris (started 8/1/21, completed 8/2/21)

J: We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson (started 8/3/21, completed 8/3/21)

<Break #2 - Look Me in the Eye by John Robison> (started 8/4/21, completed 8/4/21)

K: The Complete Poems of John Keats (started 8/5/21, abandoned 8/9/21)

K: Plain Tales from the Hills by Rudyard Kipling (started 8/10/21, completed 8/12/21)

L: Kalevala by Elias Lönnrot (started 8/13/21, completed 8/24/21)

M: The Crucible by Arthur Miller (started 8/25/21, completed 8/27/21)

N: Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair by Pablo Neruda (started 8/28/21, completed 8/30/21)

O: Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell (started 8/31/21, completed 9/5/21)

<Break #3 - Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro. (Started 9/6/21, completed 9/7/21)

P: The Manuscript Found in Saragossa by Jan Potocki (Started 9/7/21)

Q: Zazie in the Metro by Raymond Queneau 

R: Reveries of the Solitary Walker by Jean-Jacques Rousseau 

S: Saint Joan by Bernard Shaw 

T: Roughing It by Mark Twain 

<Break #4 - A Pocketful of Crows by Joanne Harris>

U: Kristen Lavransdatter I: The Wreath by Sigrid Undset 

V: Candide by Voltaire 

W: Monkey King by Wu Ch'êng-ên 

X: The Persian Expedition by Xenophon 

Y: Hungry Hearts by Anzia Yezierska 

Z: We by Yevgeny Zamyatin 

The Yellow Wall-Paper and Selected Writings (Charlotte Perkins Gilman, 1884-1916) (Penguin Classics Charlotte Gilman, 2/2)

Coming back around after wrapping the local library's challenge so that I don't leave any books unfinished, so I'm back to Charlotte Perkins Gilman once more, reading the back half of this particular volume that I started last week.

After Herland, the remainder of this book is a selection of short stories and poetry from along the length of Gilman's writing career.  The short fiction section sort of comes in two sections, early stories and stories from The Forerunner.  There's a 17-year gap between the two groups, and a very clear change in what Gilman's focus is.

The first six stories in this collection all date to the 1890s, including perhaps Gilman's most famous piece, "The Yellow Wall-Paper".  There is a clear leaning toward feminist thought on display here; of the five early stories chosen, only one doesn't seem to fit in with the others.  "The Unexpected" is a story in four chapters, in which an artist marries a young lady, becomes convinced that she's immediately engaging in an illicit affair, attempts to catch her in the act, and finds that her secret is far more wonderful than he expected.  "The Giant Wisteria" begins as a story about Puritans dealing with a daughter who had a child out of wedlock, then jumps a century forward to people staying in the same house, experiencing a haunting, and discovering the fate of the daughter from the start.  The outlier, "The Rocking-Chair", features two men taking rooms in a boarding-house after seeing a young girl in the window, and having their friendship crumble as both think the other is hiding having gotten to meet the girl, apparently the daughter of the landlady.

"The Yellow Wall-Paper" is a very clear indictment of Silas Weir Mitchell's methods of treating psychological illnesses, a semi-autobiographical account of the slow decline of a woman's sanity when she is forced to remain in a room with nothing to do but look out the window or study the wallpaper; Gilman had been a patient of Mitchell's and sent him a copy of the story in an attempt to convince him that this was a treatment that did more harm than good.  She later wrote in The Forerunner that she had learned the story had the intended effect, and Mitchell stopped using the "rest cure".  The other two stories, "The Extinct Angel" and "Through This", are shorter pieces that are more directed, more obviously focused on feminist ideas, dealing with how the traditional female roles in society completely subsume the personality, the purity, and eventually the sanity of women.  Gilman is decidedly outspoken even in these early pieces, and you can see the beginnings of her focus on feminist social justice that would eventually culminate in Herland.

The remainder of the stories come from later, and are largely devoted to showing how Gilman's views on a perfect society would potentially work in practice.  The women are resourceful, willing to think outside the box when necessary, and more than willing to do what's best for everyone, rather than just themselves.  Additionally, there is the continuing theme, as seen in Herland, of motherhood being a sort of sacred duty, and that those who cannot perform that duty well should be willing to pass it to others who are better-suited.  Everything seems to just be these perfect little settings where all the ills of the world could be quite nicely sorted out if the women were just allowed to have some say in things instead of being buried under all the stresses of their place in a male-dominated society and...

Yeah, they're very didactic, and very much of a kind with the other material from The Forerunner.  While they are well-written and are fun reads, they do begin to feel somewhat the same after a time.  The general formula is: female protagonist is wronged somehow, female protagonist either learns of her own ability to effect change or works out the best way to do so, that change is effected, female protagonist ends the story in a much better position.  The whole theme is women's empowerment, and the various ways that it is illustrated are enjoyable, but in retrospect, the stories really do kind of start to blend together.

The poetry section is somewhat similar in formatting; early poetry holds more varying topics but a general feminist leaning, while later poetry starts to become more obviously political.  While there are a few poems from the period between the early fiction and Gilman's self-publishing, it's a very slim selection, and it's harder to see the development of ideas when they're confined to slim pieces of verse.

This raises perhaps the most important issue I have with the volume I've read here.  There's a 17-year gap with very little of Gilman's material on display here, and importantly, much of her writing during that gap was a mix of nonfiction essays and several nonfiction books, showing the development of her ideas into what would eventually become the topics of The Forerunner in general and Herland in specific.  And yet, for some reason, the "Selected Writings" on display here have completely missed that arguably-important part of her oeuvre.  Not even the piece she wrote on the topic of why she wrote "The Yellow Wall-Paper" made it in, and that story is the first part of the collection's title!  It feels like an unusual omission, especially in a collection edited by a scholar with multiple Gilman-themed works to her name.

All this is to say that I certainly see why Gilman belongs on a classics shelf, and while the shape of her ideas is clearly on display in the stories and novel included here, I do wish that the collection hadn't had such a large piece of time left obscured.  There is value in seeing the development of ideas, and I would be very interested to have been able to see the evolution from what is on display in "The Yellow Wall-Paper", "The Extinct Angel", and "Through This" to become what was spelled out in Herland and The Forerunner.

The Stonewall Reader (ed. New York Public Library, 2019)

I'm not really sure why, but one of the common traits that seem to exist among the friends I've made in my adult life is that a majority seem to exist somewhere on the queer spectrum.  Sure, part of that might be because I identify as asexual, which is the eighth letter in the common alphabet soup of inclusive lettering and is frustratingly-often understood as meaning 'ally' or something similarly missing-the-point, but I wasn't even aware of that as a term before 2017 or so.

I know there's a lot of question of the value of labels, whether they're forcing people into boxes, but when you don't have a word to describe how you feel and suddenly learn that there is a box you fit into, it's remarkably freeing, interestingly enough.  It's knowing 'I'm not alone!' that makes all the difference, really.  And even if it's not something that carries any real stigma, comparatively, it does complicate things; I'm not aromantic, I definitely want a life partner at some point, but... sexual desire isn't really part of it, and I haven't the slightest clue how I would even bring up the subject with a prospective partner.

Darn neurodiverse brain.

Anyways, getting back to the topic on hand.  I've had a lot of queer friends over the years, and tend toward being very much in favor of acceptance and normalization and... other words that mean 'bigotry bad' and such.  I'm a millennial, I grew up in a time where queer topics just weren't as taboo as they might have been in the past (Ellen's 'coming out' episode ran when I was in seventh grade, and Will & Grace was on the air during my time in high school), I knew people who were out of the closet by the time I graduated, and my sophomore year in college included someone coming out as the first of many trans* friends I've had over the years.

Even with all that, though, largely because of the media landscape when I came of age, I never really had a solid understanding of just what the struggle for civil rights looked like for queer communities.  You always learn about Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. when you're in school, and maybe you learn about Cesar Chavez, but that's about it, when it comes to mid-twentieth-century civil rights.  Even with the college history classes I've taken, I never really got a good understanding of exactly what the Stonewall uprising was.  Thanks to the New York Public Library, that particular blank space in my knowledge of history has been filled, at least a bit.

The Stonewall Reader, published in honor of the 50th anniversary of the uprising, was very much an eye-opening read for me.  It's separated into three sections, and each provides a number of voices to give a feel for what the general feel of the era was like, in a way that is sort of a cross between an anthology and an oral history.  The first section of the book, "Before Stonewall", is designed to give an idea of what the state of queer rights was like in the 1960s, followed by "During Stonewall" that gives accounts by people who were actually there during the uprising, and "After Stonewall" to go over the civil rights movement that arose in the aftermath, and the changes in the culture through the last decades of the 20th century.

There's a distinct lack of voices on display here for gay white men, but that's somewhat by design; there's a definite intention on display here toward amplifying marginalized voices, so that there ends up being a focus on non-white writers and interviewees, but also a noticeable emphasis on trans* voices.  This was particularly surprising to me; sure, I had always understood Stonewall to have been about the police cracking down on a gay bar, but I had no idea of the specific nature of that gay bar, that it was the only one that would really let the drag queens and transvestites in, that the police crackdowns would go differently for pre- and post-op transsexuals...  And the number of accounts that include a mention of a chorus line stretching across the street and singing and doing Rockette-style dancing in front of a phalanx of riot police?  Amazing.

What is rather less amazing, however, is the way that everything kind of changed in the aftermath.  It's easy to look at the news right now and see how trans* rights haven't kept pace with the rest of the queer alphabet soup, and it's kind of obvious why, when you see how they were treated by the movements as a whole.  Several of the interviewees in the "After Stonewall" section are downright bitter about how, after being such a fundamental part of that initial bout of civil disobedience, the trans* community was just kind of pushed aside, always stuck on the sidelines and getting strung along without nearly as much effort put into their rights.  It's honestly infuriating to me.

I'm glad I took the time to read this.  It's one of those important parts of American history that I had somehow never really heard about, and given its relative importance, it feels like it should be better-understood, better taught.  Good on Penguin for publishing this, and amplifying the voices within.

No-No Boy (John Okada, 1957)

 

Question 27: Are you willing to serve in the armed forces of the United States on combat duty, wherever ordered?

Question 28: Will you swear unqualified allegiance to the United States of America and faithfully defend the United States from any and all attacks by foreign and domestic forces, and forswear any form of allegiance or disobedience to the Japanese Emperor, or any other foreign government, power, or organization?

In one of the more shameful episodes of American history, roughly 120,000 people of Japanese descent, about 2/3 of whom were American citizens (the rest being Japanese immigrants who were at the time forbidden by law from becoming citizens), were forced into concentration camps on U.S. soil over the course of 1942, out of a misguided fear that they might act against the country's interests and be secretly working for the Japanese military.  While these camps weren't anything remotely like the horrors of the camps seen in Europe, they were still a traumatic experience for the Japanese-American population, unlike anything seen by German- or Italian-Americans.

In 1943, a questionnaire was circulated among the U.S. citizens in the camps, ostensibly trying to judge how "American" or "Japanese" they were, labelled as an "Application for Leave Clearance".  The first three pages of this questionnaire were much like a combination of a Census form and a job or college application, asking for identifying information, relatives, where they had lived, education, work experience, and foreign language skills.  The true nature of the form only starts to become clear with the last question of the third page, asking about any foreign investments; the last page starts out seeming fairly innocent, but after asking about contributions to community organizations and magazine readership, suddenly veers into asking if the person filling it out has Japanese citizenship, if they have applied to cancel said citizenship, and then ended with the two questions I opened this piece with.

Most of those who filled out the questionnaire answered "yes" to both questions.  Those who didn't, whether because a 'yes' to 27 might mean they could be fighting their own relatives in the Pacific theater, because they thought a 'yes' to 28 implied that they had previously held foreign allegiances, or even because they were just plain angry that a government that was treating them like criminals would ask them to show it any loyalty, were further segregated from the others and sent to an entirely separate camp, Tule Lake, for the more "troublesome" inmates.  Referred to as "no-no boys", hey faced a similar degree of ostracization after the war to those who had refused to join the military when called for the draft.

This serves as the historical background for John Okada's 1957 novel, No-No Boy.  While some of the details are inaccurate (the protagonist, Ichiro Yamada, was incarcerated for refusing the draft, which would not have happened in real life if he had answered "No" to both questions), the essential situation is the same: Ichiro has just returned home to Seattle after being let out of his imprisonment at the end of the war, and immediately encounters the accusations of disloyalty and treason that the community levels toward those who didn't join the war effort.  He wasn't actually a "no-no", more a "no-yes", but he was sent to Tule Lake, all the same.

He comes home to a mother who is completely unable to believe that Japan lost the war; she's so sure that Japan is superior that all evidence to the contrary, including letters from family in Japan asking for aid, is just a hoax perpetrated by the American government.  Any day now, the ships will arrive to bring the loyal Japanese who never doubted the cause back home where they will be celebrated, and she knows it's true because she got a letter from Brazil telling her as much.

...yes, this is something that actually happened.  A lot of people, especially in Brazil, lost everything they had because of this particular hoax.

Mrs. Yamada is an interesting character.  She's depicted as someone who is so devoted to the idea of making money so she can go back to Japan and live well in her old age that she is completely unable to assimilate into American culture, doing her best to prevent any aspect of it from entering her house.  No radio, no television, the one time that a young Ichiro borrowed a phonograph ended with her utterly destroying the device.  She is completely unable to see why her children, who are barely able to speak Japanese, might want to remain in America.

Ichiro's father, on the other hand, is much more of a realist.  He knows that original goal is long last being possible, that the war is over, that Japan lost.  He's decidedly henpecked, however, and can't do anything without Mrs. Yamada's approval.  He reads the letters asking for food and clothing but can do nothing to help, because she is so convinced that they are fabrications to help the American government steal from them.

The last member of Ichiro's family is Taro, his days-from-being-18-year-old younger brother.  We don't see much of Taro; he resents Ichiro, and has already decided that as soon as he is of age, he's going to drop out of school and go join the army, because his brother wouldn't.

Ichiro's homecoming drops him right into the middle of all of this.  He's one of the last to return after the war, so he falls into a situation where all the resentment of the "no-no boys" is at its height, while his mother is proud of him for "doing the right thing" and eagerly wants to show him off to all the other Japanese families, while he is struggling with what he feels is an unforgivable crime against his home.

From there, Ichiro moves about his neighborhood in Seattle, meeting back up with friends from before, friends from the prison camp he spent the previous two years in, and, well... People who hate him for what he did, without any understanding of the thought processes that led to the choice.

One of the voices of reason in all of this is Kenji, a friend who did go to war, and lost his leg, though the wound has never healed properly, and they keep having to remove more and more of it.  Kenji is the first character we meet who really treats Ichiro well; he understands the pressures that complicated Ichiro's decision, and a recurring thread in their conversations through the book is which one of them has it worse.

The biggest impetus for the plotline ends up being Taro's decision to leave on the evening of his birthday to join up.  This devastates his mother, still holding on to the hope that Japan actually won the war; Ichiro can't deal with it and goes out drinking with Kenji.  Unfortunately, the club they go to also serves minors, and it's where Taro has gone to party with his fellow new enlists.  This leads to Taro luring Ichiro into an ambush, albeit one ended by Kenji's intervention.

While all this is going on, a letter from Japan for Mrs. Yamada arrives, from her sister, attempting to make clear the urgency by relating a secret from her past that nobody else would know.  This is devastating for her; she goes into a sort of fugue state, enough that when Ichiro leaves to go with Kenji to the VFW hospital in Portland, she barely notices.

In Portland, while Kenji is in the hospital, Ichiro starts to look for work that would get him away from the people who know his shame; it slowly starts to dawn on him that his actions are no less unforgivable than those of his country toward him.  Kenji outright tells him that it's going to get better, that the issues are because the returning soldiers are angry that the same old racism is still present and want someone to blame, that Ichiro needs to go home and face his issues head-on.

Ichiro's return is rather unfortunately timed; he arrives in the midst of a series of tragedies.  Even in the middle of all of this, though, Ichiro is able to start healing himself, finally.  The tragedies of the past and present come together to give him sufficient perspective to see a way forward, and he seizes it.  There's the potential for him to return to school, a possible romance, and reconciliation with his father, who is finally able to start assimilating into American culture.  Not everything is perfect, and it's impossible to escape the racism that underpins everything in this country, but there's hope, and he ends the book having come to terms with himself, even if that point hasn't quite come for all of those around him.  There's a glimmer of hope, even if he's going to have to work to reach it.

There are a lot of parallels that can be seen between this book and current events.  Let's face it, people clinging to their beliefs in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary is how we get things like the events of January 6, and one of the Supreme Court cases that were litigated in the 1940s over the legality of the concentration camps was just overturned in the last few years... Ironically, in the same decision that upheld the Trump-era bans on Muslim travel.  Immigrant families are being rounded up at the borders and shoved into detention centers on a regular basis, and work is only just beginning to reunite families that were forcibly separated in those locations.  The underlying injustices involved in No-No Boy are still here, still happening, just with different skin colors and terminology.

If we don't learn from the past, we can't overcome it.  It would be nice if those in power could learn that.

A final note on this:  I learned after picking up this book that there was some significant controversy over its Penguin Classics edition; apparently, arguing that the book was in the public domain because it was originally published in Japan, and ignoring a later copyright established in the 1970s, Penguin decided to publish it without notifying John Okada's family or paying any royalties.  They quickly backpedaled after the story blew up on social media, and ceased marketing it in under a month, though it can be found on their website.

My copy was purchased used, so Penguin didn't see any money from it, but I'm going to make the rare assertion that in this case, the Penguin edition is absolutely not the correct way to go.  If you're going to read this book, buy the University of Washington Press edition, instead; that one pays the royalties properly.

Herland (Charlotte Perkins Gilman, 1915) (Penguin Classics Charlotte Gilman, 1/2)

 

I think it says a lot for the quality of a book when I can plunge through the whole thing in a matter of hours.  I mean, sure, I'm a fan of well-written utopian/dystopian literature anyways, when a great deal of time is spent exploring the world with some considerable depth, but being able to plunge through a whole novel, even when it's perhaps somewhat short, in a single day, even with interruptions?

Herland is one of the few instances of true utopian literature that I've actually read; the closest thing I can think of is H.G. Wells's "The Country of the Blind", in that the ramifications of the cultural change have been fully explored.  Usually, there's some clear drawback to the society explored; what is Utopia to one is Dystopia to another.  There is some aspect of that in Herland, where one of the 'outsider' characters definitely finds it to be anything but paradise for him, but, well...  I'll get to that.

The central conceit in Herland is that there is a hidden country high in the mountains of... Somewhere; the narrator specifically says he has no intention of making it clear exactly where this country is, but it's about the size of Holland and impossible to reach except by air.  A combination of volcanic activity, slave uprising, and self-defense killings resulted in the complete cutting-off of this land, along with the utter destruction of the entire male gender.  Spontaneously, one of the young women left behind turns out to have the ability to reproduce parthenogenically, which is also passed on to her daughters, and their daughters as well, eventually leading to the country being entirely populated by what is essentially one big family.  Without any outsiders to contend with, the women are able to instead focus on improving the land and their culture for future generations.

Genetic diversity is somewhat handwaved here, but we're in some light fantasy territory so let's just see where this goes.

It's probably most useful to take a moment to consider the author.  Charlotte Perkins Gilman was a prominent feminist writer in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, with a socialist leaning in her philosophies, and a particular focus on the inequalities created by capitalism and the tendency for women to have to rely on men instead of being fiscally independent.  During the early part of the 20th century, she even wrote and published her own magazine from 1909-1916, "The Forerunner", in which she expressed her views to her readership. 

This comes out quite clearly in the all-female culture we see in Herland.  The women have no money, few personal belongings, and little need for anything in their lives.  The population, stated as being around 3 million, is kept steady simply through each woman being allowed one child (with certain exemplars being allowed to have a second if others are considered unsuitable), and once a baby is able to leave her mother's side, her upbringing is in a communal child-rearing environment much like a 24/7 Montessori school where all activities are designed to be educational without the child realizing she is learning.  There is an intense focus on lifelong learning in the culture; while children are expected to choose a profession by which to better the land when they reach their teenage years, this is purely based on their interests.  

This way of choosing a calling is exemplified by the character of Ellidor, one of the first women met in the narrative.  At one point, she describes how she brought a moth she had caught to an "insect teacher" to ask what it was, learned that it was a pest that threatened a particular variety of nut tree and that was actively being eradicated as a result.  The ensuing course of education as she dug deeper and deeper led her to decide to devote her life to forestry.

Spirituality is somewhat passive; the belief is that the Deity lives within everyone, expressed as the feeling of motherhood that drives the culture as a whole, with no afterlife, everything instead being focused on the betterment of society for future generations, with little reverence for the beliefs and laws of the past if they can be made more just and equitable.  Those whose callings lead them to be able to serve as counselors to those who need psychological help spend part of their days in the temples located in each town, so that someone is always there to listen and offer guidance to the troubled.

Into this idyllic country, where the focus of everything is to make the land better than it was before, come the three outsider characters: Terry, a swaggering alpha male sort who is convinced that the legendary "Land of Girls" that they are searching for is sure to make him king because obviously they're all going to fawn over him; Jeff, a romantic sort of man who believes that his one purpose in life is to worship and serve a woman who loves him; and Vandyck, the narrator, who holds a view somewhat in the middle.  All three come in with an essentially androcentric worldview, and while they exoect to find a patriarchal society, they very much don't expect to find a complete lack of the Y chromosome.

The three reach the plateau where this country exists via a biplane, but find themselves quickly captured, imprisoned in decidedly comfortable surroundings, and forced to simultaneously learn the native language (streamlined and made elegant over time so that it is easy to teach and learn) and teach English to the inhabitants (who show little difficulty in learning).  This is quite fine with Van and Jeff, but Terry quickly grows frustrated by the captivity and the fact that the teaching staff and guards are all middle-aged, and talks the others into engaging in an escape.  This works well enough, and they manage to make it all the way back to the plane, only to discover that it has been seen into a gigantic cloth bag to protect it from the elements, and also that their entire escape and flight into the forest has been observed without their knowledge.

The book progresses from there as the three learn about the culture they have dropped into (which all three men find disappointing in certain ways, though only one is unable to come to terms with it), teach the women about the outside world, and slowly find love, of a sort.

And then Terry tries to get overly macho about his unchanged notion of gender roles, attempts to force himself on the woman he loves, is thoroughly and physically rebuffed, and gets himself thrown out.  The last chapter deals with this final part, and the preparations for a return to the outside world.  Van will come along to make sure he gets back to the outside world safely, and Ellidor won't allow Van to leave without being by his side.  Jeff has no intention of leaving; his lover is pregnant with the first two-parent child the country has seen in 2000 years, and he wouldn't dream of leaving her side.

Throughout the book, the injustices and inequalities of the outside world are shown to be problematic, not only when Van is forced to consider them, but also through the reactions when the women are told about them.  The final chapter includes a lot of foreshadowing about how Ellidor reacts when faced with these injustices up close, but only that; it ends with the three who are leaving, well... Leaving.

Herland was originally published in a serialized form in "The Forerunner".  Perhaps unsurprisingly, the very next month she began serializing the sequel, With Her in Ourland.  Unfortunately, the volume I'm reading from doesn't include that novel, instead following Herland with a selection of short stories and poetry from the whole of Gilman's career.  I find myself rather disappointed by this; I rather want to read the sequel now just to see where she chose to look for the contrasts that would surely be offered.