Herland, the Land of Women (1915), by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, the utopian literary tradition and the influence of feminist utopia in contemporary debates on maternity

Abstract

This paper proposes a study of the novel Herland, the land of women (1915), of the American writer Charlotte Perkins Gilman, in the light of its relation to a utopian literary tradition and the influence of the utopian-feminist novel in contemporary debates on Maternity. If at the beginning of the century XX the desire to create a space played by women, even if fictitious, was urgent, in our current historical moment this urgency did not lose anything of its relevance and significance. With the desire to break with the patriarchal and macho hegemonic politics in force at the time, in writing Herland Gilman not only established a source model for the feminist utopias that would emerge in the 1970s, as it became a reference for gender studies and for feminist criticism. Thus, to emphasize the contribution of this feminist utopia to our current historical moment in what concerns, mainly, the debates about maternity, is the objective of this project. For this, based on the initial theoretical works, as analyzes are made from the literary analysis of the novel, its narrative structure, but also from its ideological premises, with emphasis on the figure of the woman in fiction and, also, comparing the Historical moment of the work with the current one. Feminist authors will be visited from a first wave of feminism to a contemporary, whose works and researches dialogue directly and/or indirectly with the theme of maternity. Are they: Kate Millet, Betty Friedan, Juliet Mitchell, Shulamith Firestone, Verena Stolke, Mary Dietz, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, among others. (AU)