ABSTRACT
Many formulations of maternalism rely in their idealization of motherhood on a theory of gender which enshrines polarized male and female 'essences' that combine — sexually, emotionally, socially, metaphysically — to form a perfect and stable whole. The mother–child bond, and the maternal activities and qualities of nurture, care, and love are invoked as a corrective to the anonymity and brutality of modern society. In Herland, Gilman used the utopian form as a testing-ground for maternalist ideas, and in the process articulated a feminist critique of patriarchy and its deformations of 'true' femininity. In Hauptmann's The Island of the Great Mother, the spatial semiotics are somewhat more complicated, in that the maternalist arcadia is positioned not only against contemporary civilization, but against the male colony it creates through segregation. The island matriarchy institutionalized an antagonistic conception of gender, and the resulting social order was inherently unstable.
