ABSTRACT

In this chapter, the author shows how the text encourages the reader to be drawn into a particular ideology and perspective with particular reference to notions of gender. Moreover, the Herland women are also given negative evaluative devices stressing in particular their emotional coldness: grave, grim, severe(ly), stern, unsmiling. Sometimes, though, when a negatively evaluated adverb or adjective is used of the Herlanders, its effect is toned down by being combined with a more positively evaluated one. Female readers might perhaps tend to identify more directly with the Herland women’s position, so that their process of reading the male narrator’s text becomes a process of reading between the lines, of seeing through the language, of noticing and deconstructing the androcentric assumptions, norms and values underlying what Van says. While both coinages challenge the masculine preconception of women as weak and easily frightened, the latter also reminds us that even love includes a vertical dimension of power.