If the patriarchal character of the traditional utopian narrative paradigm is reflected not only in the social and political provisions of the Renaissance utopia, but also in the distinctively masculine character of the fantasy which underlies them, it is scarcely surprising that where the influence of this paradigm persists, its doubly patriarchal bias should be so hard to escape. As we have seen, the conscious attempts of writers such as Bellamy, Wells, and Huxley to provide for a greater degree of sexual equality are undermined by the contradictions that emerge within the narrative— which perhaps indicates the extent to which the paradigm itself serves to potentiate the latent assumptions of male dominance rooted in the culture which utopia seeks to transcend. Even dystopian attacks on the premises of the traditional utopia rarely avoid a reinscription of the utopian suppression of the female: except in Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, dystopian narrative enacts an erasure of the feminine no less striking than that embodied in Bacon's The New Atlantis.

It would seem to follow, therefore, that a successful challenge to the inherently patriarchal assumptions of the traditional utopia might be likely to have more far-reaching narrative repercussions than those produced by Wells's primarily narrative experimentation, by libertarian reworkings of the traditional utopia's authoritarian premises, or even dystopian parody. Such a challenge is clearly the goal of a number of writers who have envisaged societies not merely no longer dominated by men, but wholly exclusive of them. And while some of these (those of Monique Wittig, Joanna Russ, or Suzy McKee Charnas, for example) are only tangentially utopian, others—notably Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Herland (1915) and Sally Miller Gearhart's The Wanderground (1979)—offer fully developed accounts of a more perfect society whose most fundamental premise is the absence of men.

Herland

Of the two, Herland seems, at least at first sight, far closer to the traditional paradigm. Whereas Bellamy, Morris, and Wells had already acknowledged the implications of the end of the age of discovery by either projecting their utopias into the future, or else positing such science fictional scenarios as the existence of a parallel universe, Gilman adheres to the time-honoured convention of the geographical utopia, lying in some unspecified southland, inaccessible and undiscovered.