I Who Have Never Known Men, and The Sound of a Life Without History

Written by Amelia Cropley

What happens when a story strips humanity down to its bare bones – no names, no history, no mercy? I Who Have Never Known Men goes beyond the binary of a dystopian novel; it is instead a feminist, post-apocalyptic meditation on survival, memory, and the aching void of meaning. Beginning in the repressive setting of a cage holding forty women, this story world is where the absence of answers is more terrifying than the presence of fear.

Jacqueline Harpman’s I Who Have Never Known Men can be described in short as a centre-piece within the collection of novels where The Handmaid’s Tale, Never Let Me Go, Vox and many other feminist and dystopian works lie. Therefore, it is well-renowned and held in high regard of the genre.

But despite having much literature that resonates with this book, it is simultaneously a novel of its own entity. Unique, haunting, and never before written. A girl is imprisoned underground with thirty-nine other older women. Being the youngest she is different, with no memories of men, femininity or the world outside her prison. And yet none of the women know why they are imprisoned, but all the other women have bleak memories of previous lives, of their husbands, children, mothers and fathers. When the women one day mysteriously manage to escape, they are faced with a wasteland of a post-apocalyptic society – a land not even readers with knowledge of civilisation could navigate.

For me, an important aspect of the novel is the narrator remains unnamed and anonymous – her presence, I thought, like being a void in time and history. This with her lack of memory and distance from the other woman curates a sad tone for the confinement she’s in. As readers, we are lucky for her first-person narration, for without this, she is just a number of another woman confined without reason. Yet simultaneous to this sadness, sparked my inquisitiveness and existential questioning of how identity can exist without history and memories – into which this narrator is the prime example against the backdrop of a claustrophobic, eerie and stripped environment.

“We have no names, they treat us as if there is no difference between one woman and another.”

If you are looking for a terrifying read, isolation and alienation permeate this novel. This is terrifying in its introspection, I felt haunted as a reader even trying to think how characters in a dystopian world can physically and mentally cope in such an environment – both cage and wasteland – Harpman successfully puts the readers in her cage too, but we have a history behind us, memories inside us and a freedom her characters don’t have. In a sense, I wished to be haunted by this setting, for that is the key symptom of a good book – to be affected. But more so because curating a feminist dystopian novel, is only a mirror to many surfaces of our world, and many women on it.; as prisoners for no apparent reason and at no fault.

Like the title suggests, men are almost entirely absent in this novel. So what does it mean to be a woman in a world without gender roles, reproduction or patriarchy whilst they are still ever-present? Still however, identity away from mainstream society, memory and history (even without any) course through its pages. This novel questions whether memory is necessary for identity, and how to navigate yourself a world you are isolated from and where to start. Harpman’s sparse prose with intentional minimalism echoes the emptiness of the world, and the narrator unaccustomed to the world. As a consequence, the novels themes and events are so much more pronounced by the way in which Harpman’s detached, quiet and almost clinical tone reads off the pages – of bleakness, oppression, of nothing and simultaneously like the end of the world.

“Perhaps one of the dead women I’d seen in the bunkers was my mother, and my father was lying mummified near the bars of one of the prisons; all the links between them and me have been severed. There is no continuity and the world I have come from is utterly foreign to me. I haven’t heard its music, I haven’t seen its painting, I haven’t read its books […]. I know only thr stony plain, wandering, and gradual loss of hope. I am the sterile offspring of a race about which I know nothing […]. Perhaps, somewhere, humanity is flourishing under the stars, unaware that a daughter of its blood is ending her days in silence.”

To return to my first impressions of this novel, my most immediate thought from only a few pages in was how much Harpman’s work reminds me of Herland (Charlotte Perkins Gilman). This comparison was sparked by a woman being held in isolation with no memories or past in our society, unaware of cultural norms, men, relationships or a woman’s purpose outside her bunker. The key difference however, is Herland is a utopian novel where the women live most gracefully and beneficially without a patriarchy. I Who Have Never Known Men is very much a dystopian work, and even though the women cannot see any man beside the guards outside their cage, they live inside patriarchal oppression. Charlotte Perkins Gilman curates a world where women are blissfully ignorant of societal norms and our civil action, a world that is almost tangible if patriarchy was out the picture, but Harpman composes a hauntingly realistic depiction of what the actual environment would look like if women were separated from men.

At its heart, I Who Have Never Known Men is a philosophical novel for our present and future. Jacqueline Harpman crafts more than a dystopian narrative; she lets readers sit in the bones of someone who does not have freedom by constructing a stark landscape which interrogates the essence of human existence when stripped of its history, culture, and identity. The protagonist’s isolation from not just societal norms but traditional forms of femininity invites such an existential reflection: what remains of the self when all external meaning is removed? Harpman uses the barren world and the women’s ambiguous, unknown imprisonment to invite questioning of freedom, life and the search for meaning in a universe devoid of clear purpose. I Who Have Never Known Men, is not merely a story of female survival, but a meditation on what it means to be human in the absence of everything that conventionally defines humanity.

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In-article image courtesy of Waterstones. No changes were made to this image. 

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