49 pages • 1 hour read
I Who Have Never Known Men
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Background
Authorial Context: Jacqueline Harpman and Freudian Psychoanalysis
Jacqueline Harpman (1929-2012), a Belgian Jew, was 10 years old at the outbreak of World War II. The Nazis invaded Belgium in 1940, forcing her family to flee to Casablanca. The atmosphere of I Who Have Never Known Men mirrors details of Nazi invasions and the Holocaust. The characters have only faint memories of the events preceding their imprisonment, but the women describe screams, flames, and a chaotic onrush in the middle of the night. The imagery parallels pogroms, most notably Kristallnacht, in which Nazis seized and imprisoned Jews while synagogues and other buildings burned. Likewise, Harpman’s characters experience the dislocation and separation of families, as well as mass incarceration, a system that resembles Nazi concentration camps. Moreover, the characters’ discovery of successive mass graves echoes the realities of postwar Europe.
Harpman was also a trained psychoanalyst, and I Who Have Never Known Men touches on the foundational concepts introduced by Sigmund Freud in the early 20th century. Freudian psychoanalysis focuses on exploration of an individual’s unconscious, which may harbor childhood fears or traumas, such as the young protagonist’s experience of the guard’s whip when she seeks a comforting embrace. In Freudian psychoanalysis, traumatic experiences may lead to defense mechanisms and the repression of instinctive drives, just as the narrator develops an aversion to both feelings and touch. Freudian psychoanalysis also explores psychosexual development that occurs through transitional childhood affinities with male and female parents. Harpman’s novel explores the maturation of a young girl who is stripped of all parental care and does not understand sexual difference until her twenties. Likewise, psychoanalysts study how fantasies and dreams manifest in the unconscious’s repressed desires: In the novel, the adult narrator recoils from physical and emotional intimacy, but both lifelong dreams and childhood fantasies produce pleasure through images of human contact.
Genre Context: Feminist Dystopian Fiction
A subgenre of speculative fiction, feminist dystopian fiction features women struggling to survive in desolate, post-apocalyptic, male-dominated worlds, which often include elements of sexual or reproductive slavery. I Who Have Never Known Men is a work of speculative fiction and contains features of feminist dystopian fiction, mystery, and psychological thrillers. The novel defies exact classification, however, because of the plot’s many unsolved mysteries and conflicting genre elements. For this reason, the novel both shares and subverts characteristics of these subgenres.
Featuring caged women under male guards’ constant gaze, Harpman’s book resembles many works of feminist dystopian fiction. Archetypes in the subgenre, such as Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), portray hyperbolic patriarchal systems featuring extreme gendered and/or reproductive inequities. In I Who Have Never Known Men, however, the forces behind the prison system are unidentified. While the guards are all male, many prisons contain men. Moreover, the protagonist theorizes that the guards are also uninformed victims of the power structure, and she stops thinking of them as the enemy.
Despite hazy memories, Harpman’s characters describe warlike scenes just before their imprisonment, and the women escape to find mass graves. In these ways, I Who Have Never Known Men shares similarities with feminist dystopian works condemning patriarchal militarism, such as Katharine Burdekin’s anti-fascist dystopian Swastika Night (1937). The chaos before imprisonment, the barren environment, and the disappearance of the guards are never explained, sustaining the possibility that patriarchal, alien, and/or natural forces are responsible. The unanswered questions, therefore, also make science fiction a possible designation for Harpman’s novel.
Even classifying I Who Have Never Known Men as dystopian fiction is debatable. Sophie Mackintosh notes in the Afterword to the 2019 edition that the women “create the best possible utopia available to them” when they settle in the village, form couples, and live peacefully (Mackintosh, Sophie. Afterword. I Who Have Never Known Men, Jacqueline Harpman, Transit, 2019). She finds parallels, although subverted, to Charlottle Perkins Gilman’s feminist utopian novel, Herland (1915). By presenting both dystopian and utopian elements, I Who Have Never Known Men presents more questions than answers about the nature of men and women’s relationships, the nature of relationships between women, the line between sexuality and asexuality, and the need for human companionship.
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