My life in books

Nomansland is inspired by a casual reference to a female-only society in the classic post-apocalypse novel The Chrysalids by John Wyndham: "To the north-east they say there is a great land where the plants aren’t very deviational, and the animals and people don’t look deviational, but the women are very tall and strong. They rule the country entirely, and do all the work. They keep their men in cages until they are about twenty-four years old, and then eat them. They also eat shipwrecked sailors. But as no one ever seems to have met anyone who has actually been there and escaped, it’s difficult to see how that can be known. Still, there it is—no one has ever come back denying it either." Hauge has taken this reference as the basis for the community of Foundland.

In talking about Nomansland, I think it is important to keep its beginnings in mind because both novels feature extreme examples of societies obsessed with conformity to a rule of behaviour and indeed of ways of being, and young people who secretly challenge the strictly enforced norms and ultimately elect to leave these societies. It's also important to keep in mind that in both societies, memory of what life was really like before the apocalypse has been lost in part, supressed in part, and heavily coloured by the choices made by the founders of these post-Tribulation societies. As well, knowledge about other existing communities of survivors is repressed and mythologised - the women of Foundland are not cannibals, and as the young protagonist of Hauge's novel learns, men as not exactly as she has been told either.

Nomansland presents a society that shares some elements with other women-only dystopias, including Wyndham's Consider Her Ways, and also some elements with the medieval Christian monastic orders, both for men and for women. The women of Foundland live under a rigid caste structure, live highly regimented communal lives, obey rules of conduct that focus on a denial of individuality, sensuality, "vanity" - which includes everything from personal decoration to looking in a mirror, are enjoined to avoid "special friendships" and receive severe punishments including whippings, shunnings, solitary confinement and banishment for breaking the Rule.

However, as the teen-aged protagonist Keller learns, these rules are indeed broken at every level of Foundland's society. Its rulers dress up in fancy clothing and indulge in sensual repasts. Some adults maintain extended "special friendships" and a few maintain clandestine connections with men who visit the island from time to time, trading in tobacco and other luxuries. And some of Keller's peers have stumbled upon a cache of artifacts from the past, including clothing, jewely, cosmetics and fashion magazines. Some reviewers of the novel have fastened on the way in which Keller and her companions throw themselves into frenzies of secret beauty pageants and make-over parties as a rebuke of feminist criticism of "the beauty trap," and even a statement about the "essential" quality of decoration as part of the female psyche, but it serms to me more that these are adolescents embracing new (to them) behaviours and rejecting the severe codes of behaviour they grew up with, and human beings seeking to explore their individuality and sensuality. In any case, the novel provides much food for thought on issues of gender and individual identity.

It's also a good read.