I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Harpman
Dreadfully despondent, purposeless; a world where the main character has never felt the ✨joy✨ of knowing men.
I know men, and not knowing them isn’t that big of a deal, sweetheart.
This book, though, centers womanhood and the female characters; it also stresses the lack of men and how desolate the landscape and the world are because of the lack of, you guessed it, men.
It’s strange to treat men as a silent, ghost-like character when they themselves have no agency, only purpose in the novel. Men play a fixed, almost distant role, yet they are constantly reminded that the MC doesn’t “know” men, as if that is a tragedy versus, some would say, a blessing.
We never know why these women were locked in a cage. Or whatever strange event happened that caused these women to be locked up. Was it a catastrophic event? A plague? Aliens?!
And you know what? We never find it. Yay.
But what I do know is that the MC never experienced the joys of being with a man. Having a family; living in this perpetual state of virginity; never truly penetrating the threshold of womanhood because of her lack of experience with the opposite sex. Okay.
Men have three roles in the novel—the voiceless guards, the dead prisoners, and the ghosts of the women’s husbands and sons.
I guess I’m a bit confused — if society had collapsed… why not reproduce? It seemed pointless to keep people in cages without the intent to…for lack of a better word, use them to procreate.
But maybe that was the point — how pointless it was. How pointless to waste 12 years. How pointless that these guards, whose purpose we will never know (also where the FUCK did they go?!?) did they teleport? Did they dissolve? Where are the tire tracks if they drove away? Why did they leave?!?
Like….
Through the eyes of the main character whose origins we know nothing of, only knew the cage and this desolate world, we see her dissect the intricacies of womanhood, at times, through an indifferent and dismissive lens, muddied by her frustration with societal dynamics reflected in the world she never experienced. It was interesting at times to hear her perspective on specific phases of womanhood and choices from an outside perspective, though I would argue the bite of her ire came from feeling bereft of the experiences and relationships she would never have. Like staring out a window, her fist pounding to be let in, she eventually grew tired as she settled into the resolve that she would never know the life promised to her.
However, a recurring theme throughout the novel is her — sexless, childless, pointless life. Oh, the horrors of not being a mother! Yes, the story was written in a different time where more old-fashioned themes are reflected, and frustratingly not too far off from where we’ve grown as a society.
Overall, it was a quick, depressing read. Maybe the desolateness of the world, the pointlessness of the cage, the waste of these pages, was for a purpose—to strip back the layers of our society, our male-centered society, and show how pointless a world would be… without them. 🥺