Herland: Irony 2 key examples

The men have just been describing the gendered division of labor in their society. They tell Alima and the others that women do not work outside the home, instead managing the household and raising children. The Herlandians, who take motherhood and childhood education very seriously, are startled to hear that raising children is considered a small enough job that mothers can do it while also keeping house. Terry's explanation that servants help with all the work does not satisfy the Herlandians. Soon, they learn that the most wealthy women have access to both birth control and domestic servants. The poorer a woman is, the less access she has to either of these resources. As a result, poor women are expected to care for more children with less help.

This system is ironic when the men spell it out like this. It sounds especially upsetting to the Herlandians because their entire society is organized around the mission of raising children to be good citizens, a project they treat as sacred. They believe every child should have access to the best collective resources society has to offer. Under the system the men describe, the children of rich parents receive a disproportionate amount of the child-rearing resources (a tale that is still familiar today). Meanwhile, for poor women, motherhood is a burden they are forced to bear without help. This prevents motherhood from being the sacred, sought-after role it is in Herland.

Ellador is skeptical that sex develops a permanent kind of love that has nothing to do with parenting children. She gives the example of monogamous birds that only mate during the mating season to produce offspring. Van's people would be anomalies in nature, she points out, if they need sex in order to bond with one another. She is willing to believe that that is the case, but the way she poses the question undermines some of the beliefs Van has previously taken for granted. He knows that sex and love do not always exist in proportion to one another, so now he is left wondering what exactly their relationship is in his society.

Rather than fully admitting his own shortcomings, Van jokes that, "It is a very awkward thing, sometimes, to have a logical mind." This is an example of verbal irony. Explicitly, he is complaining about the burden of being a smart, logical person. He is complimenting his own mind. Beneath that compliment, however, is an indirect admission that Ellador's logical mind has bested his own. It is "awkward" not only that she has presented him with logic that forces him to reevaluate his assumptions, but also that she has done so as a woman. He comes from a society that stereotypes men as logical and women as emotional. Here, though, Ellador has broken that stereotype and proven herself to be (at least sometimes) better at logic than her husband.