"It Began This Way": The Synonymy of Cartography and Writing As Utopian Cognitive Mapping in "Herland."(Critical Essay‪)‬

In Maps of the Imagination: The Writer as Cartographer, Peter Turchi asserts that writing combines two intermingled acts--exploration and presentation (11). These acts are precisely what Charlotte Perkins Gilman and her narrator, Van Jennings, perform in Her/and. Van's narration and his conversion experience from skeptic to believer, from explorer to explored, and from would-be conqueror to conquered are essential to fully understanding the novel. While scholars such as Roger George, Marina Leslie, Darby Lewes, and Kenneth Roemer have undertaken more literal studies of mapping utopias, this article employs both Fredric Jameson's notion of cognitive mapping to explain how and why utopias are conceived and Peter Turchi's notion of writing as analogous to mapping to understand the complexities of Her/and, as narrated by Van. (1) Gilman writes/maps a feminist utopia as the object of conquest and exploration by three male explorers not only in order to map her own notion of utopia as expressed in her earlier sociological and economic writing and presented in Her/and, but also to map Victorian patriarchal misconceptions of femininity. She shows the starting point in order to determine the route to the destination. It is perhaps impossible, or at least inadvisable, to write an article on the topic of mapping and utopian literature without acknowledging Fredric Jameson's writing. His notion of cognitive mapping shapes the way that contemporary fictional utopias have been studied by utopian academics. Jameson uses Kevin Lynch's idea of cognitive mapping from The Image of the City--the notion that individuals create cognitive maps of cityscapes based on how they imagine they are situated within that particular city--and Louis Althusser's notion of ideologies as "the imaginary representation of the subjects relationship to his or her Real conditions of existence" (qtd. in Jameson 353), to define cognitive mapping in social thought. Jameson's definition of "cognitive mapping" is that "[T]he mental map of city space ... can be extrapolated to that mental map of the social and global totality we all carry around in our heads in variously garbled forms" (353). Jameson argues that cognitive mapping, in this sense, is essential to utopian thought. He contends that in order to think specifically about a better future, one must know exactly where he or she stands in the present (353). According to Jameson, it is imperative to know one's position in reality in order to imagine utopia.