Reading I Who Have Never Known Men

It's a review and an essay and mostly a lot of questions

I recently read I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Harpman (1995, for context). I’m going to describe the plot overall and in some detail, so I’ll say don’t read this if you don’t want spoilers. I do recommend the book—it was interesting and a very fast read, due to being both short and written in a way that made the pages fly by. I think that’s impressive, because there is a lot of interiority which often makes a book slower paced. It has a really sad premise, though, so check out content warnings if you might need them. I thought I Who Have Never Known Men was a very good novel. It was interesting, and it was a bit lonely, and the premise is definitely a nightmare on several levels. Yet I enjoyed it.

Okay, spoilers start below!

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It opens with a narrator who has grown up in a “bunker”—isolated with a bunch of other women under absolute scrutiny in every moment; allowed no privacy, touch, or mental stimulation beyond talking to each other. The protagonist consistently calls it a bunker, but they are imprisoned—I would call it a prison.

They are kept in line by the crack of a whip in the air, meant to remind them of an earlier time they don’t remember, when they must have been actually whipped. The women have also been drugged over many years, they determine—and it’s unclear if that, or just an endless expanse of boredom and despair, has dulled their memories. They realize they’ve been on an abnormal sleeping schedule, too, by the protagonist learning to count her own heartbeats, and extrapolating that into minutes and hours.

The women and her, as a very small child, were kidnapped years ago and put in the room with no explanation. They are kept alive and sort of healthy, and clean, which baffles them all. Why would they be kept physically okay for so long—they wonder what their “use” is; why it would be worth it to hold them captive, in this holding pattern, for years? The narrative never offers an explanation—to the protagonist or to the reader.

About a third of the way into the book (it’s short, about 200 pages) they all escape. An alarm goes off, and all of the guards abandon what they’re doing, their weapons, everything, and vanish within minutes. The protagonist and her cell-mates are in the middle of being handed food when this happens, and miraculously the guard has left the key in the door. They turn the key and run.

By the time they climb out of this basement and out through a front door, there is no one there. They wander for years, finding many other bunkers, all filled with corpses, because they were abandoned without a key in reach for those trapped there. This is part of why I said miraculously—the narrative implies there was almost no chance this would happen.

Eventually, they stop wandering and settle down; they build a village. They eat only from very well-stored food in various “cabins” (what they call the entire structure that includes the “bunker” and the food stores and bizarrely empty offices.)

One by one, people die off, from age or illness or just despair, in the way that sometimes when someone elderly dies, their partner dies soon after. Not a sudden suicide, but dying of heartbreak. I don’t recall anyone dying of suicide except one character who’s already dying a painful death due to illness. Eventually, whenever someone is dying naturally and in too much pain, because there is no medicine, they ask the protagonist to stab them in the heart, which she does. She has no socialization against killing, and this is a favor, so while the others can’t make themselves do it, she doesn’t struggle at all.

There is ultimately nothing out there—no civilization beyond the abandoned cabins. They speculate about whether they are even still on Earth. The protagonist eventually finds, in one cabin, many years later, a hidden apartment, also abandoned, in fact seeming to have never been used before. She is the last one living at this point, and she moves into it, exploring the world and returning for the rest of her life. The novel is framed as her writing her life story, in case anyone is out there, and ever finds it.

There are a few big pieces of the book I want to discuss. There’s the mystery of where they are and why, which is never solved. There is the aspect of gender. There are themes about identity, isolation, connection, intimacy, and society as a whole.

My first question when I finished the book was: if there had been men, would these characters not have given up so quickly and completely?

I was struck by how a group of forty people only somewhat built a new society. It may just be that we should assume the narrator wasn’t describing it, because she doesn’t know what a society otherwise would be. Many of the women pair off into couples, and of course they are a group of people, so in some ways they are just carrying on with society.

But I was struck by the last few women dying, not of old age, more inexplicably. I read this as dying of boredom and despair about the end of what society they have—maybe also the despair of having seen so many people die, who died in the same moment they gained freedom.

What was that freedom, to them?

To the protagonist, it was an immense amount of freedom. A whole world opened up, even if it did not have more people, or diverse plants, or any animals. There are trees—they use these to build their homes—but otherwise it seems like a pretty empty landscape. Yet, this was much more of a world than she ever had before.

To the other women, this was much better than their recent past, but seems to pale in comparison to the lives they had before, with jobs, hobbies, children, and men.

The way the story unfolds made a lot of sense to me—they are at first surviving, then searching for information, then accepting that the rest of their lives are going to be the same; with each other in an empty world.

There isn’t discussion of what happiness people experienced, if any. There must have been happiness between the couples, between friends, and as a group; but it doesn’t seem to reach the protagonist, and having grown up without touch, she doesn’t want it—so for her, she is maybe meant to not be a narrator who could explain the happiness of hugging your friend or kissing your partner; holding hands.

But they do die. That is the piece that feels separate from the protagonist’s perspective. Some of them do give up and they die. Not all of them—some die of old age or cancer or something else. But especially near the end, some die younger without a medical reason.

I ask if it would be different with men for a few reasons—partly, would the women who were used to loving men feel less absence—but even greater, I think—would the ability to have children have changed everything?

Not necessarily as individuals, but as a group.

My partner is reading it too, and I discussed with them how sometimes it seemed very strange how they probably could have done more innovating to keep busy or improve things. They mentioned how strange it was that they built houses but when their combs broke, the characters gave up on having combs, instead of carving wooden ones. The tone of the novel evoked an experience of being without a drive to create, to really live. And it’s unclear if that is supposed to stem from feeling broken down by all those years in a prison cell or whatever effect drugs had had on them. But the protagonist also spent that time and likely had those drugs. I think she just wasn’t missing anything—there was only the bunker and the empty world, for her. And she was driven to explore and build for the rest of her life. She is in her sixties dying of cancer when she’s writing the story—she never gave up.

When I finished reading, I felt a need to problem solve—what made this book feel so lonely and despondent? I think the choice to have forty women was a really good one. I think if there had been say, only five women, it would have made sense so completely for the tone to be hopeless and lonely. There is little chance to spend a very long life with just five people in an empty world with no medicine. But forty—that’s enough for diversity, for friendships, and it was—they had partners and friends.

Why didn’t that become a more recognizable society? I’m sure some people would disagree with me that it didn’t. Having any norms makes a society, maybe. But I think the idea of being away from Earth reminded me of sci-fi kind of “starting a new civilization on an empty planet” narratives. If you’re alone in an empty landscape, does it feel useless to create? Does it feel even more useless among other people who miss a bustling world too painful to want to create again?

Am I projecting my own values, that a boring life is giving up?

If there had been men, and there had been children, would that be creating a new human world, rather than surviving an alien environment? And would that have added excitement to life that they couldn’t otherwise achieve?

The description on the back of the book called it a story about female friendship and intimacy, which is honestly confusing to me. The protagonist is not experiencing much intimacy—she doesn’t know how. She doesn’t feel like she can talk to others very much, she doesn’t like touch. She’s talking about romantic intimacy in a very far away fashion, and is not experiencing friendship intimacy in the way women usually talk about, or in the way she seems to disconnectedly observe in a few moments.

There is something interesting there about solidarity, though. It doesn’t sound like the women are having drama; the narrator does not talk about jealousy among the couples or really any fighting. They have been in survival mode together for a very long time. Would having men around, say if they found forty living men from one of the other bunkers, activate old expectations? Would it have created competition based around a sense of self-worth, or more practically, around who could have their own children?

Would it have created a very different society, where people were cooperative and respectful, and raised children communally, having been already living in such a communal way for so long?

Could that society grow?

Would they have figured out how to grow food if society was going to grow? Why didn’t they try to plant any of the potatoes? Would things have felt more worth it to try things if there were more people?

It makes me wonder—how much do we create in the world because we know there will be more people to appreciate it, to build on it?

Did Harpman even intend for their society to sound hopeless? I came away with this feeling, a feeling of eternally being home and knowing the world was happening somewhere else. I have had times where I feel isolated, and crawl desperately into my phone to feel like I’m not. The plot of this book is such an interesting scale of the nightmare of being alone. It’s enough that it isn’t isolation as an individual, but it’s an isolation from their origins, their family and friends, their culture, and the idea of a future. There very much is everything else happening somewhere else. I haven’t read a book with that level of isolation in it. It’s such a somber, sad feeling to imagine.

I’m very curious why this title was chosen. Is the title “I Who Have Never Known Men” just a provocative title, or is that really crucial to the story? Is it about the fact she is lacking a lacking, not knowing a society with men? She has also never known children, but that wasn’t the title. What about men is important enough?

One of the inciting moments of the plot was the protagonist’s frustration that the women wouldn’t explain sex to her. In the first scenes, she has given up on connecting with the others because after a lot of feeling left out, they also won’t explain sex to her—what they are missing with men—because “what use would it be?” They don’t want to talk about it. No one explains it to her until significantly after their escape, when people start creating couples (and one triad!) When she learns about women having sex with each other, she asks what men are for.

This all does present the role of men as sexual and romantic, and I assume also fathering, as some of them have children they lost.

This makes me think that if these women can have sex and friendship, then what is missing without men is children. This is never stated in the novel, and I think that is so interesting. It doesn’t sound like anyone complains about lacking children, which makes sense, I imagine it would be too painful, and too distant at the point where they’re free.

When I read the passages about finding the dead men, it was a different sort of sad. I imagine it would be very painful to miss men conceptually and find only endless corpses of them, beyond the horror of finding so many corpses at all. It’s interesting having a narrator so different from the other characters; it’s unclear how much she’s not saying because it doesn’t matter to her, versus what we should assume the other women don’t talk about at all.

I also wonder: what would it have been like if all the bunkers had been full of women, and all those women had escaped?

In wondering what else might have made people feel less despondent—I’m desperate internally to write a version of this that is less painful, I guess—I am thinking about what would have happened if it had simply been many more people.

Would that have felt more like a whole society to them? Felt like people really lived in this place? Like creating a new place with what they have available? Would that have been enough people to need rules, laws? Would that have lead to jobs (building, looking for food, etc.) that were categorical rather than by individual?

I’m speculating that with a further extension of the world that would include a similarly unlimited amount of food. The other prisoners being dead meant taking food scarcity out of the picture. I want to assume that’s still available—maybe finding much larger stores of just food, or something.

Focusing entirely on the social aspect—is forty people a low enough number to not need structure? Why do we have structure? At what point is structure and major conflict more inevitable?

Does this story imply that women, alone, wouldn’t have that kind of conflict? Or just that people with their spirits already broken would not dare to create strife between them?

Gender Roles

Something interesting my partner also mentioned to me is that the protagonist doesn’t really have the same gender as the other women. She calls them “the women” and they call her “the child”. She doesn’t actually have a name (which is why I’ve just called her the protagonist throughout this essay).

I agree that her gender is different. Without a reason to enforce gender roles, they haven’t done so on her. They haven’t raised her to care about male approval, or women’s “roles” in society. They are the only society she has.

Without being raised in with gender roles, being called a girl or a woman doesn’t mean the same thing. I think that’s why 1) there are a lot of women who don’t understand non-binary identity because they themselves simply don’t care about their role as women and it’s just a title 2) some such people identify as non-binary later in life when they first learn that’s an option.

I’ve done so much thinking and talking and reading about gender over the last decade+, and one of the more interesting concepts is gradients and versions of gender. There is “woman” and “man” and a conglomeration of non-binary under that label, if we want to reduce it down to the broadest strokes our society can handle. But, because “not a man or woman” is not one experience, with no assigned roles, there are infinite other labels people use to describe their gender. If “outside or in between” has infinite versions, can’t women and men also have infinite versions? When people talk about sports bro guys and geeky guys—don’t they have different gendered expectations under some umbrella ones? I live in the Pacific Northwest, and men here seem to have a different expected gender than where I’m from on the East Coast.

I’d say this protagonist has no gendered expectations at all—and so she is also living outside of the gender of woman, or is just perhaps a different gender of woman than the others—who may themselves have a different relationship to gender than each other. It’s very unclear if those who create couples are all already queer, or if life without men made them more flexible.

That’s another fascinating aspect of this story. It’s barely touched on but stands out so loudly. When one character explains to the protagonist that the women are “doing what they can for each other,” to explain the couples and their sex lives, it implies they are missing out on a “real thing” of being with men. There’s never any discussion with those women, which seems so impossible to me; so—did the protagonist leave it out of the story, or just not care to question it, or learn more about these people?

Did the author simply not want to address queerness directly, but from the side, forcing all kinds of readers to consider it? I can imagine it harder to object to a story about women having sex with each other in a world devoid of men.

Education & the Role of Storytelling

The purpose of education comes up a few times in the book. There’s the initial “what use would it be?” presented to her about knowledge sex. Then later, she does ask about learning to read. The friend she’s made tells her they tried a bit when she was young, but they couldn’t make her learn, and there wasn’t really a use for the knowledge. It makes a bit more sense why they’d tell her there’s no use when she asks questions later—they long had to accept that education might mean nothing for her. I’m really fascinated by that. I don’t have conclusions, but this also stood out to me.

One of the most fascinating things in this book to me was the lack of storytelling. When they are still in the “bunker”, their only real entertainment is talking to each other. The protagonist does not mention any storytelling, and while I did not think about it while reading, afterwards, that is such an interesting choice from the author. I assume that if I were trapped for maybe the rest of my life with a bunch of people, with no entertainment or touch, the only possible salve would be that there are so many minds for storytelling.

They never discussed their backgrounds during their imprisonment, and I wonder if that is supposed to also explain the lack of storytelling. Maybe it was too painful to imagine the world they knew, or a magical world that exists to them just as much (as little) as the lives they once had. Or, maybe that’s meant to be explained by the drugs. I think of storytelling as one of the biggest pieces of human life and culture. That’s what a culture is—storytelling. Does this narrative imply that they had the storytelling drive removed from them? Would their lives without men and children and new people seemed less sad with that drive in tact?

Conclusion

As you can see, I was left with so many questions; my thoughts are mostly questions branching from my own questions. That doesn’t even include the direct questions the text never answered—why they were there, where they guards went, etc. I think this book is written incredibly well for leaving so much to wonder about while telling a complete story. I really recommend I Who Have Never Known Men if you can deal with the painful subject matter.

If you’ve read it (or even if you haven’t), I would LOVE love love to hear your thoughts and interpretations. Your takeaways from the plot, different questions, if you have different ideas about my questions, what you think about this piece, questions for me about the plot or my interpretations, or whatever else you’d like to share.

If you’d like to comment publicly (and start/join a discussion!) you can click the button below, or you can email me directly at michaelzzaki.writes@gmail.com to have a chat with just me!

Thank you so much for reading!!