I Who Have Never Known Men

A Book Review

I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Harpman is a science fiction novel about a young girl who has grown and lived in a cage underground with thirty-nine other women. The novel began with our main character, who the women called “child,” becoming conscious and curious about her situation. With no memory of her early childhood before being taken captive, the girl only knows the bars surrounding her, the two toilets at the center of the room, the mattresses each woman sleeps on, and the three male guards that pace the perimeter of the cage at every moment, ensuring they keep themselves alive and healthy without causing any disturbance. None of the women know why they were captured, who captured them, or how long they’ve been there. The only indication of time down there was the child that was taken with them by mistake, acting as their “human clock”. The entire novel is narrated by the young girl in one long continuous chapter, or train of thought. It is an account of her life as she becomes introspective in the cage and seeks knowledge from the other women. Fortunately, a freak incident caused the guards to abandon their posts and leave the keys in the lock of the cage. Shock reverberated among the women as they soon realized they were free to escape, but at what cost? Once the women made their way outside to see the world they once knew, they had found that it completely changed, and that they were the only people alive. For the girl who had never known life before the cage, everything was new and exciting. It’s a complete account of human life from the perspective of a girl who doesn’t know love, society, or norms in the traditional sense.

Review (Beware of Spoilers )

At around midnight today I read the novel’s last sentence:

“It is strange that I am dying from a diseased womb, I who have never had periods and I who have never known men,” (Harpman, 1995).

and I quietly closed the book, placed it on my bed, and shut my eyes for a moment. It was far too quiet in my apartment and I had far too many thoughts racing around in my head for such silence. The ending was heartbreaking. In fact, I would say most of the novel was heartbreaking, but it was beautiful.

Let’s take a step back, to the beginning of the novel. The first quarter or so of the novel follows our main character as she tells readers about her life, how she doesn’t remember life before the cage, and she only knows Earth before through the 39 other women who experienced it. The other women had lives with careers, husbands, and children that they were forced to leave behind. Curiously, they can’t seem to remember how they ended up in the cage and they don’t remember the first few days they were there, evidence of possible drugging involved. From the signs of the girl’s body, the other women were able to tell that she was about fourteen or fifteen years old, and it was around this age that she begins her story. This is the age that she begins to think more inquisitively.

As I was reading the pages that followed just her thoughts alone, I couldn’t help thinking how intelligent she was. She had formulated intricate ideas, complex ways to measure time, and was able to participate in lengthy discourse with another prisoner, Anthea. I couldn’t believe that this young teenager who never had any proper education and couldn’t read or write, was fully capable of thinking on such a high level. But as she explained her life, it made all the sense in the world. Here, you have a girl who has been rejected from knowing too much about Earth and society and who is ignored by a majority of the women because of her young age. She delves into the rules the guards have set for the women by use of fear conditioning: no touching each other, no speaking too loudly, no self-harming, and no conspiring. If any of these are breached, the guards threaten them with their crackling whips. Furthermore, the guards have set their schedule where they are woken up, given food to cook and eat, given a few hours of leisure, and then they’re given another round of food to cook and eat, and they are promptly sent to bed. Within those few hours where they are not cooking, they have absolutely nothing to do besides talk to each other. For our main character who has been ostracized by the women for being the only child, she is denied their only pleasure they have of conversing. So then, I thought, “Well, no wonder she’s so goddamn smart, all she does is think.” It made me wonder if I were to be left to my own devices, with nothing but gray walls and questions, would I also be that smart? Would I also be that curious? If I have to ask myself that question, then there’s only one answer. However, this made for such an amazing, dynamic main character and I instantly decided that I really enjoyed her and her thoughts.

I’ll leave you the sheer joy of reading when the women finally escape the cage and can emerge on Earth’s surface, because it was such an exhilarating read. After the women escaped, they chattered about their next move, and then curiously, they made a private bathroom out of blankets, shrubs, and a hole in the ground. And this, my friends, was the first time our main character had been completely alone.

“At once I had a curious impression of strangeness. My heart thumped, I felt light-headed. I glanced around: I could only see the thorny branches and the folds of the brown-coloured blankets that created a screen between the others and myself. I shivered. But I soon understood: this was the first time that I’d ever found myself alone. No woman could see me, and I couldn’t see any of them. I found that very disturbing. I stood there at a loss, contemplating my situation. I discovered physical solitude, something so ordinary for all the others, but which I had never experienced. It immediately appealed to me,” (Harpman, 1995).

It dawned on me then that this young girl has never known herself alone, without the constant presence of another human being beside her or watching her intently. This singular fact alone sums up our main character as a person and explains why she prefers the company of herself rather than most of the women she spent her life with.

As the women venture further into their new lives being free, we see that they begin to couple up. This confuses our main character deeply because before they were freed, she had never felt the touch of another person. She also never finished fully developing. We read that her breasts and pubic hair began to grow, but that they shortly stopped. She never began her menstruation cycle, and she never felt romantic feelings. In the cage she experienced “explosions” after creating elaborate stories in her mind. Originally, I thought she may be experiencing something similar to an orgasm, but I soon realized that because she never finished developing, these were just moments of pure pleasure, incredible excitement. So, this young girl never knew physical or romantic attraction, and she never would. The novel then begs the question: What are we, if not for romantic love- if not for the purpose of procreating?

The years trek on, the women move between cabins, stock up just enough to reach the next cabin, and so on. Eventually they begin to learn that they are the only humans left alive, and the oldest of the women, Dorothy, soon becomes frail. The women continue on until she dies, as she requested: “If you stop, I’ll say to myself that half an hour later we might have found something, and I’ll die angry. I want to keep going until my last breath,” (Harpman, 1995). Once Dorothy died, the older of the women became tired as well and had wanted to find a suitable area to settle down and build homes. Our main character became quite the carpenter and builder. She managed all of the house projects and built up to ten houses at one point. This was so the couples could have their privacy and live in a makeshift, but functioning village as they might have once before. Slowly but surely, each of the women die of old age or the implications that come with aging, and our main character finds herself completely and utterly alone on this planet.

When alone, the main character, now well into her forties, sets out on an adventure to find an answer as to why they were captured and kept alive underground all of those years ago. She walks for years, finding little but the evidence on an abandoned road that something catastrophic happened when they were released (readers will have to find out). Her hope falters, until she finds a pile of stones carefully placed on one another. She begins digging beneath the marked spot on the ground and soon she finds a hatch that leads down a spiral staircase, and to a corridor with endless objects that she’s never heard of or seen (later revealed to be all sorts of technology), and at the end of the corridor, a door that led to a room, kitchen, and bathroom. All of which she had never seen before. A room with books, a bed, and a bathtub. It was luxury. From then on, she used that underground bunker as her home base, and she returned to it after every expedition she had. Fifty, she said. Fifty more expeditions, and she never did find anything else. What was her purpose?

I believe her purpose, even though she denied the fact of it, was to find her own humanity. She repeatedly say that she’s “barely human,” but the entire novel is her chasing humanity. Her purpose matched humanity’s own. To learn to love, and not romantically, but platonically and holistically. To learn to love the planet as she was introduced to it. To understand the world she never knew. To learn everything there was to know under the sun. To keep going, even if there was no one beside her to share her knowledge with. In the end, she did feel lonely and she did miss having someone to love. That was proof enough that she found her humanity, and fulfilled her sole purpose.

Let’s talk about the last line. The line that broke my heart and buried it in a desert where it would be impossible to dig up. It wasn’t an accident that the guards were always men, and it certainly wasn’t an accident that this particular story was told from the perspective of a young girl who never got to see “men” besides the ones who kept her captive. Sure, she had the idea of a man from the guards’ presence, and the stories that she heard from the other women, but she had never interacted with a man, never really looked upon a man, and never spoke with a man. She truly, in every single aspect imaginable, did not know men. It’s because of this and her underdeveloped sex that she is not enthralled by the idea of romantic love or physical intimacy. She’s tried to imagine it, made up several detailed stories about her and the young guard, but nothing progressed more than eye contact and spoken words. She must not have been very interested in more. So why then was she burdened with the illness of ovarian cancer when she has never meaningfully met a man? Her womb was not intended for the biological use that it was given for, yet she had to suffer the implications of it when her body grew old. It was no mistake that she dies this way, and it is a blunt nod towards feminism and the harm men cause women (although not direct) even when all of the men in the world have died.

There are a few other things that intrigued me about this strange, new world the women entered when they came out of the hole. Why were they being kept in a cage? What was the alarm for? Where had the guards gone after they left the cabins? There was absolutely no trace of them afterwards, not even their sacks of belongings that our main character found on the bus later on. Why? Why did they need to wear masks? Could they not breathe oxygen? Might they have been alien? Did they invade Earth and keep these cabins as sort of human farms, minus the breeding? So many questions that I will ponder on for the rest of my days until I read the novel again (which I am already looking forward to).

I Who Have Never Known Men was a masterpiece.

Rating: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️