By Kelly Keene

Originally published in 1995, I Who Have Never Known Men is a uniquely dystopian novel that has been republished recently in response to a growing interest in dystopian literature. Harpman, a Belgian author whose work was originally published in French, wrote many novels, but this was the first translated into English. The story begins when a young girl starts to go through puberty. She’s trapped in an underground cage of some sort, surrounded by thirty-nine other women. This narrator, who tells the story from the end of her life looking back on the moment she first became self-aware, was raised entirely in captivity. Unlike the older women, she has no memories of life before imprisonment. She is also physically different: she never develops properly, never menstruates, and lacks the ability to reproduce. We learn that all the women were originally from Earth, and that despite her stunted development, the narrator still feels desire, longing, and curiosity. As she says early on, “Human beings need to speak, otherwise they lose their humanity” (21). Her desire to speak and converse with the others nurtures the buddening humanity within her.

The book has no chapters or traditional organization; it moves much like the narrator’s life. The guards who provide food and medicine disappear one day when an alarm sounds, and the women are suddenly able to escape their imprisonment. Before they escape, the older women have stopped engaging deeply with their own thoughts. They distance themselves from the narrator because she reminds them of everything they’ve lost. When she begins asking questions and trying to engage them intellectually, they hesitate, afraid to “wake up” from the numbness they have maintained for years. She urges them to keep thinking. When Anthea, the mother-figure to our speaker, tells her that the speaking is not necessary, she replies, “True, but I’ll know what you think, you’ll know what I think, and perhaps that will spark off a new idea, and then we’ll feel as if we’re behaving like human beings rather than robots” (24). This captures a central conflict in the story. To remain silent, and passive might also mean losing the crucial bit of us that makes us human. Even as she awakens to her reality, there is always a fear of slipping back into the ignorance and apathy of before. She says, “I’m afraid that the guards will realize and will drug us again. We’ll sink back into apathy, we’ll be half-dead and we won’t even realize it. I can’t imagine anything more humiliating” (50).

Inside the cage, mealtime is the only topic the women can sustain conversation about. The young girl—excited by thoughts, ideas, and even the intrigue of a young guard—cannot understand why she is an outcast. Another defining feature of the cage is its lack of privacy; constant exposure reinforces their loss of personhood. Her difference—her ability to think in new ways—becomes crucial on the day they escape. At the end of the tunnel leading out of the cage is a long staircase that stretches to the surface. The narrator, the youngest and most naïve, is also the bravest and the first to take the risk of climbing the stairs. Reflecting on the difference between herself and the women who struggled to adapt, she notes, “They’d wanted something all their lives, but now they had it they didn’t recognize it. Perhaps, when everyone has experienced a day-to-day life that makes sense, they can never become accustomed to strangeness. That is something that I, who have only experienced absurdity, can only suppose” (56). Symbolically, this suggests that younger generations sometimes remind older ones of the value of taking risks—even after we’ve accepted our fate. Those risks allow us to still feel alive.

Another thing that sets the narrator apart after their escape, is her willingness to take a life. Most of the women are much older than she is, and many fall ill as they travel long distances across a bleak and unfamiliar landscape. After a time, they stop searching for others, even though they find signs of life. They settle in an area with water and access to bunkers stocked with food—enough to sustain them indefinitely. As time passes, one by one the women die. When some of them suffer from illness or injury, it is the narrator who steps forward to end their pain. Her youth and inexperience make her, strangely, an empathetic murderer. The others cannot bring themselves to kill someone they love, but she sees it as an act of mercy.

Much of the middle of the story hinges on the decision between continuing to explore or stopping to build a community. What does it mean to settle? For the narrator, settling means giving up on the possibility of a wider world. Her desire to keep moving, even as most of the group perishes, reveals another way she differs from the women who have known men, or who have known life before the cage. When the women choose to settle, they build homes and latrines, giving each other dignity and privacy. Their relationships become distinguished and  some couple off. They create meaning in the absence of anything else. 

Everything changes when the narrator decides to continue on alone. The novel shifts from communal survival to individual wandering. She becomes physically isolated, yet mentally more connected to the women whose deaths she witnessed. She explores bunker after bunker—grim reminders of humanity’s capacity for cruelty. Many resemble concentration camps, with bodies stacked and abandoned. She wonders whether the corpses might be her family, “Perhaps one of the Dead women I’d seen in the bunkers was my mother, and my father was lying mummified near the bars of one of the prisons; all the links between them and me have been severed. There’s no continuity and the world I have come from is utterly foreign to me. I haven’t heard its music, I haven’t seen its painting, I haven’t read its books, except for the handful I found in the Refuge and of which I understood little. I know only the Stony plane wandering, and the gradual loss of hope. I am the sterile offspring of a race about which I know nothing, not even whether it has become extinct. Perhaps somewhere, humanity is flourishing under the stars, unaware that a daughter of its blood is ending her days in silence. There is nothing we can do about it” (102). It no longer matters. The narrator has already found her family among the women she lived with, cared for, and killed mercifully. She also finds companionship in books, art, and writing. She says tears never came to my eyes except when I think about anthea, a woman I actually knew. I cannot mourn for what I have not known” (102). 

Thinking and learning are the core tenets Harpman underscores in this moment of the story. To love, and connect is to learn and explore. If we have not explored relationships with our biological family, our ancestors, we do not know, and we therefore do not suffer when we lose them. 

One of the most frustrating aspects of the novel is that we never learn what actually happened to Earth or how the women ended up in the cage. We almost receive answers when the narrator discovers a bus filled with dead guards—possible evidence of their attempted escape—but the scene provides no real explanation. Learning to become comfortable with the unexplainable is one of the novel’s major themes. What choices do we make in the face of total despair, annihilation, and uncertainty? The narrator chooses exploration, reading, and writing. She ends her life in another underground bunker, this one richly furnished with art and literature. She reads Shakespeare and finds a measure of peace.

Although I usually prefer plot-driven stories, I appreciated the vast descriptions of the landscape. The setting is intriguing—desolate enough to suggest an overwhelming void, yet containing just enough resources to sustain life. There are no animals, few plants, and the central features of the environment are the hills, rivers, and stars. In the absence of people to interact with, the characters look inward for motivation and purpose.

The narrator’s skill with carpentry also stands out. Once the women settle, she becomes adept at crafting homes, furniture, and tools. In the cage, she had only her mind; outside it, she has wood, tools, and physical labor. Yet even carpentry becomes a distraction—something to occupy restless hands while her mind continues searching for meaning.

The title remains provocative. Although the characters’ experiences appear centered on gender, the novel also includes bunkers filled with forty men who died. The only living men the narrator ever sees are the guards. Her first awareness of men awakens her to her own reality, yet she never gets to know them in any meaningful way. The absence of men, and the narrator’s inability to experience the world they belonged to, raises questions about identity, humanity, and what it means to live a full life.

Overall, I thought the book was just okay. I wanted more from it, and I don’t like that the novel never reveals the mystery of how the women arrived there, what happened to Earth or if the land we explore here is even Earth at all. Still, it is a compelling thought experiment. I recommend it to students interested in philosophy or texts that examine the core of humanity. As a feminist text, I’m not sure femininity is as central to the narrative as advertised. However, the difference between the narrator and the other women, her lack of development and her unique way of understanding the world, is undeniably interesting.

Harpman, J., Schwartz, R., & Mackintosh, S. (2022). I Who Have Never Known Men. Transit Books. Print.