Flatland by Edwin A. Abbott (books to read to get smarter TXT) 📕

of ascertaining what I may call their invisible Irregularity, that is to say their potential Irregularities as regards possible offspring. This is effected by carefully-kept pedigrees, which are preserved and supervised by the State; and without a certified pedigree no woman is allowed to marry.

Now it might have been supposed that a Circle⁠—proud of his ancestry and regardful for a posterity which might possibly issue hereafter in a Chief Circle⁠—would be more careful than any other to choose a wife who had no blot on her escutcheon. But it is not so. The care in choosing a Regular wife appears to diminish as one rises in the social scale. Nothing would induce an aspiring Isosceles, who had hopes of generating an Equilateral son, to take a wife who reckoned a single Irregularity among her ancestors; a Square or Pentagon, who is confident that his family is steadily on the rise, does not inquire above the five-hundredth generation; a Hexagon or Dodecagon is even more careless of the wife’s pedigree; but a Circle has been known deliberately to take a wife who has had an Irregular great-grandfather, and all because of some slight superiority of lustre, or because of the charms of a low voice⁠—which, with us, even more than you, is thought “an excellent thing in woman.”

Such ill-judged marriages are, as might be expected, barren, if they do not result in positive Irregularity or in diminution of sides; but none of these evils have hitherto proved sufficiently deterrent. The loss of a few sides in a highly-developed Polygon is not easily noticed, and is sometimes compensated by a successful operation in the Neo-Therapeutic Gymnasium, as I have described above; and the Circles are too much disposed to acquiesce in infecundity as a law of the superior development. Yet, if this evil be not arrested, the gradual diminution of the Circular class may soon become more rapid, and the time may be not far distant when, the race being no longer able to produce a Chief Circle, the Constitution of Flatland must fall.

One other word of warning suggests itself to me, though I cannot so easily mention a remedy; and this also refers to our relations with women. About three hundred years ago, it was decreed by the Chief Circle that, since women are deficient in reason but abundant in emotion, they ought no longer to be treated as rational, nor receive any mental education. The consequence was that they were no longer taught to read, nor even to master arithmetic enough to enable them to count the angles of their husband or children; and hence they sensibly declined during each generation in intellectual power. And this system of female non-education or quietism still prevails.

My fear is that, with the best intentions, this policy has been carried so far as to react injuriously on the male sex.

For the consequence is that, as things now are, we males have to lead a kind of bi-lingual, and I may almost say bi-mental, existence. With women, we speak of “love,” “duty,” “right,” “wrong,” “pity,” “hope,” and other irrational and emotional conceptions, which have no existence, and the fiction of which has no object except to control feminine exuberances; but among ourselves, and in our books, we have an entirely different vocabulary and I may almost say, idiom. “Love” then becomes “the anticipation of benefits”; “duty” becomes “necessity” or “fitness”; and other words are correspondingly transmuted. Moreover, among women, we use language implying the utmost deference for their sex; and they fully believe that the Chief Circle Himself is not more devoutly adored by us than they are: but behind their backs they are both regarded and spoken of⁠—by all except the very young⁠—as being little better than “mindless organisms.”

Our theology also in the women’s chambers is entirely different from our theology elsewhere.

Now my humble fear is that this double training, in language as well as in thought, imposes somewhat too heavy a burden upon the young, especially when, at the age of three years old, they are taken from the maternal care and taught to unlearn the old language⁠—except for the purpose of repeating it in the presence of their mothers and nurses⁠—and to learn the vocabulary and idiom of science. Already methinks I discern a weakness in the grasp of mathematical truth at the present time as compared with the more robust intellect of our ancestors three hundred years ago. I say nothing of the possible danger if a woman should ever surreptitiously learn to read and convey to her sex the result of her perusal of a single popular volume; nor of the possibility that the indiscretion or disobedience of some infant male might reveal to a mother the secrets of the logical dialect. On the simple ground of the enfeebling of the male intellect, I rest this humble appeal to the highest authorities to reconsider the regulations of female education.

Part II Other Worlds

“O brave new worlds, that have such people in them!”

XIII How I Had a Vision of Lineland

It was the last day but one of the 1999th year of our era, and the first day of the Long Vacation. Having amused myself till a late hour with my favourite recreation of geometry, I had retired to rest with an unsolved problem in my mind. In the night I had a dream.

I saw before me a vast multitude of small Straight Lines (which I naturally assumed to be women) interspersed with other beings still smaller and of the nature of lustrous points⁠—all moving to and fro in one and the same Straight Line, and, as nearly as I could judge, with the same velocity.