‘I Who Have Never Known Men’ Left Me Frustrated and Fearful

‘Even a person raised in captivity learns to want, yearns to see beyond their cage. How much of our humanity is intrinsic? How much remains, when all else is stripped away?’

- I Who Have Never Known Men, Jacqueline Harpman, 1995

A few weeks ago, I was sat in a writing class that began by asking which book I had read recently that made me feel the most uneasy. I Who Have Never Known Men may sound like a dream on the surface, but it crept into my bones and sunk in a fear that only grips you in a way that the unknowable can, the way only true psychological fear sinks in.

Uneasy is certainly the word I would use to describe how I felt when reading this book. A truly unique reading experience, and I’m not sure I’ll find anything else quite like it. I don’t think dystopian or sci-fi labels quite encapsulate this novel; perhaps the closest identifier would be to call it something like speculative fiction, but speculating what exactly? Well, I’m not sure we ever truly find out.

I Who Have Never Known Men follows our nameless protagonist, a girl who has grown up in a bunker, imprisoned with 39 other women who all have vague memories of their lives before they were taken - all apart from our protagonist, who has only known her cell, these women, and the male guards on rotation in the bunker. One day, an alarm blares, the men disappear, and the women are left alone. Their freedom, however, is not quite as sweet as they were expecting.

Jacqueline Harpman is a master at drip-feeding the reader just enough information to keep them engaged, to set the mind racing and leave them ultimately frustrated, yet changed. This little novel held a narrative I can’t get out of my head. Because our protagonist has grown up only knowing her imprisonment, without a family or a home, her view of the world is skewed, and wholly objective. She struggles with feeling the same emotions as the rest of the women as she can only guess at what the longing for their other lives feels like - she does not know what the food they miss tastes like, or how it hurts to miss their partners and children. Moreover, because of her stunted growth in the bunker she does not ovulate, and can’t quite manage to understand the ideas of sex and romance as the other women explain them to her. Because of this removed perspective of the world, it is at times difficult to be in her head. However while reading I found myself fully submerging my mind into hers, and becoming frustrated as she was by the other women’s lack of determination to find out what happened to them, and where they have ended up.

As someone who needs answers (I didn't quite realise just how much I hated unanswered questions until reading this book), I found it was quite easy to get into our protagonist’s mindset. After gaining their freedom, the women are instead in a prison of unlimited confinement: a world unfamiliar to them, with no-one to be found.

This book deals with freedom as a central concept - what does freedom look like, and can you really be free if your only choice is survival? Even without the guards at the door of their cell, the women have no choice but to wander a barren landscape to try and find answers, or civilisation, or a new home. Instead of the bunker, our protagonist finds herself stuck in an endless loop of searching for something she can’t imagine herself: a life she has only had described to her. 

I think part of what makes I Who Have Never Known Men such a terrifying tale is the idea of being purposeless, of not knowing why you were put somewhere and what for. To be completely alone and not have any responsibility, or any reason to carry on being a functioning human being. I’m not sure any of us can truly say what our purpose is - we can have our own individual answers: some people aim for success, or love, or family, but a universal answer as to why we are here is something we’ll never know. Something there is likely no answer to. However, that doesn’t make our existence purposeless. We work, we forge relationships, we eat, play, create, tell stories - all in order of making our lives ones worth living. 

(Spoilers ahead).

The protagonist of Harpman’s novel spends her entire life trying to find the answers to her existence, only to come up with none. She travels a deserted wasteland - that it is hinted at pretty heavily is not Earth as we know it - for her entire life, looking for something, anything, that could explain why her life was taken from her and why she has no memory of what came before. We never find out why forty women were imprisoned and guarded by nameless men who don’t speak. We never find out where they disappeared to, or how. And those unanswered questions leave our protagonist to have led, arguably, a purposeless existence.

One of the women, after being asked whether beauty was for men, answers: ‘Some women say that it is for ourselves. What on earth can we do with it? I could have loved myself whether I was hunchbacked or lame, but to be loved by others, you had to be beautiful’. This is a really interesting answer to me, not just meditating on the idea of beauty and external appearance, but also the idea that some things are done entirely for the benefit or attention of others, rather than ourselves. This became something that I kept at the back of my mind throughout the novel, as one by one the women die and leave our protagonist alone. She wonders, now that she has no-one to depend on her, and she knows she can never have the answers she desires above all else, whether there is any point in anything if it is only for herself. The simple routines of life that she was performing alongside the other women suddenly become optional - how much do we do things for ourselves, and how much for other people?

It’s these kinds of questions, that you could go over and over again in your mind and never come up with an answer, that I Who Have Never Known Men prompts. It not only introduces numbers of unanswered questions, but causes the reader to spiral through their own. To me that is the point of this novel, if there is one: to ask and provide no answer.

Perhaps that’s why I find it so terrifying. It makes me think too much.