A Knife Through her Heart: A Woman’s Absurdism in Jaqueline Harpman’s "I Who Have Never Known Men"

    Absurdism can be defined as rejecting the search for meaning in a meaningless world. In her novel I Who Have Never Known Men, Jaqueline Harpman uses absurd aesthetics and a dying world where men no longer exist to re-signify the philosophical concept of absurdity through a gynocentric perspective. In the study of philosophy, women are more than not excluded from narratives such as absurdity. Albert Camus, the mind behind absurdism, and other male philosophers refer to humanity as “man,” which allows them to group together all experiences and ignore what separates women from men: deep rooted global patriarchies. In Harpman’s work, the reader sees how isolation in womanhood leads to hopelessness as a result of the morals androcentric societies force on women, literal depictions of philosophical suicide through the symbol of a heart, and a reworking of vanity to fit the idea of the unknown in an absurd world. 

It is far more common in literature and film for girlhood and womanhood to be connected to existentialism, or the search for meaning in a meaningless world. Famous examples of this include The Bell Jar or Pearl, both works where women experience psychotic breaks. As opposed to these stereotypes, Harpman allows a feminine character to exist in a world of absurdity absent of existentialist ideology. In the original French, Harpman uses the word, “absurde,” which most closely translates to “absurd,” 11 times in the 177-page novel. The girl, who also behaves as the narrator, refers to herself by saying, “I, who have only experienced absurdity…” (Harpman 55). The absurdity the narrator refers to is her life, which began as a girl trapped in a bunker with thirty-nine other women. Her and the women eventually escape only to find everyone else in the world is dead. One by one, the women die of hopelessness and the girl is left on her own. She grows old and develops cancer, ultimately resulting in a decision to kill herself. The dynamic of her being a prisoner who was drugged, who knows nothing of how civilizations once lived, being guarded by men, not menstruating as a result of such, watching the women sew, cook, and go about their lives, all while also hearing stories of women who have tried to kill themselves in the bunker are the details that mold the plot into absurdity. Sisyphus is a figure in Greek Mythology who was condemned to rolling a stone up a hill, only to watch it fall, and must repeat his actions. Absurdists often refer to Sisyphus as the perfect human. Framing the story through the perspective of a girl in the midst of absurdity allows Harpman to pose the narrator as a female Sisyphus and force women into this narrative. 

At the beginning of the novel, the girl sets up her story in telling us about the ways she spends her days after all the other women have died. Her opening statement says, “Since I barely venture outside these days, I spend a lot of time in one of the armchairs, rereading the books” (Harpman 1). The narrator’s actions are presented as repetitive. However, she still endures pain in her tranquility, which is shown when she speaks about grieving over her lost friends. She says, “I, who could no longer speak because there is no one to hear me, began to call her” (Harpman 2). The narrator also presents the pain she feels in losing her friends as “as powerful as the pain of the cancer in my belly” (Harpman 2). What separates her from Sisyphus, however, is suicide, which is her escape from the absurdity of the world. But it is important to note here that Sisyphus had no way of escaping the absurdity he was condemned to, unlike the narrator. Creating a feminine Sisyphus allows the story to be told from both a gynocentric and absurdist view. However, the narrator was not able to get to this point without first encountering the absurd. 

While in the bunkers, the women are held under extremely restrictive circumstances, which are seen in their fear of even raising their voices. If the women were to resist or break a rule, they were whipped by the male guards who ruled over them. The tasks the women had been able to do were to make decisions about which vegetable to cook for dinner, talk, and sew. All these tasks reflect gender norms imposed on women in patriarchal societies. Another way the women are restricted is through a lack of access to feminine hygiene products. According to the narrator, the women had to deal with their periods by “washing out the rags they had to jam between their legs as best as they could by squeezing them together with their thigh muscles” (Harpman 6). The lack of resources reflects how androcentrism leads to unsafe methods of dealing with menstruation. As men rule a government, ignorance is prevalent when making laws on what is traditionally viewed as “women’s menstrual health. It is important to note that Harpman excludes transgender identities from this narrative. There is never any reasoning as to why the women were in bunkers, which sucks more meaning out of the women’s lives, therefore creating yet another absurd factor out of the concept of men ruling over women. This critiques the way women are treated in androcentric societies by forcing the reader to view misogynistic treatment as a part of the meaninglessness and absurdity of life the women lead. 

Another factor of absurdity is shown in the isolation between the girl and the women at the beginning of the novel. Because she does not menstruate or have any knowledge about men, the narrator grows distant from the other women, and them from her. She finds comfort during her years of isolation in the bunkers through the development of a romantic fantasy about one of the male guards. She says, “I prided myself and reveled in having found a distraction that I thought was extraordinary” (Harpman 17). She was able to concentrate for days on the male guard’s pace and lead herself through detailed imagery in her stories. For the girl, she begins to reflect what is seen in modern society as “fangirl behavior.” Fanfiction is a form of fantasy where the fan is able to live their own utopia alongside characters or celebrities they have grow obsessed with. Teenage fangirls are most famous for fanfictions. The girl’s obsession with the guard creates fantasies in her head which can be closely connected to the behavior reflected in fanfictions. Fantasizing is the root of what is known as philosophical suicide. Philosophical suicide is the concept of using a foreseen utopia to find peace in an absurd world. Harpman poses the narrator as a girl who can only find escape from absurdity through fantasizing about men—which is often the way fangirl behavior is perceived in an androcentric and misogynistic society.

Her concentration transforms when she hears from one of the women that everyone has a certain amount of heart beats per minute. The women make use of the girl only when they find that she is able to track minutes and hours with her heartbeats. It is only through acting as a clock that the girl develops a relationship with the women. The idea that a girl is only useful with her heart reflects the view presented by The Cult of Domesticity, which was that women are only useful to be nurturing and loving, through a literal sense. Through using a heart as a clock, Harpman is able to create a symbol of the heart through connecting it to time. Shortly after discovering how to keep time, the guards flee the bunkers. Harpman then makes a situation where the women are able to escape the bunkers. This symbolizes the end of a patriarchal government. It was the girl, in her haste to know the outside world, who convinced the women to go outside with her. The first thing the girl experienced when she stepped outside was rain, which typically symbolizes sorrow, but she viewed it as beautiful, and even admires the way her dress sticked to her thighs when the fabric was wet. The girl and the women nearly rejoice when they realize that the guards have fled and they are no longer in danger. This reaction poses their emotion as joy in the presence of absurdity. The concept of a woman escaping the absurdity of a patriarchy shines a twisted spotlight on the goals of the feminist movement where, instead of men being equal to women (and therefore women can thrive), men simply do not exist (which allows women to thrive). This new take on feminism directly opposes and critiques the idea displayed that playing out fantasies about the male guard in her head was the only way the narrator could find peace in absurdity.

 However, as the women ventured out into the world, they stumbled across other bunkers where they found 40 dead people in each—some women, some men. This represents concept in the theory of absurdism is that every problem will come back around in one way or the other, and that all solutions to problems are only temporary. The women began to realize that, even if they were to rebuild a civilization, they could not reproduce. Anthea, who was viewed as one of the oldest and wisest of the women, told the girl, “’Men mean you are alive’” (Harpman 31). Even though they had escaped a world of androcentrism, the ideologies presented that women were useless without men were still prevalent. The knowledge that men no longer existed created the hopeless feeling which led the women to slowly die off. As the women grow ill, they don’t seek medication, but instead ask the youngest, the narrator, to stab them through their hearts. This symbolizes a stop in time. In absurdism, the heart and time are connected. The heart is known as the center and drive of absurdity, and the absurd person is found to be fully aware of time. The only way the women are able to stop the absurdity of their lives is through stopping time and their hearts as a whole. For the narrator, her heart and time are one in the same. As a finale to her work, she chooses to tell the reader her plans to stab herself through the heart. This stops time and the absurd, which are the prevalent factors of her life. She also stages her death to be clean and says, “I hope there will be no blood” (164). And she is persistent with the idea that someone will eventually find her work, her life story, and her body dead with a knife through her heart. The connection of death with cleanliness reflects the sisterhood she felt with women, which she longs for again even after she dies. 

            Vanity has been closely tied to womanhood across literature from the Bible to modern works with female tragedy, especially existentialist works written by men such The Virgin Suicides. But the way Harpman chooses to write about vanity lacks any sort of image. The reader has no idea what the girl looks like. She is literally faceless, bodyless, and nameless all at once—which adds to the absurd aesthetic of the novel. All the reader knows is that the girl grows grey hair and wrinkles, as we all inevitably do. She doesn’t get to see her reflection until she is old, when she finds a house built for pleasure for the first time in her life. The house is colorfully decorated with green wallpaper and warmly-lit lamps—all materials which were foreign to her. She refers to a light switch as “small and smooth with a button” (Harpman 149). In this new-found house, she discovers a mirror. Beauty means nothing to the girl, as she has no perception of what is beautiful and what is ugly. Regardless, she spends hours looking in the mirror and deciphering her facial expressions. A woman learning her emotional expression in a world where men do not exist creates the theme of feminine emotions. Expressions humanize anything. The condition known as pareidolia refers to seeing faces on inanimate objects, often through a certain expression the object has on its front. For example, those with pareidolia say some cars look angry, some sad, some happy. Pareidolia is one example of how humans search for emotion. Through diving into the outward expression of emotions, Harpman uses the narrator to display how women grow unaware of their expressions when isolated from humanity. The isolation from humanity that occurs in real life stems from the typical gendered idea that women work as housewives and aren’t made to express their emotions, therefore dehumanizing women as a gender. 

Harpman crosses the images of a girl stabbing herself and others through the heart, a girl gazing into the mirror at her emotions, a group of women curled in a bunker, and a beating heart for a clock to aesthetically and symbolically create her own feminine absurd world. As a final stretch in the novel, the girl who never menstruated goes through menopause just prior to making the decision to kill herself. She refers to her uterus as “the part of my body that had always been so silent” (Harpman 161). The occurrence of menopause despite her body never fully developing adds to the absurdity through displaying that life, even in a natural state with no outside forces intervening, is unpredictable yet meaningless in and of itself. Through presenting absurdity in a gynocentric way, Harpman is able to critique the exclusion of women from philosophy and break the stereotypical pattern of existentialism in feminist coming-of-age stories. 

Harpman, Jacqueline. I Who Have Never Known Men. Translated by Ros Schwartz, Transit Books, 2022.