Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions

The system is also a fraud at its summit. Among the educated it is known that “no Circle is really a Circle” (§ 11), only a polygon with very many sides, and the infants of the highest Polygons are broken and re-set in the hope that they will pass for Circles. The rare promotion of a workman’s child into the Equal-sided class is valued as “a most useful barrier against revolution from below” (§ 3), since it keeps the hopes of the rest alive. The Circles grow less fertile with every generation, and the Square catches them scolding their own children as though conduct were chosen after all; the order survives only by a double language, one for the Women’s rooms and another for the books.

The Square’s own family is the sharpest point of the joke. His Grandfather was an Isosceles, voted Equal-sided shortly before his death, so that the Square stands only two generations from the serfs whose risings he is glad to see crushed. Abbott never makes him notice this. He leaves the reader to see that the man who writes so calmly of the Isosceles rabble would have been one of them, had his ancestors been less patient in the slow growth of their angles.

Women, the Narrator and the Question of Misogyny

No part of the book has been argued over more than § 4, where the Women of Flatland are needles, invisible end-on and lethal by accident. They are bound by a Code, kept in apartments built to stop them turning round, and denied any education, and the Square describes them, with every sign of conviction, as “wholly devoid of brain-power” (§ 4). In the same passage he tells of a Woman who destroyed her household in a rage and asked half an hour later what had become of her husband. The question is whose voice this is.

The first readers divided at once. Nature’s reviewer treated the chapter as one man’s partial testimony and asked for a woman’s reply, and two American notices of 1885, in Science and The New York Times, singled out the book’s plea for the education of women. Abbott answered in the Preface to the second edition, where the Editor reports the charge that the Square “is a woman-hater” and pleads that he wrote “as a Historian”, adopting the views of his world, and that prison has since changed his mind. Most later readers have taken the satire at its word, and Abbott’s own work for the education of women, set out in the Introduction, supports them. A minority, the science-fiction writer Isaac Asimov among them, have suspected that the author shared some of the prejudice he mocked.

This edition’s judgement lies between the two. The irony is real and aimed at the Square, for Part I ends with his appeal for the education of Women, and the Sphere tells him that many of the wisest in Spaceland prefer “your despised Straight Lines” (§ 18) to his Circles. Even the Square’s reasons are made to look poor, since he wants the Women taught for the sake of the male intellect. Yet the book that mocks a society for silencing its women keeps its own women silent too. The Wife has no name. She is shut out of the revelation, lied to twice, and last seen being persuaded back to her household duties. The Preface says that the Square now shares the Sphere’s opinion of the Straight Lines, but in § 18 the Sphere had declined to rank human faculties at all, so the opinion was never quite his. The conversion is reported, not shown. Nature’s request for a female view of Flatland is never answered within its pages, and Abbott, who saw the injustice clearly, did not imagine the voice that could speak against it.

Persuasion, Revelation and the Failure of Words

Flatland is a book about teaching, written by a headmaster, and its verdict on teaching by argument is bleak, for every attempt to carry a truth across the border of a dimension follows the same course and fails at the same point. The Square tries words on the King of Lineland, then deeds, stepping out of the line and back, and is taken for a Woman and a magician. The Sphere tries words on the Square, then deeds, vanishing and taking the tablet from the locked cupboard, and is called a juggler, an enchanter and a devil, until at last he resorts to force. The Square’s Grandson simply laughs. Before the Council the Square has nothing left but his story.

The pattern shows what demonstration cannot do, for the King hears the Square count his subjects correctly and decides that he must have heard the facts and dreamed the rest. The brother watched the Sphere’s section widen in the Council Chamber and, after seven years of weekly lessons, still “frankly avows his disbelief in the existence of a Sphere” (§ 22). Evidence persuades no one who is not ready to be persuaded. Revelation persuades the one who undergoes it, but it does not keep, and by the morning after his vision the Square feels it slipping away from him “like the image of a half-grasped, tantalizing dream” (§ 21).