Attraction and climate

Use in the book

The compass is a useful early lesson in imaginative reconstruction. A reader accustomed to finding North by heavenly bodies must accept a different set of clues: resistance when moving northward, rain from the North, the orientation of houses and the trunks of trees. The narrator's occasional helplessness on an empty plain makes this reconstruction experiential rather than merely diagrammatic. Knowing directions depends on available contrasts; remove them and even an informed traveller may have to wait.

The same passage quietly imports social assumptions. The claimed weakness of women turns a physical tendency into an etiquette of protection: a gentleman gives a lady the northern side. The comedy lies partly in the difficulty of performing the courtesy when the gentleman cannot readily establish where North is. A convention of breeding presents itself as an obvious response to nature, although its performance depends on unstable information.

Later, stronger attraction in southern regions helps explain stricter restrictions on women. Involuntary motion can cause injury, but the passage proceeds from that hazard to laws which punish the body liable to move. The geographical account lends necessity to choices about confinement and punishment. Conversely, “better regulated” and “temperate” regions are not consistently humane: §523 assigns the starvation and frequent replacement of classroom specimens to just such places. The reassuring vocabulary cannot be accepted as an independent moral judgement.

Climate has another role in the distribution of knowledge. Fog supplies the variable brightness required for sight recognition, and this resource is unavailable in the torrid zones. The cultivation claimed by privileged observers therefore rests partly on an environmental condition rather than on their intrinsic superiority. The text does not reduce culture to weather, but it gives weather a place inside what the society calls culture.

These usages make physical world-building inseparable from social explanation. The reader should neither discard the stipulated mechanics nor accept every political conclusion hung upon them. Attraction can genuinely explain a difficulty of movement without justifying the legal treatment of the person who encounters it.

Places to read

1. §22“a constant attraction to the South”
2. §22“waiting till the rain came”
3. §22“a point of breeding”
4. §423“the force of gravitation is greater”
5. §523“the more temperate and better regulated regions”

In this edition

Note 27 explains the Victorian street courtesy behind giving a lady the North side. Note 31 relates the roof and floor to rain and attraction. The edition offers these as contextual helps; the fiction does not supply a complete physical theory of its climate, and the lexicon should not invent one.

Attraction

The steady physical pull toward the South that enables Flatlanders to orient themselves without a sun. Its varying strength links geography to bodily experience, while the narrator uses women’s supposed weakness under it to justify a rule of gentlemanly behaviour. Printed form: attraction (§ 22). See Attraction and climate.

Casual

Accidental or arising by chance, rather than informal or relaxed. Casual motions are grouped with involuntary movements as dangers supposedly intensified by southern gravitation, helping turn climatic explanation into an argument for harsher control of women. Printed form: casual (§ 423). See Attraction and climate.

Furlong

A measure of distance equal to one eighth of a mile, or 220 yards. Applying this substantial terrestrial measure to inhabitants only inches long gives their country an ordinary geographical scale despite the extraordinary bodies that occupy it. Printed form: furlongs (§ 22). See Attraction and climate.

Rude health

Vigorous, robust health: rude here means strong and unaffected, not discourteous. The healthy man hardly feels the southern pull and may consequently find it difficult to perform the courtesy of giving a woman the north side of the road. Printed form: rude health (§ 22). See Attraction and climate.

Torrid zones

The very hot climatic regions, where Fog does not prevail. Their clearer atmosphere paradoxically restricts visual knowledge, linking the narrator’s hierarchy of civilised regions to an optical resource unavailable everywhere. Printed form: torrid zones (§ 6234). See Attraction and climate.

Give her the North side of the way (contextual phrase)

“give her the North side of the way” (§ 22)

This is Flatland’s formula for a gentleman’s street courtesy to a Lady. Since the natural pull is southward, directions have bodily consequences, and etiquette makes the north side a concession to someone assumed less able to resist that pull. Yet the narrator admits that a healthy man in a temperate region may barely feel the force that is supposed to guide his conduct. The result is a small comedy of manners built into the physics: the better equipped he is physically, the less certain he may be how to behave politely. The supplied editorial note compares the convention with giving a woman the wall side of an English pavement. The comparison clarifies the social code without making Flatland’s rule identical to it. See Attraction and climate, Class and caste, and Women.