Language and gender

Use in the book

Section 423 repeatedly treats women's supposed lack of reason as a consequence of their shape. Section 1223 supplies a history that destabilises that explanation: a decree removed their instruction in reading and arithmetic, and intellectual decline followed. The social order has helped produce the condition it offers as justification for exclusion. The reader is not required to accept the narrator's account of an original female deficiency in order to see this causal sequence.

The resulting double language operates through systematic translation. “Love” becomes “the anticipation of benefits”; “duty” becomes “necessity” or “fitness.” The alterations are not merely synonyms chosen for precision. They remove disinterested obligation and affection from the explanation of conduct. The supposedly rational idiom defines away values which the male speakers nevertheless invoke when governing children or managing domestic life.

The domestic language is also a managed fiction. Men express supreme deference to women in their presence and deny their rational standing behind their backs. The practice continues the tactical false promises praised in §423. What appears as courtesy can therefore be an instrument of control, and what the narrator calls scientific candour depends on keeping its terms unavailable to those it describes.

Children pass between the idioms. At three, boys must unlearn the maternal language while preserving the ability to repeat it before mothers and nurses. Their education is an apprenticeship in selective sincerity. The danger that a child might disclose the male vocabulary shows that the system relies on secrecy, not only on intellectual differences. A woman's surreptitious reading of an ordinary book could likewise expose the contradiction.

The narrator finally urges reconsideration, but his stated reason is the damage to male mathematical powers. This is a limited, interested argument, and it should not be made into an uncomplicated declaration of equality. At the same time, the account gives readers grounds for a wider judgement than the speaker is prepared to draw. His preferred vocabulary cannot quite suppress the loss disclosed by words such as love, pity and hope, nor can his fear of female reading sustain his claim that women have no capacity for consequential understanding.

Places to read

1. §1223“female non-education or quietism”
2. §1223“bi-lingual, and I may almost say bi-mental”
3. §1223“the anticipation of benefits”
4. §1223“mindless organisms”
5. §1223“taught to unlearn the old language”
6. §1223“the secrets of the logical dialect”

In this edition

Notes 117–11923 distinguish quietism's religious history, the political and philosophical implications of the double vocabulary, and Abbott's work for women's education. That biographical evidence belongs to the annotation. It should inform, without erasing, the difference between Abbott's concerns and the self-interested reform proposed by his fictional speaker.

Barbarism

An expression condemned as violating accepted linguistic usage. Here the charge falls on feel used transitively to mean introduce; the narrator’s objection is to fashionable grammar, not to the bodily contact that the formula arranges. Printed form: barbarism (§ 523). See Language and gender.

Bi-lingual

Using two languages or distinct vocabularies. Flatland’s men speak an emotional and moral language to women while privately substituting a supposedly scientific vocabulary, so linguistic difference becomes a means of controlling access to knowledge. Printed form: bi-lingual (§ 1223). See Language and gender.

Bi-mental

Having, as it were, two modes of mind. The narrator’s extension of bi-lingual suggests that maintaining the public moral vocabulary and the private deterministic one requires conflicting habits of thought, not merely different words. Printed form: bi-mental (§ 1223). See Language and gender.

Dashing

Fashionably spirited, showy, or boldly up-to-date. Applied to young gentlemen who shorten the formula of introduction2345, it marks a social style whose careless linguistic innovations offend the narrator’s conservatism. Printed form: dashing (§ 523). See Language and gender.

Fast society

The fashionable pleasure-seeking set, with an implication of looseness or recklessness. Its approval legitimises an abbreviated use of feel that the narrator calls a barbarism, locating linguistic change in a morally suspect elite. Printed form: fast society (§ 523). See Language and gender.

Hand-alphabet

An alphabet represented by finger positions, used in communication by or with deaf people. The narrator invokes it as the allegedly easier practice that obstructs lip-reading, an educational analogy reflecting a contested nineteenth-century preference for oral instruction. Printed form: hand-alphabet (§ 6234). See Language and gender.

Idiom

A characteristic form or manner of expression belonging to a community. The male scientific idiom is an exclusive social language whose meanings boys must learn while preserving the older vocabulary for conversations with their mothers. Printed form: idiom (§ 1223). See Language and gender.

Lip-speech

Speech articulated with the lips, here part of the oral education of deaf people and paired with lip-reading. The narrator prizes it above manual communication in order to justify withholding the supposedly easier art of Feeling from elite children. Printed form: lip-speech (§ 6234). See Language and gender.

Logical dialect

The supposedly rational vocabulary reserved for males and their books. Its secrecy underwrites the men’s authority, and the narrator fears that a child might disclose it to a mother and expose the duplicity of their deferential speech. Printed form: logical dialect (§ 1223). See Language and gender.

Quietism

Enforced mental inactivity, used here for the system that withholds education from women. The term’s associations with passive repose acquire a coercive turn: the policy produces the intellectual decline that supposedly validates the original exclusion. Printed form: quietism (§ 1223). See Language and gender.

Sensibly

Perceptibly or noticeably, rather than prudently. The statement that untaught women sensibly declined makes the effect of denied education observable, unsettling the claim that their inferior condition is simply a fixed natural fact. Printed form: sensibly (§ 1223). See Language and gender.

Transmuted

Changed into another form or substance. Moral words are transmuted when love becomes anticipated benefit and duty becomes necessity or fitness, suggesting a systematic conversion of ethical relations into calculations and constraints. Printed form: transmuted (§ 1223). See Language and gender.

Feel and be felt by (contextual phrase)

“feel and be felt by” (§ 523)

The older formula of introduction2345 spells out reciprocal action: each stranger will inspect the other’s angle and submit to the same examination. Its balanced active and passive verbs make equality within the encounter audible, even though the purpose is to discover unequal rank. Successive urban shortenings omit the explicit passive half and eventually make feel mean introduce. The narrator complains of linguistic degeneration, but the transformation also shows how a bodily procedure can become conventional social shorthand. A courteous introduction2345 grants access to information that cannot be read directly from an apparent outline. Because an unexpected movement may kill the examiner, the formal words are backed by an exacting discipline of stillness. Etiquette here manages physical exposure as well as reputation. See Feeling and touch, Angle, and Language and gender.

A bi-lingual and bi-mental existence (contextual phrase)

“a kind of bi-lingual, and I may almost say bi-mental, existence” (§ 1223)

The qualifying phrases make the narrator sound cautious while he describes a profound division between public and private thought. Men use love, duty, and moral judgment in speaking to women, then replace those terms with calculations of benefit, necessity, and fitness among themselves. Bi-mental suggests that this division cannot remain a harmless change of vocabulary: boys must acquire incompatible ways of explaining action and learn when to display each. The Square’s stated worry is the injury to male intellectual strength, although his examples also expose systematic deception of women. His fear that a mother might learn the logical dialect reveals how much the arrangement depends on restricted literacy and controlled transmission. The language policy therefore preserves authority by making knowledge unevenly available within the household. See Language and gender, Women, and Education and schools.