49 pages • 1 hour read •
I Who Have Never Known Men
A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
Perpetual Light
Perpetual light in the bunkers is a symbol of the unbroken power of the mysterious forces behind the women’s imprisonment. When the women are in captivity, the lights enforce sleeping and waking hours by shifting from full to partial brightness. The women, therefore, achieve rebellion by keeping their own time, independent of the lights. However, there is never an absence of light, just as there is never a moment when the guards are not watching. After their escape, the narrator’s first experience of total darkness in the wilderness signifies her freedom from the cage.
Still, as the women search the outside world for explanations of their captivity or signs of civilization, they only find more prisons. Each has perpetual light, symbolizing the continued power of the system. Outside, the women find neither answers nor a return to their past lives. Moreover, they never discover a power station or conductors, meaning they never understand the source of the electricity—nor the authoritarian forces governing their lives.
The protagonist’s underground home, however, has a light switch. This represents the relative degree of freedom she achieves by finding meaning, purpose, and pleasure amid the desolation. Still, she can always hear the bunker’s air conditioning system. She calls it “the same soft hum that indicates that everything is working” (197), meaning the same unseen forces remain in power. Although the electricity powers the oven and hot water in the home, which she considers luxurious, she thinks, “There is always light. Sometimes I hope that one night it will go out, that something will happen” (200)—but the light outlasts her.
Timekeeping
Timekeeping is a motif that underscores the inseparability of Humanity and Interconnectedness. Timekeeping is repeatedly shown to be a human construct, a system of societal organization. The prison enforces an arrhythmic schedule of sleeping and eating, and the women’s reclamation of their 24-hour day unites them in a shared conceptual space separate from the guards. Furthermore, it is by providing and participating in the women’s time system that the child is first included in her companions’ society.
Outside the prison, the narrator continues to track time and understands the importance of a shared schedule for the village. When alone, however, she realizes timekeeping only matters in relation to others. As a result, she starts her trek before dawn and organizes her days according to her energy, hunger, and curiosity. At first, this is liberating, allowing her to explore as she wishes.
At the end of her life, however, the protagonist contemplates the passage of time in solitude. As a child, she was the women’s clock, allowing them to gauge passing years by observing her maturation. In the village, she felt time pass as her companions aged. She still keeps time but concludes that “time is a question of being human” rather than something determined by day and night (202). Without company, she does not feel the passage of time. She thinks, “Perhaps you never have time when you are alone?” (201).
She associates time with interpersonal experiences like gestation periods and child rearing, which are foreign to her. However, she believes a mere conversation would create time and, therefore, restore her humanity. She suspects she wrote her story to create time by conversing with a potential reader.
Food Stores
The bunkers’ food stores are plentiful, containing vast canned goods and stocked freezers that are cold enough to preserve meat indefinitely. They ensure the women’s sustenance despite the infertile landscape and lack of civilization. However, the food stores represent two different interpretations of the outside world as either a form of freedom or imprisonment.
Taking food without payment troubles the narrator’s companions, and they resent their dependence on the cold stores. Dorothy suggests the arrangement robs them of their humanity, making them parasites. Anthea describes the women as underground thieves, living off an absent enemy. Moreover, the high-powered freezers signify the barrenness of both the women and their environment while underscoring the situation’s permanence.
The protagonist, however, never knew the economies the women describe. For her, the food stores represent freedom to explore. She remembers Dorothy warning the women not to waste their thoughts as they organized their new lives, but the abundance of food guarantees survival. She writes, “I could allow my mind to wander as it pleased, it did not matter if the paths it took were dead ends” (166). Likewise, she notes that the food stores are the only parts of the bunkers that vary. Rather than signifying frozen stagnation, they both yield their own novelties and enable her explorations.
The food stores, along with the endless supply of electricity and lack of predators, distinguish the novel from other works of dystopian fiction, in which the scarcity of resources and the abundance of predators—human, animal, alien, or supernatural—are constant threats to the protagonists’ well-being. The food stores belong to the totalitarian power that kept the women imprisoned, but once they emerge, no one tries to recapture them. The quest for survival, which is a convention of dystopian fiction, moves to the philosophical realm: When a human being’s physical desires are met, what else is necessary to survive? The food stores and other reminders of civilization subvert feminist dystopian genre expectations and make the novel more difficult to categorize.
Unlock all 49 pages of this Study GuidePlus, gain access to 9,100+ more expert-written Study Guides.
Including features: