Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions by Edwin Abbott Abbott: Part 1, Sections 4 - 5

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Part one, sections four to five of flat Land. This
LibriVox recording is in the public domain recording by Ruth Golding.
Flat Land, A Romance of Many Dimensions by Edwin Abbot Abbot,
Part one, Section four concerning the women. If our highly

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pointed triangles of the soldier class are formidable, it may
be readily inferred that far more formidable are our women.
For if a soldier is a wedge, a woman is
a needle, being, so to speak, all point at least
at the two extremities. Add to this the power of

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making herself practically invisible at will, and you will perceive
that a female in Flatland is a creature by no
means to be trifled with. But here perhaps some of
my younger readers may ask, ask how a woman in
Flatland can make herself invisible? This ought, I think to

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be apparent without any explanation. However, a few words will
make it clear to the most unreflecting. Place a needle
on a table, Then, with your eye on the level
of the table, look at it sideways, and you see
the whole length of it. But look at it endways,
and you see nothing but a point. It has become

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practically invisible. Just so is it with one of our women.
When her side is turned towards us, we see her
as a straight line. When the end containing her eye
or mouth, for with us these two organs are identical.
Is the part that meets our eye, then we see

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nothing but a highly lustrous point. But when the back
is presented to our view, then, being only sublustrous, and
in indeed almost as dim as an inanimate object, her
hinder extremity serves her as a kind of invisible cap.
The dangers to which we are exposed from our women

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must now be manifest to the meanest capacity in spaceland.
If even the angle of a respectable triangle in the
middle class is not without its dangers. If to run
against a working man involves a gash, if collision with
an officer of the military class necessitates a serious wound,
if a mere touch from the vertex of a private

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soldier brings with it danger of death, what can it
be to run against a woman except absolute and immediate destruction.
And when a woman is invisible, or visible only as
a dim, sublustrous point, how difficult must it be even
for the most cautious always to avoid collision? Many are

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the enactments made at different times in the different states
of flatland in order to minimize this peril, and in
the southern and less temperate climates, where the force of
gravitation is greater and human beings more liable to casual
and involuntary motions. The laws concerning women are naturally much

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more stringent, but a general view of the code may
be obtained from the following summary. One. Every house shall
have one entrance in the eastern side for the use
of females only, by which all females shall enter in
a becoming and respectful manner, and not by the men's

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or western door. Footnote. When I was in Spaceland, I
understood that some of your priestly circles have in the
same way a separate entrance for villagers, farmers and teachers
of board schools Spectator, September eighteen eighty four, Page one,
two five five, that they may approach in a becoming

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and respectful manner. End of footnote. Two. No female shall
walk in any public place without continually keeping up her
peace cry, under penalty of death. Three. Any female duly
certified to be suffering from Saint Vitus's dance fits, chronic

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cold accompanied by violence, sneezing, or any disease necessitating involuntary motions,
shall be instantly destroyed. In some of the states, there
is an additional law forbidding females under penalty of death
from walking or standing in any public place without moving

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their backs constantly from right to left, so as to
indicate their presence to those behind them. Others obliged to
woman when to be followed by one of her sons
or servants, or by her husband. Others confine women altogether
to their houses, except during the religious festivals. But it

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has been found by the wisest of our circles or statesmen,
that the multiplication of restrictions on females tends not only
to the debilitation and diminution of the race, but also
to the increase of domestic murders, to such an extent
that a state loses more than it gains by a
too prohibitive code. For whenever the temper of the women

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is thus exasperated by confinement at home or hampering regulations abroad,
they are apt to vent their spleen upon their husbands
and children, and in the less temperate climates, the whole
male population of her village has been sometimes destroyed in
one or two hours of simultaneous female outbreak. Hence, the

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three laws may and above suffice for the better regulated states,
and may be accepted as a rough exemplification of our
female code. After all, our principal safeguard is found not
in legislature, but in the interests of the women themselves.
For although they can inflict instantaneous death by a retrograde movement,

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yet unless they can at once disengage their stinging extremity
from the struggling body of their victim, their own frail
bodies are liable to be shattered. The power of fashion
is also on our side. I pointed out that in
some less civilized states, no female is suffered to stand

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in any public place without swaying her back from right
to left. This practice has been universal among ladies of
any pretensions to breeding in all well governed states as
far back as the memory of figures can reach. It
is considered a disgrace to any state that legislation should

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have to enforce what ought to be and is in
every respectable female a natural instinct, the rhythmical, and, if
I may say so, well modulated undulation of the back
in our ladies of circular rank is envied and imitated
by the wife of a common equilateral, who can achieve

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nothing beyond a mere monotonous swing like the ticking of
a pendulum, And the regular tick of the equilateral is
no less admired and copied by the wife of the
progressive and aspiring isosceles, in the females of whose family
no back motion of any kind has become as yet

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a necessity of life. Hence, in every family of position
and consideration, back motion is as prevalent as time itself,
and the husbands and sons in these households enjoy immunity,
at least from invisible attacks. Not that it must be

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for a moment supposed that our women are destitute of affection,
But unfortunately the passion of the moment predominates in the
frail sex over every other consideration. This is, of course
a necessity arising from their unfortunate conformation, for as they

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have no pretensions to an angle, being inferior in this
respect to the very lowest of the isosceles, they are
consequently wholly devoid of brain power, and have neither reflection, judgment,
nor forethought, and hardly any memory. Hence, in their fits
of fury, they remember no claims and recognize no distinctions.

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I have actually known a case where a woman has
exterminated her whole household, and half an hour afterwards, when
her rage was over and the fragments swept away, has
asked what has become of her husband and her children. Obviously,
then a woman is not to be irritated as long

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as she is in a position where she can turn round.
When you have them in their apartments, which are constructed
with a view to denying them that power, you can
say and do what you like, for they are then
wholly impotent for mischief, and will not remember a few minutes.
Hence the incident for which they may be at this

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moment threatening you with death, nor the promises which you
may have found it necessary to make in order to
pacify their fury. On the whole, we get on pretty
smoothly in our domestic relations, except in the lower strata
of the military classes. There the want of tact and

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discretion on the part of the husbands produces at times
indescribable disasters. Relying too much on the offensive weapons of
their acute angles instead of the defensive organs of good
sense and seasonable simulations. These reckless creatures too often neglect
the prescribed construction of the women's apartments, or irritate their

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wives by ill advised expressions out of doors, which they
refuse immediately to retract. Moreover, a blunt and stolid regard
for literal truth indisposes them to make those lavish promises
by which the more judicious circle can in a moment
pacify his consort. The result is massacre, not, however, without

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its advantages, as it eliminates the more brutal and troublesome
of the isosceles, and by many of our circles, the
destructiveness of the thinner sex is regarded as one among
many providential arrangements for suppressing redundant population and nipping revolution
in the bud. Yet, even in our best regulated and

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most approximately circular families, I cannot say that the ideal
of family life is so high as with you in spaceland.
There is peace in so far as the absence of
slaughter may be called by that name, But there is
necessarily little harmony of tastes or pursuits, and the cautious

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wisdom of the circles has ensured safety at the cost
of domestic comfort in every circular or polygonal household. It
has been a habit from time immemorial, and has now
become a kind of instinct among the women of our
higher classes, that the mothers and daughters should constantly keep

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their eyes and mouths towards their husband and his male friends.
And for a lady in a family of distinction to
turn her back upon her husband would be regarded as
a kind of portent involving loss of status. But as
I shall soon show, this custom, though it has the

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advantage of safety, is not without its disadvantages. In the
house of the working man or respectable tradesman, where the
wife is allowed to turn her back upon her husband
while pursuing her household avocations, there are at least intervals
of quiet when the wife is neither seen nor heard

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except for the humming sound of the continuous peace cry.
But in the homes of the upper classes there is
too often no peace. There. The voluble mouth and bright
penetrating eye are ever directed towards the master of the household,
and light itself is not more persistent than the stream

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of feminine discourse. The tact and skill which suffice to
avert a woman's sting are unequal to the task of
stopping a woman's mouth. And as the wife has absolutely
nothing to say, and absolutely no constraint of wit, sense
or conscience to prevent her from saying it, not a

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few cynics have been found to avert that they prefer
the danger of the death dealing but inaudible sting to
the safe, sonorousness of a woman's other end. To my
readers in Spaceland, the condition of our women may seem
truly deplorable, and so indeed it is. A male of

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the lowest type of the Isosceles may look forward to
some improvement of his angle and to the ultimate elevation
of the whole of his degraded caste. But no woman
can entertain such hopes for her sex. Once a woman,
always a woman is a decree of nature, and the

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very laws of evolution seem suspended in her disfavor. Yet
at least we can admire the wise pre arrangement which
has ordained that as they have no hopes, so they
shall have no memory to recall, and no forethought to
anticipate the miseries and humiliations, which are at once a

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necessity of their existence and the basis of the constitution
of Flatland. Section five of our methods of recognizing one another,
You who are blessed with shade as well as light,
You who are gifted with two eyes, endowed with a

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knowledge of perspective, and charmed with the enjoyment of very colours,
You who can actually see an angle and contemplate the
complete circumference of a circle in the happy region of
the three dimensions, How shall I make clear to you
the extreme difficulty which we in Flatland experience in recognizing

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one another's configurations. Recall what I told you above. All
beings in Flatland, animate or inanimate, no matter what their form,
present to our view the same or nearly the same
appearance viz. That of a straight line. How then, can

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one be distinguished from another where all appear the same?
The answer is threefold. The first means of recognition is
the sense of hearing, which with us is far more
highly developed than with you, and which enables us not
only to distinguish by the voice our personal friends, but

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even to discriminate between different classes, at least so far
as concerns the three lowest orders, the equilateral, the square,
and the pentagon. For of the isosceles, i'd take no account.
But as we ascend in the social scale, the process
of discriminating and being discriminated by hearing increases in difficulty,

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partly because voices are assimilated, partly because the faculty of
voice discrimination is a plebeian virtue, not much developed among
the aristocracy, and wherever there is any danger of imposture,
we cannot trust to this method. Amongst our lowest orders,

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the vocal organs are developed to a degree more than
correspondent with those of hearing, so that an isosceles can
easily feign the voice of a polygon, and with some training,
that of a circle himself. A second method is therefore
more commonly resorted to. Feeling is among our women and

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lower classes. About our upper classes, I shall speak presently
the principal test of recognition at all events between strangers,
and when the question is not as to the individual,
but as to the class. What therefore introduction is among
the higher classes in spaceland, that the process of feeling

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is with us. Permit me to ask you to feel
and be felt by my friend, mister so and so
is still among the more old fashioned of our country
gentlemen in districts remote from towns the customary formula for
a flatland introduction. But in the towns and among men
of business, the words be felt by are omitted, and

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the sentence is abbreviated to let me ask you to feel,
mister so and so. Although it is assumed, of course,
that the feeling is to be reciprocal. Among our still
more modern and dashing young gentlemen, who are extremely averse
to superfluous effort and supremely indifferent to the purity of
their native language, the formula is still further curtailed by

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the use of to feel in a technical sense, meaning
to recommend for the purposes of feeling at being felt,
And at this moment the slang of polite or fast
society in the upper classes sanctions such a barbarism, as
mister Smith, permit me to feel you, mister Jones. Let not,

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my reader, however, suppose that feeling is with us the
tedious process, that it would be with you, or that
we find it necessary to feel right round all the
sides of every individual before we determine the class to
which he belongs. Long practice and training, begun in the
schools and continued in the experience of daily life, enable

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us to discriminate at once by the sense of touch
between the angles of an equal sided triangle, square and pentagon.
And I need not say that the brainless vertex of
an acute angled isoceles is obvious to the dullest touch.
It is therefore not necessary as a rule, to do
more than feel a single angle of any individual. And this,

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once ascertained, tells us the class of the person whom
we are addressing, unless indeed he belongs to the higher
sections of the nobility. There the difficulty is much greater.
Even a master of Arts in our University of Wentbridge
has been known to confuse a ten sided with a
twelve sided polygon. And there is hardly a doctor of

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science in or out of that famous university who could
pretend to decide promptly and unhesitatingly between a twenty sided
and a twenty four sided. Member of the aristocracy, those
of my readers who recall the extracts I gave above
from the Legislative Code concerning Women, will readily perceive that

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the process of introduction by contact requires some care and discretion.
Otherwise the angles might inflict on the unwary feeler irreparable injury.
It is essential for the safety of the feeler that
the felt should stand perfectly still. A start, a fidgety

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shifting of the position, yes, even a violent sneeze has
been known before now to prove fatal to the incautious,
and to nip in the bud many a promising friendship. Especially,
is this true among the lower classes of the triangles.
With them, the eye is situated so far from their

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vertex that they can scarcely take cognizance of what goes
on at that extremity of their frame. They are moreover,
of a rough, coarse nature, not sensitive to the delicate
touch of the highly organized polygon. What wonder, then, if
an involuntary toss of the head has heir now deprived

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the state of a valuable life. I have heard that
my excellent grandfather, one of the least irregular of his
unhappy Isosceles class, who indeed obtained shortly before his decease
four out of seven votes from the Sanitary and Social
Board for passing him into the class of the equal sided,

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often deplored with a tear in his venerable eye, a
miscarriage of this kind which had occurred to his great
great great grandfather, a respectable working man with an angle
or brain of fifty nine degrees thirty minutes. According to
his account, my unfortunate ancestor, being afflicted with rheumatism, and

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in the act of being felt by a polygon, by
one sudden start, accidentally transfixed the great man through the diagonal,
and thereby, partly in consequence of his long imprisonment and degradation,
and partly because of the moral shock which pervaded the
whole of my ancestors relations, threw back our family a

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degree and a half in their ascent towards better things.
The result was that in the next generation the family
brain was registered at only fifty eight degrees, and not
till the lapse of five generations was the lost ground recovered,
the full sixty degrees attained, and the ascent from the

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Isosceles finally achieved. And all this series of calamities from
one little accident in the process of feeling. At this point,
I think I hear some of my better educated readers exclaim,
how could you in Flatland know anything about angles and
degrees minutes. We can see an angle because we, in

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the region of space, can see two straight lines inclined
to one another. But you, who can see nothing but
one straight line at a time, or at all events,
only a number of bits of straight lines, all in
one straight line, how can you ever discern any angle,
and much less register angles of different sizes. I answer

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that though we cannot see angles, we can infer them,
and this with great precision. Our sense of touch, stimulated
by necessity and developed by long training, enables us to
distinguish angles far more accurately than your sense of sight
when an aided by a rule or measure of angles.

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Nor must I omit to explain that we have great
natural helps. It is with us a law of nature
that the brain of the isosceles class shall begin at
half a degree or thirty minutes, and shall increase, if
it increases at all, by half a degree, in every generation,
until the goal of sixty degrees is reached, when the

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condition of serfdom is quitted, and the freeman enters the
class of regulars. Consequently, Nature herself supplies us with an
ascending scale or alphabet of angles for half a degree
up to sixty degrees, specimens of which are placed in
every elementary school throughout the land. Owing to occasional retrogressions,

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to still more frequent moral and intellectual stagnation, and to
the extraordinary fecundity of the criminal and vagabond classes, there
is always a vast superfluity of individuals of the half
degree and single degree class, and a fair abundance of
specimens up to ten degrees. These are absolutely destitute of

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civic rights, and a great number of them, not having
even intelligence enough for the purposes of warfare, are devoted
by the state to the service of education. Fettered immovably
so as to remove all possibility of danger. They are
placed in the classrooms of our infant schools, and there
they are utilized by the Board of Education for the

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purpose of imparting to the offspring of the middle classes
that tact and intelligence of which these wretched creatures themselves
are utterly devoid. In some states the specimens are occasionally
fed and suffered to exist for several years, but in
the more temperate and better regulated regions, it is found

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in the long run more advantageous for the educational interests
of the young to dispense with food, and to renew
the specimens every month, which is about the average duration
of the foodless existence of the criminal class in the
cheaper schools. What is gained by the longer end distance
of the specimens is lost, partly in the expenditure for food,

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and partly in the diminished accuracy of the angles, which
are impaired after a few weeks of constant feeling. Nor
must we forget to add, in enumerting the advantages of
the more expensive system, that it tends, though slightly yet perceptibly,
to the diminution of the redundant isosceles population, an object

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which every statesman in Flatland constantly keeps in view on
the whole. Therefore, although I am not ignorant that in
many popularly elected school boards there is a reaction in
favor of the cheap system, as it is called, I
am myself disposed to think that this is one of
the many cases in which expense is the truest economy.

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But I must not allow questions of school board politics
to divert me from my subject. Enough has been said.
I try to show that recognition by feeling is not
so tedious or indecisive a process as might have been supposed,
and it is obviously more trustworthy than recognition by hearing. Still,

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there remain, as has been pointed out above, the objection
that this method is not without danger. For this reason,
many in the middle and lower classes, and all without
exception in the polygonal and circular orders, prefer a third method,
the description of which shall be reserved for the next section.

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End of Part one, Section five. Recording by Ruth Golding