I Who Have Never Known Men

I Who Have Never Known Men is a bleak, post-apocalyptic novel by Belgian author Jacqueline Harpman, first published in French in 1995 and later translated into English in 2022 by Ros Schwartz, where shortly after it surged in popularity online. It’s a fairly short book at around 200 or so pages, and I tore through it in a few sittings. The premise of the book is that 40 women are being held prisoner in a bunker underground. They are policed by guards, who are male, and forbid the women from talking to them, or from getting too close to each other. None of them know why they are being held prisoner, or if they are the only ones being held in captivity.

We are not given many answers as to why the women have been confined in this way. The first act of the book builds up to a defining moment in the book where the women, through a stroke of good luck, are able to escape from their underground prison and go to the surface.

Oh! That first time I went up the stairs! When I think of it, my eyes fill with tears and I feel that compulsion, that surge of triumph. I think I’d be prepared to relieve twelve years of captivity to experience that miraculous ascent, the wonderful certainty that made me so lift that I flew up the hundred steps in one go, without stopping for breath, and I was laughing.

The second act of the book turns out to be equally bleak: the initial rush of escaping their bunker has worn off, and the women have to contend with an even crueller reality: that they are entirely alone in the world, seemingly with no explanation. The outside world is framed as a prison itself. Beyond searching for any others, the women must such for meaning in a world which gives them no answers to their circumstances. The reader is also left in a similar position, as we never get the answers to any of this either.

We get to know the narrator well, who is the youngest of the group of women imprisoned, and the only one who doesn’t have any memories of life before her confinement. We also learn a lot about one of the other women, Anthea, who is older than our narrator, and is something of a mentor to her. She tries to explain to her about what the world was like before they were all locked up. I thought it was a missed opportunity that the other cast of women are largely interchangeable, some are only named once or twice and are not described in any real detail.

I was surprised by how little attention Harpman gives to the romantic or sexual relationships between the women. We hear briefly that some couples share beds, but these relationships remain vague and largely undescribed. This stands in contrast to the narrator’s recurring erotic dreams about one of the young male guards, which Harpman describes in considerably more detail towards the beginning of the book. I found myself wondering what Harpman was trying to emphasise through this imbalance. My interpretation was that the guards are the symbol of authority and order in the narrator’s world, and so her desire is more a manifestation of her longing to understand the world itself.

I usually prefer plot-heavy books, and struggle with books that are more introspective with less defining events in them, but I think I just really wanted to learn more about their situation and how it came to be in the first place: who did the guards work for? Where did they disappear to, and why did they disappear so suddenly? It was the atmosphere of the book which made me want to continue reading to the end. Harpman succeeds in creating a world that feels cold and empty.

Despite this, the novel is able to give us a final note of optimism through a meta-literary device, the revelation that the novel itself is effectively the narrator’s manuscript. A woman who began the story with no knowledge of the world ultimately learns to read and write well enough to the preserve herself, and the memory of the other women, through her language. Writing, then, becomes the ultimate form of rebellion against oblivion.