Patriarchy in the Flatland
“About three hundred years ago, it was decreed by the Chief Circle that, since Women are deficient in Reason but abundant in Emotion, they ought no longer to be treated as rational, nor receive any mental education. The consequence was that they were no longer taught to read, nor even to master Arithmetic...and hence they sensibly declined during each generation in intellectual power. And this system of Female non-education, or quietism, still prevails.”
What A Square is describing here is the systematic processing of a discriminatory academic system designed to subjugate females and keep them submissive so they must depend on the males. The imagery suggests that he is against this system and, indeed, he will go on to offer a rationale for why it should be discontinued. Flatlanders proved to be predictably patriarchal when it turns out that even the progressive A Square’s proposal for change is rooted in making the process more beneficial to the males with the Females becoming beneficiaries only as a collateral effect.
Making Pointland Great Again
The King of Pointland is not just the ruler of that land, but its entire population and, indeed, its everything. This is a description of the worst of all possible dimension, even the Sphere describes it as an Abyss of No Dimensions. The utter lack of dimensionality would, one think, but easy to see, but Pointland is alive and well in the here and now:
“Behold, yon miserable creature…He is himself his own World, his own Universe; of any other than himself he can form no conception...he has no cognizance, even of the number two; nor has he a thought of Plurality, for he is himself his One and All, being really Nothing. Yet mark his perfect self-contentment, and hence learn his lesson: that to be self-contented is to be vile and ignorant, and that to aspire is better than to be blindly and impotently happy.”
Flatland Social Hierarchy
Geometric imagery is utilized to situate the social class hierarchy of Flatlanders. In a land without depth, how else would such judgments be made? Flatland is a society in which caste rigidity is the only possible means to judgment of worth:
“Our Women are Straight Lines. Our Soldiers and Lowest Class of Workmen are Triangles with two equal sides…Our Middle Class consists of Equilateral or Equal-Sided Triangles. Our Professional Men and Gentlemen are Squares (to which class I myself belong) and Five-Sided Figures or Pentagons. Next above these come the Nobility, of whom there are several degrees, beginning at Six-Sided Figures, or Hexagons…the Circular or Priestly order; this is the highest class of all.”
Mythological Allusion
Though he has failed in his effort to become the apostle of the Third Dimension which is chosen at the dawn of each millennium, A Square ends by comparing himself to the ultimate mythological rebel. He, too, has been punished, but at least he doesn’t have to wake up every day to the expectation of a vulture eating his liver, so there’s that:
“Prometheus up in Spaceland was bound for bringing down fire for mortals, but I—poor Flatland Prometheus—lie here in prison for bringing down nothing to my countrymen.”
