In Chapter 2, Van, Terry, and Jeff first encounter Ellador, Celis, and Alima hiding in a tree. Van tries to describe them using two similes, and Terry uses a metaphor:
[T]hey in turn, with no more terror than a set of frolicsome children in a game of tag, sat as lightly as so many big bright birds on their precarious perches and frankly, curiously, stared at us.
“Girls!” whispered Jeff, under his breath, as if they might fly if he spoke aloud.
“Peaches!” added Terry, scarcely louder. “Peacherinos—Apricot-nectarines! Whew!”
They were girls, of course, no boys could ever have shown that sparkling beauty, and yet none of us was certain at first.
These women, though young, are not children. Van seems to sense that they are human adult women, but he can't resist the impulse to describe them as first childlike, then birdlike. Both of these similes suggest that the women are less fully developed than the men are. Jeff has no problem calling them "girls" rather than women. In a disturbing way, his word "girls" sexualizes them. Jeff believes that women should wait until they are married to have sex, and that marriage and sex turn girls into women. When he calls them "girls," he reveals that he sees them as still eligible for marriage—and, in fact, these women eventually become the men's wives.
Terry takes the objectification even further than Van or Jeff. He uses a metaphor comparing the women to fruit. He seems to become more excited and breathless as he spits out the string of fruits the women remind him of: "Peaches! [...] Peacherinos—Apricot-nectarines! Whew!" The abundance of fruit names tumbling out of his mouth suggests that he has an appetite and sees the women as so much fruit ready for him to bite into it. Terry's metaphor is the most obviously disturbing. He not only objectifies the women, but furthermore thinks of them as food whose sole purpose is for him to gobble up. But the way Van and Jeff also fail to describe the women as what they actually are (human adults) reveals that all of the men arrive in Herland with a distorted view of women.
Comparisons between characters and "savages" become something of a motif if Herland. One example of this motif occurs during the men's escape attempt in Chapter 4, when Van uses a simile to describe them "like so many creeping savages":
We did not have to risk our necks to that extent, however, for at last, stealing along among the rocks and trees like so many creeping savages, we came to that flat space where we had landed; and there, in unbelievable good fortune, we found our machine.
The simile is supposed to convey something about the men's posture and stealth. They believe they are navigating the forest as secretly and expertly as Indigenous people stereotypically do. There is humor in the comparison because, as they soon find out, the Herlandians have been tracking them the entire time. On a deeper level, the simile reveals Indigenous identity as something Van (and Gilman) like to try on when it is convenient while also maintaining a distinctly white, so-called "civilized" identity. If Van, Jeff, and Terry are "like so many creeping savages," it is clear that they are nonetheless not "creeping savages." Whenever the motif comes up, the men use the slur "savage" to describe Indigenous people, revealing that they believe in a clear racial hierarchy with white people at the top.
Gilman seems to believe in this same racial hierarchy, and she uses it to make her point about the Herlandians. The men expect to find a community of "savages" in Herland. Instead, what they find is a well-organized society of women who Van, the sociologist, insists must have descended from white ancestors. Just as Van compares himself and his friends to Indigenous people in part to highlight their own distance from Indigenous identity, Gilman also positions the Herlandians in geographical proximity to Indigenous societies in South America so that she can demonstrate that women are able to create a supposedly "civilized" society. Casual racism like this was common in many feminist arguments in the early 20th century, as white women sought to prove to white men that they were a group worth elevating and empowering. Gilman makes some attempt to represent the women as varied in skin tone and phenotype, but she nonetheless links their success to the idea that, for all intents and purposes, they are white.
In Chapter 7, Van describes how the Herlandians have cultivated their environment so that every plant produces food, and they match their population to their food supply. He uses a simile to describe his admiration for this practice:
I had never seen, had scarcely imagined, human beings undertaking such a work as the deliberate replanting of an entire forest area with different kinds of trees. Yet this seemed to them the simplest common sense, like a man’s plowing up an inferior lawn and reseeding it. Now every tree bore fruit—edible fruit, that is.
Van calls this kind of agriculture "simplest common sense" and compares it to "a man's plowing up an inferior lawn and reseeding it." It seems to be by design that his comparison is gendered. In the patriarchal society Van calls home, it is primarily men who make agricultural decisions. He thinks of men violently ripping up a lawn and "reseeding it." The lawn, popularized in the 18th century, does not usually nurture anyone. Rather, it is a display of wealth and power. A man "plowing up an inferior lawn and reseeding it" is destroying plant life and planting new grass simply to show off his status. For a feminist like Gilman, even the idea of "reseeding" evokes the way men use women's bodies to bear children, also sometimes as a display of their bourgeois standing. It makes "common sense" to reseed a lawn like this only if it's commonly accepted that men should waste resources to show off their social status. By contrast, what the Herlandians are doing is making sure everyone in their society can eat. Doting mothers, they nurture plants so that they can nurture their children. While Van sees both approaches to agriculture as "common sense," Herlandian agriculture is clearly more focused on maintaining a healthy community and environment.
