The novel's tone is self-conscious, but Gilman plays with the irony of her male narrator's limited viewpoint. The narrator, Van, spends so much time commenting on himself and his role as the narrator that he sometimes fails to see the full implications of what he is describing. It often seems that Gilman is using Van to make a point that he might be missing. One example occurs at the start of Chapter 5, when Van prepares to describe Herland's history:
It is no use for me to try to piece out this account with adventures. If the people who read it are not interested in these amazing women and their history, they will not be interested at all.
Van himself seems earnest enough here. He reminds the reader that he is doing his best to construct a faithful "account" of his time in Herland. As a sociologist, he is interested in presenting a scientific view of things. He understands that his account could easily become an adventure story with a little exaggeration, but he insists that this is not what he's interested in. The story is, he upholds, a sociological account, not an adventure story.
While Van is insisting that his account is boring because he is trying to be scientific, truthful, and detached, Gilman also seems to be making a different point. Van is so wrapped up in what his "mundane" account says about him that he fails to note that the story he is telling is not free of adventure. He and his friends are simply not the heroes of the adventures. In this chapter, he goes on to relate a grand adventure story about how the Herlandians overcame adversity to construct their utopian society. The kind of adventures that happen in Herland lead not to bloody conquest but rather to collective action and nation-building. Van's frequent references to himself as the storyteller are attempts to center himself in the narrative. Gilman lets him make a fool of himself so that the reader can see how insignificant he and other men actually are and how successful and interesting women can be all on their own.
