Edwin Abbott's Flatland

Edwin Abbott’s novel, Flatland, was written to mirror the society of Victorian England . The story reflects broad themes such as the treatment of women in England in the 1800's, the oppression of disenfranchised groups such as the Irish, and is also a critique of the human tendency to deny the truth, even when directly confronted with it. He used fictional elements of Flatland to voice his own opinion and portray the qualities of the 1800s . Abbott wanted people to find that Flatland wasn’t a whole lot different than the world they lived in during the 1800s. His strong feelings towards women’s rights and minorities’ rights encouraged him to write Flatland, and he wanted to illustrate the tendency of humans to avoid changing their perspective

Instead, they were forced to stay home and obey their husbands, and female treatment at the time resembled slavery. Abbott was one of the few at the time to oppose the idea and felt women had the right to do anything a man does. He sent his daughter to school, and was active in the campaign to get more women into schools.. He wrote Flatland to illustrate how women were treated, and it forced people to ponder whether or not women were dealt with fairly. Also, in Victorian England, there was a lot of racism towards the Irish people, and Abbott, being a person who fights for rights, probably felt that this was wrong. Much of the oppressiveness in Flatland resembles the treatment of the Irish in Victorian times, and Abbott wrote Flatland to demonstrate how immoral segregation

Abbott was a gender equality activist, and the fact that he incorporated the theme into the story shows that he has strong beliefs towards equality. At the time he wrote the novel, women were just sent off to marry men, and any single women was thought of as a disgrace. Women were denied an education, a job, and the right to vote, and the majority of them just stayed indoors taking care of the children and the house. In Flatland, there were several harsh laws applied to women such as the one that confined them to stay indoors or be killed. The women of Flatland were denied an education and were even forced to enter the home through a different door. Abbott included this to make people see how the harsh the treatment was for the women of Flatland , but then actually contemplate whether or not it’s much different than the condition of women in Victorian England. There is a lot of similarity between the treatment of women in both England and Flatland, and Abbott clearly wrote Flatlands to make people connect these two places. To add on, the fact that women are represented by a mere line symbolizes that women are seen as practically nothing in society. Abbott wrote Flatland to demonstrate the obscurity of placing women below men, and an example of this was when Abbott used a line to represent a woman. The reader would find it weird that women and men