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The social structure within Flatland seems to present a very constricting and pessimistic look at an individual’s ability to become something greater than what he or she was born into. The common masses’ hope that they could rise above their circumstances, like those few common people who eventually got accepted into a higher rank, was needed to keep them content so that those in power would not have to fear an uprising. But of course such a thing is a very rare occurrence, so most people, the author seemed to be suggesting, were sustained by nothing more than a delusion. Also, a person’s class was determined by their physical characteristics at birth, which inherently made one more intelligent the more angles one had. It was only through successive generations that isosceles triangles could gradually grow into equilateral and reach a higher social status. I wonder what the meaning of this is, since it seems to have nothing to do with our picture of how an entire species evolves at once, not parts of it evolving while there were already parts in that more highly evolved state. Also, the strange thing is that evolution in Flatland seems to be an inevitable thing that just happens in an automatic, already determined pattern, and one does not seem to control one’s own evolution.  Flatland presents a picture in which nature allows people to be happy within their own minds, but it does so by designing them so that their brains are not capable of comprehending the world. So basically, it sees society members as biological machines whose limitations are innately set- and that they may be happy but their happiness is the fulfillment of automatic processes that keeps them in their place; they cannot hope to comprehend the universe or master it, as we human beings like to believe we can.

      The view of women here is very strange. Women have power, but their power comes from their ability to hide, and they are straight lines, utterly dimensionless. They have no intelligence, but they do have emotion, such as the hot fury that drives them to unwittingly kill their husbands and children. I guess it reminds me of how in some cultures today women are restricted from showing themselves and cannot go out without a male, etc, customs which are also based on fear of the woman, just as in Flatland they fear women just based on the fact that they are women and they fear that women will also be driven out of control.