Fuqizheng Xingfa Chixi

The Irregular Penal Laws make geometric conformity a condition of safety and social belonging in Flatland. Square argues that unequal sides would unsettle recognition and everyday trust, then defends a regime that subjects Irregular people to lifelong stigma, surveillance, exclusion, and, in some cases, destruction. His proposed compromise stops short of the most extreme measures, but leaves the system’s central premise intact: the state may judge a body’s form and decide whether it should be allowed to live, marry, or participate in society.

Regularity as a Social Necessity

Square begins from the assumption that every person in Flatland is a Regular Figure: Women are straight lines; Artisans and Soldiers have two equal sides; Tradesmen have three; and Lawyers such as Square have four. In his account, this regularity is not merely a visual convention. It makes individuals identifiable and allows social interaction to proceed without laborious examination of every angle and side. Because a single angle can stand for a figure’s form, recognition by sight can support confidence in dealings among strangers.

The imagined alternative is practical disorder. If sides were unequal, angles could no longer be inferred from one another, and people would have to establish each acquaintance’s shape by touch or by a survey of the entire perimeter. Square insists that such work would consume the time needed for ordinary life and undermine both sight recognition and touch as reliable arts. His examples turn the abstract concern into domestic and public hazards: a Tradesman with a twelve- or thirteen-inch diagonal appendage might become stuck in a house door, while a crowd unable to assess figures at a glance could be thrown into chaos by even a slight panic. In a society where collisions are already dangerous, he argues, uncertainty about bodily form could cause serious injury or loss of life.

This account supplies the rationale Square gives for the law: expediency, Nature, and legal authority are said to converge on Regularity. But his illustrations also show how an environment built around standardized figures helps define deviation as a threat. Doors, houses, churches, theatres, and lecture rooms are presented as requiring predictable bodies; the possibility of adapting those spaces to difference appears in his argument as an unacceptable burden rather than an alternative to punishment.

Stigma, Surveillance, and Punishment

Square describes Irregularity as a category with moral and criminal force, not simply a geometrical description. He reports that an Irregular may be rejected by parents, mocked by siblings, neglected by servants, suspected by society, and shut out of positions involving responsibility or trust. Police watch the person’s movements until the age of inspection. At that point, someone whose deviation exceeds the fixed margin is destroyed; someone who falls within it may be confined to a Government Office as a seventh-class clerk.

The lesser sentence is still a comprehensive restriction on life. The clerk is prevented from marrying, assigned monotonous work for a miserable stipend, required to live and board at the office, and kept under close supervision even during vacation. Square acknowledges that such surroundings might embitter and corrupt a person, but he does not treat that possibility as a reason to change the regime. Instead, he says the hardships are required by the interests of the greater number.

He further argues that an Irregular body could expose society to fraud and physical danger. A person with a triangular front and polygonal back might, he claims, exploit a shopkeeper’s trust by presenting one shape and concealing another; in military ranks, an irregular form might bring destruction to comrades. Square uses these hypothetical dangers to cast the Irregular as a potential hypocrite and mischief-maker, converting the state’s suspicion into an apparent confirmation of the law’s moral judgment. The account thus presents exclusion as both punishment for bodily difference and proof, in the narrator’s reasoning, that such difference cannot be trusted.

The Case for a Middle Course

Square does not endorse the harshest policy practiced in some States: immediately destroying an infant whose angle departs by half a degree from the prescribed measure. He notes that some men of exceptional ability experienced deviations of forty-five minutes in early life, and that their deaths would have deprived the State of valuable lives. This qualification makes room for the possibility that an irregular form may change and that early measurement cannot always settle a person’s future.

He also points to medical interventions—including compression, extension, trepanning, colligation, and other surgical or dietary operations—that have partly or wholly corrected Irregularity. On that basis he proposes a middle course, refusing to set an absolute boundary for every case. The decision would instead come when the frame begins to set and the Medical Board reports that recovery is improbable; only then, he suggests, should the Irregular offspring be “painlessly and mercifully consumed.” The language of mercy softens the proposed killing without withdrawing the state’s power to authorize it. His moderation limits the timing and scope of destruction, not the principle that a life may be ended for failure to meet a geometric norm.

The Regime Beyond the Penal Code

The evidence of the laws surrounding women shows that coercive regulation in Flatland is not confined to the inspection and punishment of Irregular figures. Every house must have an eastern entrance for women, who are required to enter “in a becoming and respectful manner” rather than through the men’s or western door. A woman walking in public must continually keep up her Peace-cry under penalty of death. These rules organize access to homes and public space through gender as well as geometry.

The wider system also governs women’s movement and marriage. In some States, women who walk or stand in public must constantly move their backs from right to left to signal their presence; elsewhere, a travelling woman must be followed by a son, servant, or husband, or women are confined to their houses except during religious festivals. Separately, a woman cannot marry without a State-certified pedigree, because her visible straightness does not reveal whether her ancestry carries the potential for Irregular offspring. Together, these rules show how the state supervises bodies, movement, descent, and domestic life as connected matters of public order.

Square reports that the wisest Circles and Statesmen recognize a limit to multiplying restrictions on women: excessive prohibition can weaken and diminish the population and increase domestic murders, leaving the State worse off. That calculation resembles his defense of a middle course for Irregular people. In both accounts, the system’s stated concern is the welfare of the State, but the permitted response is determined by administrative judgment rather than by the subject’s freedom or equal standing.

The Law’s Contradictions

The rules express a hierarchy in which bodily measurement is treated as a reliable guide to character, fitness, and social danger. Square presents regular form as a foundation of civilization, but the measures he describes do more than identify bodies: they shape who can marry, work, enter public life, hold responsibility, or remain alive. In this way, punishment and regulation make the social consequences of classification appear to follow naturally from geometry.

Square’s own qualifications expose tensions in that logic. Exceptional men may begin life with substantial deviations; medical treatment can alter a figure; and the state’s strictness toward women can produce harms that outweigh its benefits. Yet these complications do not lead him to abandon the governing distinction between Regular and Irregular. His preferred remedy is selective adjustment of enforcement—medical assessment instead of automatic destruction at birth, and restraint instead of unlimited prohibition—not equality for those whose bodies fall outside the norm.

The Irregular Penal Laws therefore stand at the intersection of Flatland’s geometry and its politics. Their defense depends on treating standardized forms as prerequisites for recognition and safe social arrangements; their operation turns that premise into surveillance, confinement, reproductive control, and threatened death. The gap between Square’s language of public necessity and the penalties he recounts makes the regime’s cost visible even as he argues on its behalf.