Robin Hall

Essay #1 –  Forcing Conversations: The Complex Morality of Ustopias

We have studied a variety of ways in which dystopic fiction is distinguished from utopic fiction, and one of the notable style distinctions is that the characters are more developed in dystopic fiction because there is conflict to resolve. In utopias, the characters are generally all either “right livers” or those who are eventually persuaded to join the “right livers.” The morality of their choices is a given, since they are perfect people who live in a perfect place. Dystopias offer an opportunity to “get to know” a character better because of the role they play in the plot against the dystopic society, but the key reason readers identify and engage more with dystopic characters is because they face moral decision points where the reader is also forced to have an opinion and to approve or disapprove of their actions.  In pure dystopias like Anthem, those decisions are pretty much foreordained, and the reader almost always agrees with the character in choosing right over wrong. Margaret Atwood coined the term “ustopia” to describe both utopias and dystopias because she thought they each necessarily contained latent elements of the other (Atwood 2011, 66). That term is especially appropriately applied to novels like The Dispossessed, The Handmaid’s Tale, and Oryx and Crake, in which the edges between utopia and dystopia are blurred, and I use it here in that sense of a “combination.” Authors have an increased ability to develop their characters in ustopias because the characters have to make conscious choices between “living right” and “living wrong” as they wind their way through the novel, and the choices are not always clear. In addition to adding layers of complexity to the plot, this also allows the authors to add layers of complexity to the characters.  Right and wrong are no longer black-and-white concepts like they were in Herland, or even in Anthem; interpersonal conflicts, religious and scientific ethics, and political considerations affect people’s choices, just like they do in real life. Just like real life, these considerations have to be weighed in every moral decision the characters make. This engages the reader and their own values in the moral life of the characters, which not only makes for more interesting reading, it also leads to thoughtful, big-issue conversations about right and wrong. This is a continuation of the goal of utopian authors to engage readers with their ideas about how to live right, but with an extended application to moral decisionmaking.

Thomas More’s primary character in Utopia was his narrator, who played only a minimal part in the development of the plot, such as it was, so there really were not any moral decisions to be made other than Raphael’s predictable gift of Christianity to the utopians, which was of course well-received. Herland and Ecotopia, while they were more developed as novels, had characters with a pretty clear vision of what was right (their utopia) and wrong (modern America). Although he flipped the concept of a utopia around, Anthem’s Prometheus at least had a clear idea of what was wrong with his City, and he clearly recognized what he thought was right when he finally found it. In contrast, The Dispossessed, The Handmaid’s Tale, and Oryx and Crake all walk a fine line between utopia and dystopia, crossing back and forth over the boundaries and requiring their characters to examine and evaluate their own sense of right and wrong at every step. In The Dispossessed, Anarres sits on the fence between utopia and dystopia and Shevek has to help determine which side it will land on. The Handmaid’s Tale is set in a place that is both utopic and dystopic at the same time. Oryx and Crake is even more complicated, with elements of utopia and dystopia intermingled throughout both the past and the present. The reader brings their own morality to the books, which engages with that of the characters and leads to a re-evaluation of what is right and wrong, both on the page and in the real world.

In Utopia, Herland, and Ecotopia, we read about well-organized, garden-like, prosperous, and law-abiding isolated utopic communities. The details of the societies varied, but they all shared similar traits: communal values, money was unimportant, work was enjoyable and rewarding, everyone followed the rules, and everyone had all the food, clothing, and shelter they needed. A key requirement for these utopic societies was that they be inhabited by “utopian people”: people who shared common values. These utopians did not need to discuss – or even think about -- what was right or wrong, since by definition, their utopia did everything right. These traits were somewhat simplistically contrasted with those of our own society through reflections by the narrators, which helped us primarily to discern what traits about their own societies the authors thought needed to be fixed.  The characters did not have to make decisions between right and wrong; the only choice lay with the narrators in deciding whether or not to stay in the “good place.” Anthem followed many of these utopian literary conventions, but we recognized almost immediately that Anthem was dystopic because the narrator Prometheus was unhappy in and rebellious against the supposedly utopic society that he was born into. The reasons for his unhappiness illustrated some of the dystopic conventions we discussed in class. To use the garden motif, the carefully tended “garden” of Prometheus’s City had been over-weeded and over-watched. Their sense of community was so over-developed that even the thought of personal desires was prohibited, and the concept of the individual ego was prohibited. While Prometheus had a moral choice to make, it too, was one-sided and predetermined. Like the “right” way was the only option for living in Herland, the “wrong” way was the only option for living in Anthem. Prometheus was never happy with anything in The City. He escaped to establish his own version of a utopia in the wilderness, with a single mate and the idea of “I,” leaving us with a new and somewhat upside-down version of a utopia that nevertheless reflected the aspects of the author’s society that she felt needed to be fixed. In all of these books, there were no real moral conflicts and no gray areas between the black and the white.

In The Dispossessed, The Handmaid’s Tale, and Oryx and Crake, the aspects of utopia and dystopia are interwoven in a more complex manner, creating combined “ustopias.” That makes the plot more complicated. It also creates new avenues for character development that were not available in the earlier novels, making these more interesting as stories and increasing reader engagement. The characters in these novels face decisions between right and wrong at every turn. As we get to know them, we try to understand their moral decision-making matrix: what do they value, what do they think right looks like, what are their guiding principles, and most importantly, are they correct? These questions never needed to be answered in the pure utopia/dystopia realm, but in the “ustopias” they are key to both plot and character development. The complex morality required of these characters draws the reader in as we recognize and empathize with the multiple factors that go into their decisions, even while we do not always agree. These individual evaluations of right and wrong are part of the big conversations that Atwood and LeGuin are trying to spur.

The Dispossessed is set in an awkward middle ground between the utopian founding principles of Anarres, which led the original citizens to found an anarchic society away from the amoral influences of the “propertarians,” and an increasingly rigid and legalistic government that discouraged scientific advancement, close personal or family relationships, and intercourse with the rest of galactic society. The founders of Anarres wanted to “live right.” As Shevek was growing up, he believed in the utopian values he was taught in school and the utopic vision of Anarres was very real to him. However, as Anarres developed, the society became ever more “legalistic,” persecuting those who deviated from the social norm in any way, and Shevek eventually had to confront the growing amorality in his beloved country. He recognized that Anarres was at a turning point. “The social conscience totally dominates the individual conscience, instead of striking a balance with it. We don’t cooperate – we obey” (LeGuin 330). Even intimate family relations became suspect, as children were taken from their parents to live in dormitories at an early age, and something as innocent as “family dinner” with the children was frowned upon.  Shevek and Takver were assigned to work far apart from each other, and while the official position was that it was a temporary necessity, Shevek’s fruitless attempts at reassignment illustrated that it was instead a deliberate separation. Shevek and Bedap set up The Syndicate of Initiative, a society to encourage individual and scientific creativity, for which they were persecuted. This is sure to offend the political sensibilities of modern democratic readers. As he gradually came to recognize the dystopic, over-regulated, impersonal course Anarres had started down, Shevek struggled with trying to figure out what was right. He loved his family and wanted to be with them, which every reader can empathize with, but he had been raised with strong communitarian political values that made him think he was being “propertarian” for wanting to live with his wife. His suspicions that the remote job postings were a tool for State separations rather than strictly for the good of the country added another layer to his dilemma – how could this utopian country that he loved so much be acting “wrong”? And what to do about it? His inner conflict draws the reader in and makes them form an opinion of their own, but the reader’s opinions change as often as Shevek’s do. On Urras, Shevek was given a pleasant life full of the work he adored. He had to make an active choice to go out and see the ugly side of Urras, and then he had to decide what to do about it, if anything.  The values he had been raised with led him to try to help “liberate” the Urrasti populace like his fellow Odonians had liberated themselves from propertarian rule. That led to violence and bloodshed. Was it the right thing to do? Readers will see both sides, as Shevek does, and they will have differing opinions about whether he should have gotten involved, raising real issues about politics, rebellion, workers’ rights, oppression, and poverty that need to be discussed. Shevek was afraid he would be persecuted on his return to Anarres.  He wanted to return to the country he loved and the people he loved, which is an emotion that again, every reader can empathize with, but he was still afraid. Should he have gone back? It’s hard to imagine a citizen of Ecotopia or Herland being afraid to return home. Shevek’s moral dilemmas lead the reader to examine their own values. Is the family more important than career or country? Is knowledge important for its own sake or only for what can be done with it? Is violence a good response to oppression? Should you still love a homeland that doesn’t love you? These are some of the important conversations that ustopias encourage us to have.

The Handmaid’s Tale appears at first glance to be strictly dystopic because we empathize with the misery of the narrator from page one. Lest we simply write off Gilead as a pure dystopia, though, remember the religious zeal of Aunt Lydia, who told the women at the Red Center how lucky they were to be on the forefront of saving the world. Although Serena Joy ended up being unhappy in her role, she too was a zealous advocate for the theocracy who participated in setting it up according to her ideals. Gilead was truly their utopia. They were not alone in believing that living according to the rules they established would be “living right.”  These true believers shared common values, valued the community over themselves – they were doing all they could to save the human species, after all – and everyone was provided for, with a job, food coupons, and a place to live, even if it was not the place or job they would have chosen. The hallmarks of a utopia were all there.  However, the hallmarks of a dystopia existed right alongside and between them, simply depending on who you asked. As the Commander said, “Better never means better for everyone…It always means worse, for some” (Atwood 1986, 211). The moral choices that Offred made were smaller and more restricted than those Shevek had to make, since they were limited by her smaller and more restricted lifestyle. Although she reflects on her past life, which provides the reader with a way to get to know her as a “real person,” those choices were over and done with. Offred’s complex morality comes through in her present choices between bad options. She had a choice about becoming a Handmaid, although her options were perhaps only death or life, but Offred said “I intend to last” (Atwood 1986, 8, 10). Her little choices about making conversation with Ofglen, about accepting the offer of the doctor to help her get pregnant, about stealing something from Serena Joy’s sitting room, about coping with routine rape, or about looking for some happiness with Nick, all of these choices give us clues to her moral character and make us question our own. Because we got to know Offred through the eyes of her past, we can more easily empathize with her choices and we are all the more horrified at her options and how they are normalized. Although they were not on the same scale as the conflicts Shevek was presented with in The Dispossessed, Offred’s choices nevertheless touch on relatable, complex human emotions that we the readers face every day. We again share in moral decision-making with the characters and are forced to have important, if uncomfortable, conversations about right and wrong.

Oryx and Crake is the most complex ustopia that we read this semester. It is impossible to separate its utopian and dystopian elements by person, place, or time. The days of Jimmy include both utopic Compounds and dystopic Pleeblands, utopic scientific advances and dystopic scientific advances, utopic personal relationships and dystopic personal relationships. In contrast, the days of Snowman find the environment to be a dystopic wasteland while the human population, the destroyer of the environment, has been virtually wiped out, which may be interpreted to be utopic. The Crakers live a utopic existence within the dystopic environment. Science has reverted to the utopic primitive stereotype. Snowman is lonely and alone, but he is constantly with his best friends Oryx and Crake in his mind. Every decision Jimmy/Snowman makes at every stage of this novel is a moral minefield, even though he does not always recognize it.  His earliest interactions with Crake watching snuff and porn on the internet balances the morality of what they were watching with his need for a relationship with Crake. He overlooks Crake’s sociopathic tendencies with his science experiments, his mother, and later Uncle Pete because of his need for friendship and his admiration for Crake. Crake, too, has layers of morality to be peeled away. Like Shevek in The Dispossessed, Crake is dedicated to Knowledge. He is concerned about overpopulation and wants the world to survive. Even as he kills Oryx, there is a debate about whether he did so to save her from the ravages of disease or in revenge for revealing his misdeeds. He clearly cares about Jimmy at some level.  Oryx and her history of childhood sexual exploitation prod us with yet another kind of moral dilemma. How reasonable was her response to the movie maker who took care of her and made sure she was fed?  What do we make of her decision to sleep with both Jimmy and Crake? Were she and Jimmy right to help Crake with his Craker project? Is Snowman right to allow the Crakers to turn Oryx and Crake into deities?  In addition to the unanswered – and possibly unanswerable -- moral dilemmas Atwood forces her characters (and her readers) into, she obscures the facts surrounding those decisions much like the facts around many of our own everyday dilemmas remain obscured, so we may never know what is right or wrong. But like she did in The Handmaid’s Tale, Atwood and Jimmy/Snowman force us to have important conversations about right and wrong, possibly reaching answers on some bigger questions even while the details of the story remain unclear.

One of the defining conventions of pure utopias is that the characterization tends to be flat and one-dimensional, which makes it difficult to engage the reader with the characters or draw them into the story. While the authors we read in the first half of the semester had varying degrees of success in overcoming this limitation, Ursula LeGuin and Margaret Atwood simply threw it out the window by combining and layering elements of utopia and dystopia throughout their novels and forcing their characters to deal with it. In these ustopias, the characters necessarily have a more complex morality because they have to make decisions about right and wrong to further the plot development. They are not Herland’s “utopian people” who simply live in a perfect world under a perfect system.  They live in an imperfect and more relatable world, in which good and bad walk side by side. They draw us in by dealing with complex moral issues that we all have opinions about, and their decisions about what is right have consequences for both the character and the plot. Not every reader will agree with every moral choice, and it is our enjoyable job to debate those choices. LeGuin and Atwood share with Gilman and Callenbach a desire to share their ideas for living right and to inspire people to talk about them. The difference is, the moral complexity of the worlds that ustopian characters find themselves in leads the characters, and therefore the readers, into more meaningful conversations about how real human considerations should and do affect the moral decision-making process.

References

Atwood, Margaret. The Handmaid’s Tale. New York: Anchor Books, 1998. First published 1986 by Houghton Mifflin Company (United States).

Atwood, Margaret. “Dire Cartographies: The Roads to Ustopia.” In In Other Worlds: SF and the Human Imagination, 66-96. New York: Anchor Books, 2011.

LeGuin, Ursula K. The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia. New York: Harper Voyager, 2011. First published 1974.

Essay #2 - Ah, the Good Old Days: Utopia as Nostalgia for the Past

We have examined a number of conventions of utopic fiction this semester, including the journey, the limited characterization, the communal values, the narrative style, and the isolation. Although convention tells us that utopias may be placed in an idealized past or an idealized future, even utopias set in the future are still based in some part on nostalgia for the past. Ecotopia and The Handmaid’s Tale both share a common nostalgia for a lost past.  This is also true of real-world historical attempts at utopia, such as the return to rural life found in Twin Oaks, the return to Biblical polygamy found in the early Mormon Church, the “Leave It To Beaver” lifestyle sought in Disney’s Celebration, and the “white flight” communities discussed in Rich Benjamin’s Searching for Whitopia. Perhaps this is because people have some sort of knowledge about what was, whether it is accurate or not, which gives them mental building blocks to work with, while they would have to rely on pure imagination to create a futuristic utopia out of whole cloth.

This desire to recreate an idealized “memory” of the way things used to be goes a long way towards explaining why real-world utopian communities have not been very successful, and it also suggests a reason for the greater success of smaller scale utopian ideas like food forests or bike shares; they function to modify the world as it actually is, they do not try to recreate the world that used to be. As the saying goes, “you can’t go back.” Even if every participant in a community had exactly the same nostalgic memory of the past they were trying to recreate, they would still encounter the problem everyone experiences when they go back to their high school to “revisit their glory days,” or they try to recreate a great family vacation by going to the same place with the same people. In the case of modern day utopian communities, even those that look backwards for inspiration, people now have modern day education and experiences, modern day values like gender equality, and modern day conveniences like cell phones, cars, and the internet. You can’t go back.

Utopian fiction and utopian experiments can help us learn about the past by examining both the problems that were sought to be solved and the idealized versions of the past that authors and real-world founders pursued. However, it does require a little extra work to determine what was real, what part was idealized, and what social flaws the author wanted to correct. This extends the concept of a “literature of ideas” to include literature that requires not only thought but also a little outside knowledge to fully appreciate.

The nostalgia for the past in literary utopias takes different forms, depending on the author’s particular expertise and interests. Ernest Callenbach wrote Ecotopia at the height of the environmental movement and towards the end of the American “hippie-commune” movement, which is reflected throughout the novel. In Ecotopia, there is an emphasis on returning the land to a stable state, to its unspoiled nature. Marissa represents the “earth-mother” and actually “worships” in a tree. Callenbach references many Native American customs and traditions, including hunting with bows and arrows and participation in war games, demonstrating a nostalgia for the way the early Native Americans lived in synchrony with the land. The main character, Weston, even undergoes his final “conversion” in a Native American-style sweat lodge. Ecotopians valued their primitive animal nature, as sex was actually a cultural value and was not necessarily private, and they sometimes actually hunted for their food. Throughout the novel, Ecotopia yearns for the “Good Old Days” of Native American life.  In Herland, Charlotte Perkins Gilman writes about the “Good Old Days” described by sociologist Lester Ward, when women were the equals (or even the superiors) of men in hunting, gathering, and politics (Finlay 1999, 254). She explicitly describes those days in her “Proem,” that served as an introduction to Women and Economics. “Twofold man was equal; they were comrades dear and daring, living wild and free together in unreasoning delight” (Gilman 2018, 5). In Herland, Gilman’s women are responsible for every level of society, from soldiering and government to food production and education, and they do it better than the men of Van’s America, just like they ostensibly did it in the idealized early pre-industrial days. In Ayn Rand’s Anthem, Prometheus finds the utopia he is looking for in the books of the past. In Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, Offred keeps returning to an idealized past in her mind. “I wander back, try to regain those distant pathways; I become too maudlin, lose myself. Weep” (227). She says “[h]ow were we to know we were happy, even then?” (192). Even while Offred was seeking the utopia of her past in her head, the government of Gilead was attempting to revert to a Biblical society of the even further past. Similarly, in Atwood’s Oryx and Crake, Jimmy/Snowman keeps returning to the past in his mind, wishing he were with a living Oryx, or with his living mother (67, 110).  Atwood contrasts these idealized pasts with Snowman’s substantially less pleasant, even dystopic present. In Ursula LeGuin’s The Dispossessed, Shevek has a similar nostalgia for the past, but Shevek’s past is the ideal of what he has been taught about his history: the founding Odonian experiment. Shevek finds himself in an oppressive, constricting present and compares it with his idealized version of what his society used to be, the early days of Odo and the founding of Anarres. LeGuin leaves open the question of whether the past or the present will win out on Anarres.

One reason The Handmaid’s Tale so effectively obscures its utopic side is that Atwood uses the real past as building blocks for her novel. Because the reader recognizes that these (un-idyllic) things actually happened, it limits our ability to idealize the past and thereby limits our ability to be nostalgic about it. This starkly contrasts with the fictional Gileadan nostalgia for that past and forces us to empathize with the dystopic rebel, Offred, whose views we tend to empathize with.  As Offred waxes nostalgic about her personal past, we the readers can relate to that past as it is something we recognize and consider ordinary.  At the same time, we have difficulty perceiving Gilead to be even an attempt at utopia because the past it is reenacting is made up of acts that offend our twenty-first century sensibilities, including religious and racial purges and strict control over the lives of women. Atwood’s heavy-handed religious symbolism demonstrates that Gilead’s founders were clearly attempting to revert to a Biblical patriarchal and polygamous society, but Atwood’s use of the worst examples of religious abuses as her building blocks insures that we the readers will not find that version of the past to be a “good place” for which any reasonable person would be nostalgic. The Commander admits that “[b]etter never means better for everyone…It always means worse, for some” (Atwood 1986, 211). We the readers cannot help but feel that the worse outweighs the better in Gilead. Even though The Handmaid’s Tale fits all the literary criteria for a utopia, our twenty-first century values and our identification with Offred make it impossible for the utopic aspects to outweigh the dystopic aspects that are revealed through Offred’s narrative perspective.

This nostalgia for the past is also evident in real-world attempts at utopias. Twin Oaks was designed to recreate the “Good Old Days” of pre-industrial communal living. As an article on their webpage stated, “[i]n many ways, early Twin Oaks was a sort of grassroots communism which sought to liberate the world from wage slavery and consumerism, and give the good life to everyone who was willing to work their quota of labor credits.” “Twin Oaks originally had a vague mission to create ‘the good life’ as imagined by B.F. Skinner (in his book Walden Two), but there was no strategy for how to go about it…The founders were simply enamored of the mystique of farm life, rather than pursuing a rational plan” (Nexus article). While it has continued to exist, most of its members treat it only as a temporary “vacation” from modern society rather than a permanent lifestyle (Monroe 2013). The original Mormon Church was set up as an isolated community that hewed to literalist religious values, as interpreted by their founder, and engaged in Biblically-based polygamous marriage. However, polygamy set them squarely outside of the law, and in order to become a part of larger American society, they were forced to give up this Biblical throwback (Patheos article). Disney’s Celebration was an attempt to recreate the idealized suburban lifestyle of the 1950’s, down to the grass-filled yards, white picket fences, and neighborhood ice-cream shops. However, racial and economic segregation, major problems in 1950s America, again raised their heads in Celebration. Furthermore, Celebration was not populated with “utopian people” who all got along and agreed on everything, leading to internal strife and dissatisfaction. Disney eventually sold the property and let it become just another suburban community (Goodnough 2004). The communities Rich Benjamin visited in Whitopia are populated by people who want to recreate the “Good Old Days” of racial segregation. They left urban, diverse communities to set up communities filled with people like themselves. In St. George, Utah, Benjamin found a lot of (white) money, a lot of golfing, and a lot of concern about illegal immigration. In Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, he found not just white people, but a community of white former LAPD officers as well as an arm of the white nationalism movement. Forsythe, Georgia, was populated by white people who fled a racially diverse Atlanta to form a white community in neighborhoods that were filled with old slave cemeteries and memories of lynchings. Benjamin observed “an existential crisis among pockets of conservative white America (about the fact that white people are predicted to become a minority by 2042) and Whitopia is speaking to that” (Benjamin 2009). “Whitopians,” like those who bought into the original Disney Celebration concept, are looking to recreate the “Good Old Days” when people like themselves were a comfortable and unchallenged majority.

Despite looking backwards, utopian experiments that were willing and able to adapt to and accommodate the needs of the present have had some success. Twin Oaks permitted porous boundaries and has encouraged “temporary” memberships, making it as much a leave-of-absence from modernity as permanent lifestyle. Despite their basic communistic values, they have also developed a more capitalistic funding base, generating a great deal of income from their sales of hammocks, furniture, and tofu products (Monroe 2013). The Mormon Church was willing to set aside its nostalgia for the good old days of polygamy, and it has thrived (Patheos website). The “Whitopias” appear at present to be ongoing communities, but Benjamin’s interview suggests that their “whiteness” may already be endangered by socioeconomic factors and simple population trends (Benjamin 2009).  Smaller scale utopian projects like bike sharing projects and neighborhood food forests, which have their roots in utopian ideas like those presented in Ecotopia, have been successful likely because they did not rely on any shared imaginary vision of the past but focused solely on a single problem or set of problems in today’s world that could be solved using the utopian ideals of community and sharing. Jane Addams’ Hull-House project may also appropriately be categorized among these latter projects, which applied utopian concepts to modern world problems and improved specific parts of society without attempting to recreate a wholly new one. These latter projects might, in fact, be seen as independent “fruits” of the literature of ideas.  

This nostalgia for the past gives an interesting twist to the literature of ideas and to the study of utopias in general. The literature of ideas forces us to think about the concepts that authors were concerned about and to consider the problems and solutions they presented. People necessarily remember or imagine the past in different ways, which inevitably causes problems for real world utopias that attempt to satisfy everyone. Margaret Atwood demonstrates in The Handmaid’s Tale the radical divide that differing visions of the past can create, and the “whitopias” that Rich Benjamin explored bring those differing visions into real-world focus.  If you look for the past that people are nostalgic for, that past contributes an essential element to the conversation about perfecting the present.

References

Atwood, Margaret. The Handmaid’s Tale. New York: Anchor Books, 1998. First published 1986 by Houghton Mifflin Company (United States).

Atwood, Margaret. Oryx and Crake. New York: Anchor Books, 2004. First published 2003 by Nan A. Talese (United States).

Benjamin, Rich. C-Span Interview. October 17, 2009. https://www.c-span.org/video/?289775-1/searching-whitopia#

Finlay, Barbara. “Lester Frank Ward as a Sociologist of Gender: A New Look at His Sociological Work.” Gender and Society 13, no. 2 (April 1999): 251-265. doi:10.1177/089124399013002006.

Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. “Proem.” In Women and Economics. 5-6. OPU, 2018. First published 1898.  NOOK edition.

Goodnough, Abby. “Disney is Selling A Town It Built to Reflect the Past.” New York Times. January 6, 2004. https://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/16/us/disney-is-selling-a-town-it-built-to-reflect-the-past.html

Monroe, Rachel. “I Worked Hard for No Pay – and I Dug It.” Salon.com. 10 February 2013. http://coursesite.uhcl.edu/HSH/Whitec/xcritsource/jrnlsm/TwinOaksMonroe2013.htm

Nexus. “Walden Two’s Bastard Child.” From Twin Oaks Community Webpage. Accessed April 28, 2019. https://www.twinoaks.org/culture-government-65/walden-two-community?start=5

Patheos Religion Library. “The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints.” Patheos website. Accessed April 28, 2019.  https://www.patheos.com/library/mormonism

Essay #3 - Weeding The Garden

Utopias are frequently compared to gardens, both physically and psychologically. I reviewed Kristine Vermillion’s 2013 final exam submission “Garden Motif in Utopian Literature,” Grant Law’s 2019 midterm essay, “The Utopian Garden was Eden and Eden is an Escape,” and one of the research posts that they both referred to, Jenna Zucha’s 2011 research post “The Garden of Utopia.” All three discussed garden examples in Utopia, Ecotopia and Herland, and Grant’s reference to Anthem fits with some of the more dystopic aspects of the garden analogy that we have discovered in The Dispossessed and The Handmaid’s Tale. While Kristine and Jenna focused on the importance of boundaries in gardens, I find Grant’s discussion about “gardening of the person” to be a more convincing determinant of the utopic or dystopic nature of a society, as it focuses more on how the efforts of the Gardener (the State) affect the lives of the citizens inside the garden, thereby making a place a “good place” – or not.

Jenna’s description of the garden as “an allegory for the actual process of creating and maintaining a utopic state” seems apt. Kristine provided specific analyses of the garden as a deliberate taming of the wilderness to benefit society in Utopia, Herland and Ecotopia, noting that the Compounds were at least a deliberate “paradisiacal” contrast to the slums of the pleeblands in Oryx and Crake. Grant extended the “garden” analogy to a figurative “gardening of the person” in a discussion of the way Ecotopians also nurtured their physical health and the way nomadic peoples like the Romani developed their culture, identity and community despite lacking a set piece of ground to garden upon. This “gardening of the person” is also seen in Herland, where women rated education as their highest value and had not had a crime committed in 600 years.  However, Grant raised a problematic contrast with Anthem, in which Prometheus flees the cultivated garden of the City to go to the uncultivated wilderness…in the hope of cultivating the wilderness into his own version of a garden of individuality.

Margaret Atwood uses a garden theme throughout The Handmaid’s Tale in all the ways described by Jenna, Kristine, and Grant. Gilead had established boundaries, within which everything was controlled and placed just so, down to the color-coordinated outfits. Even thoughts were controlled; the Bible had been carefully modified to say what the leaders thought it should say; there were prescribed ways of speaking -- or not speaking -- to each other; everybody had their place and stayed in it. Serena Joy kept a garden because it was something she could “order and maintain and care for” (12). Offred equated flowers and plants to fertility, which was of utmost importance in Gilead.  Serena Joy’s perfume smelled like Lily of the Valley, a Biblical flower, which referred both to gardens and to the predominant theocratic religion. There were flower pictures on the wall in Offred’s room, flowers in Serena Joy’s sitting room, and flowers on the sofa, drapes, and bedspread at Jezebel’s. However, Gilead was full of things that could not be controlled by the Gardener – recalcitrant weeds, perhaps. The fish were poisoned. Produce was in short supply. Men (and women) were sterile. Citizens, especially women, were unhappy with their roles. The Gardener made a valiant effort at control, forcing undesirables to clean up toxic waste by hand, but the environment remained poisoned. Women who tried to flee Gilead were hunted down and brought back, while those who helped them were punished, but people still fled. Gilead’s refusal to accept that it could not control these things sowed the seeds of its own destruction. Only imagine if the government had used science to address the root cause of sterility (likely the pollution) and thereby also succeeded in cleaning up the air and water, thereby better sustaining food sources, thereby minimizing toxic waste to be cleaned up…

Jenna’s comment that “[b]oth the garden and the utopia must be under constant surveillance in order for them to survive” is particularly appropriate in “ustopias” like those found in Anthem, The Dispossessed, The Handmaid’s Tale, and Oryx and Crake, in which The State was becoming or had become so controlling as to become oppressive. In Anthem, the thought- and language-police criminalized any personal desires and even the use of the word “I.”  In The Dispossessed, novel ideas were strictly squelched, as when Shevek and Bedap were persecuted for establishing The Syndicate of Initiative and Tirin was driven insane because of his playwriting. In Anthem, Prometheus shocked the establishment and was criminalized for inventing electricity. In the Handmaid’s Tale, Atwood called the Agents of Gilead “Eyes,” as they were always watching and were quick to punish any violations. In Oryx and Crake, the garden-like Compounds were heavily guarded and access was limited to those who “belonged” there.  In all of these novels, State control of the “garden” of their utopia had turned into intolerance of the intrusion of any ideas from the outside wilderness. Clearly, surveillance of the garden can be taken too far.

As Jenna pointed out, “[u]topian ideas and communities, like gardens, are not perfectly organized and must tolerate some intrusion from the outside wilderness in order to survive.” This is perhaps a literary equivalent of the biological necessity for strengthening the gene pool in animal communities by bringing in a mate from an outside pack or community. In both Anthem and The Handmaid’s Tale, outside ideas were forcefully prevented, while in The Dispossessed, LeGuin left us wondering whether Anarres would follow the path of Gilead to self-destruction or whether it would yield some ground to Shevek’s ideas. In Oryx and Crake, not just outside ideas but also outside people were kept out of the Compounds by gun-toting guards. Jimmy was repeatedly questioned threateningly about his mother and her “subversive” ideas, even though he had not seen her in years, and Crake’s father was murdered by HealthWyzer when he found out they were creating and spreading diseases in order to sell their cure. The government in Atwood’s Gilead tried to control the uncontrollable without new ideas, trying to simply beat the issue into submission like a gardener fertilizing flowers on a rock bed.  Rather than seek solutions for infertility, Gilead simply denied its existence (in men) and forced fertile women into sex slavery. Rather than seek solutions to reduce pollution, they transported their undesirables to sweep it up. Speaking out against the government or the State religion was punished harshly. The ongoing efforts of people to flee Gilead for the “wilderness” without recalls Prometheus’s flight from The City in Anthem. Although Atwood did not describe Gilead’s downfall for us, the final chapter lets us know that it did occur. As Kristine pointed out, “When the wilderness is more hospitable and safer than the garden, something has gone terribly wrong.”

Grant’s discussion of “gardening of the person,” Jenna’s discussion of the requirement for constant surveillance, and Kristine’s discussion of gardens within boundaries place the utopian garden analogy squarely within an ecofeminist analysis. Kristine points out that garden imagery has always been somehow linked with women and fertility. In Ellen Cronan Rose’s article “The Good Mother: From Gaia to Gilead,” she spoke to the pre-industrial historical construct of Earth as a nurturing “mother” who took care of her “children.” This symbolism faded away during the scientific revolution, but it returned in an idealized form in the 19^th century when the bourgeois ideal of nurturing mothers staying home to care for hearth and children captured the popular imagination (Rose 79). “Rational” feminists like Simone de Beauvoir protested this equivalence by insisting that women could and should compete with men on a completely equal footing. “Radical” or “cultural” feminists, on the other hand, adopted the “earth mother” analogy, emphasizing women’s “inherent” creative and nurturing abilities and embracing the closer ties to nature suggested by woman’s ability to bring new life into the world (Rose 78).  This latter group gave rise to the ecofeminist movement, which equates male discrimination against or mistreatment of women with a similar discrimination against or mistreatment of nature (King 403).  Val Plumwood identified a 5-step model that illustrated the similarities: radical exclusion, homogenization, backgrounding/denial, incorporation, and instrumentalism (Plumwood 337-338). An example of the application of instrumentalism shows that in The Handmaid’s Tale, the male-dominated society treated women as nameless “natural resources,” just like water or soil, to be abused and used up in pursuit of “masculine” social goals like profit. Without arguing against the “radical” feminist position, Rose warned about its inherent dangers: “[i]n such a culture, male views of mothers’ value prevail, to the benefit of men and children (especially sons) and at the cost of women’s nonreproductive freedoms. Fetal protection policies in the workplace, fetal rights legislation, erosion of abortion rights, and discussion of the contractual obligations of surrogate mothers suggest that the idea of maternal solicitude can all-too-easily segue to the more sinister conception of a (potential) mother as a fetal container” (Rose 87). The Handmaid’s Tale illustrates precisely that danger. In Gilead’s effort to perfect the “garden” of their society, specifically within the women in their society, they set up strict boundaries of behavior, clothing, appearance, and language. The desired conduct was studiously nurtured and constructed through (re)education, punishment, and constant surveillance and “weeding.” Outside ideas were not permitted, and everything was done in furtherance of the (male-determined) ultimate female value, reproduction. The result was a “female garden” with red, blue, green, and white flowers inside the garden walls, surrounded by a “male garden,” with its own set of prescribed behaviors, many of which pertained solely to maintaining and controlling the female garden.

The garden metaphor is a useful tool for analyzing both utopias and dystopias. “Ustopias,” a  term coined by Margaret Atwood to describe both utopias and dystopias (Atwood 2011, 66) necessarily require the same boundaries, rule-setting, and careful cultivation that gardens do. Herland and The Handmaid’s Tale apply the “earth-mother” analogy to women, but with strikingly different outcomes. In Herland, woman apply their “natural maternal values and abilities” to raise and nurture their children and their environment in peaceable, idealistic, placidity. In The Handmaid’s Tale, however, women’s “earth-mother” value has been boiled down to Rose’s “mother as fetal container.” Rose’s slippery-slope warning also appears applicable to identifying the fine line between utopias and dystopias. If all gardens require boundaries, cultivation, and constant surveillance, what does it take to push a utopic garden over the edge to a dystopia?  The gardens in dystopias like Anthem and The Handmaid’s Tale were too diligently weeded; they did not permit enough variety to grow within the gardens for the garden as a whole to survive. The garden of Herland had an impenetrable barrier to prevent “outside ideas” from entering, yet the people within were also raised tolerantly and encouraged to educate themselves. Individual desires were cultivated towards useful outcomes without being enforced from above, as in Ellador’s gratified desire to become a forester because she liked butterflies. Similarly in Ecotopia, individual development was encouraged and rewarded as long as it furthered the good of the community. In comparison, the government of Anarres in The Dispossessed gave lip service to individuality but in fact strongly discouraged it, even when it was done with the interests of the community in mind. The garden of Anthem had more porous physical borders than those of Herland or The Dispossessed, but the garden within was strictly “weeded” of independent thought, choice, and language, as was the garden of Gilead in The Handmaid’s Tale which had both hard borders and strict “weeding.” Unlike Herland, the City government in Anthem assigned jobs regardless of desire or ability. Personal relationships in the City were discouraged. In Gilead, even conversation was limited to culturally prescribed greetings. In both places, prescribed roles were enforced by strict punishments.  These examples illustrate how the “gardening of the persons” inside the boundaries of a utopia is more important than the established boundaries and is perhaps even more important than the original design of the garden altogether.

A garden may necessitate boundaries, but as Shevek recognized, “Those who build walls are their own prisoners… I’m going to go unbuild walls” (LeGuin 332). While Jenna’s distinction emphasizes the strength of the borders as determinative to the success of a utopia, the distinction between utopia and dystopia is as much, if not more, determined by the internal cultivation practices of the Gardener (The State). The society that cultivated Shevek the un-builder just might end up succeeding.

References

Atwood, Margaret. The Handmaid’s Tale. New York: Anchor Books, 1998. First published 1986 by Houghton Mifflin Company (United States).

Atwood, Margaret. “Dire Cartographies: The Roads to Ustopia.” In In Other Worlds: SF and the Human Imagination, 66-96. New York: Anchor Books, 2011.

King, Ynestra. “Toward an Ecological Feminism and a Feminist Ecology.” In Debating the Earth: The Environmental Politics Reader, 2^nd ed., edited by John S. Dryzek and David Schlosberg, 399-407. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005.

LeGuin, Ursula K. The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia. New York: Harper Voyager, 2011. First published 1974.

Plumwood, Val. “Androcentrism and Anthropocentrism: Parallels and Politics.” In Ecofeminism: Women, Culture, Nature. Edited by Karen J. Warren, 327-355. Bloomington IN: Indiana University Press, 1997.

Rose, Ellen Cronan. “The Good Mother: From Gaia to Gilead.” Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 12, no.1 (1991):77-97. https://www.jstor.org/stable/3346579