LITR 5737: Literary & Historical Utopias
Final Exam Submission 2005

Gloria Sisneros

June 30, 2005

Topic 2.  Literary and Cultural Perspectives of Millennialism

            Millennialism can be defined as that period when Christ returns to earth:  “This is the first resurrection.  Blessed and holy is the one who shares in the first resurrection. . . . [T]hey will be priests of God and of Christ and they will reign with him for [the] thousand years” (New American Bible, Rev. 20:5-6).  After this period of Christ’s reign, Satan will be released to roam the earth and stir up the nations against each other for battle.  He and his followers will be defeated and cast into a pool of fire by God’s army.   Christ will once again be in Heaven’s center in the New Jerusalem, and the Tree of Life will be located there.

            This millennial strain can be found coursing through Daniel Robison’s class presentation, “Heaven as Utopia.”  It brings up contemporary cultural issues found in Revelations.  Robison broaches the problem of a heavenly utopia as being excessively boring to a secular intellectual, as evidenced by George Orwell who writes:  “Heaven is as great a flop as Utopia though Hell occupies a respectable place in literature, and has often been described most minutely and convincingly.”  Orwell’s views as a literary critic are at odds with this reader who finds The Book of Revelations and its reinstatement of heaven or The New Jerusalem to be both frightening and inspiring.  But, this again can be seen as a matter of individual faith, and not intellectualism.

            The injection of “millennialism” into a utopian narrative, however, can be examined from both a literary and a cultural perspective.   Setting, characterization, and plot development in the cataclysmic account of Butler’s The Parable of the Sower stand out favorably in contrast with the static properties found in Rand’s Anthem. 

            For example, the post-apocalyptic setting of The Parable of the Sower places fifteen year old African American, Lauren Olamina, in the center of this tale.  Within her diary, she records events and thoughts she has about her walled community of Robledo.  She thinks about this city her father grew up in, “20 miles from Los Angeles, and, according to Dad, once a rich, green, unwalled little city that he had been eager to abandon when he was a young man” (9).  It seems to have been a fairy tale.  The walls, within which she and her loved ones live, protect them from a chaotic outer world composed of drug-induced sociopaths, corporate slaveholders, and feral dogs.   Her neighborhood is a patch of Eden with its fruit trees and gardens and a diverse collection of people who watch out for each other.

            In contrast, the setting for Anthem is a bleak, collectivist world where universal conformity sets the moral tone.  Individualism is suppressed with life that begins in the Home of the Infants.  It is a sin, also, “to be born with a head which is too quick” (21).   This dystopia has emerged from the “Unmentionable Times [when the] Evil Ones were burned” (48, 49).  The novel’s millennialism surfaces when the man and woman break into the Uncharted Forest.  They find “water and fruit in the forest,” and even their new Eden when they see a flame blazing from a high peak.  In the fortress they find there, they can begin a new race of egocentric human beings.  The new kingdom will be established.

            Plot and characterization suffer in comparing Anthem to Parable.  Anthem’s Adam and Eve, Prometheus and Gaea, are portrayed in caricature form, lacking depth or definition.  Their actions are predictable—even in their lovemaking:  “And that night we knew that to hold the body of women in our arms is neither ugly nor shameful, but the one ecstasy to the race of man” (84).  Obviously, it can be difficult to identify with characters whose speech and actions are so unnatural.

            In Parable, the millennial parallels begin when Lauren’s family and neighborhood are destroyed.  Lauren is a dynamic character, one who nurses secrets that gradually spill over as events become more menacing.  Her intelligence and spirituality, her messianic mission, are at the core of the small band of followers.  Her hyper-empathy presents problems that she finds burdensome and harmful to her.  Hence, the plot of the story is conflict-driven which makes for compelling reading.  Misunderstandings that are never fully resolved arise between individuals, e.g., between Lauren and Harry Balter.  And, sporadic attacks along US Highway 101 have the survivors fighting for their lives and developing strategies for strength, as shown in this passage:  “Three is the smallest comfortable number at a water station.  Two to watch and one to fill up” (181).  All this for something as basic to human survival as water!   Lauren succeeds in getting her small band to a new “paradise,” or New Jerusalem, in northern California.  There she plants the tree of life, burying an acorn for each loved one she and her friends have lost.  It is only a matter of time before their community is discovered, and once again, the tribulations begin.

            For centuries, people have questioned the validity of millennialism and its end-of-time speculation.  Is it literature’s job to provide an entertaining analogy to this problem, or must it remain dry and unknowable?  Is it up to “the faithful” to seek the one answer?  We already know what Orwell thinks of the first question;  for the second question, try asking a religious Protestant, Catholic, or Eastern Orthodox Christian.       

Topic 3.  An Examination of Ecotopian Concepts

            Callenbach’s Ecotopia, a novel about a region of the United States that has seceded and becomes an environmentally-focused nation, contains three elements found in both More’s Utopia and Gilman’s Herland:  (1) a foreigner who visits a utopian civilization; (2) a government that is socialistic in nature, and (3) a society in which the greater good supersedes the individual’s interests. 

Foreigner Visitors

            Raphael Hythloday in Utopia, William Weston in Ecotopia, and the three friends in Herland—Terry Nicholson, Jeff Margrave, and Vandyck Jennings, are each, to borrow a famous title of Robert Heinlein’s, “strangers in a strange land.”  Each is seeing a revolutionary concept of government, and that leads to questions of existence and to cause for self examination.   For instance, the reader finds William constantly protesting about conditions in Ecotopia.  After all he is a citizen of the dominant country in the world, the USA.  Why should he have to agree with a country that sees the environment as its overriding concern?  As an American, he is entitled to wasting nature’s resources; it is not his concern that his waste pollutes others’ territories.  Consequently, he displays the typical self-absorption, time-driven, career-focused propensities of the average American professional, and as such, he does not feel the need to care about what others think of his actions.  In fact, he is disturbed to find that Ecotopians do not feel the way he does about cars and highways:

Ecotopia [doesn’t] build speedy cars for its thousands of miles of rural highways—which are now totally uncongested even if their rights of way have partly been taken over for trains. . . I attempted to sow a few seeds of doubt in their minds:  no one can be utterly insensitive to the pleasures of the open road, I told them, and I related how it feels to roll along in one of our powerful, comfortable cars, a girl’s hair blowing in the wind. . . . (29)

Terry is the only other traveler who seems to share his views of disapproval about the land he visits.  The two things that concern him in Herland are that the women are not exceedingly feminine, to his eyes—beautiful, nor are they are swooning over his hyper-exaggerated manliness.  There is a difference between the two men, however.  William finally succumbs to the charms of his Ecotopian lover, Marissa, and the land that she loves; while Terry has to be spirited away by the Herlanders in order to keep him from hurting someone.

Socialistic Governments

            The issue of governance cannot be avoided when these visitors, accustomed to a mercantile/capitalistic society, come to observe.  In all three instances they find  socialism in place.  Hythloday, as do Weston and Jenning, describes in detail the myriad number of councils or committees needed to make decisions which impact the citizenry.

Will Weston finally does get to interview the female president of Ecotopia.  He finds to his surprise that she is a person of considerable weight in terms of leadership and compares her heft to that of Mao Tse-tung and Ho Chi Minh (160).   Her arguments prove so convincing that he suffers a crisis of identity:

The talk left me feeling exhausted, depressed, as if a huge weight has settled on top of my head.   This country is really too much.  Even the President wants to mess with your soul. . . .  As I left, I had the flash that she reminded me of my grandmother, whose disappointments were visited upon several generations of my family. (162)

Society versus the Individual

            It is difficult for capitalists to accept a society which stomps all over their self-interests and favors those of the citizenry.   Will sees it in this negative light and cannot accept this as fact.  The reader also notices that what makes Ecotopia different from the other novels is its emphasis on the environment, that a society can be designed to achieve a “balance between human beings and the environment” (back cover).  Will Weston overlooks the general benefits and chooses to report that aside from personal articles, no Ecotopian can now inherit any property at all! (99)   A small matter, if one looks at the big picture.  After all, Ecotopia shares everything else.  Who would not like a 20 hour work week, with extra vacation time thrown in for labor performed overtime?

Real World Observation

            Another text that can be compared to Ecotopia involves the real world.  Matt Mayo observes in “Twin Oaks:  An Ecotopia,” a community’s goals to “escape from middle class values, create a better and more peaceful society, one more rooted to the earth than contemporary society.”  Although the Twin Oaks presentation does not have a foreign visitor taking notes, it does share the second and third elements.  A member of Twin Oaks since inception states, “Here is a community that has maintained for thirty years ideals that are “gentler on the earth” and that “feature . . . cooperation [over competition].”

            Overall, if the practical matters of deadlines, convenience, and boredom did not matter to one, I think an ecotopia would be a great place in which to live!