LITR 5737: Literary & Historical Utopias
Midterm Submission 2005

Keri Welborn

June 16, 2005

Utopia: Ideal Perfection

            Utopia can be defined as a place of ideal perfection.  However, perceptions of ideal perfection vary widely, which can lead to any number of different utopian ideas.  Objective 4e asks, “Is ‘utopia’ too simple and singular a word or concept for the variety of phenomena it describes?”  To answer this question I will look into Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward, Charlotte Perkins Gillman’s Herland, and Ayn Rand’s Anthem, each provide variations of the utopian ideal perfection that can be explored.

            Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward provides a unique look into an idealistically perfect society, which countered the problems within Bellamy’s own society.  The character, Julian West, essentially wakes up in what he will come to see as a perfect world.  The rising immigration and surplus of workers has disappeared, and the society has turned from the Gilded Age into an Age of Perfection.  Instead of men who lacked the money for a formal education being tossed to the street to be a laborer, he was educated.  And poverty, which was prevalent in the Victorian era, was essentially extinct: 

A thorough study of the national industrial system, with the history and rudiments of all the great trades, is an essential part of our educational system...usually long before he is mustered into service, a young man has found out the pursuit he wants to follow, has acquired a great deal of knowledge about it, and is waiting impatiently the time when he can enlist in its ranks. (Bellamy 71)

Looking Backward also states that men are educated in all trades because “such ignorance would not be consistent with out idea of placing every one in a position to select intelligently the occupation for which he has most taste (Bellamy 71).  This shows how the society of Bellamy’s 2000 has radically abolished poverty and created a community of equality.  Given the social class systems of the Victorian era in which Bellamy lived, the idea of abolishing poverty was extremely liberal for such a conservative time, and would have been an endorsed topic among the middle and lower classes.

            The issue of money and its uses is also discussed in Looking Backward.  The futuristic world that Julian West wakes up in is void of money.  His idea of money has, like poverty, become obsolete.       

Everything was procurable from one source, and nothing could be procured anywhere else.  A system of direct distribution from the natural storehouses took the place of trade, and for the money was unnecessary. (Bellamy 83)

When Julian questioned Dr. Leete about the amount of credit a person would receive for the work achieved, he replied, “His title...is his humanity.  The basis of his claim is the fact that he is a man” (Bellamy 87).  This supports Bellamy’s futuristic ideas about equality in the year 2000, as well as the forgotten handicap of poverty.  A good example in Bellamy’s text about the varying ideas of utopia comes from one of the last scenes in Looking Backward.

            Julian, an upper-class gentleman saw the reformation of his world as the save all to the problems he found in his own society.  However, once given the chance to go back to his 19th century society he found that the 2000 that he had come from was only seen as a perfect society to him.  While at a dinner with his fiancé, her father, and friends he begins to tell the other guests at the table about his experiences and is amazed at their response:

I looked around the company, saw that, gar from being stirred as I was, their faces expressed cold and hard astonishment...what was to me so plain and so all important was to them meaningless.  (Bellamy 227 & 9)

Julian clearly saw the reformation as a positive change to the world, but those he had loved were angered and offended.  His utopia was not meant for them, they were happy in their 19th century society, being rich and not impeded by the lack of education and money to the lower classes.  Bellamy’s utopian society put a great amount of emphasis on some of the times problems, which to many revolved around poverty and education; this is unlike Charlotte Perkins Gillman’s novel Herland, which primarily focuses on feminist issues in the early 20th century.

            Charlotte Perkins Gillman’s Herland exposes a feminist utopian society in which the women who inhabited it did not follow the “norms” of the outside world.  Herland discusses feminist issues prevalent to Gillman’s society such as the educated woman, and the raising of children.  It also offers a creative look at how the utopian ideas differ from person to person with the characters of Jeff and Terry. 

            Women in the 19th century did not have the same educational resources that men had.  This is emphasized in Herland in the way that all the women in the island were educated.  Their education allowed them to “effectively and permanently limit the population” (Gillman 72), as well as improve the quality of the population, and perfect philosophy, hygiene, sanitation, and physical culture.  Van says at one point, “As for the intelligence, I confess, that this was the most impressive, and to me, most mortifying, of any single feature of Herland” (Gillman 79).  Van was mortified because women in his society did not possess that kind of education and intellect to the extent that these women did.  Gillman used Herland as a means of showing her society what a woman can do when educated.  Another point emphasized is that the women were not only able to bare children in the absence of men, but also able to care for them while in the midst of their ongoing education. 

            The story of childbirth in Herland is impressive for the time period.  Gillman is essentially stating what women now know, that women don’t need men to have or care for children.  Gillman’s society lacked the technology necessary to explore the methods we do today, and instead went with a more natural route, Parthenogenetics.

For five or ten years they worked together, growing stronger and wiser and more and more mutually attached and then the miracle happened—one of these young women bore a child.  Of course they all thought there must be a man somewhere, but none was found.  (Gillman 57)

This one woman was held above all others and as Gillman says, “founded a new race” (Gillman 59).  What is even more interesting is the emphasis these women placed in the raising of the children.  Motherhood to the Herland women was held above all other things.  The women focused their lives to the care of their children to make sure that they led happy, fulfilled lives.  “Motherhood—yes, that is maternity, to bear a child.  But education is our highest art, only allowed to our highest artist” (Gillman 83).  The art of motherhood was held to such a high degree that only a select few were allowed to have the children and to raise them, which was considered educating them.  To the women on Herland, raising a child and educating a child were seen as equal.

They [the children] found themselves in a big bright lovely world, full of the most interesting and enchanting things to learn about and to do...In each step of the rich experience of living, they found the instance they were studying widen out into contact with an endless range of common interest.  The things they learned were related, from the first; related to one another, and to the national prosperity. (Gillman 101)

The women of Herland found a way to raise their children and teach them, while at the same time relating what the children were learning to their common interests and to the betterment of the community.  The children became the communities, not a single mother’s child.

            A unique way that Gillman shows the diversity of utopian ideals is with the characters Jeff and Terry.  These two characters are essentially polar opposites in the way that they view women, their society, and what a utopia is. 

Jeff’s and Terry’s ideas were so far apart that sometimes it was all I could so to keep the peace between them.  Jeff idealized women in the best Southern style.  He was full of chivalry and sentiment.  And he was a good boy; he lived up to his ideals…Terry’s idea seemed to be that pretty women were just so much game and homely ones not worth considering.  (Gillman 11)

Initially it is Terry who desires to see a land of only women, having an idea that it would be a summer resort of sorts.  An island inhabited only by women is a dream not just held by Terry, but what he had in mind and what he actually got were two different things.  He was expecting women who fit into his perception of an ideal, albeit perfect, woman.  He was not expecting to find educated women who were capable of living in a valley secluded from the rest of the world without the need of men.  Once in Herland he becomes terrible disappointed at the state of his position and unhappy during his entire stay.  Even once he marries Alima, he finds that she is clueless about what it means to be married and tries to force himself upon her, which gets him banished from the society.

            Jeff, on the other hand, holds a different belief than Terry.  He believes that women should be worshipped, and comes to believe more and more that Herland is a perfect society that has found answers to all of the problems in his society.  In Herland there are no poor, homeless people.  Every woman lives as an equal.  They each have jobs that they do, and each work for the betterment of the community. Jeff became more and more attuned with the culture of Herland that when it was time for the men to leave, after Terry was expelled, Jeff decided that he wasn’t going to return:

Why should I want to go back to all out noise and dirt, our vice and crime, our disease and degeneracy…I wouldn’t take Celis there for anything on earth…She’d die!  She’d die of horror and shame to see our slums and hospitals. (Gillman 135)

The Herland that Terry encountered and the Herland that Jeff encountered were two different worlds.  Herland was no more a utopia for Terry as the society they had come from was for Jeff.  Their perspectives differ as to what makes a society of ideal perfection.  For Terry to be happy he had to go back to what he knew, the women that he could conquer.  Jeff had no desire to conquer women.  He had found his utopia in a world that could not be compared to the world that he came from.  Gillman focused Herland around the feminist ideas of her time, showing a different approach to what a utopia is. 

            Ayn Rand’s Anthem shows more of a dystopia than a utopia. Unlike Looking Backward and Herland, which shows an ideal society, Anthem shows a society that appears to falling into ruin.  This allows a good look at the challenges that can be found in utopian literature.  However, it also shows how the ideals of a perfect society change from person to person.  Where the characters in the previous texts have found the utopian society they were in to be ideal (with the exception of Terry), Prometheus finds his community to be restraining him.  At the end of the text he discovers his utopia, which is a far cry from the utopias of Looking Backward and Herland.

            Anthem, like Looking Backward and Herland, shows a socialist community where the society does not work for the betterment of the individual, but for the betterment of the entire community.  Anthem, however, shows a society that has become suffocated by the betterment of the community.  Men and women are told what they need to know, what they are to do in their lives, and how they are to do it.  The government takes away all personal gratification from the members of the society.  The government essentially dictates every step a person takes in Anthem.  Though it is questionable whether this society began as a utopia, it does leave the reader, as well as Prometheus, wondering how this system came to be:

But I still wonder how it was possible, in those graceless years of transition, long ago, that men did not see whither they were going, and went on, in blindness and cowardice, to their fate…But such has been the story, for I have lived in the City of the damned, and I know what horror men permitted to be brought upon them. (Rand 103)

Its ideals are similar to those of the previous utopias, but it is obvious that at some point something went wrong.  The society ceased to be a utopia and began to be a dystopia.  As a friend told me, all utopias become dystopias.

            Prometheus makes drastic changes throughout the narrative.  He is aware that he is breaking the law by being alone in the tunnel and by working on the light bulb by himself; but regardless of the punishment he continues:

No single one can possess greater wisdom than the many Scholars who are elected by all men for their wisdom.  Yet we can.  We so.  We have fought against saying it, but now it is said.  We do not care.  We forget all men, all laws and all things save our metals and our wires.  So much is still to be learned!  So long a road lies before us, and what care we if we must travel it alone! (Rand 54)

Although Prometheus does not realize it, this statement shows how he is moving away from the ideal of betterment for the whole to the betterment of the self.  The last few chapters affirm his evolution from being a member of the whole to an individual.  He learns what he wants to learn and lives how he wants to live without the government ruling his actions.

I am done with the monster of “We,” the word of serfdom, of plunder, of misery, falsehood and shame…There is nothing to take a man’s freedom away from him, save other men.  To be free, a man must be free of his brothers.  That is freedom and nothing else. (Rand 97 & 101)

Prometheus’s utopia, unlike that of Julian West and Jeff Margrave, is not for the greater good of the community, but for the greater good of the individual. The ideal utopia for Prometheus could very well be complete and total individuality.

            Literary utopia’s in regard to Objective 4e shows that utopia is too simple and singular a word for the variety of phenomena that it describes.   Within the texts there are a number of different utopian ideals of perfection, and to sum them up in a word that means “no place” or “good place” is not very effective.  Is there a better way to define and/or describe utopia?  Yes.  Utopia can be defined or described as a person’s place of ideal perfection.  This definition gives a little leeway for the variety of phenomena and perceptions that a utopia actually encompasses.

            Historically, utopias have been developed by a person whose idea of perfection had been accepted by a group.  This group, or utopian community, eventually secluded itself away from the larger community to avoid persecution for their beliefs.  However, the leader was the heart of the utopian community, should the leader resign his position or dies, the community would have become fragile and most likely fail.  Objective 3 asks, “Given the fact that utopian communities always fail (usually sooner rather than later), what historical critique of utopias is possible beyond ‘They don’t work’ or ‘It’s futile?’”  An exception to objective 3 and the idea that utopian communities always fail is the Mormons.

            Bobby Ausmus discussed the movement of the Latter-day Saints (LDS) for his formal presentation.  The Mormons based their beliefs on the religious doctrine of Joseph Smith.  After Smith died and Brigham Young took over the religion the religion continued to prosper, instead of diminish.  In fact today the Mormon religion is one of the fast growing religions in the United States, which means that it is a success.  Questions as to why it is a success are many.  Perhaps it is the fact that Joseph Smith’s utopia was essentially founded on a religion that focuses on community.  As stated in class people don’t convert to Mormonism for the theology, but for the community.  A key factor in the Mormon community is the theology, which acts like a glue holding them together.  In this sense, the Mormon’s contract Objective 3, because they are a success.

            A utopian community that is relevant to objective 3 is the Oneida Community, which proves that utopia’s fail.  John Humphrey Noyes developed the community with a series of doctrines and beliefs.  Through these beliefs he met his wife, converted followers, and became so controversial that he was forced to buy land to move the community to.  The actual downfall of the group came when Noyes passed leadership onto his agnostic son Dr. Theodore Noyes.  The community as a whole did not like or approve of this change, and although there was not a “revolt” among them, it was the underling reason that the community was not a success.  The historical critique of the Oneida Community is that it literally was founded and upheld by Noyes, and when he left the position of power there was nothing left to hold it together.  Unlike the Mormons, who had religion as their glue, the Oneidans had nothing but Noyes.

            Contrary to objective 3, historical utopias do not all fail.  The ones that succeed in their utopian ideals do have troubles along the way.  Leaders die, the community grows, and individualism can sometimes get in the way of the focus of the community.  It’s not that the communities “fail” or “don’t work,” it’s that they lack that glue that binds them together. If the community has something to join it together, to keep it in place, it has a greater chance of surviving than those that don’t.