LITR 5737: Literary & Historical Utopias
Midterm Submission 2007
Donny Wankan
06/18/2007
Utopia: Process Definition
Utopia, as a literary category, as a political ideal, as a social experiment, might be easier to assign to an individual cultural phenomenon than to define as such. Thomas More's chosen word, unraveled etymologically—good place or no place—is as good a beginning as any. Considering the ambivalent possibility, the term might as well serve as a satirical pun, dissolving the necessity of antithesis in terms like dystopia or anti-utopia. The unreality of literary utopian worlds, even if not intended by their authors, inevitably comes to life in a reader's mind, but is this a relevant component if not intended so? Is mistrust of the utopian proposal simply a culturally embedded blindness to other possibilities? Things worked perfectly in the descriptions of the twenty-first century in Looking Backward, but I found myself imagining the hidden underside of the perfect future, teeming with stealthy homeless and social outcasts who had refused to accept the uniform life. Utopia must contain both elements, the good and the non-existent.
More's Utopia presents an idealism that, coupled with the standard biographical view of More, may seem a starry-eyed projection. Amy Braselton's presentation on him, skeptical like most of the class's take on the Utopian novels, asked questions about the man's spotless record of humanistic compassion, with the stories of More burning protestants at the stake in his back yard. It is easy to imagine, considering the religious brutality of his time, and the idealism of the Renaissance, that he was both a violent anti-protestant, and a man who could believe in a perfect world. Still, I found myself questioning whether he had intended to seem so naïve in his presentation of Utopia; questioning whether, for instance, the mothers of children would so easily give up their own for another community whose population had dropped, or whether the citizens of Utopia were really all so devoted to learning and intellectual pursuits. Am I projecting my own modern skepticism, though, in questioning the optimistic collective of hard-working, endlessly fulfilled and endlessly altruistic social functionaries of Utopia?
Ayn Rand took the opposite approach in Anthem, depicting the same structurally collective society as in both Utopia and Looking Backward as a destructive power that bleached its citizens of identity and ambition. Both depictions of the Utopian (or dystopian) model(s) offer a hope for a more productive social model, and both present a limited reality. In More's as in Bellamy's fictional world, the system's perfection (in both stories, grounded in cooperation) precludes any social complaint or almost completely eliminates anti-social behavior, and in Ayn Rand's dystopian fantasy, this very concept of cooperation is what has destroyed the culture and spirit of the citizens. But, in all three stories, the high ideals are rife with contradiction. For instance, in Utopia More presents a society which, although free in terms of religious belief, outlaws atheism, so that freedom itself contradicts the highest of spiritual tenets.
. . . he therefore left men wholly to their liberty, that they might be free to believe as they should see cause; only he made a solemn and severe law against such as should so far degenerate from the dignity of human nature as to think that our souls died with our bodies . . . (73).
So, underlying the joyous equality of Utopia was just the type of masked social control behind the collective oppression in Anthem's world. But Rand's ideals contradict themselves as well. The sexy free-ness of Gaea, whose “hair flew in the wind, shining and wild, as if it defied men to restrain it,” (39) becomes a submissive sheep to her man later in the novel, breaking out of the confines of collective hell, to pray to her male hero, “Your will be done” (92).
In fact, a reader automatically defines Utopian as unrealistic, questioning, for instance, what the president in Looking Backward really does if his society is so self-regulating. Charlotte Perkins Gilman builds a sense of self doubt into the inhabitants of Herland, who seem to question the perfection and completeness of their own society. But, how much their desire to learn from the visiting men counteracts their virtual imprisonment of their visitors is difficult to decide. Again, the contradictions make a seemingly edenic world questionable at times, and this landscape of questioning is the location of Utopia in the imagination.
Realism is not a component of Utopian literature, but these questions move into the real world. I think it no coincidence that humans continue attempting to create Utopian societies, nor that few of those who do so refer to their experiments as Utopian. Even the inhabitants of Twin Oaks, a somewhat Utopian community, acknowledge the inevitability of adjusting Skinner's ideas to fit a real community, and altering the original social plan of the community to accommodate changing times. Still, their manipulation of social structures demonstrates a belief in the possibility of a better system, and their experiments in human organization, as foolish as they may seem to the rest of us, are putting those questions to the test.
This is a great way to see Utopia defined, as an attempt to perfect or improve human interactive systems by presenting a fictional or attempting to create a real society of ideals. I don't think Thomas More really believed that his Utopia was realistic, nor do I believe Bellamy or Gilman thought so. Rand obviously greatly distrusted the concepts inherent to the former writers' Utopian ideals, but she too had a dream of improvement and perfection underlying her story. I would argue that these writers were not as naïve as their fictions might suggest. Their purpose instead was to highlight problems in their own worlds and to offer suggestions toward solutions. Perhaps then, as readers, it would serve us better to forego the accusations of unrealistic worlds and to take from these stories, or experimental communities for that matter, ideas for improvements of our own.
Reading over the previous midterms, I noticed that most of them touched on the separation between the fiction of Utopias and the real world attempts at creating such places. Bryon Smith, for instance, offered the following suggestion: “barring mythological accounts of places such as Eden, utopias are absent from the history of humankind.” I think this statement assumes that a Utopia can or should actually exist, and I would argue that this illustrates a misunderstanding of what the term means. I would define Utopia as an imaginative, rather than a real, phenomenon. The so-called Utopian communities, although they model themselves after Utopian dreams of the perfect society, are not perfect, and I think few of the actual members of such communities would be foolish enough to suggest that they are (if so, we might be dealing with a cult rather than a Utopian experiment). Utopia is the fiction or the fantasy of a perfected society. In that sense, although the communities which we call “Utopias” operate under the structure of a particular Utopian ideal, they are not Utopias, but rather experiments in combining the theories and fantasies of perfection in society with real-world communities.
We can look at Utopia as a scientific phenomenon. In science, the truth is only as trustworthy as its application to the real world, and the same applies to any aspect of human life. We experiment with technology, art, communication, etc, and move toward (in most cases) more practical, more cost-efficient products and tools. In that sense, the human race is an evolving organism, and Utopia, as a literary genre and as a social phenomenon, is a step in the process of social and political human evolution.