LITR 5439 Literary & Historical Utopias
Midterm Submission 2009

Julie Bollich

June 25, 2009

The “Burbs”

            The suburban utopia of my childhood was the greatest. My brother and I were allowed to play with the neighborhood kids until the streetlights came on.  Block parties were scheduled three or four times a year, and my mom never thought twice about leaving us in the care of one of the neighbors, should something suddenly came up at work. When Hurricane Allison flooded our streets and homes, everybody in the neighborhood looked out for one another and lent a helping hand. There was no crime because there were no broken windows in this neighborhood. Life was sublime. 

            I have lived in the “burbs” my entire life and never thought of a suburb as a type of utopia.  The term utopia comes in many different forms, such as being called experimental or planned communities, but the idea is basically the same:  one community sharing a set of core values trying to make life a little less cumbersome.  But is the suburb a successful utopian model, or is it just a figment of my childhood imagination?

            Historically, the suburbs were planned communities that enticed and promised a fulfillment of the American Dream. Lakisha Jones’s presentation over the suburbs really emphasized the American ideals behind suburban life.  In the 1950’s, GI’s returning from war were encouraged to use government loans to buy homes and move their families into these planned communities.  Levittown was one such suburb.  Levittown offered small, detached, single-family houses on the outskirts of New York City.  People had easier access to the city thanks to the new highway systems that President Eisenhower implemented.  “All the luxuries of the city without having to live there” became the credo of the masses.  Well, the credo of the middle class masses.  Suburban communities catered to the middle class, and class divisions became more solidified.  People were meant to identify with those in their community, and it was very obvious if someone from the “other side of the tracks” was in the wrong neighborhood. 

      Ironically enough in today’s time, “the place to be” is back in the city.  The idea of gentrification was a new concept for me.  The buying and renovation of impoverished or deteriorated homes in the city by middle and upper class families displaces low income families and pushes them to the much more affordable suburbs outside of the city. The utopian ideal seems to only follow people who can afford to dream.     

            Of course, the suburbs were not the only type of communities created with a utopian outlook.  Like-minded individuals moved into communities that were formed to protect certain kinds of belief systems. 

The communities of Twin Oaks and Oneida, for instance, were formed by like-minded people seeking lifestyles that echoed their need for egalitarianism and spiritual perfectionism.  Separation in such cases occurs as a result of a spiritual awakening or a conscious choice to live separately from society’s mainstream. (Hopkins, 2007)

Isolation plays a big role in the creation of a utopian society.  In Thomas More’s Utopia, the king has his people create an island to be separate from the mainland.  Common values in religious beliefs, marriage traditions, education and other social constructs bring some people together but exclude others. The challenge of creating a utopian society is that everyone’s idea of perfect is different.

            The word utopia makes you think about a perfect world, which cynics quickly dismiss as a possibility of ever creating (Objective 3).  However, a utopian outlook is not necessarily one of perfection, but rather, one that attempts to make life and society better. Utopian movements have significantly impacted Western civilization, specifically through literature. In utopian literature such as Utopia, Looking Backward, Herland, and Anthem the community is the most emphasized and important aspect of all.

            In Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland, the female characters did not claim that their society was perfect, just better than it used to be.  The male characters, at first, perceive life in Herland to be primitive and sorely lacking in “important” patriarchal structures.  They felt they had entered some kind of sexual paradise.  “When the men first encounter the ladies of Herland, they are dangling from the trees, seeming to the men as ripe fruit, ready to be picked and devoured” (Bird, 2007).  The women were not sexually depraved and did not need substructures from secular society.  Their community revolved around the raising of the children and making improvements to their already successful way of life.  Much like the characters in More’s Utopia, everybody is expected to work and improve himself or herself intellectually (More 34).  A Renaissance man like Thomas More established the working patterns for writing Utopian literature and Herland was one of many novels that played with those utopian ideals.

            The powerful novel of Looking Backward by Edward Bellamy became extremely influential after 1860. With a strong plot and characterization, this novel portrays the egotism of the utopian ideal because Dr. Leete is basically saying that he and his society “knew better” (obj. 3G).  Again, the community was not claiming perfection, but that they were able to improve upon the mistakes of past centuries.  History definitely played a more important role in this novel than in Herland, and I feel that it has more realistic characteristics.         

            Ayn Rand’s Anthem is more of a liberatory narrative, liberation from conformity and ignorance.  Told from a worker’s point of view and not from the elders of the community, this novel is considered dystopic.  The disgruntled perspective highlights the fallacies of a seemingly utopian society. “In a Utopia, you work together, you think in ‘we’ rather than ‘I’” (Kitch, 2005).  The individual is not valued; only what you contribute to the greater good is considered noble. This, of course, was Rand’s main objective in writing the novel. 

    Much like the 1950’s suburb, utopian literature is not very multicultural.  I think that the main reason for this is because ideally cultures should not separate us.  The utopian culture would be shared by the community experiences of traditions and similar upbringings.  The chance for a fresh and innocent beginning would replace the sinfully corrupt societies of old.  Utopias are not just childhood memories or fanciful notions of the perfect world.  Studying utopias opens up discussions for improving humanity and recapturing a less tarnished view of the American dream.