Haylie Unger

17 June 2011

                                   Desire: the Drive and the Destruction of Utopias

            In Ovid’s Metamorphoses, unruly gods flash across jagged landscapes in the form of all manner of creature, raping, ravishing, and pursuing whatever the heart desires. On the other hand, Utopian literature, from More’s Utopia to Bellamy’s Looking Backward and C.P. Gilman’s Herland, presents societies which ostensibly control their citizens’ extreme, beastlike desires. I immediately observed this shift in the characterization of fictional characters and wondered how realistic the Utopian method might actually be. Is it even possible to repress or channel human desires effectively enough to produce a society largely free of crime, living as one communal whole, each member putting the welfare of the group before his or her own? Utopias often allow their citizens to express some of their desires—they choose their own jobs in Utopia (2.7) and are allowed to spend their money “according to personal taste” in Looking Backward (10.39)—but even such choices as these are restricted by availability and the state’s needs. What happens when the basic human instinct of desire is repressed? Does one actually find himself in the wonderful world of Utopia, or does he instead wake up in H.G. Wells’ land of the Eloi? What place does desire fill in Utopias?

            Strangely enough, in many Utopian novels the origin of the Utopian society is described as a product of human desire. Utopus builds Utopia and establishes laws, a clear expression of a desire to create (More 2.59-2.60); similarly, Gilman’s women of Herland conceive children purely through desire, an act which allows their society to survive (12.50). According to Naomi Jacobs in her Islandia: Plotting Utopian Desire, “utopian fiction is the ultimate fiction of desire. . . . a conscious attempt to awaken or reawaken desire for a more perfect state of being” (1). That is to say, the founder/originator of a Utopian society often creates the society with a desire to better the state of humanity, improve some condition of living, provide for the whole community all the basic needs of life, et cetera. Importantly, his or her motivation is grounded in desire. Sean Moiles, in his well-researched work Search for Utopia, Desire for the Sublime, explicitly connects the search for a Utopian society to desire; Moiles describes this impulse as a “desire for the historical sublime” (168). Consequently, then, it becomes clear that desire is necessary for the founding and building of a Utopian community.

            However, after the establishment of the society, individual desires are curbed or eliminated altogether. Strict laws often forbid the expression of desires that deviant from those approved by the state. In Herland, girls who show “bad qualities” are encouraged not to have children (controlling their desires) and if they do give birth the child is placed with another mother (7.82-7.90). In like vein, citizens in More’s Utopia are restricted from even wanting more than a certain number of outfits; in fact, it seems unthinkable in Utopia that a man could want more than the set number (2.9a). This stringent control of desire or partial elimination of it seems important to the continuation of the Utopian society, but what is the result? What happens to the human when his or her desires are repressed?

            Freudian research into the repression of desire warns against the possible outcomes. Dino Felluga explains that, while Freud thought “the very act of entering into civilized society entails the repression of various archaic, primitive desires,” Freud also suggests that when the individual is faced with obstacles which prevent his normal pursuit of satisfaction (i.e. limits on simple choice-making), he may develop symptoms of repression. According to Felluga’s research on Freud, Freud maintained the following:

Insistent desires that the individual feels s/he must repress will often find alternative paths toward satisfaction and therefore manifest themselves as symptoms. Symptoms tend to be activities that are detrimental or perhaps only useless to one's life. In extreme cases, such symptoms can result in an extraordinary impoverishment of the subject in regard to the mental energy available to him and so in paralyzing him for all the important tasks of life. 1

Based on this research, it seems clear that forcing the repression of individualism can only lead to eventual disaster and the shifting of a Utopian society into a dystopian one.

            Interestingly, Tracy McNulty’s work Demanding the Impossible: Desire and Social Change describes this exact phenomenon. According to McNulty, all good, moral, or selfless acts must derive from desire and that “identification can never be the foundation for real willing, because it works to repress . . . making some Other responsible for guaranteeing the ego . . .  the same is true of ideals and values…” (3). In other words, Mcnulty maintains that forcing an individual to become a member of a group will never result in personal morality or the pursuit of selflessness because the individual must give up the idea of self (ego) to embrace the identity of the community. As a result, one ends up with a Utopian society somewhat mirroring the world of H.G. Wells’ Eloi—a world in which individualism is forgotten and along with it all of the noble impulses of the individual.

            To summarize, my reading and research has shown that the creation of a Utopian society springs from the desire to improve or better the lot of humanity. However, expressions of desire must later be repressed in Utopian citizens to insure the continuance of the Utopian society. Consequently, the forced repression of desire and individualism prevents citizens from truly developing morals or values of their own, resulting in a society of clones unable to think beyond the restrictions of the Utopian government. To further develop this conclusion, research into the purposes and personalities of actual charismatic leaders who have founded communities based on the idea of Utopia will need to be conducted. Until then, it seems clear that the desire that drives the creation of Utopias ultimately leads to their destruction. 

Works Cited

Felluga, Dino. "Introduction to Sigmund Freud, Module on Repression." College of Liberal Arts : Purdue University. Web. 17 June 2011. <http://www.cla.purdue.edu/academic/engl/theory/psychoanalysis/freud3.html>.

Jacobs, Naomi. "Islandia: Plotting Utopian Desires." Utopian Studies 6.2 (1995): 75-89. Print.

McNulty, Tracy. "Demanding the Impossible: Desire and Social Change." Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 20.1 (2009): 1-39. Academic Search Complete. EBSCO. Web. 17 June 2011.

Moiles, Sean. "Search for Utopia, Desire for the Sublime: Cristina Garciacute;a's "Monkey Hunting.." MELUS 34.4 (2009): 167-186. Academic Search Complete. EBSCO. Web. 17 June 2011.