John Sissons

Iconoclastic Elements in Early Utopian Literature

My research interest in the LITR MA program is the study of story-tellers. I write science fiction books. I decided to study the way truly gifted writers of fiction told their stories in order to improve my own voice as a fiction writer. To this end I have taken one of each of the LITR faculty’s classes. When I saw this class on Utopias, I immediately signed up. In my book, Marilyn Carter, there exists a civilization that lives completely underground in twenty- three cities (Galleries) that stretch from upstate New York to Ohio paralleling the Great Lakes. The first two Galleries collapsed because of poor engineering design, leaving twenty-one Galleries for about twenty million people. These people never visit the surface of the earth. This class appeared perfect for my writing project. How do utopias work in the minds of the writers who use them in their fiction? How do they construct a society where the people can function as free people and not engage in social strife of one sort or other?

The first three books assigned for this class each had some attributes in common. First there is a heavy-handed state authority. Secondly there seem to be specially constructed people with pre-set behaviors that fit the author’s set-up for the utopia. Thirdly, the special people are not allowed to raise their children as they see fit. Fourthly, there is no private property and sometimes no privacy. So why do these early writers of utopias construct their fictional societies so tightly? The answer I believe is that these three early authors have an axe to grind. That is, they are trying to change the world they live in: In a word, these first three authors are iconoclasts. In J. Max Patrick’s article, “Iconoclasm, the complement of Utopias,” he argues that writers of utopias seek to make a point about the shortcomings of their own society. He writes, “In short, from its beginnings, utopian literature has been quite iconoclastic. To ignore or slight this and define utopias in the traditional manner is to misunderstand the full nature and significance of the genre.” Patrick points out that the function of the common attributes of utopias mentioned above is to “put forth a norm or standard for comparison…with which known societies may be contrasted.”

In Warren W. Wooden’s article, “Anti-Scholastic Satire in Sir Thomas More’s Utopia” he makes the same points as Patrick. More used his work, Utopia, to satirize the existing order of what Wooden describes as “Schoolmen.” After a description of the first book of Utopia where More lists the evils of the current system in England, More begins his description of his Utopia,or Nowhere. Wooden writes, “The targets of this secondary attack [by More] are the humanists’ foremost adversaries, the scholastic theologians and schoolmen.” In short, Thomas More was seeking to change the behavior of the established scholars because of their attack on his friends John Colet and Erasmus.  Wooden writes, “The Utopians are here exemplars of the humanists’ contention that the pedantic hypersystemization of modern school philosophy serves only to hinder the search for truth.”

In Katherine Fusco’s article, “Systems, Not Men: Producing People in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s  Herland,” she argues that Gilman was fighting against the prevailing attitude in the so-called “progressive era” that women should not be allowed to work when and where they pleased.  A US Supreme Court case, Muller v. Oregon, restricted the number of hours a woman could work based upon the notion that women should be home making babies. Fusco writes, “…in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland (1915) Gilman launches a two pronged attack on both industrialization and the infantilization of American women.” Gilman is also using Frederick W. Taylor’s argument for a more scientific approach to labor efficiency by emphasizing the inefficiency of traditional women’s work, i.e. homemaker. Fusco cites a 1913 Gilman article, “The Waste of Private Housekeeping” as an example of Gilman’s state of mind when she wrote Herland. Gilman was trying to bring attention to the systematic gender discrimination toward women in this country. Women would have to wait for Ruth Bader Ginsberg to fight the US Supreme Court in the 1970s for the gender equality envisioned by Gilman in her utopia.

In Gene H. Bell-Villada’s highly readable article “Who Was Ayn Rand?” he details her well known attitude toward centralized governmental power. In Anthem she skewers the idea that the collective is good.  Bell-Villada writes, “Her hard-line opposition to all state intervention in the economy is a stance as absolute and unforgiving as was the Stalinist program of government planning and control.” Ayn Rand was fighting the Soviet machine she had fled after university. She sought to point to the failings of a centrally controlled government economy with almost every one of her works. And she appeared to believe that the US government would follow the path of the socialist governments of Asia and Eastern Europe.

All three of the early authors studied in this class appear to try to repair a fault they perceived in the societies in which they lived. Their fiction voiced the concern they had for the failings they perceived in an effort to ameliorate the conditions of the real people they knew. My Marilyn Carter shares some of the attributes of these books, but not the strident tone they each adopt.

Bell-Villada, Gene. “Who was Ayn Rand?” Salmagundi, No. 141/142 (Winter/Spring 2004), pp. 227-242.

Fusco, Katherine. “Systems, not Men: Producing People in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland.” Studies in the Novel, Vol. 41 No. 4 (Winter 2009), pp. 418-434.

Patrick, J. Max. “Iconoclasm, the Complement of Utopianism.” Science Fiction Studies, Vol. 3, No. 2 (July, 1976), pp. 157-161.

Wooden, Waren W. “Anti-Scholastic Satire in Sir Thomas More’s Utopia.” The Sixteenth Century Journal, Vol. 8 No. 2, “Humanism in the Early Sixteenth Century (July, 1977), pp. 29-45.