Literary & Historical Utopias
Utopian Literature & Communities
The
word “utopia” comes from the title of Sir Thomas More’s utopian novel /
tract of 1516, Utopia.
The word is made up of Greek parts, formed either from ou
(no) + topos (place, as in
“topography”) to mean “no place,” or from eu
(good, as in “euphoria”) + topos
(place) to mean “good place.”
In
late 20th-century popular or scholarly usage, the word “utopia”
may be used in several ways:
“Utopia” may refer to an actual or historical commune in which participants agree to particular rules or modes of behavior that distinguish them from everyday society and are designed to promote greater happiness, fulfillment, or harmony between humans and their environment. (see list of examples below) Such actual historical communes may be known as "Intentional Communities" or "Experimental Communities."
“Utopia” and especially the adjective “utopian” may describe visionary political attempts to improve or reform society. Usually such usage is negative or contemptuous. For instance, slogans associated with a leftist like Hillary Clinton such as “It takes a village [to raise a child]” may be criticized by right-wingers like Rush Limbaugh as “utopian,” meaning “hopelessly impractical.”
A “utopia” may
also be a novel or a non-fiction book or essay describing an ideal or
planned community or the adventures of a person in one.
Famous
historical utopias in American history:
Shaker
Communities
(1800s, early 1900s); celibate lifestyle, dignity of labor, “simple gifts”;
celibacy practiced because Shakers thought they were the last generation before
the Apocalypse; thus only a few Shakers are left.
Brook
Farm
(1840s): “Transcendentalist” community outside Boston; attempted to
reconcile intellect and labor, later remodeled on principles of Fourier.
Attended by Nathaniel Hawthorne, Margaret Fuller, R. W. Emerson
Oneida
Community
(mid-1800s): "complex marriage" community in New York state;
eventually became corporation marketing Oneida silverware & stainless
Twin
Oaks
in Virginia (1960s—present), functions partly on behavioral principles
outlined in B. F. Skinner’s Walden Two
Puritan
settlement of Boston
(1600s): often seen as utopian in purpose, as the Puritans aimed to create a
model society that Europe would observe and imitate.
Cult compounds such as the Branch Davidians in Waco, TX, the Fundamentalist Mormon Yearning for Zion compound near Eldorado, TX, or survivalist or militia compounds like those in the Pacific Northwest, Idaho, and Montana, are analogous to utopian communities, but are usually not considered utopian.
Why not? They are usually isolated and hostile to the rest of the world rather than serving as a model for the larger society; they react against social trends rather than trying to reform them; or they are seen as “charismatic cults,” centering less around ideas than around the leadership of a charismatic figure--as are many utopian groups.
Utopian
texts (fiction and nonfiction, often mixed)
Genesis
(“Eden”); Revelation (Heaven)
Plato,
The Republic; Laws (ca. 375
BCE)
St.
Augustine, De Civitate Dei (The City of
God) (413-426)
Sir
Thomas More, Utopia (1516)
Campanella,
The City of the Sun (1602)
Francis
Bacon, The New Atlantis (1627)
James
Harrington, The Commonwealth of Oceana
(1656)
Daniel
Defoe, Adventures of Robinson Crusoe
(1719)
Charles Fourier, Theory of the Four Movements (1808)
James
Fenimore Cooper, The Crater (1847)
Etiene
Cabet, Voyage in Icaria (1840)
Bulwer
Lytton, The Coming Race (1871)
Samuel
Butler, Erewhon (1872)
Edward
Bellamy, Looking Backward, 2000-1887
(1888)
William
Morris, News from Nowhere (1890)
William
Dean Howells, A Traveller from Altruria (1892-3); Through the
Eye of the Needle (1907)
Frank
Baum, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz
(1900)
J.
M. Barrie, Peter Pan (1904)
H.
G. Wells, A Modern Utopia (1909); The
World Set Free (1914)
Charlotte
Perkins Gilman, Herland (1915)
Eugene
Zamiatin, We (1920)
James
Hilton, Lost Horizon (1933) (i. e.,
Shangri-La)
B. F.
Skinner, Walden Two (1948):
Aldous
Huxley, Island (1962)
Ursula
K. LeGuin, The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous
Utopia (1974); Always Coming Home (1985)
Ernest
Callenbach, Ecotopia (1975)
Marge
Piercy, Woman on the Edge of Time
(1976)
Iain M. Banks, The Culture Series (Consider Phlebas , The Player of Games , The State of the Art , Look to Windward)
Dystopias
or satirical utopias
Jonathan
Swift, Gulliver's Travels 1727
Nathaniel
Hawthorne, The Blithedale Romance
(1852) (based partly on Hawthorne’s brief stay at Brook Farm in the 1840s)
Mark Twain, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889) (Time travel to medieval past)
George
Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949)
George
Orwell, Animal Farm (1945)
William
Golding, Lord of the Flies (1954)
Aldous
Huxley, Brave New World (1932); Brave
New World Revisited (1958)
Ayn
Rand, Anthem (1937, 1946)
Margaret
Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale (1984)
Margaret Atwood, Oryx and Crake (2003)
Northrop
Frye, "Varieties of Literary Utopias." Utopias
and Utopian Thought, ed. Frank E. Manuel (Cambridge: Riverside, 1966).
25-49.
27-28
Since More, utopias have appeared regularly but sporadically in literature, with
a great increase around the close of the nineteenth century.
This later vogue clearly had much to do with the distrust and dismay
aroused by extreme laissez-faire versions of capitalism, which were thought of
as manifestations of anarchy. . . .
Naturally, since the Industrial Revolution a serious utopia can hardly
avoid introducing technological themes. And
because technology is progressive, getting to the utopia has tended increasingly
to be a journey in time rather than space, a vision of the future and not of a
society located in some isolated spot on the globe (or outside it: journeys to
the moon are a very old form of fiction, and some of them are utopian).
28
two kinds of utopian romance: the straight utopia, which visualizes a
world-state assumed to be ideal, or at least ideal in comparison with what we
have, and the utopian satire or parody, which presents the same kind of social
goal in terms of slavery, tyranny, or anarchy.
29 In the literature of the democracies today we notice that utopian satire is very prominent (Golding's Lord of the Flies) but that there is something of a paralysis of utopian thought and imagination. We can hardly understand this unless we realize the extent to which it is the result of a repudiation of Communism. In the U. S. particularly the attitude toward a definite social ideal as a planned goal is anti-utopian . . . .