Roads to Utopia
Interlude: From Renaissance to Victorian
Barnita Bagchi
More and Renaissance Utopia: Recapitulations
---Interest in exploration, voyages, new lands (see linking of the tale with
Amerigo Vespucci’s voyage)
---Tremendous interest in politics and government: both in their corruptions or
intrigues or sordidness, and in their capacity to transform human life
positively
---Critique of inequality of wealth, of private property.
---Religious freedom and plurality advocated. Religion should not inflame or
cause sedition.
More’s Utopia: Recapitulations
• Plays with the question of how seriously we
could take the work.
• Plays with comparisons between contemporary
England and Utopia: distorting mirrors?
• Human happiness is the goal.
• Considers deeply work and leisure.
• Love of the expanding boundaries of human
knowledge.
• Many contradictions: for example, war.
• Hierarchical.
Other Major Utopian Writing 15001660
• In its own way, Shakespeare’s The
Tempest is a utopian/ dystopian play. In
post-colonial readings, Prospero is the
magician-king-colonizer, Caliban, the
colonized, is made to slave for this
colonizer. There is a conspiracy involving
the ‘baser’ characters in which a
vulgarised version of utopia is articulated.
Other Major Utopian Writing 15001660
• Tommaso Campanella’s City of the Sun (1623).
• Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis (1626)
• Campanella’s is a theocratic state where
women, goods, and children are held in
common. Christian imperialist sub-theme.
• In Bacon’s island, the brightest and best are
trained in Salomon House in the scientific and
experimental method, which Bacon championed.
After More
• Four main historical stages in evolution of utopian writing
(Claeys and Sargent, p. 3)
• Religious radicalism in 16th and 17th centuries produce egalitarian schemes, giving
importance communal property-holding, from Spartan and Christian points of view.
Socialism.
English Revolution of the 17th century (beheading of Charles I)—radical sects such as
Levellers and Diggers.
• Voyages of ‘discovery’ from the 16th century—debates about the virtues and vices of
‘primitive’ peoples. (Shakespeare’s The Tempest—Caliban, the primitive man, for
example)
• Scientific discovery and technological innovation holding out the promise of a far
better (or far worse!) life. Science fiction and its associates as bearers of utopian and
dystopian impulse.
• French and American Revolutions: aspirations for greater social equality, utopian
promise of revolution and new lands. USA, Australia. Small new utopian communities:
an explosion of them in the US. Owenite, Fourierist communities in 19th century.
Kibbutz. Hippie communities. Squat communities in the Netherlands…
We Need to Add Others
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Missing from the earlier picture are
Women
Colonized.
Colonized indigenous peoples e.g. Native
Americans and Aborigines in Canada, USA, and
Australia.
• And many other categories, such as sexually
marginalised groups.
• Women, and the colonized acquired powerful
voices, and wrote powerful utopian fiction. E.g.
Herland, Sultana’s Dream.
Enlightenment Utopia
• 1660-1800, broadly speaking, is the period of
the European Enlightenment, with its emphasis
on reason, science, progress, and order.
• Utopian and dystopian writing of this period
include Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels.
• This is satirical. Using races of huge, little and
idiotic men (Brobdingnag, Lilliput, Yahoos), Swift
savages many aspects of contemporary human
society. His ideal a race of rational horses, the
Houyhnhnm?
Enlightenment Feminist Utopia
• Sarah Scott, Millenium Hall (1762), for example.
• A group of women banding together in a
country-estate, with a common vision of welfare,
helping the poor, infirm, and disabled, incomegeneration for such people.
• A project led by gentlewomen, who have had to
leave their families because of despotic fathers,
horrible stepmothers, impossible marriages…
• A male voice, a visitor into the community, offers
approval. A feature in Herland too.
Industrialization and Utopia/
Dystopia
• The Industrial Revolution, late eighteenthcentury to late nineteenth-century.
Massive transformation in ways people work,
produce things.
Transformations also in rhythms of life.
Transitions from the rural, agrarian-based
economies to the worlds of ever-multiplying
cities.
Industrializing Nineteenth Century
Hotbed of Utopianism
• This is the period when people try to put
into practice utopian communities, when
movements that Marx called ‘utopian
socialism’ flourish, when people write
thoroughly fascinating anti-industrial utopia
like News from Nowhere.
Romantic Utopia
• To understand Morris, a poet such as William
Wordsworth, a Romantic poet, is useful.
• Wordsworth made the northerly Lake District of
England into a real-life utopia through his
poems.
• Rooted, enduring, rural and pastoral forms of
life. Sheep and shepherds, primal dignity and
innocence.
• In contrast to the huge wealth and huge poverty,
the disparities and churning, exploitative chaos
of urban industrialization.
Shakers, Fourierists, Owenites,
Saint-Simonians…
• A host of radical socio-political movements such
as the three mentioned above try to formulate
utopian schemes, communities, houses, and
lands.
• All have some form of socialistic inclination.
• Various kinds of radical sexual experimentation
in some cases, such as the Saint-Simonians.
• Co-operative production.
• Radical Christianity: Shakers. Among their most
enduring productions are the wooden furniture
they produced.
Victorian?
• Reign of Queen Victoria in Britain.
• 1837-1901
• British Empire at its zenith.
• Socialism also flowers, in many different versions. Morris’s utopian
socialism, Marx’s scientific socialism.
• Marx lives in London during the Victorian period! The Communist
Manifesto (1848) is today considered a utopian text par excellence.
Feminisms Develop in the period
Between 1850 and 1930
• Globally.
• In the USA, in India, in Egypt.
• Charlotte Perkins Gilman is a journalist, an activist, and a feminist in
the USA during this time. Writing in newspapers, periodicals,
publishing books pamphlets…
• In India/ South Asia, Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain, younger than
Gilman, is also a writer in journals and reviews, founder of a school.
• Women who craft their own lives, and in a sense attempt to live out
utopia.
• We have come a long way from More to Morris to Hossain.
• Utopian writing as key embodiments of social
transformations and change.