Univerzita Karlova v Praze
Filozoficka fakulta
Ustav anglofonnich literatur a kultur
Diplomova prace
Katefina Kounovska
Spolecny sen:
Komunitnf a politicke aspekty vybranych americkych
utopif devatenacteho a dvacateho stoletf
A Dream Shared:
Community and Politics in Selected
19 th and 20th Century American Utopias
Praha 2009
vedoucl prcke: Pavla Vesela, Ph.D
Cestne prohhiseni
Prohlasuji, ze jsem tuto diplomovou praci vypracovala samostatne a vyhradne s pouzitfm
citovanych pramenu, literatury, svych poznatku a konzultad s vedouci prace.
V Praze dne 11.5. 2009
/
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank my professors and colleagues at the faculty for being an inspiration and
providing me with support throughout the course of my studies. Special thanks to Pavla Veseia,
Ph.D., for her sustained encouragement and guidance during the writing of this thesis.
Contents
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
Introduction .................................................................................................................................................................... 5
1.1
History of Utopian Writing, Classical and Christian Heritage .............................................. 5
1.2
The Role of an Artist ................................................................................................................................ 8
1.3
The American Society ............................................................................................................................. 9
Looking Forward to a Socialist Utopia: Edward BelIamy and His Work ......................................... 11
2.1
Nineteenth-Century America: The Context ............................................................................... 12
2.2
Looking Backward: The Book ........................................................................................................... 13
2.3
BelIamy and Socialism ......................................................................................................................... 14
2.4
The Transformation ............................................................................................................................. 16
2.5
BelIamy's Utopian Society: Community and the Individual... ............................................ 19
2.6
Race, Gender and the Marketplace in the Year 2000 ............................................................ 21
2.7
The Aftermath ......................................................................................................................................... 24
Forcing the Hand of Evolution: Jack London and The Iron Heel .......................................................... 26
3.1
London's Artistic Production ........................................................................................................... 29
3.2
The Road to London's Utopia ........................................................................................................... 31
3.3
London's Socialism ................................................................................................................................ 33
3.4
Human Nature and London's Female Characters ................................................................... 35
3.5
London and BelIamy: Two Sides of the Same Coin ............................................................... .38
Twentieth-Century Ecotopias .............................................................................................................................. 39
4.1
CalIenbach's Environmentalism ..................................................................................................... 43
4.2
Ecotopia: The Book ............................................................................................................................... 44
4.3
The Ecotopian Setting .......................................................................................................................... 46
4.4
Women in Ecotopia ............................................................................................................................... 49
4.5
The Question of Race ............................................................................................................................ 51
4.6
CalIenbach's Message ........................................................................................................................... 53
Marge Piercy: Everybody Matters ..................................................................................................................... 55
5.1
Woman on the Edge a/Time: Life in Mattapoisett .................................................................. 57
5.2
Gender(Iess) Power .............................................................................................................................. 61
5.3
"Luciente's Warn ..................................................................................................................................... 63
5.4
The Challenge .......................................................................................................................................... 65
ConcIusion ..................................................................................................................................................................... 67
6.1
The Force of the Collective ................................................................................................................ 69
6.2
A Dialogue with the Future ............................................................................................................... 71
7.
Works Cited and Consulted .................................................................................................................................. 74
8.
Summary ....................................................................................................................................................................... 78
1. INTRODUCTION
"The real power of utopian literature is in the capacity to reveal the present as a moment
in history, that is, as a temporal horizon of possibilities that is constantly changing."1
Peter Ruppert
The tendency to dream of a better tomorrow, a better society and a better world had
existed long before utopian writing was defined by Sir. Thomas More in 1516. Utopian ideas are
present all throughout history, from Greek and Roman literature, myths and mythology, various
festivals or the "Cokaygne" utopias to religious paradise, the belief in infinite progress, utopian
science fiction and finally the modern western utopia.
This thesis will focus on four selected American literary utopias: Edward Bellamy's
Looking Backward: 2000-1887, Jack London's Iron Heel, Ernest Callenbach's Ecotopia and Marge
Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time. It seeks to analyze the social notions inherent in the four
ideal utopian societies portrayed in these novels, the suggested process of social and historical
change leading up to them and to note the development of selected social issues in the
nineteenth and the twentieth century through the discussion of these works.
The introduction will begin with a brief discussion of the background of utopian writing,
include arguments for perceiving the institution of an artist as a cultural force, as well as include
the historical and cultural background necessary for the discussion of the novels. Chapters two
to five will deal with the proposed literature in a more concrete manner, concentrating on the
authors' presentation of the ideal society, its values and structure, the means of attaining this
new order and the author's political beliefs and background. As these books and their authors
are known in the utopian and academic circles, a full plot summary or biographical information
of the authors will not be included, instead the focus will be on concrete issues within the given
area of interest.
1.1 History of Utopian Writing, Classical and Christian Heritage
In spite of only dealing with the modern western utopia in this thesis, it would
nevertheless be appropriate to briefly review the roots of the genre. In Utopia and Anti-Utopia in
Modern Times Krishan Kumar proposes the following:
The modern utopia - the modern western utopia invented in the Europe of the
Renaissance - is the only utopia. It inherits classical and Christian forms and themes,
1 Peter Ruppert, Reader in a Strange Land: The Activity of Reading Literary Utopias (Athens: University of Georgia
Press, 1986) 19.
5
but it transforms them into a distinctive novelty, a distinctive literary genre carrying
a distinctive social philosophy.2
The classical examples Kumar notes span from the Golden age in Hesiod's Works and Days,
Arcadia in the writings of Virgil and avid, to the idea of an ideal city in Plutarch's Lives and
various architectural utopias, such as Andreae's Christianopolis or Campanella's City of the Sun.
Even the parodies of utopia's most hedonistic ideas have been incorporated into various
carnivals and feasts, such as Saturnalia or the Feast of Fools.3
The connection with the Christian heritage is rather complex. There seems to be an
inherent contradiction in the ideologies of this particular type of a religious paradise and the
utopian space. As far as the orthodox Christian paradise is concerned, the ideal world or place
does not exist here on earth. When the apostle Paul writes in a famous passage to the Colossians:
"Set your minds on things above, not on earthly things."4 he points to the focus of thought and
affection common to all believers, which is in the supernatural, rather than the natural realm. In
contrast, utopian writing has been aiming to draw a picture of a better society, better
environment and a better life, which is both very desirable and attainable for the human race, in
spite of the various time and space conditions.
Nevertheless, there have been points of contact where Christian or Jewish thought
intertwined with utopian ideals and created new movements, radical or conservative; such as
the belief in the physical presence of the Garden of Eden, the perfectibility of man or
millenarianism. 5 Christian heritage as a whole helped establish western utopian writing. Kumar
stresses the uniqueness of the position of modern western utopia, which has both classical and
Christian heritage, essentially suggesting it to be the only kind of utopia:
Other societies have, in relative abundance, paradises, primitivist myths of a Golden
Age of justice and equality, Cokaygne-type fantasies, even messianic beliefs; they do
not have utopia. 6
While the western utopia certainly is unique in its developing alongside capitalist and
nationalist structures, as Tom Moylan observes in Demand the Impossible: Science Fiction and the
Utopian Imagination, it is not the only type of utopian discourse; its occurrence is world-wide:
from the Garden of Eden, the Buddhist Western Paradise, the Native American Happy Hunting
Krishan Kumar, Utopia and Anti-Utopia in Modern Times (Oxford: Basic B1ackwell, 1991)3.
Kumar 2-32.
4 Colossians 3:2, NIV.
5 Kumar10-19.
6 Kumar 19.
6
2
3
Ground, Plato's Republic, the Celtic Hy Brasil, all the way to contemporary popular songs and
fiction.?
Western utopia may draw on other utopian literature and internalize some of it. Kumar
ultimately suggests that modern western utopia takes all these impulses and creates a novel
view of human possibilities and the ability of any society to transform itself into something
better, incorporating the belief in these possibilities into the desire to craft such a new society.s
The presence of the older utopian structures in the modern utopia is apparent, as is the
incorporation of religious structures. In A Religion of Solidarity, Mark Ferrara points out:
These religious dimensions of utopian fiction can take many forms, from the formal
religion followed by members of a fictional community (like the mix of Hinduism
and Buddhism practiced in Aldous Huxley's Island) to the religious themes present
in the narrative (for instance, the dedication of Solomon's House to the study of
God's works in Francis Bacon's New Atlantis); they can also include ethical and
moral codes that help to bring about the realization of a utopian social order (for
instance, the belief in continual improvement found in Charlotte Perkins Gilman's
Herland).9
It could be argued, however, that the belief in a better future and the desire for tomorrow to
surpass today is in fact a constant, which did not change with the invention of the modern
utopia. Recent critical writing concerning utopias focuses on the common desire in utopian
thinking. Russel Jacoby in The End of Utopia: Politics and Culture in an Age of Apathy defines
utopianism as "a belief that the future could fundamentally surpass the present."lO Similarly,
Ruth Levitas writes that "utopia is the expression of the desire for a better way of living" in "For
Utopia: The (Limits of the) Utopian Function in Late Capitalist Society."ll What changed with the
invention of a modern utopian genre were the means of achieving the utopian ideal, not the
underlying desire. The religious belief in a higher authority and power was transformed into a
humanistic belief in mankind and its power to change the world.
In "Utopias as Practical Political Philosophy," Peter G. Stillman observes:
Utopias explore "what is not", portraying in some detail the principles and practices
of one or more alternative imaginary societies; they examine what is, surveying
contemporary society's norms, practices and possibilities for change; and they ask
7 Tom Moylan, Demand the Impossible: Science Fiction and the Utopian Imagination (New York: Methuen, 1986) 2.
a Kumar3.
9 Mark Ferrara, "A Religion of Solidarity: Looking Backward as a Rational Utopia," Renascence: Essays on Values in
Literature 59.2 (2007): 1.
10 Russell jacoby, The End of Utopia: Politics and Culture in an Age ofApathy (New York: Basic Books, 1999) xi-xii.
11 Ruth Levitas, "For Utopia: The (Limits of the) Utopian Function in Late Capitalist Society," The Philosophy of Utopia,
ed. Barbara Goodwin (Portland, OR: Frank Cass, 2001) 27.
7
about the relation of what is to what is not, about the possibility, effects, and
desirability of various changes. 12
Stillman goes on to say that utopias produce reactions in their readership; reactions that can
lead to actions. They present the world with alternatives to its stereotypical functioning and
values.13 The implied relation between artistic production and social and cultural changes is
inherent in the utopian genre, as will be shown momentarily. While the means of achieving a
utopian space change along with what is presented as ideal, all these spaces are, nevertheless,
based on a system of belief in the possibility of change, improvement and redemption.
1.2 The Role of an Artist
Before beginning the discussion of utopian writing itself, the position of an artist should be
briefly addressed. The works treated in this thesis are discussed for their political and social
implications, rather than their literary quality. As such, the role writers play in the forming of
society and culture is an important aspect of their work.
In his book on American culture, The Real Thing, Miles Orvell presents artists as a changing
force within their culhlre. On the one hand they are shaped by their upbringing and the social
impulses around them; on the other hand they themselves influence the surrounding world and
sometimes effectively mold it by their work. In his introduction, Orvell writes:
[...] while the artist is thus a product of the complex set of forces shaping all
individuals in a given culture, we nevertheless rightly attribute to him or her the
power to fashion the materials of the given world - in the work of art itself - and to
thereby effect an alteration in the consciousness of the age through the organization
of the artwork.1 4
As they are shaped by it, the utopian artists consequently reflect their contemporary
society, its tendencies and issues. This direction of influence is important for the study of the
general and mainstream notions of a utopian society or world, and the way they are perceived
and imagined by the authors of the ever-changing American nation. As Orvell asserts, "writers
have characteristically articulated the concerns of society with sensitivity and due complexity,
thus providing central evidence for the student of cultural change."15 Kumar argues the same
point more specifically in the case of utopias: "If utopia is not in one very obvious sense
concerned with the here-and-now, for the most part it draws both its form and its content from
Peter G. Stillman, "Utopias as Practical Political Philosophy," The Philosophy o/Utopia, ed. Barbara Goodwin
(Portland, OR: Frank Cass, 2001) 11.
13 Stillman 11.
14 Miles Orvell, The Real Thing: Imitation and Authenticity in American Culture, 1880-1940 (Chapel Hill & London: The
University of North Carolina Press, 1989) xix.
15 Orvell xxi.
8
12
the contemporary reality."16 Utopian writing reflects the present from a distance. As such, it can
bring both valuable insight along with fresh suggestions regarding the present time and
encourage hope for the future, which makes it an ideal form for the seekers of cultural and social
reform.
The four authors that are going to be discussed in this thesis all were or still are politically
engaged and contribute to specific political movements whose cause they believe in. As will be
shown, Bellamy and London were involved in the socialist movement, Callenbach supports the
environmental cause and Piercy propagates both the green and the feminist agenda in her work.
They were all influential writers and cultural reformers. Thus in the analysis of their literary
utopian work, attention will be paid both to their socio-economic and political background and
to the critical and political reactions their works received.
1.3 The American Society
Given that utopian writing both reflects and influences the state and the issues of the
society in which it is produced, the American cultural and socio-economical situation in the
nineteenth and twentieth century must be taken into consideration as a basis for its
interpretation. Most authors and critics agree that America is an exceptional and unique
environment. Arnon Gulfeld, in American Exceptionalism: The Effects of Plenty on the American
Experience, suggests that there was an important reversal in the amount of land and the number
of people with regards to the European conditions, where the people were many and the
resources few. As a result of this, the usual methods of government and socioeconomic rules had
to be reworked in the New worldJ7 He writes:
The frontier process was characterized by constant renewal. Americans learned
rapidly that reliance on time-tried traditions was a prescription for disaster and
demise. [ ...] The frontier represented constant renewal, new opportunities and a
constant desire for the simplicity of an uncomplicated society. The wild aspects of
the frontier also helped shape American society and contributed to its unique
national and political institutions. The "frontier" reality that molded the character of
the pioneer was much influenced by the constant struggle for survival in a hostile
natural environment.18
The newly created American nation did not have a great past to look back to and learn
from. Moylan introduces the European image of the "new world" by saying that
Kumar 32.
Arnon Gutfeld, American Exceptionalism: The Effects of Plenty on the American Experience (Portland: Sussex
Academic Press, 2002) xi.
18 Gutfeld xii-xiii.
9
16
17
the Americas especially offered space in which the imagination could work out
alternatives that broke the bounds of the historical status quo. [...] They gave a sense
of refuge and room for a people to achieve their utopia: whether it was a "city on a
hill" subject to the laws of God and justice [ ...] or a way out from the increasingly
restrictive life in the new Europe. 19
As the settlers distanced themselves from both their European ancestry and the Native
American popUlation; their heritage and tradition, they had no established way of dealing with
the new environment that surrounded them. They focused on a common future with its hopes
for progress and improvement. Hence, their institutions had to be adapted, improved or
altogether replaced by those that would help them survive and prosper. Each individual was
independent and provided for themselves and their own, which led to actions of ambiguous
morality, as was the case of the treatment of the native population.
Gutfeld goes on to say that this behavior, bordering on what is considered immoral or
improper was closely tied to the experience of the frontier and the wilderness to be conquered.
For individuals, he says, it was "a phenomenon of indistinct boundaries, whose inner essence
depended, to a large extent, on the viewer's perceptions."2o This tendency to explain everything
within a given context, rather than giving a clear-cut rule to personal behavior, is the source of
the cultural vagueness that readers and critics are sometimes confronted with when discussing
American society.
The sense of endless possibilities and constant renewal, the fact that America was often
viewed as utopia, city on a hill or the promised land 21, the ideas of a self-made man, infinite
progress and the continuing bettering of all mankind, the hopes for a more equal and just society
that have been present from the very beginning of American settlement, all these gave rise to the
specific type of western utopia,22 four examples of which are going to be discussed in this thesis.
Moylan4.
Gutfeld xiii-xiv.
21 Kumar, for example, says that America is "a nation accustomed to think of itself in terms of a 'garden', or a
wilderness" (139). Further, there are numerous references made to America as the "City on a Hill," or the
"uncorrupted garden", as in A Mighty Baptism: Race, Gender, and the Creation of American Protestantism, eds. Susan
Juster and Lisa Macfarlane (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1996) 270; or the "Garden of Eden," as in Alden T. Vaughan's Roots
ofAmerican Racism: Essays on the Colonial Experience (New York: Oxford UP, 1995) 54.
22 Gregory Claeys, Lyman Tower Sargent, eds., The Utopia Reader (New York: New York UP, 1999) 3-4.
19
20
10
2. LOOKING FORWARD TO A SOCIALIST UTOPIA:
EDWARD BELLAMY AND HIS WORK
To begin the discussion of the first set of utopias, Edward BelIamy's Looking Backward:
2000-1887 and Jack London's Iron Heel, it could be useful to delimit the range of political and
social trends commonly labeled as "socialist." In "The Life and Time of Socialism," G6ran
Therborn speaks of the core values of socialism:
The core of socialist values might be said to consist of equality and solidarity, which
may be given either an individualist or a colIectivist inflection, as in the communist
utopia of Marx and Engels and in most socialist movement practice respectively.
Both core values are conceived universalisticalIy, referring, at least in principle, to
all humankind. 1
Adding to the dictionary definitions, which refer to socialism as "a system of social organization
in which private property and the distribution of income are subject to social control, rather
than to determination by individuals pursuing their own interests or by the market forces of
capitalism" (The New Encyclopedia Britannica)2 or "any of various economic and political
theories advocating collective or governmental ownership and administration of the means of
production and distribution of goods; or a system of society or group living in which there is no
private property" (Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary) 3, Therborn stresses the culture and
values associated with socialism.
This thesis does not aim to master the whole scope and variety of the world socialist
movement but to focus on several tendencies, generally accepted as socialist, present in all four
proposed utopias. Both the economic aspects - the distribution of income and goods, the
difference between governmental or group ownership as opposed to private ownership - and
the social implications - changes in values and culture - of the proposed agendas will form part
of the discussion.
G6ran Therborn, "The Life and Times of Socialism," New Left Review July/Aug. 1992: 18.
"Socialism," The New Encyclopedia Britannica, 15 th ed., 1985.
3 "Socialism," Def. 1 and 2a. Merriam- Webster Online Dictionary, 24 Feb. 2009 <http://www.merriamwe bster.com/ dictionary/socialism>.
1
2
11
2.1 Nineteenth-Century America: The Context
In "Socialism and Utopia," Adam Ulam speaks of the connection between socialism and
utopia, pointing to utopian traits in the socialist ideology:
Even in that least utopian of socialisms, in Marxism, it is the vision of the final and
frankly utopian phase of social development, of communism, which is responsible
for much of its appeal. A society of perfect equality and harmony is the final promise
of Marxism, the promise which has enabled it to offset the anarchists' charge that it
proposed to displace a multitude of capitalists by one, the state. 4
On reading Bellamy's Looking Backward and London's Iron Heel, one cannot help but wonder at
the implication of communal control, be it officially the control by state or common governing of
the whole society.
Considering the actual developments in the nineteenth century America, which led to such
reactions in fiction, there were certainly monopolizing tendencies in the marketplace.
Corporations and trusts grew, the pace of industrialization was faster than ever before, the
urban population was growing rapidly and the American mindset was changing. According to
Kumar, the changes in the thinking of the society were indeed revolutionary. The individualism,
which was prevalent before the Civil War, yielded to the perception of society as the founding
element of human identity. 5
The conditions of common people, the cornerstone of the social critique of both Edward
Bellamy and Jack London, were unbelievably bad. In Imaginary Communities: Utopia, The Nation,
and the Spatial Histories of Modernity, PhiIIip E. Wegner notes these social tensions:
The explosive acceleration of industrialization following the Civil War had produced
a scale of labor exploitation that seemed to rival that of the now defunct institution
of slavery. At the same time, the process of industrial modernization dissolved the
underpinnings of an older social order, so that even those whose positions had long
been secure now risked being swept up in a maelstrom of riot and poverty.6
Gutfeld also describes the appalling legal circumstances of the workers and the social pressures
when they tried to change them by striking. Large businesses, supported at the time by the law
Adam Ulam, "Socialism and Utopia," Daedalus (Spring 1965): 383.
Krishan Kumar, Utopia and Anti-Utopia in Modern Times (Oxford: Basic Blackwell, 1991) 127.
6 Phillip E. Wegner, Imaginary Communities: Utopia, The Nation, and the Spatial Histories of Modernity (Los Angeles:
University of California Press, 2002) 65-66.
12
4
5
and the public, hired provocateurs and infiltrators to undermine the position of the unions and
discredit them. Striking and scabbing have become everyday terms in social dialogues.?
As a result of their changing conditions, including the growth in the level of education and
readership, as well as the power and scope of the media, more people became interested in what
was going on around them and more thought was given to society and its evolution, rather than
to the encouraging of self-sufficiency and individualism. As Kumar puts it: "In such conditions of
compressed economic, demographic and urban growth it is hardly surprising that apocalyptic
visions haunted America at the end of the nineteenth century."8 The following chapters will
discuss two such visions, which took the form of literary utopias, in connection to the abovementioned developments.
2.2 Looking Backward: The Book
When speaking of utopias, Wegner labels Bellamy's Looking Backward as "the single most
influential narrative utopia of the nineteenth century."9 There is no doubt as to its contemporary
popularity. It exceeded a quarter of a million sold copies in the United States in the first year
after its publication, becoming the second best-selling American novel in the nineteenth century,
after Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, as well as the second novel to reach the
impressive milestone of a million sold books. Outside of the United States, the book was also
immensely popular and was translated within the first two years since its publication into most
major world languages,lo
What made this particular book so significant and widely read? Surely there had been
utopias written before, even socialist utopias and utopian and socialist communities or
communes were founded, even though many had disappeared by the time of BeIlamy's writing.
It has been suggested by Wegner and others that the novel's ability to move its readers and even
influence contemporary politics is largely given by its timing. It is a vision of a great social
reconstruction, a miracle of positive progress, writteri and published at a time when the
American people felt as if they were at the beginning of a similar transformation, whose end and
consequences they could not begin to fathom.
Wegner sees this alignment with the contemporary developments as one of the primary
reasons for the novel's popularity, later stating that such unconditional belief in the positive
force of progress has not been present in the American society since:
7 Arnon
Gutfeld, American Exceptionalism: The Effects of Plenty on the American Experience (Portland: Sussex Academic
Press, 2002) 114.
8 Kumar 139.
9 Wegner 62.
10 Kumar 133.
13
One of the great attractions of Looking Backward for a late-nineteenth-century
audience lay in its comforting portrayal of a new and much improved social order
rising out of the upheavals experienced in the present. l1
Jonathan Auerbach finds another possible explanation for the novel's appeal. In "The
Nation Organized: Utopian Impotence in Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward," he writes that
Bellamy "treats the Nation as a collective autonomous subject"12 and goes on to say: "Looking
Backward owes its tremendous popular success to its avoidance of [ ...] an understanding of
power itself, the means to effect social change." 13 He finds the novel lacking in specificity and
support of an individual vision; and argues that it is partially due to this ambiguity, this refusal
to pinpoint the exact mechanisms of the change between the nineteenth and the twentieth
century, that made Bellamy's novel popular with the contemporary readers. It is indeed possible
to view this vagueness regarding an individual's purpose in the work as appealing, to the extent
that it gives readers the power to fill in the meaning for themselves. As a whole, however,
neither Bellamy nor London encourage individual actions when they deviate from the common
objective.
2.3 Bellamy and Socialism
As has already been implied, the understanding of Bellamy's work comes from an
understanding of his contemporary society. Wegner has noted the interconnection between
Bellamy's portrayal of the utopian society and the "ascendancy of a new middle class," his
profeSSional classes and the growth of expert culture, the inherent consumerism of his new
society, which will be discussed in detail later, or the suburban quality of the new Boston:
Mediated through the consciousness of West and the descriptions of Dr. Leete, the
world that arises in the text is quite simply the social, cultural and normative
ideologies of this emerging class stratum made concrete. 14
Wegner goes on to suggest that Bellamy's transformed society is based on a continuation of the
fundamental reorganizing developments that were already present in the American society of
the nineteenth century. Their real-world consequences would also lead to ideological and social
changes, ultimately reallocating cultural power between the newly developed classes. 15 Thus
there is a clear connection between the rapid industrialization, the creation of trusts after the
Wegner 64.
Jonathan Auerbach, "The Nation Organized: Utopian Impotence in Edward BelJamy's Looking Backward," American
Literary History 6.1 (2004): 31.
13 Auerbach 27.
14 Wegner 85.
15 Wegner 64.
11
12
14
Civil War and the growing influence of big businesses, and Dr. Leete's descriptions of the
transformation, leading to the new world.
However, in spite of admitting to what can only be labeled as socialist tendencies in his
work, Edward Bellamy was not particularly fond of the label. In a letter to William Dean Howells,
he gives his reasons for disliking the term "socialist":
Every sensible man will admit there is a big deal in a name especially in making first
impressions. In the radicalness of the opinions I have expressed I may seem to outsocialize the socialists, yet the word socialist is one I never could well stomach. In
the first place it is a foreign word in itself and equally foreign in all its suggestions. It
smells to the average American of petroleum, suggests the red flag, with all manner
of sexual novelties, and an abusive tone about God and religion, which in this
country we at least treat with decent respect. [ ...] Whatever German and French
reformers may choose to call themselves, socialist is not a good name for a party to
succeed with in America.1 6
Kumar suggests that as an experienced journalist, Bellamy was aware of the American
aversion to anything socialist, anarchist or "red" in the days after the Haymarket Riots, as well as
the fact that openly socialist movements did not have a good track record in gaining support of
the middle-classes. Moreover, Bellamy simply did not believe in a revolutionary approach to
changing society. His was the way of peaceful social evolution. Kumar quotes Bellamy's address
to the Boston Nationalists in 1890:
We are the true conservative party, because we are devoted to the maintenance of
republican institutions against the revolution now being effected by the money
power. We propose no revolution, but that the people shall resist a revolution. We
oppose those who are overthrowing the republic. Let no mistake be made here. We
are not revolutionists, but counterrevolutionists,17
Nevertheless, from our perspective today, the difference between Bellamy's Nationalism
and certain branches of socialism would be hard to find. While he succeeded in avoiding Marxist
ideas of class struggle, the general aims of socialism - a collective form of economic regulation,
which would ensure monetary equality - were in line with his work, which can be seen even
more clearly in the sequel to Looking Backward - Equality. Kumar writes on the subject:
What socialists did not disagree about, and what Bellamy would have heartily
concurred in, was the grave consequence of leaving the economy to its own laws and
16 "Mutual Indebtedness: Unpublished Letters of Edward Bellamy to William Dean Howells," Harvard Library Bulletin
12.3 (1958): 19-57, quoted in Wegner 69.
17 Kumar 145.
15
momentum, and the urgent need to incorporate economic life fully into the body
politic.
The means of achieving such an ideal state might differ from group to group, from a
revolutionary struggle to an evolution, from Marx and Engels to Saint Simon and Comte 18, but
the overreaching tendency to regulate economy is undeniable. It is also this very tendency,
which forms the backbone of Bell amy's utopian order.
2.4 The Transformation
As was already stated above, Bellamy did not believe in a revolution but in an evolution. In
line with his avoidance of the Marxist type of socialism or American anarchism, Bellamy's
transformation is a peaceful one. In his novel, he has Dr. Leete explain very carefully that neither
the anarchists nor the socialists had anything to do with the positive social developments that
lead to the ideal society of the year 2000. When West asks about the contribution of "the
followers of the red flag" to the forming of the new order, Dr. Leete plainly answers:
They had nothing to do with it except to hinder it, of course [... ] They did that very
effectually while they lasted, for their talk so disgusted people as to deprive the best
considered projects for social reform of a hearing,19
He goes on to explain that it was the nationalist party, which finally gained support of the
majority of the population and started a further diplomatic conversion of the system, but not
before the industrial and social system had been rearranged on a "higher ethical basis."20 Gutfeld
proposes that this violence-less transition goes somewhat against the actual experience of
American politics, when the most important changes in the society are considered.
Political violence is intimately intertwined with what are considered the most
glorious chapters of the American story - the emancipation of slaves, conquest of the
frontier, modernization of a backward society and turning it into a modern state,
and the emergence of the American welfare state [ .. .)21
Nevertheless, according to Gutfeld, in spite of the actual frequent political violence, the American
political system remained virtually unchanged. 22 He believes that it is the effect of plenty, which
has Americans loyal to their way of life and politics. The specificity of the American environment
Kumar 148.
Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward: 2000-1887 (Champaign, Ill: Project Gutenberg, 2008) 25 Feb 2009
<http://www.gutenberg.org/fiIes/25439/25439-h/25439-h.htm> 252.
20 Bellamy, LB 252.
21 Gutfeld 92.
22 Gutfeld 94.
18
19
16
lies in the fact that, unlike the European revolutions, the examples of political violence stated
above all aimed at correction of the political system, not its replacement: 23
Even though the division of wealth was uneven, and economic and social injustices
caused violent outbursts, the American myth of success and the dedication to the
idea of equal opportunity caused people to subscribe to the hope of a better future
even if this belief had no firm, real basis. A society characterized by despair of the
prospect of change and improvements tends to produce revolutionary conditions,
whereas the optimistic belief in a better future, so central to the American political
culture, was intensified by the vast expanses of virgin lands and seemingly endless
natural resources. 24
Bellamy essentially argues the same: If everybody had enough resources to live
comfortably, they would not act against what he sees as essentially good human nature. Or.
Leete suggests to West that it is not human nature but one's conditions, which drive one to
behave against one's better instincts. 25 Later, when discussing men's nature again, he uses a
metaphor of a rose bush to say essentially the same. The bush, in the same way as a person,
reflects its surroundings. To prosper and blossom, it needs to be planted in good soiJ.26 Through
Dr. Barton's sermon, Bellamy supports this idea further by declaring that
human nature in its essential qualities is good, not bad, that men by their natural
intention and structure are generous, not selfish, pitiful, not cruel, sympathetic, not
arrogant, godlike in aspirations, instinct with divinest impulses of tenderness and
self-sacrifice, images of God indeed, not the travesties upon Him they had seemedP
Based on this belief, Bellamy plants his utopian society among changed conditions,
allowing everyone to benefit equally from the common resources. By the means of plenty, Dr.
Leete explains, and equity, the Ten Commandments have been rendered obsolete and the
temptations to misbehave disappeared. 28 Consequently, the force behind the social changes Dr.
Leete speaks of is one of natural evolution. People do not seem to be responsible for the changes
directly; it would rather appear that Bellamy's utopia came to be somewhat automatically, in the
wake of capitalism, as the only logical response to the sodo-economical problems of the
nineteenth century. In fact, BeIlamy, through the words of Or. Leete, blames individualist
struggle for the conditions people found themselves in at the end of the nineteenth century. He
proposes the creation of a unified "we" as the only logical answer:
Gutfeld 90.
Gutfeld 95-96.
25 Bellamy, LB 61.
26 Bellamy, LB 288.
27 Bellamy, LB 288.
28 Bellamy, LB 286.
23
24
17
Poverty with servitude had been the result, for the mass of humanity, of attempting
to solve the problem of maintenance from the individual standpoint, but no sooner
had the nation become the sole capitalist and employer than not alone did plenty
replace poverty, but the last vestige of the serfdom of man to man disappeared from
earth. 29
This tendency is reflected in Bellamy's rejection of the communitarian utopianism. He
believed in a nation-wide movement, not in solitary solutions. In "Progress of Nationalism in the
US" he writes:
We do not believe in the colony idea as a help to the social solution, any more than
we believe in the monastic idea as an assistance to the moral solution. 30
It is clear from the very name Bellamy uses to describe his political movement, "Nationalism,"
that his ideas and aspirations superseded local and individual matters. In fact, Bellamy sees
economic equality as embedded in the American right to freedom and equality. Kumar writes of
the Nationalist program:
Their programme of complete nationalization of the economy, and complete
equality of condition, would bring about the second, positive, stage of the realization
of democracy, to complement the earlier negative stage accomplished by the
American Revolution. 31
This inclination is already present in Looking Backward. Dr. Leete is explaining to Julian
West that since all men are equal, so are to be their wages. These wages are then based on effort
and citizenship rather than result. In Dr. Leete's words: "It would be an extraordinary sort of
logic which should try to determine a moral question by a material standard."32 It becomes even
more explicit in Equality, where Dr. Leete asks:
What is life without its material basis, and what is an equal right to life but a right to
an equal material basis for it? What is liberty? How can men be free who must ask
the right to labor and to live from their fellow-men and seek their bread from the
hands of others? How else can any government guarantee liberty to men save by
providing them a means of labor and of life coupled with independence; and how
could that be done unless the government conducted the economic system upon
which employment and maintenance depend?33
29 Bellamy, LB 286.
30
Edward Bellamy, "Progress of Nationalism in the US," North American Review (June 1892), quoted in Kumar 137.
31 Kumar 146.
32 Bellamy, LB 94.
Edward Bellamy, Equality (Champaign, Ill: Project Gutenberg, 2005) 29 Mar. 2009
<http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etextOS/equaI10h.htm> Ch 11.
18
33
Therefore the utopian ideal in Looking Backward is achieved by monetary equality and equal
distribution of labor and of commodities.
2.5 Bellamy's Utopian Society: Community and the Individual
In line with his understanding of the value of the nation, Bellamy's utopia is based on
changes driven by national needs. To better the lives of individuals, he seems to be giving their
individuality up to some degree. His solutions are nation-wide and common to all. Everyone
should receive the same amount of money and the same access to education. Having funds is to
prevent outbursts of negative behavior and being educated to the same level allows for a more
unified society.
Throughout his novel, there are no social relations to speak of between individuals or
between separate nuclear families. The families eat in the same building but each rent separate
rooms; they do not compare themselves or exchange goods with each other. There is virtually no
place for an individual character portrayal, as could be expected in a "fanciful romance," which
Bellamy proposes as the intended genre of his utopia in the postscript. 34 As for the two main
characters of Looking Backward, Dr. Leete's monologue descriptions form the large part of the
novel, with virtually no reference as to his character or desires, and Julian West is nothing more
than what Pfaelzer called the "registering apparatus."35
Bellamy also works with the idea of the clean slate. Everyone begins the journey the same
but later they are allowed to choose their vocation based on their own preference and on the
reports of the observing teachers. Everyone has the right to the same education, to serve both
them and their neighbor.3 6 Bellamy's presentation of the educational system is, however, in the
same way as his depiction of the gigantic transformation of the society, rather vague. It is,
nonetheless, clear that the universality of right and responsibility, which can be seen throughout
Looking Backward is present. Everyone is to be educated, regardless of, or perhaps as a
consequence of, their natural dispositions.
Each individual is to have the same background and upbringing, so that they can become
the faceless crowd, the nation, which can be seen in this utopia. Wegner points out "It is this
universal education, finally, that turns the perspective of the entire population from their
diverse cultural pasts to the unified national future."37Bellamy's concept of individuality in
general is closer to a clearly defined category, rather than something unique. As WaIter B.
BeIlamy, LE 334.
Jean Pfaelzer, The Utopian Novel in America 1886·1896: The Politics of Form (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh
Press, 1988) 38.
36 BeIlamy, LE 220.
37 Wegner 98.
19
34
35
Michaels notes, it does not come from independence but from a deeper dependence on
classifYing people's differences. 38
In an unpublished essay "The Religion of Solidarity," Bellamy presents a theory of the
double nature of identity and self. Wegner describes this theory as "a two-tiered Romantic
theory of the self, at once individual and disinterested or universal, much in the vein of Shelley
or, even more directly, Emerson." Bellamy clearly expresses the necessity of giving up the purely
individual desires in favor of the common, collective ones. 39 He writes:
This passion for losing ourselves in others or for absorbing them into ourselves,
which rebels against individuality as an impediment, is then the expression of the
greatest law of solidarity.4o
The connection between Emerson and Bellamy is by no means a far-fetched one.
Emerson's idealism is truly transcendental, based on the idea that inside every human being is a
part of a consciousness which goes beyond the individual and its own vantage point but which
does not prevent it from being truly original and unique, experiencing life differently from any
other. In The Over-Soul, he writes:
In youth we are mad for persons. Childhood and youth see all the world in them. But
the larger experience of man discovers the identical nature appearing through them
all. Persons themselves acquaint us with the impersonal. In all conversation
between two persons tacit reference is made, as to a third party, to a common
nature. That third party or common nature is not social; it is impersonal; it is God.
[ ...] It arches over them like a temple, this unity of thought in which every heart
beats with nobler sense of power and duty, and thinks and acts in unusual
solemnity.41
When speaking of the correlation between Bellamy's and Emerson's visions, Auerbach
speaks of the idea of one mind, from History: "There is One Mind common to all individual men.
Every man is an inlet to the same and to all of the same."42 He writes:
Imagining a transcendental "common" automatically possessed by each individual
who can demonstrate self-possession, Emerson replaces society with "One Mind", an
abstraction whose laws prove or test the self just as Bellamy's centralized state
educational apparatus proves and entitles each of the utopia's citizens. Nationalizing
and reifYing "One Mind", Bellamy converts Emerson's self-evident, self-regulating
Waiter Benn Michaels, "An American Tragedy, or the Promise of American Life," Representations 25 (1989): 8l.
Wegner 91.
40 joseph Schiffman, ed., Edward Bellamy: Selected Writings in Religion and Society (New York: Liberal Arts Press,
1955) 3-27, quoted in Wegner 91.
41 Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays: The First and Second Series (Stilwell: Digireads.com, 2007) 86.
42 Emerson, Essays 5.
20
38
39
laws into an equally self-correcting bureaucratic order, the "one source" that
preserves anonymity while working to maintain interconnectedness. Its own
subject, the Nation thus retains the most attractive features of individualism, now
attributed to the equalizing technology of distribution itself.43
However similar their idea of a principle overreaching any single individual, Emerson and
Bellamy would not agree on the way in which individuals react to life's various stimuli. Whereas
Bellamy is attempting to bring individuals from different intellectual levels into a unified nation
by means of general education, Emerson opposed the theory that people are inactive receptors,
each reacting in the same way to a similar stimuli, and as such moldable by those in charge,
wishing to influence and limit individual potential. For example, in Experience, he writes:
"Nature and literature are subjective phenomena; every evil and every good thing is a shadow
which we cast."44 Bellamy goes in the opposite direction, limiting exceptionality and
individuality in favor of a sense of belonging, be it the quality of the characters portrayal or a
semblance of any independence on their part, which both give way to the descriptions of the
utopian structure.
2.6 Race, Gender and the Marketplace in the Year 2000
There is a similar vagueness in the description of the position of women and other races
in Bellamy's utopia. He does not in truth deal with racial or gender issues in his novel. As far as
race is concerned, his use of the word itself throughout the novel suggests that it stands for all
humanity with very rare exceptions: once it is used to imply a social class, stressing the gap
between the rich at the poor by comparing the mutual strangeness to "living in isolation among
a jealous and alien race;"45 once to speak of women in general: "women are a very happy race
nowadays."46 Bellamy's treatment of the notion on the whole points to a purposeful avoidance of
the issue of racial difference in his utopia. There is a single instance in the novel when race is
used to signify another nation or ethnic group, when Dr. Leete speaks of "the joint policy toward
the more backward races, which are gradually being educated up to civilized institutions,"47
implying a clear division between his utopian western population and "the others."
Similarly to his treatment of race, his notion of gender equality is to be found lacking. Even
though the first American feminist utopia, Mary E. Bradley Lane's Mizora: World ojWomen, was
43
44
45
46
47
Auerbach 39.
Emerson, Essays 137.
Bellamy, LB 15.
Bellamy, LB 260.
Bellamy, LB 140.
21
written seven years before the publication of Looking Backward, Bellamy's attempt to deal with
the gender issue falls quite close to simple repetition of stereotype. Wegner points out:
Despite the text's powerful and progressive views of marriage and women's rights,
gender too remains a horizon of preexistent difference beyond which Bellamy will
not pass. 48
While Bellamy does his best to level any differences in the depiction of his utopian society
in general, through unified education and work options, equal monetary means and a single allencompassing class, he does little or nothing to rid his society of the inequality of gender and
race. He suggests that only those women who have been wives and mothers fully represent their
sex, and only those that have achieved this fullness are permitted into higher positions of his
utopian social structure. 49 Though he in all probability wished equality for all men and women,
his expression of the division of labor between them is all but egalitarian, and has provoked
many a feminist criticism of his work:
Women being inferior in strength to men, and further disqualified industrially in
special ways, the kinds of occupation reserved for them, and the conditions under
which they pursue them, have reference to these facts. The heavier sorts of work are
everywhere reserved for men, the lighter occupations for women. Under no
circumstances is a woman permitted to follow any employment not perfectly
adapted, both as to kind and degree ofIabor, to her sex.so
This altogether patriarchal attempt at redress within the status quo naturally does not
hold under feminist critiques. Pfaelzer, for example, observes:
In believing that economic factors alone were responsible for women's inequality,
Bellamy perpetuated patriarchal images of natural female inferiority and created
socialist female characters who conformed to the standards of the cult of True
Womanhood, who were pure, pious, domestic and submissive."sl
As Pfaelzer further points out, BeIIamy, along the lines of his political conviction, deems it
enough to deal with the economical side of the gender inequality, thus disregarding what later
feminist writers will see as more important issues. Nevertheless, as Daphne Patai suggests in the
introduction to her selection of essays on Looking Backward, the focus on monetary equality was
an important premise and a step in the direction of gender equality.
For all his lack of attention to the myriad ways in which women's subordinate status
vis-a.-vis men is articulated (the documentation of which is a major achievement of
Wegner 83.
Bellamy, LB 286.
50 Bellamy, LB 257.
51 Pfaelzer 36.
48
49
22
contemporary feminism), Bellamy noted that this status rested first and foremost on
an economic dependence that must be abolished. 52
It is not only the clarification of the social transformation or Bellamy's idea of an
individual or gender that is somewhat unsatisfactory in the novel. The reader would also be hard
pressed to find any description of the actual production of the goods that seem to be so freely
and universally available to all. Wegner compares Bellamy's utopia to a vast marketplace:
The whole of society in Bellamy's utopia thus has been transformed into a giant
marketplace, occupied by a population that now functionally defines itself according
to the sheer circular formality of the commodity process: the endless consumption
of feitshized goods, objects that magically seem to produce themselves, becoming a
social end in itself At the center of such a society stands the cathedral-like
department store - an apt symbol for the new "religion of solidarity" that would
hold together the utopian social arrangement. 53
Bellamy solved the labor problem of the nineteenth century by applying what West calls
"the principle of universal military service" to it. 54 In this way, he answered the questions raised
by the issue ofIabor distribution, which was one of the main concerns of his time, and portrayed
what can be described as a society of leisure, a new class wholly absorbed in consumerism. As
Wegner writes:
The consumerist world of Looking Backward thus prefigures the social
circumstances of the new bourgeoisie of an American industrial capitalism, those
whom Thorsten Veblen famously labels the "leisure class": the emerging public that
alone possessed opportunities for a "lifestyle of consumption" (the ideological
foundation of Bellamy's utopian order) that would not be available on a wide scale
until much later. 55
Based on Dr. Leete's descriptions of equal means and the easy availability of all consumerrequired goods, West questions the utopians' motivation for work, as the monetary incentive has
been taken away from them. Dr. Leete comes back with the analogy of an army fighting to defend
their country. The image of soldiers' loyalty to their nation is strongly present in BelIamy's
description of his industrial army as well as the armies of the past:
Not higher wages, but honor and the hope of men's gratitude, patriotism and the
inspiration of duty, were the motives which they set before their soldiers when it
Daphne Patai, ed., Essays on Edward Bel/amy (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988) 14.
Wegner 80.
54 Bellamy, LB 62.
55 Wegner 81.
23
52
53
was a question of dying for the nation, and never was there an age of the world
when those motives did not call out what is best and noblest in men. 56
West further objects to the extent of power granted to the utopian government, again
contrasting his life experience to what is presented to him in this new order of things. He
believes in the susceptibility of all politicians to the temptations of money and power, as well as
in the overall selfishness of mankind, given the chance to practice it. Having dealt with the
question of selfishness, selflessness and human nature earlier, Dr. Leete primarily disagrees with
the extent of governmental power being greater in the year 2000 than it was in 1887. Again, he
draws on the example of the power of the nineteenth century government to wage war and
"seize upon the bodies of citizens and deliver them over by hundreds of thousands to death and
mutilation, wasting their treasures the while like water; and all this oftenest for no imaginable
profit to the victims."57 In Bellamy's utopia, there are not wars between nations, only the war
against hunger and nakedness. Again, the reader is forced to look at things that seem natural
enough to them from the future vantage point and hopefully also come to the same conclusions
that are proposed by Dr. Leete.
Having absorbed the positive outcome of a social evolution proposed in Looking
Backward, West cannot help but long to become a part of this new order. As a reader, one cannot
help but wish for a more elaborate guide as to how these changes were to take place, for an
image based in reality with real-life suggestions and proposals. This is perhaps one of the
reasons for the influence this book and BeIlamy's consequent work, both literary and political,
had on its many readers.
2.7 The Aftermath
In regard to the social and political reactions to the novel, Kumar writes that
Looking Backward created an appetite and a vogue for utopias that did not subside
for a dozen years. Between 1889 and 1900 at least 62 utopias and novels influenced
by Bellamy were published - most of them in the United States, but several also in
Britain and Germany.58
Among those influenced by BeIlamy's work, Kumar names John Dewey, Charles Beard, Edward
Weeks, who all listed Looking Backward as the second most influential book world-wide (after
Bellamy, LB 97.
Bellamy, LB 60.
58 Kumar 135.
56
57
24
Marx's Das KapitaTj, socialist leaders like Daniel de Leon, Eugene V. Debs and Norman Thomas or
social critics like Thorstein Veblen and Upton Sinclair.59
It was both in literature and in politics that Bellamy made a lasting impression. His work
led to an outburst of political activism. Several months after the publication of Looking Backward
the first Nationalist Club was established, to promote his ideas. By 1891 there were 165 of
them. 60 Moreover, these clubs supported the rise of the larger Populist Party and further
progressive politics and reforms. 61
The Wilson Quarterly printed:
[ ...] Bellamy's vision captured the nation's imagination like no other. This quiet man
living on a Massachusetts hilltop was widely seen as a prophet-his ideas helped
inspire the Populist Party, whose candidate won more than a million votes in the
1892 presidential election.62
Whatever the contemporary reaction was, having in fresh memory one way of implementing
such socialist governing scheme in reality, one may be reluctant to view this piece very
favorably, over a hundred years after its publication. Nevertheless, as Kumar points out at the
end of his discussion of Looking Backward, "as criticism of the moral and social order of
capitalism it still carries great force and [ ...] the sorry spectacle of the mass of humanity being
led by the nose is as accurate as ever."63
Kumar 134.
Kumar 136.
61 Wegner 63-64.
62 "Looking Downward," The Wilson Quarterly (Spring 2003): 105+.
63 Kumar 167.
25
59
60
3. FORCING THE HAND OF EVOLUTION:
JACK LONDON AND THE IRON HEEL
"By the beginning of the twentieth century, the late nineteenth-century boom in utopian
American fiction was in decline," Nicholas Spenser writes in After Utopia: The Rise of Critical
Space in Twentieth-Century American Fiction, and goes on to say: "Yet the spatial imagination
that informed these utopian texts did not disappear. Rather, it migrated into socialist fiction,
such as that of Jack London." 1
As will be seen in this chapter, Jack London does not simply carry on with the project of
Bellamy's socialist utopian imagination; he changes its strategy by concentrating on social
historical changes rather than on the blueprint of a new order. By describing what he sees as an
appalling testament to human irresponsibility and greed, he is trying to awaken his readers to
their surroundings and to kindle a flame of revolution in them. Like Bellamy, he wants them to
look forward towards new possibilities and goals, but unlike him, he does not create a detailed
blueprint of the future.
Though qualified by some as a dystopia, Jack London's The Iron Heel can be generally
categorized as a utopian piece. As Francis Robert Shor writes in Utopian ism and Radicalism in a
Reforming America, 1888-1918, the main focus of the book is to present its readers with a vision
of a utopian alternative, a mature socialist society in the distant future. The disharmony,
bloodshed and appalling socio-economic conditions of the masses of the 19 th century America
are the background and the impulse for the change:
[ ...] criticism that sees the novel's utopian thrust as primarily a dystopic obsession
with conflict and destruction without providing more of a context than London's
mind-set undermines an understanding of how the novel is part of the discursive
practices of the period and a "strategic site for the contestation of dominant
ideological subject identities."2 In particular, London's adherence to the discursive
practices of naturalism, notwithstanding the sentimental and romantic components
found in The Iron Heel, helps to configure the conflictual and dystopic elements of
the novel as utopian fiction. Moreover, London's use of marginal notes to convey the
1 Nicholas Spencer, After Utopia: The Rise of Critical Space in Twentieth-Century American Fiction (Lincoln. NE:
University of Nebraska Press, 2006) 4.
2 Tony Bennett, "Texts in History: The Determination of Readings and Their Texts," Post-Structuralism and the
Question of History, eds. Derek Attridge, Geoff Bennington, and Robert Young (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1987) 80.
26
social character of the utopian future also helps to locate the political context of
London's perspective on utopian possibilities and socialism.3
The Iron Heel is undoubtedly more naturalistic and darker than Looking Backward,
especially given its focus on the "present" society and the beginnings of a violent social
revolution, rather than describing the ideal utopian future. However, considering it a pure
dystopia would mean completely avoiding London's presentation of a better tomorrow, which is
indisputably present in the novel, however vague and unspecific its portrayal may be.
When further considering The Iron Heel, one must come to terms with its literary qualities.
Unlike the facts of Jack London's biography and his motivation for writing, the lack of literary
quality of this particular piece is not often disputed. G. P. Coryn noted:
With a daring originality the story is introduced as a manuscript that has been
hidden in an oak tree for seven centuries. If the author fails to use the other
accessories of a sliding panel and a midnight ghost he has no doubt reserved them
for future occasions. 4
Even Leon Trotsky, otherwise a great supporter of London's writing and this novel specifically,
admitted that it was not of particular literary quality:
Not because of its artistic qualities: the form of the novel here represents only an
armor for social analysis and prognosis. The author is intentionally sparing in his
use of artistic means. He is himself interested not so much in the individual fate of
his heroes as in the fate ofmankind. s
Coryn's review in Argonaut is not untypical for the contemporary reviews of the book. The
fiction reviewers saw it as a violent socialist propaganda, and while many socialist papers
applauded London's attacks on capitalism and his vivid wake-up call to the socialist groups,
others did not agree with the violent methods or the time span proposed by London between
their efforts and the achievement of a socialist paradise. The second quote is perhaps more
worthy of note, as Trotsky saw The Iron Heel and its author powerful, intuitive and
revolutionary, despite the novel's small creative value. On the whole, most parties agree that the
purpose of this book is an ideological, rather than artistic one. 6
It is interesting to note, as PhiIlip Wegner does, that London's pessimism and postponing
of the great socialist future actually reflects that of Marx in his later works:
Francis Robert Shor, Utopianism and Radicalism in a Reforming America, 1888-1918 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press,
1997) 68.
4 G. P. Coryn, "New and Notable Novels: The Iron Heel," Argonaut [San Francisco] 18 Apr. 1908: 256.
5 Lean Trotsky, "Critique of the Iron Heel," The Critical Response to Jack London, ed. Susan M. Nuernberg (Westport,
CT: Greenwood Press, 1995) 137.
6 Susan M. Nuernberg, ed., The Critical Response to Jack London (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1995) 138.
27
3
In this, London seems to replicate Marx's shift from the confidence in the imminence
of revolution found in The Communist Manifesto - a text, I will suggest momentarily,
upon which London models his own narrative - to the much longer-range temporal
perspectives ofthe Grundrisse.7
While the contemporary socialist reviewers of London disliked his pessimistic prognosis, later
readers, such as Trotsky, quoted above, saw him as a prophet of the future, more specifically in
this case, as a prophet of the fascist "contra-revolutionary" wave. 8
One of the literary issues concerning The Iron Heel is London's narrator, Avis Everhard.
London creates the character of an editor, Anthony Meredith, who presents the Manuscript to its
readership, as it is being published for the first time seven hundred years after Avis' death. As a
way of introduction, Meredith speaks of Avis' "error of perspective, and vitiation due to the bias
of love," and says she "lacked perspective."9 Thus from the very start, London undermines the
credibility of his narrator, and he does so even before she starts speaking. All throughout the
novel, Meredith, a member of a thriving socialist society, gives comments on the events
described and corrects Avis and her views, which he continues to deem mostly naIve and biased.
Approaching this matter from another angle, Joan Hedrick, in Solitary Comrade, Jack
London and His Work, proposes that the authority of the narrator is further destabilized by the
position of women in London's society:
London frames his social prophecy in the consciousness ofa woman (Avis Everhard)
who is unconsciously oppressed by the sexist assumptions of capitalist society. Thus
the vigor and bite of London's political analysis is at every point undermined by the
sentimentality of his narrative consciousness. [ ...] Form cancels content 10
She goes on to point out that by introducing a correcting mechanism into the story, London
effectively divides his narrative voice in two - one from the past, sentimental and subjective, and
another from the future, clear and objective, with a distinct purpose: to teach mankind about the
atrocities of capitalism at the beginning of the twentieth century,!l
Through Dr. Leete and Julian West, Bellamy used distinct voices and sets of opinions, each
from a different era, and each with a different vantage point. This is very similar to London's
method of narrating his utopia. In the case of The Iron Heel, there are actually three separate
7 Phillip E. Wegner, Imaginary Communities: Utopia, The Nation, and the Spatial Histories of Modernity (Los Angeles:
University of California Press, 2002) 116.
8 Wegner 117.
9 Jack London, The Iron Heel (Champaign, Ill: Project Gutenberg, 2006) 18 Feb. 2009
<http://www.gutenberg.org/fiIes/1164/1164-h/1164-h.htm> Introduction.
10 Joan D. Hedrick, Solitary Comrade, jack London and His Work (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press,
1982) 190.
11 Hedrick 191.
28
viewpoints - those of Ernest Everhard, Avis Everhard and Anthony Meredith - set before the
reader to choose from.
It can in fact be argued that this method of splitting the narrative voice between two or
multiple characters is a method of framing the utopian depictive story, typical for the genre in
general. For example, Chris Ferns observes in Narrating Utopia: Ideology, Gender, Form in
Utopian Literature:
Yet for all this diversity, one thing that exhibits far less variation-at least so far as
literary utopias are concerned- is the story, the framing narrative which accounts
for how the narrator or central character reaches the more perfect society and
obtains the opportunity to witness its distinctive excellences. 12
As will be shown later on, this is also overall the narrative method of choice in Call en bach's
Ecotopia and Piercy's Women on the Edge of Time, which are told from the perspective of a
stranger witnessing the utopian society from an outside perspective.
3.1 London's Artistic Production
Twenty-six years Bellamy's junior, London lived in the same age of great social changes.
Hedrick praises his connectedness to the present:
With bold strokes London extrapolates the future, building always on the bits of
history he has lived through-the rise of populism and socialism, the violent
suppression of dissent (Haymarket, industrial strikes), the powerful combinations of
capital, the lessons of the Russian revolution.1 3
There is another change in the fabric of social connections, which has not been mentioned before
and which is perhaps more important for London than for Bellamy. In addition to the economic
and social changes described in the previous chapter, the nature of art and the role of the artist
were also rapidly changing. As is often pointed out, in the new realm of the free market, writers
were becoming more and more dependent on the readers - consumers.14 A theme often
discussed, in connection to this development, is the authenticity and quality of London's work.
In her introduction to The Critical Response to Jack London, Susan Nuernberg argues that
the negative contemporary reports on London were largely due to the fact that
critics have taken at face value London's open acknowledgments that he was a
"vendor of brains," that he would rather dig ditches any day than write if only it paid
Chris Ferns, Narrating Utopia: Ideology, Gender, Form in Utopian Literature (Liverpool: Liverpool UP, 1999) ix.
Hedrick 189.
14 e.g. Wegner 131.
12
13
29
as well, and that he devoted two hours a day to writing and ten to farming when in
fact he was a serious writer committed to his craft.IS
This motive makes its way into the The Iron Heel when Everhard speaks of it to Avis: "The result
will be great art; for no longer, as up to yesterday, will the artists pander to the bourgeois taste
of the middle class."16 The artist were to become a revered class during the later years of the
Oligarchy, they build wonder cities, which the successful revolutionaries still live in, centuries
later. Where in the utopian society of Looking Backward, the artist had to pay for the privilege to
expose his or her art to the public, here the artists were to be admired and richly rewarded.
In response to the accusation of plagiarism in The Call of the Wild, London writes to the
editor of the magazine, saying, "Fiction-writers have always considered actual experiences of life
to be a lawful field for exploitation-in fact, every historical novel is a sample of fictional
exploitation of published narratives of fact."I? However ambiguous his biographies and various
reports of his life may be, the fact is that during his lifetime, London became one of the most
popular and best paid American writers, and was extensively translated into over eighty
languages.1 8
In spite of this, London himself saw The Iron Heel as a failure. In a letter to a friend, quoted
by Francis Robert Shor in Utopian ism and Radicalism in a Reforming America, London writes: "It
was a labor of love and a dead failure as a book. The book buying public would have nothing to
do with it and I got nothing but knocks from the socialists."19 Reading Meredith's comment about
nineteenth century labeling, provoked by Mr. Wickson's calling Everhard a "Utopian," supplies
valuable insight into how London felt as a socialist and a revolutionary in his time:
The peopJe of that age were phrase slaves. The abjectness of their servitude is
incomprehensible to us. There was a magic in words greater than the conjurer's art.
So befuddled and chaotic were their minds that the utterance of a single word could
negate the generalizations of a lifetime of serious research and thought. Such a word
was the adjective UTOPIAN. The mere utterance of it could damn any scheme, no
matter how sanely conceived, of economic amelioration or regeneration [author's
capitalizati0 n).20
Jack London, however, did not only write about his convictions. He was very active in the
socialist movement, especially between 1905 and 1907. In addition to trying to make the
movement understood by the general public through his work, he was traveling, giving lectures,
Nuernberg xxiv.
Jack London, The Iron Heel (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. 1945) 143.
17 Jack London, letter, The Independent 14 Feb 1906: 375-76, quoted in Nuernberg 72.
18 Nuernberg xxiv.
19 Shor 67.
20 London, IH 55.
30
15
16
fundraising. 21 Hedrick argues that socialism was a form of release for London, allowing him
respite from depressions and from the general ennui he himself proclaimed the consequence of
being cultured. She writes: "It gave him the psychic release of a religion and the physical release
of a fight."22
3.2 The Road to London's Utopia
As opposed to Bellamy's focus on the description of his utopian society in Looking
Backward, London marginalizes his sketch of the Brotherhood of Men and does not place in front
of the reader an image of a perfect tomorrow but the problems of today. London's work thus
reflects his desire for social change.
The information on the Brotherhood evident from the text is sporadic, to say the least, and
can only be inferred from the editor's footnotes, when there was a need to explain something to
the proposed readership in the year two thousand. What can be deduced, however, is that the
people of the Brotherhood did not revert to agrarianism, but continued in the trend of
technological progress, living in densely populated wonder cities, built by the revolutionaries
during the rule of the Oligarchy,23 in an industrial way similar to that of Bellamy's utopian
society. Also paralleling the future society of Looking Backward, there is no segregation of class 24
or social struggle,zs no slavery26 or bloodshed 27 and virtually no crime. Z8 Reason and planning,
taking full advantage of scientific advances, going as far as laboratory provisions in London's
case govern both societies.z9 One clear distinction, however, can be seen in the lack of capitalist
production of the Brotherhood. Where this very same production and the distribution of goods
seem to form the backbone of Bellamy's idea of socio-economic equality, London is quite clear in
its abandonment. 3o It is perhaps a pity that London did not develop his theory of the future to a
greater extent. However, in spite of the scarcity of information on the topic, his presentation of
the utopian society clearly has the appearance of harmony and balance. It is perhaps the very
absence of some of the biggest social problems Of the nineteenth century, which is hinted at in
the text, which qualifies his vision as utopian.
The social transformations necessary to attain this state follow the path suggested by
Marx: changes in the society, leading to the creation of only two antagonistic camps, in Marx's
Philip S. Foner,jack London: American Rebel (New York: Citadel Press, 1947) 63.
Hedrick 81-82.
23 London, lH 143.
24 London, lH 91.
25 London, IH 82.
26 London, IH 69.
27 London, IH 155.
28 London, IH 34.
29 London, lH 182.
30 London, IH 93.
21
22
31
terminology the Bourgeoisie and Proletariat. 31 This is in line with what Wegner points out,
alongside many leftist critics, who claim that the high number of diverse leftist groups has been
the major problem for the creation and sustaining of an effective left strategy or party.32 In the
plot, London achieves such unification by crafting a variety of economic situations for each of
these independent groups, virtually doing away with one power group after another, be it the
middle-class business owners, the farmers or the clergy, until the only thing that remains
opposing the Oligarchy is a unified group of the unhappy, unsatisfied and oppressed masses,
who will give rise to the revolution. This development is clearly comparable to that described by
Marx in the Manifest of the Communist Party:
Of all the classes that stand face to face with the bourgeoisie today, the proletariat
alone is a really revolutionary class. The other classes decay and finally disappear in
the face of modern industry; the proletariat is its special and essential product. 33
It is interesting, however, to note that Ernest views this very same process of the side of
the capitalists, i.e. monopolization, or, the creation of large corporations and trusts as ominous,
regardless of its consistency with the process of revolution he himself expects. It is as if he
wished for the revolution to come and wanted to delay it at the same time. While Bellamy saw
monopolization ultimately as the prime means of achieving his utopia, London presents it as a
temporary victory of the capitalist machine and the Oligarchy, in spite of it being clearly the
logical way to unite the workers and thus produce the "grave diggers" for the bourgeoisie, as
Marx famously predicted. 34
Why was it impossible for London to imagine a peaceful way of restructuring the society,
in the same way Bellamy does? Wegner suggests that it was the historical experience that stood
between the two authors, mainly the Russian Revolution in 1905.
[The Russian Revolution of 1905], coupled, in London's case, with a series of
political disappointments that occurred the same year in the United States,
demonstrated [...] the untenability of the progressivist faith at the heart of such
earlier utopias as Looking Backward. [ ...] A new utopian order would emerge only
from the crucible of revolutionary struggle, and both works [Bogdanov's Red Star
and London's Iron HeeTJ issue a call for this kind of radical praxis. 35
Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Manifesto o/the Communist Party (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House,
1893) 49.
32 Wegner 132-133.
33 Marx and Engels 67.
34 Marx and Engels 71.
35 Wegner 100.
32
31
After the Russian Revolution, London could no longer believe in a quiet social evolution and
passive progress. Ernest also moves from having faith in the possibility of a democratic turnover
to being very pessimistic in saying:
I had hoped for a peaceable victory at the ballot-box. I was wrong. Wickson was
right. We shall be robbed of our few remaining liberties; the Iron Heel will walk
upon our faces; nothing remains but a bloody revolution of the working class. Of
course we will win, but I shudder to think of it.3 6
In line with what Ernest predicts, the revolutionaries create Fighting groups, to return the
violence of the Iron Heel with violence of their own. London's revolution, similarly to the
transformation proposed by Bellamy, is a quest for the redistribution of power, but unlike
BelIamy, it is to be a fierce and bloody one:
And we intend to take, not the mere wealth in the houses, but all the sources of that
wealth, all the mines, and railroads, and factories, and banks, and stores. That is the
revolution. It is truly perilous. There will be more shooting, I am afraid, than even I
dream of. 37
Shor suggests that this Marxist notion of power was one of the core elements uniting
London's particular brand of socialism with that of the Workers of the World and most of the
other socialist thinkers and supporters. 38 Power in The Iron Heel is presented as something
anonymous. Ernest speaks of "things vast, vague and terrible," "nameless and formless."39
Wegner draws a parallel between the obscurity of this power and the character of the newly reforming nineteenth-century American society. He proposes that it reflects the constant
broadening of social horizons, going beyond anything that a single individual alone can grasp.40
By avoiding a detailed description of the nature of the power that is to be redistributed, London
makes his proposed social agenda slightly more ambiguous than the clarity of Ernest's proposals
would at first suggest
3.3 London's Socialism
Even though the notion of the class struggle and of social revolution is in line with the
Marxist beliefs, it is quite difficult to precisely pinpoint the kind of socialism London believed in.
It had aspects of the Marxist revolution, of the mainstream belief in the power of labor but it also
had very individualistic aspects, which reflected him as a person. Shor addresses these
London, IH 112-113.
London,IH 42.
38 Shor 77.
39 London, IH 70.
40 Wegner 124.
36
37
33
discrepancies between London's individualism and his communal utopia. Quoting WaIter
Rideout, he writes:
Socialism was always interpenetrated by [London's] individualism, a condition
which explains how both he and his writings could at once combine racism, the
glorification of the superior individual over the mass, a fascination with brute force,
and a warm-hearted sense of the brotherhood ofman.41
As was already suggested, many socialists disagreed with the vision presented to them in
The Iron Heel, either because of its violent nature or because of London's positioning the victory
of their social fight so far into the future. Shor observes that the seven centuries that London
places between himself and the utopian society mirrors a certain Marxist awareness of the
difficulty of defeating capitalism. He sees that there are several stages of capitalism that must
come to pass. 42 In one of his comments to the utopian reader, Meredith writes:
We must accept the capitalistic stage in social evolution as about on a par with the
earlier monkey age. The human had to pass through those stages in its rise from the
mire and slime of low organic life. It was inevitable that much of the mire and slime
should cling and be not easily shaken off.43
London himself wrote, in a letter to C. Jones, that he would truly prefer being able to
believe that the socialist era is at hand, but that it goes against the principle of social change he
had come to adopt as his own:
I should like to have socialism yet I know that socialism is not the very next step; I
know that capitalism must live its life first That the world must be exploited to the
utmost first; that first must intervene a struggle for life among the nations, severer,
intenser, more widespread, than ever before. I should much more prefer to wake
tomorrow in a smoothly-running socialistic state; but I know I shall not; I know that
a child must go through its child's sicknesses ere it becomes a man. So, always
remember that I speak of the things that are: not ofthe things that should be. 44
The "child's sicknesses" proposed by London during the three centuries of the rule of the Iron
Heel, which followed the story of the first revolt witnessed by Avis and Ernest Everhard and
described in the Manuscript, were changes of great magnitude in the industrial system as well as
the concepts of religion, politics and society, already hinted at by Everhard. After centuries of
economic terror of the monopolies and the Oligarchs' fascist tactics, the oppression finally gave
Waiter B. Rideout, The Radical Novel in the United States, 1900-1954 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1966) 41-42, quoted
in Shor 85.
42 Shor 78.
43 London, IH 158.
44 loan London,jack London and His Times: An Unconventional Biography (Seattle: University of Washington Press,
1968) 333-34.
34
41
rise to a successful wave of revolutionary struggle, which joined socialists from all over the
globe. After this final victory and the end of the Christian era, the four centuries of the
Brotherhood of Men ensued, bringing about the disaster and violence-free age of intelligence
and rational thought.
London's temporal reworking of what Bellamy saw as an imminent change is also clear from
his work with the utopian space in general, or perhaps the lack thereof. London's great
disappointment brought on by the 1905 Russian revolution has already been noted. The way he
chose to reflect this revolutionary setback was to marginalize the utopian space effectively to the
editor's footnotes and redirecting his attention to what Wegner calls "the process of social
change."45
3.4 Human Nature and London's Female Characters
In his utopia, London essentially calls for a transformation of values. The deep need he felt
for such a large-scale social transformation, led him as Shor proposes to the socialist ideology.
This transformation was indeed so imperative to London's utopian endeavor that he continued
writing and lecturing about it for the most part of his life after the publication of The Iron Heel. 46
Like Bellamy, London blames the current state of the world and people's behavior on their
social conditions. His notion of human selfishness, however, seems to be more complicated. At
one pOint, Ernest argues for general selfishness of all people, yet later on he says people's
selfishness is a result of their environment. In a debate with Bishop Morehouse, he says: "We
agreed that the average man is selfish. He is the man that is," and later seems to contradict
himself by saying: "He ought not to be selfish, but he will continue to be selfish as long as he lives
in a social system that is based on pig-ethics [the capitalist system]."47 London's treatment of
human nature thus in fact seems to suggest that he sees it as something fluid and changeable,
dependent on outward impulses.
This argument of social pressures steering human behavior is also applied to the
subsequent compromise of values which people are, in Ernesfs opinion, forced to make. He
explains that people act the way they do out of fear and the need to protect their families: "But as
I was saying, no one to-day is a free agent We are all caught up in the wheels and cogs of the
industrial machine."48 In this case, Ernest does not draw a line between the worker and the
capitalist - both are equally dependent on their circumstances:
Wegner 100.
Shor 84.
47 London, IH 26-27.
48 London, IH 42.
45
46
35
They are so tied by their human nature that they can't do a thing unless they think it
is right. They must have a sanction for their acts. When they want to do a thing, in
business of course, they must wait till there arises in their brains, somehow, a
religious, or ethical, or scientific, or philosophic, concept that the thing is right. And
then they go ahead and do it, unwitting that one of the weaknesses of the human
mind is that the wish is parent to the thought.49
Throughout the plot London draws on examples of these situations and further ads to his
point, mirroring Ernest's preaching, as for example when Peter Donnelly, the scab foreman at
the Sierra Mills later joined a Fighting Group, when his wife and children (the reason for his
earlier cooperation with the Iron Heel) died. 50
This short excerpt points to another issue inherent in the novel, which is one set of values
that London neglects to deal with in greater detail as a part of his discussion of the society - the
patriarchal one. London does not speak of genuine everyday women in his novel. He uses a
submissive woman in love as his narrator and then mentions hardened and de-feminized
women as members of the Revolt. Throughout the novel, the reader is faced with the fact that
while London saw quite clearly the subjugation of the common worker, they would be hard
pressed to describe any clearly gender-related issues in the nineteenth-century society London
portrays. He observed and described one great wave of oppression, not distinguishing, as
Hedrick puts it, between the oppression of class and that of sex. 51 She goes on to say:
The contradictions here are acute: Everhard builds his vision of a new society by
pumping iron in the oppressive social relationships of the capitalist society he
wishes to overthrow. London's awareness of the contradictions of manhood in
capitalist society was neutralized by his ignorance of the contradictions of
womanhood. [ ...] Even though London's heroes are sometimes with women, his
understanding of them does not include their relationships with women. He is at his
best when describing oppression in the male spheres of work, saloon, and prison.
[...] Ernest is simply too tired to extend the revolutionary struggle into the politics of
his domestic life. 52
London, as well as Bellamy, lived in an era in which women have already been voicing
their claims to equality for decades and it was an issue he had to deal with one way or another in
his work, especially as his work was dealing with similar issues, be it in a different area. In an
article titledJack London's New Woman: A Little Lady with a Big Stick, Andrew J. Furer writes:
49
50
51
52
London, IH 48.
London, IH 175-176.
Hedrick 196.
Hedrick 196.
36
Socio-economic independence was a crucial goal for feminist reformers of the
period and an issue London addressed directly and intensively in a successful novel
from midcareer, Burning Daylight (1910), which emphasizes the importance of
economic equality and independence for women. Throughout his career, London
wrote frequently of his view that the ideal woman is a "good comrade and fellowworker and joy-sharer. "53
Thus another thing, which BeIlamy and London have in common, is the obvious lack of any
direct address of the gender issue. Moreover, London does not introduce any truly satisfactory
female characters. There are two types of women in this novel, which easily fall into the
Madonna- whore dichotomy and reflect the division between the private and public spheres, as
defined for example by Susan Gal and Gail Kligman in The Politics of Gender after Socialism. 54 The
first are the wives and daughters of the male characters, who need to be cared for and protected,
as were the already mentioned Donnelly's wife and children. The second are revolutionary
women, who seem to have adopted a mixture of male and female attributes; or rather are
presented as manly attitudes and opinions in a female body, as for example Avis Everhard or the
"Red Virgin," using their charms for the cause. This second type of women inspired several
critics, mentioned by Furer, to speak of "a single, androgynous sex" or a "hard-limbed youth with
breasts tacked on as an afterthought."55 Shor, in somewhat less explicit terms, agrees with the
implied changes in character and lifestyle that the revolutionary women had to make:
In effect, at Ernest's request, Avis must become less of the naive and helpless middle
class maiden and more of a strong comrade-mate, not surprisingly unlike London's
real-life "mate-woman" Charmian Kittredge. 56 [ ...]
In the character of Anna Roylston, dubbed the "Red Virgin" in the novel, London
reveals once more [ ...] how "the bourgeois virtues [are associated] with a narrow,
effeminate way of seeing," and in transcending such bourgeois values women, in
particular, must to some extent de-sex and harden themselves. Thus, Anna Roylston
and the other revolutionaries of the Fighting Groups must especially eschew the
snares and sentiments engendered by family lifeP
Furer proposed that London needed women as monogamous mothers to "keep the human
race fit and on its path to evolutionary perfection."5B While this may be somewhat of an
Andrew J. Furer, "Jack London's New Woman: A Little Lady with a Big Stick," Studies in American Fiction 22.2
(1994): 1.
54 Susan Gal and Gail Kligman, The Politics of Gender after Socialism (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2000) 37-62.
55 Furer 1.
56 Shor 82.
57 Shor 82.
58 Furer 1.
37
53
overstatement, London certainly did not deal with the feminist cause in a consistent manner as a
part of his quest for social equality, instead concentrating on what he saw as more pressing
matters for his utopian endeavor.
3.5 London and Bellamy: Two Sides of the Same Coin
The most obvious link between Bellamy and London, which has already been discussed, is
their belief in the socialist movement. Both conjured up and image of a utopian socialist society,
where all are apparently equal and the economy is run collectively. The first imagined a peaceful
way of evolution, the latter a violent revolution. The first proposed a span of a hundred years,
between his present and the ideal society, the latter required seven centuries. Both were
influential writers of the socialist movement in the United States and both contributed to its
politics.
Yet a different kind of connection between these two authors has been discussed in the
recent years, namely by the already quoted PhilIip Wegner in Imaginary Communities (2002) or
Nicholas Spenser in After Utopia (2006). They draw our attention to the already mentioned
inversed aspects of the two works: the first focuses on the depiction of the "idealized social
space" rather than on the historical processes leading up to it. The other reverses these
priorities. Spenser writes:
[London's] naturalism [ ...] is governed by versions of socialist theories of dialectical
struggle and deterministic history. The totalized and monolithic utopian space that
we see in novels such as Looking Backward is transformed into a set of spatial
representation that express a utopian impulse. 59
It would be virtually impossible to base a community on London's depiction of his utopian
space. BeIIamy's novel is, however, in Spencer's words a "localized model of social practices and
relationships that serves to inspire the dialectical struggle of history." As the next two chapters
will show, the blueprint utopias were by no means abandoned after BeIIamy. For Jack London,
however, that was not the way to reach his readers. He wanted them to relive his experience
through his work, to see what he saw and to react by attempting to change it.
59
Spencer 4.
38
4. TWENTIETH-CENTURY ECOTOPIAS
Continuing the trend of the late nineteenth century, the twentieth century saw the power of both
large corporations and governments grow, often in response to each other's actions. In The End
of the World as We Know It: Social Science for the Twenty-First Century, Immanuel Wallerstein
defined two elementary features of capitalism. First of all, to achieve its goal, which is the
endless accumulation of capital, the capitalist system must endlessly expand. This is in line with
what Marx and Engels proposed in The Manifesto of the Communist Party:
The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie
over the whole surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere,
establish connexions everywhere,!
The second feature, which Wallerstein calls "the dirty secret of capitalism," is that capitalists
need to avoid paying their bills as much as they can. 2
The second part of Wallerstein's definition shall be dealt with further on. In line with his
first rule, however, the corporations of the twentieth-century America continued growing and
thriving. On the other hand, as a part of the economic and social reforms of the Progressive era,
the federal government received further authority to support citizens' rights against those of
large monopolies, but also to control the citizens themselves. This involved among many others
the regulation of rail roads under the Elkins Act and the Hepburn Act of 1903 and 1906, as a part
of Roosevelt's "Square Deal", the antimonopoly Clayton Anti-Trust Act of 1914, the control of
media under The Espionage Act of 1917 or the ban of anti-government expression under the
Sedition Law of 1918. Adding to this the two World Wars, the Great Depression and the rise of
the Soviet Union, all these developments caused enormous shifts in the American social
infrastructure and belief system, also giving rise to various concerns regarding individual
rights. 3
Consequently, the nineteen-fifties saw various authors announce the end of ideology and
utopia. The overall atmosphere is clear enough from some of the titles of critical works
published at the time. To name three examples, H. S. Hughes wrote "The End of Political
Ideology"4 in 1951, Judith N. Shklar published After Utopia: The Decline of Political FaithS in 1957
and Daniel Bell authored The End of Ideology: On the Political Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the
1 Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House,
1893) 54.
2 Immanuel Wallerstein, The End of the World as We Know It: Social Science for the Twenty-First Century (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1999) 77-78.
3 Arnon Gutfeld, American Exceptionalism: The Effects of Plenty on the American Exeprience (Brighton: Sussex
Academic Press, 2002) 118-121.
4 H. S. Hughes, "The End of Political Ideology," Measure 2.2 (1951): 146-158.
5 Judith N. Shklar, After Utopia: The Decline of Political Faith (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1957).
39
Fifties 6 in 1960. With Stalin dead and Khrushchev denouncing him at the Party Congress of 1955,
"no one could pretend that an alternative to advanced capitalism existed," Russell Jacoby writes
in The End a/Utopia and goes on to say:
Nor could we return to pure laissez-faire economy; undiluted capitalism was also
obsolete. Liberalism and socialism were no longer pure doctrines or pure
opposites.?
In the sixties, the New Left emerged. Jacoby notes: "In the early 1960s, history was
speeding up and radicalism found a new life; ideological conflict was intensifying, not
weakening."8 He credits the 1960s with reaching a new level of alertness concerning racial and
social discrimination and laying to rest the discussions about the end of ideology.9 There was a
myriad of causes to be dealt with: the civil rights movement, environmentalism, gay rights,
pacifist and feminist protests, etc. The utopian and revolutionary spirit was, at least for several
decades, revived. It survived in the ongoing activism of the time and in what Tom Moylan calls "a
return to the human agenda of the categories of cooperation, equality, mutual aid, liberation,
ecological wisdom, and peaceful and creative living."lo In short, people believed that it was
possible to change the future again.
It was in this era of a renewed interest in human equality and longing for a sense of
community that CaIlenbach and Piercy wrote their utopias. Their critique of consumerism, the
quest for higher profits, deskilling and division of labor, along with the alienation of people from
nature and from each other in a way resembles the various critical voices that could be heard all
around. In Modern Environmentalism: an Introduction, David Pepper observes:
The [environmentalist] critique has affinities with most of the dissenting voices that
accompanied the rise of modern capitalism, with its political philosophy of laissez/aire liberalism, over the past three hundred years; ranging from Romanticism,
traditional conservatism and anarchism to the many varieties of socialism. Its most
immediate ancestor is probably the 'countercultural' movement of the 1960s, which
was intellectually sustained by, among others, 'neo-Marxists' concerned with social
and spiritual alienation in our society (as distinct from traditional orthodox
Marxism's preoccupation with economic alienation).l1
Daniel Bell, The End of Ideology: On the Political Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the Fifties (New York: Free Press,
1960).
7 Russell jacoby, The End of Utopia: Politics and Culture in an Age ofApathy (New York: Basic Books, 1999) 3.
B Jacoby 5.
9 Jacoby 6.
10 Tom Moylan, Demand the Impossible: Science Fiction and the Utopian Imagination (New York: Methuen, 1986) 10.
11 David Pepper, Modern Environmentalism: An Introduction (New York: Routledge, 1996) 14-15.
40
6
One of the environmentalists' main concerns was the unwillingness of the major
corporations to admit, let alone minimize, their contribution to the destruction of the
environment. Wallerstein proposes that with the rising price of labor, a result of general
deruralization, corporations wanted to avoid dealing with its total costs - his second rule of
capitalism. These discrepancies can then be either subsidized by the government, a by and large
unpopular measure, or compensated for by externalizing various other costs, which the
government will not force the corporations to include into their budget. This is where the costs
for restoring the environment come to be important. Since it is not strictly enforced to restore
the environment to the state it was in before the beginning of any production, very few
businesses will do this or include this in the cost of the product. 12 The critique of this and other
corporate practices became an important environmentalist argument against capitalist misuse
of nature and, it plays an important role in Callenbach's and Piercy's defense of the necessity for
change and the creation of a sustainable ecological environment.
By the 1970s, when Ernest Callenbach's Ecotopia and Marge Piercy's Woman on the Edge
of time were published, environmental thinking had become more mainstream, losing its
stigmatic label of a protest movement. However, as M. Jimmie Killingsworth and Jacqueline S.
Palmer write in Ecospeak: Rhetoric and Environmental Politics in America, this also meant a
radicalization of a certain part of the environmentalists, who felt the move into the mainstream
meant losing some of their edge. The first of such groups was probably the most commonly
known environmentalist group today, the Greenpeace Foundation, which moved from general
propagation of its ideals to more political actions, employing methods of protest originally used
in Civil Rights and peace movements,13
Callenbach's and Piercy's utopian novels are an alternative to such political activism,
using the art of literature to promote the environmentalist and feminist agendas. They try to be
constructive and create acceptable visions of a future society, based the principles of ecology
and gender equality. The connection between the artist and social change, which has been
proposed in the introduction to this work, here takes the form of a more easily digestible
utopian genre of science fiction, in the same way Looking Backward and The Iron Heel do, but
more notably to the current reader. Killingsworth and Palmer note:
In contrast to the rhetoric of other radicals, Callenbach's book makes a smoother,
more subtle appeal to the general public, offering its eccentric views in the popular
genre of science fiction where such views, if not expected, are at least tolerated by
Wallerstein, The End 80-81.
M. Jimmie Killingsworth and Jacqueline S. Paimer, Ecospeak: Rhetoric and Environmental Politics in America
(Carbondaie, IL: Southern Illinois UP, 1992) 194.
41
12
13
readers whose censoring mechanisms are relaxed in the presence of this "escapist"
genre. 14
The genre of science fiction inherently opens the 'possibility to express somewhat
unpopular or uncommon notions without alienating the reader, in a way a straightforward
political or academic proposal would. In Worlds within Women, Thelma I. Shinn, speaks of this
tendency from a feminist point of view. It is, however, clearly applicable to any ideology fighting
established notions of reality or culture. She writes:
Stilt while the visual arts and poetry can confront truths on a personal level, it
remains for fiction to realize this vision in action in the social context. The realistic
fiction of today, however, is locked into current perceptions of reality - to, if you
will, our cultural myths. Fantastic literature, on the other hand, has always been
open to alternatives. 15
Shinn proposes that the science-fiction genre frees its writers from the limits imposed on
them by the society. In her opinion, it is necessary for fiction to challenge these limits and
cultural boundaries and to free the human imagination to create new and better societies,
unbiased by a pre-established perception. Fiction frees the life it creates from any time or
geographic constraints. It is the ultimate genre for revolutionary and utopian writing. 16
KiIlingsworth and Palmer in their work on environmentalism also support this argument:
In this way, science fiction can contribute mightily to the radical cause. Since these
stories are forthrightly fictitious, they are insulated from the criticism ladled upon
environmentalist predictions of real events in the apocalyptic mode. Fiction does not
claim the same kind of truth value, so little is lost if its forecasts fail to come true in
actual historical circumstances. Under the right conditions, however, such radical
visions may well model real revolutionary actions by expressing in language - our
chief tool for mediating thought and action - what would otherwise be the stuff of
insubstantial fantasyY
They see the utopian impulse in literature as a precursor to the change in perception needed for
political involvement in the real world. The freedom of the genre on the one hand encourages
radicalism but on the other hand consequently exposes masses to its teachings and works
toward a change in their attitude.
Killingsworth and Palmer 195.
Thelma J. Shinn, Worlds within Women: Myth and Mythmaking in Fantastic Literature by Women (New York:
Greenwood Press, 1986) xi.
16 Shinn 10-13.
17 Killingsworth and Palmer 235.
42
14
15
4.1 CaIlenbach's Environmentalism
Ernest Callenbach's Ecotopia, published in 1975, followed two other influential ecological
utopias: Aldous Huxley's Island from 1962 and Ursula K. LeGuin's The Dispossessed from 1974,
but it was his contribution which gave name to the whole sub genre of utopian writing. The book
deals with the politics of environmentalism and presents its readers with a vision of seceded
American states of Washington, Oregon and northern California, which, having separated
themselves from the rest of the United Stated in 1980, pursue environmentalist political and life
policies.
However, in spite of its futurist genre, Ecotopia is not an easy holiday reading. It urges the
readers to come to terms with their lifestyles and rethink their priorities regarding the world
around them. As a political statement, the book was quite influential. In Beyond Political
Correctness: Social Transformation in the United States, Michael S. Cummings speaks of Ecotopia
as an inspiration for the green movement:
Many green activists and Green Party members of European governments have cited
Ernest CaIlenbach's 1975 utopian novel Ecotopia, along with economist E. F.
Schumacher's 1973 treatise Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered, as
the two works that most inspired their own ecological awareness and impelled them
to political action. IS
CaIlenbach himself is an active participant in his local politics through his writing. He
expresses his belief in all writers' responsibility toward their readership in an article called
"Ecological "rules" ofa Sustainable Society":
Writers and others in the cultural world, while avoiding boringly didactic novels,
poems, songs, and so on, need to reflect ecological realities in their work. In subtle or
blatant form, all such works convey attitudes and rules. Hitherto these have been
mainly consumerist. Many new possibilities exist for exciting innovations.19 20
Michael S. Cummings, Beyond Political Correctness: Social Transformation in the United States (Boulder, CO: L.
Rienner, 2001) 276.
19 Ernest Callenbach, "Ecological "rules" of a Sustainable Society," Cities and the Environment: New Approaches for EcoSocieties, eds. Takashi Inoguchi, Edward Newman, and Glen Paoletto (New York: United Nations UP, 1999) 17.
20 To reach the less available readership, Callenbach for example created a set of "Earth's ten commandments" to be
printed on posters and hung on walls:
Thou shalt love and honor the Earth for it blesses thy life and governs thy survival.
Thou shalt keep each day sacred to the Earth and celebrate the turning of its seasons.
Thou shalt not hold thyself above other living things nor drive them to extinction.
Thou shalt give thanks for thy food to the creatures and plants that nourish thee.
Thou shalt limit thy offspring for multitudes of people are a burden unto the Earth.
Thou shalt not kill nor waste Earth's riches upon weapons of war.
Thou shalt not pursue profit at the Earth's expense but strive to restore its damaged majesty.
Thou shalt not hide from thyself or others the consequences of thy actions upon the Earth.
Thou shalt not steal from future generations by impoverishing or pOisoning the Earth.
Thou shalt consume material goods in moderation so all may share Earth's bounty.
43
18
Callenbach, in the same way as Bellamy and London, wants to bring about social change. For
him, this means creating a new set of "rules." He writes: "In the final analysis, therefore, although
technical innovations are important, an eco-society will only be created if a new set of 'rules'
becomes dominant."21
In his opinion, these new rules will unavoidably clash with the already established
conventions of corporate behavior in America and all over the Western world. 22 Callenbach goes
on to create a set of rules or attitudes needed to achieve a sustainable ecological setting. In his
opinion, these new ethics must lead to a reconsideration and eventually a new definition of the
established perception of many things, including waste - everything produced must be
recyclable and recycled; costs - these do not only consist of the market value of a product but
also of the cost of dealing with the environmental effects of its production; population growth here Callenbach actually promotes a strict limit of two children per family; energy - renewable
sources of energy must be utilized; happiness - comes from relationships and nature, not from
acquiring consumer goods; relationships with other species - mankind is to protect them, not
rule them; and the future impact of our actions, which is to be considered in a much greater
extent than just a few generations. 23
True to his belief in the responsibility of the world writers and leaders to promote these
ideas, he works these rules into fiction, along with his ideas of environmentalist reforms, holistic
science and general ecology, and creates a novelistic proposition of how this all might function in
a living and breathing society. The result of this merge was a very well accepted and utilized
book, which has become a classic among green utopias. According to Werner Christie Mathisen
in "The Underestimation of Politics in Green Utopias," more than 650,000 copies of Ecotopia
were sold and it has been translated into nine languages by 1999.24
4.2 Ecotopia: The Book
The reader of Callenbach's novel is invited along to an American journalist's expedition
into the heart of a formerly American land of Ecotopia, 19 years after its secession from the rest
of the United States. William Weston, an unbeliever at the beginning, gradually comes to accept
the Ecotopian novel way of life and eventually decides to stay forever. As in the two previous
utopias, there are again two distinct attitudes and points of view, one of the hardheaded,
Callenbach, Rules 17.
Callenbach, Rules 18.
23 Callenbach, Rules 19-22.
24 Werner Christie Mathisen, "'The Underestimation of Politics in Green Utopias: The Description of Politics in Huxley's
Island, le Guin's the Dispossessed, and Callenbach's Ecotopia," Utopian Studies 12.1 (2001): 1.
44
21
22
mistrustful and materialistic journalist, as he was labeled by Killingsworth and Palmer,25 and the
other of the Ecotopians.
Weston is an ideal character for the promotion of the quite extreme environmentalist
measures, particularly because he himself at first refuses to believe in the good nature of the
Ecotopian endeavor. He is not trusting of these new developments, being enveloped in American
ideals of progress and consumerism, and as such makes it easy for the reader, who in most
probability comes from a similar background as Weston, to trust him to tell the truth. His official
reports remain written as if from an American perspective until the very end, which can be
confusing for the reader of the utopian narrative, given the emotional and cultural changes,
which Weston admits to in his personal journal, but it is consistent as far as American press is
concerned. Killingsworth and Palmer observe that the whole story of Ecotopia and Weston's
"education" can be seen as an illustration of the slow American acknowledgment of ecological
problems:
The story of the hero's conversion to the culture and politics of deep ecology, holistic
science, and green technology - in addition to hinting at the author's rhetorical
designs upon initially skeptical readers - could well represent the American public's
gradual adoption of environmentalist values. 26
It is interesting to note that Callenbach's presentation of the utopian environment slightly
alters the narrative method generally accepted as utopian - the idea of a single guide to the
utopia, a solitary interpreter of his or her society, who can be seen in Bellamy's and also in
London's work - in favor of a multiplicity of voices. Even though Marissa, who becomes Weston's
lover, has probably the biggest impact on his belief system, he is nevertheless faced with a
variety of other people and their individual internalizations of this new order. As a journalist, he
visits a wide range of places and encounters more people than West does in Looking Backward
and through him the reader witnesses multiple voices describing the utopian setting, as opposed
to the single voice of Meredith in The Iron Heel.
In addition to this, Weston's own output is also dual, as has already been suggested.
Throughout the novel the reader is presented with Weston's public reports that are being sent to
the United States for print, as well as his private journal, which unveils more of his thought
process and his gradual conviction of the sincerity and authenticity of the Ecotopian people. This
allows for a wider dialogue with the reader concerning the various unique experiences Weston
has, which reflects the tendency noted by Ruth Levitas and already discussed above, to move
from a description of a given blueprint of a utopian setting to a more diversified and open
25
26
Killingsworth and Palmer 229.
KiIlingsworth and Palmer 229.
4S
interpretation of possible changes in society. At the same time, this method helps create a
character, which is far better developed than the protagonists of the previous two works, and
reveals a more human side of West on, which can be sympathized with more easily.
4.3 The Ecotopian Setting
The foundation of Callenbach's Ecotopia was democratic and virtually bloodless, if
extremist. The population of the three states was won over by the Survivalist party, interestingly
led mostly by women, who were calling for secession. Political struggle led to some armed
confrontations, which were, however, ended by a nuclear threat on the side of the Ecotopian and
followed by political independence. Such strategy would perhaps be more difficult today, since
President Reagan's policy of non-negotiation with terrorists;27 nevertheless it proved effective in
Callenbach's novel as a prevention of a revolution along the lines of The Iron Heel.
The Ecotopian political system, its corporations, industries and transportation are
nationalized and reformed. To deal with overproduction, working hours are reduced by one half,
resulting in lower income and the subsequent regulation of the prices of basic food and
necessities. 28 As Weston points out: "The Ecotopian situation has allowed their government to
take actions that would be impossible under the checks and balances of our kind of
democracy."29 Great and forceful administrative changes were necessary to establish Ecotopia as
a radically ecological state, similar in magnitude to those proposed by Bellamy and London.
However, unlike their governments, Callenbach's quickly proceeded to decentralize, leaving all
local matters in regional hands.
The resulting city-based committees are an example of the intertwining of social and
political life typical of all Ecotopia. People are generally more interested in what is going on
around them and contribute to the social and political discussions. There are strict laws against
pollution and what Weston considers "white-collar crimes" are treated severely. However, as
opposed to the strict initial moves by the centralized government, Ecotopian committees
replaced bans and restriction of unsafe products by a simple "Bad Practice" list, which is not
enforced at all but still seems to discourage the production of such goods. 3D In fact, the reader is
often faced with a confusing mixture of sternness and leniency; fast, radical activity and gradual
natural change.
In Cummings' opinion, the political system Callenbach is describing is in fact very similar
to that of the United States to which it was supposed to be presenting an alternative. He also
KilIingsworth and PaImer 230.
Ernest CalIenbach, Ecotopia: The Notebooks and Reports ofWiIliam Weston (BerkeJey: Bantam Books, 1975) 58.
29 CalIenbach, Ecotopia 23.
3D CalIenbach, Ecotopia 24.
27
28
46
finds Call en bach's description of economical policies inconsistent and his legal system
sometimes arbitrary. Nevertheless, Cummings sees the biggest issue in the abolition of a public
education system:
Unlike doctrinaire socialists, Callenbach incorporated a good deal of private
ownership into his fictional utopia, including the ownership of all schools by their
teachers. The curricula of these cooperative schools emphasize children's hands-on
learning in nature, and thus accord well with the Ecotopian system as a whole. But
what is to ensure the continuation of the ecological slant of these curricula?
Ecotopian schools rise and fall with their market popularity,3!
In spite of there being a very close connection to nature virtually in all aspects of the
Ecotopian life, on the elementary level Callenbach does not ensure a continuous ecologicallyfriendly education. He seem to be simply assuming that all Ecotopians will always feel the same
about nature as they do now and will never shift their focus toward a more consumerist lifestyle.
He believes that once the Ecotopians adopted a new way of living, they will have no reason to
doubt it. However, leaving so much space to individual decision could potentially, in Cummings'
opinion, lead to isolated individuals taking advantage of various loopholes in the system in favor
of bigger and faster profits, eventually bringing the whole society back to capitalist way of
thinking. Cumming notes that:
Indeed, unless uniformly enforced laws control such activities, individual producers
and consumers have a competitive incentive to cheat on the common good. 32
Since this is quite a logical conclusion, it must be assumed that CaIlenbach is aware of this
human tendency. Thus it also has to be assumed that he either believes in an infinitely good
human nature, which would not give in to such temptations but for which there is no support in
his plot line, or that he wants to avoid a system of controlled education, and the possibility of
being accused of "brainwashing." It would indeed seem that Callenbach is not in favor of the
strictly enforced governing, however drastic the initial setting up of his utopian stable-state was.
Cummings, who argues for guided education, notices this confusing duality:
Citizenship training from an early age need not be a "brave new world" of mindnumbing behavioral engineering. Unlike ants, humans require culture and therefore
socialization. There is no such thing as a natural person, unwrapped by
socialization. 33
31
32
33
Cummings 277.
Cummings 277.
Cummings 278.
47
Callenbach's attitude to education in Ecotopia is even more interesting, given a later
quote, from the above-mentioned essay on sustainable society, where he says:
Educators need to instruct students from elementary school through university in
the principles of ecology. It is just as important for all of us to grasp an ecological
vocabulary and methods of analysis as it is for us to understand arithmetic. Teachers
must advance beyond the "charismatic megafauna" stage and help their students to
grasp the systemic lessons of ecology.34
Does he, with time, like Cummings, realize that "there is no such thing as a natural person" and
see the need for an early exposure to the good ecological practices? Perhaps Callenbach feels
that the Ecotopian family system, which virtually abolishes the nuclear family in favor of larger
groups, provides its children with enough exposure to the ecological thinking, and thus does not
see the need for stricter education guidelines.
Leaving aside Callenbach's system of education, the rest of his government mixes stricter
controlling traits with those of the free market. There is no individual tax, apart from land tax,
which seems to be encouraging people to live in smaller and denser communities. The main tax
income of the state comes from corporation tax, which is based on both net and gross income.
Collecting taxes is decentralized and they tend to be used for common benefit of all citizens. 35 In
spite of the independence of their state, which Ecotopians animatedly profess, there is a
somewhat leftist life time "guarantee of minimal levels of food, housing, and medical care,"
provided by the government, which is available to all, and used by some, for example artists,
who want to fully concentrate on their work. 36
Similarly to Bellamy's classless society, there is no capitalist class or super-rich class.
There is capitalism on the level of enterprises, which compete with each other and seek to
increase sales and profit despite being heavily ecologically regulated. On the personal level,
however, it is clear that Ecotopians value relationships and nature over goods and ownership,
exactly in line with the rules Callenbach proposed for all mankind in his non-fiction workP
Marissa especially teaches Weston about the value of openness and emotionality, which
seems to be an important quality to all Ecotopians. He writes: "If I lapse into inattention or mere
American businesslikeness, she gets furious and accuses me of being detached and inhuman."38
Things in Ecotopia are done with emotion, both in life and at work. The Ecotopian care for
nature is not only consistent with their respect for it, but also with their emotional attachment to
Callenbach, Rules 27.
Callenbach, Ecotopia 116-117.
36 Callenbach, Ecotopia 120.
37 Callenbach, Ecotopia 118. See Callenbach, Rules above.
38 Callenbach, Ecotopia 75.
34
35
48
it It almost seems like a religion. Marissa and others speak to the trees and apologize before
marking them for felling; Weston even witnesses an Ecotopian hugging a tree as a brother. 39
The idea of arms opened to embrace and be embraced by nature is in line with the general
acceptance and lack of discrimination in Ecotopia. With the exception of a certain problem of
gender representation and racial segregation that will be discussed shortly, the issues discussed
in the previous chapters - monetary and political equality as a part of a different mind-set are
incorporated into Callenbach's utopia.
4.4 Women in Ecotopia
In spite of the general acceptance of Callenbach's novel as an environmentalist handbook,
there are those who do not agree with his presentation of an ideal society as far as his
presentation of gender, age, race and even the presence of private enterprise are concerned. 40
He is the first out ofthe discussed authors who attempts to integrate a feminist viewpoint
to his utopia on a larger scale. While Bellamy certainly made an effort to provide the women in
his utopia with a space of their own, it was precisely that - men made space for women in their
hierarchy, and this space was only granted under certain, earlier discussed, conditions. In a
similar way, London allowed his female characters to work beside the revolutionary comrades,
but preserved a clear gender dichotomy.
As for Callenbach's intentions concerning gender, all seems well at first glance. His way of
making Ecotopian politics very personal, decentralized and informal, parallels the feminist
slogan "the personal is political" discussed in the already mentioned book by Gal and Kligman. 41
He truly makes politics personal in the discussions of the good for the environment as well as
the women. Since everyday life and politics are linked much more closely in Ecotopia, the
distinction between the public and the private fields seems to be disappearing. Mathisen notes
the lack of ceremony:
Reducing the formality of politics and its character as a separate activity, kept apart
from everyday life and personal matters, may be regarded as a strategy for making
politics more responsive to yearnings for a new-green er-way of being in the world.
It could also make it easier to translate general ecopolitical principles into everyday
practice at home and in the neighbourhoods. 42
Throughout the novel, men and women are officially given equal political and social
power. Early on Weston notes down an observation on the topic:
Callenbach, Ecotopia 74.
Cummings 276.
41 Susan Gal and Gail Kligman, The Politics of Gender after Socialism (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2000) 37-62.
42 Mathisen 1.
49
39
40
Women in Ecotopia have totally escaped the dependent roles they still tend to play
with us. Not that they domineer over men-but they exercise power in work and in
relationships just as men do. Above all, they don't have to manipulate men: the
Survivalist party, and social developments generally, have arranged the society so
that women's objective situation is equal to men's. Thus people can be just people,
without our symbolic loading on sex roles. 43
It all seems logical. If one is to abandon pre-established notions of a consumerist society and
aggressive individuality, why not also dissolve the differences between the genders and get rid
of this power struggle as well all other inequalities. In "Recent Feminist Utopias: World Building
and Strategies for Social Change," Peter Fitting discusses this general tendency of abandoning
the traditional hierarchy. In his study of works, which struggle to imagine new behavioral
patterns, he includes Callenbach's work, as an example of a male writer "with feminist
overtones:"
Insofar as they emphasized the changed lives and experiences of their characters
and because they described alternate societies that would make such new patterns
of behavior and interpersonal relations possible, these works provided the reader
with an experience, however limited, of what a better world, beyond sexual
hierarchy and domination, might look and feellike. 44
KiIlingsworth and Palmer observe very much along the same lines that the mental and
social processes in Ecotopia are more important than the detailed social and political blueprint
the reader is presented with. Consequently, they do not have to view the free sex arrangement in
some of the groups or the ritual of war games for men as a necessary prerequisite for the
functioning of an environmentalist society. They suggest that
if we allow the novel the ordinary conventions of psychological realism, we may
simply look upon these actions as a dramatic means for showing the mental
conversion of WiIliam Weston, as a rite of passage away from his competitive,
"scarce resource" mentality of consumerism in everything from clothes to work to
women. 45
If this is true, however, it becomes necessary to deal with the "dramatic actions" in greater
detail, which presents a problem. Naomi Jacobs notes a discrepancy between Callenbach's
conscious intent and his less guarded story line, saying, "Callenbach seems to have had
Callenbach, Ecotopia 42.
Peter Fitting, "Recent Feminist Utopias: World Building and Strategies for Social Change," Mindscapes: The
Geographies ofImagined Worlds, eds. George E. Slusser and Eric S. Rabkin (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois UP, 1989)
155-156.
45 KilIingsworth and Palmer 234.
50
43
44
considerably less difficulty in thinking an alternative future than in imagining it [author's
emphasis]."46 She goes on to argue that while Callenbach creates a space based on the feminist,
environmental and decentralizing program, his own cultural background seeps through the
interaction of his characters. Women are presented as equal and active participants in all areas
of life, including or perhaps especially in politics, given that the Survivalist party, which was
behind the secession, was formed mostly by women. However, if Weston's official
communication with Ecotopians is to be considered, he mostly deals with men - guards, soldiers,
politicians, teachers, and people in the street. The majority of his encounters with women are
sexual in nature or conform to gender stereotypes, as in the case of the cook in a cafe, whose
work is being criticized by a (male) customer. Even when Weston eventually meets the female
president, he first comments on her looks in a way, which Jacobs describes as "perpetuating the
masculinist stereotype that a politically powerful woman will not also be sexually powerful."47
Probably the most disturbing and the most obvious glitch in the proposed gender equality
are the war games, presented as a way to channel "the physical competitiveness that seemed to
be inherent in man's biological programming."48 War games are described as a social experiment
of a single generation that is to be reviewed and possibly discontinued. However, set as it is, men
are portrayed as the naturally physically competitive gender, while women are left to compete
over who the father of their children will be. 49 And so it must be concluded that Callenbach's
presentation of the gender equality, while meant well, does not end well. Furthermore, there is
Callenbach's disconcerting treatment ofthe racial issue to be discussed.
4.5 The Question of Race
It is to be said that unlike Bellamy and London, Callenbach attempts to deal with the
subject of racial differences. However, he does not discuss a way of integrating the various
American races into one common Ecotopian nation. Instead he describes their willing
segregation and isolation from the rest of the population. In "Utopia and the Problem of Race:
Accounting for the Remainder in the Imagination of the 1970s Utopian Subject," Edward K. Chan
writes:
Instead of trying to incorporate racial difference into its utopian vision, Ecotopia
follows a model of separatism by imagining that OakIand (and eventually Chinatown
46 Naomi Jacobs, "Failures of the Imagination in Ecotopia," Extrapolation 38.4 (1997): 319.
47 Jacobs 321.
48 CaIlenbach, Ecotopia 94-95.
49 CaIlenbach, Ecotopia 96.
51
and other areas devoted to ethnic communities: Latinos, Japanese, Jewish, Native
American) would be a separate state within Ecotopia. 50
There are "a few black people" who decided to stay within the white community and are
fully integrated. However, the majority of the ethnic community in Ecotopia has chosen to
separate themselves from the rest and pursue their own independence. 51 In his commentary,
Weston speaks of an increasingly nationalist and separatist black population after the
independence:
Having been strangled by the white suburbs earlier, the black population now
wanted to control their own territory. After a long and bitter political struggle, the
black areas [...] were officially designated as city-states within Ecotopia.52
These states have their own industries, governments, police force and legal system and are
virtually independent, except for a common foreign policy with the rest of Ecotopia. Even this
level of self-sufficiency, however, is not deemed satisfactory to some of the black population and
there are plans for relocation and complete independence. 53
Apart from the separation, there is an issue of Callenbach's portrayal of the black
community as more consumerist than the rest of Ecotopia:
Life within the black territories [ ...] has more hold-overs from pre-Independence
days than Ecotopia as a whole. In fact a few private cars are still mysteriously
tolerated, and people cling to certain symbols of the old ways: there is a brisk trade
in high-quality Scotch whisky and other imported luxury goods which are hard to
find in Ecotopia elsewhere. 54
Weston goes on to describe that these areas have a higher income and longer working hours,
considered to be a consequence of "the lag in black consumption before Independence."55 He
goes as far as to say that since most of the convicted criminals in Ecotopia were black, these
areas had to undergo a strict prison reform. Drugs were legalized and penalties for violent
crimes were raised. 56
An interesting contradictory detail to note here would, however, be that while white
Ecotopians practice their war games with spears, the black population considers this too savage
and uses heavy sticks.57 Is Callenbach trying to suggest, along the lines of Bellamy and London,
Edward K Chan, "Utopia and the Problem of Race: Accounting for the Remainder in the Imagination of the 19705
Utopian Subject," Utopian Studies 17.3 (2006): 1.
51 CalIenbach, Ecotopia 126.
52 CalIenbach, Ecotopia 125-126.
53 CalIenbach, Ecotopia 126.
54 CalIenbach, Ecotopia 126.
55 CalIenbach, Ecotopia 126.
56 CalIenbach, Ecotopia 127.
57 CalIenbach, Ecotopia 128.
50
52
that criminality and general misbehavior is caused by the environment and that at heart the
black population is less prone to violence? Weston observes that the black areas export various
kinds of artists to Ecotopia and the rest of the world and that their enterprises are more
naturally collective than those in the white areas. 58 Most of what Callenbach suggests seems to
be in line with the idea of genetic and racial tendencies, rather than the influence of the
environment. In a way, his treatment of race is very similar to his subconscious keeping to the
sexual stereotypes when gender is concerned.
Weston concludes his report by saying that "this admission that the races cannot live in
harmony is surely one of the most disheartening developments in all of Ecotopia, and it clouds
the future of our nation as well."59 In a similar manner, it speaks for Callenbach's own disbelief in
a peaceful co-habitation of different races, which is quite curious given his attitudes to
environmentalism and even his conscious views on feminism.
4.6 Callenbach's Message
In his utopian novel Callenbach deals almost exclusively with the utopian society, only
mentioning Weston's America in passing, most frequently in comparison to the novel traits of
the Ecotopian setting. Perhaps he felt that the consumerist culture was not something he needed
to describe or explain to his intended readership. It was indeed his intention to create "a nagging
challenge to the underlying national philosophy of America: evercontinuing progress, the fruits
of industrialization for all, a rising Gross National Product" as Weston puts it 50
Callenbach's main premise in his environmentalist articles as well as in his utopian fiction
is that biological survival is more important than economic growth. In the above-mentioned
article in Cities and the Environment: New Approaches for Eco-Societies, he suggests that it takes a
major event for people to change their mindsets faster than gradually, taking several
generations. 61 Once again, he calls forth the writers, world leaders, teachers and various
networks to apply pressure on the government and responsible institutions.
In an interview for Seattle Weekly, given thirty years after the publication of Ecotopia,
Callenbach predicts the re-assertion of regionalism, following the collapse of globalizing
tendencies. He calls for the redefinition of large corporations and an electoral reform. Again, the
role the corporate world plays in conserving the capitalist status quo is being stressed, along
with the need for raising the level of general awareness of the American people. Callenbach's
Callenbach, Ecotopia 127.
Callenbach, Ecotopia 129.
60 Callenbach, Ecotopia 5.
6! Call en bach, Rules 23. He gives an example of the promotion of the capitalist ideals by public relations and
advertisement companies after the Second World War to illustrate this point.
53
58
59
work is a manifestation of his belief in the need for extended ecological and common sense
education. At the time of the interview, he was working on an article informing the American
people of what is going on around them and encouraging them to "take responsibility into their
own hands again." 62
This attitude is already clearly apparent in Ecotopia. The world Callenbach creates is a
fictional example of a society, which has adopted the ecological rules he proposes, including
further "basic attitude changes." At the end of the already mentioned political proposal, he
clarifies:
Of course, new attitudes by themselves will not create an eco-society. In the
language of logic, we must say that they are "necessary but not sufficient." The
transition to an eco-society will also require a wholesale reinvention of technology, a
rebuilding of substantial parts of car-dependent cities (especially in America), and
fundamental reforms of agriculture, forestry, and fisheries. But without basic
attitude changes, none of these other transformations can happen. 63
These basic attitude changes, flowing out of a better awareness of one's surroundings, are vital
for people to start living in harmony with nature and with each other. This is clearly visible in
the way Callenbach portrays his characters. It is through their eyes that the critique of the
consumerist society is most evident, more easily than through scientific data. It goes beyond
data and graphs, it becomes life. Leaving aside the gender and racial issues of the novel for the
moment, Ecotopia has gained a canonical status. While Callenbach's vision may be at times
deemed too extreme or not practicable to the last detail in reality, given the new technological
and political developments mankind faces each day, it is nevertheless fair to say, together with
KiIlingsworth and Palmer, that "the novel charts a path for narrative explorations of social
ecology, whose goals would be to create, maintain, and extend the institutions of an
environmentalist culture."64 As the founder of ecotopian literature, Callenbach encourages his
readers to go and find their own path and contribute to the environmental cause in their own
way.
62 Geov Parrish, "The Man Who Invented Ecotopia," Seattle WeeklY Mar. 23 2005 Apr. 30 2009
<http:jjwww.seattleweekly.comj2005-03-23jnewsjthe-man-who-invented-ecotopia>.
63 Callenbach, Rules 19.
64 Killingsworth and Palmer 230.
54
5. MARGE PIERCY: EVERYBODY MATTERS
Marge's Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time has been classified, much in the same way as
London's Iron Heel, by various critics both as utopia and dystopia, as well as "speculative fiction"
and "relative fiction with fantastic episodes."! For the purposes of this thesis, the piece will be
treated as a utopian narrative, in line with the qualities of utopia discussed in the introduction.
Piercy most definitely believes in a future that surpasses the present. Whether this future will
have a utopian or a dystopian character depends on the people living today - their ethical, moral
and political choices. In her novel, Piercy shows what life on Earth can look like if mankind
chooses to live in harmony with nature and with each other, as well as a glimpse of the appalling
alternative.
In Becoming and Bonding: Contemporary Feminism and Popular Fiction by American
Women, Katherine B. Payant points to evidence of socialist and feminist traditions, going back to
the nineteenth century, present in Piercy's writing. She observes:
This tradition questions institutions of capitalist society, especially as they impinge
on women, and advocates sweeping social and political change, although it differs in
the various "aspects of the private sphere - sexuality, reproduction and
motherhood"- that should be changed. This fiction [ ...] directly advocates radical
solutions to the problems of women and men. 2
Payant notes that as a result of Piercy's work's promotion of radical social and political
changes in society, she has been labeled "polemical and propagandistic."3 Whatever her label,
Piercy has succeeded in introducing these radical feminist and ecological ideals to a broad
public, and has done so particularly well by interlinking these with the science fiction genre. As
has been discussed earlier in connection with Callenbach's Ecotopia, and as can be seen even in
more recent fiction, for example is Octavia Butler's writing, this strategy proves to be very
successful in exposing readers of fiction to radical political ideas.
Marge Piercy is a prolific writer. She has written many novels and is famous as well for
her poetry, which also reflects her political beliefs. She strongly believes that women's position
in society must change alongside other inequalities that need to be redeemed. Having been
involved in the New Left in the late sixties and seventies, she came to the conclusion that "radical
men were as traditional in their attitudes toward women as bourgeois businessmen."3 She
therefore proceeded to search for feminist answers to capitalist problems. Later on she
Kerstin W. Shands, The Repair of the World: The Novels of Marge Piercy (Westport, eT: Greenwood Press, 1994) 65.
Katherine B. Payant, Becoming and Bonding: Contemporary Feminism and Popular Fiction by American Women
Writers (Westport, eT: Greenwood Press, 1993) 92.
3 Payant 91-93.
55
1
2
commented on the ideological content of Woman on the Edge of Time saying "the ideas are the
ideas basically of the women's movement."4
Piercy was not the only feminist writer disillusioned with the left movement at the time.
The turn to literary utopian fiction was noted as a general trend in feminist writing of the
nineteen seventies for example by Maria Lauret in Liberating Literature: Feminist Fiction in
America:
Marge Piercy's Utopian/realist novel Woman on the Edge of Time is in many ways a
pivotal text of the 1970s and marks the transition from predominantly realist to
predominantly fantasy (or historicist) modes of representati on in feminist fiction. s
In "Shaping Our New Jerusalems" Cora Kaplan goes as far as to suggest that the shift from
feminist realism to fantastic and utopian writing was a consequence of a universal decline in the
liberal, black and feminist movement at that time:
The anti-realism of these texts ... masks a shared despair about and disillusionment
with the possibilities of political change as a product of mass social and political
movements, even as they articulate an inventive optimism about the possibilities of
a revolutionized future. 6
While these texts and Woman on the Edge of Time specifically reveal the problematic
status of the no-longer unified feminist movement, placed in direct opposition to the assault of
the New Right, rising in America, they are not a sign of defeatism and surrender, but an answer
to the call for a new and creative way of thinking and living. The formation of a new concept of
social order, created with a free and liberated imagination, is as valuable and often more
accessible than political statements. As such, it has the potential to reach a much wider audience.
Piercy proposes the merits of such cultural work:
I write to change consciousness, to reach those people who don't agree already.
Cultural work is one of the most effective ways of reaching people. If you don't
support alternate ways of imagining things, people aren't going to be able to imagine
a better world.?
Piercy, like Bellamy and London, works extensively to guide her readers to imagine the
possibility of a better world, and, what is more, to make them feel a burning desire to do so. She
portrays the problems and inequalities of the present in the realistic parts of her novel to show
and justify the need for an alternative. The exposition of such an alternative is then presented in
Marge Piercy, Parti-Colored Blocks for a Quilt (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1982) 100, quoted in Shands
65.
5 Maria Lauret, Liberating Literature: Feminist Fiction in America (New York: Routledge, 1994) 166.
6 (ora Kaplan "Shaping Our New Jerusalems," New Statesman 26 April 1985: 26, quoted in Lauret 167.
7 Marge Piercy, flyleaf to Fly Away Home, quoted in Lauret 163.
56
4
the other portion of her book as a portrayal of a fictional harmonious society in the future. In
Narrating Utopia: Ideology, Gender, Form in Utopian Literature, Chris Ferns suggests the
importance of such a connection:
Piercy's vivid representation of the glaring abuses present in her own society makes
the need for alternatives seem that much more pressing, and in consequence her
utopian imaginings appear less arbitrary than is often the case. 8
Reading about the novel's nineteen seventies' protagonist, Connie Ramos, and considering
the way she was treated by her parents, her family, even her lovers; being faced with her
intolerable situation as a poor woman of color, fighting the windmills of chauvinism, racism and
simple narrow-mindedness, makes it easier to accept Piercy's political and social proposals. The
in-depth character depiction of an individual removed from the mainstream society, a mental
patient, an outcast, so different from the stereotypical white male protagonists of the earlier
utopias, signals a move towards a dialogue with the reader, rather than a straightforward and
unquestioning depiction of a perfect ideal.
As in Callenbach's Ecotopia, the character of a utopian guide is multiplied and the
experience of a new world is dispersed among dialogues and actions of various individuals, its
synthesis essentially left up to the reader. While the dichotomy of a present-day traveler and her
perception versus that of the future guides is preserved, much in the spirit of utopian
convention, the initial contact is reversed - Luciente comes from the future to speak to Connie,
who is a "catcher" - a receptive person, who can sense and receive the presence of other beings
across time and space. This underlines the importance of the individual and the present for the
future utopian existence, further stressing the dialogue between the present and the mUltiple
possible futures. Unlike the three previously discussed utopias, the future is not given here, it is
not already happening from the point of view of the reader or the traveler.
Moreover, Piercy has also managed to avoid a large segment of the authoritarianism so often
criticized in the earlier utopias. As will be shown, her world is one of extreme individualism and
collective decisions, harmony with nature and advanced technology, acute emotions and
personal sacrifice.
5.1 Woman on the Edge o/Time: Life in Mattapoisett
When Connie first travels to the future utopian society of Mattapoisett in the year 2137,
she is expecting tall skyscrapers and rocket ships. Instead, she is faced with a rural village
environment, small buildings or bricks and stone, cows, fishponds, greenhouses, solar energy
8
Chris Ferns, Narrating Utopia: Ideology, Gender, Form in Utopian Literature (Liverpool: Liverpool UP, 1999) 209.
57
and rainwater holdings 9 • Her first impression is not a favorable one, as she asks herself: "How
different was it really from rural Mexico with its dusty villages rubbing their behinds into the
dust?"lO
Ferns also points to the Arcadian features of Women on the Edge of Time:
We learn that mining is performed entirely by machines, and we are given a brief
glimpse of a fully automated pillow factory, but in general, as in News from Nowhere,
the narrative emphasis is less on innovation than on restoration, on the need to
repair the damage done to the environment by urban industrialism. Connie's
puzzled comment, 'Forward, into the past?' (p.70) captures perfectly the ambiguous
temporal direction which Piercy's utopia shares with that of Morris. l l
The most notable differences between Connie's present and Luciente's future society are indeed
the vast ecological and feminist achievements. The ecological behavior adopted by the people in
Mattapoisett is similar to those Callenbach presents his readers with. They see themselves as
partners of nature, not its masters. Compared to Connie's "fat, wasteful, thing-filed times,"12 the
utopians reuse everything, nothing is thrown away, and people feel responsible for the
environment as a whole, not just their village or region. People do not buy or sell anything; there
is a clear absence of any profit production. 13 While luxuries do exist, they are shared by
everyone or specially produced to be used only once and then composted. 14
The individual regions try to be what they call "ownfed" - self-sufficient in the production
of proteins. While they still eat meat on holidays, they prefer plant proteins.1 5 In spite of the
generally rural way of living, the utopians do use technology to extend their memories by
wearing personal computers - "kenners" - around their wrists and to automate certain types of
production, essentially all repetitive or dangerous work, while manuallabor being preferred for
the rest. 16
As for their behavior, similarly to Ecotopia, people in Mattapoisett are more connected
with their bodies and freely display their emotions:
Touching and caressing, hugging and fingering, they handled each other constantly.
In a way it reminded her again of her childhood, when every emotion seemed to find
Marge Piercy, Woman on the Edge o/Time (London: The Women's Press Ltd, 1986) 68-70.
Piercy, Woman 73.
11 Ferns, 206.
12 Piercy, Woman 69.
13 Piercy, Woman 64.
14 Piercy, Woman 175.
15 Piercy, Woman 100.
16 Piercy, Woman 128-130.
58
9
10
a physical outlet, when both love and punishment had to be expressed directly on
her skin.17
They have also adopted a leisurely attitude to things, or as Connie puts it a "maiiana attitude,"18
which is comparable to that of Ecotopians. A slower work pace and general enjoyment of life is,
according to Jackrabbit, a consequence of the utopians' abandonment of the management and
financial structures of the past:
Grasp, after we dumped the jobs telling people what to do, counting money and
moving it about, making people do what they don't want or bashing them for doing
what they want, we have lot of people to work. Kids work, old folks work, women
and men work. We put a lot of work into feeding everybody without destroying the
soil, keeping up its health and fertility. With most everybody at it part time, nobody
breaks their back and grubs dawn to dust like old-time farmers. 19
Piercy's utopians enjoy work. In Looking Backward lowering its prescribed number of
working hours compensated for the lack of satisfaction inherent to certain types of employment.
In Mattapoisetts, similarly to Ecotopia, people merge work and play, all working considerably
less as a result of better management. Moreover, the vast range of options given to them in
organizing the work schedule around their other activities ensures long-term satisfaction.
The system of education is also comparable to that of Ecotopia: children are taught outside
of school in the field, alongside adults. Jackrabbit explains this to Connie:
Who wants to grow up with a head full offacts in boxes? We never leave school and
go to work. We're always working, always studying. We think, what person thinks
person knows has to be tried out all the time. 20
Thus from the very start, children are incorporated into the adult world, making the transition
between school and work and work and play almost absent. This absence of social authority and
official power is reflected throughout Piercy's utopian structure. This is clear from the utopians'
general refusal to differentiate between each other or to devote themselves entirely to one
specific type of work. Everyone must cook, defend the borders, make political choices and work
in the field, in addition to what could be called specializing in their line of work. No one and no
task is deemed more important than anyone or anything else,21 a clear statement of the
underlying equality.
Piercy, Woman
Piercy, Woman
19 Piercy, Woman
20 Piercy, Woman
21 Piercy, Woman
17
18
76.
128.
128-129.
131.
267.
59
In a way similar to Callenbach's utopia, political and social life is intertwined more closely
than in Connie's or today's contemporary society. Everyone has the right to take part in every
decision, because they affect everyone. If a person chooses not to participate on any level, it is
seen as an emotional and personal problem. 22 All the past positions of power - chairmen, town
leadership, judges and even teachers, are chosen by lot and rotated regularly. There is no final
authority. Everything is a discussion and an agreement is to be reached among all, which often
leads to strenuously long discussions, openly described by Piercy and made even more
exhausting by the level of emotionality the utopians freely express. 23
Like in Ecotopia, crime is diminished, generally due to people's attitude. If someone steals
something, they are not punished but given presents, because stealing is considered a sign of
lacking. There is no rape. Sexual relations are freed from all social constraints, as well as
separated from the process of childbearing. Magdalena explains: "We don't find coupling bad
unless it involves pain or is not invited."24 Assaults and murder still exist, perhaps
understandably; given the level of emotion the utopians express every day. The offending party
is either healed, if they claim the act unintentional, or sentenced. The sentence is, unlike in
Ecotopia, not imprisonment. It can be for example exile, remote labor, sheep herding, ship life or
space service. Again, having abandoned the institution of a constant judge to decide, the victim,
the offender and a judge assigned by lot decide the sentence together. While the first sentence is
perhaps quite lenient, second time offenders are executed. The utopians choose not to live
around people who live lives of violence and they do not want to keep each other in check. 25
While Piercy clearly opposes the violence, she, similarly to Callenbach, finds she cannot
abandon the concept altogether. There is a distinct shift in the notion of human nature between
the first two discussed works and these later ones. Bellamy believed in an overall goodness of
human nature and attributed the evils of human behavior to socio-economic conditions. London,
less clear on the matter, argued both for general selfishness of mankind and the influence of the
environment on human value systems. Callenbach's introduction of war-games as an outlet for
(male) competitiveness and Piercy's inclusion of executions into her utopian world, however,
point to a different understanding of the idea. They both clearly see human nature as more
complex, something that resists the simplification of black and white or good and bad. In line
with their perception of the ideal being constantly developed they allow for a gray area in their
depiction of the inherent intentions of mankind.
Piercy, Woman
Piercy, Woman
24 Piercy, Woman
25 Piercy, Woman
22
23
277.
150-152.
139.
209.
60
As long as there is a choice to be made and an alternative future to be had, the quest for
power, which is, according to Piercy, inherently a violent one, cannot stop. When Connie asks
Luciente's advice on murder, the latter argues: "Power is violence. When did it get destroyed
peacefully? We all fight when we're back to the wall - or to tear down a wall."26 Therefore
Piercy's utopians are still at war and share their defense duties. The other side, mostly robots
and cybernauts have control of the moon, space platforms and Antarctica; the war consisting
mainly of raids and defense of the disputed areas, bringing death and pain in its wake, as well as
a sense ofpurposeP
Piercy presents the reader with a very clear and detailed description of the utopian
society, including the clothes, food, art and everyday discussions. Ferns argues that she is aiming
to avoid idealized abstraction in her portrayal of a utopian alternative. 28 Indeed, Piercy does not
avoid including negative or problematic experiences in her utopia. The plotline includes a
painful resolving of Luciente's jealous conflict with Bolivar, another of Jackrabbit's lovers, as a
result of their free sexual arrangement; her immense grief after Jackrabbit's death during
defense, which is not resolved by the rituals the utopians have to ease the pain of the bereaved,
or the often stressful and emotional arguments between the advocates of advanced human
genetic manipulation, the Shapers, and those who wish to let nature do most of the work, the
Mixers. Ferns observes:
More than most utopias, Piercy's is one where change still appears to be taking
place, and as a result, for all the childlike characteristics which the utopians exhibit,
the element of regressive fantasy is far less apparent. There is freedom, but not
freedom from responsibility; security, but only as a result of unceasing struggle. 29
Thus the readers are not presented with an abridged version of an ideal society that one would
dream to live in, but with the portrayal of a living and breathing community. They are not invited
to be complacent but prompted to act. This is also reflected in Connie's development throughout
the novel from a victim of her society to a person with a mission, a theme that will be discussed
further.
5.2 Gender(less) Power
Probably the most extreme of Piercy's proposals is the complete reformation of the
institution of gender relations, motherhood and the creation of the brooder. Women no longer
bear children, who are bred artificially in the brooder, mixing various genes throughout the
26
27
28
29
Piercy, Woman 370.
Piercy, Woman 267.
Ferns 207.
Ferns 208.
61
popUlation. Each child has three co-mothers, both men and women, who breastfeed and mother
the child (though live apart from them) until they choose to go through naming - essentially a
ritual of self-definition.3o By breaking the bond between genes and culture, the utopians are
aiming to do away with the old habits of dependence and help parents realize that their children
are equal members of the society.3l
Piercy takes gender and race equality a step further than Callenbach by virtually annulling
the differences inherent in the categories. Women alone have neither the burden nor the
privilege of motherhood and mothering, there is no longer any difference in what they can do or
achieve. As for racial separation, so painfully evident in Ecotopia, in Woman on the Edge of Time,
while the utopians keep various cultures alive by keeping to their traditional heritage, culture
itself is no longer in any way connected to the genetic makeup of its people.
Throughout her utopian experience in Mattapoisett, Connie struggles hard to grasp the
concept of freedom, growing out of the absence of power and difference. After having to face the
reality of all children being everybody's and living apart from their parents, she sees a man
breastfeeding and gets angry:
These women thought they had won, but they had abandoned to men the last refuge
of women. What was special about being a woman here? They had given it all up,
they had let men steal from them the last remnants of ancient power, those sealed in
blood and in milk,32
She comes to learn the balance, which comes through the surrendering of specific male and
female powers. Luciente explains to her, that it was all part of the women's long revolution,
essentially giving up power so that there is no more power to be had for anyone: "As long as we
were biologically enchained, we'd never be equal."33 As Angelika Bammer notes in Partial
Visions: Feminism and Utopianism in the 1970s, Piercy does not take the path of replacing the
male dominance with female. She tries to do away with the category of gender completely:
"Piercy does not substitute a female-centered perspective: she attempts to eliminate gender
altogether:'34
The purposeful erasing of gender differences in Piercy's work is also clear from the
transformed language of the future community. Third person possessive pronouns have been
replaced by "per," "mother" and "father" by "corns" or "co-mothers," the words for friendship
and partnerships have been revised. The change in language is closely linked to the already
Piercy, Woman 104.
Piercy, Woman 116.
32 Piercy, Woman 134.
33 Piercy, Woman 105.
34 Angelika Bammer, Partial Visions: Feminism and Utopianism in the 1970s (New York: Routledge, 1991) 103.
62
30
31
discussed change in social structure. Piercy is stressing the necessity for an all-encompassing
structural change, not just partial solutions. Bammer observes that "Piercy acknowledges the
structural and conceptual links among language, institutions, and consciousness" but also that
"The language issue merely highlights the complex power dynamics of this fictive relationship
between [Connie] and US".35 The shift in gender perception is also clear from Connie's confusion
of the gender of her utopian guide. When she first encounters Luciente, she thinks Luciente is
male. Her exact thoughts are that he lacks "the macho presence of men in her own family", and
has neither Claud's "massive strength", nor Eddie's "edgy combativeness."36 This again shows
the power of stereotypical thinking, which Piercy's utopians seem to have overcome.
With the absence of the male/female power and task dichotomy in the future society, men
and women can move closer together and become to some degree more similar to each other.
Unlike the case of London's characters, however, this does not lead to an abandonment of female
sexuality and pleasure or androgynous characteristics. It leads to a more balanced and satisfied
community. Shands remarks:
Piercy's scenario critiques the slotting of women into either tainted bodily flesh or
pure Madonna-like spirituality, both of which negate female sexuality. In
Mattapoisett, this dichotomy has been transcended. Motherhood, a source of joy and
power, is everyone's prerogative.37
Women's bodies are no longer alienated from their soul and as such are not devaluated, as was
the trend in Connie's time. According to Shands, this devaluation had very close connection to
the exploiting attitude towards nature. Therefore Piercy's answer - a mix of ecological and
feminist ideals - is a logical step towards the solution of both the problem of oppression and
power struggle.
5.3 "Luciente's War"
Woman on the Edge o/Time is a statement of belief in an individual's ability to change the
world. Unlike the coIlectivist and evolutionary change that could be seen in BeIlamy's Looking
Backward or London's inevitable, albeit violently struggled for, future, Piercy's road toward the
utopian society and the future of the world is not a given. While Ecotopia came to be through
straightforward political actions, the community in Mattapoisett is still fighting for its existence.
The chances for a drastic alteration of reality, inherent in the concept of time travel as it is
Bammer 103.
Piercy, Woman 36.
37 Shands 74.
35
36
63
introduced by Piercy, make the very existence of a specific future a fragile notion. As Luciente
explains to Connie:
Much I don't comprehend that led to us. But not inevitably, grasp? Those of your time
who fought hard for change, often they had myths that a revolution was inevitable.
But nothing is! All things interlock. We are only one possible future. 38
Piercy does not see future developments as set in stone but presents us with a dialogue
between possible futures. Consequently, there is yet another dichotomy present in Piercy's
narrative. Not only is the reader presented with the opposition of Connie's and Luciente's times
but also Luciente's future and an alternative reality. This alternative future, which Connie
throws herself into after having a brain implant inserted, is technocratic, power-hungry and
sexist. Crafted women are kept for men's enjoyment; people eat artificial food and never see the
outside world. Only the rich live on the surface and profit from the technological advancements
by living longer, the poor are their walking organ banks. Everyone is monitored at all time and
mind control, essentially a consequence of the brain implant program Connie is made a part of, is
a standard. 39 People are merging with the machines and have already become a population of
androids, robots, cybernauts and partially automated humans. 4o
When Connie comes back to her own reality, she decides to enlist in Luciente's war.41 It is
clear to her that she must do everything in her power to help usher in the utopian future. Thus
again, Piercy introduces a dialogue into her utopia, rather than using a static description of the
unquestionable future developments, in a way that Bellamy, London and even Callenbach did.
On the other hand, the process of making history and the transformation itself is not very clear
from Piercy's novel, apart from her focus on individual responsibility. Luciente explains to
Connie that hers is a "crux-time" where alternate universes coexist,42 Barbarossa speaks of her
time as the time when too few have too much power and alternate futures are equally possible
and Bee says even more explicitly:
You may fail us. [...] You individually may fail to understand us or to struggle in your
own life and time. You of your time may fail to struggle together. [ ...] We must fight
to come to exist, to remain in existence, to be the future that happens. That's why we
reached YOU. 43
While they all convey the feeling of great importance to Connie, they are not specific in what it is
she should do. Similarly to Bellamy, Piercy is reluctant to give a concrete outline of the changes
Piercy,
Piercy,
40 Piercy,
41 Piercy,
42 Piercy,
43 Piercy,
38
39
Woman
Woman
Woman
Woman
Woman
Woman
177.
290-299.
267.
301.
177.
187-198.
64
that need to happen for a utopian society to come forth. However, unlike him, she believes in the
influence of an individual life and in the power of the spoken and written word to change the
circumstances of that life. Her revolution is one of individual effort, not powerful syndicates.
Sojourn er declares: "The powerful don't make revolutions" and Otter goes on to stress the merit
of individual effort:
It's the people who worked out the labor-and-land intensive farming we do. It's all
the people who changed how people bought food, raised children, went to school!
Who made new unions, withheld rent, refused to go to wars, wrote and educated
and made speeches. 44
Piercy's utopia, much like London's has been set up through a revolution. 45 The crucial
change was genetics and brain control, which Luciente called "birth-to-death surveillance."46
However, that is all the information provided. Similarly, Connie is left wondering what it is she
should do to help bring the right future about. It is clear that individual actions matter but what
they should be is very vague. Bee tells Connie: "There is always a thing you can deny an
oppressor, if only your allegiance. Your belief. Your co-opting."47 In the end, Connie commits
murder and virtually sacrifices the rest of her life to what she sees as her purpose - ending the
brain implant program - and the reader is left to wonder if she has chosen the correct path.
5.4 The Challenge
Callenbach and Piercy wrote at a time of renewal of the belief in human potential to form a
community and the nobility of mankind, but also a renewal of the utopian endeavor. Tom
Moylan notes the appearance of a new type of utopia at this time, one that he labels "critical
utopia":
The new novels negated the negation of utopia by the forces of twentieth century
history: the subversive imaging of utopian society and the radical negativity of
dystopian perception is preserved; while the systematizing boredom of the
traditional utopia and the cooptation of utopia by modern structures is destroyed. 48
It would indeed seem, as Bammer points out, that once again in contrast to the more traditional
utopias of the nineteenth century, Woman on the Edge of Time places the process of establishing
a utopian community above the depiction of its ultimate goal. 49 It is, however, not a description
Piercy, Woman 198.
Piercy, Woman 198.
46 Piercy, Woman 223.
47 Piercy, Woman 328.
48 Tom Moylan, Demand the Impossible: Science Fiction and the Utopian Imagination (New York: Methuen, 1986) 10.
49 Bammer 103.
65
44
45
of the process that Piercy is interested in. It is rather the portrayal of the changes in human
behavior and lifestyle necessary to allow the process of transformation to begin.
There are no easy answers, there is no finite utopia, and everything is still in motion. The
reader is to ask the question of how, rather than when, and is to actively seek out ways of
contributing to the change of his or her surroundings. The change, which is, in Bammer's words,
"nothing more (and nothing less) than the sum of changes we ourselves create day by day in the
process of living."so The here and now is important. That is where Piercy's utopia gains its
speculative quality and deviates from the visions Bellamy and London and even Callenbach.
Utopia is no longer a goal to be reached; it is a way of life in the present, a set of values and
choices that are different, seen in each individual sacrifice and each small battle won. Bammer
reflects:
Cumulatively, I believe, the feminisms of the 1970s recuperated the concept of the
utopian as a vital dimension of a radical politics. They did so by redefining what the
"utopian" meant and challenging their readers to do likewise. sl
Piercy undoubtedly believes in a future different from the present, in the possibility of
improvement and progress. "Growth means going forward," Luciente argues. S2 To grow into our
future selves, we must keep moving, aware that our actions are shaping the future - ours and
that of the next generations. Whether we reach a utopian world or have to live through a
dystopian alternative is only up to us and the choices we make today.
50
51
52
Bammer 104.
Bammer 158
Piercy, Woman 212.
66
6. CONCLUSION
Peter Ruppert's initial quote at the beginning of this thesis speaks of the horizon of
possibilities. I believe that it is this propensity of utopian fiction for opening a dialogue with the
present, which is one of its greatest merits. The perspective which utopian writing offers is a
fresh and valuable one, setting before its readers an image of a transformed society, unbound by
what seem like unalienable tendencies and insurmountable structures of the present. In
"Commitment in Politics" E. P. Thompson speaks of this reformative potential of utopianism:
The value of utopianism is to be found, not in raising banners in the wilderness but
in confronting living people with an image of their own potential life, in summoning
up their aspirations so that they challenge the old forms of life, and in influencing
such social choices as there are in the direction that is desired,1
The image of a new and different life, even just the possibility of making a difference, gives
one hope, regardless of the specifics of the utopian mode, which are as fluid as human dreams. It
is not only the utopian discourse, which changes, however. A single utopian vision will speak
differently to different people at different times. In Picture Imperfect: Utopian Thought for an
Anti-Utopian Age Russell jacoby notes the importance of the reader's mindset and social position
for the interpretation of utopian thought:
[Utopian ideas) are irrelevant for the affluent and immaterial for the hungry - and
dangerous for many intellectuals, to boot. To the desperate, utopian ideas seem
meaningless; to the successful, they lack urgency or import; to the thinking classes,
they lead to a murderous totalitarianism.
That is not to say, however, that we should do away with utopianism completely. Idealist and
utopian thinking is crucial to the function of human society and to its progress. As jacoby
observes further on:
The choice we have is not between reasonable proposals and an unreasonable
utopianism. Utopian thinking does not undermine or discount real reforms. Indeed,
it is almost the opposite: practical reforms depend on utopian dreaming - or at least
utopian thinking drives incremental improvements,z
The surveyed utopias are four examples of how one man's or one woman's utopian
venture was influenced by-and in turn influenced-contemporary politics and either gave rise
to or supported a different way of thinking. As has already been noted, the response to Bellamy's
work led to the creation of the Nationalist Party and Clubs. It also inspired many other novelists
1
2
E. P. Thompson, "Commitment in Politics," The Universities and Left Review 6 (1959): 55, quoted in Diamanti 136.
Russell jacoby, Picture Imperfect: Utopian Thoughtfor an Anti-Utopian Age (New York: Columbia UP, 2005) 1.
67
to write up their utopian ideals towards the end of the nineteenth century. London's portrayal of
a socialist revolution gave rise to heated discussions among socialists regarding the temporal
aspect of the transformation from capitalism to socialism and the strategies necessary for its
promotion. Callenbach's fiction gave the name to an entire sub-genre of utopian writing and
convinced many of the necessity to take nature and ecology into account. Piercy's work has been
labeled as a rite of passage for a wide range of women readers "toward increased awareness of
the asymmetric encoding of power in both private relations and in a largely male-defined
societal and cultural context:'3 spreading the idea of equality where it has not been heard before.
However powerful at one point, the focus of utopian desire - the presentation of the ideal
space or the process of its creation - changes with time. As far as the four utopias analyzed in
this thesis are concerned, many variables in their arrangements have been noted. Consumerism
could be seen to form a major part of Bellamy's utopia, then it was abolished in London's work;
Callenbach envisioned a system of state-regulated production, while Piercy's society was
agrarian and consisted of smaller self-regulated communities. The way of establishing the new
orders varied from social evolution and political secession to straightforward and violent
revolutions.
From Bellamy to London, an inversion of importance from the blueprint presentation of
the utopian space to the stressing of historical and social changes could be seen, as well as a
change in the temporal outline. The shift from the nineteenth to the twentieth century noted a
decline in the utopian dialogue, cumulating in the "end of utopia and ideology" in the fifties, only
to be presented with a new wave of utopian literature in the sixties and seventies.
It would indeed seem that the utopian endeavor is closely connected to the historical and
social fluctuations of the society it wishes to transform. The surveyed novelists' take on gender,
to develop one example, differed substantially and it could certainly be argued, along the lines of
Filio Diamanti's critique in "The Treatment of the 'Woman Question' in Radical Utopian Political
Thought" that "radicalism is not necessarily a guarantee for feminism."4 As has been previously
discussed, Callenbach's and London's utopias fall short of fully emancipating their women. Even
though there is some critique of the traditional forms of marriage, women cannot completely
escape their conventional roles.
Feminist writing did already exist in Bellamy's time and before. F. M. C. Fourier, who is at
times credited with coining the term "feminism," wrote, "The extension of the privileges of
Kerstin W. Shands, The Repair of the World: The Novels of Marge Piercy (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1994) 1.
Filio Diamanti, "The Treatment of the 'Woman Question' in Radical Utopian Political Thought," The Philosophy of
Utopia, ed. Barbara Goodwin (Portland, OR: Frank Cass, 2001) 116.
68
3
4
women is the basic principle of all social progress."5 Radical feminists adopted this as a slogan
already in the eighteen forties, forty years before the publication of Looking Backward. 6 That
being said, however, it is true that with time gender assumptions change and so does the
language used to deal with them. As the four novels analyzed in this work have a time span of
nearly a hundred years between the first and the last, the difference in social setting can justify a
certain leniency toward the discussed shortcomings of the equalitarian issues in the two earlier
pieces. As Naomi Jacobs notes in "Failures of the Imagination in Ecotopia", it is indeed true that
we cannot separate the utopian characteristics from the time period in which they were created.
It would be naIve to expect the same level of emancipation in the nineteenth and the twentieth
century. Jacobs observes:
Though BeIlamy's concept of gender equality is problematic for many latetwentieth-century readers of Looking Backward, the separate but equal women's
world that he establishes would have satisfied many, if not all feminists of his own
time.?
Thus, as has already been proposed, neither Bellamy nor London was able to deal with the entire
range of issues of dehumanization by technology, gender or race in a way that would be found
satisfactory in the twenty-first century. It would, however, not be just to criticize their work
from our current point of view without noting where they were coming from.
On the contrary, leaving aside the utopias of the nineteenth century for the moment, in
comparing CaIlenbach and Piercy, one cannot help but note a certain lack of precision and
consistence in CaIlenbach's dealing with gender or race, the issues of which have been a part of
this discussion earlier. It must be observed, along with Jacobs, that Callenbach "could and should
have known better,"8 given his circumstances. In Piercy's utopia, written in the same period, a
full emancipation and integration of women, as well as complete equality of gender, age and race
can be found. Thus, using gender as a case in pOint, it can be concluded that not only did the
writers have a hand in shaping their culture, as has been discussed previously, but were in turn
also shaped by it.
6.1 The Force of the Collective
The various differences between utopian presentations have been discussed and analyzed.
What, however, changes very little, is the collective quality of the utopian space. Therborn's
F.M.C. Fourier, The Theory o/the Four Movements, eds. G.S. lanes and I. Patterson (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996)
132, quoted in Diamanti 117.
6 Diamanti 121.
7 Naomi jacobs, "Failures of the Imagination in Ecotopia," Extrapolation 38.4 (1997): 318
8 jacobs 319.
69
5
definition of socialist values, presented in the earlier discussion of Bellamy's and London's
works, speaks of equality and solidarity. If we consider a system, which is based on these core
values, as well as common or evenly distributed means of production and goods or the
equivalent, to be socialist, it is hard not to see socialist traits in the utopian societies created by
Callenbach and Piercy as well. Although Callenbach incorporates a form of competition into his
description of production, he attempts to avoid the pitfalls of the capitalist system by
introducing common ownership of the production plants, banning all private investments and
abolishing the tradition of inheritance - essentially preventing the existence of surplus and the
capitalist class. Piercy goes even further in her quest for equality. She does away with private
ownership in its entirety with the sole exception of equally distributed lUXUry credits, which are
only used to acquire disposable or shared items. All decisions are made collectively, all types of
work are evenly distributed and as a result of the establishment of self-sustained communities
there is no surplus to be accumulated. Thus in addition to being in harmony with nature and
each other, and promoting both ecological and feminist ideals, Callenbach's and Piercy's utopian
communities share clear socialist tendencies with the utopias of the nineteenth century, in spite
of encouraging individualism to a much greater extent.
While the merits of a life within the utopian time and space are evident, the questions
concerning the process of arriving at such a state as a society remains difficult to answer. It
seems at times easier and less problematic for the utopian authors to imagine the ultimate goal
of an ideal future society than to describe exactly how to get there. In Narrating Utopia "
Ideology, Gender, Form in Utopian Literature Chris Ferns points out that "Utopian fiction is often
characterized by a certain prescriptive quality, suggesting, not simply that things might be
otherwise, but that they ought to conform to a specific vision [author'S emphasis]."9 On a similar
note, Krishan Kumar notes that
Most utopias have as their main emphasis a vision of ultimate goals, a final state of
society in which peace, happiness and freedom are at last realized. It is this vision
which gives them their power and their enduring appeal. For if we examine the
mechanisms by which these goals are achieved, and the means described for
maintaining the utopia in working order, we might be very much less inclined to
enter into the realm ofutopia,lo
The answer which the later utopias, written at a time of renewed interest in social
transformation and liberation, seem to be giving to this conundrum is opening a dialogue with
Chris Ferns, Narrating Utopia: Ideology, Gender, Form in Utopian Literature (Liverpool, England: Liverpool University
Press, 1999) 4.
10 Krishan Kumar, Utopia and Anti-Utopia in Modern Times (Oxford: Basic Blackwell, 1991) 349.
9
70
the reader regarding the ultimate goal along with refocusing on the process of transformation. In
Demand the Impossible: Science Fiction and the Utopian Imagination Tom Moylan argues:
For the critical utopias of the 1960s and 1970s not only revive the generic form but
also, more or less aware of the totalizing limitations of the form as well as its
cooptation by market forces, destroy and change that form in such a way that, selfcritical and wiser for the wear, it can give new life to the utopian impulse without
faIling into compromised abuse or negated disuse. l l
By avoiding the blueprint versions of perfect societies, these authors can also avoid the portrayal
of concrete steps towards their establishment. What is left is a suggestion of a better way oflife,
rather than a concrete agenda. As Moylan observes: "These literary works are a significant part
of the social process of discourse, debate and conflict about power and social relations."12
As a part of the much broader movement of liberation, opposition and change, authors like
Callenbach and Piercy focus on the reformation of values along with the underlying social
structures present in the society. They paint the images of the future to change the present.
Moreover, they answer the movement's call for more individual freedom and diversity within
the ideal societies while merging these with collective leadership and guidance. A crucial aspect
of this method is decentralization along with population control, giving everybody the
motivation and the opportunity to influence their immediate surroundings and thus retain their
individuality. Callenbach and Piercy work within this trend, as a way of ensuring freedom as well
as sustainabiIity of their utopias.
The answer they give to the dichotomy of utopian social engineering and American
inherent individualism is thus found in the creation of local self-sufficient communities
essentially in charge of themselves, with some sort of a loose overreaching strategy concerning
global issues. These communities devote themselves to protecting their autonomy and
democratic system, internal and external equality as well as ecological and feminist principles,
along the lines of the new opposition of the sixties and seventies as defined by Moylan. 13
6.2 A Dialogue with the Future
This thesis proposed that utopian writing in general and the four discussed novels
specifically share a common desire for change. Whether the means to achieve this is the
production of a blueprint version of a better and improved society or starting a dialogue with
the utopian reader, which eventually leads to his or her redefinition of the contemporary world,
Tom Moylan, Demand the Impossible: Science Fiction and the Utopian Imagination (New York: Methuen, 1986) 31.
Moylan 30.
13 Moylan 11.
11
12
71
does not change or hinder this underlying expression of need for transformation. Some have
argued that the move from a utopian idealism to a more realistic perception of the world,
essentially the announced death of utopia in the fifties discussed above, can be seen as positive.
Peter Fitting, for example, in spite of finding the sixties' and seventies' success in spreading the
vision of an alternative to a greater audience commendable,14 suggests that it is possible that
the turn to more "realistic" visions of the future is a way of maintaining our
vigilance, that the building of a better society does not need images of that better
world, but the energy, anger, and strategies to change this one. IS
It is true that utopian visions often skip the intermediary step of actually constructing the
society and present their readers with already finalized idealistic products. Nevertheless, if a mix
of fantastic elements and real suggestions can help redefine and improve a backward social or
cultural structure by instilling a sense of hope or longing and essentially helping in taking the
first step toward change, is that not a great accomplishment?
Utopia ultimately moves human consciousness beyond its current experience, giving it the
freedom to make choices unbound by stereotypical ways of thinking in the present. Its fiction
seeks to instill a sense of empowerment in the reader, a sense of responsibility for their world
and a belief in the possibility of change. As has been noted in Piercy's writing, the utopian
narrative can establish a dialogue between the present and a variety of possible futures,
essentially emphasizing the choice individuals have to make to form the world around them.
Are we truly dead to utopian ideals as a result of them being cheapened by massive
advertising campaigns and the consumerist culture of our "image-obsessed society" as Jacoby
proposes?16 Moylan suggests that in the twentieth century, the longing for a utopian ideal has
been to some degree contained in the maintenance of the capitalist status quo in the western
world:
Stimulated but unfulfilled desires are effaced and channeled into the service of the
state or the consumer paradise. In western industrial societies, utopian longing can
be discovered as the underlying stimulus to the machinery of advertising,17
As a result of the ever-present marketing, desires and longing for something better are thought
to be satiable by acquiring material possessions. As the consumer society takes the place of a
utopian ideal, however, a stronger and more radical critique arises in the form of dystopian
writing. This, on the other hand, as Moylan points out, should not lead to the conclusion that
Fitting 163.
Peter Fitting, "Recent Feminist Utopias: World Building and Strategies for Social Change," Mindscapes: The
Geagraphies a/Imagined Worlds, eds. George E. Slusser and Eric S. Rabkin (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois UP, 1989)
162.
16 jacoby xvi.
17 Moylan 8.
72
14
15
utopian writing has reached its limits. Rather, as in the strongly oppositional culture of the
nineteen sixties and seventies, it should lead to "a return to the human agenda ofthe categories
of cooperation, equality, mutual aid, liberation, ecological wisdom, and peaceful and creative
living."18
While the more traditional utopianism in the form of a blueprint prescription of the perfect
society, without any mental contribution on the side of the reader, may be exhausted, as Jacoby
suggests, his later statement that "utopianism does not require blueprint"19 is a testament to the
transformation and redefinition of the genre. There are limits to what language and images can
convey and perhaps the time has indeed come for an absence of clear-cut images and a greater
humility in foretelling the future. Nevertheless, the need for a testimony of the transformative
human potential remains. At the core of all that is utopian, be it written, spoken or only
imagined, there are desire and hope. And that is something mankind cannot step into the future
without.
18
MoyJan 10.
19
Jacoby 143.
73
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2009
8. SUMMARY
Tato diplomova prace se zabYva rozborem ctyr vybranych americkJch literarnich utopif:
Looking Backward: 2000-1887 (Pohled z roku 2000 na rok 1887) Edwarda Bellamyho, The Iron
Heel (ielezna pata) Jacka Londona, Ecotopia (Ekotopie) Ernesta Callenbacha a Woman on the
Edge of Time (Zena na hrane casu) Marge Piercy. Prace analyzuje socialnf rysy ctyr utopickJch
spolecnostf popsanych v techto pracfch, navrhovany proces spolecenskJch a historickJch zmen,
vedoucfch k jejich vybudovanf, stejne tak jako socioekonomicke podmfnky a posun
spolecenskJch temat vamericke spolecnosti mezi devatenacrym a dvacarym stoletfm na pozadi
techto diH.
V uvodu teto diplomove pr<ke dochazime k zaverQ, ze pres zrejme jedinecne postaveni
zapadnich utopif je vira v Iepsf budoucnost a touha, aby zitrek prekonaI dnesni potize,
konstantou lidske existence. Tendence takto snit
0
svetlejsich zitrcfch, le psi spolecnosti a
dokonalem svete existuje od pradavna a projevovala se davno pred tim, nez Sir Thomas More
sIavne definovaI zanr utopie v roce 1516. Utopicke idealy zasahuji do behu historie a literatury,
objevuji se v recke a Hmske literature a mytologii, casta splYvaji s ideou nabozenskeho raje,
promitaji se do viry v nekonecny vy-voj lidstva, do zanru scifi, a konecne vytvarf svuj vlastni zanr
utopicke literatury v podobe moderni zapadni utopie.
V jedne ze zakladnich studif utopicke literatury vubec se Krishan Kumar zabYva mimo jine
v,Ysadnim postavenim modernf zapadni utopie, jako vynalezu evropske renesance, ktery zdedil
klasicke a krest'anske dedictvi a zpracovaI je do nove formy a socialni filozofie
charakteristickeho literarnfho zanru. PHkladem dedictvf klasicke literatury muze by-t koncept
zIateho veku v Hesiodove pojednani Prace a Dny, pojetf Arkadie ve spisech Virgila a Ovida, Ci
plany dokonaleho mesta v Andreaeove Kristianpoli Ci Campanellove Slunecnfm statu. Parodie
nejhedonistictejsich utopickJch idealu se take staly soucasti nejruznejsfch festivalu a svatkU,
jako je napHklad Saturnalia nebo Svatek blaznu. 1
Krest'anske a judaisticke prvky se do utopif promitaji velmi zretelne a tvoH zakladni
pudorys utopickJch viz!. Kombinace techto nabozenskJch elementu a utopickJch idealu
v historii vedla k zalozeni cetnych novy-ch hnutf, jak radikilnfch tak konzervativnfch. Prikladem
nam muze by-t vira ve hmatatelnou existenci zahrady Edenu na zemi, vira v neustavajicf
zdokonalovanf se lidstva Ci mileniarismus. Pres Kumarem ustanovenou jedinecnost teto formy
1
Krishan Kumar, Utopia and Anti-Utopia in Modern Times (Oxford: Basic Blackwell, 1991) 2-32.
78
utopie a jeji vYvoj po boku kapitalistickYch a nacionalistickYch struktur vsak zapadnf utopie nenf
utopif jedinou. Tom Moylan oznacuje utopicka pojednanf za celosvetov,Y trend a zahrnuje tak do
v,Yctu utopickYch pi'fkladu napi'fklad buddhistickou Shangri-Lu, indianska vecna loviSte,
Platonovu Republiku, keltskY Hy- Brasil i dnesnf popularnf pfsne a fikci. 2 Definovanf zanru
modernf utopie tedy nevedlo k uplnemu predefinovanf zanru jako takoveho, ale spfSe ke zmene
zpusobu dosahovanf utopickYch idealu, kdy vfra ve vyssf moc byla nahrazena humanistickou
duverou v lidstvo a lidskou schopnost pretvaret vlastni spolecnost.
Podle Petera Stillmana utopie zkoumajf to, co jeste nenf, i to, co je jiz hmatatelne. spojujfce
tyto dva protip6ly ve studiu soucasnych kulturnfch a spolecenskych trendu a zkoumajfce je ve
vztahu k moznostem a zahodnosti urCit,Ych zmen. 3 Autofi utopif tak promftajf do sv,Ych del
problemy soucasne spolecnosti, jeji tendence a vYvoj. Stejne tak ale tvoi'f soucast teto
spolecnosti a jsou ji ovlivllovani. Ctyri autofi, jejichz dila tvoi'f zaklad pro rozbor utopii v teto
diplomove praci, byli ci stale jsou politicky angazovani v ramci hnutf, ktera svou tvorbou
podporovali. Soucasti anal.vzy jejich diH je tak i politicke a kulturni pozadf, na kterem se tyto
postavy americke literatury pohybovaly a kriticka reakce na jejich produkci.
Utopicka literatura si klade za cil probouzet ve ctenafi touhu reagovat, ktera muze vest
k zasadnfm spolecenskYm zmenam. Predstavuje tak svetu nove alternativy jeho stereotypnfch a
ustalenych hodnot. Prestoze zpusob dosahovanf utopickYch spolecenstvi, tak jak je prezentovan
autory utopii, stejne tak jako to, co je povazovano za lepsi a dokonale, se meni a vyvijf, tyto
spolecnosti jako takove jsou nicmene stale zalozeny na systemu vfry v moznost zmeny, zlepseni
a obnovy.
Uvod teto diplomove prace strucne prezentuje vYvoj utopicke literatury, resi postaveni
umelce jako navrhovatele zmen ve spolecnosti a kulture a take se venuje nezbytnemu
historickemu a kulturnimu pozadi diskutovanych deI, tudiz americke spolecnosti devatenacteho
a dvacateho stoletL Kapitoly dve az pet se detailneji venuji jednotliv,Ym kniham a soustredf se na
konkretni prezentaci idealnfch spolecnostf, vcetne jejich vybudovanych struktur a hodnot a toho,
jak bylo tohoto noveho radu dosazeno. Diskuze take zahrnuje biograficke informace
0
auto re ch,
ktere se t,Ykaji jejich politickeho presvedceni a spolecenskeho postavenL Vzhledem ke znamosti
diskutovanych del v akademickYch kruzfch diplomova prace nezahrnuje celistv,Y rozbor obsahu
del ani zivota autoru.
Tom Moylan, Demand the Impossible: Science Fiction and the Utopian Imagination (New York: Methuen, 1986) 2.
Peter G. Still man, "Utopias as Practical Political Philosophy," The Philosophy of Utopia, ed. Barbara Goodwin
(Portland, OR: Frank Cass, 2001) 11.
79
2
3
Druha kapitola se venuje knize Looking Backward: 2000-1887 Edwarda Bellamyho. Pred
samym rozborem dfla se zabYva velk,Ymi zmenami, kterymi prochclzela americka spolecnost a
kultura v devatenactem stoleti a na ktere navazoval vYvoj americke utopicke fikce. Tyto zmeny
se t,Ykaly vsech oblasti zivota americke spolecnosti. Vekonomicke sfere docbazelo ke vzniku
monopolu kolosalnich rozmeru, korporace a fondy rostly a industrializace nabirala na rychlosti.
Populace ve mestech se stale zvysovala, lidske postoje a hodnoty prochazely obrovsk,Ymi
zmenami, zmeny v mysleni americke spolecnosti byly takrka revolucni. Individualismus, ktery
pi'evladal pred obcanskou valkou, byl nahrazen predstavou komunity a spolecnosti jako zakladni
jednotky lidske identity. Dusledkem menidch se podminek, vcetne narustu urovne vzdelanosti a
ctenarske verejnosti, stejne tak jako rozsahu a moci medii, se stale vice lidi zaCinalo zajimat
0
politicke a kulturni denf a vice se zamyslet nad spolecnostf a jejim vYvojem. Tento vYvoj vedl
k vytvarenf vizi budoucnosti, do kterych se promftaly zivotni strasti a touhy americke
spolecnosti a ktere pfijaly formu utopick,Ych romanu.
Kapitola dale pokracuje jiz konkretnfm rozborem Bellamyho utopie. Roman je
spolecenskou kritikou v,Yse zmfnenych tezk,Ych podminek a zaroven pred ctenare predklada
alternativnf vizi budoud spolecnosti, zalozene na rovnosti a rovnopravnosti. Je to vize velke
spolecenske re konstrukce, zazraku pozitivnfho vYvoje, ktera byla napsana a publikovana na
pocatku promen americke spolecnosti, jejichz dusledky si v tehdejsf dobe nebyl nikdo schopny
komplexne predstavit. Nasledny uspech romanu byl tedy mimo jine dusledkem spravneho
nacasovanf, jelikoz v podstate reflektoval denf, ktere kazdy jiz citil, a daval nadeji, ze po techto
utrapach bude nasledovat obdobf harmonie a prosperity.
Co se t,Yce zpusobu dosazenf Bellamyho utopicke spolecnosti,
aut~r
vefil v pokojnou
spolecenskou a ekonomickou evoluci, kdy stale rostoud monopoly pi'ejdou nakonec pod statni
spravu, ktera se nasledne stane jedinym zamestnavatelem a zaroveii v,Yrobcem veskerych
komodit, zajiSt'ujic tak ekonomickou a spolecenskou rovnost pro vsechny. Bellamy veri!, ze
lidska podstata je v jadru dobra a ze za lidske zlo je zodpovectna spatna socioekonomicka situ ace
vetsiny populace. Vini! individualismus a nedostatek kolektivnfho mysleni za podminky, ve
kterych se Amerika ocitla na konci devatenacteho stoletL V souladu s touto virou pfisoudil sve
spo]ecnosti noveho Bostonu v? roce 2000 zmenene a vyrovnane podmfnky, dfky kterym se mohl
kazdy jednotlivec promenit v modeloveho obcana nove lidske rasy, aniz by byl v pokusenf se
obohacovat na ukor nektereho ze sv,Ych bliznfch.
Navrhuje tedy narodnf strategii, vytvoi'enf jednotneho "my" namfsto sobeckeho "ja," jako
jediny logick,Y krok ke st'astnejsi budoucnosti. Zatfmco se tedy vyvaroval marxisticke teorie
tfidnfho boje, obecne dIe socialismu, jako je statem Nzene hospodarstvf za ucelem zajiStenf
80
rovnosti vsech obcanu, do sveho niivrhu utopicke spolecnosti Bellamy zahrnuje. Jeho spolecnost
ma nicmene z dnesnfho pohledu daleko do dokonalosti. Jeho sirokosahle zmeny jsou zalozeny na
potlacenf jedince a individuality ve prospech? plosne vYchovy rovnopravnych obcanu.
Nedostatky taktez trpf jeho pojetf rovnosti ras a pohlavL Jeho predstava rovnopravnosti se tYka
vYhradne rovnosti ekonomicke, vnitrnfmi nerovnostmi se jeho prace nezab.vva.
netf kapitola se venuje Jacku Londonovi a jeho utopii nazvane The Iron Heel. Oproti
Bellamymu se London ve sve knize nesoustredf na popis utopicke spolecnosti, ale venuje se
zejmena popisu spolecenske premeny, ktera k nf ma vest. Nesdflf ani Bellamyho optimismus, co
se tYce pokojne spolecenske evoluce. Cestu ke sve utopicke spolecnosti znazoriiuje jako blfzkou
alternativu nasilne marxisticke revoluce, a to zrejme dusledkem deziluze, jfz prosel v roce 1905
nasledkem neuspechu ruske revoluce. London nebyl ochoten verit ani v pokojny evolucnf
proces, ani v brzke nastolenf harmonicke spolecnosti. Mezi dej knihy v pfltomnosti a existenci
sve utopicke spolecnosti vlozil celych sedm stoletf. Toto byla take jedna z vecf, ktere vyvolaly
kritiku socialistick,Ych ctenaru jeho doby.
Jak jiz bylo receno, spolecenska promena vedoucf k zalozenf Londonovy utopicke
spolecnosti odpovfdala v,Yvoji predpokladanemu Marxem: zmene ve strukture spolecnosti
vedoucf k vyhranenf dvou nepratelskych taboru, burzoazie a proletariatu, a nasledne nasilne
revoluci. Svou utopickou spolecnost tak London zaklada na zcela nOvYch ekonomick,Ych
zakladech a ustavenfm rovnopravnosti a stejneho majetkoveho zazemf chce, podobne jako
Bellamy, uvolnit cestu dobre lidske prirozenosti. Z toho mala, co se
dozvfdame z poznamek pod carou, je jasne, ze se jedna
0
0
jeho utopicke spolecnosti
vysoce technologicky vyvinutou
komunitu, zijfcf v huste obydlenych mestech, vybudovanych revolucionafi jeste za vlady
oligarchie.
Nejsou zde trfdnf rozdfly, otroctvi, krveprolitf ani zlocin. Rozum a planovane
hospodarstvi, spolu s vyuzitfm technologickeho pokroku tvori, podobne jako u Bellamyho,
zaklad teto spolecnosti.
Oproti Bellamymu zde ale nenajdeme zadnou kapitalistickou vYrobu. Tarn, kde Bellamy
preferuje rust spotreby a flzenou distribuci zbozf a zaklada na nich spokojenost sve spolecnosti,
London tyto trendy zcela zrejme opoustL Je skoda, ze svou teorii budoucf spolecnosti nedovedl
k uplnosti. Nicmene zrejma absence nejvetSfch problemu americke spolecnosti devatenacteho
stoletf v Bellamyho novem Bostonu Cinf jeho vizi utopickou.
Ani Londonovi se vsak nepodarilo uspesne se zhostit role prostrednfka mezi pohlavfmi Ci
rasami. Ctenar se musf postupne vyrovnat s tfm, ze zatfmco London zretelne zaznamenal utlak
pracujfcf trfdy jako celku, ignoroval popis jak,Ychkoli problemu v nerovnosti pohlavf ci ras
81
v Americe devatenacteho stoleti. V konecnem dusledku tedy k sobe Bellamyho a Londonova
utopie maji blizko, pfes rozdilnost sveho zamereni.
V uvodu ctvrte kapitoly jsou pfedstaveny socioekonomicke zmeny vamericke spolecnosti
dvacateho stoleti, vedouci k nove vine utopickeho mysleni a literarni tvorby v sedesatYch a
sedmdesaqch letech. V teto doM se politicke diskuze orientovaly na rasovou a socialni
diskriminaci, byla to doba pacifisticrych, feministicrych a ekologicrych protestu, hnuti za
obcanska prava, za svobodu sexualni orientace atd. Tyto rovnostarske trendy se promitly do
navratu k humanisticke a egalitafske agende v literatufe a oziveni utopickeho a revolucniho
ducha.
Ernest Callenbach ve sve knize nazvane Ecotopia s duchem doby kritizoval honbu za zisky
a pokles odbornosti v pracovnim procesu, spolu s odcizenim se lidi od pfirody a od sebe
navzajem. Jeho kniha se zabYva politikou hnuti za ochranu zivotniho prostfedi a pfedstavuje
ctenafi vizi ti'f americrych statu, Washingtonu, Oregonu a severni Kalifornie, ktere se oddelily od
zbytku Spojenych statu a zalozily na striktne ekologicrych zakladech stat vlastni. Zalozeni
Ekotopie Callenbach prezentuje jako demokraticke a prakticky nenasilne. Vedeni Stranou za
pfeziti, ktera se skladala povetSinou z zen, se obyvatele teto casti zeme rozhodli odtrhnout a
zaCft znovu.
Callenbach tak vytvari utopicry prostor zalozeny na feministicke, ekologicke a
decentralizacni agende. Veskere korporace, podniky, tovarny i system dopravy jsou znarodneny
a nOvYmi majiteli se stavaji lide, ktei'i v nich pracuji. Obrovske administrativni zmeny nasleduje
proces decentralizace vlady a ponechani veskere zodpovectnosti jednotlivYm samospravnym
oblastem. Politicry a spolecensry zivot se prolina do takove mfry, ze kazdy Ciovek se eftf by-t
soucastf procesu rozhodovanf a urcovanf nasmerovanf zeme. Lide se vice zajfmajf
0
dusledky
svYch Cinu, zejmena v souvislosti s ekologicrymi dusledky produkce a konzumnfho zivotniho
stylu.
Stejne jako v prvnich dvou diskutovanych utopiich dochazi ke vzniku jednolite spolecnosti
bez rozdilu ti'id ci majetkovYch pomeru. Nicmene ani zde se autor nedokazal vyhnout kritice z
fad feministickeho hnuti. Zatimco jeho vectoma prezentace utopicrych pomeru dava velry
prostor popisu zrovnopravnenf zen, dejova rovina qkajfci se kazdodennich zkusenostf hlavnfho
hrdiny, novinare Williama Westona, prvnfho americkeho navstevnika Ekotopie ode dne jejiho
odtrZeni, tomuto neodpovida. Zatimco teoreticky se na politickem poli ma pohybovat snad i vice
zen nez muzu, postavy, se kterymi se Weston sqka a od kterych cerpa informace, jsou skoro
82
vYhradne muzskeho pohlavf. Vyjimku tvoft popisy jeho sexualnfch zkusenostl, ktere ale spadajf
do genderoveho stereotypu.
Co se tyce jeho vyrovnanf se s rasovou otazkou, resf ji vfcemene stoprocentnf segregacf
etnicky odlisne populace do vlastnfch mestsk,Ych statu, coz je vetsinou povazovano za nejvetsf
nedostatek tohoto dfIa. To se jinak zapsalo do dejin jako pruvodnf dfIo noveho utopickeho
subZanru a ve sve dobe se stalo kanonickou knihou ekologickeho hnutf.
Pata kapitola se venuje jedine zenske autorce vyberu, Marge Piercy, a jejfmu romanu
Woman on the Edge of Time. Hlavni postavou je zde chuda zena mexickeho puvodu, Connie
Ramos, pacientka ustavu mentalnfho zdravi. Jiz timto se Piercy odpoutala od tradicniho pojetf
navstevnfka utopie. Jejf kritika spolecnosti, pramenfcf z krut,Ych zivotnfch zkusenosti jeji
protagonistky, je tak ctenari mnohem blizsf nez Ciste objektivnf popis spolecensk,Ych struktur,
tak jak byly prezentovany BeIIamym ci Londonem a do jiste mfry i CaIIenbachem. Dochazf tak
k dialogu se ctenarstvem a jejich nazory, ktere nasledne tvorf sou cast efektu cele prezentace
utopickeho idealu.
Utopicka spolecnost v Mattapoisett roku 2137 je jeste vfce nez CaIIenbachova spolecnosti
ruralnf. Misto velk,Ych mrakodrapu a raketovych lodi, ktere Connie ocekava, se objevuje
v prostredi male vesnicky, domku z cihel a kameni, krav, skleniku a solarnfch panelu. Jeji prvnf
dojem tak nenf kladny, nicmene postupem casu se dfky nejruznejsim setkanim a zkusenostem
stava zastancem teto verze budoucnosti ve svem svete. Piercy jako prvnf z diskutovanych autoru
pfichazf s alternativni verzf budoucf spolecnosti, a tak jeste dale rozsiruje dialog mezi svou
utopickou vizi a americkou spolecnostf dvacateho stoleti. Ctenar se zaroven s Connie utvrzuje
v dulezitosti kazdeho jednotliveho rozhodnuti, ktere muze zmenit budoucnost celeho lidstva.
Vedle kladeni vetsiho durazu na lidskou zodpovednost k budoucfm generacfm a sobe
samym Piercy take prichazi s popisem spolecnosti, ve ktere je zrejma uplna rovnost pohlavi a
ras. Jako dusledek technologickeho a spolecenskeho v,Yvoje oddeluje Piercy materstvi od zenstvf
a kulturu od geneticke skladby populace, cfmz prakticky anuluje platnost rozdfIu mezi pohlavfmi
i rasami, ktere byly tak zrejme jeste u CaIIenbacha. Zeny tak nenesou ani bremeno ani nemajf
vYhodu materstvi. Deti se rodi umele na zaklade nahodnych genetick,Ych uprav, jsou
vychovavany spolecne a povazovany za plnopravne mnohem drive, nez tomu je dnes.
Jak jiz bylo receno, tato utopie je vypovectf
0
dUIezitosti jednotlivcu a jejich schopnosti
ovlivnit budoucnost. Zatimco tato velka zodpovednost je zcela zrejma, nechava Piercy na ctenafi,
aby rozhodI, k cemu ma tato odpovectnost vest, jakym smerem se vydat a jake kroky podniknout.
83
Toto
ambivalentnf
poselstvf
je
podtrZeno
v zaveru
romanu,
kde
Connie
spacha
nekolikanasobnou vrazdu ve vfre, ze tfm zabranila budoucfmu zneuzitf technologie pro
manipulaci lidstvem. Autorka se k spravnosti Ci naopak nespravnosti teto vfry nevyjadruje, a tak
je opet na ctenafi, aby rozhodl.
Zaver prace se venuje zejmena shrnuti, paralelam a rozdilum mezi diskutovanymi
utopiemi a budoucnosti zanru. Jakkoli rozdilne utopicke vize mohou byt a jsou, jejich predstava
kolektivnf zodpovednosti a zivota ve skupinach se menf malokdy. V prezentaci utopicke
spolecnosti vsech ctyr autori't je tudfz mozne naIezt rysy jako je sfrenf rovnosti a solidarity,
spolecne planovane hospodarstvi, at' jiz se tak deje na urovni statu nebo mensfch spolecenstvf, a
rovnomerna distribuce vYrobnfch prostredkii ci potravin. Vedle otevrene socialistickYch utopif
Bellamyho a Londona, vidfme tyto znaky i u Callenbacha a Piercy, kde spolecne vlastnictvf a
upustenf od financnfch ziskii a konzumnfho zpusobu zivota jsou podkladem pro genderovou
rovnopravnost a ekologicke principy.
Utopicke myslenf a vfra v budoucnost, ktera prekona soucasnost, jsou zakladem vYvoje
lidstva a nezbytnou soucastf jeho fungovanf. Russel Jacoby dokazuje, ze nase volba nespoCiva ve
vYberu mezi racionalnfmi navrhy a nerozumnymi utopismy. Utopicka pojednanf neznemoznujf
prakticke reformy, ale naopak k nim mohou vest.
4
Ctyri utopie zkoumane v teto praci jsou
pffkladem toho, jak utopicka vize jednoho Cloveka muze inspirovat nove smery myslenf Ci
dokonce ovlivnit kulturnf a politickou situaci spolecnosti.
4
Russell jacoby, Picture Imperfect: Utopian Thought for an Anti-Utopian Age (New York: Columbia UP, 2005) 1.
84