It should be no surprise that the idea of utopia has often been explored by American writers, since one could argue that America itself exists as a sort of utopian ideal. The words of the Declaration of Independence posit a sort of utopia in their idealistic talk of ’life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.’ This is very bound up with the notion of America as a new world, a new place where fresh starts can be made and the mistakes of the past avoided:
The utopian passages in Euro-American writings tended to elevate American spaces and colonists by comparing them to non-American landscapes and peoples and to view American land in the abstract terms of a tabula rasa or virgin territory to be used for existing fresh starts. (Serafin & Bendixsen 1169)
This tabula rasa is what attracted the Pilgrim Fathers: the opportunity to create God’s kingdom here on earth. At the same time, within American culture and history, there are glaring contradictions: the founding fathers came to this continent to find the liberty to practice their religion, safe from persecution. However, ‘practicing their religion’ meant imposing a rigid, theocratic state which impinged on the freedom of others or those who simply did not share their beliefs: indeed, American fictional heroes like Hester Prynne, Huck Finn, Holden Caulfield and Randall P McMurphy all define themselves by their rebellion against the stifling and rigid mores of society and fight to preserve their individual integrity. Indeed, this admirable assertion of individual liberty can militate against any utopian vision – which, by its very nature, tends to be collective and communal. Furthermore, the history and legacy of slavery in the United States has complicated the utopian visions of writers as we shall see below. The utopian ideal in the United States (because because of its geographical size and guarantees of freedom) has been given physical reality for over four centuries during which utopian communities are set up as social experiments to ameliorate the lives of individual citizens. The expression of utopian ideals in literature seems to have flourished at times of crisis in the national psyche, when writers felt the need to re-assert the idealistic core values of the founding principles of America as a haven for freedom and social harmony. However, it is also true that the social conformity and harmony involved in the creation of a utopia can lead to a terrifying loss of personal liberty and free will.
According to Mizruchi (256) between 1888 and 1900 one hundred and fifty utopian novels were published in America. It was a time of enormous social upheaval and technological change and Mizruchi (256) argues that these changes prompted the popularity of the utopian genre: “The utopian novelistic form afforded writers a distance that facilitated an engagement with the economic and social developments that both dazzled and disturbed them.” Faced with such dramatic demographic and technological change, the utopian genre allows writers to re-assert the values that they believe in. Unprecedented levels of immigration were also occurring in this era and this had an effect on utopian fiction:
The preoccupation with reproduction, ethnicity and race in utopian novels is even more pronounced. It reveals how the genre helped to express the distress generated by rising levels of social heterogeneity (with immigration rates unrivalled by those of any previous or subsequent time in the nation’s history). (Mizruchi 257)
It is almost as if, faced with such huge social and economic changes, American writers felt compelled through utopian fiction to re-assert the founding principles of America. As Mizruchi (257) puts it, “Many utopian novelists were concerned with the renovation of religious ideals they believed essential to alleviating social ills.” Those religious ideals chiefly concerned the problem of how to integrate the poor and the dispossessed onto mainstream society. As the nineteenth century came to an end one social ill that was receiving critical attention across the civilized world was the question of women’s rights.
Herland by Charlotte Perkins Gilman reflects the growing demand for greater rights for women and presents a society where women are in charge and there is no element of social competitiveness at all. Indeed, in Gilman’s utopia all the women are responsible for the nurture and care of all the children. The whole running of Gilman’s society is based on co-operation – all individuals engaged together in the common good. The educational system allows each individual to reach the level of prowess that their intelligence and aptitude allows, and work is seen not as laborious, dreary toil but as a means of being creatively productive and contributing to the common good. It is easy to see that Gilman is reacting not only to the lack of power that women had in the late 19th century but also to the rapid industrialization and perceived injustices of a capitalist system where work in a factory becomes meaningless and gives no satisfaction.
Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward shares with Gilman a faith in the ability of social institutions to effect change and, like Gilman, his utopia places great emphasis on education. It is easy to see Bellamy’s work and his utopian vision as a response to the changes taking place in American society in the late 19th century. In his future USA, Bellamy imagines education for all until the age of twenty-one and then employment in a role which each individual is suited to through aptitude and talent. It is absolutely vital that in Bellamy’s utopia that everyone gets paid the same wage: indeed, money has been abolished – citizens simply gain credits for their work which they exchange for any goods they need. This equality of income is clearly a reaction to the rampant, unfettered capitalism of the late 19th century and has a strong socialist feel to it. In Bellamy’s utopia everything is powered by electricity and cities like Boston are no longer polluted. Spacious public gardens and attractive buildings are the result of careful government planning, and there are no industrial disputes or strikes since there is no competition – everyone is paid the same, no matter what their function in society. Crime is practically non-existent too, since by removing social inequality, there can be no motive for crimes involving financial gain. Of course, some jobs are still mundane and deeply unattractive – but in such cases workers work reduced hours as compensation for the unpleasantness of their occupation. One potential weakness of Bellamy’s work is that he does little to address the role and function of women.
James Hilton’s The Lost Horizon was written at another historical moment of doubt and uncertainty – the height of the Great Depression. It is significant that the story begins in Berlin =- where the spectre of Hitler and all that was to follow already looms large. Hilton’s text seems more fantastic, more escapist than the other utopian novels I have read: Shangri La, the land where the characters end up, is physically far removed from the realities of Depression hit America and the totalitarian, book-burning and anti-semitism of Hitler’s Germany. And Shangri La does serve as an exotic haven of moderation and serenity in contrast with the impending World War that will engulf Europe. But Hilton’s vision is very vague compared with those of Bellamy and Gilman. – and seems to consist largely of half-understood and half-thought-through impressions of Buddhist philosophy. It is escapist nonsense – which perhaps is what the reading public needed in the early 1930s. Even the plot does not endorse Shangri La as a workable alternative. Conway, who has been picked out by the High Lama as his successor to preserve civilization at Shangri La while war in Europe destroys it elsewhere, leaves at the end of the novel – “doomed, like millions, to flee wisdom and be a hero.” (Hilton, 253)
It is significant that the two utopian novels that I will discuss finally come from the Cold war period –another time of crisis in the nation’s history. Although neither text refers explicitly to these events, the cultural revolution of the 1960s, the success of the Civil Rights movement, the opposition to the war in Vietnam and, as the decade moved on, the Watergate scandal – all these phenomena created a sense of doubt about the direction of American society – a mind-set that we might argue is conducive to writing about utopias as a way of re-asserting whatever the writer sees as the inherent values of America.
B. F. Skinner’s Walden Two is very reminiscent, in some ways, of Bellamy and Gilman, despite being written over seventy years later. Skinner’s novel is slightly different in that he does not imagine an entire new world order, but a community within American society which lives according to the ideals and principles that Skinner developed and championed through his work as a behavioural psychologist. Any tension in the plot derives from whether or not particular characters will join the self-sufficient utopian community described in the novel. Like Gilman, Skinner has strong views on the nurture of children and the potentially psychologically damaging effects of intimate family life, so that responsibility for bringing up the children of the community rests with all the adults, not simply the biological parents. Skinner was a behavioural psychologist and used Walden Two as a vehicle for his belief that negative traits of character and personality can be trained out of children if the right type of training and nurture is given in early childhood. Some readers find this sinister and treat Walden Two as if it were a dystopia, rather than the utopia that Skinner clearly intended it to be. The problem lies with behavioural psychology because its critics argue that it removes free will, and you accept that intellectual objection to it, Walden two becomes not a dream utopia, but a forced, manufactured utopia where there is no freedom of choice. Many philosophers and theologians would argue that what makes us quintessentially human is our free will: take away that and we are less than human; take away that and you have the community described in Walden Two.
Ira Levin’s This Perfect Day a future society very similar in some respects to the other utopian fiction that has been discussed is presented, but, in fact, Levin’s future society turns out to be dystopian. In this vision of the future peace reigns on earth: only one language is spoken and there are no racial differences, and certainly no nation states. Everything in Levin’s vision of the future tends to conformity and uniformity: there are only four names for males and four for females; surnames have been abolished and everyone is known by a number and identified by a bracelet which tracks their movements and ensures that they go only where they are allowed to go. Every human being is happy – but this is a false happiness and is based on weekly drugs treatments that keep individuals compliant and co-operative. There is no individual freedom in this future world: all decisions – such as where you live, what you eat, whom you marry, what profession you follow, how many children to have – are all made for you. This is possible because the entire planet is managed by a single computer – UniCorp – which even has a system for dealing with dissent and rebellion: those who do not conform or who are resistant to their weekly drug program, are banished to various islands where their activities can be monitored without any danger to the stability of the world state. We can see from my description that This Perfect Day is an ironic title and, as a novel, has more in common with Orwell’s 1984 or Huxley’s Brave New World. Indeed, just like Winston Smith in 1984 and Bernard Marx in Brave New World, This Perfect Day gains its narrative interest from Chip – a rebel against the system who plots to destroy the UniCorp computer. In this future society, harmony, peace and individual contentment have been established, but only at the cost of uniformity and a complete loss of individual freedom. Humanity is drugged into a state of false consciousness and is not truly alive. This notion takes us right back, arguably, to the founding of America: the theocracy established in New England had no room for rebels like Hester Prynne who had to live a marginalized existence on the edge of the community, just like the malcontents in This Perfect Day who are exiled to islands in order to contain their contaminating urge for freedom and self-expression without the false comfort of government-sponsored drugs treatments that ensure social stability and supposed personal happiness. Indeed, the UniCorp computer bears a striking similarity to the Combine in One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest in which the narrator, Big Chief, is convinced that all the thoughts of the inmates of the mental hospital which is its setting are controlled by the Combine. It perhaps goes without saying that Kesey is arguably using the mental hospital as a symbol of the whole of the USA. Just like Chip in This Perfect day, McMurphy and Big Chief stand up to the Combine and assert the importance of individual freedom and free will as more important than the artificial contentment of a manipulated population.
What is missing from most American utopian fiction is any adequate or meaningful addressing of the problems of race and ethnicity. The late 19th century was a popular time for utopian fiction but it was a genre usually shunned by African American writers, as Fabi (44) points out:
Among utopian scholars the assumption of the absence of a significant body of late 19th century African American utopian texts can be regarded as a critical commonplace. Critics remark that Afro-American literature has never had any significant utopian dimension or that the African American utopian impulse as it emerges from the spirituals has not resulted in formal literary utopias.
In other words, the priorities of African American writers were too urgent to be addressed through the ‘fantasy’ of the utopian genre and, if we look at most of the best work that emanated from the Harlem Renaissance (works by Jean Toomer, Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes and Richard Wright) there is a strong sense of social realism and a desire to present the authentic African American experience, rather than construct literary utopias. Claeys (100) goes even further in saying that,” African Americans were typically ignored, but the real invisible men and women of American utopias were the first Americans.” One utopian work by an African American, Imperium in Imperio by Sutton Griggs (1899) paints a very negative vision of a future America by imagining separatist African American state secretly set up in Texas and threatening the integrity of the entire United States. This expression of militant black separatism finds echoes all through the twentieth century ion the differing approaches to black empowerment taken by W. E. B. Dubois as opposed to Booker T. Washington, and in later decades, Malcolm X compared with Martin Luther King. Later African American literature, in terms of aspirations, is hardly utopian in vision and scope. In Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun, the Younger family’s dream (their utopia if you like) is constrained by racial prejudice and is limited to being able to move in to a house in a white neighborhood. Perhaps the sheer level of injustice and violence directed towards African Americans over the centuries has meant that utopian literature has been seen as a trivial irrelevance. Indeed, one might make a case for saying that the finest expression of African American utopianism was made in a real speech by Martin Luther King on August 28th, 1963. Thus, it is only through a real political speech delivered by a real community leader that the African-American utopia can be imagined, such was the lack of African American empowerment at the time.
In conclusion, it can said that the utopian genre has particular appeal for American writers because of America’s original status as a tabula rasa; that it a genre that is especially popular at times of crisis in American historical or social life; and, finally, that it is a genre that has largely failed to include African Americans and Native Americans in its imaginative vision. It is also a genre fraught with tension, because on the one hand, America has always promised a fresh start away from the mistakes of the European past, but it has also stood for individual freedom and emancipation – which may, at times, be at odds with the uniformity and conformity that most utopian fictions aspire to.
Works Cited
Bellamy, Edward. Looking Backward. 1996. New York: Dover Publications. Print.
Claeys, Gregory. The Cambridge Companion to Utopian Literature. 2010. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Print.
Fabi, Maria Giulia. Passing and the Rise of the African American Novel. 2001. Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Print.
Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. Herland. 1999. New York: Dover Publications. Print.
Griggs, Sutton E. Imperium in Imperio. 2007. Charleston, SC: Bibliobazaar. Print.
Hansberry, Lorraine. A Raisin in the Sun. 2001. London: Methuen. Print.
Hilton, James. The Lost Horizon. 2005. London: Summerdale Books. Print.
Kesey, Ken. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. 1962. London: Picador. Print.
Levin, Ira. This Perfect Day. 1972. London: Pan. Print.
Mizruchi, Susan Laura. The Rise of Multi-Cultural America: Economy & Print Culture, 1865- 1915. 2008. University of North Carolina Press. Print.
Serafin, Steven & Bendixen, Alfred. The Continuum Encyclopaedia of American Literature. 2005. New York: Continuum International Publishing Group. Print.
Skinner, B. F. Walden Two. 1976. London: Macmillan. Print.
