Feminist Utopian Novels of the 1970s

Joanna Russ and Dorothy Bryant

Tatiana Teslenko

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• ISBN:
  9781135885168
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This book presents an exploration of the reinvented utopia that provided second-wave feminists of the 1970s with a conceptual space to articulate the politics of change. Tatiana Teslenko argues that utopian fiction of this decade offered a means of validating the personal as well as the political, and of criticizing a patriarchal social order. Teslenko reveals feminists' attempt through fiction to envision a new political order.

CHAPTER ONE

Utopia and Utopianism

Our reality is essentially unfinished, and utopian dreaming is important precisely because it describes a possible future (or a range of possible futures) located within real life. Both ideology and utopia are consigned to a symbolic realm of ideas which is outside this reality and can be contrasted with it. In this chapter, I will discuss Ernst Bloch’s and Karl Mannheim’s insights on the relationship of utopia and ideology.

A diachronic look at the efforts to define utopia reveals some interesting dialectics: in order to demonstrate one or more utopian traditions, scholars have to define utopia, but that definition itself emerges from existing traditions. As Lyman Tower Sargent argues in “Three Faces of Utopianism Revisited” (1994), the basic utopia, eutopia, dystopia lexicon must be complicated to express the range of materials that authors have recently created, though his criterion in all cases is the existence of at least one work that fits into a single category. In particular, he challenges anti-utopia and dystopia, two commonly used terms: “Anti-utopia is in common use as a substitute for dystopia, but as such it is often inaccurate, and it is useful to have a term to describe those works that use the utopian form to attack either utopias in general or a specific utopia” (“Three Faces of Utopianism Revisited” 30–37)). At the same time, he concludes, recognizing changes in the utopian traditions, we need to realize that those traditions still exist. The task of defining utopia is problematic due to the evolution of utopian traditions, that is, in turn, caused by real-life social developments.

There is now a consensus in the critical discourse that the traditional utopian emphasis on perfection is outdated; most commentators argue that adhering to this characteristic of utopia easily leads to misrepresentation of the continuous evolution and dynamic nature of utopianism as a “living dream of poets.” I find that this patriarchal approach to utopia cannot be applied to the analysis of feminist utopia because it is incomplete in two important ways: a) it fails to capture the richness and diversity of utopian thought; b) it creates a view of utopia which sees it as closing debate, ending progress, and providing ideal conditions for stagnation and decay.

Needing to redefine utopia, I will explore Lyman Tower Sargent’s seminal index of utopias, grounding my approach in it. I will further examine the concept of the utopian chronotope, the futility of blueprints, and the emphasis on ideology in utopian fiction.

UTOPIA AND IDEOLOGY

Without the Utopias of other times, men would still live in caves, miserable and naked. It was Utopians who traced the lines of the first city…. Out of generous dreams come beneficial realities. Utopia is the principle of all progress, and the essay into a better future. (Anatole France, cited in Mumford 22)

The above comment of Anatole France implies that the common-sense meaning of the term utopia is twofold: first, it refers to the ultimate human dream of perfection in an imaginary land; second, it is directly connected to progress because it outlines rational efforts to remake human nature, environment and institutions, and to enrich the possibilities of communal life. Since the time when More spun on eutopia or “good place,” commentators have added dystopia or “bad place” and anti-utopia or “not a good place.” Therefore, the imaginary utopian place must be recognizably good or bad for the readers. To enrich and challenge the common-sense understanding of utopia, researchers have done a lot of spinning around these three terms, one of the latest additions being as unusual as uchronia or “not when” (Sargent “Three Faces of Utopianism Revisited” 1–2). Moreover, we should also remember that utopias evolve diachronically: most sixteenth-century eutopias would horrify today’s readership even though the authors’ intentions were progressive for that time. On the other hand, most twentiethcentury eutopias would be considered dystopias by sixteenth-century readers; many of them would likely be burnt as “the works of the devil.”

In her influential book “The Concept of Utopia” (1990) and in her recent paper “Educated Hope: Ernst Bloch on Abstract and Concrete Utopia” (1997), Ruth Levitas provides an account of a more recent and complete discussion of utopianism while providing extensive comments on the past definitions and the current situation in utopian scholarship. She starts with the seminal work of Ernst Bloch which has been widely incorporated into utopian studies as a justification and celebration of utopianism. Bloch’s work fulfilled the need to defend utopia against those who regard it as trivial or dangerous (Levitas “Educated Hope” 65).

In his encyclopedic study, The Principle of Hope, Ernst Bloch richly details the presence of a utopian impulse which he understands as “the human capacity to fantasize beyond our experience and the ability to rearrange the world around us” (Bloch 1:3). It is fundamental to Bloch’s argument that reality does not consist only of what is, but includes what is becoming or might become. The material world is essentially unfinished and in a state of process—a process whose direction and outcome are not predetermined. Levitas agrees that the utopian impulse is a crucially important human activity which is conditioned by “the unfinished-ness of the material world” (66). It is true, then, that utopia is the expression of hope, but that hope is to be understood “not…only as emotion… but more essentially as a directing act of a cognitive kind” (Bloch 1:12).

Bloch makes an important distinction between abstract and concrete utopia. This distinction is fundamental to the relationship between utopia and any political orientation involving a commitment to social transformation (Levitas “Educated Hope” 65). Without this distinction, utopians can only visualize alternative worlds; the point of political activism, however, is to create one. For Bloch, then, abstract utopia is fantastic and compensatory: yes, it is wishful thinking, but the wish is not accompanied by the will to change anything. Concrete utopia embodies what Bloch identifies as an essential utopian function, that of simultaneously anticipating and affecting the future. While abstract utopia may express desire, only concrete utopia carries hope (Levitas “Educated Hope” 67). Concrete utopia, understood both as content and function, is within the real, but relates to what Bloch describes as Front, or Novum, that part of reality which is coming into being on the horizon of the real. This particular location (within, but on the edge of the real) means that utopia is transcendent; yet, it is “transcendent without transcendence” (Bloch 1:146). Sheila Delany (1983) divides utopia into two categories: the programmatic and the ideological. The former stresses a comprehensive social critique and serious social planning; it attempts to demonstrate what should change and what might realistically replace present arrangements; and it also tends to propose social reforms that give scope to human variability. According to Delany, the ideological utopia tends to minimize social criticism or confine it to a few key areas of social concern, to simplify both social criticism and social planning in accordance with a specific, schematic ideology, and to offer a static social structure that emphasizes uniformity rather than variety (157–160).

In this study, I will follow the distinction proposed by Bloch, treating feminist utopias as concrete utopias that carry hope and simultaneously anticipate and affect the future. Bloch’s distinction between abstract and concrete utopia can be clarified by comparing it to Karl Mannheim’s understanding of ideology and utopia (one of the chapters in which Bloch discusses the issue is entitled “The Encounter of the Utopian Function with Ideology”). Mannheim views both ideology and utopia as categories of ideas incongruous with reality. However, utopias are oriented to the future and represent those ideas that transform reality in their own image, whereas ideologies are oriented to the past and serve to legitimate the status quo. Consequently, not all forms of wishful thinking are categorized as utopias. Mannheim agrees that “wishful thinking has always figured in human affairs” (184). For Mannheim, those forms of wishful thinking which do not serve to affect the future are not utopias at all. For Bloch, they are utopias, but largely comprise abstract utopias.

Both Bloch and Mannheim point out that their distinctions are analytical and their categories are ideal types: concrete utopia contains abstract elements, ideology may contain utopian elements, and utopia may contain elements of ideology. Whereas concrete utopia, like Mannheim’s utopia, is anticipatory, transformative and linked to the future, abstract utopia (while compensatory) is not necessarily linked to the past in the sense of sustaining its social forms (although it does draw upon memory rather than imagination in the construction of its images). Mannheim’s ideology is anti-utopian in function; Bloch’s abstract utopia is not.

Another fundamental difference is in the relationship between utopia and reality. Mannheim sees reality as given, and, moreover, regards the question of what is real as unproblematic. Both ideology and utopia are consigned to a symbolic realm of ideas that lies outside of this reality and can be contrasted with it. For Bloch, reality is essentially unfinished, and concrete utopia is important precisely because it describes a possible future (or a range of possible futures) located within the real. It is not only subjectively anticipated in utopian thinking (as a product of the “not yet conscious”), but treats objective reality as the “not yet become” or as the real-possible future, whether or not in any particular case it becomes actual reality. Whereas Mannheim can only retrospectively define ideas as utopian, since they qualify only if they succeed in realizing themselves, Bloch’s open future dispenses with the criterion of success in distinguishing between abstract and concrete utopia. Mannheim fears utopia as irrational and potentially revolutionary while Bloch welcomes the “red dream” and the revolution.

UTOPIA AS LITERARY GENRE

As a literary genre, utopia is not only a subset of utopianism, but has a “composite” structure: it resembles a novel yet usually lacks developed plot and character; it resembles a political tract yet generally lacks the close argumentation or the explicit agitational point. In his prefatory note to A Modern Utopia (1905), H.G.Wells was “vacillating over the scheme of this book” and asking himself whether his utopia was “an argumentative essay, a discussion novel or a ‘hard narrative.’” Wells concludes that utopia is “a sort of shot-silk texture between philosophical discussion on the one hand and imaginative narrative on the other” or “a hybrid of the two” (Delany 157).

An important generic characteristic of utopia is its chronotope—an imaginary location in time and space related to a representation of a certain set of values of the utopian community. In his essay “Forms of Time and the Chronotope in the Novel” (1981), Bakhtin observes that every genre has “a certain chronotope which expresses space/time relations that reflect certain social beliefs regarding the placement and actions of human individuals in this particular space and time” (Bakhtin “Forms of Time” 233). Bakhtin understands chronotope as a formally constitutive category of literature; he ventures to say that “it is precisely the chronotope that defines genre and generic distinctions, for in literature the primary category of the chronotope is time” (85). The chronotope as a formally constitutive category determines to a significant degree the image of the individual in literature. From this, Bakhtin infers that the image of the individual (protagonist) is always intrinsically chronotopic. Projecting Bakhtin’s concept on the utopian genre, we can define the utopian chronotope as a means for uncovering social contradictions that employs a certain way of expressing time’s fullness: the way of utopian inversion. Utopian thinking locates such categories as purpose, ideal, justice, perfection, the harmonious condition of the individual and society in the utopian space and time. Discussing the concept of the Golden Age, Bakhtin points out that “this particular ‘trans-positioning,’ this ‘inversion’ of time is typical of mythological and artistic modes of thought in various areas of human development; it is also characterized by a special concept of time” (Bakhtin’s emphasis, 147). In utopia, the world of the future (or the alternative present) is not homogeneous with the real-life present and the past, it is somewhat empty and fragmented, with just enough detail to support its ideological plane. The primary characteristic of the utopian chronotope is its ambiguity or the conditional mode of the narration: utopia is often presented as a dream, a vision, an illusion. Kenneth Burke suggests that in order to understand how reality is apprehended “what we want is not terms that avoid ambiguity, but terms that clearly reveal the strategic spots at which ambiguities necessarily arise” (Burke’s emphasis, Grammar xviii). Therefore, ambiguity becomes a resource for multiple utopian visions in alternative worlds that are governed by laws different from the real-world laws. Tzvetan Todorov defines the particular kind of ambiguity in utopia as “problematic in terms of its existence”:

The ambiguity is sustained to the very end of the adventure: reality or dream? Truth or illusion?… The person who experiences the event must opt for one of two possible solutions: either he is the victim of an illusion of the senses, of a product of the imagination—and laws of the world then remain what they are; or else the event has indeed taken place, it is an integral part of reality—but then this reality is controlled by laws unknown to us. (Footnote 24, quoted in Delany 160–161)

The next essential characteristic is the prominence of the ideological difference: utopia describes an imaginary “community” or “society” with a distinctively differing ideology; in this way, ideology is rendered (more or less) discursively visible. This makes utopia social and ideological in nature: the term generally refers to works which describe an imaginary society in some detail. Some centuries stressed certain aspects of societal life and neglected others, and some authors are concerned with certain parts of society more than others. But, as researchers point out, it must be a society—a condition in which humans (or utopian people) express themselves in a variety of ways. For example, Darko Suvin defines utopia as:

the verbal construction of a particular quasi-human community where socio-political institutions, norms and individual relationships are organized according to a more perfect principle than in the author’s community, this construction being based on estrangement arising out of an alternative historical hypothesis. (132)

Lyman Tower Sargent argues that Darko Suvin misses an important point found in J. Max Patrick, who says “a Utopia should describe in a variety of aspects and with some consistency an imaginary state or society” (293). On the other hand, Suvin’s definition is important in emphasizing that most utopias are based on “an alternative historical hypothesis” or, in other words, an explanation of how the better society came into being. Utopias are often criticized for simply describing the society without indicating how that society was or could be achieved. While many utopias skip such explanations altogether, they are, as Suvin notes, frequently there.

A traditional characteristic of utopia that is currently being debated is whether it should strive to provide a blueprint for a perfect society. Many classic utopias are characterized as finite or static, or representing/ desiring perfection. These are the fundamental characteristics of any encyclopedia or dictionary definition,¹ and, as such, they form the pivotal terms of the standard view of utopia. Some authors insist that the utopian society must be perfect and therefore unrealizable. One goes so far as to say that “Utopia is a place where everybody lives happily ever after,” which obviously does not include dystopias and critical utopias. People do not “live happily ever after” even in More’s Utopia. As Sargent (1975) demonstrated, perfection has never been a characteristic of utopian fiction, but the misuse of the word perfect persists (Cf. Sargent, “A Note”).

Sargent defines the broad, general phenomenon of utopianism as social dreaming: “the dreams and nightmares that concern the ways in which groups of people arrange their lives and which usually envision a radically different society than the one in which the dreamers live. But not all are radical, for some people at any time dream of something basically familiar” (Sargent “Three Faces of Utopianism Revisited” 3). Sargent further maintains that utopianism has been expressed in three different forms, each with many variants—utopian literature, which includes two fundamental traditions (which he calls body utopias or utopias of sensual gratification, and city utopias or utopias of human contrivance); communitarianism; and utopian social theory. He makes an important point when he argues that it is essential for commentators to keep these forms distinct and not deny the existence of any of the three.

In his more recent work, Lyman Tower Sargent further elaborates the term “utopia” as an umbrella term to update his basic definitions. He discusses the dialectics of the efforts to define utopia and acknowledge its traditions: in order to demonstrate that there is one or more utopian traditions, we have to define utopia, but that definition emerges from the existing traditions. Sargent reflects briefly on the nature of definitions, arguing against the very possibility of defining since the act of defining depends on where we stand and who we are. At the same time, says Sargent, we constantly make distinctions and must do so to have any sort of control over the flow of information and knowledge that passes through us each day. These distinctions are the root of definition. It is necessary to be able to say that something is utopia or not-utopia, intentional community or not-intentional community. At the same time, it is ne...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• List of Tables
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter One
• Chapter Two
• Chapter Three
• Chapter Four
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Glossary
• Bibliography