On utopias, past and present

Imagine a world where all property is held in common. Everyone earns the same salary, paid by the state. They are apportioned jobs most suited to their abilities and likes, whether banker, builder, mechanic or cleaner.

They retire early, living out interesting and rewarding lives funded by equal pensions from that beneficent state.

Or a country peopled entirely by women. They reproduce by parthenogenesis. There is no crime, no war, no strife, no domination of one class of people by another.

Or a country where respect for nature is so entrenched, where the love of nature and a green, eco-friendly way of life is so strong that they even have a special word for the love of the patch of land you grew up on.

Visions ahead of their time

All three of these utopias were imagined by authors writing a century or more ago. I have always had a fascination for these early attempts to imagine the perfect society, a brand of proto-science fiction focused on political and social change. Much of mainstream science fiction is dystopian.

Brave New World, 1984, Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We, PD James’ The Children of Men, Margaret Attwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. And those apocalyptic, post-nuclear works such as Nevil Shute’s On The Beach, where the remnants of humanity are gradually extinguished by radiation poisoning.

Utopias are much rarer. Perhaps they are seen as less interesting.

Blueprints for a better world

The socialist utopia comes from Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backwards 2000 – 1887. Though largely forgotten today, it was enormously influential then: only the second novel published in the US to sell a million copies.

People set up societies to promote his socialist ideals, though he seems to have preferred the term “nationalism”, believing a strong but benevolent state was essential.

It follows a young Bostonian who falls into a coma in the 1880s and awakes in the year 2000, when that socialist society has been in place for some decades.

A rival vision: Morris responds to Bellamy

Interestingly, the Bellamy book appears to have inspired a rather better-known utopia at the time, William Morris’s News From Nowhere, published in 1890. Morris’s work is similar to Bellamy’s, and is likewise a critique of capitalism, but he disagreed with several tenets of Looking Backwards, not least in its belief in a highly centralised state.

Poster for Morris Mania exhibition — Morris mania poster © William Morris Gallery

(Morris is these days better known for his work in design and involvement with the Arts and Crafts movement. This month sees an exhibition of his work, ‘Morris Mania’, at his home in Walthamstow, east London.)

The second, feminist utopia is from Herland, by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. A party of explorers stumble across a rumoured but undiscovered country peopled only by woman. It was published in magazine form in 1915 and rediscovered more recently as a proto-feminist work.

Nature, love and liberation in Wright’s Islandia

The ecotopia is Islandia, by Austin Tappan Wright, surely one of the oddest episodes in twentieth century fiction. Wright was a respectable lawyer who worked in Boston and then became an academic in Berkeley, California. He was seemingly a pillar of the establishment, from a prosperous, well-connected family.

He died in a car accident in 1931. Among his effects was found a huge pile of manuscripts detailing the imaginary continent of Islandia, its genealogy, its language – a bit like Tolkien but without any dragons or hobbits.

Wright turned out to have some decidedly peculiar ideas for someone of his time and background. The women of Islandia were entirely liberated, enjoying complete sexual freedom.

He coined three names for different types of love. Apia was erotic love, Alia that love of place, and Ania, mature love in a close marriage.

A cult revival for a utopia ahead of its time

Perhaps, not surprisingly, Islandia was rediscovered in the 1960s and 1970s, where Wright’s ideas were rather more in keeping with the times than in the buttoned-down 1920s in the US. It is not a great work. It is very long and very wordy. I don’t think Looking Backward or Herland are great works either, much of the former being the nature of the socialist society explained at great length to the protagonist.

All three works, though, use the same framing device. They allow the central characters to return to their homelands and see the true reality of them for the first time. The young Bostonian goes back in a dream to the 1880s and is horrified and revolted by the poverty and misery he had not previously been aware of, the squalor, the women prostituting themselves to feed their children. He wakes up, and he is back in the year 2000.

In Islandia, the young diplomat returns to the US, to be appalled by the overcrowding, the industry and the resulting pollution.

In the sequel to Herland, With Her In Ourland, the explorers and one of the women visit the US of the time. It does not come out well.

These are three odd byways of literature, and as I say not great literature. It is interesting, though, to realise that such ideas were already emerging among some writers ahead of their time.