Utopia ut&dyst in am cult

Previously published in this series:

23. Multiculturalism and the Canon of American Culture, 1993
24. Victorianism in the United States, 1992 *
25. Cultural Transmissions and Receptions, 1993
26. Modern American Landscapes, 1994
27. Fair Representations, 1994
28. Hollywood in Europe, 1994
29. American Photographs in Europe, 1994
30. American Culture in the Netherlands, 1996
31. Connecting Cultures, 1994
32. The Small Town in America, 1995
33. 'Writing' Nation and 'Writing' Region in America, 1996
34. The American Columbiad, 1996 *
35. The Insular Dream, 1995 *
36. Brave New Worlds, 1995
37. Social and Secure? 1996
38. Living with America, 1946-1996, 1997 *
39. Writing Lives, 1998
40. Through the Cultural Looking Glass, 1999
41. Dynamics of Modernization, 1999
42. Beat Culture, 1999
43. Predecessors, 1999
44. Ceremonies and Spectacles, 2000 *
45. The American Metropolis, 2001
46. Transatlantic Encounters, I en II, 2000
47. Federalism, Citizenship, and Collective Identities in U.S. History, 2001
48. Not English Only, 2001

49. "Nature's Nation" Revisited, 2003 *
50. Straddling Borders, 2004
51. Dreams of Paradise, Visions of Apocalypse, 2004
52. Religion in America, 2004
53. Public Space, Private Lives, 2004
54. Working Sites, 2004

Nation on the Move, 2002 **

DREAMS OF PARADISE, VISIONS OF APOCALYPSE

Utopia and Dystopia in American Culture

edited by

Jaap Verheul

* These volumes have been produced for the European Association for American Studies
(E.A.A.S.).
** This title is not a volume in the series, but closely connected with it.

VU UNIVERSITY PRESS

AMSTERDAM 2004

EUROPEAN CONTRIBUTIONS TO AMERICAN STUDIES

This series is published for the Netherlands American Studies Association

(N.A.S.A.) and the European Association for American Studies (E.A.A.S.)

General editor:

Rob Kroes

Amerika Instituut
Spuistraat 134

1012 VB Amsterdam

VU University Press is an imprint of
VU Boekhandel/Uitgeverij bv
DeBoelelaan 1105

1081 HV Amsterdam

The Netherlands
E-mail: vu-uitgeverij @vuboekhandel.nl

ISBN 90 5383 898 8 (ECAS no 51)

NUR 686

This volume is published with the financial support from the Royal Netherlands
Academy of Arts and Sciences

Copy editor: Kate Delaney
Design cover: De Ontwerperij (Marcel Bakker), Amsterdam
Cover illustration: Coll. Library of Congress: photo Brooklyn Bridge, 1896 (Geo. P.
Hall & Son)
Printer: Wilco, Amersfoort

and VU University Press, Amsterdam

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in an retrieval
system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical,
photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written consent of the
publisher.

CONTENTS

Introduction: Utopia and Dystopia in American Culture

Jaap Verheul

I. WRITING UTOPIA: CONSTRUCTING THE AMERICAN

REPUBLIC

America and the "British Revolution:" Geopolitics and Transatlantic
Emigration in the 1790s' Jacobin and Anti-Jacobin Novel

W.M. Verhoeven

Debating Domesticity: Women, History, and Utopia in the Early Republic

Teresa Murphy 26

The Leopard's Spots: Thomas Dixon's Dystopia of Radical Reconstruction

Anneke Leenhouts 34

II. UTOPIAN DREAMS AND DYSTOPIAN REALITIES IN

THE GILDED AGE

"The Eyes of All People Are Upon Us:" Utopia, Dystopia and Brooklyn
Bridge

Richard Haw

"Instruct the Minds of all Classes:" Celebrations of Empire at the American
Circus, 1898-1910

Janet M. Davis

"In Perfect Operation:" Social Vision and the Building of the Panama Canal

Alexander Missal

Producerist Dreams and the Dystopia of "Wage Slavery" and "Progress"

Mel van Eiteren

Bullying the Pulpit: Harold Frederic's Challenge to Authority in American
Culture

Lisa MacFariane

A Utopian America: Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Herland

Madide Martin Gonzalez

100

CONTENTS

III. LOCATING UTOPIA: CITIES, FRONTIERS AND

LANDSCAPES

Resuscitating Willem Kieft: Utopian Alternatives to Dystopian Traditions

Christopher Pierce 111

Dangers Within and Dangers Without: Director-General Petrus Stuyvesant
and the Building of a New Society

Jaap Jacobs 122

Los Angeles in the 1930s: Magic City, White Utopia, or Multicultural
Museum?

Julia Ley da 130

"The Fall of America:" Confessional Narrative and the Documentary
Literature of the Great Depression

Richard Nate 137

In and Out of History: Forest Lawn's Ideal America

Kevin McNamara

149

IV. REALIZED UTOPIAS AS TECHNOLOGICAL DYSTOPIAS

From Utopia to "Real-topia"—Inventing the Inevitable

David E. Nye 161

Cyber Dreams and Nightmares: Early Adopters, Luddites and the
Millennium Bug

Kate Delaney 173

Apocalypse Now: Evangelical Visions of Dystopia at the End of the Last
Millennium

Nancy A. Schaefer 183

Reprogramming Human Nature: Utopian and Dystopian Views in Science
Fiction

Elisabeth Kraus 198

V. LITERARY UTOPIAS AND APOCALYPTIC

PROJECTIONS AT THE END OF A MILLENNIUM

Utopian Literature in the United States 1990-2000

Lyman Tower Sargent

207

CONTENTS

The Utopias and Dystopias of Generation X

Paul McDonald 220

Apocalypse and Utopia in the Works of Gerald Vizenor

Suzanne Harmsen-Peraino 228

How the West Was Lost: Apocalyptic Visions of Multicultural America in
Bharati Mukherjee's Leave it to Me

Andrea Dlaska 239

Notes on Contributors 249

AMERICA AND THE "BRITISH REVOLUTION:"

GEOPOLITICS AND TRANSATLANTIC EMIGRATION IN

THE 1790S' JACOBIN AND ANTI-JACOBIN NOVEL

W.M. Verhoeven

University of Groningen

"Come to these Arcadian regions where there is room for millions, and
where the stings of outrageous fortune cannot reach you... ."

— Gilbert Imlay, The Emigrants

"Happy, happy shores [of Britain]... . How few comparative evils do you
know. Unvisited by savage war—insulated from a treacherous and rapa-
cious foe—untainted by pestilence, and at a distance from the climes, where
earthquakes and tornados in one moment swallow up, or sweep away the
exertions of a century"
— George Walker, The Vagabond

The political and sociocultural climate of the 1790s in Britain is marked perhaps

above all by the rise and fall of Jacobin radicalism: while the initial euphoria follow-
ing the French Revolution gave rise to dreams of liberty, democracy, emancipation,
and the perfectibility of mankind, the Terror provoked a conservative, anti-Jacobin
onslaught on radical thinking that effectively laid the foundation for what was soon
to become the bourgeois hegemony of "middle England."

This crucial shift in the

ideological focus of the 1790s pursuit of happiness in Britain can be traced accu-
rately in the textual markers left to posterity by a proliferating number of travel writ-
ers reporting and commenting on "America," one of the most evocative symbols in
the long-standing western tradition of Utopian projections of the Golden Age.
Among the more familiar schemes associated with late-eighteenth-century Romantic
primitivism is Coleridge's Pantisocracy, the ideal site for which he found in Thomas
Cooper's 1794 eulogy on Pennsylvania, more particularly the area at the confluence

of the two branches of the Susquehanna river; what is less well-known is that the
first suggested site for Coleridge's Pantisocracy was the Kentucky hinterland, the

I use the term "Jacobin novel" to refer to the fiction written in the service of social and po-

litical reform during the 1790s by novelists such as Robert Bage, William Godwin, Mary
Hays, Thomas Holcroft, and Elizabeth Inchbald, who in the publications of anti-Jacobin writ-
ers were often represented as subverting church and state in the interests of French republi-
canism and atheism. Unlike their anti-Jacobin colleagues, Jacobin writers had a firm belief in
the perfectibility of society, which was reflected in their belief in social progress; reason;
natural rights; individualism; political justice; liberty; democracy and equality; agrarianism; a

written constitution; and separation of church and state.

W.M. VERHOEVEN

main advocate for which was the land-jobber and womanizer Gilbert Imlay, who had
outlined his dreams of a physiocratic utopia on the banks of the Ohio River in 1792.

The ideological, discursive, and military tussles that demarcated and con-

solidated English nationalism in the course of the 1790s coincided with—indeed,
significantly contributed towards—what is regarded as the culmination of Britain's
transformation into a print culture. The proliferation of writers and readers in the
final decades of the eighteenth century was matched by a sharp increase in the vol-
ume of printed material, as well as in the kinds and numbers of genres of written
English. One of the most popular genres of the period was the travel narrative, both
that reporting on real and, increasingly in the 1790s, imaginary journeys. The grow-
ing popularity of the travel narrative can probably be explained by the fact that of all
contemporary textual genres, the travel narrative most fully contained the cultural
markers of the age: for—as Todorov has argued—pre-twentieth-century Western
travel narratives are by definition "colonialist" (allowing both the traveler/narrator
and, implicitly, the reader to be "curious about the other, and secure in [their] own
superiority"), the travel narrative both represented and disseminated the dominant
ideologies of nationhood ("Englishness" as opposed to "otherness"), Enlightenment
(Reason; empiricism; common sense), colonialism (empire), and class (the trading
middle class). In this essay I will argue that in the 1790s' British travel narratives,

especially the narratives of emigration, "America" became a crucial site of contesta-
tion where supporters of the "new philosophy" and opponents of Jacobinism met in
discursive battle over Britain's cultural capital—staging in America's imagined
"backwoods" a British version of the French Revolution, which the increasingly
repressive political climate at home prevented from taking place on British soil.

Although until the 1780s, roughly, the travel novel about America played

second fiddle to the (quasi-)factual travel account—indeed, without the "real" travel
narratives, there would not have been fictional ones—for practical purposes I want
to limit the scope of my analysis to a discussion of fictional travel narratives of the

1790s only. Immediately following the end of hostilities between Britain and Amer-

ica, there was a sharp increase, both in absolute numbers and percentages of the total
production, in the number of British novels that in some form or other dealt with
American scenes, whether in the plot, in an episode, in dialogue, or merely in pass-
ing references or in the title.

Whereas before, in the 1760s and 1770s, interest in

For a discussion of the rivaling land-jobbing schemes developed by Gilbert Imlay and Tho-

mas Cooper, see my essay "Land-jobbing in the western territories: radicalism, transatlantic
emigration, and the 1790s' American travel narrative," in Amanda Gilroy, ed., Romantic Ge-
ographies: Discourses of Travel, 1775-1844 (Manchester: Manchester University Press,
2000), 184-203.

Tzyetan Todorov, The Morals of History, trans. Alyson Waters (1991; Minneapolis and

London: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1995), 69.

That the American War affected the production of novels in Britain is borne out by the total

output figures. The number of novels published in Britain in a year rose from around twenty
in the early 1760s to over fifty novels per year in the early 1770s; then, as political tension
began to rise, the number began to drop, to eventually fewer than twenty novels in 1776; the
numbers recovered somewhat in the early 1780s, but it was only a couple of years after the
Peace of Paris in 1783 that the production figure shot up to, on average, eighty novels or more
per year. For further statistical data on the publication of English novels in the period, see

AMERICA AND THE "BRITISH REVOLUTION"

novels about America was largely positive and idealist (as America became the ob-

ject of Arcadian dreams and primitivist longings associated with the Golden Age),

during the Revolutionary War the interest in America shifted from the Elysium motif
to that of the asylum of the oppressed and the nursery of liberty. But it was only after
the radical Jacobin spark of the French Revolution had begun to ignite restless pro-
gressive minds in Britain, that America in the English novel began to be depicted as
a radical, physiocratic alternative to "corrupt" and "despotic" Europe—a country
that was no longer a Romantic, Utopian dream but the real-life destination for all
those believers in Godwinian radical anarchy and other "new philosophies" who
were contemplating emigration to the land of liberty, equality, and fraternity. Thus, I
want to contend that Gilbert Imlay's 1793 novel The Emigrants is a key text when
trying to fathom and understand the popular appeal of the radical emigration move-
ment to America. Though until now largely ignored by critics and only recently pub-
lished in a modern edition (Penguin, 1998), The Emigrants was extraordinarily in-
fluential in the mid-1790s and initially generated a whole string of imitators, includ-
ing Frances Jacson's Disobedience (1797) and the anonymous Henry Willoughby

(1798). However, in the later 1790s, as the spirit of radicalism began to wane, The

Emigrants became the focus of anti-Jacobin diatribe, first mildly, as in Berkeley Hall
(anon., 1796), and then rather more vitriolically, as, notoriously, in George Walker's

The Vagabond (1799).

* * *

The American Gilbert Imlay (17547-1828?) was a man of many trades and talents,
few of which were within the confines of what is conventionally regarded as legally
and morally acceptable behavior. A self-styled "Captain" in the American Revolu-
tionary Army, Imlay set out to try his luck across the Allegheny Mountains in the
Ohio Valley soon after the 1783 Treaty of Paris had ended the war with Britain. In

Kentucky he became deeply involved in various shady activities, including land
speculation schemes and dubious secessionist politics. Having piled up more debts
than he could handle and constantly having to elude sheriffs' summonses and court
writs, Imlay quietly left the west and America some time in late 1786. He reappeared
in London in 1792, in which year his first and highly influential book appeared, A
Topographical Description of the Western Territory of North America. This was fol-

lowed, in 1793, by his only other known publication, the epistolary Jacobin novel

The Emigrants.

Besides being an eclectic account of the American Horn of Plenty and a

practical 'How-to-emigrate-to-Kentucky' guide, Imlay's Topographical Description
can be regarded as a comparative analysis of, in the words its narrator, "the simple
manners, and rational life of the Americans, in these back settlements" and "the dis-
torted and unnatural habits of the Europeans," which, the book's "editor" reminds

us, "have flowed no doubt from the universally bad laws which exist [in Europe],
and from that pernicious system of blending religion with politics, which has been

Robert Bechtold Heilman, America in English Fiction: 1760-1800 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana
State University Press, 1937), chap. III.

W.M. VERHOEVEN

productive of universal depravity."

In this analysis of the American back settle-

ments, Imlay goes beyond earlier attempts to map the socio-political significance of
the region. For although it has been claimed in the past that Imlay's Topographical
Description is closely modeled after (or even concocted from) earlier topographical
classics,

it is evident that, unlike its predecessors (with the exception of Jefferson's

Notes), Imlay's book constitutes a sustained geopolitical doctrine, in that it not

merely describes the western territories in terms of a New Canaan for the prospec-
tive emigrant but also provides the physiocratic rationale for the opening up and
development of the western territories.

A real estate developer avant la lettre, Imlay's topographical description of

the western territory of the United States, as well as the geopolitical vision based on
it, centers around just two natural phenomena: mountains and rivers—more particu-
larly, the Allegheny Mountains and the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers. The Allegheny
Mountains, which until the 1760s caused the colonization of America to be con-
tained within the relatively confined coastal strip bordering on the Atlantic, have
undergone a crucial metamorphosis in Imlay's Topographical Description, as well as
in his novel The Emigrants. Rather than an impregnable obstacle for further west-
ward expansion, the Alleghenies are presented to us in both texts, not so much as a

physical, but a moral watershed, separating the pastoral innocence of the western

settlements from the social evil, political corruption, and religious blindness that
dominated life in the eastern states; as The Emigrants has it, the "chaste regions of
innocence and joy" lie to the west of the mountains, while vice runs rife in Bristol
and the east.

But Imlay knew well enough that even a Promised Land is a worthless land

if it is not easily accessible. The northern route to Kentucky—by wagon from either
Philadelphia or Baltimore across the Alleghenies to Pittsburgh and then down the
Ohio River on flat-bottomed barges—was an onerous one, and no matter how
smooth Imlay makes the journey appear, it would (as John Filson and others had
observed before) continue to render produce dear in the western settlements. The
key to the back settlements lay in the navigability of the Mississippi and Ohio Riv-

ers, and it is not surprising that in his Topographical Description as well as in The
Emigrants Imlay dwells at length on the West's unique transportation potential of
interlocking rivers and lakes, which effectively turns the region into a physiocratic
paradise.

And, once the problem of upstream navigation had been solved with the

Ibid., I^

Notably Thomas Hutchins's A Topographical Description of Virginia, Pennsylvania, Mary-

land, and North Carolina (1778); Jonathan Carver's Travels Through the Interior Parts of
North America (1781); Thomas Jefferson's Notes on the State of Virginia (1784-85); Comte
de Buffon's Histoire Naturelle (1749 - 1804); Jedidiah Morse's American Geography (1789);
Brissot de Warville's New Travels in the United States (1792); and, especially, John Filson's
The Discovery and Settlement ofKentucke (1784).

Gilbert Imlay, The Emigrants, ed. W.M. Verhoeven and Amanda Gilroy (1793; New York:

Penguin Books, 1998) 213. Further references will be cited parenthetically within the text.

Cf: "You will observe, that as far as this immense continent is known, the courses and extent

of its rivers are extremely favourable to communication by water; a circumstance which is
highly important, whether we regard it in a social or commercial point of view. The inter-
course of men has added no inconsiderable lustre to the polish of manners, and, perhaps,

AMERICA AND THE "BRITISH REVOLUTION"

help of steam, this would enable the dwellers on Kentucky's green and fertile fields
to open up communication and trade with the settlements on the Pacific coast and in
Canada. Seeing that, "[a]ccording to the present system, wealth is the source of
power" and that "the attainment of wealth can only be brought about by a wise and
happy attention to commerce," Imlay proudly concludes that the western regions, far
from being an outpost of civilization on the margins of America, were actually at the
heart of the North American experiment and mankind's best bet to realize even the

wildest, most extreme notions of physiocratic idealism and Neoclassical perfectibil-

ity.

Imlay's novel The Emigrants in many respects simply puts into fictional

form the ideological concerns of the earlier text. While downplaying any overt
commercial angle, the plot nevertheless emphasizes the ease with which the emi-
grant may travel west and how an elaborate infrastructure of roads and waterways
will be at his disposal once he arrives there. With its sentimental interest frequently
being put to the service of its geopolitics, it is therefore no coincidence that The
Emigrants at times reads more like a travelogue than a novel. Thus, the opening let-
ters make much of the heroine's insistence to walk much of the way across the Alle-
gheny Mountains (in sharp contrast to her lethargic brother, George, who prefers to
be carried on a wagon, along with the old people in the company)—more like a pic-
turesque tourist than a pioneer. But even more significant is the unstoppable wander-
lust of the hero, Ari—ton, which first takes him from Pittsburgh down the Ohio
River to Louisville, and later, in what John Seelye calls "a fit of expansionist
pique,"

further west, via St.Vincent's (Vincennes) toward St. Anthony's Falls and

the sources of the Mississippi, from where he plans to travel down the river to
Kaskaskia, then up the Missouri, back again to Kaskaskia, down the Mississippi to
New Orleans, and from there back to Baltimore. Even though Caroline's captivity by
the Indians forces Ari—ton to prematurely abandon his frantic wilderness trip, the
reader gets the distinct impression that moving across vast tracts of the rugged
American landscape is not more arduous, and only slightly more risky, than a jour-
ney in rural England or a promenade in London, and certainly much more thrill-

ing—sublime or picturesque sights being available at every twist and turn of the
emigrant's tour. As Caroline puts it, "here is a continual feast for the mind" (25).

Imlay's physiocratic dream of an independent western state governed by the

laws of reason and humanity is fulfilled in the Utopian community founded by the
hero Ari—ton toward the end of The Emigrants. Ari—ton confirms that he turns to
the western territory as the site of his new society, named Bellefont, "as its infancy
affords an opportunity to its citizens of establishing a system conformable to reason
and humanity" and is thus able to "extend the blessings of civilization to all orders
of men" (233). The community is situated on the banks of the Ohio near Louisville

commerce has tended more to civilize and embellish the human mind, in two centuries, than
war and chivalry would have done in five" (Gilbert Imlay, A Topographical Description of
the Western Territory of North America [London: J. Debrett, 1792], 107-8).

Gilbert Imlay, A Topographical Description of the Western Territory of North America

(1792; 3rd, expanded ed., London, 1797), Introduction, xii.

John Seelye, Beautiful Machine: Rivers and the Republican Plan, 1755-1825 (New York

and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 156.

W.M. VERHOEVEN

and constitutes in total an area of about 256 square miles, which is parceled out to
men who served with Ari—ton in the Revolutionary War (presumably because they
are most likely to be men of honor and common sense). These men and their fami-
lies will live in an idyllic, enchanting spot, against the background of the impetuous
Ohio River, the gushing fountain that gives the community its name, fertile mead-
ows, whispering breezes, and warbling birds. The days follow a regular routine of
agricultural cultivation and rural relaxation, including much dancing to rustic music.
Bellefont is no doubt the type of insular Arcadia promised by Imlay to prospective
emigrants as part of his land-jobbing activities. However, the society is organized
along radical, Godwinian notions of social and political justice; each man owns the
section of land that he occupies, and all males over the age of twenty-one are enti-
tled to vote for members of a house of representatives, who, in turn, elect a presi-
dent. The members are to meet every Sunday throughout the year to discuss issues
of agriculture, arts, government, and jurisprudence. The subversive, anti-
ecclesiastical Sunday meeting as well as the structure of its government confirm that
Ari—ton's community is to be an atheistic, secessionist state, independent of the
government of the United States.

For this is the ultimate significance of Imlay's Arcadian project: blending

the region's rivers with its mountains, soil, climate, and natural resources into a
physiocratic, geopolitical doctrine of progress and universal prosperity, Imlay's work
ultimately transcends the travel narrative proper and sublimates it into a metaphor
for Utopian radicalism—in effect creating a prototype of the doctrine of Manifest
Destiny, albeit with at least one significant difference. Crucially, Imlay's
physiocratic millennium does not have its origin in the early colonial experiments in
Virginia and New England, nor even in the ideological energy released by the
American Revolution: instead, Imlay envisages the cradle of his physiocratic utopia
to be in the West, more particularly in Kentucky, and the ideological forces that rock
it to be generated by the French, rather than by the American Revolution. Indeed,
underlying Imlay's dream of America is a fervent plea for a secessionist utopia
across the Allegheny Mountains that creates an ideological dichotomy between two
distinct Americas: between the eastern states, which he regards as an outpost of an
earlier, Puritan exodus, whose original energy had petered out and had become per-
meated with the social evils of the Old World, and the "true," trans-Alleghenian
America in the West, which was radically discontinuous with the earlier, European
colonization of North America.

It is surely a sign of the immense popularity of Imlay's transatlantic pas-

toral project and of the degree to which it became incorporated into the cultural dis-
course of broad sections of British society to see sympathetic reworkings of Belle-
font appear in several contemporary novels—not Jacobin novels as such, but novels
of manners, and hence geared toward instilling "correct" ideas and the "right" feel-
ings in their readers. Thus, Frances Jacson's Disobedience (1797) tells the tale of
William Challoner and Mary Hastings, the hero and heroine, who, having experi-
enced the persecutions of their respective parents, decide to leave their native Wales
to seek a freer, happier, and less troubled life in America. They, too, make the Imlay
trip—by wagon across Pennsylvania and the Allegheny Mountains and down the
Ohio by boat—to finally settle in a prodigiously flourishing private venture in Ken-
tucky (at which point the novel's prose explodes into a delirium of superlatives). In

AMERICA AND THE "BRITISH REVOLUTION"

Henry Willoughby (1798) disgust with life is again what triggers the sally into the
American wilderness. Again the American episode comes rather late in the tale,

when Monthermer, the friend of the eponymous hero, escapes from the brutal treat-
ment in the British navy and seeks refuge in Revolutionary America. Falling in with
a family of Friends who are on their way to the back settlements until the war is
over, Monthermer finally arrives at the small Quaker settlement of Anachoropolis,
near the Falls of St. Anthony on the Mississippi, where the settlers "enjoy the pas-
toral life in all its primitive innocence, and Arcadian felicity."

Blending an imper-

fect knowledge of Quakerism with a limited understanding of the doctrines of the
new philosophy, the author attributes the success of this pastoral idyll to the fertility
of the soil, the distribution of labor, collective ownership of property, religious toler-
ance, and an elaborate system of liberal education based on Rousseau's ideas.

Whilst both Disobedience and Henry Willoughby to some extent reflect the

popular appeal of Imlay's pastoral myth of the retreat from European evils to the
American wilds, it has be noted that by 1797-98 Imlay's Arcadian trimmings were
facing constant attack from an increasingly sceptical and conservative press. Thus,
the Critical Review lashed out at the latter novel's "stale political allusions and rhap-

sodical declamations in favour of emigration to America," while the reviewer in the

British Critic wondered why, since so much of the scene was laid in Wales, the au-
thor did not treat the reader to "some glowing descriptions of that picturesque coun-

try" but instead revealed "a leaning towards America, which disposes him to feel
more pleasure in extolling the wilds of Kentucky, than describing the Mountains of
Llamamon."

Accusing the author of misanthropy, the reviewer of Henry Wil-

loughby in the Gentleman's Magazine commented dismissively, "if such a man [like

Monthermer] chuses to forego society, which, even in its present state, has its
charms and advantages, in God's name let him quit them to those who can enjoy
them; and we heartily wish he may be as happy as Robinson Crusoe with his mon-
key on his desart island."

Also rejecting the author's misanthropic slant, the re-

viewer in the Monthly Review commented, "There are many vices and evils to cure
among us; yet not enough to make it necessary, in order to the enjoyment of happi-
ness, that we should abandon our country for the deserts or savannahs of America."

The same reviewer concludes his remarks by observing that novels "have lately been
the vehicles of certain speculative principles, in which these are artfully exhibited as
established truths, essential to the improvement and happiness of man; and human

nature in her present state is blackened beyond reality, in order to give them effect.
We protest against this as an unfair proceeding; and no system can be good that
wants such aid." It is clear from these reviews that in the second half of the 1790s
Imlay's "Arcadian regions where there is room for millions" were rapidly receding
to the printed pages of none-too-successful tales.

Anonymous, Henry Willoughby, 2 vols. (London: Printed for G. Kearsly, 1798), II, 229.

Critical Review, n.s., 25 (February 1799), 233; British Critic 12 (November 1798), 542-43.

Gentleman's Magazine 72 (August 1802), 742.

Monthly Review, n.s., 27 (October 1798), 233.

W.M. VERHOEVEN

According to A.D. Harvey, "Of the dozen or more anti-reform novels, George
Walker's The Vagabond (1799) was easily the best. Walker had perhaps the distinc-
tion of being the only novelist between Sterne and Jane Austen who succeeded in
being funny when he tried. His novel was also, though almost the shortest of the

group, the one containing the most elaborate exposé of reform ideas." Indeed, The

Vagabond is a delightful novel. Offering a vitriolic critique of post-Bastille Jacobin-
ism and sans-culotte-style mob rule, its true-to-life satirical portraits of many of the

radical men and women who fought in the forefront of the "British Revolution" are
nonetheless full of playful banter and farce. For George Walker may be known as a
prominent exponent of the satirically reactionary school of the Anti-Jacobin, slash-
ing away at everything "liberal," but underlying his satire is a humor and geniality

seldom found in works of this school. With major swipes at Hume, Rousseau,
Godwin, Wollstonecraft, and Paine among persons; the French Revolution among
events; and the noble savage, natural virtue, liberty, equality, and romantic primitiv-
ism among ideas, The Vagabond offers a unique cross-section of 1790s radicalism.

What gives this section a real feel of the 1790s, so to speak, is the way in which
Walker seamlessly blends historical events (such as a rendering of the Gordon Riots,

or the activities of the London Corresponding Society) and historical figures (includ-
ing Thomas Holcroft; Tom Paine, as "Citizen Ego"; and Gilbert Imlay, as "Citizen
Common") into his fictional tale. The climax of the first volume is a thrilling repre-
sentation of the British Revolution-that-might-have-been, in which Frederick leads a
mob of blood-thirsty "radicals" on the rampage through London—looting, torching
buildings, and even attacking the Bank, the Tower, and—not to be outdone by the
French—Newgate Prison, setting free all the "victims of injustice" incarcerated
there. Added to wild and Gillrayesque scenes of riot and uproar in the streets and

taverns of London is a string of equally hilarious transatlantic adventures of the
novel's radical hero and his motley entourage. The climax of the book is an excur-
sion to found a backwoods utopia in America, where squabbles, Indian scalpings,

and mosquitoes eventually wreck the emigrants' illusions. In short, The Vagabond is
a novel that makes the 1790s come alive in a way that few other novels of the period
achieve.

The first volume is set in and around London and introduces us to the four

main characters: Frederick Fenton, the hero-vagabond, a student boiling over with
radical enthusiasms; Doctor Stupeo, who was Frederick's tutor before his father
fired him and who initiated Frederick into the "new philosophy"; Doctor Alogos, a
country gentleman with radical ideas; his beautiful niece Laura; and a kitchen maid
named, Susan, who is also Alogos's mistress. By the time the story opens, Frederick
has come down in the world, making a living as a highwayman, though only robbing
people ostensibly in strict accordance with the Godwinian principle of "greater

need." Thus, holding a gun to Doctor Alogos's breast in the opening scene, Freder-

A.D. Harvey, "George Walker and the Anti-Revolutionary Novel," Review of English Stud-

ies 28:111 (1977), 290.

For a detailed discussion of the historical context of The Vagabond, see the introduction

and appendices in my forthcoming edition of the novel (Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press,
2001).

AMERICA AND THE "BRITISH REVOLUTION"

ick reminds his victim, "All property is a monopoly ... and unless you can prove that
some other has a greater claim to your property, I must have the contents of your
pocket"—upon which the Doctor exclaims, "You are a philosopher" (I, 5), takes him
home, and invites him to tell his life story.

It appears that Frederick was born into the landed gentry, and had had all

the advantages of his class in terms of comfort and education. However, under the
influence of his college preceptor, the polygamist Doctor Stupeo, Frederick had
learned to regard those who held property as tyrants; respecting and obeying one's
parents as unnatural; and all bonds of loyalty and trust, as well as promises, as im-
moral. Instead, Doctor Stupeo immersed Frederick in (quasi-)Humean lore, includ-
ing the notion that "to doubt is the first step to be a great philosopher, and the more
you doubt, the more real knowledge you are possessed of (I, 21); that man has no
soul but is merely "a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeed
each other with inconceivable rapidity, and are in a perpetual flux and movement" (I,
28); and that "All ideas are only slighter impressions than realities, and there is no
other difference between reality and idea" (I, 29). By the time Stupeo was sacked by
Frederick's father and his son returned home again, it was too late. Acting upon Stu-
peo's thesis that in a system of "genuine liberty" men would no longer be able to
claim exclusive rights to a particular woman, Frederick seduced Amelia, the fiancée

of his best friend, Vernon. When a fire gutted Amelia's house, Frederick dithered so
long trying to decide which was the "greater good"—saving the now pregnant Ame-
lia first, or her father—that both perished in the flames. A number of irate local
farmers persuaded Frederick that it was best to make a strategic withdrawal. Arriv-
ing in London, Frederick was caught up in a total break-down of law and order.
Soon the leader of an angry mob, he managed to liberate Stupeo during an attack on
Newgate Prison, only to see him struck down by a bullet at his side. Having with-
drawn to the countryside when things began to get too hot, Frederick became a
highwayman. During a raid on a coach, which happened to contain his parents, Fre-
derick unwittingly killed his mother, and was nearly shot by his father. The latter
allowed Frederick to make his escape from the authorities.

Impressed by the young man's story of his life, Doctor Alogos takes Freder-

ick up into the commune of new philosophers that has established itself at his house,
which also includes Laura, Alogos's mistress, Susan, and, ultimately, Doctor Stupeo
as well. As the two Doctors go about their business proselytizing among the parish-
ioners to persuade them to drop their faith and adopt the new philosophy, Frederick
begins a long siege of Laura's virginity. However, to his utter chagrin and humilia-
tion, Frederick gradually discovers that neither Wollstonecraftian or Godwinian doc-
trines of natural love and sexual liberty, nor plain-old flattery has any effect on
Laura, who more and more reveals herself to be the only voice of reason and com-
mon sense among the new philosophers—constantly pointing out inconsistencies in
her companions' radical ranting and criticizing their American emigration scheme as
"a wild-goose chase after happiness" (II, 58).

A lengthy debate among the new philosophers about the pros and cons of

leaving Britain for the "terrestrial paradise" of America—where the War has recently
ended (1783)—ends with the company finally setting off in the second volume of
the novel. After a stormy passage across the Atlantic, during which they are at one
point so miserable that they are quite willing to abandon their doctrine of atheism

W.M. VERHOEVEN

and scepticism for the smallest of blessings of the Supreme Being, the radical travel-
ers arrive at long last in Philadelphia. Expecting to have arrived at "the place where
truth and justice had erected the standard of reason" (II, 125), the emigrants are soon
confronted with a whole string of disappointments. Not only do they discover that
the "renowned city" is much smaller than rumored, not to mention in the throes of
an outbreak of yellow fever, but also that the climate is extremely unpleasant (being
excessively hot); prices exorbitantly high; and the people rude and aggressive. Not
surprisingly, the emigrants are more than willing to talk to the land-jobber offering
his services to the new arrivals. Recommending agriculture as "the most noble pur-
suit of independent man" (II, 132), "Citizen Common" bursts forth in a euphoric ode
on the Kentucky wilderness: "it is the most delectable spot on the face of the earth; it
is a second Arcadia—a continued scene of romantic delight and picturesque pros-
pects" (II, 134-33). Citizen Common proudly cites as his authority on Kentucky an
"author of undoubted veracity"—indeed, his lengthy description of the heavenly
region of Kentucky is a literal quotation from Imlay's Topographical Description.

Having purchased a thousand acres of land from Citizen Common, and having spent
an extra one thousand pounds on provisions and farm implements, the emigrants set

out across the Allegheny Mountains toward Fort Pitt, and then down the Ohio River
toward Lexington—the same route Imlay's emigrants had taken before. However,
Lexington, that "metropolis of the finest country in the world," turns out to consist
of only "about thirty ill-looking wooden houses" (II, 143), but what is worse, the
estate they have bought turns out to be already occupied by another settler. Although
the owner, an attorney, offers to go to law for them over the issue, Doctor Alogos
declines: "what[,] are there laws and lawyers in a wilderness? I expected to have
found nothing worse than rattle-snakes and tigers" (II, 145).

In an attempt to escape from all blights of society, the emigrants decide to

buy another tract of land 150 miles east of Lexington and embark on a long and ar-
duous march through the wilderness. Instead of blooming orchards and sugar-
groves, the travelers are treated to "insufferably hot" weather, with "millions of in-
sects" and snakes tormenting them night and day, and "prodigious large frogs and
toads wallowing in every little tank of stagnant water" (II, 148). Arriving at their
new estate, they find their property "covered with prodigious large trees, which

seemed to bid defiance to human labor. A thick cane brake over-ran half the surface,
and was so matted and entangled with the trees, that they could not even clear a path
through. The ground, which was not thus covered, was apparently so barren, that the
black heaths of England were a sort of comparative garden" (II, 149). Stubbornly

refusing to abandon their radical principles in the face of evident failure, the emi-
grants settle down to a miserable existence. Alogos and Frederick are soon debili-
tated by fits of ague, whilst Stupeo puts into practice some of the age's radical
thoughts on sexual freedom and forms a liaison with Susan, who, having grown tired

of Alogos, is more than willing to contribute her share toward "peopling this wilder-
ness" (II, 155). Susan duly becomes pregnant, and gives birth to a son, subsequently
expiring in agony because of the lack of proper medical care—an event soon fol-

In a footnote to the text, Walker acknowledges his source ("See Imley's [sic] Romantic

Account of Kentucky"; II, 137); the quote is actually from the Topographical Description,

138-39.

AMERICA AND THE "BRITISH REVOLUTION"

lowed by the death of her child. Then a tribe of Indians steals all their goods and
kidnaps Laura. Whilst in hot pursuit of the kidnappers, our emigrants get lost and
wander long in the woods, quickly degenerating into "truly the vagabond children of
nature" (II, 258). A severe earthquake shatters the last remnants of their pastoral ide-
alism, and the company now deeply regrets ever having entered the wilderness. Stu-
peo is the last to give up faith in Rousseau's teachings about the blessings of life in a
natural state, but by then it is too late for him. When the vagabonds are finally cap-
tured by the "children of nature," the latter tie Stupeo to a stake, stick his body full

of pine knots, and set fire to him, "mocking his cries, and encouraging their children
to dart at him little pointed arrows" (II, 262-63). Thus the "great philosopher, meta-
physician, and politician" (II, 265), who minutes before was still arguing that "Pain,
pleasure, life, death, every thing is an idea, or Hume must be wrong" (II, 261), "per-
ishes] in the heat of his own ideas" (II, 265). The timely arrival upon the scene of a
band of hunters led by Vernon (who turns out to have already rescued Laura), saves
Frederick and Alogos from a similar fate. While Alogos blesses Providence and
curses the day he became a convert to the new philosophy, Frederick confesses: "the
new sophisticated jargon of philosophy and impracticable liberty, had rendered me
insane. I have, however, been the pupil of experience, and have seen the ashes of

Stupeo scattered in the wind" (II, 268). With their reform completed, the former
radicals hasten back to "the land of genuine liberty, where there is not one man so
obscure as not to possess a right, not one man so high, as not to be subject to the
laws" (II, 272-73).

It is probably because of its explicit satire that The Vagabond seems less a

work of sheer invention than most other anti-Jacobin and anti-emigration novels, but
it is at the same time evident from the text that, unlike so many of his colleagues, the
author knew what he was talking about when he was denouncing the new philoso-
phy, and that he had at least talked to people who had had actual experiences in
America. Nor is the satire in The Vagabond a matter of gratuitous jeering or of trying
to score easy points against Jacobinism. Indeed, Walker has avoided establishing
predictable one-to-one relationships between any of the characters and the historical
radicals that are the butts of his satire, thereby creating a more nuanced, and less
programmatic type of sociopolitical critique. Thus, we variously recognize Rousseau

("man is a machine"), Godwin ("Society is a fungus, reared in the hotbed of lux-
ury"), Wollstonecraft ("not to be confined in a gilded cage"), and Hume ("man has
no soul") in the opinions and observations of all three of the male protagonists. And
yet, even though Walker shows himself to be quite familiar with the various theo-
retical and philosophical concepts and doctrines of his political opponents, perhaps
the main strength of The Vagabond is the way in which the author has managed to
narrativize his critique of the new philosophers.

Walker's enemy number one is Godwin, and the main target of his criticism

is the manifesto of the "new philosophy," Political Justice. In order for the reader to
fully enjoy the sarcasms leveled at Godwin's "system," Walker has consistently
footnoted his novel with detailed bibliographical and explanatory references to Po-
litical Justice (and to a lesser degree to The Enquirer), while in his Preface he speci-
fies the edition of Political Justice he has used (the 4

edition). The Godwinian doc-

trine that comes in for special sarcastic treatment is the thesis "that, in the old system
of things, the labour which was performed by a certain number of the lower people,

W.M. VERHOEVEN

could be done in half-an-hour's labour, for each individual per diem" (II, 190). In the
lengthy description of the "Perfect Republic" (II, 183-242), which the new philoso-
phers stumble upon in the Pennsylvania wilderness during their erratic search for the
kidnapped Laura, Walker depicts the fatal consequences of this experiment in the

equal division of labor. Since "all [are] equal, and all labourers, and all studying the
public good" (II, 190), the whole community is in a state of neglect and decay, with
the citizens going about naked, buildings forever uncompleted, all specialized skills
lost, and education never rising above the level of basic knowledge. While Doctor
Stupeo praises the Perfect Republic as a country "where the new philosophy com-
pletely triumphed, protesting if they had but a little brandy, he would prefer it to any
spot on the earth" (II, 241), their local guide, Parecho, understands the real nature of
the problem: "if all is base, all equality, there can be no building, and of all build-
ings, the pyramidical is found to resist longest the destruction of the elements. Had
Nature designed men to be equal ... she would have endowed men with equal stat-
ure, prowess, and intellect" (II, 211).

AMERICA AND THE "BRITISH REVOLUTION"

ideological, rather than the geographical space) was a country printed in Europe, and
notably in England. If, during the heyday of Jacobinism, the site of happiness had
been located in the transatlantic regions of North America, by the late 1790s it was
firmly replanted on Britain domestic shores—but with America remaining Britain's
significant, albeit negative, "other." In ways that we have yet to fully explore, Amer-
ica was thus much more important to British novelistic and national identity in this

period than literary history has so far recognized. Despite the rapid development of
two distinct and rivaling cultural repertories, post-Revolutionary nationhood in both
Britain and the United States continued to be defined transatlantically.

* *

Analyzing these once popular, but now largely unread novels in the context of the

evolution of the radical movement in the 1790s in Britain, one gains an insight into
the degree in which America played a significant role in both the country's popular
imagination as well as in its ideological battles. Cultural and historical studies of the
Revolutionary Decade in Britain have traditionally concentrated on the French
Revolution and the war with France as the defining events for British identity in the
late eighteenth century; recently, however, new attention has been given to the sig-
nificance of the American Revolution and the loss of the colonies. The present essay

adds a new dimension to the view that the loss of the colonies—frequently referred
to at the time as the "dismemberment" or "amputation" of the Empire—affected
British politics and culture of the 1790s more profoundly than has often been as-
sumed. Indeed, this loss caused a psychic shock that determined future imperial pol-
icy: never again would the English promote the idea of "independent" subjects; fu-
ture colonial administrations would be based on the subordination of indigenous
peoples backed up by the use of force. Positing that the outbreak of the war against
France in 1793 reactivated conservative Britain's undigested trauma associated with
the loss of the American colonies, I argue in this essay that both 1790s' "Jacobin"
radicalism and the "Anti-Jacobin" reaction were less uniquely concerned with the
meaning and impact of the French Revolution than with deciding what the American
Revolution and America's successful bid for independence meant for the social and
political future of Britain. Emigration to America may have been for British progres-

sive minds less a real-life choice than a way to talk about radically reshaping British
society, but the conservative elements took the pro-emigration discourse seriously
nonetheless, and hence attacked the idealist emigration scenarios with fervor. The
two sides in this ideological conflict released an unprecedented stream of documents
relating to North America in general and to travel and emigration to America in par-
ticular, contributing significantly to an already buoyant and prolific print culture. In
fact, it is not a wild exaggeration to say that at this point in time, "America" (i.e. the

DEBATING DOMESTICITY: WOMEN, HISTORY, AND

UTOPIA IN THE EARLY REPUBLIC

Teresa Murphy

George Washington University

The home and the cult of domesticity created around it in the nineteenth century
formed the central Utopian fantasy of the middle class. Removed from the vulgar
world of politics and economy, a spiritual refuge of love, this domestic space was
Utopian in its very timelessness and otherworldly character. It was also dystopian in

significant ways. Ann Douglas argued a quarter of a century ago that this world of
domesticity was a self-created trap of uselessness for the white middle class women
who inhabited it. More recently, scholars have examined how the home was carried
forward under the banner of conquest as gift and discipline. Native Americans, peo-
ples of African descent, and other non-Europeans, all were savages to be domesti-
cated (both politically and personally).

Whether we think about the way in which the otherworldliness of the home

limited middle class white women or the way in which the imperialism associated
with its project assaulted people of color, the oppressiveness of the paradigm is
clear. The female writers who published in this vein are thus inescapably a part of
this broad project. In recognizing this congruence, we have come to recognize the
overriding power of this paradigm: its complicity in racism and conquest despite the

intentions and differences of the various proponents of its value. It was inherently
white, inherently middle-class, and inherently imperialist. Having said that, how-
ever, it was also the site of struggle. Indeed, regardless of how domesticity was—
and is—perceived as a fully formed timeless phenomenon, it had a history. Both its
nature and its boundaries changed and were debated. It is this struggle that interests
me as a key to understanding the way in which women's history emerged as a genre

in the early nineteenth century.

Most analysis of literary domesticity has focused on fiction, but domesticity

is equally important in the area of women's history, which was also emerging as a
genre at this time. Indeed, I would argue that women's history took shape largely
around the very political question of what the exact nature of domesticity should be.
We can see the kind of debate that took place on this question by comparing two
texts that were central in the emergence of women's history: Lydia Maria Child's
History of the Condition of Women published in 1835 and Sarah Josepha Hale's

Ann Douglas, The Feminization of American Culture (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1977),

especially Chapter 2. More recent scholarship on the imperialistic implications of domesticity
may be found in Ann McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colo-
nial Conquest (New York: Routledge, 1995); Amy Kaplan, "Manifest Domesticity," Ameri-
can Literature 70 (September 1998): 581-606; and Shirley Samuels, eds., The Culture of Sen-

timent: Race, Gender, and Sentimentality in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford
Univ. Press, 1992).

DEBATING DOMESTICITY

Woman's Record published almost 20 years later in 1852. But what would probably

strike most readers at first glance are the overwhelming similarities.

Both Child and Hale were not only committed to promoting and analyzing

the domestic role of women; they were also committed to the significance of sepa-
rate spheres. Child thus made a point of condemning the French Revolution as a
time when "people ran wild with the idea that men and women ought to perform the
same duties, and that it was gross tyranny not to choose women to command armies,
harangue senates, &c."

In a similar vein, Hale argued, "I have no sympathy with

those who are wrangling for 'woman's rights,' nor with those who are foolishly urg-
ing my sex to strive for equality and competition with men."

These were writers

who believed in difference and in separate spheres. Both women also explored in
elaborate detail the domestic arrangements of women in the past—whether in bibli-
cal times, classical Greece and Rome, the Renaissance, or the nineteenth century.

Given this orientation, it is not surprising that these early efforts are diffi-

cult for us to place now. There hardly seems to be a point to these histories, let alone
a political point. Or if there is a political point it is one simply that women's place is
in their protected domestic sphere—away from the male world of power and poli-
tics—and by implication, away from history. Ann Douglas, for example, in critiqu-
ing the culture of sentiment, saw in the female obsession with domestic writing both
a critique of and an escape from history. For Douglas, the domestic and the historic
were in opposition. To write a history of domestic life would thus be a contradiction
in terms—domesticity was an escape from history. Nina Baym shares some of this
view in her study of women writing history. Baym is clearly troubled by the early
efforts at writing women's history and concludes that what united authors such as
Hale and Child was not politics but a shared belief in the innate spirituality of
women and their intellectual as well as biological differences from men. Women's
history for Baym represents a decline from the accomplishments of women of the
eighteenth century such as Mercy Otis Warren who wrote political histories of the
state and wrestled with problems of citizenship that in the nineteenth century were
off-limits to women. Even Carolyn Karcher, who argues for an implied feminism in
Lydia Maria Child's work, still finds little of argument in Child's History of the

Condition of Women. Karcher is struck—even a little puzzled—by Child's dispas-

The most important work on the writing of women's history is to be found in Nina Baym,

American Women Writers and the Work of History, 1790-1860 (New Brunswick: Rutgers

Univ. Press, 1995), Chapter 10. Also important is Susan Conrad, Perish the Thought: Intellec-
tual Women in Romantic America, 1830-1860 (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1976), 93-

133.

Lydia Maria Child, The History of the Condition of Women, in Various Nations and Ages

(Boston: John Allen & Co, 1835), vol. II, 156. Subsequent references to this work will appear
as parenthetical notes within the text.

Sarah Josepha Hale, Woman's Record; or Sketches of All Distinguished Women from "the

Beginning" till A.D. 1850 (New York: Harper & Bros., 1852), xxxvii. Subsequent references
to this work will appear as parenthetical notes within the text.

TERESA MURPHY

sionate, rambling mass of facts, and a style that clearly lacked the passion of her
attacks on slavery.

What I would like to argue in this essay is that our difficulty in understand-

ing the arguments and the politics of these works is partly rooted in our failure to
understand the larger historical narrative they were engaging. There was indeed a
discourse of women in history that was circulating in the U.S. when Child began to
write. It had been formulated first in the universal histories of civilization by the
likes of John Millar, Lord Kames, and Adam Smith.

Their work had placed women

and their separate sphere at the heart of their analyses. These conjectural histories
about the stages of civilization moved back in time and across space to create a nar-
rative of the world in which European society was at the apex. According to this
narrative, it was not only wealth or government or literature that indicated the great-
ness of a society, but its domestic arrangements. The educated and virtuous spouse,

alive to the world, but not corrupted by it, was the crowning achievement in civiliza-
tion's march and the bedrock of its continued success. A second set of authors, in-
cluding John Adams, William Alexander, and Antoine Leonard Thomas had moved
one step further. They eliminated the political and economic issues that also ani-
mated these analyses of civilization to focus their narratives solely on women—
creating a body of core texts that would provide the basis for women's history.

In narratives that were as much normative as analytical, a civilization's

progress was narrated as the story of women becoming increasingly removed from
the world of work and committed to a life of sexual chastity. It was one in which

women were assumed to be inherently incapable of political understanding, intellec-
tual rigor, artistic achievement, or military service. The women's histories that
emerged from the likes of Adams, Alexander, and Thomas, might celebrate female
accomplishments—in particular their role in spreading Christianity or in educating
themselves—but these accomplishments were always circumscribed by assumptions

of innate difference and the importance of women's separate sphere in the home.
Home was the cradle of civil society—the non-private cradle of civilization and
government.

This was the discourse of women's history circulating in the United States

in the early years of the republic. The books were read by literate women and quoted
in a variety of contexts—in speeches, newspaper articles, and private correspon-

Douglas, Feminization of American Culture, 165-199; Baym, American Women Writers,

214-228; Carolyn Karcher, First Woman of the Republic: A Cultural Biography of Lydia
Maria Child (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 1994), 224.

John Millar, The Origin of the Distinction of Ranks; or an Inquiry into the Circumstances

which Give Rise to Influence and Authority, in the different Members of Society (London: J.
Murray, 1779); Henry Home, Lord Kames, Sketches of the History of Man (1778; reprint,
Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlagbuchhandlung, 1968); Adam Smith, Inquiry into the Nature
and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (Dublin: 1776.)

William Alexander, The History of Women from the Earliest Antiquity to the Present Time

(1782; reprint, Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 1995); John Adams, Sketches of the History, Genius,

Disposition, Accomplishments, Employments, Customs, Virtues, and Vices of the Fair Sex in
All Parts of the World (1790; reprint, Gettysburg: Robert Harper, 1812); Antoine Leonard
Thomas, Essay on the character. Manners, and Genius of Women in Different Ages; Enlarged

from the French ofM. Thomas by Mr. Russell (Philadelphia: R. Aitken, 1774).

DEBATING DOMESTICITY

dence. Many of the individual women were particularly well known and debated—
Aspasia, Hortensia, Lady Jane Grey, to name just a few. And the very public activi-
ties of these women were of special interest to women participating in reform activi-
ties of the early nineteenth century. I suspect that is why they were read by women

such as Maria Stewart and Carrie Chapman Catt and quoted in newspapers such as

the Voice of Industry? Many of these women were also negotiating and reshaping
the boundaries between public and private, domestic and political. To a large extent,
the narrative that had been created in these earlier histories of women was the narra-
tive of domestic feminism: the narrative that women had an important role to play in
their sphere, but that their sphere was different from that of men. Thus difference,
rather than equality, was at the heart of their power (or more precisely influence.)
But their separate sphere could be conceived as a relatively broad—even public
arena.

Child's Condition of Women was really the first full-fledged attempt in the

United States to engage this narrative and create a history of women. It shared in
many of the characteristics of those produced in Europe: it moved back in time
through the Old Testament and across space to consider the condition of women in
Asia and Africa. Indeed, one of the most striking things about Child's work is the
way in which she copied, almost verbatim, large portions of Adams' work in particu-
lar. This was not an unusual practice—Adams had copied many of these same por-
tions from Thomas. Indeed, what this suggests, more than anything, is the somewhat
ambiguous nature of this genre. As much epic as history, the tradition was to tell and
retell the same stories of the same characters, though perhaps with a different twist.

That is, in fact, precisely what Child did. Her stories of women featured

biblical figures, women in Greece and Rome, the queens of Europe, and benevolent
women in the United States. Far less passionate than her appeal on behalf of African
Americans, there was nothing overtly polemical in the style of this history. With
little in the way of explicit arguments, Child lent authority to her perspective by the
simple recitation of events. History for her was not an act of literary representation,
so much as it was scholarly mining. Repeating verbatim well-known stories (and
adding a few that were not so well known), Child was simply laying "facts" before
her audience. Her own authorship disappeared as the facts merged with representa-
tion. This is no doubt why Karcher found little argument in the book and Baym saw
no sign of female agency.

But within this narrative construction, there were some very disruptive

elements, particularly in light of the tradition she was engaging. For example, Child
recounted from the Bible how "Jacob found Rachel tending the flocks of her
wealthy father." Earlier histories would have argued that this physical labor by Ra-
chel was evidence of women's (and thus society's) degraded position during this
time. Child, however, hastened to point out that Rachel's work in the field was not a

The Voice of Industry recommended William Alexander's book in an article on January 23,

1846; Maria Stewart cited Adams' Sketches of the Fair Sex in her 1833 Farewell Address to

Her Friends in the City of Boston, reprinted in Marilyn Richardson, ed., Maria W. Stewart:

America's First Black Woman Political Writer, Essays and Speeches (Bloomington: Indiana

Univ. Press, 1987), 68; Carrie Chapman Catt, the famous suffragist, owned a copy of Adams'
book also, which is now in the Library of Congress.

TERESA MURPHY

sign that women were badly treated during this time. "The performance of these
tasks does not necessarily imply a deficiency of respect for women, for at that period
kings and princes were in the habit of reaping their own grain, and slaying their own
cattle" (I: 4). Indeed, Child even suggested that such activities might bring with
them significant privileges. She concluded, "In the patriarchal ages the Jewish

women must have enjoyed a large share of personal freedom; for we read of all
ranks engaged in the labors of the field, and going out of the cities to draw water"
(I: 6).

Even more striking is Child's depiction of women in ancient Athens. Like

the other writers, Child deplored the treatment of respectable women in ancient
Greece because they were denied education and forced to endure physical solitude in
their homes. As a result, it was argued, courtesans had gained undue influence over
men. But Child went to great lengths to defend the courtesans condemned by other

historians for their loose morals. These were the brave women who "alone dared to
throw off the rigorous restraints imposed upon the sex, and devote themselves to
graceful accomplishments, seductive manners, and agreeable learning." The respect
these women received could no doubt be traced to this assertiveness, and their lack
of modesty was assumed to follow from the way they had to assert themselves for an
education. Child particularly went to great lengths to defend Aspasia:

Aspasia, first the mistress and afterward the wife of Pericles, obtained unri-
valled influence and distinction. The most celebrated of the Athenian phi-
losophers, orators, and poets, delighted in her society, and statesmen con-
sulted her in political emergencies. They even carried their wives and
daughters to her house, that they might there study agreeable manners and
graceful deportment. This, together with the fact that Pericles made her his
wife, and to the day of his death retained such a strong affection for her,
that he never left her to go to the senate without bestowing a parting kiss,

seems to imply that she could not have been so shockingly depraved as
many writers have supposed. It is more probable that she deserves to rank
in the same class as the Gabrielles, and Pompadours of modern times.
(II: 20)

Although Child went out of her way to celebrate the importance of female chastity
and modesty throughout this two-volume history, she also recognized that historical
circumstances could shape a woman's options, and chastity was not always the most

admirable path. The context mattered when judging moral behavior, a kind of rela-
tivity very much at odds with the more inflexible standards of stage theorists such as
Millar.

It is probably not insignificant that a similar kind of relativity would show up in the next

decade in Harriet Jacobs' autobiography, which Child helped to edit. For excellent discus-

sions of the significance of Jacobs' autobiography in critiquing the cult of true womanhood,
see Hazel V. Carby, Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-American
Woman Novelist (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1987), chapters 2 and 3, and Jean Fagan
Yellin, Women and Sisters: The Antislavery Feminists in American Culture (New Haven:
Yale Univ. Press, 1989), chapter 4.

DEBATING DOMESTICITY

Finally, Child included a discussion of women as political leaders that was

significantly at odds with earlier histories. While Adams had described the rights of
queens in his history, and Child followed suit, she also added several paragraphs on
the political activities of other kinds of women, beginning with the comment that
"English history presents many instances of women exercising prerogatives now
denied to them" (II: 145). She then described various government offices held by
women in the past, from governor of the house of correction to grand chamberlain to
clerk of the crown (II: 145).

Lest her readers miss the significance of the challenges posed by these ex-

amples, Child also took on the generalizations of difference articulated by stage
theorists such as Kames and historians of women such as Adams, who felt that
women simply did not have the same political capacities as men. When it come to
the ability to govern, Child argued bluntly, "There has been a comparatively greater
proportion of good queens, than of good kings." Explaining this generalization,
Child continued, "Perhaps it may be that women, distrustful of their own strength,
pay more attention to the public voice, and their government thus acquires some-
thing of the character of elective monarchies." Beyond this general characteristic of
women, however, was also the force of particular individuals, from Queen Elizabeth
to Margaret of Denmark and Norway to Isabella of Castile, Zhinga of Angola, and
Catherine of Russia. Having enumerated outstanding queens in the history of the
world, Child also cited the bravery of women when their societies were at war in a
broad range of different times and places. "The personal bravery evinced by women
at all periods excites surprise," Child concluded (II, 206-207, 209).

Child's history is certainly a bit unfocussed. But I would like to suggest that

this lack of focus is part of the point. This is a style that undercuts the triumphal
march of civilization and disrupts the narrative of progress that most of the earlier
universal histories contained. Histories work best with victory, but Child doesn't
know where to locate it. And while committed to the idea of separate spheres, Child
repeatedly disrupts that commitment in work, in sex, in politics. In many ways, she
is raising the kinds of questions that would begin to provoke earnest agitation for
women's rights in the next decade. It's not surprising that Sarah Grimké would re-
package extensive sections of Child's work in her much more polemical Letters on

the Equality of the Sexes.

If challenges to the domestic erupted in Child's work, precisely the oppo-

site was the case with Sarah Josepha Hale. Writing almost twenty years later, after
demands for female rights—including suffrage—had begun to be debated, Hale had
a much clearer vision of her narrative than did Child. And she worked assiduously to
channel all disruptive data about women's capabilities and historical activities into a
different kind of narrative that would contain these challenges.

Hale made it clear in the preface to Women's Record that the authority and

legitimation for women's roles was to be found in religion—not in nature or in so-
cial practice. However, religion, like nature (though not like history) contained a
sense of immutability—a timeless standard against which women's behavior could

Sarah Grimké republishes large sections of Child's work as Letters V, VI, VII, IX, and X in

Letters on the Equality of the Sexes and the Condition of Women (Boston: Isaac Knapp,

1838).

TERESA MURPHY

be judged rather than a contingent one. This framework of a religious narrative
worked well with the biographical approach adopted by Hale—another genre that
lends itself to moral judgment rather than historical explanation. There was nothing
in the nature of historical data that could override the spiritual nature and mission of
women.

Hale argued throughout her biographies that women were always morally

superior to the men of any given time, though morals were generally more degraded
in the past than in the present. Thus Cleopatra might have been wicked, but she was
less wicked than Marc Antony (18). Similar conclusions might be drawn about As-
pasia:

She was the creature of the corrupt institutions which man, by his superior

physical strength, sensuous passions and unjust laws, had imposed on social
life. Yet, as degraded as she was, Pericles, the hero of the Athenians, was
her slave; and Socrates, the wisest of the heathen sages, her admirer and
friend. Thus the woman's spirit held sway over the subtle Greek! Aspasia

was better than those she subdued. They had degraded humanity by degrad-
ing woman; thus compelling her to seek that influence by unholy means
which should have been the right of every Athenian wife, namely, that of
social equality and companionship with her husband. (18)

This was a very different kind of relativity from that proposed by Child. In this case,
historical circumstances did not justify a choice; Aspasia degraded herself. The best
that could be said was that the immutably spiritual character of woman made her

superior to man regardless of when she lived. Hale may have had to deal with the
idea of history, but she worked very hard to define woman's nature as outside of

historical circumstance and to create a narrative in which the endpoint was the time-
less, spiritual world of chaste domesticity.

With women's nature clearly circumscribed as spiritual by no less an au-

thority than the Bible, Hale then proceeded to arrange her biographies along a con-
tinuum of spiritual progress. As she moved through her different epochs—the pre-
Christian, the early Christian, and the Renaissance, she finally arrived at the nine-
teenth century in which she saw women finding their ultimate fulfillment as spiritual
and intellectual vessels, protected from manual labor and political intrigue. The pro-

gress of society and the ethereal nature of women provided witness to one another.
Thus Hale chose Laura Bridgman as her representative figure of the nineteenth cen-
tury. Laura, who was both deaf and blind, had been educated by Samuel Howe.
However, what Hale found most important was not Bridgman's impressive acquisi-
tion of knowledge, but the fact that men such as Howe saw intellectual promise in
all women, even one as enfeebled as Laura Bridgman. She was thus celebrated as
much for how men treated her as for her own accomplishments (564, 592-597).

For Hale, the culmination of female (and civilization's) progress lay in

women who found fulfillment primarily in the spiritual realm. This was a brilliant
rhetorical strategy for closing off discussion of female activities in other arenas as
evidence of possibilities or otherwise desirable behavior. Hale thus effectively dis-
armed the value of historical precedent. It really didn't matter (for her narrative)

whether women had done other things, be they political, military, or economic.

DEBATING DOMESTICITY

Given the unenlightened state of society in the past, this might well be the case.
What mattered was that women move towards more spiritual activities as a fulfill-
ment of their God-given destinies and evidence of their higher purpose than man.
And for Hale, the progress of western civilization and of women were intimately and
surely connected. That was a connection Child had more difficulty making.

When we consider these two works in relationship to the larger master nar-

rative at work on women and civilization, it's not surprising that Child's work would
be so inspirational for the Grimkés in their feminist attack on patriarchy. Without
appearing to argue, Child undercut and questioned many of the central tenets of civi-
lization's progress with her mounds of data. She wrote somewhat aimlessly, in the
style of one who has lost—those poetics, themselves, are important. Hale, on the
other hand, wrote to remove troubling historical date from having any effective
meaning—she created a spiritual narrative that moved women out of history. For
Hale, domesticity was a Utopian ideal removed from time; Child was not so sure.
Those differences in perspective were quite central to the debate that organized the
writing of women's history. These early works in women's history were not so much
an escape into Utopian domesticity as they were a debate about whether domesticity
constituted utopia.

FROM UTOPIA TO "REAL-TOPIA"

—INVENTING THE INEVITABLE

David E. Nye

Odense University

Rather than pose the usual binary opposition between utopia and dystopia, I will
argue that Americans have operated with a cycle of four narratives. First, a Utopian
story emerges, one which questions contemporary society and projects alternative
social arrangements that seem imminently achievable. Second and somewhat later
comes the dystopian moment. The dystopia projects into the immediate future not
improvements but mistakes, not greater equality but greater inequality, not a better
society but one descending into chaos or authoritarianism. Third, even as dystopian
critiques appear, inventors, promoters, and investors are creating various elements of
this utopia in practice. Researchers can easily overlook these scattered materials,
found in newspaper stories, patent descriptions, stock promotions, advertising, trade
magazines, and other sources that propose (usually profitable) solutions to immedi-
ate problems. These texts describe the realization of individual elements of some-
one's utopia, and they are filled with an exuberant boosterism. I call these "real-
topias"—because they claim to represent topias, or places, that are in the process of
becoming real. Such texts are crucial parts of the social (re)construction of everyday

life. They transform the novel into the prosaic; they naturalize change. Finally, sev-
eral generations after the original Utopian impulse, the social arrangements, inven-
tions, and ideas that once seemed novel and inspiring have fallen into disuse. They
may also become the focus of nostalgia. Utopia is replaced by a longing for a lost,
indeed a non-existent past. The "nos-topia" (or place of nostalgia) can be repre-
sented as a museum, theme park, historical reconstruction, television program, or
historical novel. However it is concretized, in a nos-topia the tensions and fears that
animated a dystopia disappear. Where the utopia imagined a radically improved
future, the nos-topia presents an idealized past.

A diagram summarizes (and oversimplifies) the relationships between these

narratives. It can be read both horizontally and vertically. Looking at this chart verti-
cally, both utopia and nos-topia are ideal worlds of harmony and order where his-
torical tensions have been resolved. In contrast, both dystopia and real-topia are
imperfect worlds of competition and conflict. Reading along the horizontal axis, on
the other hand, emphasizes what utopia and dystopia share. Both are unrealized,
overtly ideological projections into the future of present potentialities. In contrast,
both nos-topia and real-topia are concretized in actual objects. They provide narra-
tives for things that already exist, while utopia and dystopia focus less on objects
than ideas.

162

DAVID NYE

perfect

(tensionless)

utopia

nos-topia

imperfect

(conflicted/

fragmented)

dystopia

real-topia

potential unrealized,

overtly ideological

realized/created,

covertly ideological

This chart as a whole is not about Marxist utopia. It does not suggest a dialectic
based on the system of production and manifested in class struggle. It applies to the
construction of American Utopian narratives far more than to those in Europe. The
Marxist tradition also includes utopia within narrative, but as a potential future state,
not something that is described in detail. There was no best-selling Marxist equiva-
lent to Bellamy's Looking Backward in the United States, and the Marxist dialectical

narrative has not been a compelling story to most of the American public. This is an
enormous subject, and I mention it to emphasize that the cycle of American Utopian
narratives I have described is culturally shaped and by no means a universal pattern.

In the United States, the non-Marxist Utopias that predominated can be

understood as the first part of a cycle with four phases. The dystopia and real-topia
emerge together as competing responses to Utopian promise. The "real-topia" often
is less a coherent text than a series of individual projects to realize the Utopian im-
pulse piecemeal, while the dystopia is a more integrated critique of contemporary
trends and potentialities. When real-topia gradually predominates, it takes the form
of many micro-narratives developed to explain the meanings and uses of new ob-

jects. I am thinking here of the social construction of everyday life as described by

Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann.

In some cases, however, the dystopian cri-

tique proves more persuasive, and makes it impossible to naturalize social and tech-
nological change. Alternatively, the real-topian description of the world naturalizes a
transformation. Indeed, it usually does this so effectively that in retrospect the real-
topia seems inevitable.

A generation or two later, the "nos-topia" based on a nostalgic longing for

the past becomes possible, and it brings the cycle to a close. The nos-topia is only
possible when the new conditions which made utopia and dystopia seem possible
have disappeared. The initial vision of Utopian transformation thus passes through a

series of rewritings, and in the process is fragmented, contradicted, absorbed into the

Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construction of Everyday Life (New York:

Doubleday, 1966).

FROM UTOPIA TO "REAL-TOPIA"

163

fabric of daily life, and finally repackaged as a vision of the past. The Utopian im-
pulse itself does not die out, however, for new narrative cycles always begin.

What causes these narrative cycles? Is the narrative impulse a universal constant,
recurring in all cultures? Roland Barthes once argued that narrative is "international,

transhistorical, transcultural."

But even if this argument is correct, Utopias and

dystopias have not recurred with anything like a constant frequency. If we take
Plato's Republic to be the first major work in the genre, there is by any standard a

rather long period between Plato and other classical authors and Sir Thomas More.
Since the Renaissance Utopias have become more common, but they have not been
produced at a constant rate, and public interest in reading them fluctuates as well.
Certain periods produced more such works than others, notably in the United States

during the 1830s and 1840s, and again in the 1880s and 1890s.

Not only has the writing of Utopias become more common since More re-

vived the genre, but there have been frequent attempts to create these ideal worlds in
practice. Missionaries in Paraguay established a community modeled on More's

Utopia. Robert Owen and Charles Fourier inspired experimental communities in

both Europe and the United States in the 1830s and 1840s.

In the 1890s readers of

Bellamy's Looking Backward formed an organization whose goal was to build a

society like that he had described. Such attempts to translate text into reality bring
me to my second argument, that Utopias are closely linked to the emergence of tech-
nologies. The creation of Utopias is not a constant activity; rather it comes in waves.
At certain historical moments interest intensifies, I will contend, because of the
availability of powerful new energy sources and machines. This is not a simple mat-
ter of cause and effect, in which a technology causes Utopian narratives to be written.

Rather, imagining the possible Utopian uses of new technologies has always pro-
moted their development. A good contemporary illustration is the way that investor

enthusiasm has driven up the price of Internet stocks, creating the capital for exten-
sive research and development. Putting money into such stocks requires that inves-
tors buy a Utopian narrative about the technological future.

I will look briefly at six technologies in the American context—water-

driven factories, the railroad, electric power, the assembly line, atomic power, and
the computer—to show how each was enfolded within this cycle of narratives.

Water power. When the United States was a new nation, many debated whether or

not it should industrialize. On one side were the agrarians, most notably Thomas

On narrative and technology, see David E. Nye, Narratives and Spaces: Technology and the

Construction of American Culture (Exeter: Univ. of Exeter Press, 1998 & New York: Co-
lumbia Univ. Press, 1998), 75-92, 179-188.

Roland Barthes, "Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narratives," Image, Music, Text,

trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Hill & Wang, 1977), 79.

On these and other early Utopias in the U.S., see John Humphrey Noyes, History of Ameri-

can Socialisms (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1870: reprinted, New York: Dover, 1966).

164

DAVID NYE

Jefferson, who followed the ideas of the French physiocrats.

On the other side, were

those, notably Alexander Hamilton and Tench Cox, who wanted to follow the Brit-
ish example and build factories. For Jefferson and the agrarians, the new nation was
potentially Utopian in its agricultural state.

Because the United States had abolished

aristocracy, royalty, primogeniture, and other forms of class privilege, and because
the new nation had enormous space for agricultural expansion (albeit at the expense
of Native Americans), the agrarians believed prosperity and progress could be
achieved without industrialization. Yet Jefferson himself was fascinated by mechani-
cal improvements. Far from being averse to manufacturing in all its forms, he oper-
ated a nail factory on his own plantation and installed many ingenious devices in
Monacello. What Jefferson feared was not manufacturing itself, but urban laborers
who had no land of their own, and who might therefore become dependent and ser-
vile.

What emerged from the early American debate on industrialization was a

form qf rural manufacturing quite distinct from that in Britain. American mills typi-
cally employed fewer men than young women and children, and they did not rely on
the steam engine but the water wheel. The power source may seem a mere detail, but
water power by definition was small-scale, non-polluting, and rural. Steam power
operated on a larger scale, it darkened the skies and fouled the water, and it concen-
trated people in cities.

As late as 1840, American manufacturing operated 66,000

water wheels and fewer than 1,000 steam engines.

The most famous manufacturing

community was Lowell, and if one reads the early plans for Lowell and the descrip-
tions written by the first visitors, it clearly was conceived as the Utopian American
alternative to British industrialism. Lowell, the story went, would employ young
women for a few years only, and never produce an industrial proletariat. Instead,
these temporary laborers would save money, improve themselves in their leisure
time, and then leave the factory after a few years, typically to marry and settle else-
where.

The Utopian moment for Lowell was c. 1835. A decade later its workers

were restive, and dystopian accounts of life in cotton mills began to appear. These
accounts described women and children whose health was undermined by the dust,
the heat, and the long hours. By the 1850s the notion that American industrialization
would never result in a permanent working class seemed implausible, as French
Canadians and Irish Americans took many of the worst mill jobs. But after the Uto-

pian discourses of the promoters and early visitors had been forgotten, and after the

Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia (Gloucester: Peter Smith, 1976), 156-158.

This debate is well represented by the selection of documents in Michael Brewster Folsom

and Steven D. Lubar, The Philosophy of Manufactures: Early Debates over Industrialization
in the United States (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1982).

Jefferson, Notes, 157.

On the effects of choosing different energy sources, see David E. Nye, Consuming Power: A

Social History of American Energies (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1998), 43-102.

Louis Hunter, Steam Power (Charlottesville: Univ. of Virginia, 1985), 74.

For more on Lowell and the women who worked there, see John Kasson, Civilizing the

Machine (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977), 62-64; Thomas Bender, Toward an Urban Vi-
sion (Louisville: Univ. of Kentucky Press, 1975); "Excursion to Lowell," Niles Weekly Regis-
ter (July 6, 1833): 313-315; Philip S. Foner, The Factory Girls (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois

1977).

FROM UTOPIA TO "REAL-TOPIA"

165

dystopian rebuttals had become well-known, the cotton mills remained. They be-
came not just familiar but "natural" and by the 1870s, at the latest, such factories
were accepted as an integral part of the American landscape. At this point they were
inscribed into that "real-topia" which is the phenomenology of everyday life. In the
case of the New England mills, this "real-topia" lasted until the 1930s. By the end of
that decade most of them had closed down or curtailed production, which had been
moving South for decades.

Once the mills no longer functioned, their cultural meaning began to change

again, and they could be inscribed in the nostalgic narrative, or the "nos-topia." I am
thinking not only of the Lowell National Historic Site, but also of the many mills that
have been transformed into restaurants, antique stores, and factory outlet malls. Col-
lectively, these restored buildings suggest a lost world that offers a vivid contrast to
the present. Much of the old industrial landscape has been lost, and what survives
reminds the visitor of the superiority of the present. The restoration serves to obscure

the ways in which the mill itself was once novel and transformative. Reconstructed
as "nos-topia," a technology becomes traditional.

The railroad. When the first American railroads were built in the 1830s, Americans
celebrated them in Utopian terms.

In 1836 Daniel Webster asked what was then a

rhetorical question: "Who is so familiarized to the sight even now, as to look without
wonder and amazement on the long train of cars, full of passengers and merchandise,
drawn along our valleys, and the sides of our mountains themselves with a rapidity

which holds competition with the winds?"

Webster and his contemporaries trans-

lated the speed and power of the railroad into political terms. The railway would
bind the nation together with bands of iron, erasing sectional differences. It would
merge local economies into a national market. It would hasten the settlement of the
West.

In "The Young American" Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, "An unlooked for

consequence of the railroad is the increased acquaintance it has given the American
people with the boundless resources of their own soil... .it has given a new celerity to
time, or anticipated by fifty years the planting of tracts of land, the choice of water

privileges, the working of mines, and other natural advantages. Railroad iron is a
magician's rod, in its power to evoke sleeping energies of land and water." Thus
Emerson imagined the railroad as a Utopian instrument of westward expansion. His
rhetoric suggests that nature was not being invaded, rather its "sleeping energies"

were being aroused. Emerson also uses another characteristic rhetorical strategy of
the Utopian narrative: human agency disappears. The railroad is magical, it creates
these effects directly.

On the railroad in the American imagination, see Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden:

Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2000 [reprint

of 1964]).

Daniel Webster, reprinted in Edwin C. Rozwenc, ed., Ideology and Power in the Age of

Jackson (Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1964). I discuss the early enthusiasm for the

railroad in David E. Nye, American Technological Sublime (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994),
45-79.

On the idealization of the railroad, see James Ward, Railroads and the Character of Amer-

ica. 1820-1887 (Louisville: Univ. of Tennessee Press, 1987).

Ralph Waldo Emerson, "The Young American," in Complete Works, Vol. 1 (Boston:

Houghton Mifflin, 1903), 364.

166

DAVID NYE

FROM UTOPIA TO "REAL-TOPIA"

167

Emerson's contemporary, the newspaper editor Horace Greeley wrote in a

similar vein. Greeley emphasized that, "Railroads in Europe are built to connect
centers of population; but in the west the railroad itself builds cities. Pushing boldly
out into the wilderness, along its iron track villages, towns, and cities spring into
existence, and are strung together into a consistent whole by its lines of rails, as
beads are upon a silken thread."

Greeley's conceit was visualized in a popular

Currier and Ives 1868 lithograph, "Across the Continent," in which a railroad train
pushes out across the great plains.

Ahead the track is still being laid, but the area

already served by the railroad contains a prosperous new community, with a promi-
nent public school. The power to move across the land was translated into expansion
and settlement.

Dystopian views of railroads became more common by the middle of the

nineteenth century. In the 1850s Henry David Thoreau complained in Waiden that
the railroad rode man and the same Horace Greeley found that railroads were swin-
dling'the public, abusing the land grants given to them by state and federal govern-
ments. Traveling a new line through Missouri he was surprised to find "infinitely less
population and improvement" than he had expected. "Of course, this road was run so
as to avoid the more settled districts, and thus to secure a larger allotment of the
public lands....I had not believed it possible to run a railroad through northern Mis-
souri so as to strike so few settlements."

He found one section of level prairie fifty

miles long virtually uninhabited and thought it "incredible that such land, in a state
forty years old, could have remained unsettled till now."

Railroads often refused to

serve towns that did not grant them special subsidies. For example, in the 1870s the
Southern Pacific "did not hesitate to change its route to avoid towns which refused it
subsidies. Many of these deserted settlements were thus doomed to stagnation."

Far

from building cities, new railroads were actively avoiding or undermining those that
already existed, in order to promote towns that they had designed and built them-
selves.

Indeed, railways often held land off the market, waiting for its value to

increase. During the boom in railway construction of the 1870s "memorials and
petitions poured into Congress from dispossessed settlers" of the West and from
their legislatures.

These complained that those who settled a territory ahead of the

railroad often found their land claims invalidated. The railroad, rather than fostering

settlement, drove them away and seized their lands. Furthermore, the railroad did not
open the west, but closed it to poor settlers who could not afford to pay the higher
prices that property suddenly fetched along its routes. Worst of all, from the western
point of view, the railroads transformed settlement from an individualistic process to
a centralized corporate practice. The railroad often brought not free market devel-

Horace Greeley, et. al., The Great Industries of the United States, 2 volumes (Reprint, N e w

York: Garland Publishing, 1974), 1032.

For discussion, see Kasson, Civilizing the Machine , 178-79.

Horace Greeley, An Overland Journey from New York to San Francisco in the Summer of

1859 (New York: Saxton, Barker & Co., 1860), 14.

Greeley, An Overland Journey , 15.

Glenn S. Dumke, The Boom of the Eighties in Southern California (San Marion: Hunting-

ton Library, 1944), 2 0 - 2 1 .

Roy M. Robbins, Our Landed Heritage: The Public Domaine, 1776-1936 (Lincoln: Univ.

of Nebraska Press, 1962), 257.

opment and prosperity, but immediate economic disaster for some and long-term
economic control for all.

Railroads and steamboats were used to stimulate land speculation from

Pennsylvania to California. A volume from 1867, which everywhere described the

West as being in convulsive growth, ironized over the many new towns promoters

were trying to establish in the northern plains.

On paper, all these towns were magnificent. Their superbly lithographed
maps adorned the walls of every place of resort. The stranger studying one
of these, fancied the New Babylon surpassed only by its namesake of old.
Its great parks, opera houses, churches, universities, railway depots and

steamboat landings made New York and St. Louis insignificant in compari-
son. But if the newcomer had the unusual wisdom to visit the prophetic city
before purchasing lots, he learned the difference between fact and fancy.
The town might be composed of twenty buildings; or it might not contain a
single human habitation. In most cases, however, he would find one or two
rough cabins, with perhaps a tent and an Indian canoe on the river in front
of the "levee." Any thing was marketable. Shares in interior towns of one or
two shanties, sold readily for a hundred dollars. Wags proposed an act of
Congress reserving some land for farming purposes before the whole Terri-
tory should be divided into city lots.

The author concluded, "It was not a swindle, but a mania. The speculators were quite
as insane as the rest,"

and they continually reinvested their inflated profits only to

lose them in the end. The apparent truth of the Utopian narrative of western expan-
sion was too strong for mere facts of geography. Indeed, the author confessed that,
against his better judgment, he too fell into speculations. While these proved prof-

itless, his book was suffused with opulent visions and gorgeous prophecies of pro-
gress.

By the last decades of the nineteenth century dystopian critics realized that

the railroads had become a dangerous power. As the largest businesses and the main
form of transportation in the country, they could dictate shipping costs to farmers
and make or unmake towns by changing their routes and schedules. Railroads pur-
chased the entire output of steel mills to supply their rails, and they needed the wood

of entire districts just to replace their ties. As interstate corporations the railroads at
times were beyond legislative control, and they threatened the democratic system of
politics.

Yet even as critics questioned how well the railroad had lived up to its Uto-

pian promise, it became a central technology in constructing the real-topia of every-
day life. Indeed, it was not the government but the railroads that standardized time in
the United States, in order to improve their operations. Steam power's apotheosis as

See, for example, George H. Miller, Railroads and the Granger Laws (Madison: Univ. of

Wisconsin, 1971) and Paul Wallace Gates, Fifty Million Acres: Conflicts over Kansas Land
Policy, 1854-1890 (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1954), 171-175.

Albert D. Richardseon, Beyond the Mississippi (Hartford: American Publishing Company,

1867), 59.

Richardson, Beyond the Mississippi, 59.

168

DAVID NYE

the animating energy of real-topia was the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia of

1876. The railroad had been woven into the texture of American life. It had become

natural and inevitable. In the twentieth century American railroads went into a long
decline. Their total trackage peaked during World War I and has steadily declined
since then, while automobiles, trucks, buses, and airplanes have taken away much of

their traffic and all of their Utopian glamour. Steam railroads have disappeared com-
pletely, outside of their nos-topias, the many tourist attractions, where they represent
the past.

Electricity. During the last decades of the nineteenth century electrification became
inextricably bound up with ideas of social progress and the transformation of human
nature. Beginning with Bellamy's work, more than 160 Utopian books appeared in
the United States in a twelve-year period. Collectively, these explored the social
arrangements that new technology seemed to make possible and appealed particu-
larly to the middle class and better educated workers. Looking Backward sold sev-

eral million copies, and led to the formation of a national society that held regular
meetings to discuss ways to realize the ideal Bellamy had described. His utopia was
made feasible not only by elimination of wasteful competition and by equal distribu-
tion of goods, but also by what he called a "prodigious impulse to labor-saving in-
ventions in all sorts of industry." In his year 2000, "Electricity ... takes the place of
all fires and lighting."

Electricity played an even more central role in Bellamy's

later writings and other Utopian works of the period, where it was one of the three
most commonly mentioned scientific marvels of the future (the others: very light-
weight metals and high-speed trains).

Citizens of these Utopias had shorter working

hours, and they enjoyed electric light and heat, television, radio, electric transporta-
tion, and electrified, automated factories. Electricity could even prevent divorce.
Arthur Bird's Looking Forward contained an advertisement for an "Electric Equal-
izer" guaranteed to "dissipate any domestic storm and insure harmony in families

...[it was] so delicate in adjustment that the first angry word sets free a soothing

magnetic current.. ."

Regardless of whether they read the new Sunday newspaper supplements or

Scientific American, Americans everywhere discussed electricity as a scientific mys-
tery that seemed connected to magnetism, the functioning of the brain, and, some
claimed, "the secret of life itself." The Literary Digest confidently predicted trans-
mission of pictures by the telegraph and typewriters operated by the human voice.
"We are soon to have everywhere smoke annihilators, dust absorbers, ozonators,
sterilizers of water, air, food, and clothing, and accident preventers on streets, ele-
vated roads, and subways. It will become next to impossible to contract disease
germs or get hurt in the city, and country folk will go to town to rest and get well."

A sequel to Looking Backward voiced similar ideas in 1894: "Smoke, cinders, and
ashes are unknown because electricity is used now for all purposes for which for-

E d w a r d Bellamy, Looking Backward (New York: M o d e r n Library, 1982), 85.

Kenneth M. Roemer, The Obsolete Necessity: America in Utopian Writings, 1888-1900

(Kent, OH: Kent State Univ. Press, 1981).

Arthur Bird, Looking Forward: The Phenomenal Progress of Electricity in 1912 (North-

ampton, MA: Valley View Publishing, 1906), 60-61, 70-71, 74.

"Dreams That Come True," Literary Digest (Dec. 4, 1915).

FROM UTOPIA TO "REAL-TOPIA"

169

merly fires had to be built.... The very germs of unclean matter are removed by the
most powerful of disinfectants, electrified water, that is sprayed over our walls, and
penetrates into every crack and crevice."

Thomas Edison not only invented much of the electrical generation and

distribution system, he also expressed Utopian ideas about its uses that frequently

appeared in the popular press. He predicted that electrification of the city would
eliminate the distinction between night and day. He declared that introducing appli-
ances into the home would speed up women's mental development, making them the

intellectual equals of men. He expected that perpetual lighting might lead to the
elimination of sleep. In later years he even hinted that he was experimenting with
electrical ways to communicate with the dead.

Like the computer in recent times,

electricity and electrical machinery provided persuasive images for progress, the
mind, and the nature of the body. It became central to many explanations of mental
disorders, genius, impotence, progress, sexuality, illnesses, communication with the

dead, and the operation of the nervous system. So much was attributed to electricity
that in The Devil's Dictionary, Ambrose Bierce sarcastically defined it as "The

power that causes all natural phenomena not known to be caused by something
else."

Some of these attributions were dystopian, perhaps most famously Henry

Adams, who brooded on the meanings of the dynamo at the Paris Exposition of

1900. A Black preacher warned that mankind's use of electricity might unbalance

the earth and blow it up. Social reformers railed against utility rates and service to
the poor.

But such concerns were themselves but symptoms of the fact that electric-

ity increasingly became central to the structure of social reality. It seemed to underlie
physical and psychic health and to guarantee economic progress. At the real-topian
moment, the attempt to understand the social meanings of such a new technology

simultaneously through several narratives made it into a universal sign that seemed
linked to every problem and its solution. As electricity rapidly moved from being an
element of utopia to being a central part of the real-topia, its use seemed natural and

inevitable. It is difficult to imagine the time when electricity might be replaced by
some other force, making it possible to rethink its history and inscribe it within a
nos-topia. This difficulty in itself suggests the narrative power of real-topia, which

not only provides operating instructions for the technologies of our life world, but
naturalizes those technologies. Each new generation acquires a new real-topia as
their description of the world, and it becomes difficult to imagine other forms of
everyday life, except, of course, the out-moded existence of various nos-topias.

Solomon Schindler, Young West: A Sequel to Edward Bellamy's Celebrate Novel, "Look-

ing Backward, " (Boston: Arena, 1894), 45.

On E d i s o n ' s Utopian views, see David E. Nye, The Invented Self: An Anti-biography of

Thomas A. Edison (Odense: Odense Univ. Press, 1983), 146-155.

Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary (New York: Hill & W a n g , 1961), 42.

For a more thorough discussion, see David E. Nye, Electrifying America: Social Meanings

of a New Technology (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1990), 138-184.

170

DAVID NYE

The assembly line was developed and perfected between 1909 and 1913 at Henry
Ford's Highlard Park factory in Detroit.

Once its productivity became understood,

the Ford factory became a popular tourist site, with 3,000 visitors a day, including
President Taft and many journalists.

One of the most popular exhibits at the San

Francisco Exposition of 1915 was a full-scale automobile assembly line. Visitors sat
in a grandstand and watched cars being produced and in some cases bought them on
the spot. Here again, utopia was not only something that Americans read about, it
was made real.

The assembly line also speeded up the narrative cycle. In less than a decade

dystopian views of Ford's assembly line were common. According to its critics, the
assembly line de-skilled the worker, transforming him into a replaceable part. To
work on the assembly line was repetitive, soul destroying, mindless, and boring. If

from 1914 until 1929 the assembly line seemed to guarantee permanent growth and
prosperity, during the 1930s mass production was held responsible for permanent
unemployment and economic depression.

No doubt the most famous of these cri-

tiques were the factory scenes in Charlie Chaplin's "Modern Times."

But after the 1930s, both the dystopian and Utopian conceptions of the as-

sembly line began to fade. Instead, mass production became normalized. In a capital-
ist society it was always already there. We still have not reached the moment of nos-
topia, but significantly the original assembly-line factory, Highland Park, now stands

empty. As computerization offers new ways to organize production, the possibility of
nos-topia begins to come into view. My guess is that at the centenary of the assembly
line, books, films, and museum exhibits—not to mention conferences—will all be
mobilized to recreate the assembly line as a nos-topian space. As was the case with

the water-driven mill, when early mass production becomes a frozen historical space,
it will have lost all of its original, revolutionary potential.

Atomic power was already being celebrated in the 1930s, before it was technologi-
cally possible, as the energy source of the future. In the 1940s and early 1950s
newspaper stories often quoted scientific experts who declared that atomic energy
would be a perpetual source of power that was too cheap to meter.

Atomic energy

is a fascinating variant of the pattern I have been describing until now. For in this
case, early Utopian expectations were successfully subverted by the dystopian narra-
tive. France followed the more usual pattern. There, real-topian discourse smothered

dystopian fears, and most of French electricity today comes from nuclear reactors.
But in the United States government and industry failed to produce a real-topian
narrative that could naturalize the new technology for the public. A good deal of
money was spent on this project, including world's fair exhibits (Brussels, 1958 and

New York, 1964) and books such as Our Friend the Atom (with an accompanying

For more on the assembly line, see David E. Nye, Henry Ford: Ignorant Idealist (New

York: Kennikat Press, 1979), and Nye, Electrifying America, 221-231.

On the Ford factory as tourist site, see David L. Lewis, The Public Image of Henry Ford

(Detroit: Wayne State Univ. Press, 1976), 54.

3 4

On interpretations of the assembly line, see Nye, Henry Ford, 4 3 - 4 4 , 7 4 - 7 5 .

Stephen Hilgartner, Richard C. Bell, and Rory O'Connor, Nukespeak: The Selling of Nu-

clear Technology in America (Harmonsworth: Penguin, 1982).

FROM UTOPIA TO "REAL-TOPIA"

171

animated film).

But from the 1950s onwards the fear of nuclear weapons remained

inseparable from the so-called "peaceful" development of the atom. The Three Mile
Island Accident reinforced that fear, and after 1979 it became virtually impossible to
get planning permission to build a nuclear plant in the United States.

Those that

had been approved during the energy crises of the early and middle 1970s went on
line, but there were almost no further developments.

In those rare instances when a dystopian narrative is normalized, is nos-

topia possible? Probably not, since nos-topia is essentially a rewriting of real-topia,
and when that has not come fully into existence, the nostalgic story becomes more
difficult. But one can imagine a future time when no atomic reactors are still in use,

and a few remain as museums. People might visit these sites as places where one
could be nostalgic for the kind of innocence which people briefly had in the middle
of the twentieth century, an innocent belief that technology made it possible to get
something for nothing.

My final example is the computer, discussed in detail in Kate Delaney's paper else-
where in this volume. Once again technological Utopians are claiming that it will
provide more freedom for the individual, a more competitive market, and universal
communication. Much the same claims were once made for the railroad, the automo-
bile, and television. According to Newt Gingrich (who was echoing the Tofflers), the

computer is ushering in a new era in which information and expertise will be democ-
ratically dispersed to all and in which every citizen will be empowered and linked to
every other. This so-called Third Wave will break up big business and big govern-
ment, and promote greater individual autonomy. "The coming of the Third Wave
brings potential for enormous improvement in the lifestyle choices of most Ameri-

cans."

I need not belabor the obvious here. The computer and more specifically the

Internet have been made central to many Utopian and dystopian narratives, and this
new technology is rapidly being naturalized as a part of everyday life. We may read
William Gibson's Neuromancer

as a characteristic dystopia, but the computer is

probably real-topian to anyone born after c. 1990, at the latest.

Conclusions

These six examples illustrate the movement through the narrative cycle. First the
Utopian story and then the dystopian reply cease to be persuasive or interesting to
most people, leaving only the "real-topia" for as many generations as the technology
remains in common use. The "nos-topia" takes a longer time to appear. Of the six

technologies considered, only the nineteenth century water-driven factory and steam
engine have become so outmoded as to become antique, allowing them to pass into

On promotion of atomic power, see Daniel Ford, The Cult of the Atom (New York: Simon

and Schuster, 1984), and Michael Smith, "Advertising the A t o m , " in M. Lacey, ed., Govern-
ment and Environmental Politics (Washington: Wilson Center Press, 1989).

Spencer R. Weart, Nuclear Fear: A History of Images (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press,

1988).

Newt Gingrich, To Renew America (New York: HarperCollins, 1994), 7, 57.

William Gibson, Neuromancer (New York: Harper/Collins, 1984).

172

DAVID NYE

that narrative realm. Electricity and the assembly line are now seldom understood
through Utopian narratives, as they often were during the first half of the twentieth
century. They are no longer novel or potentially transformative, but merely ubiqui-
tous, possibly dystopian. The electrical system and the assembly line are so fully
woven into our social construction of the world, that we are scarcely aware that they
are parts of the contemporary "real-topian" narrative; we can easily confuse that
narrative with reality itself. The artificiality of this narrative is more visible, how-
ever, from a Mennonite farm or the Third World.

Atomic power, and the computer, on the other hand, are still new enough

and still controversial enough to generate not only "real-topias" but Utopian and
dystopian narratives. Indeed, the Internet is the best contemporary example. Its sud-
den expansion in the 1990s reminded us of how promoters and enthusiasts of facto-
ries, railroads, electrification, and the assembly line also drove up stock prices and
stimulated rapid investment. In each case, Utopian expectations have speeded up the
exploitation of the new technologies to create new social arrangements. After a dec-
ade, the Internet is becoming "real-topian" and soon e-commerce and e-banking will
be taken for granted, just as electric lights have been for generations. Somewhere in
the future, the computer may become as antique as the waterwheel, and then become
a fit subject for nos-topia. Already the IBM mainframes or the giant Univac of the

1950s seem pathetically slow dinosaurs of another age. But for now, the computer

stands as the most recent example of how a new technology is translated from uto-
pian/dystopian potential into what seems to be the historical inevitability of the real.

CYBER DREAMS AND NIGHTMARES:

EARLY ADOPTERS, LUDDITES AND THE MILLENNIUM

BUG

Kate Delaney

The good news and the bad news, utopia and dystopia have often been paired in
American culture. The dialectic between "dreams of new beginnings" and "night-

mares of apocalypse" is particularly visible today in the discussion surrounding cy-
berspace, the Internet and related technologies.

J i k S r ! many Ampriran ntnpias i g h ^

^^I^fW^fj^qyp^Ji^S! y p

tgchnjdog^. David Nye has convincingly demonstrated the centrality of the
technological sublime to American culture,

and such receptivity, such susceptibility,

seem to also apply technological Utopias.

In particular, it applies to cyberspace, which has repeatedly been explicitly

linked to the American Dream, to core American values, and to a Utopian vision. At
this point it would probably be useful to define what I mean when I use the term
cyberspace. It includes computers, the Internet, email, World Wide Web, Internet
Chat, Artificial Intelligence and the other technologies that have been grouped under

the rubric of "new media." The history of the Internet is well known, how it arose
during the Cold War from the Pentagon's Advanced Research Project Agency's
contracts with BBN (a computer consulting firm) and a few university-based engi-

neering and computer science labs. The key individuals and the moments of break-
through have been repeatedly chronicled.

In spite of the government-military origins of the Net, the early adopters,

the enthusiasts, the "Netizens," often had links and affinities to the liberationist and
commune cultures of the 1960s and 70s. As Roy Rosenzweig has observed, these

'60s liberationists have been joined by such free market advocates as George Gilder,

Newt Gingrich, and Alvin Toffler to produce a technolibertarian culture that repeat-
edly invokes core American value concepts such as Jeffersonianism and the frontier.

Following the example of the Founding Fathers who were reacting to what

they perceived as unjust usurpation of government powers, John Perry Barlow, a co-
founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and a lyricist for the Grateful Dead,

aroused by the Telecommunications Reform Act of 1996, issued a "Declaration of

David E. Nye, American Technological Sublime, (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994), 297.

Katie Hafner and Matthew Lyon, When Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins of the Internet,

(New York: Touchstone, Simon and Schuster, 1996); Arthur Norberg and Judy O'Neill,

Transforming Computer Technology: Information Processing for the Pentagon, 1962-86
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1996); Michael Hauben and Rhonda Hauben, Neti-

zens: On the History and Impact of Usenet and the Origins of the Internet (Los Alamitos, CA,

IEEE Computer Society Press, 1997).

Roy Rosenzweig, "Wizards, Bureaucrats, Warriors & Hackers: Writing the History of The

Internet," American Historical Review 103 (Dec. 1998): 1530-1552.

UTOPIAN LITERATURE IN THE UNITED STATES 1990-2000

Lyman Tower Sargent

University of Missouri-St. Louis

I have, so far, identified approximately 360 Utopias published by U.S. authors from

1990 through 1999. The count is approximate due to uncertainty regarding the na-

tionality of some authors and because I have not yet identified or read a number of
items. I am working on both problems, but my guess is that the final number will
approach 400.1 am well aware that counting numbers of works published is not par-
ticularly helpful, but the mere existence of works discussing topics or presenting
themes, where no such works existed before is at least interesting and perhaps even
important.

It is becoming more and more difficult to draw neat demarcations in the lit-

erature, even between the eutopia and dystopia. In the last quarter of the 20

cen-

tury, we added the categories "critical utopia" and "critical dystopia," and while at
one point the critical utopia seemed to be a temporally localized phenomenon related
to the 1960s (in the U.S. roughly 1965 to 1975), it is still being written.

Further-

With the exception of "critical dystopia," which I have added recently, the definitions I use

here are from my "The Three Faces of Utopianism Revisited" {Utopian Studies 5.1

[1994]: 1-37) and are as follows:

Utopianism-social dreaming.
Utopia-a non-existent society described in considerable detail and normally lo-
cated in time and space.
Eutopia or positive utopia-a non-existent society described in considerable detail

and normally located in time and space that the author intended a contemporaneous
reader to view as considerably better than the society in which that reader lived.
Dystopia or negative utopia—a non-existent society described in considerable de-
tail and normally located in time and space that the author intended a contempora-
neous reader to view as considerably worse than the society in which that reader
lived.
Utopian satire—a non-existent society described in considerable detail and nor-
mally located in time and space that the author intended a contemporaneous reader
to view as a criticism of that contemporary society.
Anti-utopia-a non-existent society described in considerable detail and normally

located in time and space that the author intended a contemporaneous reader to view
as a criticism of utopianism or of some particular eutopia.
Critical utopia-a non-existent society described in considerable detail and nor-
mally located in time and space that the author intended a contemporaneous reader
to view as better than contemporary society but with difficult problems that the de-

scribed society may or may not be able to solve and which takes a critical view of
the Utopian genre (9).
Critical dystopia-a non-existent society described in considerable detail and nor-
mally located in time and space that the author intended a contemporaneous reader
to view as worse than contemporary society but that normally includes at least one
eutopian enclave or holds out hope that the dystopia can be overcome and replaced
with a eutopia.

208

LYMAN TOWER SARGENT

more,the most important texts of the 1990s do not fall neatly into a euto-
pian/dystopia dichotomy, a phenomenon Raffaella Baccolini has called "genre slip-
page."

Another phenomenon that I have noted that belongs somewhere in the same

general neighborhood as the "criticals" and that has affinities with what I called the
"anti-utopia" as distinct from the dystopia is what I want to call the "flawed utopia."
The paradigmatic case here may be Ursula K. Le Guin's "The Ones Who Walk
Away from Omelas" (1973),

in which the eutopia is founded on the suffering of a

child. Le Guin references William James, but The Brothers Karamazov (1880) is the
undoubted origin. Most "flawed Utopias" are more simplistic than Le Guin's story
and present what appears to be a good society until the reader learns of some fatal
weakness. In the 1990s examples include Ronald Beck's The Future is Free (1992),
the Galactic Milieu trilogy (1992, 1994, 1996) by Julian May (1931-), Michael Arm-
strong's The Hidden War (1994), and possibly / [Slant] (1997) by Greg Bear
(*1951).

Very few of the 1990s works have received critical attention, and many of

them are not very interesting. Quite a few continue the well-established practice of
presenting an authoritarian government suppressing the citizenry in fairly standard
ways. But beyond the hackneyed plots and the familiar names, the 1990s turned out
to be a quite interesting decade from the point-of-view of its Utopian literature.

My purpose in this paper is, while not neglecting the better known works,

to discuss the others that manage to avoid the standard plots and themes.

In particu-

lar, there are a number of the more complex works that are now being called critical
Utopias and critical dystopias that include both positive and negative aspects of the
future society. Piercy's He, She and It (1991) (published in the United Kingdom as

The Body of Glass) is the best known.

It has always been the case that writers of Utopias have had difficulty find-

ing publishers, and a large number of the works considered here were published by
obscure presses, including presses that only publish what the author pays for (in the
U.S. these are called "vanity publishers") and works published on the World Wide

Intentional community-a group of five or more adults and their children, if any,
who come from more than one nuclear family and who have chosen to live together
to enhance their shared values or for some other mutually agreed upon purpose (14-

15)

Raffaella Baccolini, "Gender and Genre in the Feminist Critical Dystopias of Katharine

Burdekin, Margaret Atwood, and Octavia Butler," in Future Females, the Next Generation:

New Voices and Velocities in Feminist Science Fiction Criticism, ed. Marleen S. Barr

(Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000), 13-34.

See Utopian Studies 2 no's.l & 2 (1992) which reprints the story and has a number of essays

on it. On the flawed utopia, see Lyman Tower Sargent, "The Problem of the 'Flawed Utopia':
A Note on the Costs of Eutopia," in Dark Horizons: Science Fiction and the Dystopian

Imagination, ed. Raffaella Baccolini and Tom Moylan (New York: Routledge, 2003), 225-31.

During the period sequels to earlier works by Suzy McKee Charnas, Suzette Haden Elgin,

Walter M. Miller, Kim Stanley Robinson, Frank Herbert, Philip José Farmer, John Shirley,
Joe W. Haldeman, Jack Womack, Joan Slonczewski, and Marion Zimmer Bradley (particu-
larly in her Free Amazons series) were published. I have not discussed them here.

UTOPIAN LITERATURE IN THE UNITED STATES 1990-2000

209

Web. I have tried to systematically collect these works. While there are dozens of

such titles, the WWW has not yet produced the explosion of Utopias that some have
predicted; however, more appear all the time. Unfortunately they disappear as
quickly as they appear. For example, Yahoo has established a utopia site that has
included a few original Utopias, some of which have already disappeared.

Themes

This paper surveys an almost unknown literature, and I relate the works to the cul-
tural situation of end of the century America. Reading through the material I became
convinced that someone had mentioned every conceivable subject for a eutopia or
dystopia (usually both). This forced me to focus my attention on what seems to be

(a) the most important themes and (b) themes emerging in the decade that had a less
central role earlier (in a few cases these are the same). I also decided to focus on
those themes that appear most in the United States as opposed to the other countries
I have studied (Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom).

I shall argue that these works are "symptomatic" of a number of the issues

that troubled America during the period. In particular there are deep right-left divi-
sions.

Utopia has also become multicultural. While Utopian fiction by African-

Americans goes back at least to Sutton E. Griggs's Imperium in Imperio (1899) and
Mrs. Lillian B. Jones's Five Generations Hence (1915), the late 20

century has

seen a major growth in the number of such works, particularly by Samuel R. Delany
(1942-) and Octavia E. Butler. Also, in the 1990s Leslie Marmon Silko (1948-) in-
cluded a suggestive Utopian fragment, "One World, Many Tribes," in her Almanac

of the Dead (1991). In this section of the novel she describes the gathering of the
tribes to reclaim the land and includes brief notes on how the world will be healed in
the future.

Since in the space available I obviously cannot discuss all of the themes

that can be found in this decade's literature, to give an idea of their range, I shall
simply list and give a very brief comment on those that appeared most often. These
include:

Ecology—mostly pro with some anti.
Anarchism—a major change from the past. Anarchism used to be very rare

in Utopian literature but no longer is. The Dispossessed (1974) by
Ursula K. Le Guin seems to have been the generator of the
change.

On anarchism and Utopian literature, see Lyman Tower Sargent, "An Anarchist Utopia,"

Anarchy 104 no. 9/10 (October 1969): 316-20; Idem, "A Novel of the General Strike," Anar-

chy 7, no. 1 (February 1972): 15-16; Idem, "A New Anarchism: Social and Political Ideas in
Some Recent Feminist Eutopias," in Women and Utopia: Critical Interpretations, eds. Mar-
leen Barr and Nicholas D. Smith (Lanham, Maryland: Univ. Press of America, 1983), 3-33;
and Idem, "William Morris and the Anarchist Tradition," in Florence Boos and Carole Silver,
eds., Socialism and the Literary Artistry of William Morris (Columbia: Univ. of Missouri

Press, 1990), 61-73.

210

LYMAN TOWER SARGENT

Libertarianism/Anarcho-capitalism—a mostly U.S. phenomenon. Poul

Anderson (1926-) has been writing such works for a long time, but
recently others have joined him, particularly those writing from
the perspective of libertarianism, such as L. Neil Smith (1946-).

Gay and lesbian—most lesbian are eutopian and most gay are dystopian,

but now there are some gay male eutopias, a new phenomenon.

Religion—more dystopias than eutopias.
New Age.
Dystopias of genetic engineering.
AIDS/Disease.
Far right eutopias and dystopias.
Overpopulation dystopias—a theme continued from an earlier period.
Violence.
Cyberpunk—mostly dystopian.
Takeover of the United States by China or Japan-a 19

century theme re-

turning in a new guise. Earlier in the 20

century the worry was

over the USSR.

Race.
Technology—as much dystopian as eutopian. Tension around technology is

not new.

Class.

There are many different ways to group these themes, and there are a number of
possible sub-themes, but I shall focus on how some of these themes illuminate the
tensions in contemporary U.S. society, and I shall mention specific texts in doing so.

Anarchism/'Anarcho-capitalism/Libertarianism

With a few arguable exceptions, until recently Utopian literature has tended toward
governmental solutions to the problems perceived by the author. Beginning with
Poul Anderson (1926-) and Ursula K. Le Guin (1929-), representing two very differ-
ent non-governmental approaches, contemporary U.S. Utopian literature became rich
in anarchist Utopias. The Anarcho-capitalist or Libertarian strain pioneered in sci-
ence fiction by Anderson produced a substantial number of works, primarily in the

1980s but continuing into the 1990s. The communal form pioneered by Le Guin has

been particularly strong in the 1990s. The differences in publishing histories of these
two streams of anarchism are striking. On the whole, the anarcho-
capitalist/libertarian or right wing works have been published by mainstream pub-
lishers, and the communal anarchist or left-wing works have been published by
small presses.

Le Guin makes explicit references to Emma Goldman (1860-1940) as an

inspiration, while most Libertarians

(see Orth on Libertarian Utopias) were inspired

by Ayn Rand (born Alissa Rosenbaum [1905-82]), who wrote two Utopias, Anthem
(1938) and Atlas Shrugged (1957). Anarcho-capitalism, while not solely a U.S. phe-

On Libertarian Utopias, see Micahel Orth, "Reefs on the Right: Fascist Politics in Contempo-

rary American Libertarian Utopias," Extrapolation 31, no. 4 (Winter 1990): 293-316.

UTOPIAN LITERATURE IN THE UNITED STATES 1990-2000

211

nomenon, has been stronger in the United States than elsewhere and has a history
going back at least to Lysander Spooner (1808-87).

Anderson's most recent story, "Tyranny" (1997), is a "flawed utopia" in

that it depicts a libertarian eutopia that has become bureaucratized and dependent on
the rational decision-making of a computer. Thus, even a society founded to be free
requires vigilance to keep it that way; "Tyranny" is about the beginnings of an
armed revolt and why each person is taking part. In "Demokratus" (1997) Victor

Komen presents an anarcho-capitalist eutopia, in which the strongest swear words
are "government" and "taxers," contrasted with a planetary eutopia in which all de-

cisions are made by voting. Both are shown to be less than perfect.

In Gulliver (1993) Michael Ryan revisits all of the countries Swift's Gulli-

ver visited but with a distinctly anarchist twist, and in Animal Farm (1997) the pseu-
donymous Jane Doe retells the Orwell story from an anarchist perspective. In Ser-

pentine Wisdom (1993) Frank Hatfield presents a eutopia of philosophical anar-

chism.

Anti-government positions of all stripes have a long tradition in America;

both Jefferson and Paine worried about the potential for tyranny in any government.
Today, as in their time, Americans are deeply ambivalent about government and the
current popularity of anarchist Utopias reflects that.

Utopias of the Extreme Right

Politically the other significant new phenomenon in United States Utopian literature
is the use of the Utopian form by the extreme right. While there were a fair number
of non-utopian novels from the extreme right in the 1950s, the work that has inspired
numerous imitators is The Turner Diaries (1978) by William L. Pierce (1933-2000),
writing as Andrew Macdonald. Two recent volumes, one published by Pierce's Na-
tional Vanguard Press, the other with no publisher identifiable on the book itself but
published by a small right-wing publisher in California, are clearly modeled on
Pierce's book. The latter, Hear the Cradle Song (1993) by O.T. Gunnarsson, follows

Pierce's race-war model and is virulently anti-Semitic.

The former, Serpent's Walk (1991) by Randolph D. Calverhall is predomi-

nantly a story of heroic SS members who went underground after World War II to
build a new fighting force. When they emerge to successfully rally white America to
fight against equality, they create what can only be called a fascist eutopia.

The extreme right is, of course, very strong in the United States today, and

it is using every avenue of expression available.

There are numerous extreme right

intentional communities where the members are trying to live the life they desire.
There are also "survivalist" individuals and communities who believe they are pre-
paring for the wars outlined in these novels.

The possibility of the dominance of the right has, of course, produced

dystopias. Elaine Bergstrom's "Net Songs" (1990) depicts a right dictatorship con-
trolling the population through the fear of disease. Sue Robinson's The Amendment

Peter Fitting, "Utopias Beyond Our Ideals: The Dilemma of the Right-Wing Utopia" Uto-

pian Studies 2, nos. 1 & 2 (1992): 95-109.

For a collection of readings, see Lyman Tower Sargent, ed., Extremism in America: A

Reader (New York: New York Univ. Press, 1995).

212

LYMAN TOWER SARGENT

(1990) and Lucy Ferris's The Misconceiver (1997) both depict the dystopia created
when anti-abortion forces take power.

Feminism
The major thing that surprised me in writing this essay is that while there were fif-
teen texts in the 1980s where I used "feminist eutopia" as the primary descriptor,
there was only one in the 1990s, Joan Slonczewski's Daughter of Elysium (1993),
which is set in the same world as her better known A Door into Ocean (1986). The
vast outpouring of Free Amazon stories from Marion Zimmer Bradley (1930-1999)
and her acolytes, which began in the late 1970s and early 1980s, continued into the

1990s, but they really belong to the earlier decade. There are works by feminist au-

thors like Suzy McKee Charnas, Suzette Haden Elgin, and Marge Piercy, but none

of them, and this applies to Slonczewski as well, are straightforwardly eutopian. The
only traditional feminist eutopias are lesbian, and most of them raise more complex
issues than they did just ten years earlier.

There are, though, two extremely interesting stories that raise questions

about feminism. Deborah Wheeler's "Madrelita" (1992) focuses on class divisions
and the exploitation of poor women by the rich. A more basic problematizing of the
feminist eutopia is Ursula K. Le Guin's "Solitude" (1994) which—according to a
small experiment I conducted—gendered eyes are likely to read as a dystopia (male)

or a eutopia (female). To confuse matters, in the same year Le Guin published "The
Matter of Seggri" which presents a dystopia of gender separation with women
dominant.

Problematizing gender
Ursula K. Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness, published in 1969, describes a so-
ciety in which people take on sexual characteristics only when in "kemmer" (ready
for procreation) and may become either male or female depending on what gender
the partner becomes. Le Guin was criticized for using masculine pronouns in the
book, and in 1994 in the 25

anniversary edition of the book she responded to her

critics. In this important text she includes an "Afterword" in which she rewrites a
few key passages using different pronouns to show how the book reads with gender
neutral pronouns and pronouns that shift with the gender of the person. The differ-
ences are quite startling and demonstrate clearly that we read with gendered eyes. In

1995 Le Guin went a step further with a new story set on the planet Gethen—

"Coming of Age in Karhide"—in which she presents the rites of passage of and
emotional responses to going into kemmer for the first time.

Gay
Before her untimely death in 1998, Lynn Williams was compiling a bibliography of
non-traditional sexual relations in science fiction, and she and I exchanged titles and
ideas over a number of years.

The most striking phenomenon, one that we regularly

discussed, was that, although lesbian positive Utopias have a long history, the depic-
tion of gay men in Utopian literature was virtually non-existent until the 1980s. The

Lynn Williams, "Separatist Fantasies, 1690-1997: An Annotated Bibliography," Femspec 1

no. 2 (2000): 30-42.

UTOPIAN LITERATURE IN THE UNITED STATES 1990-2000

213

exceptions were gay male dystopias, but even these were rare, and today, while gay
male positive Utopias have been published, the literature remains overwhelmingly
dystopian, depicting the mistreatment of gays in the larger society.

The most recent works fall into two categories, science fiction as a venue

for erotic/pornographic fiction and concern about AIDS. Some raise difficult ques-
tions about what is eutopian and what is dystopian.

An explicitly (pun intended)

eutopian sadomasochistic story ["One Day in the Life of the Landfords" (1995) by
Tammy Jo Eckhart] is a minor problem. Homosexual rape presented as part of gay
male stories that appear to be intended to be read as eutopias is, for most people, a
serious problem. That is why I contend that this literature should be read primarily

as erotic/pornographic fiction in a science fiction setting.

There are some interesting exceptions. For example, in Toby Johnson's Se-

cret Matters (1990) aliens arrive at the beginning of a gay coming out story. The
aliens are humans who did not experience the Fall and follow their God's com-
mandment to mate man to man and woman to woman, which produces a eutopia.

Lesbian
Leaving aside the debate over whether some of the feminist Utopias of the 17

and

centuries should be called lesbian, the first explicitly lesbian works were some

dystopias of the 1960s that either presented lesbians suppressing heterosexuals or
lesbians being suppressed by heterosexuals. Contemporary lesbian Utopias can be
dated from 1972 with Joanna Russ (1937-)'s story "When It Changed" followed by
her novel The Female Man (1975). The next important text was Donna J. Young's
Retreat: As It Was! (1979), and lesbian eutopias and dystopias have been common

ever since. Today the best known author is Nicola Griffith, whose Ammonite (1993)
presents a lesbian eutopia on a primitive planet. Interestingly lesbian eutopias fre-
quently involve fairly primitive societies. Perhaps this can be connected with

ecofeminism, which argues that women are more in touch with Nature than men.

Environmentalism
Inspired by Ecotopia (1975) by Ernest Callenbach (1929-), which he followed with
Ecotopia Emerging (1981), ecology became a major theme of 1990s Utopian litera-
ture, one that is manifested in both eutopias and dystopias. Earlier, "pollution" and

"overpopulation" dystopias were popular and reached their highest points in The
Sheep Look Up (1972) (pollution) and Stand on Zanzibar (1968) (overpopulation) by
John Brunner (1934-95).

The ecological dystopia has continued in works like Norman Spinrad's

Greenhouse Summer (1999) and a half a dozen overpopulation dystopias. The eco-
logical eutopia continues in, for example, Daniel Fischer's Anthropolis (1992) and

The earliest works were Ed Dean is Queer (1978) and The Fourth Wall (1980) by N[ikos]

A. Diaman (1939-). The first gay male eutopia was by a woman, Ethan ofAthos (1986) by
Lois McMaster Bujold (1949-).

Peter Fitting has discussed some of the issues involved using John Norman and a lesbian

novel, Pat Califia's Doc and Fluff: The Dystopian Tale of a Girl and Her Biker (1990) in his
essay, "Violence and Utopia: John Norman and Pat Califia," Utopian Studies 11, no.l (2000):
9-108.

214

LYMAN TOWER SARGENT

Jan Spencer's "A Trip to the Mall" (1999). While there was no utopia in the 1990s
that could be characterized primarily as ecofeminist, Slonczewski's work certainly
can be read from that perspective, as can the New Age/Wiccan The Fifth Sacred

Thing (1993) by Starhawk.

Environmentalism in the United States, not counting exceptions like Earth

First! and the Unabomber, has generally been more conservative than in Europe.
The dystopias suggest that the conservative approach does not convince many peo-
ple, and the re-emergence of the overpopulation dystopia in particular points to a
new awareness of this potential threat. The ecological eutopia suggests that at least
some people still have hope. The ecological eutopias do, however, maintain that we

will have to undergo a radical change in lifestyle to achieve the eutopia. There is no
evidence whatsoever that people in the United States are willing to make any sig-
nificant changes at all. In the spring of 2000 Americans screamed when petrol prices
went up to half of what Europeans normally pay, a good illustration of the reluctance
of Americans to accept changes in their consumption patterns.

Race

Since I am discussing the United States, race is an obvious area for dystopias and the
odd eutopia. Racial issues are a long-established part of U.S. Utopian literature, and

rigid separation of the races has been presented positively a number of times, most
recently in Howard Means's C.S.A.: Confederate States of America (1998). "Next"
(1992) by Terry Bisson (1942-) included a neat twist on the usual scenario with a
future racism in which dark skins are preferred as protection against the hole in the
ozone layer.

Class
In the United States we are intensely aware of racial differences and problems and
tend to ignore those of class (in the United Kingdom the situation is reversed), so it
is striking to see class play a significant role in recent U.S. Utopias, exclusively as
dystopias depicting rigid rich-poor divisions. Examples include Charles Sheffield's

Brother to Dragons (1992), Mary Rosenblum's "Entrada" (1993), and Frederik

Pohl's "A Visit to Belinda" (1994 Belinda = Belgium plus India).

Architectural Utopias

A phenomenon that has not been much discussed by scholars, but which, on reflec-
tion, appears to have a long history is what I shall call the "architectural utopia."
Related to the centuries-old ideal city tradition, the architectural utopia can most

often be found in the pages of architectural reviews but has recently produced a few
books.

Lebbeus Woods's The New City (1992) consists of architectural drawings,

cityscapes, and buildings combined with short essays that make the utopianism ex-
plicit. Michael Sorkin's Local Code (1993) presents an ideal city through its build-
ing code.

For background to the novel see Starhawk, Walking to Mercury (New York: Bantam

Books, 1997).

See Utopian Studies 9, no. 1 (1998), which is devoted to Utopia and architecture.

UTOPIAN LITERATURE IN THE UNITED STATES 1990-2000

215

I cannot judge how important this phenomenon is because the research on

which to base the judgment has not been done. For example, when I was doing a
bibliography of New Zealand Utopian literature, a student who was completing a

Masters of Architecture thesis by creating a eutopian Wellington, New Zealand

asked me to be on his committee. As a result I did an initial search for similar theses
in New Zealand and turned up a number written by students completing either a
Masters of Architecture or a Bachelors of Town Planning degree. I am not aware of
any similar search anywhere else, and so far my own further work has been com-
pletely unsystematic. Still, even that unsystematic work has turned up a number of
titles.

Religion
One of the most interesting phenomena is that although the number of religious in-
tentional communities has grown rapidly, and there have been a number of eutopias
centered on religion, the religious dystopias far outweigh the eutopias. It might be

worth adding that many of the religious intentional communities can be read as
dystopias in that they are frequently held together by an authoritarian charismatic
leader (mostly, but not always, male), and the line between religious intentional
communities and cults is often in the eye of the beholder.

Orson Scott Card (1951-) is a well-known science fiction writer and a

committed Mormon who has used the LDS Church in a number of his novels and
stories. A number of religious dystopias have been written by Christians who see the
contemporary world as the time of troubles before the Second Coming/millennium

and depict the Antichrist (Marlin Maddoux, The Seal of Gaia: A Novel of the Anti-
christ [1998]), the Apocalypse (Grant Garber, The Sabbath Chapter: A Novel of the
Apocalypse [1993]), and even Hell (Paul Thigpen, Gehenna [1992]).

Those who fear a fundamentalist takeover write most of the religious

dystopias. Helen Collins's Mutagenesis (1992) presents a religious patriarchy as a
dystopia; Charles McNair's Land O'Goshen (1994) presents a religious war fol-
lowed by a dictatorship; J.G. Eccarius's Resurrection 2037 presents another dystopia

with religion as the dominant theme; and Scott Smith's In the Name of God (1999)
presents a dystopia in which a fundamentalist minister becomes President of the
United States.

In a poll published in The New York Times on 7 May 2000, 81% of Ameri-

cans reported that they believed in some sort of afterlife that they expect to experi-
ence. It is difficult to know what to make of such a figure, but at least it suggests that
religion continues to play a significant role in American life. It also is central in

some of the most intractable of contemporary political issues in the United States.
Roman Catholics may no longer pay any attention to the Church on birth control, but
the Church is a major player in the abortion controversy. "Family values" is code for
an anti-feminist conservative campaign that would like to undo most of the changes
of the last forty years, and the Christian Right is central to this campaign. Christian

Tim[othy] Miller, '"Cults' and Intentional Communities: Working Through Some Compli-

cated Issues," in Communities Directory: A Guide to Intentional Communities and Coopera-
tive Living 2000 Edition (Rutledge, MO: Fellowship for Intentional Community, 2000), 30-

32.

216

LYMAN TOWER SARGENT

UTOPIAN LITERATURE IN THE UNITED STATES 1990-2000

217

Identity churches are a significant part of the racist propaganda of the extreme right,
and such groups have established white-only communes throughout the United
States. Thus, the religious eutopias and dystopias reflect the hopes and fears of many
across the political spectrum.

Science
The dystopias of the 1990s have added one significant topic to the panoply of earlier

scientific dystopias—genetic engineering. Surveys of earlier science fiction concern-
ing science reveal that the genre that is often thought of as mindlessly pro-science
has often, perhaps even most often, been suspicious of science.

Science fiction in

this area might be thought of as a debate between two of its founders, Jules Verne
(pro-science) andH.G. Wells (ambivalent about science).

Cyberpunk
Although the term was first used by Bruce Bethke in 1983, cyberpunk was popular-
ized by the Canadian author William Gibson (1948-) in his Neuromancer (1984). It
can be considered as the most significant addition to the dystopian genre in the late
20

century. Once mostly a male preserve, it was invaded first by Kathy Acker

(1948-1997) and then by a number of women (particularly Pat Cadigan). Most cy-

berpunk tales seem to be complex versions of the classic science fiction plot of the

rebel against the bad guys, here usually corporate controllers of technology. In cy-

berpunk the characters usually enter virtual reality and struggle there against the

establishment.

Critical utopias/dystopias
As I noted above we are now using some modified terminology to describe Utopian

works for the simple reason that authors continue to be inventive, and critics and

scholars must scramble to keep up. The "critical utopia" has been accepted into the

terminological lexicon, and I expect that the "critical dystopia" will follow suit.

both cases they differ from their predecessors in that they are not purely eutopian or
dystopian and may even, in the case of the "critical dystopia," contain their opposite.
In the 1990s critical Utopias were rare, with only Molly Gloss's The Dazzle of the
Day (1997) really qualifying. In it she describes a troubled Quaker society near the
end of a multi-generation space flight trying to decide on settling a rather undesir-
able planet. The novel ends with a picture of the society established there after a few
generations.

"Critical dystopias" have been fairly common, with a Piercy's He, She and

// (1991) describing a complex future dystopia run by corporations with an embat-

tled Jewish eutopia as the central focus. The Parable of the Sowers (1993) and The

See Lyman Tower Sargent, "Eutopias and Dystopias in Science Fiction: 1950-75," in Amer-

ica as Utopia, ed. Kenneth M. Roemer (New York: Burt Franklin & Co., 1981), 347-66;
Idem, "The Pessimistic Eutopias of H.G. Wells," The Wellsian, no. 7 (Summer 1984): 2-18.

See the entry in John Clute and Peter Nichols, eds., The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction

(London: Orbit, 1993), 288-90.

On the critical dystopia see the work of Raffaella Baccolini and Tom Moylan in Dark Hori-

zons, 1-12, 233^9.

Parable of the Talents (1998) by Octavia E. Butler (1947-) are complex novels in
which a young black woman leads the search for the best possible place in the

dystopian future. In the process she creates a flawed Utopian community around her-
self.

Kim Stanley Robinson has produced the most Utopian pages in the 1990s.

His four volume Martian trilogy (it is a trilogy with an added volume of related ma-
terials) alone runs to 2077 pages (although I don't count Red Mars [1993J as a uto-
pia). In addition, some scholars (although not I) include his Antarctica (1997) as a

utopia. Robinson says that he is a writer of Utopias, and both eutopias and dystopias
can be found in the Martian works. For example, "The Constitution of Mars" in The

Martians (1999) is the detailed exposition of a Utopian constitution, a form of uto-
pia-making that goes back to James Harrington's The Rota (1660) and included at

least one other work in the 1990s, Barry Krusch's The 21st Century Constitution
(1992). Yet, taken as a whole the Martian works fall within the "critical utopia" sub-
genre.

Conclusion

Since the bibliography of 1990s Utopias is not yet complete, this essay is designed to
survey the terrain and to see how U.S. Utopias during the period reflected contempo-
rary debates within U.S. culture. Utopian literature is, among other things, like a fun
fair/carnival distorting mirror, sometimes in reverse; it reflects back a twisted ver-
sion of reality (the dystopia) that warns of future catastrophe or an improved version
of the present (the eutopia) that will be possible with effort. At least that is what it
used to do; today authors have invented more complex mirrors at show us both pos-

sibilities at the same time. Thus, it accurately reflects our current confusions.

Texts Cited

1990 Bergstrom, Elaine. "Net Songs." In The Women Who Walk Through Fire:

Women's Fantasy and Science Fiction Vol. 2. Edited by Susanna J. Sturgis

(Freedom, California; The Crossing Press, 1990), 93-110.

1990 Johnson, [Edwin Clark]. Secret Matter. By Toby Johnson [pseud.]. South

Norwalk, Connecticut: Lavender Press.

1990 Robinson, Sue. The Amendment. New York: Birch Lane Press.

1991 Calverhall, Randolph D. Serpent's Walk. Hillsboro, West Virginia: Na-

tional Vanguard Books.

1991 Piercy, Marge. He, She and It. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. U.K. edition as

Body of Glass. London: Michael Joseph, 1992.

1991 Silko, Leslie Marmon. "One World, Many Tribes." In hex Almanac of the

Dead (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1991), 707-763.

Robinson's doctoral dissertation was on Philip K. Dick. See Kim Stanley Robinson, "The

Novels of Philip K. Dick" (Diss. California San Diego, 1982. 82-19209).

218

LYMAN TOWER SARGENT

1992 Bisson, Terry [Ballantine]. "Next." The Magazine of Fantasy & Science

Fiction 82, no. 5 (May 1992): 58-65.

1992 Beck, Ronald. The Future Is Free. New York: Vantage Press.
1992 Collins, Helen. Mutagenesis. New York: Tom Doherty Associates.
1992 Fischer, Daniel P. Anthropolis: A Tale of Two Cities. Macon, Georgia:

Mercer University Press.

1992 Krusch, Barry. The 21st Century Constitution: A New America for a New

Millennium. New York: Stanhope Press.

1992 May, Julian. Jack the Bodiless. Book One of The Galactic Milieu Trilogy.

New York: Alfred A. Knopf.

1992 Sheffield, Charles. Brother to Dragons. New York: Baen.
1992 Thigpen, Paul. Gehenna. Lake Mary, Florida: Creation House.
1992 Wheeler, Deborah. "Madrelita." The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fic-

tion 82, no. 2 (February 1992): 140-160.

1992 Woods, Lebbeus. The New City. New York: Simon & Schuster.
1993 Butler, Octavia E[stelleJ. Parable of the Sower. New York: Four Walls

Eight Windows.

1993 Cassutt, Michael. "The Folks." The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fic-

tion 85, no. 1 (July 1993): 59-71.

1993 Garber, Grant. The Sabbath Chapter: A Novel of the Apocalypse. Santa

Barbara, California: Fithian Press.

published February 1993.

1993 Gunnarsson, O.T. Hear the Cradle Song. Np: np.
1993 Hatfield, Frank W. Serpentine Wisdom. New York: Vantage Press.
1993 Robinson, Kim Stanley. Red Mars. New York: Bantam
1993 Rosenblum, Mary. "Entrada.'7*aac Asimov 's Science Fiction Magazine 17,

no. 2 (February 1993): 8-12, 14-16, 18-24, 26-28, 30-32, 34-36, 38-40. Re-
printed in her Synthesis & Other Virtual Realities (Sauk City. Wisconsin:
Arkham House, 1996), 32-61.

1993 Ryan, Michael. Gulliver. New York: Autonomedia.
1993 Sorkin, Michael. Local Code: The Constitution of a City at 42° N Latitude.

New York: Princeton Architectural Press.

1993 Starhawk. The Fifth Sacred Thing. New York: Bantam.
1994 Armstrong, Michael. The Hidden War. Lake Geneva, Wisconsin: TSR.
1994 Le Guin, Ursula K[roeber]. The Left Hand of Darkness. 25th anniversary

edition. New York: Walker. Originally published in 1969.

1994 Le Guin, Ursula K[roeber]. "The Matter of Seggri." Flying Cups and Sau-

cers: Gender Exploration in Science Fiction & Fantasy. Edited by Debbie
Notkin & The Secret Feminist Cabal (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Edge-
wood Press, 1998), 347-84. Originally published in Crank, no. 3 (1994).

1994 Le Guin, Ursula K[roeber]. "Solitude." The Magazine of Fantasy and Sci-

ence Fiction 87, no. 6 (December 1994): 132-159.

1994 May, Julian. Diamond Mask. Book Two of the Galactic Milieu Trilogy.

New York: Alfred A. Knopf.

1994 McNair, Charles. Land O 'Goshen. New York: A Wyatt Book for St. Mar-

tin's Press.

UTOPIAN LITERATURE IN THE UNITED STATES 1990-2000

219

1994 Pohl, Frederik. "A Visit to Belinda." In Future Quartet. Earth in the Year

2042: A Four-Part Invention (New York: William Morrow, 1994), 73-82.

1994 Robinson, Kim Stanley. Green Mars. New York: Bantam.
1995 Eccarius, J.G. Resurrection 2037. Gualala, California: III Publishing.
1995 Eckhart, Tammy Jo. "One Day in the Life of the Landfords." In S/M Fu-

tures: Erotica On the Edge. Edited by Cecilia Tan (Boston, Massachusetts:
Circlet Press, 1995), 1-24.

1995 Le Guin, Ursula K[roeberJ. "Coming of Age in Karhide By Sov Thade

Tage em Ereb, of Rer, in Karhide, on Gethen." In New Legends. Edited by

Greg Bear with Martin H. Greenberg (London: Legend Books, 1995), 85-

104. U.S. edition without subtitle after the first Karhide (New York: Tor,
1995), 90-105.

1996 Doe, Jane [pseud.]. Anarchist Farm. Gualala, California: III Publishing.
1996 May, Julian. Magnificat. Book Three of the Galactic Milieu Trilogy. New

York: Alfred A. Knopf.

1996 Robinson, Kim Stanley. Blue Mars. London: HarperCollins.
1997 Anderson, Poul. "Tyranny." In Free Space. Edited by Brad Linaweaver and

Edward E. Kramer (New York: Tom Doherty Associates, 1997), 143-170.

1997 Bear, Greg[ory Dale]. / [Slant]. New York: Tor.
1997 Ferris, Lucy. The Misconceives New York: Simon & Schuster.
1997 Gloss, Molly. The Dazzle of Day. New York: TOR.
1997 Koman, Victor. "Demokratus." In Free Space. Edited by Brad Linaweaver

and Edward E. Kramer (New York: Tom Doherty Associates, 1997), 197-
220.

1998 Butler, Octavia E[stelle]. Parable of the Talents. New York: Seven Stories

Press.

1998 Maddoux, Marlin. The Seal of Gaia: A Novel of the Antichrist. Nashville,

Tennessee: Word Publishing Co.

1998 Means, Howard. C.S.A.: Confederate States of America. New York: Wil-

liam Morrow & Co.

1999 Robinson, Kim Stanley. The Martians. London: HarperCollins.
1999 Smith, Scott. In the Name of God. Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania: Buy Books

on the web.com.

1999 Spencer, Jan. "A Trip to the Mall." Talking Leaves 8, no. 3 (Winter 1999):

33-37.

1999 Spinrad, Norman [Richard]. Greenhouse Summer. New York: TOR.

Wyszukiwarka

Podobne podstrony:
Utopia ut&dyst in am cult
ut 03 dem am 2013
ut 02 mod am 2013
Bach, JS BWV 561 Fantasia & Fugue in Am
L1 Mod AM, UT
L1 Mod AM, UT
I-DD08-C02 Engine room checklist-arrival in port, AM SZCZECIN, INSPEKCJE MORSKIE, Inspekcje morskie
i am in the perfect shape 2DNRC5MXENT5R3MS5QKISO7KSSRSTHUOTGPOZEY
I-DD16-F01 Bridge check list navigation in heavy weather or, AM SZCZECIN, INSPEKCJE MORSKIE, Inspekc
Wheel as a Cult Symbol in the Romano Celtic World
Sipperl The Machine in the Pastoral Imagery of 18th century utopia
Garipzanov, The Cult of St Nicholas in the Early
Jüdisches Museum Frankfurt am Main Archiv, (Personenstandsregister jüdischer Gemeinden in Ostdeutsc
Hans Mommsen Arbeiterkultur und Lebensbedingungen in Deutschland am Virabend des 1 Weltkrieges
Amy Boesky Founding Fictions Utopias in Early Modern England 1
Fitting The Concept of Utopia in Jameson
Penier, Izabella The Black Atlantic Zombie National Schisms and Utopian Diasporas in Edwidge Dantic
I am working as a Sales and Marketing Executive in the big pharmaceutics company
Tietgen Political Utopias in Film

więcej podobnych podstron