Caitlin Hawkins 12 December 2012

Social Commentaries in Utopian/Dystopian Novels The genre of the utopian novel has a long history of creating a social commentary through the commonwealths created based on current societies values and desires. Not only do these commonwealths attempt to provide society with the things it desires, they also show humanity the flaws in their desires, further teaching the, be careful what you wish for frame of mind often taught through literature. Analyzing the social commentary in utopian and dystopian novels allows the reader to evaluate the values of societies from which the authors of this genre come. The concept of the utopia first came into being when Sir Thomas More wrote his book titled On the Best Commonwealth and on the New Island of Utopia, often shortened to be referred to as just Utopia. The term Utopia was created when: More coined it by fusing the Greek adverb ou not with the noun topos place and giving the resulting compound a latin ending. Within the books fiction, Noplace is a newly discovered island somewhere in the New World (Utopia, xi). In the revised edition of Utopia the editors added an introduction in which they define the utopian/dystopian dilemma that literary critics work with:

The commonwealth of Utopia turns out to be a highly attractive place in some ways, but a highly unattractive one in others. No one goes hungry there, no one is homeless. The commonwealth is strikingly egalitarian. On the other hand, personal freedom is restricted in ways large and small (xii).

It is important to understand the original piece of a genre before examining other pieces that fall under the same category. More began the utopian genre writing a piece which first offers social commentary and criticism of England in 1516 before moving in to the second half of his book in which he describes this new island of Utopia which serves as his vision of the best commonwealth. Critics are still not sure how to connect the two sections of Mores work, but there is no doubt that he is offering a detailed criticism of the values and customs of his society. Following in Mores footsteps, utopian novels written since then have continued to use their own descriptions of the best commonwealth in order to offer social commentary, although they may not state it as explicitly as More did. Lois Feuer offers some insight to the transformation of the utopian/dystopian genre over time, that tradition is a significant one in twentieth-century literature, replacing earlier utopian visions of paradise regained with the nightmare realization that, by the time industrial technology had made the controlled, ordered society possible, we might no longer be willing to pay the cost (83). The dystopian genre has stemmed from the original idea of the Utopia by shifting the focus from an attempt to create a perfect commonwealth to instead creating a world which takes a value of our society to the extreme. Whether the author chooses to address equality, security, or peace, it is surprising how quickly one of these basic values that we strive for in society can create a nightmarish civilization that drives us away from extremist thoughts. Equality for all is something that American society is constantly striving for, and something which we have made great strides towards in the past hundred years. We continue to work for that equality in an attempt to create a society where no one suffers from hunger or homelessness and everyone is free from injustice. As we do this though, we continue to regulate

ourselves more in other ways. In Ayn Rands book Anthem she describes a society in which everyone is equal, everyone is given a job, everyone gets the same amount of things as everyone else. It is an extremely collectivist society with socialist ideals. However, in order to create and continue a society such as this, the use of individualist pronouns (e.g. I, me, myself, etc.) is punishable by death. They have no way to consider themselves as anything more than a faction of the whole but even that may be too individualist for the society. The book follows Equality 7-2521 through his struggle with the inability to define himself as an individual. As the reader moves through the book it becomes more clear how nightmarish life would be if we were instantly given our way and everyone was to become entirely equal. The concept of equality is one which feminists, socialists, and many other activists favor as a solution to many of our worlds problems. It is the role of the dystopia to show that while working towards these ideas may be beneficial for society, there comes a point at which humanity has to realize that sacrifices will have to happen for equality to ever be fully applied. The novel Herland by Charlotte Perkins Gilman is another example of feminism and equality being taken to an extreme. Gilman depicts a society which is made up only of women who are able to reproduce asexually. It takes an interesting approach to blending gender expectations as three men discover the society and struggle to adapt to the lack of traditional understandings about gender. This is similar to the happenings in The Handmaids Tale in that it combines feminist understandings and ideas with a very traditional lifestyle. However, as we see in both novels, there is always a group that ends up being oppressed, it is how those people handle their new found oppression. One major difference between Herland and The Handmaids Tale is that memory plays a role in the attitudes of the newly oppressed members of society in The Handmaids Tale. Feuer

quotes an author who writes on the memory flashes in The Handmaids Tale, these shifting reminiscences offer glimpses of life, though not ideal, still filled with energy, creativity, humaneness and a sense of selfhood, a life that sharply contrasts with the alienation, slavery, and suffering under totalitarianism (86). The characters that possess memories of a better past life tend to rise in rebellion more readily than those that have only ever known the life they currently lead. The desire of Offred to return to a world with unwritten rules of safety women followed to deal with the threat of rape shows that despire the issues our current society possesses, it is still valued as better than many alternatives. Another major issue often addressed in utopian novels is that of security. Especially with our worlds recent bouts of natural disasters, terrorist attacks/war, and thefts of identity and material gains, this issue has become more prevalent in American society. As we continue to install security and traffic cameras, concent to surveillance and allow our government more rights in terms of invading privacy, we give up some of our rights. In books such as Hunger Games, Wrinkle in Time, and The Handmaids Tale we see more and more government control occurring. Often times this is referred to as, the eye or, as in The Handmaids Tale, there is a general fear of spies and the betrayal of others. The question being discussed by this theme is how much the public is willing to give up in order to gain total security. By consenting to a society in which there is no privacy, do citizens make themselves slaves to the government watching them? I would argue that the trade of rights required does make citizens of the given civilization slaves to those watching them. I argue this because in societies where citizens are constantly watched, there is almost always a resistance emerging from within the slaves of society. In fact, The Handmaids Tale, even goes so far as to draw a parallel between the underground

railroad that existed during slavery in the United States with an Underground Femaleroad to smuggle oppressed women to new locations. This is not a hard connection to make, but it does offer new commentary on the issue of freedoms being relinquished by members of a society. The utopian genre would suggest that for every bit of progress we make towards our societal values, we condemn ourselves slightly more to slavery under our government. Mores Utopia has the same effect as many of the current utopian novels have: despite the improvements made in these new societies, readers still see the flaws and have to decide for themselves how much they would be willing to sacrifice to live in a so-called perfect world. The underlying theme of every utopian/dystopian novel is weighing what our present freedoms cost us against the price we would pay to secure a more perfect society. Humanity is constantly looking to improve our way of life, trying to make our lives safer and better but how do we know where to stop ourselves? When will we have to become satisfied with the progress we made so as to not cross the line into sacrificing more than we gain? Readers and critics of the utopian genre must draw that line for themselves, if there is one thing we can learn from this genre of writing it is that these cautionary tales can serve as warnings to those who may not realize the ending impacts of extremist ideologies.

Works Cited Atwood, Margaret. The Handmaid's Tale. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1986. Print. Collins, Suzanne. The Hunger Games. New York: Scholastic, 2008. Print. Feuer, Lois. "The Calculus Of Love And Nightmare: The Handmaid's Tale And The Dystopian Tradition." Critique 38.2 (1997): 83. Academic Search Complete. Web. 14 Dec. 2012. Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. Herland and Selected Stories. Ed. Barbara H. Solomon. New York, N.Y., U.S.A.: Signet Classic, 1992. Print. L'Engle, Madeleine. A Wrinkle in Time. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1962. Print. More, Thomas. Utopia. Ed. George M. Logan and Robert Merrihew. Adams. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge UP, 2002. Print. Rand, Ayn. Anthem. New York: Dutton, 1995. Print.