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Understanding Utopia and Dystopia

“The prophetic purpose of Utopia lay in revealing the reality of the present rather than anticipating the future” (S.R. Jones)

This essay will explore two dystopian works; George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, and one utopian novel, Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland. I will consider whether utopian and dystopian novels aim to reveal the realities of each author’s contemporary world rather than predicting the future; however, I will argue that S.R. Jones’ statement does not ring true for either utopian nor dystopian novels. I believe that authors of utopian texts have different aims than those of dystopian. Utopian authors were mainly concerned with critiquing their current realities; they were not necessarily ‘anticipating the future’, but merely introducing an idealised vision or blueprint for society that was, in fact, unobtainable. Thus, there is an element of anticipation of the future. However, in dystopian novels, authors were both criticising their present day and warning us of an anticipated dark and threatening future if things were to continue correspondingly. Furthermore, the dystopian trope illustrates frightening realities and acts as a method of highlighting contemporaneous political, gender and socio-political issues.

The very definition of ‘utopia’ in Greek is ‘No Place’; it is a non-existent, imaginary land created by the author, where they are free to express their frustrations with the real world through satirical writing. Utopian novels usually depict “a place, state, or condition ideally perfect in respect of politics, laws, customs and conditions”; however, this does not mean that the ideals presented are practical and can actually work in the real world. Furthermore, each utopia is diverse according to the writer’s qualms and ideals; for example, the world depicted by Thomas More in Utopia is far different than the society Charlotte Perkins Gilman presents to us in Herland.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman achieves her utopia in Herland, as many other authors do, by “eliminating one partner in various pairs of terms where the excluded partner is seen to be the locus of the ills in society”. In Gilman’s case, she creates a world where there are no men; the community is strictly made up of women due to a volcanic eruption killing off the male population and cutting off the society from the outside world. The Herlanders reproduce through parthenogenesis, and only female children are born; thus, Gilman removes completely the need for men in society and urges the reader that “to think utopia means to think beyond the ostensible, the evident, and think toward a primordial phenomenon”. So, by eliminating obvious realities, in Gilman’s case all men, she also presents us with a world that “knows no war, no killing or other evil, no conflict, competition, ownership, disease, poverty, crying, or fear”. However, she reintroduces three American men to the “lost female utopia” in order to “expose cultural norms rooted in patriarchy as ridiculous” and criticise her contemporary world.

Herland was published in 1915, but Gilman was born in 1860, so throughout her life the socio-political climates regarding women in America and Britain were volatile. She was a highly educated woman and was a part of the “first wave of white, middle-class feminists who advocated women’s emancipation”. Women in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries wished for more control over their lives; as daughters they were the property of their fathers, and as wives they belonged to their husbands. Women also had limited options in terms of their physical body – everything from marriage, sex and childbearing to what they could wear and do was dictated by men. As Gilman herself stated, “a woman could have love and lose life, or she could have life and lose love, but never could she have them both”. By removing men from her society and giving women all the power, Gilman rejects the notion of the private and public spheres, as well as the traditional view of gender roles in nineteenth and twentieth-century America. She depicts Herland as being a more rational society than if it were run by men. For Gilman “the only way to save patriarchal culture from its excesses is to put the values of motherhood at the centre of the culture and to change or ‘maternalise’ men so they will voluntarily give up the selfish and hierarchal values that rule the dominant culture”.

Nevertheless, Gilman in no way wished or intended for her feminist utopia to come true, but there is an anticipatory element in the desire for some form of change. Even the women in Herland do not “consider their society perfect […] they consider it their goal continually to strive for a perfection that can never finally be achieved”. Despite being a utopia, it is not flawless; one of the male narrators of the book states that “they recognised the need of improvement as well as of mere repetition, and devoted their combined intelligence to that problem – how to make the best kind of people”. Gilman did not wish for a society where women were dominant; instead of creating a blueprint for how she wished society to be she “points to her vision of a better world achieved through the integration […] of polarities”, and is thus revealing the realities of her present and wish for equality for future generations. As Gilman said, “to be human, women must share in the totality of humanity’s common life […] women are not underdeveloped men, but the feminine half of humanity is underdeveloped humans”.

Whilst authors mainly focussed on creating satirical utopias in the previous decades and centuries, the twentieth century saw a change that developed alongside modernity; dystopia. While utopias represent an idealised and stable world or society, dystopias do the opposite; they depict worlds which are largely unstable or can “invariably turn into totalitarian systems”. The aims of the author remain largely the same to the purposes of utopian novels, as they still present a critique of the author’s contemporary world. However, there is the addition of anticipating the future by warning the reader where modernity could lead to; what the world could look like if humanity carries on regardless. Hence, “a dystopia presents the inhumanity of the soulless state machine against the hopes and aspirations of humanity”. This idea is strongly featured in arguably the most famous dystopian novel – George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four.

The fictitious world that Orwell creates is called Oceania, which is governed over by ‘The Party’. There are four ministries that keep order in Oceania, and even their names and duties demonstrate tension and friction within society; war is dealt with by the Ministry of Peace, law and order is the focus of the Ministry of Love, scarcities are organised by the Ministry of Plenty and the Ministry of Truth deals with propaganda. Such oxymorons illustrate how Orwell was attempting to perceive a “deeper level of truth and explore different layers of semantics while writing”. Furthermore, the purposeful juxtaposition of “utopian and dystopian frames creates an unbearable contradiction within the novel, which wants to portray Oceania as both plausible and absurd, stable and unstable, the epitome of rationality and irrationality alike”. Within Orwell’s dystopia every word, action and gesture are watched by ‘The Thought Police’, and unlike utopian novels there are no “attempts to save humanity or to improve the quality of human life”; the only aim of ‘The Party’ is to “perpetuate its own power”. Where Thomas More, in his Utopia, “conjures an isolated island to describe a better world but one that in hindsight sounds fascist […] George Orwell positions his utopia gone wrong in a grim futuristic society. Both are characterized by oppressive canons and the suffocation of independent thought”.

Everything in Nineteen Eighty-Four is controlled, from information and history to technology, and ‘The Party’ gained such power and control through psychological manipulation of its inhabitants; even sexuality is “strictly controlled to prevent strong emotional attachments between partners”. The story follows the protagonist, Winston Smith, living in this world and focuses on his struggle between conforming to Big Brother and his own individuality and love for Julia. Orwell shows no sign of hope or individuality conquering repression in his novel; it ends with Big Brother breaking Winston’s mind, body and soul, and Winston claims in the final sentence of the novel that “he had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother”. If “Utopia is shaped as an asymmetry, as imbalance, as an interruption in the continuum of the present, a dream that awakens”, then dystopia envisages “the relentless forces of a technologised society extending its power over the human race, offering a nightmare of the individual crushed by inhuman state forces”.

The main theme of the novel is this “quasi-omnipotence of a monolithic, totalitarian state” which is occasionally challenged by its inhabitants but generally ends up “exacting complete obedience from its citizens […] relying upon scientific and technological advances to ensure social control”, and Orwell drew from the events happening around him in order to create his world. Published in 1949, Nineteen Eighty-Four draws strong parallels to totalitarian societies Orwell witnessed in Germany and Soviet Russia in the first half of the twentieth-century. During and in the aftermath of the Second World War, Britain was introduced to the tyrannical regimes implemented by both Hitler and Stalin, where they exercised total control over the populations of their countries. Orwell, seeing this, grew concerned with the “disregard for historical truth, as well as the possibility that mass propaganda could produce a population who no longer loved liberty”. The administrations of Hitler and Stalin demanded “complete loyalty, which requires slavish submission by the intellectuals, the debasement of logic and language, […] the evocation of the worst popular passions, […] and hostility to individualism, […] in the name of war-fever and leader-worship”. Orwell encapsulates all of these ideals perfectly in Nineteen Eighty-Four, through ‘doublethink’, ‘newspeak’, ‘Hate Week’ and ‘ownlife’. It was this manipulation of the truth, and in turn people, by those in control that he was criticising in his writing; he was revealing the realities of early-twentieth century life on earth. However, unlike Charlotte Perkins Gilman in Herland, Orwell served another purpose in Nineteen Eighty-Four as he was also warning humanity of a possible future he was anticipating. He warned of “the dangers of what he termed at one point ‘the falsity of the hedonistic attitude to life’, which he claimed Hitler had recognised”. Orwell’s theme of dangerous and repressive totalitarian states is also present in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. However, instead of using fear of punishment to control, Huxley depicts a society that is controlled and repressed through the “manipulation of pleasure”.

Huxley’s society is set in a futuristic London, and from the outside appears to be the perfect utopia. Everyone has everything they could ever want, including jobs and consumer products, and they were perpetually happy due to supplies of the drug ‘soma’, and access to instant gratification through entertainment and sex. However, through the veil of happiness, presented by Huxley, lies a society where individual liberty is non-existent; the “sex, drugs and popular culture are intended primarily to divert attention from social problems and to prevent individuals from developing any sort of strong feelings that might lead them to challenge official authority”. Huxley’s futuristic London is a society “in which institutionalised eugenic engineering underpins a rigidly stratified class society, the World State, based upon breeding both intelligent rulership and complacent subservience, and governed by a privileged group of controllers”. As was the case with Orwell, the inhabitants of Huxley’s society are ruled by an all-powerful state, that uses technological advances in order to control its civilians. Such technological advances include how new humans are created; instead of being conceived by humans, babies are grown in test tubes according to five categories of classes, ‘Alphas’, ‘Betas’, ‘Gammas’, ‘Deltas’ and ‘Epsilons’. This shows societal control through the strict regulation of reproduction, which is a common theme in most utopian and dystopian novels. Furthermore, Huxley produces an “exaggerated version of capitalism in which new products must constantly be developed and marketed to stimulate both production and consumption and thereby to keep the economy functioning”. Everything in society is regulated to increase consumption, and “materialistic self-indulgence in this hedonistic society is openly encouraged” through use of propaganda slogans like “ending is better than mending” to persuade citizens to throw away their clothes if they tear and replace them with new ones. Additionally, as was also the case in Nineteen Eighty-Four, past histories have been destroyed, so that society is only told what the government wants them to know. By rendering the “consumer complacent and intellectually lethargic”, they are lulled into a false sense of security and stability as the reality of what the government were doing was disguised. There was no need for a surveillance state in Brave New World, as “there is no misbehaviour – all of the citizen’s thought are the mere product of the government’s suggestions”, and thus Huxley presents us with a society of people who are physically happy but lack individual freedom and choice, which is his dystopia.

In essence, what Huxley is doing is criticising modernity itself. Brave New World was originally published between the two world wars in 1932, when consumer societies were booming, the emergence of Ford’s assembly line allowed mass production, and societal concerns grew about looser morals following the roaring 1920s. In the words of Gregory Claeys, “the satire […] is as much upon contemporary materialism and consumerism as upon the eugenic super-state; it is upon the threads which connect America with the Germany of Hitler and the Russia of Stalin, the human willingness to renounce a more diverse life in favour of certainty and stability”. In a period of such volatility, Huxley presents a novel where this instability has resulted in terrible consequences for human individualism and free thought. Ashley suggests that authors such as Orwell and Huxley show “that it is easy to conjure dystopias out of any dark or disturbing possibility, demonstrating that there is more opportunity for the world to sink into a dystopian nightmare than evolve into a utopian dream”. In addition to his critique on early-twentieth century consumerism, Brave New World serves as a warning to the future that Huxley anticipates happening. He is “describing a society that, in a state of fear similar to our own, turns to the government to offer a sense of security”, and by showing the level of control exercised by the government over mind and body Huxley “reminds us that we must be mindful of that cost – in terms of lost freedom and lost opportunities”.

To conclude, authors of both utopian and dystopian novels use their writing to form a satirical social commentary of each of their contemporary worlds. In particular, Orwell “attempts to incorporate the utopian and dystopian elements of his political ideology within an evolutionary, historical perspective”. As well as the obvious insight into the authors grievances with their own socio-political climates, they can also serve as warnings or as idealised blueprints of humanity. Ultimately, however, utopias presented in literature are “not a legacy and they are not a source of hope; they are only what they are”.


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