Utopian Geographies and the Early English Novel . Jason H. Pearl. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2014. Pp. viii+203.
2016; University of Chicago Press; Volume: 114; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1086/687997
ISSN1545-6951
Autores Tópico(s)Folklore, Mythology, and Literature Studies
ResumoPrevious articleNext article FreeBook ReviewUtopian Geographies and the Early English Novel. Jason H. Pearl. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2014. Pp. viii+203.Nicholas SeagerNicholas SeagerKeele University Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreJason H. Pearl contends that advances in geographical knowledge in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries altered conceptions of utopia in prose fiction. Although the world was becoming more thoroughly mapped, its blank spaces filled in, to the extent that people were more likely to think of utopia in terms of time (a society that might develop) rather than in terms of place (a land that might be discovered), novelists between 1666 and 1726 “engaged strenuously with the possibility of utopia, in particular the possibility—or impossibility—of utopia as a mappable space” (2). So they imagined ideal worlds away from Europe in some respects to disprove the actual existence of any such place: utopia seemed like a conceptual impossibility because human nature and society are uniformly incapable of perfection. However, though they are dismayed, fictional travelers in works by Margaret Cavendish, Aphra Behn, Daniel Defoe, and Jonathan Swift are transformed by their experiences: they transport the ideals of overseas utopias back to Britain as social or psychological states hived off from the contamination of reality: “Worlds far away become worlds within, introjected as self-conscious fictions” (3). On this basis, Pearl argues for “the centrality of utopian geographies to the early English novel” (2).Pearl discerns a tripartite narrative pattern recurring in each of his examples. As he puts it, each work successively “emplaces, deconstructs, and reconfigures utopian geography” (17). Cavendish’s Blazing World seems to herald scientific utopianism, but the Lady encounters there factional bickering and exclusion rather than civilized, disinterested inquiry, so resorts to her imagination to construct an ideal mental world, cautiously sociable rather than solipsistic. Although Suriname in Oroonoko (1688) proves to be violently oppressive, Behn’s narrator cherishes and eventually commemorates the idyllic time spent there with the eponymous hero. The economic uncertainty and moral dubiety of a buccaneering life are transmuted by Bob Singleton and William Walters to a fraternal domesticity based on pirates’ articles of agreement when they finally retire and ensconce themselves in England. Crusoe’s solitude, for so long his torment, is disturbed by Amerindian “excursions” on “his” island that eventually cause the collapse of the colony in his Farther Adventures (1719); but in his Serious Reflections (1720) Crusoe says he can psychically recapture the condition of perfect seclusion even amid crowds in London. And in a less earnest instance of this narrative pattern, Lemuel Gulliver—though deemed unworthy of sharing in Houyhnhnm paradise—abides by its ideals once back in Redriff with his horses. So the narratives first imagine, then problematize, and finally internalize so as to recuperate utopian locales.A more naïve historiography of utopian fiction would posit that Cavendish’s The Blazing World (1666), too zany and self-conscious to be mainstream, is a final hurrah for the veritable line of works originating with Thomas More’s 1516 Utopia, and that the realistic spaces, marked by colonial violence, of Behn’s and Defoe’s travel fictions, plus the skepticism of Swift, mark a terminus ad quem for utopia in the novel, at least until the rise of speculative future fiction. Utopia is boring enough for Rasselas to want out of it. It is therefore to Pearl’s credit that he shows that strains of utopianism predicated on exotic locations persist in the Restoration and early eighteenth century. Pearl approaches utopia as a genre rather than a concept and therefore sensibly tackles it as a contingent, flexible, and heuristic category. But as a consequence the term remains nebulous enough to encompass solitude on an island as well as the developed societies Gulliver encounters; well-established colonialism in Oroonoko (1688) as well as aimless sea roving in Captain Singleton (1720); and the fantastical culture Cavendish surveys as well as the more mundane patch of earth on which Crusoe is stranded. Designating all these experiences utopian has a flattening effect, even if utopia is approached as a set of literary conventions rather than of social conditions. Of course, the real world supplied numerous other returnees from exotic locales, not just ones Defoe knew about like Alexander Selkirk and Robert Knox, and I would have appreciated a fuller account of the trope of the altered-and-returned traveler in the period so as to contextualize more fully these narratives. Pearl has established a paradigm that works for his five fictional examples, whether or not it helps account for the vast number of comparable voyages—fictitious and real, realistic and fantastical—that are not addressed in this account.The recurrent narrative pattern does not seem excessively schematic in its application because Pearl attends nicely to detail in each fiction. But I would have appreciated greater acknowledgment of the developments or differences between the works. The bleakness of Oroonoko’s ending and the ambivalence of Bob and William’s repatriation seem markedly different to Crusoe’s retired equanimity (which he uses to fantasize about genocidal global crusades) or Cavendish’s Lady’s privileging of the imagination. Gulliver Travels is appropriately presented as a subversive outlier, its ideals far more unstable, even as it conforms to the basic narrative arc. Therefore, this is the most satisfying chapter, as Pearl tracks in Swift’s satire the “ideals that are germane everywhere but instantiated nowhere, not even in patently fantastic lands” (126). A fuller sense of how the transitional works Pearl analyzes differ from similar earlier and contemporaneous works would have been helpful. For example, does utopian disenchantment produce a “utopian remainder”—the residual ideals the characters bring home—in Henry Neville’s Isle of Pines (1668), and if not, why (see 31)? Why does Defoe’s final novel, A New Voyage Round the World (1724), eschew utopian disillusionment altogether (see 22)? Utopian Geographies and the Early English Novel then is relatively modest in scope but advances a thoroughly engaging, coherent, economic, and persuasive thesis about the significance of utopian disenchantment in five important works of fiction. Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Modern Philology Volume 114, Number 3February 2017 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/687997HistoryPublished online December 09, 2016 For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.
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