Abrams, M.H. A Glossary of Literary Terms.

7th UTOPIAS AND DYSTOPIAS 3 2 7

edition. Boston: Heinle & Heinle, 1999.
and self-sufficiency; a turn away from modern society, with its getting and
spending, to the scenes and objects of the natural world, which were regarded
both as physical facts and as correspondences to aspects of the human spirit
(see conespondences); and, in place of a formal or doctrinal religion, a faith in
a divine "Principle," or "Spirit," or "Soul" (Emerson's "Over-Soul") in which
both humanity and the cosmos participate. This omnipresent Spirit, Emerson
said, constitutes the "Unity within which every man's particular being is con-
tained and made one with all other"; it manifests itself to human conscious-
ness as influxes of inspired insights; and it is the source of the profoundest
truths and the necessary condition of all moral and spiritual development.
Waiden (1854) records how Thoreau tested his distinctive and radically
individualist version of Transcendental values by withdrawing from societal
complexities and distractions to a life of solitude and self-reliance in a natural
setting at Waiden Pond. He simplified his material wants to those he could
satisfy by the bounty of the woods and lake or could provide by his own labor,
attended minutely to natural objects in the material world both for their in-
herent interest and as correlatives to the mind of the observer, and devoted
his leisure to reading, meditation, and writing. In his nonconformity to social
and legal requirements that violated his moral sense, he chose a day in jail
rather than pay his poll tax to a government that supported the Mexican War
and slavery. Brook Farm, on the other hand, was a short-lived experiment
(1841-47) by more community-oriented Transcendentalists who established a
commune on the professed principle of the equal sharing of work, pay, and
cultural benefits. Hawthorne, who lived there for a while, later wrote about
Brook Farm, with considerable skepticism about both its goals and practices,
in The Blithedale Romance (1852).
The Transcendental movement, with its optimism about the indwelling
divinity, self-sufficiency, and high potentialities of human nature, did not
survive the crisis of the Civil War and its aftermath; and Melville, like
Hawthorne, satirized aspects of Transcendentalism in his fiction. Some of its
basic concepts and values, however, were assimilated by Walt Whitman, were
later echoed in writings by Henry James and other major American authors,
and continue to re-emerge, in both liberal and radical modes, in latter-day
America. The voice of Thoreau, for example, however distorted, can be recog-
nized still in some doctrines of the counterculture of the 1960s and later.
See periods of American literature, and refer to Octavius B. Frothingham,
Transcendentalism in New England (1876); Harold C. Goddard, Studies in New
England Transcendentalism (1908); F. O. Matthiessen, American Renaissance
(1941); the anthology edited, together with commentary, by Perry Miller, The
Transcendentalists (1950); Joel Porte, Emerson and Thoreau: Transcendentalists in
Conflict (1966); Lawrence Buell, Literary Transcendentalism: Style and Vision in
the American Renaissance (1973).

Utopias and Dystopias. The term utopia designates the class of fictional
writings that represent an ideal but nonexistent political and social way of life.
It derives from Utopia (1515-16), a book written in Latin by the Renaissance
328 VICTORIAN AND VICTORIANISM

humanist Sir Thomas More which describes a perfect commonwealth; More

formed his title by conflating the Greek words "eutopia" (good place) and
"outopia" (no place). The first and greatest instance of the literary type was
Plato's Republic (latter fourth century B.C.), which sets forth, in dialogue, the
eternal Idea or Form of a commonwealth that can at best be merely approxi-
mated by political organizations in the actual world. Most utopias, like that of
Sir Thomas More, represent their ideal state in the fiction of a distant country
reached by a venturesome traveler. There have been many utopias written
since More gave impetus to the genre, some as mere Arcadian dreams, others
intended as blueprints for social and technological improvements in the actual
world. They include Tommaso Campanula's City of the Sun (1623), Francis
Bacon's New Atlantis (1627), Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward (1888),
William Morris' News from Nowhere (1891), Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Herland
(1915), and James Hilton's Lost Horizon (1934).
The utopia can be distinguished from literary representations of imagi-
nary places which, either because they are inordinately superior to the pres-
ent world or manifest exaggerated versions of some of its unsavory aspects,
serve primarily as vehicles for satire on contemporary human life and society;
notable examples are the fourth book of Swift's Gulliver's Travels (1726) and
Samuel Butler's Erewhon (1872). Samuel Johnson's Rasselas (1759) presents the
"Happy Valley," which functions as a gentle satire on humanity's stubborn
but hopeless dream of a utopia. Not only does Rasselas discover that no mode
of life available in this world guarantees happiness; he also realizes that the
Utopian satisfaction of all human wishes in the Happy Valley serves merely to
replace the unhappiness of frustrated desires with the unhappiness of bore-
dom; see chapters 1-3.
The term dystopia ("bad place") has recently come to be applied to
works of fiction, including science fiction, that represent a very unpleasant
imaginary world in which ominous tendencies of our present social, political,
and technological order are projected into a disastrous future culmination.
Examples are Aldous Huxley's Brave New World (1932), George Orwell's 1984
(1949), and Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale (1986). Ursula K. LeGuin's
The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia (1974) contains both Utopian and
dystopian scenarios.
For utopias and dystopias based on future developments in science and
technology, see sciencefiction.Refer to J. O. Hertzler, The History of Utopian
Thought (1923); Lewis Mumford The Story of Utopias (1922); Karl Mannheim,
Ideology and Utopia (1934); Chad Walsh, From Utopia to Nightmare (1962); Ne
Eurich, Science in Utopia (1967); and the anthology Utopian Literature: A Sele
tion, ed. J. W. Johnson (1960). Francis Bartkowski has analyzed Feminist
Utopias (1989), from Charlotte Perkin Gilman's Herland (1915) to the present.

Victorian and Victorianism. In its value-neutral use, "Victorian" simply

identifies the historical era in England roughly coincident with the reign of
Queen Victoria, 1837-1901. (See Victorian period, under periods of English litera
ture.) It was a time of rapid and wrenching economic and social changes that