20 - Utopian Fiction

Summary

Introduction

In The Faber Book of Utopias, John Carey notes that “Not many writers have tried to imagine utopias for other creatures besides humans” (380). Undoubtedly, Homo sapiens is the center point of the utopian tradition, but there are exceptions. The example Carey gives of an animal utopia is Rupert Brooke’s poem “Heaven,” in which fish imagine the appealing prospect (to them) of a world with “no more land” (380). Moreover, many texts which focus restrictedly on the human good also contain significant reflections on human–animal relations. While Thomas More’s foundational Utopia (1515) is concerned primarily with human interests, at many points it illustrates the connection of human and nonhuman animal lives in a way that is critical of species violence. The Utopians, for example, “look on the desire of the bloodshed, even of beasts, as a mark of a mind that is already corrupted with cruelty” (108). Earlier in the text in the section which focuses on the failures of European societies, More provides an extended critique of the social impacts of sheep farming and specifically the practice of enclosure through which “the owners, as well as tenants, are turned out of their possessions” (44). The focus on animal agriculture here anticipates the significant number of utopian texts that, even if they do not say much about what the future lives of animals might be like, do imagine vegetarian and vegan societies. In Samuel Butler’s Erewhon (1872), for instance, the inhabitants abstain from eggs on the basis that “to eat a fresh egg was to destroy a potential chicken” and from milk “as it could not be obtained without robbing some calf of its natural sustenance” (230), though the Erewhonians’ vegan culture emerges as part of a satirical structure that makes it hard to take their pro-animal orientations at face value. A more recent, and more straightforwardly committed, vegan utopia is Simon Amstell’s mockumentary Carnage (2017) in which the carnist present is seen through the lens of a vegan future. A third example – and one with a particular claim to literary historical significance – is Mary Bradley Lane’s feminist utopia Mizora: A Prophecy, serialized in The Cincinnati Commercial in 1880–1881 and subsequently published in book form in 1890.