THESIS ABSTRACT

TWO MODERN UTOPIAS:

A Comparative Study of

Aldous Huxley's Brave New World

and Stanislaw Lem's Return From the Stars

Michael Richard Lopez

May 1998

A comparison of the literary Utopias depicted in Aldous Huxley's Brave New World and Stanislaw Lem's Return From The Stars entails two major prerequisites: locating both novels within the general tradition of literary Utopias, and demonstrating that Brave New World is, in fact, a part of that tradition.

By analogy with Mikhail Bahktin's novelistic discourse, then, the origins of the literary Utopia are traced to an archaic-folkloric Utopia that reflects the intent and technique of ancient rituals of the regeneration of time (e.g., New Year rites). Also by analogy, subsequent literary productions of this archaic Utopia are shown to follow two lines of development, in the "official Utopia" (characterized by authoritarianism, monologism, legalism, and a closed and static nature), and the "unofficial Utopia" (characterized by comparatively greater individuality, polylogism, freedom, and a more open and dynamic nature), such that the former mandates an array of final solutions, while the latter displays an open field of possibilities.

Consequently, by a combination of psycho-biographical and discourse analysis that examines the monologism, conventions, narration, and hidden polemic of Brave New World, Huxley's novel is demonstrated to be an official Utopia. By a contrasting and primarily thematic analysis that examines the ubiquitous polylogism of Return From The Stars, Lem's novel is demonstrated to be an unofficial Utopia; one that offers the reader the unique opportunity of entering into dialogue with Utopia itself.

The comparison, then, of Huxley's and Lem's literary Utopias reveals the artistic, intellectual and moral shortcomings of the former over against the latter; shortcomings that have especially profound social implications (as despair and nihilism) in a genre that is home to the brightest hopes and most cherished dreams of humankind. Lem's novel, by contrast, offers an art of possibilities that nurtures and encourages those hopes and dreams.

TWO MODERN UTOPIAS:

A Comparative Study of

Aldous Huxley's Brave New World

and Stanislaw Lem's Return From the Stars

A Thesis

Presented to Antioch University

in Partial Fulfillment

of the Requirements

for the Masters of Arts Degree

by

Michael Richard Lopez

Folsom, California

May 1998

Suzann Bick, Ph.D.

Degree Committee Chair

Steven Olson, Ph.D. Jon Saari, Ph.D.

Degree Committee Member Faculty Advisor

TABLE OF CONTENTS

PREFACE

It would seem that a justification for the study of literary Utopias would not be required. However, in the event that this proves to be a presumption, Paul Tillich provides a concise and tightly-argued presentation in his "Critique and Justification of Utopia":

From this basis, Tillich stresses the truth of Utopia, that it is "but one manifestation of what man has as inner aim and what he must have for fulfillment as a person" (296), its fruitfulness that "opens up possibilities which would have remained lost if not seen by utopian anticipation" (297), and its power, insofar as "utopia is able to transform the given" (298). Over against these positive features of Utopia, Tillich also draws attention to its negatives; to its untruth that "forgets the finitude and estrangement of man...that man under the conditions of existence is always estranged from his true or essential being" (299), to its unfruitfulness in that Utopia "describes impossibilities as real possibilities--and fails to see them for what they are, impossibilities" (300), and to its impotence, which results in disillusionment, as an "inevitable consequence of confusing the ambiguous preliminary [nature of Utopia] with the unambiguous ultimate" (301), and--in actualized utopias--in terror, since "disillusionment is staved off through the political effects of terror" (301), as the Soviets have shown.

Utopia, then, and the literary works in which it is found, reflects the ultimate hopes and dreams of humankind, whether these are Judaism's Kingdom of God, the Bourgeoisie's rational state, or Marxism's classless society (Tillich 298), or the chiliast, liberal-humanitarian, conservative, or socialist-communist Utopias presented by Mannheim (211-263). But the perfection of these dreamt-of Utopias on paper cannot abide its imperfection in actual practice; what Tompkins notes of the Gothic romance applies equally well to Utopia: "Even in the hands of its finest exponent, it [is] precariously balanced over the abysses of the ludicrous and disreputable" (247). Worse still, the disillusionment and terror that result in reaction to the imperfections of Utopia in actual practice argue virtually in favor of "banning" utopian literature once and for all; as Darko Suvin notes "we have seen too many alluring gods of history turn into all-devouring monsters because of their pretended infallibility....The brightest hopes of humanity, we know, are liable to degenerate into justifications for the Inquisition, the Stalinist purges or the My Lai massacres" (215). Adam Ulam summarizes this outlook: "Perhaps we have reached a moratorium, if not indeed the end of utopias, and perhaps this is not altogether a bad thing" (134).

Mannheim objects that the disappearance of Utopia "ultimately would mean the decay of human will" (262) and "brings about a static state of affairs in which man himself becomes no more than a thing" (262-3). Worse than this, however, would be the effects of deliberately destroying our brightest hopes and most cherished dreams; effects that may be seen at work in Huxley's Brave New World. Moreover, that the "ban" should come as a mandate imposed on others, however nobly in the very name of humanity itself, makes it ultimately no different in kind than any other inhumane and totalitarian edict.

Rather, it would seem that we must come to recognize that it is not possible to realize a perfect Utopia in practice; if this is clearly understood and accepted ahead of time, then not only will there be less disillusionment (if any), but also there will be no cause for terror (as a way of maintaining a failed Utopia in spite of its failure), because society will instead be able to turn its efforts toward discovering its next vision of Utopia. Tillich suggests something similar, insofar as the synchronic Kingdom of God interacts with the diachronic events of history.

As such, there must be an eternal dialogue between the idealized Utopia in literature, and the realized Utopia in society. To give precedence to one over the other, to deny the interplay and interillumination of the imagined and the real Utopia, would be to condemn humanity to an "annihilation of everything that can be ‘kingdom'" or to a "metaphysical disillusionment." The 20th century's emphasis on the failures of real Utopias (principally in socialist-communist realms), along with the repudiation of Utopia itself implied by this emphasis, might well explain the predominantly cynical and ironic tones of the literature of this century of disillusionment; a century in which Toynbee's declaration of Utopia as a sign of cultural decay seems quite at home:

The "high" literature of the 20th century Utopia has indeed been dominated by what Suvin correctly refers to as the "whilom fashionable dystopia of the Huxley-Orwell type" (213), but the apparent disappearance of Utopia is an illusion. Rather, when criticism no longer limits its field of vision strictly to "pure" literature, it discovers that Utopia has simply changed places, and has come to occupy the genres of fantasy and science fiction. It is, then, not simply for this reason alone that I have chosen to examine Lem's Return From The Stars, as a work of science fiction, but also because by doing so our century's emphasis on real Utopias might be challenged, and the legitimacy, truth, fruitfulness and power of the imaginative Utopia might partially be restored.

Michael Richard Lopez

CHAPTER I

A HISTORY OF LITERARY UTOPIAS

In tracing the long history of literary Utopias, I have had recourse to a distinction similar to the one Mikhail Bakhtin draws between "novelistic discourse" and the novel itself. Novelistic discourse, then, reveals four essential and interrelated aspects: many-voicedness ("polyglossia"), laughter, methods of indirect representation, and ancient origins:

Laughter, as ridicule, gives way to new artistic and ideological levels under polyglossia and its associated interanimation of language here because an awareness of the relative validity of another's direct discourse intrudes that vitiates or qualifies the confidence, the "arrogance," of one's own ridiculing discourse. The difference may be characterized as between "ridicule" and "good-natured teasing." Whether ridicule or teasing, however, it is clear that to "satirize" or "parody" (to use the related literary terms) another's direct discourse, it is necessary to somehow represent that discourse; that is, one must employ forms of indirect discourse:

Novelistic discourse, then, may be described as laughing indirect discourse of folklorico-populist origins that is either ridiculing (satire) or teasing (parody), where the satiric or parodic aspect is shaped by the speaking-authorial attitude toward the discourse of another. (In Russian, there are actually two terms for "other." One, "chuzhoi," connotes the usual Western sense of the Other as "alien." The second, "drugoi," connotes rather a sense of a friendly Other, somewhat similar to Buber's "Thou." Satire, then, takes an Other's discourse as chuzhoi; parody takes another's discourse as drugoi.)

This distinction between satire and parody entails further implications. All indirect discourse is double-voiced, at least insofar as an author (one discourse) represents another's. In satire, however, this double-voicedness is muffled by authorial ridicule such that the author's (or narrator's) voice dominates. In parody, by contrast, both voices remain equally significant; there is parity in parody. Broadly speaking, then, satire is monologue, and parody is dialogue:

As such, satire differs from parody in intent, and different ends require different means. One of the most dramatic of these tactical differences may be seen in the contrasting types of laughter each employs; that is, in the contrast between the purely destructive ridicule of satire, and the renewing, ambivalent abuse-praise (teasing) of parody. Bakhtin provides a fairly complete characterization of this latter (parodic-"carnival") laughter that also brings out its contrast with satire:

From this, one could rightly conclude that satire reveals an oxymoronic "serious laughter," especially as it lacks the self-reflexive aspect of self-parodying parody. More significantly, satire lacks the renewing and regenerating aspect of parody (festive laughter); that is, it destroys, but builds nothing on the ruins; it retains the abuse, but proffers no praise. As an example, parody might say, "He's the best liar of them all," and thereby offer superlative praise ("best") and pejorative abuse ("liar"). Satire, on the other hand, would say, "He's the worst liar of them all," and retain the superlative construction, but efface any hint of praise. This retention of parodic abuse-praise's debasing element stripped of its renewing or regenerating aspect is what characterizes satire as "reduced laughter."

Apart from authorial intent and thematic treatment, a third and equally decisive contrast must be drawn between satire and parody. Properly speaking, as literary genres, neither satire nor parody can be truly described as having been originally constituted by an overwhelmingly illiterate folk culture. Rather, it is the oral and verbal style of folk laughter (with its characteristics of inversion, hyperbole, irreverence and dynamism) that was adapted to the new context of writing for the purpose of literary satire and parody. This recontextualization has very important consequences insofar as satire and parody therefore no longer directly reveal the values of folk laughter, but rather do so indirectly through the refracting consciousness and values of the literate classes. As such, a rift is created between the literally populist and literarily populistic forms of ridicule-teasing and satire-parody that engenders a distinction between "unofficial culture" and "official culture," respectively.

Consequently, though satire and parody are generally critical in nature, they nevertheless comprise a part of, and conduct their critiques according to, the ideological discourse of official culture over against the unofficial culture of populist values. For example, as is especially evident in moralistic satire, the "simplicity" of folk life is revalued as "backwardness," folk religion becomes "superstition," "sensuality" becomes "licentiousness," "physicality" becomes "barbarism," "frankness" becomes "vulgarity," "earthiness" becomes "filthiness" (in both its physical and moral senses), and so forth. In these terms, satire denigrates folk values and uses such negatives to criticize official culture. Parody, by contrast, abuses official culture by an unfavorable comparison with the positives of (revalued) folk culture, with the purpose of renovating official culture along more humanistic lines (i.e., in the name of greater liberty, freedom, freedom of speech, and so forth). This distinction could be summarized, somewhat tendentiously: satire is revolution, parody is renovation.

In spite of these contrasts however, satire and parody are united by their common origin in laughter; that is, the genre of comedy (of which satire and parody are two of the mainstays) represents the literary recontextualization of folk laughter, in contradistinction to the serious genres of epic and tragedy. As such, the satire-parody contrast recapitulates within the genre of comedy a similar contrast between the "low frivolousness" of the comedic genres and the "high seriousness" of the epic-tragic genres in general. It is one of the marvelous ironies of critical history that comedy could become devalued as a genre, precisely because it is not serious. Part of this devaluation occurred as a result of reduced laughter; that is, Carnival laughter, stripped of its universal and regenerating elements, thereby exactly loses its deepest significances and becomes merely frivolous or nasty. Insofar as it was official (literate) culture that first performed this stripping, particularly in satire, the devaluation of comedy is ironically unjust, and virtually tautological.

Literary Utopias, then, are necessarily an expression of the discourse of official culture, however critical they may be. Moreover, one would expect that they (as a subgenre of the novel) would generally recapitulate the characteristics of the novel genre itself; that is, one would expect to find within the literary Utopia a folk Utopia (recontextualized according to official culture values), along with a subsequent literary history that more or less follows the development of the novel. This expectation proves to be not only reasonable, but also justified, as I now will attempt to demonstrate.

Bakhtin has devoted the better part of his Rabelais and His World to elucidating one such folk Utopia which, in a word, may be summarized by that ritual spectacle of the middle ages and Renaissance, "Carnival." Insofar as Bakhtin's exposition is book-length, it is impossible to do complete justice to his conceptualization of Carnival, but the main points may still be noted.

One of the most central features of Carnival is its feast (which has extraordinarily profound and extremely earthy significance in Bakhtin's view):

In medieval and Renaissance culture, there were essentially two kinds of feast: the official and the unofficial (Carnival). The former "sanctioned the existing order of things and reinforced it" (9); it consecrated the present "hierarchy, the existing religious, political, and moral values, norms, and prohibitions" (9) by the way of the past. Carnival, by contrast, opposed itself to all of this in a point by point inversion (parody) of everything official: in place of official seriousness, Carnival brought festive laughter; instead of the strictly maintained hierarchy of feudal culture, Carnival reflected absolute equality; instead of official prohibitions on sexuality, speech, etiquette and association, Carnival lifted all bans; in place of official glorification of the past, Carnival festively annihilated it. The suspension of hierarchy had especially profound effects, as it allowed contact between people otherwise completely separated by social designation:

Bakhtin elucidates the significance of Carnival to illuminate the almost innumerable examples of it in Rabelais' Gargantua and Pantagruel, with the result that the intense sophistication and profundity that Bakhtin claims for the novel seems wholly justified. However, insofar as Gargantua and Pantagruel is a product of the literate castes, one can still question if it, and Bakhtin's interpretation, provide a clear window to a folk Utopia. In his introduction to Bakhtin's Rabelais Michael Holquist raises this question as well:

What makes the idealization suspect is less the unremittingly positive interpretation Bakhtin presents, and more the lopsided impression one gets from his book; that is, we only see the folk during Carnival. What about the nine months of the year not dedicated to Carnival. (Since Bakhtin did not aspire to examine non-Carnival time, its absence from the book is hardly a demerit.)

In Discipline and Punish, Michel Foucault provides another view of the folk (during non-Carnival time), in the "spectacle of the scaffold," the public execution.

Foucault also describes the fantastic spectacle of an enormous French chain-gang being transported openly from town to town in 1836, and destined for the convict-ships. Amongst the prisoners transported was a priest, Delacollonge, who had dismembered his pregnant mistress. In his open cart, insults, obscenities, stones and mud were hurled at him with particular fury. His escorts were hard-pressed to protect him, but he insisted on travelling openly, "believing that the humiliation formed part of his punishment" (260). Finally, though, he had to be disguised, but still traveled in his cart. As a result of this disguise, another notorious murderer, François, was mistaken for the priest:

One could hardly ask for a more ideal image of the Carnival spirit, in which official culture (the martyred seriousness of the priest) is relentlessly parodied by the abuse-praise of festive laughter, which laughs at itself as well. (François is not a "hero" in this scene; the crowd thought he was Delacollonge, and treated him accordingly.) On the same page, Foucault again refers to "saturnalia," the antique forebear of Carnival; "In every town it passed through, the chain-gang brought its festival with it; it was a saturnalia of punishment, a penalty turned into privilege" (261).

The above suggests, then, that Carnival was not just an event that occurred at set times, but that it was a kind of outlook or mindset that could manifest independently of Carnival proper; hence, the utterly free speech of the scaffold, the abuse-praise hurled at less notorious criminals on the chain-gang (and similar sentiments returned to the crowd), and François' parody. Compelling as these clear links are between Carnival and criminal, it could still be objected that the conclusion of a mindset behind them is overhasty; that all that has been shown so far is a kind of behavior, but not the psychology that informs that behavior. One could also object that Carnival, executions and chain-gangs represent extra-ordinary situations that do not reflect an everyday picture of the popular mind. For this, we must turn to the "archaic mentality," as described by Mircea Eliade in The Myth of the Eternal Return.

The main characteristics of the archaic mentality are most clearly discerned where its ritual imagery is most concentrated: namely, in the various forms of New Year rites. The basic elements of such rites, exemplified by the Babylonian New Year ceremony of "akîtu" as cited by Eliade, consist of "the abolition of past time, the restoration of primordial chaos, and repetition of the cosmogonic act" (57). In fact, realization of the second intention accomplishes the first, since the restoration or return to primordial chaos projects the community into mythical time, to a time before Creation. (In akîtu, this is signified by the reading of the Enûma eliš, the epic of Creation, in which the god Marduk must fight and destroy the Great Dragon, Tiamat, in order to affect Creation.) Eliade's comments here make explicit the parallels with Carnival:

The reading of the sacred epic has its parallel in the chaos of Carnival as well, insofar as the writing and public reading of innumerable parodies of Scripture and the Liturgy, in fact, all official writings, were a standard feature of Carnival. Bakhtin draws attention to this enormous body of writings, which was accorded official status during the festival (Rabelais 13).

New Year rituals often included, or began, with ceremonies for both individual and communal purification (the expulsion of diseases, demons and sins). Eliade summarizes these ceremonies in broad outline as "fasting, ablutions, purifications; extinguishing the fire and ritually rekindling it...expulsions of demons by means of noises, cries, blows...followed by their pursuit through the village with uproar and hullabaloo" (53). Again, the symbolic abolitions of time take on a different register in the primordial chaos preceding re-Creation. "Fasting, ablutions, and purifications" become "feasting, libations and profanation" in Carnival. "Extinguishing the fire" (an act reserved for the adults) transforms into a filial responsibility; in the Roman Carnival's candlelight parade, the sons blow out their father's candle, "crying out, sia ammazzato il signor Padre! ‘Death to you, sir father!'" (Rabelais, 251).

I have focussed here principally on Carnival's "restoration of primordial chaos" to locate its often inexplicable imagery in its larger context as a festival for the regeneration of time, but the "repetition of the cosmogonic act" is also present. In akîtu, the conquering of primordial chaos is finalized by the restored king's reënactment of Marduk's sacred marriage with Sarpan_t_ as "a concrete realization of the ‘rebirth' of the world and man" (Eliade 50). For Carnival, the equivalent act is the restoration of the normal order of things. The mundanity of this, however, should not obscure that Carnival does in fact wholly reflect the intent of a New Year ritual: the abolition of past time, restoration of primordial chaos, and repetition of the cosmogonic act, such that it denotes a "repetition of the mythical moment of the passage from chaos to cosmos" (34), the re-Creation of the world.

Eliade, then, lends an explanatory coherence to the overwhelming array of Carnival images Bakhtin (and to a lesser extent, Foucault) presents. Eliade also demonstrates the intense significance of Carnival indirectly that Bakhtin does not otherwise quite directly seem to justify. But even though the coherence, context, intent and significance of Carnival may be said to be established (as a repetition of the divine act of Creation, and all that that entails), the mindset out of which this ritual originated is still unclear. In other words, why does what Eliade call the ‘archaic mentality' utilize the technique of a repetition of the cosmogonic act at all?

"For traditional societies, all the important acts of life were revealed ab origine by gods or heroes. Men only repeat the exemplary and paradigmatic gestures ad infinitum" (Eliade 32). As such, repetition (reënactment) of a divine precedent obtains the divinity and sacredness of the original; Eliade provides several of such examples (29-34). More than this, however, "an object or an act becomes real only insofar as it imitates or repeats an archetype... everything which lacks an exemplary model is ‘meaningless', i.e., it lacks reality" (34). As such, New Year rites (and Carnival) employ a repetition of the cosmogonic act because any other act would be meaningless.

Carnival's repetition, then, literally projects it into the mythical time before Creation, such that one may say that its re-Creation exactly coincides with the original Creation. They become identical; re-Creation is Creation. Since this is true for all repetitions of exemplary gestures, when an individual repeats a divine precedent, an identification of deity and individual in mythical time occurs as well. By this, it is clear that the public ritual (of Carnival or akîtu) has its analog in the personal life of its participants as well. As such, the abolition of time, restoration of primordial chaos, and repetition of the cosmogonic act may all be ascribed to the mindset of the archaic mentality of individuals.

Eliade describes several other features of this mentality. First, insofar as all real acts occur only in mythical time (through repetition), the archaic mentality may therefore be said to be "ahistorical" in nature. Thus, the abolition of time entailed by exemplary repetition may be more properly understood as an abolition of profane (non-sacred) time; time taken up by all the non-important acts of life not preserved as exemplary gestures in myth. Eliade later convincingly illuminates the advantages of such a view; principally that it makes the terror of history, with its suffering, misfortune, social injustice and so forth, tolerable. Moreover, by being able to annul personal history:

This access to freedom has a correlate implication of access to power and creativity. This is obvious in the re-creation of the world in Carnival, but every repetition involves the re-creation of a first gesture, and hence is an act performed for the first time. Eliade further demonstrates the ubiquity of this type of personal creative power as cosmogenesis in ritual: in temple building and for lands conquered by war, at times of coronation, consummation of marriage, and the birth of children, or as a response to bad crops, or even bad luck.

One could critique the validity of this archaic mentality (as Eliade does to some extent), but the purpose of my discussion is only to establish the nature of the popular mindset as it informs a hypothetical archaic Utopia. As such, Eliade's assertion that the archaic mentality has served in good stead "tens of millions...century after century" (152) is perhaps less important than the fact that in 1949, when The Myth of the Eternal Return was originally published, Eliade could note that "a very considerable fraction of the population of Europe, to say nothing of other continents, still lives today by the light of the traditional, anti-‘historicistic' viewpoint" (152).

The archaic mentality's devaluation of history entails that it exists "in a continual present" (86). Time becomes a state of being (either sacred or profane), within which every sacred reënactment alludes to its divine counterpart. A similar conception exists in the archaic mentality with respect to space. Every object in the world that is conceived of as sacred (hence, real) has also an "extraterrestrial archetype, be it conceived as a plan, as a form, or purely and simply as a ‘double' existing on a higher cosmic level" (9); profane (ritually unsacralized) places do not have this archetype, and thus may be spoken of as non-real. ‘Sacred', however, must not be understood as referring only to temples or the like; an entire city, or monarch's domain, may be ritually sacralized. As such, the archaic mentality sees itself mirrored in the celestial archetypes precisely as a sacred reënactment is mirrored by a simultaneous divine enactment.

For every sacred action, then, there is a coincident occurrence of action on the terrestrial and celestial planes. If the time of this action is the continual present, then it would seem that the place of this occurrence is an equally concrete "absolute space." Such a continual present may be understood as comprised of "discontinuous moments" of time. (Why discontinuous? Imagine several pennies laid flat, edge to edge; each penny is a "moment." Though touching, there yet remains a gap between each pair of coins; this gap represents the discontinuity of non-time between each moment.) Insofar as the pennies are not actually connected, by virtue of the gap, they might just as well be scattered everywhere, as placed edge to edge. This, because the width of the gap is irrelevant, since one does not traverse the gap to get from one moment to the next; rather, one simply remanifests anew within each moment, within each instance of the continual present. As such, every moment is radically now, and this suggests the parallel term for the archaic mentality's space, here. ("Here" is also discontinuous. We do not traverse the gap between one "here" and the next, but rather remanifest anew from one "here" to the next. We are always, and perpetually, here; we can be nowhere else.)

As such, there is a radical integration of the individual into the here and now of sacred reality, that gains its meaning from the transcendental exempla and archetypes of the celestial planes. It might even be said that this reality-transcending meaning is not transcendental at all, insofar as the consciousness of its meaning is wholly bound up in the utterly integrated here and now of the act. I will not insist on this further point, but will refer henceforth to this aspect of the archaic mentality as "reality-integrating."

It is this mentality that provides the basis for the archaic Utopia, characterized by the reversibility of time (back to the Golden Age of new Creation), by a radical integration of the individual into reality here and now, and informed (transcendentally or not) by divine meaning. As a symbol, the archaic Utopia's attainment of Creation anew implies the attainment of those goals George Kateb has included as essential to Utopianism: "peace, abundance, leisure, equality, consonance of men and their environment" (Utopia and Its Enemies 11), but also adds "hope," "liberation" (from authority and time), "freedom of speech," "power" and "creativity"--all on behalf of the individual (as Carnival well illustrates). It should also be pointed out that this archaic Utopia is "temporary," "recurrent" and "small-scale."

What, then, was lost, and what was retained, of this archaic Utopia by its recontextualization and revaluation as an official (literate and literary) Utopia?

The most fundamental change may be seen foremost in the archaic Utopia being written, which after a fashion also indicates the most faithful retention of archaic values. For example, the act of authorship is a cosmogonic act that implies as much freedom, power and creativity as Eliade imputes to the archaic mentality. (There are, of course, psychological and imaginative limits here, as well as constraints on freedom of speech if the book is meant to be published, but these limitations are also operative for the archaic mentality as well.) Even so, the very act of writing literally returns the author to the beginning, to a mythical time before Creation. Past time and real-world (profane) time are abolished and, like Marduk, the author confronts Tiamat's primordial chaos ("chaos" means "gap" in Greek) in the empty white page. A struggle ensues; and the author "creates the cosmos from the fragments of Tiamat's torn body" (Eliade 55)--the remaining white space between the words, and even within the letters themselves--until Creation is complete. The text, then, is literally a record of exemplary gestures made originally by a world-creator.

The analogy continues even more precisely at the level of the reader. By the act of reading, the exemplary gestures of the author are reënacted, such that the reader's act of re-Creation refigures the original Creation in mythical time, and thus retains and reflects the freedom, power and creativity of the archaic mentality. Moreover, the distinction between deity-author and mortal-reader is also maintained, insofar as the author (if only in retrospect) knows the whole of the text omnisciently relative to the reader. This does not concern the reader, of course, who can re-start time and creation at will (by re-reading phrases, or returning to page one), who can reorder Creation (by skipping pages, or to the end of the book), or who can suspend creation indefinitely by leaving it unfinished (partly read). As a repetition of cosmogenesis, then, the reader too abolishes profane time and projects into the mythical (fictional) time of pre-Creation; there to repeat (by reading) the exemplary gestures (text) of the original Creator; to struggle with the oceanic vastness of potential textual significations; and to emerge, finally, intact and victorious, having affected an individualized Creation (meaning).

In the world of literature, it seems that the reader is typically of the lowliest caste. By the act of reading, however, the tables are turned, as in the turvytopsy world of Carnival. The reader becomes the Carnival monarch; the true sovereign (the author) is humiliated, insofar as the reader's interpretation of the text becomes sacrosanct, law, unchallengeable (unless the reader for some reason assents to a challenge). The reader sees the world with a deity's eye (especially in third-person omniscient narration). Moreover, Carnival's free and familiar contact between people normally divided by caste becomes available to the reader, who can now (with sufficient library skills) travel everywhere and meet with everyone; even the spirits of the dead (those denizens of Carnival) may be visited, or come visiting. Reading becomes a feast for the imagination, and the book "a banquet for all the world" (Rabelais 278). If the novel is comic, then the festive laughter is self evident--the laughing reader is a laughing divinity; if the novel is not comic, the festive laughter might still be asserted, in the sheer pleasure of reading itself.

Insofar as reading bears analogy with exemplary repetition, then the doubling (of sacred and celestial space, and of reënacting and divine time) that radically integrates the individual into the here and now of reality informed by transcendental meaning holds for the act of reading as well. When reading, real-world space and time become shut out, so to speak. The specific here and now where reading occurs, suffused by the transcendental meaning of the text, may therefore be described as equally radically integrating, not escapist. It should be pointed out in addition that this author-book-reader Utopia is "temporary," "recurrent" and "small scale." Lastly, as the individual's archaic mentality may be said to be the foundation for public-communal New Year ceremonies and Carnival, so also can solitary reading be adapted to a social scale, as the initial ceremonial gesture of akîtu (reading the Enûma eliš), as a traditional aspect of Carnival (the reading of sacred parodies), or simply for the sake of communal reading (as at Beat happenings and English Department teas).

Given this almost total incorporation and reflection of the archaic Utopia in the very nature of authorship, literature and reading, it is therefore surprising that the main body of literary Utopias are relentlessly authoritarian:

On one hand, these authoritarian elements manifest primarily within the text, at the level of utopian representation, rather than at the level of the architectonic relation between author, text and reader. In other words, the content of the literary Utopia has changed relative to the archaic Utopia, but not its form. This kind of change seems to precisely parallel the Catholic Church's technique of retaining the forms of pagan religion and festivals (such as the Winter Solstice), while substituting Christian content and significance (as Christmas), and clearly indicates the shift from unofficial (folk) culture to official (ruling) culture. Insofar as official culture is always authoritarian to one degree or another, the authoritarianism of literary (official) Utopias is therefore no longer so surprising.

Literary Utopias are authoritarian also because they tend to share the official culture's valuation of the "social" over against a valuation of the "individual." Of course, such "social" values are often little more than the ruling individuals' values imposed on the whole of society. As such, it is apparent that the universal freedom, power and creativity accessible to all within the archaic Utopia is claimed as belonging to only certain individuals in the official Utopia. This transformation of archaic values may be illustrated by the fact that in traditional cultures almost everything and all people were sacred; in later cultures, only certain places or people (e.g., temples and priests) were considered sacred. Consequently, the individual of the archaic Utopia vanishes, refigured as the masses and ruled by an individual who retains the sole right to the freedom, power and creativity of cosmogenesis in official Utopia.

This act of usurpation (literary or social) may have been legitimated on the basis of sheer power with respect (or disrespect) to the masses, who were neither trained nor equipped to prevent it, but power alone would be an insufficient legitimation vis-à-vis other literati or glitterati; usurpation simply "because I can" won't cut any ice amongst those who can as well. (Such a claim would provoke and justify ambitiousness in others also.) One needs a sturdier basis for authority.

Recall that akîtu begins with the reading of the epic of Creation. As I have already noted, the very act of writing is cosmogonic, but by transcribing the epic of Creation, the theme of Creation becomes not only the structural principle (as writing), but also the object of representation. As such, reading the epic represents another method for repeating the exemplary gesture of Marduk, that nevertheless remains invested with the sacredness (and hence, reality) of actual, ritual reënactment. It is this retention of sacredness and reality that precisely leads to the investiture of divine authority in the very text itself. Probably all Scripture obtains its authority in this manner, and this authority is absolute. There is no question of subjective authorial bias, since the writing is already divinely sanctioned as an exemplary repetition of oral tradition. That the written word is absolute, incontestable and sacred is nowhere better illustrated than by the fact that at the very heart of the Hebrew's temple, in the Holy of Holies, was the Ark of the Covenant (which it was death to touch) that contained the Word of God.

Authority among the ruling and literate classes, then, derives partly from sheer power, and is partly augmented by documents. It would no doubt be excessive to claim that all literature may be genealogically traced to Sacred Writ, but some influence is impossible to deny. In the very act of writing Scripture, the temporary aspect of the archaic Utopia (the temporaneity of the very repetition itself) becomes permanent. Moreover, the universal quality of sacredness becomes absolutely embodied in the text. In a sense, the text is the first usurper of cosmogonic freedom, power and creativity hitherto accessible to all; it is the first to deny universal rights to all, and to claim them for itself. As an absolute sovereign or deity, its claims encompass the whole world, and do not refrain from mandating both the large details (sexual and economic relations) and the small details of a person's life. Many literary Utopias have taken up this tendency with a vengeance.

In contrast, then, to the "temporary," "recurrent" and "small-scale" archaic Utopia, the official Utopia is "permanent" and "world-scale." The official Utopia promises "peace, abundance, leisure, equality, consonance of men and their environment," but must do so at the expense of the individual's "liberation," "freedom of speech," "freedom," "power" and "creativity." In spite of this authoritarianism though, one should never lose sight of the almost equally universal good intentions of most literary Utopists. Thus, instead of "liberation," the Utopist proposes "service" (not ‘enslavement') to Utopia's central authority; "power" becomes "loyalty" (that relies on the sovereign's power); "freedom" is purchased as the price for security (in exchange for "service"); "creativity" may be granted the patronage of the arts (only very rarely), or becomes limited to being rewarded for innovations in the workplace, for example, that increase production. In all of these somewhat questionable proposals, one might discern the faint traces of Carnival's spirit of parodic inversion--a kind of unpleasant, official humor. On a more abstract level, insofar as the archaic Utopia affects a radical integration of the individual into the here and now (informed by transcendental meaning), the official Utopia affects a radical transcendence of a society toward a "then and there" (informed by a wholly immanent meaning). In Ideology & Utopia, Karl Mannheim provides a similar definition:

Insofar as such a utopian ideal is "situationally transcendent" relative to the status quo, Utopia itself could only exist in some "there and then," not in the here and now. Moreover, it should be obvious that if one of such utopian ideas ever succeeded in being implemented, it would immediately cease to be Utopia, becoming instead the new "operating order of life"; More's pun on Utopia (‘good place'-‘no place') fits perfectly with Mannheim's definition. This sense of Utopia as then and there, which is so characteristic of the official Utopia, will henceforth be referred to as "reality-transcending."

As noted previously, satire and parody do not directly present folk laughter, but represent it indirectly from within a recontextualization of official values. A similar development is apparent in the literary history of Utopia. As folk laughter split into two forms of official laughter (satire and parody), so too does the archaic Utopia split into two strands of official Utopia. These two strands will be explored more below, but first, something must be said about the nature of the contrast between them, by way of analogy.

Previously, I characterized satire as revolution, and parody as renovation, and further noted their shared target (official culture) and comedic nature; it is tactics and intent (revolution versus renovation) that especially distinguishes the one from the other. At the heart of these genres, however, (and in fact in all official culture, including literature), there is a logical tautology. Broadly speaking, the satiric world-view may be said to see things along a continuum from Civilization to ‘folk-culture' (demonized as "vulgarity," "barbarity," "incivility" and so forth). The parodic world-view, by contrast, sees things along a continuum from Civilization (criticized as "decadent" or "absurd") to ‘folk culture' (idealized as "genuine" or "true life"). As such, both satire and parody appear to employ a Civilization-"folk culture" dichotomy, though with markedly different accents. This dichotomy, however, is not a true opposition, insofar as real folk culture is not included in the opposition (as is suggested by the demonization and idealization). The opposition is actually not an opposition at all, and rather should be indicated as Civilization-Civilization; it is simply just different kinds of "civilized" civilizations arguing for ascendancy and power, with characteristic disregard for the masses each would dominate once in power.

Precisely the same kind of false dichotomy exists between the two historical strands of literary Utopias. Ostensibly, the dichotomy appears to be a Society-Individual dyad, but in fact it is actually a Society-Society debate in which different kinds of "socialized" societies are vying for ascendancy. This is perhaps least apparent in the contrast between the Socialist Utopia and science fiction (‘fantastyka') Utopia, and is still somewhat tenuous in the contrast between the bourgeois Utopia (exemplified by Richardson's novels) and the Gothic Utopia. (This will be explored further below, but for now I will simply mention that the weddings that end many of the earlier feminine Gothic novels precisely indicate the heroine's individual achievement of establishing the society of a home.) In the contrast between the Renaissance Utopia (exemplified by More's) and the Arcadian Utopia, the opposed values of "city" and "country" most clearly bring out the fundamental Society-Society pseudodichotomy at work in the genre.

Even as this appears to be the case, there would be a certain artificiality in insisting on the point as regards developments in literary Utopias. False as the Society-Individual dyad might be at root, there is no question that it more accurately meets the literary Utopia on its own ground. It may well be that the individualistic pleas for a more genuine life, for liberation, or for a world of future possibilities coming from the mouths of the inhabitants of Arcadia, the feminine Gothic, and fantastyka are finally (consciously or not) merely self-serving, but at the very least, these cries are imaged in individuals and as such still retain their link with the archaic Utopia's assertion of individual value. It is this ancient and often tenuous link that prompts me to term this strand (Arcadia-Gothic-Fantastyka) of the two lines of literary Utopia as "unofficial." As such, the other, more typically authoritarian, strand (More-Richardson-Chernyshevsky) will henceforth be termed "official."

In general, then, the official Utopia values and advocates "Society;" the unofficial Utopia champions the "Individual." Consequently, the former will tend to suppress the individual voice; that is, such suppression will tend to be reflected in an authorial monologism, as defined by Bakhtin above. Hence, he correctly notes, "Everything capable of meaning can be gathered together in one consciousness and subordinated to a unified accent; whatever does not submit to such a reduction is accidental and unessential....All of European utopianism was likewise built on this monologic principle" (Problems 82). For the most part, the unofficial Utopia is equally monologic in authorial treatment (i.e., at the level of style and structure), but at the level of content belies a more, if only relatively, polylogic nature. It is primarily in the individualized voices of the unofficial strand (the dialogists of Arcadia, the heroine of the feminine Gothic, the "liberation" of ideas in Eastern European fantastyka) that this relative sense of polylogism arises.

Having thus characterized the general nature of the official and unofficial literary Utopia, it now becomes possible to examine the specific manifestations of such Utopias in their historical development. The first step in this direction, however, must be to abandon the two, quite traditional, definitions of Utopia Berneri cites in her Bibliography: "An Utopia has been defined, in the Encyclopedia Britannica, as ‘an ideal commonwealth whose inhabitants exist under perfect conditions' ...But a utopia has also been defined as ‘an imaginary conception of an ideal government' (Dictionaire Général de la Langue Française)" (320).

Why this must be done may be adduced from the first several selections in Berneri's work. To illustrate: Plato's Republic is purely theoretical, such that we never go to Utopia; Plutarch's Life of Lycurgus is ostensibly a history; and Aristophanes' The Clouds and Ecclesiazusae are parodic Utopias. In the medieval "extraordinary voyage" of St. Brendan, Utopia figures as an allegory for Paradise; for St. Augustine, Utopia is the City of God. Northrop Frye would defend all of these as quite proper to the history of literary Utopias; "Still, the attainment of the City of God in literature must be classified as a form of utopian fiction, its most famous literary treatment being the Purgatorio and Paradiso of Dante" ("Varieties of Literary Utopias" 34, my emphasis).

The fact, however, that Frye refers to forms of "utopian fiction," rather than to "fictive Utopias," should serve to make clear that such works as those noted above (as well as others, e.g., the Greek utopian novel) indicate a utopian discourse that is similar to the novelistic discourse Bakhtin identifies as predating the novel, and that will provide the foundation for Utopia itself. It is not until the Renaissance, then, that the disparate strands of this utopian discourse will finally be joined, most representatively in the official Utopia of Thomas More, and its unofficial counterpart of Arcadia.

There are four predominant features of More's Utopia that particularly bear commentary, especially as they establish major conventions for later official Utopias: these are Utopia's monologism, its definitive formulation of the travelogue format, its solution to the literary problem of the depiction of an entire world-society, and its social criticism.

The first three features are interrelated, as may be readily demonstrated.

In order to depict Utopia, More dramatizes what Socrates, Glaukon and others merely discuss in The Republic; in fact, the Second Book of Utopia can be described as a mobile Socratic dialogue. (Book One, which is trenchantly critical of 16th century England, adapts the Socratic dialogue to this purpose as well, but is wholly stationary.) This explicit separation of More's social criticism (Book One) and visionary utopianism (Book Two), though each may obviously be said to inform the other, is indicative of the work's monologism. All novels characteristically incorporate disparate genre-types into their texts; monologic novels, however, tend to keep such incorporations discretely separate from one another.

Further, More employs the travelogue device of a "guided tour" to present Utopia to the protagonist (and the reader); a device that inevitably tends to produce a somewhat monocular view of the place toured (much as Soviet tours once did). The fact that this one-sidedness is a structural-generic consequence of the "guided tour" device might be said to mitigate the imputation of authoritarianism against More and like-minded Utopists. Even so, the distribution of authority and speaking power between the "tour guide" and the "tourist" is inordinately in the former's favor; as Frye remarks, "As a rule the guide is completely identified with his society and seldom admits to any discrepancy between the reality and the appearance of what he is describing" ("Varieties" 26). Though he recognizes that "this is inevitable given the conventions employed" (26), that the guide tends to speak with a "pervading smugness of tone" (26) cannot be explained in terms of convention; rather, it should be understood as reflecting authorial monologism.

One of the apparently trivial details of Utopia is its attention to trivial details; a habit picked up by a distressing number of subsequent official Utopias. On one hand, this reflects More's effort to depict the entire world of Utopia--not by a detailed litany of literally everything, but rather by a selection of those details that artfully suggest everything. (Tolstoy is one of the true masters at discovering such essential details.) On the other hand, Foucault notes that in the classical age a "meticulous attention to detail, and at the same time a political awareness of these small things, for the control and use of men" (141, my emphasis) begins to crystallize, but the roots of the phenomenon are far older. In fact, one could trace this attention to detail "for the hold it provides for the power that wishes to seize it" (140), for the access to the control of others it grants, to that exemplary model of niggling details, Scripture. It may in fact partially be Utopia's generic link with the Bible (though More's Utopia is not a Christian State) that explains the bizarrely ritualistic mandates on sexual relations between husbands and wives in the book. (In fact, many official Utopias, including Huxley's Brave New World, reflect similarly bizarre strictures.) Again, as with the "guided tour," the authorial intent to depict the world through details on one hand mitigates an apparent authoritarianism that is an accidental consequence of that intent, but which at the same time contributes to the overwhelmingly monologic nature of the book.

Monologism is apparent in the socially critical element of the novel as well, insofar as the social criticism (apt as it is) seems more a rhetorical device for making Utopia seem that much more perfect. One can only wonder, for instance, how seriously one should take More's concern for the plight of the poor and dispossessed in Book One, when slavery is an institution in Utopia (Book Two); in fact, the question is hardly moot. More's pun on "Utopia" is not the only one in the book: The name for founder of Utopia, "Utopus" means "he who has no people;" the capital, "Amaurot," means "Shadowy town." Berneri notes, "Of the use of these facetious Greek names G.C. Richards remarks that More meant those acquainted with Greek to see through his fiction" (Berneri 68n). This may well be true, but the facetious names could also have served to protect More (humanist and friend of Erasmus) from any authorities angered by his non-Christian (humanist) Utopia; he could have answered any charges to the effect, "What? You thought I was serious? I called the place ‘Nowhere,'" and so forth.

However, with respect to the history of literary Utopias, the specific content and seriousness of intent of More's social criticism is of lesser significance than its rhetorical character. It would seem to be this rhetorical character that explains the odd blend of ostensible social sensitivity and despotism one typically finds in official Utopias. It finally seems as if the social criticism is less genuine than it appears; that it is rather a kind of tactic for making the Utopist's social arrangements more attractive. Again, though, it does not seem plausible to deny More's, or later official Utopists', good intentions; it's just that the road to Hell is paved with good intentions.

The static character of More's Utopia, and the bulk of subsequent official Utopias, may also be understood as an indirect consequence of monologism, insofar as both the "guided tour" device and extreme "attention to detail" naturally do not permit a great deal of narrative dynamism. The narrative movement from scene to scene is very placid and within each scene the explanations of the tour guide take precedence over the activities witnessed. This static quality, in fact, would seem to be a carryover from the discussion and debate of Book One (as a kind of symposium without food), which belies a certain intellectual movement, but precious little physical.

Again, this may be understood as a consequence of More's solution to the literary problem of depicting an entire world-society. The famous map of Utopia that More provides as a frontispiece to his book, a device that has since become de rigeur in the fantasy genre, exemplifies the official Utopia's tendency toward static states. In the genre of the "map," all time is suspended; Utopia becomes static (as well as permanent and world-scale) and objectified in the most literal way. With the device of the "guided tour," which similarly relies on an acutely necessary objectification, time is no longer wholly suspended, but remains thoroughly subordinated to space. Since More wants us to see everything, nothing can happen off-stage while we are not looking; hence, his narrative bears a similarity to those science fiction narratives in which a protagonist moves amongst the inhabitants of a world who have somehow become frozen in time. In a sense, then, More's guided tour of Utopia takes place in a single moment of time; that is, by affecting a "unity of time," with its consequential staticness, More becomes able to realize the ideal space of his Utopia.

By contrast, the unofficial Utopia of Arcadia had to solve a different literary problem: the depiction of time--specifically, pastoral-idyllic time. Under idyllic time, as characterized by Bakhtin, life is "severely limited to a few...basic realities. Love, birth, death, marriage, labor, food and drink, stages of growth" (The Dialogic Imagination 225) that all occur within, and are inseparable from, a "unity of place"; the "familiar territory with all its nooks and crannies, its familiar mountains, valleys, fields, rivers and one's own home...where the fathers and grandfathers lived and where one's children and their children will live" (225). This "unity of place," then, allows the depiction of generations (time), less as a biographical progression than as the simultaneous being together of children and the aged, and the middle-aged, who are at once both parents and children. Bakhtin further asserts that the mixing together of these age categories thereby engenders that "cyclic rhythmicalness of time so characteristic of the idyll" (225). As such, the unofficial Utopia of Arcadia reflects a dynamic quality, a rhythmicalness that is tied as well to the rhythms of Nature, quite distinct from the official (static) Utopia.

Arcadia is not precisely contemporary with More's Utopia. In fact, as part of the pastoral tradition, it has a very ancient lineage, which Northrop Frye conveniently summaries in Anatomy of Criticism:

The close association of pastoral-idyllic literature with Nature would probably already have alerted the literary historian to its links with folk culture; that its roots may be found in the Adonis lament make the links obvious, insofar as Adonis is one of the dismembered-regenerating vegetation figures of mythology. It is significant as well that the pastoral-idyllic tradition is inaugurated as a literary adaptation of an actual ritual. This is precisely the same kind of development I cited in the transformation of myth into Scripture (or the archaic into the literary Utopia). Consequently, one would therefore expect to find recontextualized and revalued folk culture in Arcadia.

This in fact proves to be the case, as may be somewhat sardonically demonstrated by noting the transformation of people into sheep in the Christian pastoral tradition. A remark by Bakhtin further suggests this recontextualization and revaluation, in less insulting terms. He notes that all the basic life-realities of the idyll are not presented "in their naked realistic aspect (as in Petronius) but in a softened and to a certain extent sublimated form. Thus sexuality is almost always incorporated into the idyll only in sublimated form" (The Dialogic Imagination 226). This sublimation is indicative of a refining or civilizing modification to the otherwise typically frank (i.e., ‘vulgar') attitude of folk culture, especially with regard to sexuality.

Although the formulation of Arcadia, as part of the much longer pastoral-idyllic tradition, is not strictly contemporaneous with More's Utopia, the milieu of the Renaissance, with its strongly court-centered and urban culture, would have almost automatically prompted a renewed interest in, and significance for, the Nature of Arcadia. Moreover, the disintegrating social conditions Utopia criticizes (such as urban crime and poverty, partly as a result of the economic displacement of peasants into the city due to the onset of the assault on the land that would later manifest fully as the enclosure movement), generally suggests two solutions: better cities (Utopia), or a return to the land (Arcadia). Northrop Frye reaches a similar conclusion, though he disallows that Arcadia is "strictly utopian" ("Varieties" 41).

Nevertheless, he admits that the Arcadian ideal reflects simplicity, equality--"a society of shepherds without distinction of class" (41)--peace and leisure; the arts appear "spontaneously, as these shepherds were assumed to have natural musical and poetic gifts" (41). And, by contrast to the sexual taboos of Utopia, in Arcadia "making love is a major occupation, requiring much more time and attention than the sheep" (41).

Arcadia also reflects two ideals almost wholly unknown to the official Utopia. Frye asserts that the pastoral is a type of "romantic comedy" (Anatomy 43), and that "the theme of the comic is the integration of society" (43). As such, the pastoral (and hence, Arcadia) may be described as "reality-integrating."

The seeming identification here between Cockayne and Arcadia, as well as Frye's disavowal of Arcadia's utopian nature noted above, must be taken issue with. Of course, if one defines Utopia as Frye does, as a "city," then obviously Arcadia cannot be Utopia, but such a definition is too limited, and causes Frye to accept the official (urban) Utopia of More as definitive, and to overlook the unofficial (rural-arboreal) Utopia of Arcadia.

With regard to Cockayne, Bakhtin notes, "There was a popular cycle of legends about the utopian land of gluttony and idleness (for instance, the fabliau of the pays de Cocagne)" (Rabelais 297). Not only does this brief remark emphasize a utopian element, the popular nature of Cockayne should also caution one against its automatic identification with the literary Arcadia; the link between the two, rather, must be recognized in the recontextualization of the former in accordance with the literate values of the latter.

Having thus clarified the nature of Arcadia, further aspects may now be explored. For one, Arcadia may be distinguished from Utopia as a "generic setting," usable by any number of poets or later novelists; it is, in a fairly concrete sense, "communally owned." (With the official Utopia, each author posited a separate island, city, or continent.) As a generic setting, then, Arcadia reflects a multi-voicedness not found in the official Utopia. This relatively greater degree of polylogism is expressed, not only at the structural level of genre, but also at the level of representation within the text. Insofar as Arcadia typically depicts generations of people, this multi-voicedness is self-evident, but there is also a comparatively greater degree of equality of speech, compared to the unequal distribution of authority and speaking power reflected in the "guided tour" device of the official Utopia.

This greater equality may be readily discerned in the playful and variously ribald encounters between any number of 17th century Stellas and Astrophels; George Williamson, in fact, notes precisely a "casuistic dialogue on love" (Seventeenth Century Contexts 64) as the distinguishing feature of such encounters. Without a presumed equality of speech, of course, such a dialogue would become quite pointless, and lose all of its charm. Neither can the importance of the theme of "love" (as the sublimation of sexuality in Arcadia) be underestimated, as it signifies the unofficial Utopia's counterdiscourse to the sexual prohibitions of the official Utopia. In this at least minimal way, Arcadia may be said to advocate individual desires over against the social desires advocated by the official Utopia.

Despite the relatively polylogic generic setting and quality of romantic encounter in Arcadia, the authorial treatment of individual texts nevertheless remains strictly conventional, such that monologism remains wholly in effect. (Insofar as poetry aspires to the condition of a "unity of voice," such monologism cannot necessarily be deemed a demerit in Arcadian poetry.) In tracing the development of the "casuistic dialogue on love" from Sidney to Donne's The Extasie, Williamson cites one interpretation of Donne's poem that indicates the most complete realization of such authorial monologism (as poetic unity); "In Donne's poem by a characteristic subtlety the dialogue is reduced to a monologue spoken by the undistinguished soul of the two lovers" (64).

To expect a plurality of voices in Arcadian poetry (or any poetry) is generally hopeless, and indicates why Bakhtin (and I after him) would seek it instead in the novel. Consequently, Bakhtin ascribes considerable significance to the idyll and idyllic time (hence, Arcadia) in later developments of the novel, in either a positive and direct sense (as incorporated into the Sentimental, family-generational and provincial novel genres), or in a negative and indirect sense (as a kind of time to be superceded, principally in the Bildungsroman). This, because idyllic time (as the officially revalued version of folk time) may be described as "circular," and hence "closed." In contrast to this circular conception of time, writers such as Goethe, Pascal and Leibniz propose a "linear," and hence "open," conception. Eliade traces the origins of this latter "progressive" view of time to Christian eschatology, which waged an ongoing battle with the cyclical nature of folk time (143-6).

It should be clear that "cyclical" is not identical to "circular"; specifically, the cyclical nature of folk time (and the archaic mentality that perceives it) is not "closed." However, by revaluing this cyclicity as circular, Arcadia thereby comes to reflect a kind of time (and hence society) that is open to the charge of "stagnation," "moribundness" and so forth. Precisely what has been lost in this shift of conceptions is the regenerating aspect of cyclical time. In spite of this misconception, Arcadia nevertheless affects a realization of ideal time that parallels the official Utopia's realization of ideal space. As such, both represent culminations or milestones in the genre of the literary Utopia that (like all milestones) both implicitly and explicitly point the way to new literary directions; milestones, moreover, that entailed both positive and negative consequences.

On the negative side, insofar as time is viewed as circular in Arcadia and static in Utopia, the images of time we have inherited in literature (especially as stripped of its regenerating capacity) are patently inadequate. Time thus viewed becomes an inescapable trap, and its tone (as in all official culture) becomes deadly serious. Laughter can only become ironic or cynical under such conditions; pleasure begins to take on that sadomasochistic quality so evident in the Romantics. At the end of Stanislaw Lem's Solaris, published in 1961, one character aptly summarizes all of these "modern" themes:

(This should not be taken as the final word in Lem's novel, as the question marks and final ellipsis suggest; Lem rarely, if ever, provides a final word in any case.)

Eliade might add that the closed or static impression of time engendered by Utopia and Arcadia, insofar as they present "negative examples" usable to argue in favor of linear time, thereby helped to condemn humanity to the terror of history, to the irreversibility of historical time in its progressive (linear) conception; that Utopia and Arcadia helped to make time into "history," which subsequently became Joyce's nightmare. As I have sketched it here, Eliade's contention might seem like a bare assertion; a fuller exposition, which would be out of place here, may be found in the last chapter of The Myth of the Eternal Return (141-162). For now, I will simply note that the official distinction between the circular and the linear views of time (as opposed to the more accurate distinction between the cyclical and the linear conceptions Eliade presents) is somewhat fatuous. In the same way that official culture stripped folk laughter of its profoundly significant regenerating aspect (thus rendering it merely frivolous or destructive), a similar stripping was performed on folk time (thus rendering it "stagnant" or "indolent"). It has only been in this century that a more accurate conception of folk time as cyclical, not circular, has been rediscovered by the Western intelligentsia; in the interim, we have been struggling with only half of the equation (a linear, irreversible time) at our disposal.

On the positive side, the realizations of ideal space and time affected by Utopia and Arcadia, respectively, realized also a set of literary conventions as exemplary models to be explored and exploited by later generations. As Bakhtin notes, the love idyll "was able to serve as the foundation for various types of novels, and could enter as a component into other novels (for example, those of Rousseau)" (The Dialogic Imagination 226), as well as the family idyll and the provincial novel. Utopia's "guided tour," on the other hand, provided a basis for the innumerable memoirs and first-hand accounts written by explorers during a particularly exploratory age. As such, the realized ideals of Utopia and Arcadia became the idealized realities of actually explored land and personally experienced time. In both cases, consciousness (personality) begins to infiltrate the official and unofficial branches of literary Utopias.

This shift is especially obvious in later titles of Utopias. After the Renaissance (which includes, along with More's Utopia, such places as Campanella's City of the Sun, Bacon's New Atlantis, Andrae's Christianopolis, Hartlib's Macaria and Gott's Nova Solyma), a place like Harrington's Oceana, published in 1656, becomes very rare, to be replaced with "memoirs," such as The Life, Adventures and Voyage to Greenland of the Reverend Father P. de Mésange, Gulliver's Travels, or The Memoirs of Gaudence de Luques. This shift is less obvious in the Arcadian branch of literary Utopias, but may still be sensed, insofar as the focus of the novel becomes centered on an individual consciousness (e.g., the novel of education or the Bildungsroman); Rousseau's Emile and Goethe's Wilhelm Meister may be considered exemplary in this respect.

In general, this shift from realized ideals to idealized realities seems to vindicate Mannheim's conception of Utopia as situationally transcendent relative to the present but realizable in the future. As previously noted, however, an implemented Utopia is no longer Utopia, but becomes rather the "operating order of life," the very status quo that Utopia is supposed to situationally transcend. (It might also be added that the very existence of literary Utopias violate Mannheim's definition, insofar as such Utopias are precisely realizable in the present as texts.) In this respect alone, it would seem to disallow that the idealized realities of memoirs and Bildungsromane warrant designation as literary Utopias, though obviously they comprise a part of utopian discourse. On a more intuitive level, there is not a strong enough sense of a specific and concrete place or time in these idealized realities to seem persuasively like literary Utopias. As such, one might say that Utopia and Arcadia per se "vanish" after the Renaissance. This disappearance, however, is not permanent, as may be seen by examining the official Utopia of the bourgeoisie, and the unofficial Utopia of the feminine Gothic.

The rise of the middle-classes to power brought with it an extraordinary upheaval of social life that amounted to a complete reinterpretation of all aspects of culture, including Utopia. One of these cultural revisions, as examined by Kate Ferguson Ellis in The Contested Castle, was the formulation of the "ideology of separate spheres." This new ideology proposes a gender division and rigorous separation of the worlds of masculine work and feminine domesticity, based on, and dignified by, Biblical and Miltonic (Paradise Lost) authority. As such, work occurs in the fallen world (with the husband as a post-lapsarian Adam), while domesticity occurs in the home (with the wife as a pre-lapsarian and innocent Eve).

The redefinition of feminine gender-roles, over against the aristocratic images of women (as slaves to their sexual passions and appetites) and in conjunction with the middle-class conceit of moral superiority, led to a conception of Eve (woman) that endowed her with the capacity to reclaim what she originally lost for all. It is woman's superior virtue, her implicit sense of morality that is self-evidently greater than man's, that especially qualifies Eve for this role. As such, this virtue, along with its correlate "passionlessness" (i.e., "sexlessness"), coupled with Eve's socially divine mission of domestic redemption, creates the image of woman as an innocent "domestic angel." A similarly total redefinition of masculine gender-roles (perhaps most completely realized in Richardson's Sir Charles Grandison) is based on both the morality of the Protestant work ethic and the civilizing conceits of early capitalism; as Adam Ulam has remarked, in "Socialism and Utopia," "Free enterprise was considered not only socially beneficent but also morally imperative" (124). However, this redefinition bears only indirectly on the history of literary Utopia, insofar as the foci of the bourgeois Utopia are the home and its resident domestic angel.

The reduction of the official Utopia from island or continent to home precisely reflects a diminution of scale that characterizes what Frye has termed the "low mimetic mode" (Anatomy 34), and for which Bakhtin provides a similar formulation, as characteristic of the pathos of the Sentimental psychological novel: "The didactic purpose behind this Sentimental pathos is tied to more concrete situations, descends to the depths of everyday life, its smallest details, to intimate relations between people and into the internal life of the individual person" (The Dialogic Imagination 396).

On one hand, this diminution represents a reaction to the historical enormity of the Baroque novel, but as Bakhtin goes on to correctly note, "[i]t is not a matter of scale, but rather of a special organization of space" (397). This special organization of space indubitably has its links with the kind of attention to detail and the emergence of what Foucault has referred to as the "disciplinary society"; "in the first instance, discipline proceeds from the distribution of individuals in space....Discipline organizes an analytical space" (141,143). The "home" is not so small as it may first seem, as the cliche "A man's home is his castle" and the maxim "the home is an island of sanity in a mad world" attest. "Home" therefore represents the bourgeois Utopia's revision of More's official "castle." There is a further parallel as well, insofar as there were several castles on More's island. As Raymond Williams notes (citing Austen as exemplary):

As such, More's island has become the bourgeois island of "class," with yawning abysses between each castle.

In attempting to realize this ideal class-space, the official bourgeois Utopia seems to have automatically adopted the authoritarian nature of its official forebears. "Home" arrogates to itself the authority of a castle; the father-husband becomes king; royal benevolent despotism becomes paternalism; the mother-wife and children become ornamental subjects. In such a context, not only must "father know best," but also, since the ideology of separate spheres adamantly maintains the innocence (i.e., ignorance) of women, "only father knows." Insofar as "Monologue pretends to be the ultimate word" (Bakhtin, Problems 293), this is blatantly monologic. This fact is also confirmed by the epistolary novel being the most prevalent subgenre of the bourgeois Utopia, with Richardson as its most prominent popularizer. (Recall that in the epistolary Pamela by Richardson, the overwhelming number of letters presented come from Pamela's pen, such that every other point of view, and hence the "other side of the story," basically goes unrepresented.)

Although Freud's theory of prehistoric humanity may never be subject to anthropological verification, it nevertheless provides a vivid example of the power distribution implicit in the ideology of separate spheres. In Freud's view, the original despot-father hoarded all women for himself, thus incurring the wrath of his sons, who are finally driven to parricide. By murdering the father-despot, the sons commit the supreme crime, insofar as it was the father who, despotically or not, established "the order which has preserved the life of the group" (Marcuse 64). But in the wake of this murder, and in order to reëstablish social stability, the sons must repeat the father's exemplary gestures, and thereby reimpose his taboos and strictures against which they had originally rebelled. These taboos, however, are imposed on all people, including the fratriarchy since they too must "obey the taboos if they want to maintain their rule" (65). Consequently, the ghost or the image of the father "survives as the god in whose adoration the sinners repent so they can continue to sin, while the new fathers secure those suppressions of pleasure which are necessary for preserving their rule and organization of the group" (64).

The seemingly fantastic significance Freud accords here to the father (as either the tyrant-despot or guilt-ridden son) is quite in keeping with the values implicit and explicit in the ideology of separate spheres, especially when it is remembered that sons become "new fathers," and that daughters are shuttled from the old father's hoard to the new father's (as wives). It is also logical that the supreme crime should be conceived of by Freud as "parricide," since parricide is the bourgeois equivalent of the supreme crime under feudalism, "regicide." Foucault provides an explicit proof of this. Against the background of gentle punishments for crime envisioned in 1781 by Vermeil, one crime warranted an "infinity of punishment, something equivalent in the new penal system to what regicide had been in the old" (113). The guilty would "have his eyes put out" (113), and be suspended naked in an iron cage in full public view, perpetually exposed to all the elements, and fed on only bread and water until death:

Vermeil's moral fury should be taken as neither eccentric nor atypical; as J.M.S. Tompkins remarks, the "vast and tidy camp of virtue, with its grand and simple plan, is one of the spectacles of the eighteenth century" (70). Consequently, her comment with regard to the era's demand for moral instructiveness in literature applies as well to the whole spirit of the 18th century in England: "In the ‘seventies and the ‘eighties...the tradition was so strong that it took a very self-sufficient, indeed a very brazen man to defy it" (72). Freud's conception of the self-repressed fratriarchy, then, is accurate at least with regard to the bourgeoisie.

The deification of the father-husband necessarily implies a concomitant submissiveness on the part of the home-king's subjects, be they wife, child or servant. In the popular literature of 1770-1800 that Tompkins has analyzed, she notes, "It is impossible to exaggerate the frequency with which this attitude occurs" (87). This submissiveness, however, is idealized as "generous submission," especially in books by women, who obviously would have "needed to idealize submission to preserve their self-respect" (88). Similarly, in an age of extreme moral didacticism, "Incomparably the most frequent of all these didactic themes is filial obedience" (84), displayed especially in gestures of "generous submission"; "Such submission was not a degradation, but a spiritual grace....The wife faced with an unworthy husband, the child oppressed by a tyrannous father, do more than obey. By an act of will they abrogate reason, quell discrimination, and not only accept but approve the fiat they bow to" (88-9). As she further notes, such "submission is an attitude that no longer has much popular appeal" (89), but this should not blind us to the popular favor it held in the late 18th century. Neither should it be thought that only men espoused these ideals. The assumption that:

is a very common idea in books by women of the period. As such, "wifely dependence," as an "economic necessity sublimated by Christian ideals" (155), thus takes on positive connotations now lost to a modern audience. This gratitude and dependence extended to children as well; "Children should be grateful for their breeding and subservient to their parents' authority. Parents, of course, should be moderate and kind, but authority is their function, and they ought not abdicate it" (85).

To these virtues, wives were also expected to add patience, loyalty, and that most frequently praised quality in a wife, "complaisance"; "a flexible deference to her husband's moods, a ready fund of encouragement for all his tastes, provided they do not transgress principle" (157). In the case of marital infidelity, "Above all, she must never recriminate; let her be blind as long as she can, and afterwards patient, and if possible cheerful. No husband was ever won back by what Mrs. Griffith calls the ‘vain arts of eloquence'" (158). Again, the potentially resigned tone of Mrs. Griffith notwithstanding, this was not an ideal solely proposed by men:

Such values, as idealizations, in general reflect the bourgeois Utopia's aspiration toward "domestic bliss." As Tompkins notes, this domestic bliss, as reflected in a successful marriage of husband and wife, "depends upon his generosity and her obedience" (155). Ellis asserts much the same, but in a very different way; "Feminism and a concern with domestic violence emerge in the context of the Enlightenment, with its faith in the power of masculine reason to correct and check social abuses" (3). "His generosity," then, also includes "his self-control," because it is precisely the threat or the actuality of the unchecked, uncorrected social abuse of domestic violence that most thoroughly vitiates the bourgeois Utopia's claim of "home" as paradise. Even in its ostensibly non-violent guise, the "rights of a husband" or "wifely duty" introduce the potential of rape into the home. Moreover, the superaggrandized authority of the father-husband, in conjunction with the enforced ignorance of women under the ideology of separate spheres, has the double negative effect of making a wife helpless before the demands of her husband, and incapable of escape, since she has been rigorously denied knowledge of the world (and hence, how to operate within it).

This prohibition on knowledge--whether Eve is not allowed to eat, or chooses not to eat, from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil--was never perfect in practice. It is from this position of forbidden knowledge gained, from the socially unacknowledged or lived experience, of domestic violence that the feminine Gothic launches its critique of the ideology of separate spheres, and offers its own counterproposed Utopia.

Before examining the specifics of the genre, however, it is necessary to reemphasize the almost fanatical moralism of the era. If it is only a "very brazen man" (Tompkins 72) who could revolt against the spirit of the age, one wonders what adjective to use to describe the woman who would seek to critique it. The idealized virtue of womanhood excluded the right to recriminate; patience and martyrdom were expected instead. Add to this, as Fanny Burney notes in Letter 39 of Evelina, that "nothing is so delicate as the reputation of a woman" (qtd. in Tompkins 141), and it becomes almost miraculous that the feminine Gothic's critique was ever written (much less published). Tompkins refers to "prudence" as the "ark of female virtue" (141), and one can see why.

In such a context, one could hardly expect the feminine Gothic's critique of the bourgeois Utopia, along with its own proposed Utopia, to be presented directly. And it is not. But, to a certain extent, the extraordinary constraints on feminine Gothicists assisted their project. Female novelists in general were viewed by critics of literary periodicals (such as the Monthly and the Critical) with a mixture of condescension and curiosity. As such, any apparent moral lapses might have tended to be seen as arising from the novelist's deficiencies of education or talent rather than from a determined perversity. This might not be enough, however, to spare such female novelists from ridicule; the reviewers, as men, were ostensibly obliged to take a considerate attitude toward the feminine sensibility of such writers, but they did not always honor their own code. (In its own small way, this illustrates the vulnerability of women, in as much as they had to rely on male self-control.)

Perhaps the first feature of the feminine Gothic to note, then, would be the self-deprecating preface that seems to be almost a standard feature of novels by women of the period. Instead of leaving it to the critics to assume some benign reason for any apparent moral lapses, these self-deprecating prefaces provide one, often with poignant biographical details about poverty, dying breadwinners and general hardship as being the sole reason behind the impulse to write in the first place. While such biographies may well be true (perhaps exaggerated somewhat for the sake of an indulgent review and book sales), it is also clear that such a preface would have helped to disguise any critique and would have helped to spur its dissemination amongst the public. In an era proud of its Christian charitableness, "Mrs. Eliza Parsons, who took up her pen for the support of eight dear fatherless children" (Tompkins 118) could rightfully hope that her book would be published and bought, if not read. As one neophyte put it directly, "a candid, a liberal, a generous Public, will make the necessary allowances, for the first attempt of a young female Adventurer in Letters" (117, emphasis in original). Such flattery might get your critique everywhere.

This possibly strategic self-deprecation is counterbalanced by two other features of the feminine Gothic. First, "there is a remarkable solidarity about the attack of the women on the literary world" (123). The sentiment is echoed by Ellis; since courage is required to write about "areas of social reality about which middle-class women were supposed to have no knowledge....novelists must ‘not desert one another'" (7). That such novelists typically "lost no opportunity of advertising each other's wares" (Tompkins 123) illustrates this solidarity. The second feature of the feminine Gothic is its sudden appearance; "Like the beanstalk, it shot up overnight into redundant vegetation, and enterprising novelists thronged its stem" (Tompkins 243). The suddenness of this is especially pronounced in Tompkins' study, since she dates the official inception of the Gothic by Radcliffe; such figures as Horace Walpole, Clara Reeve, Sophia Lee, Charlotte Smith and Mary Wollstonecraft appear more as precursors.

The apparent authorial voicelessness of self-deprecation, along with the solidarity and suddenness of the feminine Gothic's production, present a unique event in literary history, and belie as well a relative polylogism at work in the genre. One could almost assert that the feminine Gothic comes to reflect something similar to Arcadia's "communal ownership," except that the Gothic commune is not a literal place like Arcadia, but rather the class-space noted by Raymond Williams above. A similar communal ownership and transformation of time may also be discerned as "class-time" in the feminine Gothic; in it, "[t]he bourgeoisie was then able to read...of how it ‘repaired the ruins' of its medieval past as part of God's scheme of providential history" (Ellis 49).

In general, then, the unofficial Utopia of the feminine Gothic presents a point by point inversion of the official bourgeois Utopia. For example, rather than filial obedience, much of the feminine Gothic centrally involves a daughterly rebellion. This often takes the form of some kind of transgression (of innocence, of knowledge barred, against masculine will, or even as simple initiative, such as flight, which is rarely an option for non-Gothic heroines). The reason for the rebellion and transgression typically originates in a conflict between a "heavy father" figure (an actual father, or one of Freud's new fathers, a dispossessed second son) and the heroine's choice of marriage partners, which hints at the taboo realms of female sexuality and passion in an age when passionlessness was the ideal. In fact, the extent of daughterly initiative (rebellion) in the feminine Gothic already reflects a transgression in itself, since what many heroines manage to accomplish by the novel's end was beyond the pale of the socially possible at the time; as Ellis remarks of Charlotte Smith's Emmeline, "No court in eighteenth-century England would have awarded a girl in her [Emmeline's] position the title to an estate and the privileges that went with it" (92).

As such, though the feminine Gothic presents its case indirectly, it nevertheless drives straight to the very heart of the bourgeois Utopia. This is perhaps most readily seen in that most readily seen feature of the Gothic landscape: the castle. It is not enough to say that the castle symbolizes the home; rather the castle blatantly exposes the home's true nature. There is no simile at work here; the castle is a literal image of the Gothically realized home. The audacity of this exposé, however, is obscured by the anachronism of setting and by the apparent compliment paid to middle-class Protestant values (over against the castle's associations with the evils of aristocracy). More generally, by drawing on images and institutions from the "bad old days" (rarely with much historical accuracy) of England, the feminine Gothic was able to ostensibly criticize the past, and be praised for it, while actually attacking the contemporary "bad new days."

The total inversion of the era's official Utopia affected by the feminine Gothic may be understood as a parody, rather than a satire, of the bourgeois Utopia. As such, the Gothic may be said to be a comic genre; an assertion supported somewhat by its links with Arcadia (also a comic genre). These links are most evident in the importance of Nature imagery both share, but are also indicated in the weddings that often happily end Gothic novels; weddings are the most conventional literary method for conveying the socially integrating aspect of comedy noted by Frye. As a parody, then, the feminine Gothic does not aim at satiric revolution, but at social renovation--cultural regeneration as a result of festive laughter's abuse-praise. It is a vision of daughterly choice, not parental decision, in marriage partners; it is a vision of equality, not patriarchy, in the marriage itself, with the consequential establishment of a "true home," a true Paradise, that such equality implies. The heart of the feminine Gothic Utopia, then, is not so different in appearance from the bourgeois Utopia; it is the principle upon which each is founded that is radically different.

But parody, Nature, Arcadian associations and weddings may not seem to warrant the claim that the feminine Gothic is a comedic genre; its premium on "terror" alone should refute such an idea. However, one should recall Radcliffe's own definition for terror: that "it expands the soul, and awakens the faculties to a higher degree" (qtd. in Ellis xvii n1). This kind of terror is to be specifically associated with the aesthetic pleasure of the Sublime as famously formulated by Edmund Burke; "Radcliffe used Burke as the theoretical base for her work" (xvi n1). Alternatively, and somewhat rephrasing Michael Sadleir's formulation of "terror" in Radcliffe, it affects an "agreeable shudder" (Ellis 57). Narrative terror, then, is an ambivalent pleasure, very much like the terror of rollercoasters and funhouses. The funhouse (or Halloween's haunted house) is especially apt, insofar as one's squeals of terror in the company of friends is as often as not accompanied by laughter. Such laughter is very close in nature to festive laughter's abuse-praise.

In addition to parodic inversion, another common technique of festive laughter is its "grotesque realism": "Exaggeration, hyperbolism, excessiveness are generally considered fundamental attributes of the grotesque style" (Bakhtin, Rabelais 301). Such hyperbolism often borrows the grandeur of the epic for totally non-epic occasions. A classic instance in the Gothic occurs when an absurdly overlarge helmet kills Manfred's son in Walpole's Castle of Otranto. Apologists of the Gothic (such as George Haggerty in Gothic Fiction/Gothic Form) have had to negotiate around such literary faux pas in their attempts to raise the Gothic to the level of literature deserving of analysis. Such conniptions, however, are unnecessary if a comedic nature is assumed for the Gothic. The tradition of the unheroic death, for instance, extends back at least as far as Seneca's Ludus morte Claudii, "in which the emperor dies at the moment of defecation" (Rabelais 151 n1). Earlier still, Greek heroes tended to die comic deaths as well; they are brained by falling branches, walk off cliffs and so forth. It is almost not an exaggeration to claim that no Greek hero, who did not die in battle, died an epic death.

The death of Manfred's son, then, is a comic death. It is our lack of familiarity with the tradition in which it participates that makes it seem otherwise "serious," but even modern examples may be found. It is exactly the same kind of image that provides the entire basis for the very short animated film "Bambi Meets Godzilla." The difference, of course, is that such deaths are now conceived of as final; in the ancient tradition, the ubiquitous regenerating element was always somehow present.

Hyperbole is also apparent in the exaggerated virtue and villainy of the Gothic heroine and her antagonist, as well as the vastness of the Sublime in Nature. On one hand, of course, the exaggerated moral nature of the feminine Gothic's inhabitants (whether good or evil) has the advantage of justifying the heroine's rebellion as a supervirtuous act; who could not but rebel against such villainy? On the other hand, this hyperbolism veers very close to the melodrama, which seems based on the principle of bringing its audience to the very edge of hysterical laughter, without actually going over the edge. Tompkins suggests this in another way: "Even in the hands of its finest exponent, it [the Gothic] was precariously balanced over the abysses of the ludicrous and disreputable" (247). In later Gothic writing, by the Brontës and Mary Shelley in particular, the melodramatic elements are handled with considerable sophistication, though usually at the expense of laughter. (The transformation of laughter, as from comedic terror to tragic horror is almost always a sign and technique of the dignifying of a genre by "high seriousness.")

Hyperbolism affects another advantage for the feminine Gothic's critique by drawing on exaggeration's comic associations. Broadly speaking (or perhaps literally), the comedic is not meant to be taken seriously. Rabelais, for instance, asserted the most outrageous blasphemies in print at a time when people were burned at the stake, but lived to die peacefully in old age. By contrast, "Rabelais' friend, Etienne Dolet perished at the stake because of his statements, which although less damning had been seriously made. He did not use Rabelais' methods" (Rabelais 269). One might similarly contrast the fate of most feminine Gothicists to the public pillory suffered by Mary Wollstonecraft for her statements made on behalf of women's rights.

Lastly, hyperbolism may be said to be the basis of terror in the feminine Gothic, insofar as it is "the intense emotion...that a ‘good' female character can have in a novel without threatening her innocence with respect to male lust" (Ellis 46, emphasis in original). Innocent virtue is forbidden sexual knowledge and so cannot even recognize male lust, much less react to it, even in flight. Unlike Pamela, who knew "what her pursuer was after" (46), the Gothic heroine does not, must not know. For Ellis, the terror of confinement, not rape, therefore motivates the heroine's flight. True as this might be, however, the feminine Gothic's parodic inversion suggests that "terror" might actually be "lust" (as the intense emotion), disguised in the most thorough way possible. It is, after all, the heroine's "lively preference" for some man other than her would-be captor-rapist that spurs her flight as much as the threat of enclosure. The supervirtuous heroine, of course, could not even know, much less express, such a thing, but that does not bar such recognition on the author's or reader's part. It might also be added that the confrontation between the heroine and the villain, whether actual or only dreadfully imagined by the heroine, is a form of the casuistic dialogue on love, and as such adds another link between Arcadia and the feminine Gothic.

An awareness of the potential for sexuality in such a confrontation, along with its positive obverse (the heroine's wedding at the end of the novel), would already represent a transgression of official feminine virtue, made all the more audacious by the novel's being written. As such, however unobjectionably virtuous the text is, it may still be "tainted" by lust, either in the writer's mind and memory, or in the reader's reading. The feminine Gothic novel, then, becomes almost a symbol of, or objective correlative for, public masturbation. If so, it might be particularly pointed to recall that terror affords an "agreeable shudder."

Consequently, the haunted castle may be said to become the author's or reader's mind, and the undisclosable secret it holds, sexuality:

The above passage, quoted verbatim except for the substitution of "her" for "his" as noted, is addressed by Ellis toward the thematic elements of the Gothic, but I have cited it as applying to the level of the author (and perhaps the reader) as well.

As such, the Gothic drama represented within the text is reënacted outside of the novel as well; by transgressing the enclosures enforced by patriarchal society, forbidden female initiative is able to assert its claim to Utopia (determined by, not chosen for, women), and to reclaim a castle long since usurped by second sons: the cosmogonic act of writing. By reclaiming the act of authorship, the Gothicists (and all female novelists) undid the original Word of God and challenged the Father's original transgression against the female principle of Creation. By writing, women regained access to the freedom, power and creativity that Freud's new fathers had been hoarding and lording over for aeons.

Ellis cites Milton's Paradise Lost as the model and point of departure for the Gothic rebellion. The Satanic revolt, however, seems more appropriate to the Lewisite Gothic (which is antiutopian, rather than utopian, preferring destruction and satire over the parodic renovation of the feminine Gothic; thus, I have not included it in my study of literary Utopias). Howevermuch Milton may have informed or justified the theme of rebellion, its archetypal content does not fit the feminine Gothic scenario very well. The Gothic God does not expel a Satanic Eve; he tries to enclose her. Moreover, her departure and flight are wholly self-willed. The archetype that seems to be at work, rather, is something similar to Freud's prehistory, in which one of the daughters of the father's hoard escapes to freedom. If there are still Christian or Miltonic implications to be found in this, then they go beyond Lucifer's oath of Non serviam.

This rebellion may be said to originate from the fact that God advanced one son (Jesus) above all others; Lucifer refuses to serve out of a protest for this inequality of treatment. He questions God's judgment, but not the society He has created. The feminine Gothic's Eve, by contrast, is not merely a reconceptualized heroine capable of correcting the mistakes of her youth (though she can do that too); rather, in her youthfulness, she makes a much bolder claim: that the fault for original sin rests with God, and that only an act of re-Creation can correct what He has muddled. It is a protest directed against the self-proclaimed "biologically justified authority" (Marcuse 64) that boasts to have originally ordered Creation, "the order which has preserved the life of the group" (64). In fact, God is the Gothic's first usurping second son--not God the Father, but God the New Father, who denies He ever had a Mother-Goddess; the one who has usurped the castle of Creation, and turned Paradise into Hell. The "terror" of the feminine Gothic, then, may originate partly in the enormity of Eve's transgression, in the reassertion over against divine authority of her right and capacity to correct creation, but it may also arise partly from the thrill of simply "getting away with it," of parodying culture when it was absolutely forbidden to do so.

The serious intent of the Gothic critique and its Utopia of a true home, where freedom, power and creativity, equality, freedom of speech, peace, abundance, leisure and pleasure are not male-only prerogatives, is not undermined by the claim of a comedic nature for the feminine Gothic. On the contrary, the method of festive laughter's regenerating abuse-praise is fundamentally oriented toward basic and all-important aspects of life. As Bakhtin notes, "Seriousness burdens us with hopeless situations, but laughter lifts us above them and delivers us from them. Laughter does not encumber man, it liberates him....Laughter lifts the barrier and clears the path" (Speech Genres 134, 135).

Like their Renaissance forebears, the official and unofficial Utopias of the 18