The word utopia has meant many things to many people, but in its early history it signified a place, a distant but possibly real land, the remoteness of which answered for its otherwise incredible perfections. The term’s coinage, by Thomas More in 1516, punned on Greek words suggesting “no place” and “good place,” but still the root insisted on a topos, a place with at least imaginatively geographic dimensions.1 To many, it implied “wild fantasy and idle fancy,” yet it was a mappable fantasy, initially More’s fictional island and then generally any “imaginary, indefinitely remote region, country, or locality,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary. It was, for one lexicographer, an “imaginerie place, or countrey,” for another “any imaginary, or feigned place” (Cotgrave; Phillips). As Lucian Hölscher puts it, in early modern literary utopias, “one aspect was dominant: the pretence of an ideal commonwealth, imagined to be truly existent, discovered by a European traveller on a distant island in the outer reaches of the known world, who on his return gives account to those left behind” (7). Even the Land of Cockaigne, a medieval predecessor, was thought to be “a concrete place situated somewhere on earth” (Pleij 245).
Gradually, however, starting in the seventeenth century, utopia began drifting from its geographic foundation, becoming an abstract concept and eventually an ideal more reliant on temporal or historical disconnections. The shift—from utopias to “euchronias”—has been noted by many commentators and explained, incompletely, as the outcome of changing states of knowledge about geography and new attitudes about history and the future.2 Surely there is truth to the rationale that early modern navigators and cartographers pushed utopia off the map, while the intellectual and political circumstances of the American and French revolutions redefined the term to mean a possible destiny to strive for or perhaps avoid. This transition, though, involves two sets of phenomena, each with its own causal factors, and utopian geographies fell into disuse for reasons of their own.3 At stake is what Fredric Jameson calls “the utopian enclave,” the partially disconnected narrative space, produced by gaps and barriers, that enables the articulation of alternatives and their insulation from pervasive realities (Archaeologies 10–21). The formal elements of the enclave are more than accidental conventions. As the means of balancing utopia and realism, they extend and delimit—or contract—the outer thresholds of plausible representation, broadening or narrowing readers’ “horizons of expectations” in both genre and geography.4 The utopian enclave establishes our relation to utopia, how we might access it, where or when it exists in connection with us. The enclave also structures utopia’s disengagement from the rest of the world, the ways in which ideals might be shielded from the unwanted conditions that give rise to them. Studying the permutations of the enclave promises a historical index of the stretch of desire and imagination, measured against shifting requirements for narrative realism. Specifically, studying utopian geographies allows us to assess the outer limits of what geography could both inspire and restrict in the literary imagination, the extent to which undiscovered lands could freight social aspirations beyond what was normally thought attainable.
This book argues that English fiction from 1660 to 1740 engaged strenuously with the possibility of utopia, in particular the possibility—or impossibility—of utopia as a mappable space. At precisely the time when novels turned from the fabulous settings of romance to the actual locations described in contemporaneous travel accounts, a number of writers nevertheless tried to preserve and reconfigure the idea of utopia, tried to give it new coordinates and parameters. Their efforts to do so have never been considered, at least not comprehensively. In doing so here, I hope to show the centrality of utopian geographies to the early English novel.
My first of three more specific arguments is that experiments in prose fiction promulgated new models of world geography, demystifying the edges of the earth and reining in readers’ notions of the limits of societal advancement. Travel writing and geographic discourse more broadly heaped up a vast storehouse of positive knowledge, some of it still inflected with wonder, but early novels went further, extrapolating from available accounts to speculate pessimistically about early modernity’s remaining blank spaces on the map. In other words, the geographic disenchantment I will concentrate on happens in fiction, before it could be the result of fact. For writers such as Margaret Cavendish, Aphra Behn, Daniel Defoe, and Jonathan Swift, uncharted regions became subject to the same constants as the rest of the world and could differ only in relativistic ways within a universal worldview. Ultimately, their flawed and failed utopias helped realign expectations and establish new norms of geographic possibility and plausibility. These norms arise in distinctive ways in the novel, yet they transcend this still-unsettled category, informing general assumptions about the world and its most distant corners.
My second argument is that the nascent genre recovered a durable remainder, transforming utopian geographies into utopian interiorities and utopian sociabilities, new practices capable of harboring some of the displaced idealism, enabling compensation, critique, and even change within a smaller circumference. What do Cavendish’s Blazing World (1668), Behn’s Oroonoko (1688), Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719) and Captain Singleton (1720), and Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726) all have in common? These fictions imagined, questioned, and disproved the existence of utopia but also brought it back to England as a mobile ideal. They emplaced and debunked utopia, but they also salvaged and reconfigured it as an immediate possibility in the life of the returning traveler. Cavendish, for instance, sets her Blazing World on another planet, but when this planet betrays itself as too much like earth, the narrator chooses instead worlds of her own imagination. Behn dramatizes the demise of paradise but sustains it as an act of memory and writing. Crusoe idealizes his island, watches it get ravaged by war, and then finds an imaginary way to be solitary in London. Singleton precipitates the disintegration of his pirate community but re-creates it incognito with William Walters and William’s sister. Finally, Gulliver remakes Houyhnhnmland in his mind and in his horse stable back in Redriff. It is remarkable that these parallels have never been identified, let alone explained. By virtue of utopia’s unreality but also its recuperation as a resilient idea, what was remote becomes close at hand; worlds far away become worlds within, introjected as self-conscious fictions within a narrowed enclave that approximates but exceeds the boundaries of the modern self. The new enclave was also unstable, its boundaries as porous as those of utopian geographies. The bearer of utopia, therefore, is at once under threat by others but capable of bringing them in to forge intersubjective bonds and elective cadres. What results is less the disenchantment of the world than the reenchantment of smaller nodes within it, a rechanneling of desire that forsakes the unknowns of distant geography and preempts the delays of anticipated futures. This transformation entailed loss, a reduction of limits, and an elimination of coexisting possibilities, but the loss was not total, and what was lost was not wholly desirable. Written roughly in the interstice between utopias and euchronias, the novels I discuss imagine utopias for the here and now of contemporaneous England.
Third, and finally, this book recontextualizes and reperiodizes the early English novel, or a major strain of it, uncovering neglected ties with utopian writing and showing how this affinity distinguishes novels in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries from those written afterward. One might think that novels supplanted utopias in the representation of the world. Initially, novels carried forward important features of early modern utopias. Utopian projections persisted, but with redefined spatial parameters. By the middle of the eighteenth century, fictional settings started turning more insistently to national and domestic space: in England and the English household. These later novels undertook the construction of national identity and bourgeois domesticity. The earlier novels examined here cast their ideals to the ends of the earth, and although such ideals are finally pulled homeward, they never line up with conventional demarcations of nation or family.
This introduction provides an overview of the transformation of utopian geographies into utopian interiorities and sociabilities. In the following section, I outline what existing scholarship tells us about utopian literature of the period in question, distinguishing and delineating the approach and contributions of this study. Next, I show how the open form and experimental features of early novels facilitated narrative tests of utopian geography. Then I discuss the outcomes of these tests, describing in more detail the utopian remainder and its relationship with ideas about the self and sociability. The rest of the introduction lays out my rationale for focusing on particular novels and summarizes the book’s analyses of them. In chapter 1 I take a step backward before moving forward, sketching the prior relationship between utopia and geography in early modern England, thereby setting up the developments discussed in later chapters.
Post-Restoration utopias have attracted less attention than they deserve, apparently because the term came to signify only an “impossibly ideal scheme” (OED). Upon reaching the period, Franco Venturi and Frank and Fritzie Manuel simply turn their attention to France and the rest of Europe (Venturi 47–94; Manuel and Manuel 367–452). A. L. Morton once proclaimed that “utopian literature reached its lowest level in England during the eighteenth century” before ratcheting up again with the excitement and fear of the American and French revolutions (143). Estimable ambitions, the thinking goes, gave way to projects that were timidly incremental or naively grandiose—but at any rate intellectually uninteresting. Defoe heralded this shift, celebrating the so-called projecting age (Novak, Age of Projects). Jürgen Habermas has painted a sunnier picture, yet his notion of the public sphere fixes on actual institutions.5 Morton has a point, and it seems that schemes for improvement were diffused within the private sphere and its borderline, where a variety of new clubs and societies proliferated (Clark 60–93). Specters of the English Civil War checked political radicalism, instilling in thinkers a profound anxiety and instinctive—even fatalistic—skepticism (Kahn; Visconsi). As I will show, however, utopias could draw considerable force from darker energies: far from being optimistic, they often express abhorrence for what is perceived as the real world, serving as a vehicle for escape and self-extrication rather than sociopolitical reform.
A small body of scholarship has followed utopian thought into and beyond the Restoration. Gregory Claeys has proven Morton wrong, at least on a quantitative level, by expanding the category far beyond literary efforts and filling an eight-volume anthology spanning 1700 to 1850 (Modern British Utopias), in addition to two classroom collections (Utopias of the British Enlightenment and Restoration and Augustan British Utopias). David Fausett has demonstrated the central role of the South Seas in the utopian imagination, while Christine Rees has surveyed its expression in several of the period’s distinctive fictional forms.6 More recently, Alessa Johns has written on utopias by women writers, whose prescriptions she describes as pragmatic, gradual, and above all local: “The stories of feminist utopian authors take place right at home…. The distance to utopia, these authors suggest, need not be far, and social change is within the power of individuals, even those of modest means” (11–12). Nicole Pohl, meanwhile, analyzes the spaces themselves of feminist utopias, such as the convent and the country house, highlighting “the development of a new mode of utopianism—the domestic utopia—that counters the colonial paradigms of men’s utopian narratives and strives to reform and to reinscribe the private and domestic with political relevance” (Women, Space, and Utopia 10–11). Oddvar Holmesland focuses on Cavendish and Behn and claims that they negotiate between old and new ideas of “freedom and order, the natural and the contrived, idealism and skepticism, images of truth and the problem of knowing” (41). Finally, new work on joy and happiness suggests what utopia might look like when its boundaries were whittled down to individual experience (Potkay; Soni, Mourning Happiness). This book builds on all these studies. Still, the utopias discussed here are more isolated than domestic utopias; the model was still defined chiefly by vast divides and undiscovered islands and continents. These utopias negotiate between geographic as well as historical extremes. The utopian mentalities that result, moreover, cannot be equated with irruptive joy or modern happiness, both of which have different histories.
As opposed to the aforementioned monographs, this one centers mainly on the generic features of utopian writing and especially on the reconfiguration of utopia in early novels. Utopian literature as a whole is a much larger area of concern. Even bigger, or more elemental, is Ernst Bloch’s “utopian impulse,” a feeling so universal, even natural, for Bloch, that it merits his three-volume magnum opus The Principle of Hope (1938–47).7 Instead, I direct most of my attention to the fate of a single convention: the conceit of the voyage narrative, which I see as the definitive feature of early modern utopias.
The voyage convention is important because in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries it could render strange new lands faintly conceivable and minimally realistic. This device was loadbearing; it was the most effective means for producing the rupture on which utopian contrast depends. What is radical about early modern utopian literature is the way it posits concurrent alternative realities, existing spaces that were fundamentally different but separated only by traversable distance. One’s relative provincialism put them farther away, but travelers seemed to bring them closer every day. Even now, geography remains essential to the way we think about utopia (Harvey, Spaces of Hope). In early modernity, voyages into the unknown unfettered the imagination and fostered “desire for a better way of being,” which Ruth Levitas (221), revising Bloch, has offered as utopia’s defining criterion.8 The convention of travel allowed readers to “think the break,” in Jameson’s words (Archaeologies 232); it facilitated “cognitive estrangement,” in Darko Suvin’s (12). For Raymond Ruyer, utopia involves a thought experiment in “lateral possibilities” (9). The content of a utopia, the concrete prescriptions, are always vague or idiosyncratic or authoritarian, never lending themselves to easy application or widespread approval (Frye). This literature remains fixed to a point of departure, its particular geographic/historical context, inverting and transfiguring received realities and ideologies without quite outstripping them. It is “a reconstruction of contemporary society by means of a displacement and projection of its structures into a fictional discourse” (Marin, Utopics 195). More important, we now say, is that utopias facilitate new types of consciousness and expose the contingency of orthodoxy. Of course, to arrive at this forward-thinking position, we must do away with paratextual truth claims and the frame of the voyage narrative, a move early modern readers would not have made so quickly. For these readers, utopias were more concrete: they were always in some way geographic, always possibly out there somewhere beyond the range of experiential report. Crucially, breakages and estrangements were assumed by many to be already inscribed in geographic space. We cannot reduce utopias to blueprints, but uprooting them altogether runs the risk of etherealizing them, of missing their previously assumed geographic underpinning.
Both speculative and realistic, early novels test the believability of utopian geographies. As I will demonstrate, this fiction deductively answered a number of questions. Does utopia exist as an actual place? If it is only an idea, what is its status in the modern world? Furthermore, how mobile and resilient are utopian ideals? Are they feckless constructs? Are they hopelessly idiosyncratic? To what extent are they sharable among different people? More generally, what does the nature of utopia reveal about the nature of fictionality itself? Like Michael McKeon, I believe that the novel provided “a conceptual framework for the mediation (if not the ‘solution’) of intractable problems, a method of rendering such problems intelligible” (Origins 20). Early novels perform dialectical syntheses—from the emplacement of utopia to its negation to its reconfiguration—but a strict dialectical model might miss too many nuances. The first and second movements (emplacement and negation) are never symmetrical; the third movement (reconfiguration) is sometimes incompletely elaborated; and there is what amounts to a fourth term, a new expansiveness of utopian possibility. I prefer to liken these novels to actual experiments: heuristic processes designed to supplant old suppositions with new conclusions that are not yet fully conclusive. The analogy has been made before (J. Hunter, “Robert Boyle”; Bender, Ends of Enlightenment 21–56) and is perhaps even mainstream: a recent classroom handbook carries the subtitle Experiments in Eighteenth Century Fiction.9 Certainly, the spectacle of natural philosophical experiments foregrounded new kinds of evidence and proof that began to permeate English and European society (Shapin and Schaffer 22–79). Cavendish disapproved of experimental philosophy, but what is her Blazing World if not an experiment in the utopian potential of imagination and narrative? The novels I examine here take as given the attractiveness of utopia, but they also surrender the possibility of finding it in distant lands—or planets in the case of Cavendish. They put in place the controls of desire and necessity and end up with a variety of results that disenchant utopia and then reenchant a diminished form of it. Still, the outcomes of these experiments are mixed and propositional, more suggestive than decisive.
Novel experiments produce hypothetical places that are at first exceptional but then seamlessly integrated within the larger world around them. Useful in this vein are narratological applications of the philosophy of possible worlds, which can help us understand how textual spaces could be immersive (M. Ryan, Narrative), how settings could engender their own terms of credibility (Pavel; M. Ryan, Possible Worlds; Doležel; Hayot). Originating with Gottfried Leibniz, a contemporary of the early novel, this line of inquiry supposes that reality is a collection of possible worlds, among which is our actual world, though it is identified differently, or “indexically,” from different perspectives (D. Lewis 92–96). Theorists argue that, for every fiction, readers construct alternative worlds that parallel their actual worlds. As I see it, though, early novels create and fill gaps in readers’ default world, the world outside the book. In doing so, these novels also remake the surrounding terrain and reorder the whole system, the totality of actual and possible. Here, I follow Catherine Gallagher, who explains, “When we find normal novelistic characters and events probable (rather than actual), we fold them into the world we inhabit without inconsistency” (“What Would Napoleon Do?” 322). It is no surprise that literature shapes one’s view of the world or even that it can actively affect the world socially and materially. Even basic elements of the physical environment are to some extent conditioned by the imagination and the various categories we use: oceans (Steinberg); islands (Gillis); continents (Lewis and Wigen); the globe itself (Cosgrove). I would make a more specific claim: fiction can be a source of prospective facts, extrapolated information that makes the unknown in the image of the known. At first, the novels I discuss emplace utopias in relation to recognizable coordinates, making their imagined spaces geographically accessible and, therefore, logically possible. Then, narratives of demystification revalue these spaces, undermining their supposed perfection and rendering true utopias inaccessible, impossible. The shift in categories redraws the outer domain of reality, conservatively pulling in deviations from it. No two readers would agree on what the real world is, but perhaps a rough consensus comes into relief as the opposite of utopian geography.
In the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, seemingly truthful travel narratives were well positioned to influence the geographic imagination. Epistemological uncertainties created a narrowing window of opportunity for fictions to enjoy the status of facts, both of which coexisted in a relatively undifferentiated matrix (L. Davis 42–70). Various genres of history helped accouter novelistic realism (Zimmerman, Boundaries; Mayer). As we have understood for some time, travel writing offered a variety of conventions as well (P. Adams 81–102; McKeon, Origins 100–105; J. Hunter, Before Novels 351–54). The pioneers of the emerging genre took advantage of unsettled criteria for factuality; just as travelers did, novelists proclaimed the truthfulness of their narratives on the basis of firsthand experience, giving readers testimony that could not really be disproved. Indeed, to this day, some debate the historical accuracy of Behn’s Oroonoko. If the Blazing World is patently incredible, other planets obviously do exist, and what interested Cavendish was precisely this physical reality. Truth claims could be elevating and empowering, and Gallagher stresses the aesthetic freedom of self-conscious realism, which she argues arose with the novel as a recognizable genre in the middle of the eighteenth century.10 Still, the desideratum of truthfulness could also be limiting and controlling, committing representation to that which experience would verify, eventually banishing anything that appeared unusual (Costa Lima). Few novelists numbered the streaks of the tulip, as in Samuel Johnson’s famous line, but they did feel the pressure of shared experience, or the presumed experiences of their audiences. Gallagher focuses on the overt fictionality of character. Jesse Molesworth has concentrated on plot, which he sees as not “responding or contributing to a ‘hunger for actuality’” but “contributing more radically to a re-enchantment of the world” (2). Setting, it seems to me, is less supple and plentiful than these other units. It is a special case, more limited in the sense that England and Virginia are England and Virginia, and without them, the field of action shrinks in the manner of a zero-sum game. Realistic place-names, as opposed to character names, are finite; there are only so many of them. Once novelists started imitating travelers, their fictional spaces could appear real, but this connection became a criterion of value, and novelists were to some extent confined by the very open seas that liberated them.
Along these lines, recent scholarship on the novel has emphasized not only border-crossing influences but also a representational inclusiveness that makes otherwise exotic terrain the site of real-world action and interaction.11 As Maximillian Novak puts it, the genre “develops out of the rejection of a particular kind of romance—the romance involving a new paradise and the idealizations of utopias” (“Edenic Desires” 23). For Laura Doyle, the novel rises with plots of transatlantic crossing and the contested understandings of freedom that attended such displacements. Even more expansively, Margaret Cohen aims to establish the oceans themselves as among the genre’s generative contexts. For Cohen, the novel embraces faraway seas to deploy “practical reason,” a modern capacity for the “the arts of action,” exemplified in adventure stories about sailors and pirates (2). The settings of the novel, in other words, become the space of the world in its largest sense, now emptied of the kinds of breakage and estrangement that structured utopian geographies.
Interestingly, when Cohen gets to the middle of the eighteenth century, she notes that “the maritime picaresque was abandoned” (100). After Swift, many writers began looking homeward rather than overseas. Exotic lands were naturalized in early novels and then, as I explain in the conclusion, generally kept at arm’s length in the novel proper as the genre turned from exploring distant possibilities to establishing proximate imperatives. In the English novel, England itself became the center of culture, the pinnacle of learning and politeness. This redirection, equated with the novel’s everyday realism, has been remarked upon by many scholars (Said, Culture and Imperialism 62–80; Doody, True Story of the Novel 291–93; Moretti, Atlas of the European Novel 47–57; Siskin 180–87). Most recently, Srinivas Aravamudan has argued that the shift in focus is largely a sleight of hand in literary criticism that obscures “countercurrents that continued to pull away from the dominant ‘posited essence’ of realism” (Enlightenment Orientalism 62).12 The rise of the realist novel, for Aravamudan, was checked by the subordinated tradition of the oriental tale, which carried forward bits and pieces of utopianism—without the voyage convention—and scattered them widely across the vaguely delineated “East.” Gothic novels, too, absorbed some of the lost energy, though they cross different boundaries, most often historical ones. At any rate, Gothic travel rarely outstrips the Catholic world, usually a convenient foil for modern, Protestant England (Miles). Two additional exceptions deserve mention: transatlantic adventure stories and fairy tales, the former of which could accommodate utopia within a mostly naturalized Atlantic world (Johns 141–54; Wyett; Richards; Flynn, Americans 45–80; Bannet, Transatlantic Stories; Verhoeven), the latter of which cast it farther afield but with no viable route of access (Backscheider, Elizabeth Singer Rowe 83–122). By midcentury, however, gone, or largely obsolete, was the once-crucial convention of the sea voyage through unknown waters to unmapped lands.
Cohen downplays Georg Lukács’s notion of nostalgic interiorization, but I see a utopian remainder accompanying the returning traveler, an English precursor to what the Manuels call the French Enlightenment’s “eupsychia.”13 Along with Cohen, other scholars, too, have complicated and questioned the early novel’s investment in what we think of as proto-modern inwardness.14 I enter these discussions by isolating a kind of interiority that is a remnant of geographic utopias. Imaginary lands engage the imagination and then, disproven, ironically legitimize it. In the novels I discuss, the failure of utopian geography establishes interior space as oppositional and counterfactual, a site of recuperated possibilities. Despite anxieties about the imagination and its long-standing subordination to reason (Schlutz), this was a reasonable elevation and even functionalization of fantasy. According to Bloch, utopia is hope (1:70–75); for Levitas, it is desire (219–22). Here, a surplus of desire becomes a privately—and to some degree socially—viable ideal, the practice of a preromantic imagination oriented toward not self-discovery or self-realization but something like what John D. Lyons calls “embodied thought”: “a deliberate mental activity through which we experience the sensory details of the past, the present, and the possible” (5).
Expelled from utopia, the protagonists examined in this book interiorize it and thereby announce their separateness from other characters. The personae of Cavendish and Behn, Defoe’s Crusoe and Singleton, and Swift’s Gulliver are not fully “round” or deep or particularized in the manner of characters of the late eighteenth century and onward (Lynch 123–63; Woloch 12–42). Neither are they quite flat—or legible, which Deidre Lynch offers as the period’s aesthetic and social desideratum (23–79). Their interiority betokens not refined feeling but banished idealism, an idealism that is as simple and cryptic as the laws of ideal societies. Crusoe and the others become placeholders for utopia, metaphorical islands now set apart by bodily and social rather than geographic distance: divided by the gulf around those with incommunicable ideas, by the impassable barriers enclosing the determined recluse.
These characters model alternative forms of identity and selfhood before such concepts assumed their modern manifestations. At the time, cultural identities in the British Atlantic world drew on a number of localized ethnicities, pulled together tenuously by religious belief (Kidd). Union with Scotland, in 1707, and the accession of George I, in 1714, began an era of incipient nationalism that enlarged the context for self-identification (Colley, Britons; Wilson), and this context was extended still more in attempts to define the character of the early British Empire (Armitage). The identities I describe are distilled through farther geographies that ultimately succumb to skepticism and leave only an attenuated fantasy of escape. Affiliation, in other words, was imagined not simply beyond British territories but beyond the known world and then retracted to the smallest scale possible. Early modern selves, it has been argued, were understood to be “mutable, malleable, unreliable, divisible, replaceable, transferable, manipulable, escapable, or otherwise fuzzy around the edges” (Wahrman 198). Long before, however, European philosophers had been postulating notions of “inwardness,” “buffering” the otherwise “porous” self (Taylor, Sources 111–207; Secular Age 37–42, 134–42, 300–307). What I describe are attempts at self-immurement that take to an extreme the goals of “self-reliance, self-sufficiency, autarky, autonomy”—even though the self at the center is no more than a bundle of ideals (Taylor, Secular Age 138). If the novel helped bring into being modern individualism (Armstrong, How Novels Think), the characters examined here are so individualistic that they never reenter society, fearing society might somehow enter them. No man is an island; in a manner of speaking, no island is an island, not Britain, not More’s Utopia (Ginzburg 1–24). Identities are always to some degree imposed rather than willed. Notions of selfhood draw on available sources outside the self. What the novels in question assess is the limited extent to which such constraints might be negotiated and perhaps surpassed.
Of course, the ideals of retreat, solitude, and introspection have lengthy histories. Renaissance and seventeenth-century poets extolled rural retirement and removal from the vicissitudes of political life, often on the model of Horace (Bradbrook; Røstvig; Sayre 34–55). Edward Dyer withdrew to an inner utopia in these well-known lines: “My mind to me a kingdom is; / Such perfect joy therein I find / That it excels all other bliss” (136). Harry Berger Jr. writes of the period’s “second world,” a fictional space operating as “the playground, laboratory, theater, or battlefield of the mind, a model or construct the mind creates, a time or place which it clears, in order to withdraw from the actual environment” (11–12). Seventeenth-century philosophers debated our mental access to—and enclosure from—physical reality. In his First Meditation (1641), René Descartes radically questioned the legitimacy of the senses; his Sixth Meditation opened what would become a deep chasm between the mind and world. Later, John Locke dismissed innate ideas and knowledge but made only qualified claims for sense experience, leading Jonathan Bennett to ascribe to him the “veil-of-perception doctrine,” which gives us ideas but not the actual things to which they correspond (68–70). Meanwhile, Protestant theologians counseled abstention from worldly pleasures and rigorous self-examination. Freed from the mediations of priests and the Latin Bible, Puritans turned inward and recorded their trials and conversions in spiritual autobiographies (Caldwell; Hindmarsh). As Max Weber put it, “The Calvinist’s intercourse with his God was carried on in deep spiritual isolation” (Protestant Ethic 54).
Scholars of the eighteenth century have plotted these ideas and ideals according to various aesthetic and sociological binaries, including “theatricality” and “absorption” (Fried); “sociability” and “sentiment” (Mullan); “engagement versus retirement, sociability versus isolation” (Klein, Shaftesbury); “sociability” and “solitude” (Klein, “Sociability”); and “being alone” in the “age of the social contract” (Slauter). For Lawrence Klein, the key term is “enthusiasm,” which could slide along the polarity and express itself as either “the nonconformity of the enthusiast” or the “condition of uncontrolled gregariousness: imitative, contagious, and heteronomic” (“Sociability” 157). Each side had its excesses, and both were understood in political terms. As critics have explained, for eighteenth-century poets, rural retirement was not just a sanctuary for personal compensation but also a vantage point for social critique (Mack; R. Williams, Country and the City 55–59, 68–86; Sitter; Backscheider, Eighteenth-Century Women Poets 233–67). John Pomfret’s famous poem “The Choice” (1700) advocates opting out of the public world, but of course such an action nevertheless carries a variety of social implications.
Accordingly, utopian interiorities, even though they entail disengagement, remain deeply engaged with political realities. The period ushered in new forms of sociability in venues such as the coffeehouse (Cowan), and eventually the novel helped imagine the connective impulses and ethics of sensibility (Van Sant, Eighteenth-Century Sensibility; Goring; Gottlieb). Nevertheless, the fiction examined here privileges antisocial disconnections, the management of private defiance of what were perceived as incorrigible surroundings. Before, the failings of the social world licensed utopias to invert these failings—but to invert them in equally social ways. Now, discontentment with civil society authorized extreme forms of internal exile and self-sovereignty.15 It is perhaps what we should expect from writers whose utopian visions begin with forms of social cohesion that were religiously and politically nostalgic. For Claeys, eighteenth-century utopias drew from four primary sources: myths of an Arcadian state of nature, the traditions of early apostolic communalism, classical republican politics, and current Toryism (Claeys, Modern British Utopias xiii–xxxix; and “Rethinking”). Specific affiliations varied, but each of the writers discussed here reached to the past, or some myth of it, and tried to freeze old ideals in the present with protective boundaries. Each understood personally what it felt like to be cast aside by the march of history. Their well-traveled characters are likewise shut out. Unconnected to a polity, they nevertheless stand at the opposite pole of the venerable traditions of cosmopolitanism (Jacob; Schmidgen, Exquisite Mixture). Like exiled Stuart princes, but with no hopes of returning, the characters in the novels I examine live on the edges of English society and play out alternative histories in relative seclusion.
There is a remainder, though, beyond this remainder, the fourth term mentioned earlier, utopian sociability. Utopian interiority takes the buffered self as its precondition but not its final outcome. Indeed, utopia stays individualistic only to the extent that it was, in its earlier incarnation as a geography, separate and unified—which is to say incompletely. The constitutive boundaries ultimately prove permeable once again, susceptible to encroachment by others but also engagement with them in some strict or uneven way. The utopian remainder, therefore, can hesitantly expand outward, seeking reflection in different faces and thereby filling in King Utopus’s famous trench. Thus, Singleton establishes his unique bond with William upon their return to England. They rewrite the communal pirate articles as the terms for a new solidarity. Utopia promises order, and these friendships almost necessarily involve some kind of asymmetry or nonreciprocity. Jacques Derrida has deconstructed philosophical idealizations of friendship (Politics of Friendship), but anyone during the period would have acknowledged that most friendships were based mainly on kinship, alliance, or propinquity, that friendships were, above all, useful and even necessary (Thomas, Ends of Life 187–225). The friendships I deal with are exceptional, arguably the highest type of communion early novels allow us to hope for, and perhaps for that reason they are never fully described and are left to us largely as ellipses. These friendships expand utopia and delimit its communicability somewhere beyond the self; they establish social bonds but never stop questioning them. At any rate, if the small sphere becomes wider, it never lines up with consanguineal family or conjugal marriage (Flint; Perry). Actually, utopian subjectivities build longer bridges over wider gaps, defying cultural norms and challenging us to see intimacies where we would least expect them.
Methodologically, this book treats the genre of utopia not as a rigid or transhistorical category but as a working model with moving parts: integral to creative and interpretive practices but subject to revision by each new work.16 Genre studies can excavate old categories but also create new ones, positing heuristic classifications that illuminate developing or unarticulated family resemblances.17 Of course, the influence of strong prototypes ensures some consistency, and early modern utopias, named after a specific text, owed much to More’s example and its immediate successors (Morson 75–78). Utopias refer back to predecessors and almost always seem aware of them, even though they rarely announce themselves as utopias.
The novel, obviously, is more heterogeneous. The question of its origins has generated what is perhaps the most prominent debate in eighteenth-century studies. Ian Watt’s thesis about the novel’s rise has been revised and refuted, its beginnings retraced in various directions (Watt, Rise of the Novel; Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction; McKeon, Origins; J. Hunter, Before Novels). The controlling metaphor has been changed from rise to “elevation” (Warner) and “spread” (McMurran). The genre has been followed back to ancient times (Doody, True Story of the Novel) and pursued forward as a retrospective creation of the early nineteenth century (H. Brown). It has been said to mourn a lost unity (Lukács) and mischievously undermine unity, privileging “heteroglossia” (Bakhtin 259–422). It institutes social control (Bender, Imagining the Penitentiary) but also subverts such control (Castle). Terry Eagleton calls the novel an “anti-genre,” but the category remains indispensible. Historically, there are distinctions to make: in the novel’s partial consolidation around the middle of the eighteenth century, when such different writers as Richardson and Fielding were perceived to be creating more or less the same kind of thing; in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, when literary criticism, by Walter Scott and others, began to theorize the genre in influentially normative ways; and in the middle of the twentieth century, when the study of eighteenth-century novels was made a requirement in English departments. In Defoe’s time, the term “novel” carried several meanings and jockeyed with “romance,” “history,” and “life,” among others (Nixon 2009). I use the term here advisedly but unanxiously, heeding differences in self-classification but also inspired by recent attempts to view the history of fiction from wider-angle lenses.18 What I want to show is that ideas about utopia and geography drove some of the most interesting formal innovations of the period’s fiction. Indeed, the common concern with utopia and geography is what allows me to group this fiction together.
Accordingly, this book begins with English fiction that incorporates travel plots and various techniques of documentary realism; it ends with the rejection of distant travel and, accordingly, the disuse of utopian geographies. Admittedly the novels I examine are seldom thought of as central to the genre of utopian literature. Perhaps that is due to the radical ways they rewrite its conventions. Moreover, several of these narratives, in particular the Blazing World, are rarely called “novels.” My point is not to make claims about generic identity but to illustrate the pervasion of questions about utopia across numerous fictional forms, from the lunar voyage to Menippean satire, and much else. The texts I concentrate on are all well known. Indeed, by concentrating on the canon, I hope I can contribute to the way we interrelate some of its constitutive works. In the interest of thoroughness, I discuss French and Continental novels only briefly, pointing out but rarely expatiating on parallels and influences. Ultimately, my hope is to offer an alternative periodization for the early English novel, or at least a dominant strand of the genre, connecting this literature with sixteenth- and seventeenth-century utopias. It is perhaps needless to say that not all early novels adopted utopian settings, and the novel proper probably gathers more steam from what has been termed “amatory fiction” (Ballaster, Seductive Forms) and, more recently, “seduction stories” (Bowers). My focus, then, is on early novels aimed outward, beyond the national and domestic spaces that would later become default settings.
Following chapter 1, the chapters of this book analyze a succession of texts, describing how they weave together popular and traditional genres and arrive at new ways of representing and thinking about utopia. Roughly speaking, each of these chapters has three sections, corresponding to the ways the individual novel emplaces, deconstructs, and reconfigures utopian geography. Close and careful reading of these texts, I believe, is the only way to capture their subtle treatments and transformations of the concept of utopia. This methodology sacrifices the perspective of “distance” (Moretti, Graphs, Maps, Trees 1–2), but the individual chapters, taken together, should tell us something about the longer history of English fiction, as well as its incorporation of utopian literature and travel writing. The sequence of chapters is chronological but only minimally developmental. Although I do not lay out a linear development from chapter to chapter, by the time we get to Gulliver’s Travels, the possibility of distant utopias has been satirized almost beyond repair.19
Chapter 1, “Utopia and Geography,” surveys the role of the voyage in early modern utopias, from More onward, and assesses the pressure exerted on this convention by various geographic discourses, including “voyages round the world” and “special geographies.” I conclude that earlier writings bore the seeds of geographic disenchantment but that it was not articulated as a full-fledged attitude about the world until the interventions of the early novel.
“The Flickering Blazing World,” my second chapter, looks at the genre of the lunar voyage and experimental philosophy, concentrating on Cavendish’s Blazing World. This narrative is less extravagant than it is usually taken to be. Its separate world hosts a series of natural philosophical debates that are always about our world, and the Blazing World, too, suffers political tensions that threaten insurrection. Throughout the text, exuberant eccentricity deflates under its own weight, registering limits in fiction that empower only the insular mind to imagine new worlds and circumvent physical and social realities. I call this capacity the utopian remainder. As the mind looks inward, however, it finds not just its own creations but also external subjectivities, so that utopia overrides the narrow boundaries of the self.
“Remembering Paradise in Oroonoko” focuses on Behn’s Oroonoko and its relationship with paradise myths, heroic tragedy, and colonial discourse. Here, I show that this novel inherited a host of ways to place paradisiacal settings at or beyond the threshold of cartographic representation. These techniques aim to safeguard aristocratic virtue, yet the ploy proves unsustainable, especially after the “royal slave” is captured, tortured, and dismembered. By its end, Oroonoko struggles to re-member paradise—in the memory of the narrator, in the preservation of her largely absent body, and in the aggregation of others who share her royalist sympathies.
“Urban Solitude and the Crusoe Trilogy” looks at Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe volumes and the genre of spiritual autobiography. Crusoe is famous for his isolation, but throughout the three volumes, Defoe makes separation increasingly impossible: the island is overrun with activity, much of it chaotic and violent, and when Crusoe leaves, he rambles all over the world, an agent himself of interconnective commerce. In the third volume, Crusoe remakes solitude subjectively, through interiorized retreat amid the crowds of London.
“Piracy and Brotherhood in Captain Singleton” concentrates on criminal biographies and pirate narratives, particularly Defoe’s Captain Singleton, which experiments with the possibility of living beyond the law, whether on the island of Madagascar or the smaller space of a ship. The separatist community fractures because of pressures within and without, dispersing survivors who cautiously pull their true identities inward. Still, the novel ends with a revived but diminished version of the pirate community in the bond formed by Singleton, William, and William’s sister.
My final chapter, “Misanthropia and Gulliver’s Travels,” looks at Menippean satire and satiric voyages, the wildly alien spaces of which turn into pessimistic allegories of England and Europe. Here, I focus on Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, which imagines a number of alternative societies that turn out not to be alternatives at all. When Gulliver is banished, he gives up on perfect nations and ends his life mostly shunning society and living in his memories. His relationships with others—horses and humans—include asymmetries and nonreciprocities characteristic of the utopian remainder in all these narratives. In this final novel, however, the ending is almost hopeless, giving us a mental enclave more suspicious of external infringement.
The conclusion looks forward to the later history of the novel and utopian writing. After the 1740s, English novels on the model of Richardson and Fielding began eschewing foreign settings in favor of familiar ones. In the hands of Sarah Scott and others, utopia became domesticated, integrated, moderated. Later, Louis-Sébastien Mercier would popularize the conventions of the “euchronia,” which relied on temporal rather than spatial disconnections. In both of these cases, stricter notions of realism reshaped the utopian enclave and constrained utopian possibility: making it a charitable project in the first instance, a dream for the future in the second. If what is gained is a more extensive social reach, what gets lost, to varying degrees, is the earlier possibility that utopia could be both radically different and immediately present.