While I’ve never read Utopia
prior to this, I had heard of it before, and had some idea of what to expect. I
first heard of Utopia when I was
required to read George Orwell’s Animal
Farm in seventh grade. I don’t
remember much about Animal Farm now other than: the farm animals
are treated cruelly by their human masters and decide to overthrow them, but
then, gradually, one group within the farm animals (I think it is the pigs…)
rise to the tyranny that they all sought to overthrow. I believe the last line
of the novel is something to the effect that the animals look into the window
of the house, where the pigs are dining (but they look like [i.e. are dressed
like] humans I think – I may be remembering this incorrectly as it has been
almost a decade), and they can’t tell the pigs from man. (Yes, I was right! Huzzah!
Just found the line: http://www.thefirstlinelastline.com/2011/05/27/animal-farm-by-george-orwell/).
Anyway, back to the point: Orwell’s
appropriation of Thomas More’s concept of utopia was what I had going into this
task of reading Utopia, though the
details didn’t really come back to me until writing this blog post… Regardless,
Orwell shows a progression from dystopia to utopia and then a regression to
dystopia under a different tyrant, and More, in Book I, focuses on describing
this sense of dystopia that he (and Raphael and Peter Giles) observe in
society, and we know that the description of utopia will follow later. I
realize that More’s writing is dense, as Dr. MB put it, and, indeed, it was
difficult for me to discern what was going on at first (until I realized that
Raphael isn’t real, but Peter Giles and Thomas More are, but in the context of
the book, Raphael is real… I think… and More refers to him as if he is real in
his letter to Peter Giles, which I think is More being funny). Again, back to
the point: I thought it might be helpful to others to define utopia – as well
as dystopia. If we consult OED on the definition of “utopia,” we find:
a. With capital initial. An
imaginary island in Sir Thomas More's Utopia (1516),
presented by the narrator as having a perfect social, legal, and political
system.
And “dystopia” –
An imaginary place or condition in which
everything is as bad as possible; opp. utopia n. (cf.Cacotopia n.).
I think it is interesting to point out that the use of “utopia”
is first seen in More’s publication in 1516 (obviously), but “dystopia,”
according to OED, is not first used/coined until 1952 – interesting because, as
I previously mentioned, I think More describes a dystopian society in Book I –
yet, he did not give it a name. What if he had named it Dystopia? Would it
change how we read it?
I realize this post consisted of a lot of run-on sentences
and whatnot; I went with the stream-of-consciousness approach as I pieced
things together – sorry!
I think that if More were to name Book I Dystopia, then I would have read Book I in a much more serious way. I’m not saying that I take this book lightly, I’m just saying that, when I think of a dystopia I think of a horrible society, where everything is going wrong, no one is happy and darkness consumes everything. I would also think that in a dystopian society, it is harder to change the way that things are and that there would have to be a drastic overthrowing of a ruler in order to create a utopia. Because the book is not named Dystopia I read it a bit happier. I was thinking that small changes could eventually lead to a utopia of sorts. I didn’t see any need for a big overthrowing or anything. Because of this I thought that the people in Book I were kind of close to a Utopia, closer than they would be if the title was Dystopia.
ReplyDeleteI think in this Book 1 of Utopia, there is a certain mix between what you are throwing out there as the idea of Dystopia and what the reality of the world More is saying that he lives in at the time that simply needs improvement. As we discussed in class the transitions that he used between a real character and a fictional character was in my mind to get the reader to make their own conclusions for themselves rather than him say everything that is wrong with society and that being the end of it. It was also an interesting fact to me that More wrote this part after writing Book 2, because he must have thought that his "Dystopia" points that you brought up were not covered efficiently enough that he had to go back and make those points. There is clearly, in my mind that is, an angle for his Utopia that he wants the reader to take from this book and I haven't quite figured out as far as what exactly he wanted there to be fixed, but I assume that we will figure that all out in Book 2.
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