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!
