Gayle K. Brunelle
Book
Review
Chloë
Houston, The Renaissance Utopia:
Dialogue, Travel and the Ideal Society. Ashgate (Farnham, UK and Burlington,
USA, 2014), Vii-190 pp. ISBN: 978147245034
1> The Renaissance Utopia is primarily a literary study, albeit
strongly informed by historical context, and one that both historians and
literary scholars will find interesting and informative. Author Chloë Houston performs a close reading
of English utopian literature from Thomas More’s Utopia (first published in 1516) through the 1640s, with works such
as Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis
(1627) and Gabriel Plattes’ A Description
of the Famous Kingdom of Macaria (1641).
Her goal is to chart the development of the utopian literary form, and
in particular the use of dialogue and of the Renaissance travel narrative,
until its appropriation of multiple forms of writing in the mid-seventeenth
century. Form, Houston contends, is
central to utopian writing, and changes to form in utopian literature since its
foundational work, More’s Utopia,
resulted from changes in how authors of utopias conceptualized the purpose of
their works. Moreover, those changes in
both form and conceptualization resulted from shifts in English society and
culture. Societies create bodies of
literature that serve their cultural and psychological needs, and the utopian
literature of the mid-seventeenth century was the product of a society deeply
preoccupied with reform, of theology, of morality, and of political and
cultural institutions.
Mid-seventeenth-century utopian writers sought to shape those reforms
and motivate their readers to undertake them.
As a result, in Houston’s view, their utopian works differ markedly in
form, tone, and style from More.
2> “Open” dialogue characterized
early utopian literature in the sixteenth century, according to Houston. By “open” she is referring to the ways in
which More’s form and dialogue are meant to signal to the reader multiple
layers of meaning and a certain purposeful uncertainty regarding time, place,
and truth. More’s Utopia was a philosophical satire, ironic in tone, with place names
(Utopia = nowhere) and dialogue that signaled to the reader that More himself
was skeptical about the prospect that the ideal society that Hythloday, the
“traveler” who has visited Utopia, describes could ever actually exist. More and those who followed him also adopted
the form of the travel narrative, but not with the goal of actually persuading
his readers that Utopia was a real place.
Houston focuses on the intended irony of this form of utopian writing,
and especially on More’s goal of prodding the reader to question the story
itself, and in doing so to think more deeply about the nature of Utopia, and of
ideal societies in relation to the one in which they lived.
3> There is another facet, I suspect,
to this adoption of the travel narrative form in a work through which are woven
many signs for the reader regarding the fictional nature of the work. In the sixteenth century most readers,
educated or otherwise, still believed that The
Travels of Sir John Mandeville (c. 1357) more accurately described Asia
than The Travels of Marco Polo (c.
1300). Travel literature itself was by
no means indistinguishable from fiction, and travel writers frequently
described the strange new lands they had visited, or claimed to have visited,
as “utopian” although they did not use that word. The eliding of real and fictional utopias
began with More himself, or even prior to that, perhaps, in medieval travel
literature that frequently purported to describe “real” places but at the same
time through these descriptions of wonders and marvels, led readers to question
the nature of the society in which they actually lived. More’s Utopia
may therefore be the foundational work of the utopian genre, drawing upon
dialogue and travel narrative forms, but travel narratives themselves even
before More were ripe for the sort of satire that More wrote in part because
their authors freely mingled fact and fabrication, or rather fabricated where
they lacked information and embellished where it seemed useful to do so.
4> By the later sixteenth century,
however, utopian literature was undergoing a major transition away from “open”
dialogue, designed to stimulate an intellectual exchange between the reader and
the book, toward a more didactic, pedagogical approach. Utopian writers increasingly were interested
in writing utopias to teach their readers how to reform society and their own
lives, how to live well. Religion loomed
much larger in the motives and the works of later sixteenth century utopian
writers, not surprising given the centrality of religious reform to European
culture in this period, and to the conflicts that emerged within and between
European states. Utopian writers in
England articulated their political ideals and offered religious prophecies in
their works, and were less interested in drawing their readers into a dialogue
about the nature of the ideal society than in using the examples of their
utopias to persuade their readers of the need for social and moral reform, and
of the proper direction reforms should take.
The playful irony of More’s Utopia
gradually receded before the educational program of these later
sixteenth-century writers.
5> The utopian works of this era also
engaged more deeply with travel narratives, but with a different tone and less
porous line between fiction and non-fiction.
Again, the growing incorporation of travel narrative forms in utopian
literature isn’t surprising given the changes in travel writing during the same
period. As the sixteenth century
progressed and especially in the seventeenth century, many more travel
narratives were published, and the truth claims of these works increased. There were more travelers writing about their
journeys, and more checks on the most fantastical claims such writers could
make precisely because men such as André Thévet and Jean de Léry, or Samuel de
Champlain and Marc Lescarbot, had gone to the same places at about the same
time, and subsequently debated each other in print regarding the nature of
their experiences and observations. The
tone of travel writing became more didactic, and more “scientific,” especially
in the seventeenth century.
6> Houston argues that the first four
decades of the seventeenth century marked the peak in a type of utopian writing
in England that focused on reform because these decades were also a period when
it seemed eminently possible to English reformers that their utopian ideals
could be realized at home. Utopian
writers dispensed with much of the dialogue and travel narrative forms that
characterized sixteenth-century utopian works, and transparently preached to
their readers. Their utopias were
blueprints to be copied, rather than alternative societies to be examined and
questioned, and the growth of print allowed them to access a wider audience for
their works. This efflorescence of
didactic, reformist utopian literature could not survive, however, the
disappointments of the Restoration period, when it became clear that the
utopias of writers such as Samuel Hartlib, John Dury, or Gabriel Plattes would
not be realized in the England of Charles II.
After this “utopian moment,” as Houston calls it, in English history,
utopian writing gravitated closer to fiction again, and to the forms and tropes
we associate with it today.
___
Gayle K.
Brunelle
is Professor of History at California State University, Fullerton. Associate
Editor of Terrae Incognitae: The Journal
of the Society for the History of the Discoveries, Dr. Brunelle has
published three monographs and numerous articles on early modern France. Her
current book project is a study of French colonization in Guiana, 1605-1763.
_____
APPOSITIONS:
Studies in
Renaissance / Early Modern Literature and Culture,
http://appositions.blogspot.com/, ISSN: 1946-1992,
Volume Eight
(2015): Dialogues & Exchanges
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