Utopian Geographies and the Early English Novel

By Jason H. Pearl

Historians of the Enlightenment have studied the period’s substantial advances in world cartography, as well as the decline of utopia imagined in geographic terms. Literary critics, meanwhile, have assessed the emerging novel’s realism and in particular the genre’s awareness of the wider world beyond Europe. Jason Pearl unites these lines of inquiry in Utopian Geographies and the Early English Novel, arguing that prose fiction from 1660 to 1740 helped demystify blank spaces on the map and make utopia available anywhere. This literature incorporated, debunked, and reformulated utopian conceptions of geography.

Reports of ideal societies have always prompted skepticism, and it is now common to imagine them in the future, rather than on some undiscovered island or continent. At precisely the time when novels began turning 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 utopia by giving it new coordinates and parameters.

Margaret Cavendish, Aphra Behn, Daniel Defoe, Jonathan Swift, and others told of adventurous voyages and extraordinary worlds. They engaged critically and creatively with the idea of utopia. If these writers ultimately concede that utopian geographies were nowhere to be found, they also reimagine the essential ideals as new forms of interiority and sociability that could be brought back to England. Questions about geography and utopia drove many of the formal innovations of the early novel. As this book shows, what resulted were new ways of representing both world geography and utopian possibility.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Release date: Oct 1, 2014
• ISBN: 9780813936246

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Utopian Geographies & the Early English Novel

Utopian Geographies & the Early English Novel

JASON H. PEARL

University of Virginia Press

CHARLOTTESVILLE AND LONDON

University of Virginia Press

© 2014 by the Rector and Visitors of the University of Virginia

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

First published 2014

9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Pearl, Jason H.

    Utopian geographies and the early English novel / Jason H. Pearl.

        pages       cm

    Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-8139-3623-9 (cloth : alk. paper)—ISBN 978-0-8139-3624-6 (e-book)

    1. Utopias in literature. 2. Geography in literature. 3. Newcastle, Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of, 1624?–1674. Description of a new world, called the blazing world. 4. Behn, Aphra, 1640–1689. Oroonoko. 5. Defoe, Daniel, 1661?–1731. Robinson Crusoe. 6. Defoe, Daniel, 1661?–1731. Captain Singleton. 7. Swift, Jonathan, 1667–1745. Gulliver’s travels. 8. English fiction—18th century—History and criticism. 9. English fiction—17th century—History and criticism. I. Title.

PR830.U7P43 2014

    823.009'372—dc23

2013050103

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

ONE

Utopia and Geography

TWO

The Flickering Blazing World

THREE

Remembering Paradise in Oroonoko

FOUR

Urban Solitude and the Crusoe Trilogy

FIVE

Piracy and Brotherhood in Captain Singleton

SIX

Misanthropia and Gulliver’s Travels

Conclusion

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgments

Long before beginning this project, I read the acknowledgments of an academic book and found apologies to neglected friends and family members. I shuddered at my mental image of a lonely academic in a dank garret, working in solitude as life passed by outside. Of course, I could not have known then how joyfully sociable academic work can be, how crucially it depends on cooperation and even collaboration with so many other people. My peers and mentors have become some of my closest friends. With distant colleagues, I have engaged in long and elaborate e-mail discussions. Even when I spent whole days in my office, I still felt the company of others as I learned from what they had written.

First, I must thank my two dissertation advisors at Boston University, Laurence Breiner and James A. Winn. They complemented each other perfectly and gave me exactly what I needed, teaching me so much but also pushing me to chart a path of my own. Although not a specialist of the eighteenth century, Larry helped me think about the period in unexpected ways. James was a true storehouse of knowledge and a shrewd judge of my writing. I wanted so much to earn their praise, an aspiration that remains firmly in place as I now undertake new projects. Michael Prince and Bruce Redford provided additional mentorship. It was after Michael’s course on eighteenth-century aesthetics that I committed to the period. Bruce taught me a great deal about eighteenth-century travel writing.

Along the way, numerous others have stepped in and challenged me to think more expansively and more critically. Colleagues at Florida International University and the University of Miami, including Steven Blevins, Nathaniel Cadle, Tassie Gwilliam, and Timothy Watson, have patiently read and insightfully responded to individual chapters. Thanks are due, as well, to the members of the University of Miami’s Atlantic Studies and Early Modern Studies Research Groups for letting me present early chapter drafts. Jennifer Airey, Anna Battigelli, Mary Baine Campbell, Joseph Navitsky, and William Nelson have also offered helpful feedback, as have scores of others—too many to name—at conferences for the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, the Defoe Society, and the Society for Utopian Studies. My students deserve mention, too, for their patience and insight as I rehearsed unpolished ideas in the classroom.

Generous funding has given me time to work and resources to work with. Early on, a fellowship from the Andrew Mellon Foundation enabled me to participate in a seminar at Caltech, facilitated by Mordechai Feingold, and do research at the Huntington Library. A Graduate Research Abroad Fellowship from BU let me visit the British Library. A junior faculty development award from FIU made it possible to go to the Houghton Library, and a Franklin Grant from the American Philosophical Society allowed me to spend time at the Beinecke.

Thanks, also, to Studies in the Novel for allowing me to republish much of what is now chapter 4, originally printed in volume 44, number 2, summer 2012, pp. 125–43.

I am especially grateful to the staff at the University of Virginia Press, my two peer reviewers, and my copyeditor. Angie Hogan has been the perfect editor: perceptive, knowledgeable, diligent, patient, and always encouraging. The anonymous readers considered the project on its own terms and helped me see problems—and solutions—I could not have found myself. George Roupe has been a judicious and keen-eyed copyeditor. This book has been improved substantially during the peer-review and editing process.

Finally, my deepest appreciation goes to two individuals who are not academics. Bonnie MacPherson, my mother, gave me the push I needed to go to graduate school. Without her, I would probably be doing something else right now, much less enthusiastically. Leilani Pearl, my wife, has supported me every step of the way. Her quiet but unstinting kindness—to others and to me—is the best reason I can think of to believe that better worlds are possible.

Introduction

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.

Utopia in the Eighteenth Century

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.

Novel Experiments

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,