In Other Worlds Part 3

Others considered this type of fantasy writing the result of repression in an age that censored any overt mention of s.e.xuality. One related by-product of this repression was the unhealthy Victorian obsession with fairy paintings, showing t.i.tania and her train, revels near giant mushrooms, and related scenes-basically a method of slipping past Mrs. Grundy in order to paint naked people having orgies. Orgies were apparently acceptable if you made the naked or semi-clad people very small and put b.u.t.terfly wings on them. "I hate fairies," one of my English friends said to me recently. "Nasty little pink wriggly things!" It's true, many of the painted Victorian fairies were little and wriggly, though some of them were blue rather than pink. Others, however, were more G.o.ddesslike; one could see the connection between Fairy Queens-long l.u.s.trous hair, diaphanous draperies and all, and hardly ever a Fairy King in sight-and the kinds of larger-than-life Queen Bee female figures that were rapidly taking centre stage in my thesis.

These powerful female figures in the "metaphysical romances" I was studying were not G.o.ddesses, but they were not normal human women either. What then were they, besides being the great-grannies of Wonder Woman? To this question I now consecrated my waking hours. I divided the thesis into two parts: "The Power of Nature," in which I explored two kinds of strong supernatural female figures-good ones, which I saw as Wordsworthian nature deities of the "Nature-never-did-betray-the-heart-that-loved-her" variety, and bad or morally ambiguous ones, which I saw as Darwinian, or the red in tooth and claw alternate species. George MacDonald's North Wind and young-old grandmother figures-to his mind Christian allegories of Grace and the like-I saw as exemplifying the "good" kind, while H. Rider Haggard's She represented the Darwinian kind-not evil as such but amoral.

The second part of the thesis was called "The Nature of Power" and was devoted to an examination of the different kinds of societies a.s.sociated with these two types of female figures-"good" societies, which were always connected to jolly agriculturalists like the hobbits and/or with woodland activities like those of the elvish folk headed up by Galadriel in The Lord of the Rings, and "bad" societies, which were not only disagreeable tyrannies full of Orcs and other nasties but highly industrialized and polluting. The bad societies were destructive toward nature and its creatures, especially trees, thus giving us one of the most satisfying scenes in The Lord of the Rings: the revenge of the treeish Ents. (Though in Tolkien's work, as in many fictional worlds from The Wonderful Wizard of Oz to Harry Potter, there are hostile trees as well.) Thus when I went to see the movie Avatar I knew exactly where I was. I was (a) in a Royal Academy exhibition called Victorian Fairy Painting, with the giant luminous plants, the scantily clothed people with big ears, and so forth; and (b) in my own thesis of the 1960s, with the sin of Tree-of-Life burning, the supernatural female figures, the bad machine-makers and forest-despoilers, and the whole ball of wax.

I never finished my thesis, since I got diverted by novel-publication and film-script writing around 196970; but in the course of riffling through obscure books that, at that time, n.o.body but me was interested in, I discovered lots and lots of utopias. The nineteenth century, especially the second half of it, was so cluttered up with them that Gilbert and Sullivan wrote a parody operetta called Utopia Limited. I also discovered-beginning around the turn of the century but gathering steam as the twentieth century progressed, if progressed is the word-a strain of increasingly darker and more horrifying dystopias.

Why this change? In the nineteenth century, there had been many rapid technological, scientific, and medical changes-improved sewer systems and sanitation, antiseptics such as carbolic acid, anesthesia, vaccination, advances in transportation and manufacturing, and many more. The future looked set to continue in this ever-rosier direction, or as Tennyson's fiery young idealist put it in his poem "Locksley Hall," "Let the great world spin forever down the ringing grooves of change." (The metaphor came from trains, but Tennyson hadn't looked very closely at the tracks: he thought they were concave.) The nineteenth century's positive utopias were inspired, as well, by various radical social thinkers, including William Cobbett and Karl Marx, and by Christian socialists such as Charles Kingsley and John Ruskin. Many people still really believed that humankind was almost perfectible if only society could change the way it was organized. People wrote utopias-such as William Morris's arts-and-crafts socialistic News from Nowhere or Edward Bellamy's technically advanced utopia Looking Backward-because they really did think that humankind could do better than the inequality, social injustice, vice, dirt, disease, and squalor the writers witnessed all around them. Their utopias are versions of the Before-and-After makeovers you used to see in women's magazines. Before, a sloppy, sad, run-down failure; but add a nifty haircut, flattering wardrobe, more healthful diet, well-applied eyeshadow, and look! A smiling, energetic, and s.e.xier whole different person! (Though if the whole different person is smiling too eerily, watch out: you may be in a dystopia after all because, like the how-may-I-help-you women in The Stepford Wives, that person may be a robot.) Along with the literary utopias, the nineteenth century sp.a.w.ned hundreds of actual ones-groups of people who set up new communities-from the socialist Finnish colonies on the west coast of Canada, to the Esperanto-speakers who thought that a universal language might result in world peace, to the Oneida Community that practised an intricate form of polygamy and morphed into a flatware company. These had as their ancestors a large number of utopian religious communities, ranging from the Quakers, a disruptive cult that would sometimes streak church gatherings before it settled down into the more sober-sided version that went in for oatmeal and prison reform, to the Shakers (who did away with s.e.x-oddly enough, they have died out), to the Mennonites and Amish.

The seventeenth-century Puritan New Englanders began, too, as utopianists. The phrase "a city upon a hill, a light to all nations" may sound familiar, since it was used recently by an American president, but it was first attached to America in the seventeenth century by John Winthrop, and comes from the inspiring utopian prophecy in the Book of Isaiah crossed with a sermon by Jesus. The New England Colony saw itself as the City of G.o.d in action-like so many utopias, it was going to start again and do things right this time. However, as Hawthorne pointed out, the first public-works items the colony built were a prison and a scaffold-acknowledgements of its own dystopic underbelly.

The nineteenth-century literary utopias concentrated less on religious structures and more on material improvements, but the l.u.s.tre of both physical and spiritual utopian light dimmed considerably in the twentieth century. Despite this dimming, in the burst of Edwardian splendour that preceded the First World War there were brilliant upflarings of utopianism in the world of art, now dubbed, collectively, "utopian modernism." These European art movements wished not merely to reflect the world but to change it. Under this heading we find everything from Italian Futurism, the Bauhaus, De Stijl, and Russian Constructivism: all wanted to overthrow established ideas and conventions and set up their own new and improved versions.

Though utopian from their own point of view, some of these movements are dystopian from ours; indeed, in their frequent celebration of violence, they point to a recurring motif in literary as well as in political utopian thinking: the brave new order often comes about as the result of war and chaos.

Then along came the real war-the Great War-which did change the world but at horrifying cost. And then, in this changed but not improved postwar world, several societies had a chance to practise utopian social engineering on a large scale. Most noteworthy were the U.S.S.R. under Lenin and Stalin and Germany under Hitler. The result, in each case, was unprecedented bloodshed and the ultimate collapse of the supposedly utopian system.

Lest we a.s.sume that communists and fascists were the only sorts of thinkers to go in for this sort of thing, there are many lesser-known entries in the list of failed utopias, including a capitalist-and-workers' paradise set up by Henry Ford in the 1920s and 1930s. It was called "Fordlandia," after its founder, and has recently been the subject of two books, both of them called Fordlandia: a factual account by Greg Grandin and a novel by Eduardo Sguiglia. Fordlandia was situated in the backwoods of Brazil, where the happy workers were supposed to grow rubber trees to make tires for Henry Ford's Fords; but despite urban planning, and swimming pools for management, and despite or perhaps because of Ford's efforts to regiment all employees and turn them into teetotallers like himself, the community soon fell apart in a welter of corruption, waste, vice, snakebites, tropical diseases, violence, and rebellion.

Why is it that when we grab for heaven-socialist or capitalist or even religious-we so often produce h.e.l.l? I'm not sure, but so it is. Maybe it's the lumpiness of human beings. What do you do with people who somehow just don't or won't fit into your grand scheme? All too often you stretch them on a Procrustean bed or dig a hole in the ground and shovel them into it. With so much stretching, hole-digging, and shovelling going on as the twentieth century ground on, it was difficult to place faith in the construction of utopias, literary or otherwise. It became much easier to depict awful societies not as the tawdry Before side of an After happy-face future but as the much worse thing we might instead be heading toward. The future societies imagined by mid-and late-twentieth-century writers, and indeed by early-twenty-first-century ones, are much more likely to be dark than bright.

Throughout this chapter I've been using the term ustopia, and now I'll expand on it. Utopia, as you know, comes from Thomas More's book of that name-which in his case may mean either "no place" or "good place," or both. Some are of the opinion that More's book was a sort of joke: utopia can't exist because fallen human nature doesn't permit it. Nevertheless, his term stuck, and now, by general usage, utopias are thought to portray ideal societies or some version of them. Their program is to do away with the ills that plague us, such as wars, social inequality, poverty and famine, gender inequalities, fallen arches, and the like. (People-especially women-are always better looking in nineteenth-century utopias than the authors thought they were in real life.) Dystopias are usually described as the opposite of utopias-they are Great Bad Places rather than Great Good Places and are characterized by suffering, tyranny, and oppression of all kinds. Some books contain both-a sort of "look on this picture, then on that," as Hamlet puts it-one, n.o.ble and virtuous; the other, corrupt and vicious. Polar opposites.

But scratch the surface a little, and-or so I think-you see something more like a yin and yang pattern; within each utopia, a concealed dystopia; within each dystopia, a hidden utopia, if only in the form of the world as it existed before the bad guys took over. Even in Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four-surely one of the most unrelievedly gloomy dystopias ever concocted-utopia is present, though minimally, in the form of an antique gla.s.s paperweight and a little woodland glade beside a stream. As for the utopias, from Thomas More onwards, there is always provision made for the renegades, those who don't or won't follow the rules: prison, enslavement, exile, exclusion, or execution.

Forty years after having abandoned my "metaphysical romance" thesis with its chapters on good and bad societies, I find I have produced-so far-three novel-length ustopias of my own: The Handmaid's Tale, Oryx and Crake, and The Year of the Flood.

Why did I jump the tracks, as it were, from realistic novels to dystopias? Was I slumming, as some "literary" writers are accused of doing when they write science fiction or detective stories? The human heart is inscrutable, but let me try to remember what I thought I was up to at the time.

First, The Handmaid's Tale. What put it into my head to write such a book? I had never done anything like it before: my previous fiction had been realistic. Tackling a ustopia was a risk. But it was also a challenge and a temptation because if you've studied a form and read extensively in it, you often have a secret hankering to try it yourself.

I began the book-after a few earlier dry runs-in Berlin in the spring of 1984. I had a D.A.A.D. fellows.h.i.+p, in a program run by West Berlin to encourage foreign artists to visit, as the city was at that time encircled by the Berlin Wall and its inhabitants felt understandably claustrophobic. During our stay we also visited East Berlin, as well as Poland and Czechoslovakia, and I thus had several first-hand experiences of the flavour of life in a totalitarian-but supposedly utopian-regime. I wrote more of the book once I was back in Toronto, and completed it in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, in the spring of 1985, where I was the holder of an M.F.A. chair. Tuscaloosa and Alabama provided another kind of flavour-that of a democracy, but one with quite a few constraining social customs and att.i.tudes. ("Don't ride a bicycle," I was told. "They'll think you're a communist and run you off the road.") The writing of The Handmaid's Tale gave me a strange feeling, like sliding on river ice-exhilarating but unbalancing. How thin is this ice? How far can I go? How much trouble am I in? What's down there if I fall? These were writerly questions, having to do with structure and execution, and that biggest question of all, the one every writer asks him- or herself with every completed chapter: Is anyone going to believe this? (I don't mean literal belief: fictions admit that they are invented, right on the cover. I mean, "find the story compelling and plausible enough to go along for the ride.") These writerly questions were reflections of other, more general questions. How thin is the ice on which supposedly "liberated" modern Western women stand? How far can they go? How much trouble are they in? What's down there if they fall?

And further: If you were attempting a totalitarian takeover of the United States, how would you do it? What form would such a government a.s.sume, and what flag would it fly? How much social instability would it take before people would renounce their hard-won civil liberties in a tradeoff for "safety"? And, since most totalitarianisms we know about have attempted to control reproduction in one way or another-limiting births, demanding births, specifying who can marry whom and who owns the kids-how would that motif play out for women?

And what about the outfits? Ustopias are always interested in clothing-either less of it, compared to what we wear now-that was popular in Victorian times-or more of it, compared to what we wear now. The clothing concerns usually centre around women: societies are always uncovering parts of women's bodies and then covering them up again. (Maybe this is just to keep things interesting: now you see it, now you don't, though the "it" changes a lot. What was it that used to be so very alluring about a trim set of ankles?) My rules for The Handmaid's Tale were simple: I would not put into this book anything that humankind had not already done, somewhere, sometime, or for which it did not already have the tools. Even the group hangings had precedents: there were group hangings in earlier England, and there are still group stonings in some countries. Looking further back, the Maenads, during their Dionysian celebrations, were said to go into frenzies during which they dismembered people with their hands. (If everyone partic.i.p.ates, no one individual is responsible.) For a literary precedent, one need search no further than Emile Zola's Germinal, which contains an episode in which the town's coal-mining women, who have been s.e.xually exploited by the shopkeeper, tear the man apart and parade his genitalia through town on a pole. A less raw but still shocking precedent is s.h.i.+rley Jackson's short story "The Lottery" (which I read as a teenager, shortly after it came out, and which made a chilling impression on me).

The coverups worn by the women in The Handmaid's Tale have been variously interpreted as Catholic (as in nuns) or Muslim (as in burkas). The truth is that these outfits are not aimed at any one religion. Their actual design was inspired by the Old Dutch Cleanser figure on the sink cleaner boxes of my childhood, but they are also simply old. Mid-Victorians, with their concealing bonnets and veils to keep strange men from leering at their faces, would not have found them so unusual.

Old Dutch Cleanser: I prefaced the novel with three quotations. The first is from the Bible-Genesis 30, 1:3, the pa.s.sage in which the two wives of Jacob use their female slaves as baby-producers for themselves; this ought to warn the reader against the dangers inherent in applying every word in that extremely varied doc.u.ment literally. The second is from Jonathan Swift's A Modest Proposal: it alerts us to the fact that a straight-faced but satirical account-such as Swift's suggestion that the grinding Irish poverty of his times could be alleviated by selling and eating Irish babies-is not a recipe. The third-"In the desert there is no sign that says, 'Thou shalt not eat stones' "-is a Sufi proverb stating a simple human truth: we don't prohibit things that n.o.body would ever want to do anyway, since all prohibitions are founded upon a denial of our desires.

The Handmaid's Tale was published in Canada in the fall of 1985, and in the United States and the United Kingdom in the spring of 1986. In the United Kingdom, its first reviewers treated it as a yarn rather than a warning: they'd already experienced Oliver Cromwell and his Puritan republic and seemed to have no fear of re-enacting that scenario. In Canada, people asked, in anxious Canadian fas.h.i.+on, "Could it happen here?" In the United States, Mary McCarthy, writing in the New York Times, gave the book a largely negative review on the grounds that it lacked imagination, and anyway it was unlikely ever to take place, not in the secular society she perceived as the American reality. But on the West Coast, so attuned to earthquake tremors, switchboards on talk shows lit up like Las Vegas, and someone graffitied on the Venice Beach seawall: "The Handmaid's Tale Is Already Here!"

It wasn't already here, not quite, not then. I thought for a while in the 1990s that maybe it never would be. But now I'm wondering again. Of recent years, American society has moved much closer to the conditions necessary for a takeover of its own power structures by an anti-democratic and repressive government. Approximately five years after The Handmaid's Tale was published, the Soviet Union disintegrated, the West slapped itself on the back and went shopping, and pundits proclaimed the end of history. It looked as if, in the race between Nineteen Eighty-Four and Brave New World-control by terror versus control through conditioning and consumption-the latter had won, and the world of The Handmaid's Tale appeared to recede. But now we see a United States weakened by two draining wars and a financial meltdown, and America appears to be losing faith in the basic premises of liberal democracy. After 9/11, the Patriot Act pa.s.sed with barely a cough, and in Britain citizens have accepted a degree of state supervision that would once have been unthinkable.

It's a truism that enemy states tend to mirror one another in organization and methods. When colonies were the coming thing, everyone wanted one. Atom bombs in the United States created the desire for some in the U.S.S.R. The Soviet Union was a large bureaucratic centralized state, and so was the America of those times. What form will the United States a.s.sume now that it's opposed by unrelenting religious fanaticisms? Will it soon produce rule by the same kind of religious fanaticism, only of a different sect? Will the more repressive elements within it triumph, returning it to its origins as a Puritan theocracy and giving us The Handmaid's Tale in everything but the outfits?

I've said earlier that dystopia contains within itself a little utopia, and vice versa. What, then, is the little utopia concealed in the dystopic Handmaid's Tale? There are two: one is in the past-the past that is our own present. The second is placed in a future beyond the main story by the Afterword at the end of the book, which describes a future in which Gilead-the tyrannical republic of The Handmaid's Tale-has ended, and has thus become a subject for conferences and academic papers. I suppose that's what happens to ustopian societies when they die: they don't go to Heaven, they become thesis topics.

After The Handmaid's Tale there was a period of approximately eighteen years during which I did not write ustopian novels, but then came Oryx and Crake in 2003. Oryx and Crake is dystopic in that almost the entire human race is annihilated, before which it has split into two parts: a technocracy and an anarchy. And, true to form, there is a little attempt at utopia in it as well: a group of quasi-humans who have been genetically engineered so that they will never suffer from the ills that plague h.o.m.o sapiens sapiens. They are designer people. But anyone who engages in such design-as we are now doing-has to ask, How far can humans go in the alteration department before those altered cease to be human? Which of our features are at the core of our being? What a piece of work is man, and now that we ourselves can be the workmen, what pieces of this work shall we chop off?

The designer people have some accessories I wouldn't mind having myself: built-in insect repellant, automatic sunblock, and the ability to digest leaves, like rabbits. They also have several traits that would indeed be improvements of a sort, though many of us wouldn't like them. For instance, mating is seasonal: in season, certain parts of the body turn blue, as with baboons, so there is no more romantic rejection or date rape. And these people can't read, so a lot of harmful ideologies will never trouble them.

There are other genetically engineered creatures in the book as well: Chickie n.o.bs, for instance, which are chicken objects modified so they grow multiple legs, wings, and b.r.e.a.s.t.s. They have no heads, just a nutriment orifice at the top, thus solving a problem for animal rights workers: as their creators say, "No Brain, No Pain." (Since Oryx and Crake was published, the Chickie n.o.b solution has made giant strides: lab-grown meat is now a reality, though it is probably not in your sausages yet.) A sibling book, The Year of the Flood, was published in 2009. Its original t.i.tle was G.o.d's Gardeners, but although this was perfectly acceptable to the British publisher, the American publisher and the Canadian publisher objected to it on the grounds that people would think the book was a far-right extremist tract, which goes to show how thoroughly the word G.o.d has been hijacked. Many other t.i.tles were proposed, including "Serpent Wisdom," which the Canadian publisher liked but which the U.S. felt suggested a hippy New Age cult, and "Edencliff," which the British thought sounded like "a retirement home in Bournemouth." Book t.i.tles are either immediately obvious, like The Edible Woman, or very hard to decide on, and The Year of the Flood was the second kind.

The Year of the Flood explores the world of Oryx and Crake from a different perspective. Whereas Jimmy/Snowman, the protagonist of Oryx and Crake, has grown up within a privileged though barricaded enclave, The Year of the Flood takes place in the s.p.a.ce outside such enclaves, at the very bottom of the social heap. Its pre-disaster plot unfolds in neighbourhoods that the security forces-now melded with corporations-don't even bother to patrol, leaving them to criminal gangs and anarchic violence. However, this book, too, has a utopia embedded within a dystopia; it's represented by the G.o.d's Gardeners, a small environmental religious cult dedicated to the sacred element in all Creation. Its members grow vegetables on slum rooftops, sing sacred-nature hymns, and avoid high-tech communications devices such as cell phones and computers on the grounds that they can be used to spy on you-which is entirely true.

Oryx and Crake and The Year of the Flood cover the same time period, and thus are not sequels or prequels; they are more like chapters of the same book. They have sometimes been described as "apocalyptic," but in a true apocalypse everything on Earth is destroyed, whereas in these two books the only element that's annihilated is the human race, or most of it. What survives after the cataclysmic event is not a "dystopia," because many more people would be required for that-enough to comprise a society. The surviving stragglers do, however, have mythic precedents: a number of myths tell of an annihilating flood survived by one man (Deucalion in Greek myth, Utnapishtim in the Gilgamesh epic) or a small group, like Noah and his family. Do the surviving human beings in Oryx and Crake and The Year of the Flood represent a dystopic threat to the tiny utopia of genetically modified, peaceful, and s.e.xually harmonious New Humans that is set to replace them? As it is always the reader rather than the writer who has the last word about any book, I leave that to you.

People have asked, many times, about the "inspiration" for these two books and their world. Of course there are proximate causes for all novels-a family story, a newspaper clipping, an event in one's personal history-and for Oryx and Crake and The Year of the Flood there are such causes as well. Worries about the effects of climate change can be found as far back as 1972, when the Club of Rome accurately predicted what now appears to be happening, so those worries had long been with me, though they were not front-page stories in the spring of 2001 when I began Oryx and Crake. As with The Handmaid's Tale, I acc.u.mulated many file folders of research; and although in both there are some of what Huckleberry Finn would call "stretchers," there is nothing that's entirely without foundation.

So I could point to this or that scientific paper, this or that newspaper or magazine story, this or that actual event, but those kinds of things are not really what drive the storytelling impulse. I'm more inclined to think that it's unfinished business, of the kind represented by the questions people are increasingly asking themselves: How badly have we messed up the planet? Can we dig ourselves out? What would a species-wide self-rescue effort look like if played out in actuality? And also: Where has utopian thinking gone? Because it never totally disappears: we're too hopeful a species for that. "Good," for us, may always have a "Bad" twin, but its other twin is "Better."

It's interesting to me that I situated the utopia-facilitating element in Oryx and Crake not in a new kind of social organization or a ma.s.s brainwas.h.i.+ng or soul-engineering program but inside the human body. The Crakers are well behaved from the inside out not because of their legal system or their government or some form of intimidation but because they have been designed to be so. They can't choose otherwise. And this seems to be where ustopia is moving in real life as well: through genetic engineering, we will be able to rid ourselves of inherited diseases, and ugliness, and mental illness, and aging, and ... who knows? The sky's the limit. Or so we are being told. What is the little dystopia concealed within such utopian visions of the perfected human body-and mind? Time will tell.

Historically, ustopia has not been a happy story. High hopes have been dashed, time and time again. The best intentions have indeed led to many paved roads in h.e.l.l. Does that mean we should never try to rectify our mistakes, reverse our disaster-bent courses, clean up our cesspools, or ameliorate the many miseries of many lives? Surely not: if we don't do maintenance work and minor improvements on whatever we actually have, things will go downhill very fast. So of course we should try to make things better, insofar as it lies within our power. But we should probably not try to make things perfect, especially not ourselves, for that path leads to ma.s.s graves.

We're stuck with us, imperfect as we are; but we should make the most of us. Which is about as far as I myself am prepared to go, in real life, along the road to ustopia.

NOTES.

1. John Gardner, Grendel, 1971.

2. The Tempest's Golden Age is in Act II, Scene 1.

3. Underground fairylands and other worlds are numerous. I'll mention only two: George MacDonald's The Princess and Curdie (1883) and Aubrey Beardsley's Under the Hill (1896).

4. Robert Louis Stevenson wrote an engaging preface to Treasure Island in which he describes this process.

5. Escape from caverns via animal tracking is a very old motif. See, for instance, One Thousand and One Nights.

6. "Copper cylinders": See James de Mille, A Strange Ma.n.u.script Found in a Copper Cylinder, 1888.

7. "h.e.l.l hath no limits," Doctor Faustus, Scene 5, pp. 120135. "Paradise," Paradise Lost, lines 5857.

8. Honours English: a now-defunct course at the University of Toronto that covered everything from Anglo-Saxon to T. S. Eliot.

9. At the Back of the North Wind by George MacDonald (1871) contains a huge flying female character-the North Wind-with an astonis.h.i.+ng amount of hair.

10. "Someone once said ..." Scott Symons, in conversation with the author.

11. s.e.xual dimorphism in fairy fantasy writing was common in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, often featuring a large, long-haired female and a small boy. (See, for instance, Jean Ingelow, Mopsa the Fairy, 1910.) In later incarnations such as She and The Lord of the Rings, power subst.i.tutes for size.

12. Victorian Fairy Painting is the catalogue of the 1997 exhibit at the Royal Academy of Arts, London.

13. Tennyson and train tracks: "Locksley Hall," 1835.

14. The "city upon a hill" phrase was quoted by George W. Bush, twice, 2000 and 2001.

15. Greg Grandin, Fordlandia, 2010; Eduardo Sguiglia, Fordlandia, 2000.

16. Emile Zola, Germinal, 1885.

"Don't let the b.a.s.t.a.r.ds get you down." A tattoo inspired by The Handmaid's Tale belonging to Kat Thomas, co-creator of BiblioBabes.ca. Tattoo by Captain Matt of CaptainMatt.ca:

An Introductory Note.

When I began looking through my past publications in search of other pieces about SF and related topics, I found I'd written quite a lot more on this subject than I'd remembered and started quite a bit earlier. My first such published article-on H. Rider Haggard's She-dates back to 1965.

I've chosen to begin with an excerpt from a review of Marge Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time that appeared in 1976. It's clear that I was pondering the problems of utopia/dystopia writing at least nine years before I wrote The Handmaid's Tale. The other nine pieces range from an introduction to She to an examination of Jonathan Swift's science academy in Book III of Gulliver's Travels and touch on everything from the forms of dictators.h.i.+ps to human genetic engineering.

I've done some light editing to remove some overlaps and repet.i.tions, but otherwise the pieces are as originally published.

Woman on the Edge of Time.

by Marge Piercy.

None of the reviews of Woman on the Edge of Time I've read to date seems even to have acknowledged its genre. Most have a.s.sumed that the book is intended as a realistic novel, for that is certainly how it starts out. It appears to be the slice-of-life story of a thirty-seven-year-old Chicana welfare recipient named Consuelo, whose past history we are given in the first few pages of the book. Consuelo had a child, was deserted by her husband, and subsequently took up with a black, blind pickpocket whose death drove her into a depression in which she accidently broke her daughter's wrist. For this offence she was committed to a mental inst.i.tution and has had her child taken away from her. The only person left for her to love is her doped-up prost.i.tute niece Dolly, but in defending Dolly she breaks the nose of Dolly's pimp and is recommitted by him. The rest of the book takes place "inside" (with one escape and one visit to the outside), and the descriptions of inst.i.tutional life are enough to make the reader believe that Connie will be driven mad by s.a.d.i.s.tic doctors and indifferent attendants. This part of the book is rendered in excruciating, grotty, Zolaesque detail, pill by deadening pill, meal by cardboard meal, ordeal by ordeal, and as a rendition of what life in a New York bin is like for those without money or influence it is totally convincing and depressing.

However, even before Connie is recommitted she has been having visits from a strange creature named Luciente. Luciente turns out to be a visitor from the future; Connie thinks the visitor is a young man and is surprised when she is revealed as a woman. By making contact with Connie's mind, Luciente can help Connie project herself into the world of the future, Luciente's world. Connie travels there extensively, and needless to say the reader goes with her.

Some reviewers treated this part of the book as a regrettable daydream or even a hallucination caused by Connie's madness. Such an interpretation undercuts the entire book. If Connie is insane, her struggles to escape from the inst.i.tution must be viewed in an entirely different light from that in which the author puts them, and the doctors, the pimp, and the indifferent family are somewhat justified in their callous treatment. Other reviewers did not see Connie as insane but took Luciente and her troupe to be a pointless exercise in "science fiction," an exercise that should have no place in a piece of social realism. But Piercy is not that stupid. If she had intended a realistic novel she would have written one. Woman on the Edge of Time is a utopia, with all the virtues and shortcomings of the form, and many of the things reviewers found irksome are indigenous to the genre rather than the author.

By utopia, I mean books such as Morris's News from Nowhere, Bellamy's Looking Backward, Hudson's A Crystal Age, or even Wyndham's Consider Her Ways. These differ greatly from plot-centred otherworld fantasies such as Tolkien's and though they may share some elements with "science fiction," this category is too broad for them. The books I've mentioned all send an emissary from an oppressive contemporary society into the future as a sort of tourist-journalist, to check out improved conditions and report back. Such books are not really about the hero's adventures, though a love affair of some sort is usually thrown in to sweeten the didactic pill. The real hero is the future society; the reader is intended to comparison-shop in company with the time-traveller, questioning the invariably polite inhabitants and grumbling over disconcerting details. The moral intent of such fables is to point out to us that our own undesirable conditions are not necessary: if things can be imagined differently, they can be done differently.

Hence the inevitable long-winded conversations in which traveller and tour guide, in this case, Connie and Luciente, plod through the day-to-day workings of their societies. What about sewage disposal? birth control? ecology? education? Books of this sort always contain conversations like this, and it is to Piercy's credit that she has given us a very human and rather grouchy traveller and a guide who sometimes loses her temper. The world of the future depicted here is closest in spirit perhaps to Morris's. It's a village economy, with each village preserving the ethnic flavour of some worthy present-day minority: American Indian, American Black, European Jewish (suburban WASP is not represented). It is, however, racially mixed, s.e.xually equal, and ecologically balanced. Women have "given up" childbirth in order that men won't regret having given up power, and children are educated more or less communally, with a modified apprentice system. There's quite a lot of advanced bio-feedback, and instant communication through "kenners," which is uncomfortably reminiscent of such silliness as d.i.c.k Tracy's two-way wrist.w.a.tch radios. But they do have communal "fooders" and, I'm happy to note, dishwashers.

Reading utopias is addictive-I found myself skipping through some perfectly acceptable pa.s.sages about electric shock treatments and visiting hours at the asylum to find out what the inhabitants of Mattapoisett do about breastfeeding (both s.e.xes indulge; men get hormone shots), about motherhood (bottle babies, elective "mothers," production in balance with nature's capacity to support it, adolescent separation rituals), about criminals (if incorrigible they're executed because no one wants to be a prison guard), even about what they use to mulch cabbages. Writing utopias is addictive too, and Piercy expends a good deal of energy trying to get every last detail in, to get it right, and to make rather too sure we get the point.

Numerous dangers await the author of a utopia. For one thing, inhabitants of utopias somehow cannot help coming across as slightly sanctimonious and preachy; they've been like that since Thomas More. And in addition all utopias suffer from the reader's secret conviction that a perfect world would be dull, so Piercy is careful to liven things up with festivals, ceremonies, nice clothes, and a hopeful description of untrammelled s.e.xual interchange. There are problems, of course, but we are allowed to see the inhabitants working them out through council meetings and "wormings," a wonderful name for a session at which you accuse and complain. Some of these projections are a bit much: it's especially hard to write about communication between cats and humans in any way that isn't whimsical; and utopian children have difficulty being anything but cute or bratty. But the language Piercy has devised for her utopians has unexpected felicities as well as its leaden moments; some of the utopian pa.s.sages even manage to be oddly moving. The poignancy comes in part from Connie's hunger for human contact and love, in part from the resemblances she sees between the utopians and her lost child, lover, and friends. The outer virtues of Mattapoisett are overshadowed by an inner one: it is the only place where Connie is loved.

However, several issues are dodged. The utopians refuse to fill Connie in on history, so we never find out much about how it all happened. They're engaged in a war with an enemy, but we don't learn much about this either. And they tell Connie they are not "the" future, but only a possible future, and that they need her help in the present to avoid "winking out." (I wish this didn't sound so much like the resuscitation of Tinker Bell in Peter Pan.) At one point Connie stumbles into another future-presumably what will happen if we don't all put our shoulders to the wheel-in which women are termitelike objects and the air is so polluted you can't see the sky.

The Mattapoisett call to action only bewilders poor Connie, whose scope is of necessity limited. She ends by b.u.mping off a few of the evil asylum shrinks, and because of the ambiguity of the last sections we're left with the uneasy feeling that Mattapoisett may have been a paranoid fantasy after all. The only evidence against this interpretation is that Connie isn't educated enough to have such a utopian vision.

Woman on the Edge of Time is like a long inner dialogue in which Piercy answers her own questions about how a revised American society would work. The curious thing about serious utopias, as opposed to the satirical or entertainment variety, is that their authors never seem to write more than one of them; perhaps because they are products, finally, of the moral rather than the literary sense.

H. Rider Haggard's.

She.

When I first read H. Rider Haggard's highly famous novel She, I didn't know it was highly famous. I was a teenager, it was the 1950s, and She was just one of the many books in the cellar. My father unwittingly shared with Jorge Luis Borges a liking for nineteenth-century yarns with touches of the uncanny coupled with rip-roaring plots; and so, in the cellar, where I was supposed to be doing my homework, I read my way through Rudyard Kipling and Conan Doyle, and Dracula and Frankenstein, and Robert Louis Stevenson and H. G. Wells, and also Henry Rider Haggard. I read King Solomon's Mines first, with its adventures and tunnels and lost treasure, and then Allan Quatermain, with its adventures and tunnels and lost civilization. And then I read She.

I had no socio-cultural context for these books then-the British Empire was the pink part of the map, "imperialism and colonialism" had not yet acquired their special negative charge, and the accusation "s.e.xist" was far in the future. Nor did I make any distinctions between great literature and any other kind. I just liked reading. Any book that began with some mysterious inscriptions on a very old broken pot was fine with me, and that is how She begins. There was even a picture at the front of my edition-not a drawing of the pot but a photograph of it, to make the yarn really convincing. (The pot was made to order by Haggard's sister-in-law; he intended it to function like the pirate map at the beginning of Treasure Island-a book the popularity of which he hoped to rival-and it did.) Most outrageous tales state at the very beginning that what follows is so incredible the reader will have trouble believing it, which is both a come-on and a challenge. The messages on the pot stretch credulity, but, having deciphered them, the two heroes of She-the gorgeous but none too bright Leo Vincey and the ugly but intelligent Horace Holly-are off to Africa to hunt up the beautiful, undying sorceress who is supposed to have killed Leo's distant ancestor. Curiosity is their driving force, vengeance is their goal. Many a hards.h.i.+p later, and after having narrowly escaped death at the hands of the savage and matrilineal tribe of the Amahaggar, they find not only the ruins of a vast and once-powerful civilization and the numerous mummified bodies of the same but also, dwelling among the tombs, the self-same undying sorceress, ten times lovelier, wiser, and more ruthless than they had dared to imagine.

As Queen of the Amahaggar, "She-who-must-be-obeyed" wafts around wrapped up like a corpse in order to inspire fear; but once tantalizingly peeled, under those gauzy wrappings is a stunner, and-what's more-a virgin. "She," it turns out, is two thousand years old. Her real name is Ayesha. She claims she was once a priestess of the Egyptian nature-G.o.ddess Isis. She's been saving herself for two millennia, waiting for the man she loves: one Kallikrates, a very good-looking priest of Isis and the ancestor of Leo Vincey. This man broke his vows and ran off with Leo's ancestress, whereupon Ayesha slew him in a fit of jealous rage. For two thousand years she's been waiting for him to be reincarnated; she's even got his preserved corpse enshrined in a side room, where she laments over it every night. A point-by-point comparison reveals-what a surprise!-that Kallikrates and Leo Vincey are identical.

Having brought Leo to his knees with her knockout charms, and having polished off Ustane, a more normal sort of woman with whom Leo has formed a s.e.xual pair-bond, and who just happens to be a reincarnation of Ayesha's ancient Kallikrates-stealing enemy, Ayesha now demands that Leo accompany her into the depths of a nearby mountain. There, She says, is where the secret of extremely long and more abundant life is to be found. Not only that, She and Leo can't be One until he is as powerful as She-the union might otherwise kill him (as it does, in the sequel, Ayesha: The Vengeance of She). So off to the mountain they go, via the ruins of the ancient, once-imperial city of Kor. To get the renewed life, all one has to do-after the usual Haggard adventures and tunnels-is to traverse some caverns measureless to man, step into a very noisy rolling pillar of fire, and then make one's getaway across a bottomless chasm.

This is how She acquired her powers two thousand years before, and to show a hesitating Leo how easy it is, She does it again. Alas, this time the thing works backward, and in a few instants Ayesha shrivels up into a very elderly bald monkey and then crumbles into dust. Leo and Holly, both hopelessly in love with She and both devastated, totter back to civilization, trusting in Her promise that She will return.

As a good read in the cellar, this was all very satisfactory, despite the overblown way in which She tended to express herself. She was an odd book in that it placed a preternaturally powerful woman at the centre of things: the only other such woman I'd run into so far had been the Wonder Woman of the comics, with her sparkly la.s.so and star-spangled panties. Both Ayesha and Wonder Woman went all weak-kneed when it came to the man they loved-Wonder Woman lost her magic powers when kissed by her boyfriend, Steve Trevor; Ayesha couldn't focus on conquering the world unless Leo Vincey would join her in that dubious enterprise-and I was callow enough, at fifteen, to find this part of it not only soppily romantic but pretty hilarious. Then I graduated from high school and discovered good taste, and forgot for a while about She.

For a while, but not forever. In the early 1960s I found myself in graduate school, in Cambridge, Ma.s.sachusetts. There I was exposed to Widener Library, a much larger and more organized version of the cellar; that is, it contained many sorts of books, not all of which bore the Great Literature Seal of Approval. Once I was let loose in the stacks, my penchant for not doing my homework soon rea.s.serted itself, and it wasn't long before I was snuffling around in Rider Haggard and his ilk once more.

This time, however, I had some excuse. My field of specialization was the nineteenth century, and I was busying myself with Victorian quasi-G.o.ddesses; and no one could accuse Haggard of not being Victorian. Like his age, which practically invented archeology, he was an amateur of vanished civilizations; also like his age, he was fascinated by the exploration of unmapped territories and encounters with "undiscovered" native peoples. As an individual, he was such a cookie-cutter country gentleman-albeit with some African travelling in his past-that it was hard to fathom where his overheated imagination had come from, though it may have been this by-the-book-English-establishment quality that allowed him to bypa.s.s intellectual a.n.a.lysis completely. He could sink a core-sampling drill straight down into the great English Victorian unconscious, where fears and desires-especially male fears and desires-swarmed in the darkness like blind fish. Or so claimed Henry Miller, among others.

Where did it all come from? In particular, where did the figure of She come from-old-young, powerful-powerless, beautiful-hideous, dweller among tombs, obsessed with an undying love, deeply in touch with the forces of Nature and thus of Life and Death? Haggard and his siblings were said to have been terrorized by an ugly rag doll that lived in a dark cupboard and was named "She-who-must-be-obeyed," but there is more to it than that. She was published in 1887, and thus came at the height of the fas.h.i.+on for sinister but seductive women. It looked back also on a long tradition of the same. Ayesha's literary ancestresses include the young-but-old supernatural women in George MacDonald's "Curdie" fantasies, but also various Victorian femmes fatales: Tennyson's Vivien in The Idylls of the King, bent on stealing Merlin's magic; the Pre-Raphaelite temptresses created in both poem and picture by Rossetti and William Morris; Swinburne's dominatrixes; Wagner's nasty pieces of female work, including the very old but still toothsome Kundry of Parsifal; and, most especially, the Mona Lisa of Walter Pater's famous prose poem, older than the rocks upon which she sits, yet young and lovely, and mysterious, and filled to the brim with experiences of a distinctly suspect nature.

As Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar pointed out in their 1989 book, No Man's Land, the ascendency in the arts of these potent but dangerous female figures is by no means unconnected with the rise of "Woman" in the nineteenth century, and with the hotly debated issues of her "true nature" and her "rights," and also with the anxieties and fantasies these controversies generated. If women ever came to wield political power-to which they were surely, by their natures, unsuited-what would they do with it? And if they were beautiful and desirable women, capable of attacking on the s.e.xual as well as the political front, wouldn't they drink men's blood, sap their vitality, and reduce them to grovelling serfs? As the century opened, Wordsworth's Mother Nature was benign, and "never would betray/The heart that loved her"; but by the end of the century, Nature and the women so firmly linked to her were much more likely to be red in tooth and claw-Darwinian G.o.ddesses rather than Wordsworthian ones. When, in She, Ayesha appropriates the fiery phallic pillar at the heart of Nature for the second time, it's just as well that it works backward. Otherwise men could kiss their own phallic pillars goodbye.

"You are a whale at parables and allegories and one thing reflecting another," wrote Rudyard Kipling in a letter to Rider Haggard, and there appear to be various hints and verbal signposts scattered over the landscape of She. For instance, the Amahagger, the tribe ruled by She, bear a name that not only encapsulates hag but also conflates the Latin root for love with the name of Abraham's banished wilderness-dwelling concubine, Hagar, and thus brings to mind a story of two women competing for one man. The ancient city of Kor is named perhaps for core, cognate with the French coeur, but suggesting also corps, for body, and thus corpse, for dead body; for She is in part a Nightmare Life-in-Death. Her horrid end is reminiscent of Darwinian evolution played backward-woman into monkey-but also of vampires after the stake-into-the-heart manoeuvre. (Bram Stoker's Dracula appeared after She, but Sheridan LeFanu's Carmilla pre-dates it, as does many another vampire story.) These a.s.sociations and more point toward some central significance that Haggard himself could never fully explicate, though he chalked up a sequel and a couple of prequels trying. "She," he said, was "some gigantic allegory of which I could not catch the meaning."

Haggard claimed to have written She "at white heat," in six weeks-"It came," he said, "faster than my poor aching hand could set it down," which would suggest hypnotic trance or possession. In the heyday of Freudian and Jungian a.n.a.lysis, She was much explored and admired, by Freudians for its womb-and-phallus images, by Jungians for its anima figures and thresholds. Northrop Frye, proponent of the theory of archetypes in literature, says this of She in his 1975 book, The Secular Scripture: A Study of the Structure of Romance: In the theme of the apparently dead and buried heroine who comes to life again, one of the themes of Shakespeare's Cymbeline, we seem to be getting a more undisplaced glimpse of the earth-mother at the bottom of the world. In later romance there is another glimpse of such a figure in Rider Haggard's She, a beautiful and sinister female ruler, buried in the depths of a dark continent, who is much involved with archetypes of death and rebirth.... Embalmed mummies suggest Egypt, which is preeminently the land of death and burial, and, largely because of its biblical role, of descent to a lower world.

Whatever She may have been thought to signify, its impact upon publication was tremendous. Everyone read it, especially men; a whole generation was influenced by it, and the generation after that. A dozen or so films have been based on it, and a huge amount of the pulp-magazine fiction churned out in the teens, twenties, and thirties of the twentieth century bears its impress. Every time a young but possibly old and/or dead woman turns up, especially if she's ruling a lost tribe in a wilderness and is a hypnotic seductress, you're looking at a descendant of She.

Literary writers, too, felt Her foot on their necks. Conrad's Heart of Darkness owes a lot to Her, as Gilbert and Gubar have indicated. James Hilton's Shangri-La, with its ancient, beautiful, and eventually crumbling heroine, is an obvious relative. C. S. Lewis felt Her power, fond as he was of creating sweet-talking, good-looking evil queens; and in Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, She splits into two: Galadriel, powerful but good, who's got exactly the same water-mirror as the one possessed by She; and a very ancient cave-dwelling man-devouring spider-creature named, tellingly, Shelob.

Would it be out of the question to connect the destructive Female Will, so feared by D. H. Lawrence and others, with the malign aspect of She? For Ayesha is a supremely transgressive female who challenges male power; though Her shoe size is tiny and Her fingernails are pink, She's a rebel at heart. If only She hadn't been hobbled by love, She would have used her formidable energies to overthrow the established civilized order. That the established civilized order was white and male and European goes without saying; thus She's power was not only female-of the heart, of the body-but barbaric, and "dark."