Introduction
THE INFLUENCE OF RECENT CRITICAL TRENDS in eighteenth-century studies has resulted in a renewed interest in contemporary utopias and utopianism.(1) Postmodern and postcolonial critiques have deconstructed eighteenth-century paradigms of nature, knowledge, reason, and history. Simultaneously, debates on gender, sexuality and imperialism/orientalism identify the paradoxical complexity of the Enlightenment project and reveal its fundamentally `utopian' nature. Utopias and utopianism therefore are well suited to Enlightenment inquiry and critique.
The six essays collected in this issue of Utopian Studies deepen these considerations; the primitivist utopia reveals the trappings of imperialism and colonialism in order to destabilize the utopian notion of the `noble savage'.(2) Eighteenth-century somatopias explore the various instabilities and contradictions that inhere within the notion of femininity and masculinity.(3) Micro-utopias disrupt conventional narratives and serve as a form of ideological resistance. Architectural utopias provide an insight into eighteenth-century ideas about spatial socialization. Each of the essays concentrates on aspects of eighteenth-century utopianism in ways that are designed to reveal the functionality of Enlightenment suppositions.(4)
Howard Segal and Arnold Kerson mark both the dynamic encounter between eighteenth-century Enlightenments in Europe and the Americas and this impact on eighteenth-century utopianism. Segal's article reinvestigates the notion of America as utopia par excellence. Indeed he suggests that only the Enlightenment faith and the actual economic and social investment in science, technology, reason and progress transformed the potential utopia of America into a probable one. Against common assumptions, seventeenth- and eighteenth-century American settlers encountered a vast territory of uncultured land and finite natural resources, not an abundant paradise. It was the industrialist's investment in waterways, steam locomotives, manufactories and other technological advancements supported by a very distinctive credo of individualism, which emerged in the late eighteenth century that recast the wilderness into a de facto industrialist utopia. Americans "did not write treatises on Happiness or on Progress," but they converted these principles into a reality.
Arnold Kerson's contribution introduces Rafael Landivar's social fable of the beavers in Rusticatio Mexicana (1781). Part of a larger natural history project, Book 6 of the Rusticatio celebrates the collectivist society of the beaver which excels in its intricate organization of communal living, division of labor, industry, harmony, and pacifism. While Landivar was not only influenced by European contemporaries such as Buffon and Valmont de Bomare in his depiction of the beaver, and by Thomas More and Tommaso Campanella in his utopian vision of an ideal republic, he also offers an idealistic image of a "land that, with the arrival of certain idealistic Europeans, the product of Renaissance humanism, would become the logical place for a utopia that, rather than a dream, would be a reality".
Guillaume Ansart continues the investigation of Americas as (European) utopia. The texts by Voltaire, Marivaux, Lesage and Abbe Prevost address specifically the encounter between the Native American population and European settler/invaders. Two epistemic models can be abstracted from a close reading of these texts: on the one hand, the American Indian is idealized as Rousseau's noble savage--a contrast between the primitivist world of the Americas and the civilized Old World serves to demand the reversal of moral, social, and cultural degeneration in Europe. On the other hand, the primitive and untouched Native American cultures are seen as `unnatural', because pre-natural, and must be civilized under the principles of reason and perfectibility. Conquests and colonization therefore are justified as beneficial and evolutionary requisite. Native American cultures serve therefore as mere critical devices and political metaphors and remain undifferentiated and two-dimensional.
Ansart also introduces a unique generic form: the micro-utopia. Utopian episodes and descriptions of "petite societes" are embedded within a larger, non-utopian narrative.(5) The evolving genre of the eighteenth-century novel thus provided a new medium for the display of utopian thought. Brenda Tooley's paper on Ann Radcliffe's The Italian (1796) illustrates this conclusively. Embedded within a conventional Gothic narrative that conjures up the horrors of the Inquisition, the occult nature of Catholicism, and gloomy monasticism, is the episode of the monastery of San Stefano. Intended as a prison for the fugitive Ellena, and clearly dependent on strict ecclesiastical structures, it does however manage to opt out of this hierarchy. San Stefano represents the idea of a secular community based on female friendship--a tradition that evokes the writings of Mary Astell, Daniel Defoe, and Sarah Scott. The micro-utopia of San Stefano opens up an emancipatory space within the claustrophobic Gothic narrative.
Janet R. White continues the study of the convent/monastery as a potentially utopian space. In her paper, she traces the development of the Ephrata Cloister, a religious utopia founded in 1732 in Pennsylvania with specific focus on the intricate relationship between individual and social space. Ephrata's utopian spatial imagination rests on the assumption that social spaces and material conditions not only embody religious and social doctrines but in fact shape human behavior. The founder Conrad Beissel used the built environment to reinforce the behaviors he valued in his community, but during a period of power struggle, this architecture and planning turned to undermine the social structure Beissel had created.
Utopia's occupation with space and place, epitomized in More's identification of utopia as a geographical metaphor, is further investigated in O'Toole Dubois's paper. The motivation of writers such as Ann Radcliffe, Sarah Scott, Mary Astell and Delarivier Manley to urgently promote utopian spaces for women must be read within the larger context of eighteenth-century utopianism, which invests femininity with utopian hope. While this is clearly epitomized in writings by Rousseau, Paltock, Richardson, and Scott, it is even more evident in eighteenth-century somatopias. In these texts, it is the female body which is mapped out as (masculinist) utopia. Thomas Stretzer's Merryland (1740) colonizes and dismembers the female body into a complete utopian geography with rural and urban spaces. However, Stretzer's ardent persistence to map out the female body (and her sexuality) as stable and static, indicates precisely the precariousness of eighteenth-century discourses of gender, sexuality and subjectivity. The "feminine" (and its metaphorical proxies, nature, land, place, woman) is the site where the utopia of the Enlightenment is negotiated.
These are the questions and topics that guide the essays in this issue of Utopian Studies. The essays clearly complicate Frank and Fritzie Manuel's finding that eighteenth-century utopias are principally concerned with the "idea of perfectibility and the myth of the noble savage" (414). In forging a link between utopian studies and postmodern eighteenth-century studies, the essays permit new critical knowledge and adjust our conception of the eighteenth century.
NOTES
(1.) Important anthologies are: Claeys, 1994, 1996, 2000. Some helpful, full-length studies on eighteenth-century utopias and utopianism are: Johns, Kruft, Racault, Rees, Rosenau, Stockinger.
(2.) The articles collected here spring from special sessions at the International Congress on the Enlightenment in Dublin in 1999. Unfortunately not all papers could be published here. I thank Marie-Jeanne Boisacq, Alessa Johns, Ian McCormick, Lyman Tower Sargent, Norbert Sclippa, Michael Wieczorrek.
(3.) See Lewes on somatopias.
(4.) See Claeys, `Introduction', 1994, for an extensive summary of these issues.
(5.) On micro-utopias, see Kuon, Racault.
REFERENCES
Claeys, Gregory, ed. Modern British Utopias, 1700-1850, 8 vols. London: Pickering and Chatto, 1996
--, ed. Utopias of the British Enlightenment. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1994.
--, ed. Restoration and Augustan British Utopias. Syracuse: Syracuse UP, 2000.
Johns, Alessa. "Gender and Utopia in Eighteenth-Century England." Diss. California, Berkeley, 1994.
Kruft, Hanno-Walter. Stadte in Utopia: Die Idealstadt vom 15. bis zum 18. Jahrhundert. Munchen: C.H. Beck, 1989.
Kuon, Peter. Utopischer Entwurf und fiktionale Vermittlung: Studien zum Gattungswandel der literarischen Utopie zwischen Humanismus und Fruhaufklarung. Heidelberg: Winter Verlag, 1986.
Lewes, Darby. Nudes from Nowhere: Utopian Sexual Landscapes. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2000.
Manuel, Frank E. and Fritzie P. Utopian Thought in the Western World. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1979.
Racault, Jean-Michel. L'utopie narrative en France et en Angleterre 1675-1761. Oxford: The Voltaire Foundation, 1991.
Rees, Christine. Utopian Imagination and Eighteenth-Century Fiction. Harlow: Longman, 1996.
Rosenau, Helen. The Ideal City: Its Architectural Evolution in Europe. London: Methuen, 1983.
Saage, Richard. Politische Utopien der Neuzeit. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1991.
Stockinger, Ludwig. Ficta Respublica: Gattungsgeschichtliche Untersuchung zur utopischen Erzahlung in der deutschen Literatur des fruhen 18. Jahrhunderts. Tubingen: Niemeyer Verlag, 1981.
Nicole Pohl is Lecturer at University College Northampton, England. She is co-editor (with Rebecca D'Monte) of Female Communities 1600-1800: Literary Visions and Cultural Realities. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000.