Erewhon and the End of Utopian Humanism

Abstract

Samuel Butler's Erewhon, or Over the Range was published in 1871. As the title suggests, even through the euphonic distortion of Butler's wordplay, the novel is written with Sir Thomas More's Utopia in mind. More combined two words to coin his seminal neologism: "eutopos," which means the good place, and "outopos," the place which is nowhere. "Erewhon" is "nowhere" misspelled backwards, the soft vowel beginning of "eutopia" thus recalled in a word which, like "utopia," also inscribes its negation. Despite these apparent flags, the reader who hopes for utopian revelations from the civilization that Erewhon's boorish narrator discovers will be disappointed. Erewhon is no paradise of humanist social planning—no sagacious management of resources and human desires is to be found here—but instead a maze of bizarre institutions and fantastic customs. Erewhonians punish their sick and hospitalize embezzlers; they imprison those who have suffered grievous misfortune to hard labor. In all this, it seems that a devious trick has been played, such that Gulliver's Travels and not Utopia is the true template for the novel. Critics have been quick to note this, and since its first publication the novel has been understood as a biting satire of Victorian institutions. And yet the tradition of describing Erewhon as satire has not lessened the stranglehold that the concept of utopianism has on it. 1 Erewhon is frequently classified as a utopian novel, it appears in bibliographies of utopian fiction, it is taught in courses on utopian fiction, and in general, the one thing known about it is that it's a utopian novel.