HOW AMERICA COULD BECOME UTOPIA

Abstract

Carol Farley Kessler, ed. Daring to Dream\ Utopian Stories by United States Women, 1836-1919. Boston: Pandora Press, 1984. 266 pp. Howard P. Segal. Technological Utopianism in American Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985. 301 pp. Illus. Jean Pfaelzer. The Utopian Novel in America, 1886-1896: The Politics of Form. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1985. 211 pp. The last dozen years have proved rich ones for utopology, or the study of Utopias. The major event was the publication, in 1979, of Frank and Fritzie Manuel's massive intellectual history, Utopian Thought in the Western World. Despite the vast scope and formidable erudition of this landmark work, there are, neverthe- less, glaring lacunae, none perhaps more apparent than their sketchy, poorly- informed and generally inadequate treatment of American Utopias. Except for the obligatory discussion of Edward Bellamy's immensely popular Looking Back- ward, the Manuels hardly mention the flood of Utopian fiction produced in America between the Civil War and World War I, a flood that crested in the last decade of the nineteenth century when more than 150 such works appeared, the largest single body of Utopian writing in history. But if the francocentric Manuels leave this body of writing unexplored, other scholars are taking it up, with increasing sophistication and specialization of treatment. For many years, Vernon L. Parrington, Jr.'s American Dreams: A Study of American Utopias (2nd ed., 1964) was the standard survey of this literature; but, while admirably informative in many respects, his survey was highly uneven and sometimes inaccurate, analytically comatose and stylistically lame. In 1976 appeared Kenneth Roemer's The Obsolete Necessity : America in Utopian Writings 1888-1900-, while the scope of his work is narrower than Parrington's, the execution is greatly superior, synthesizing material drawn from 166 novels into a thematically coherent volume that enlightens without overwhelming with details. The Obsolete Necessity has become—and will no doubt remain for a long while—the central work on American Utopian literature, a model of its kind. In addition, five years later Roemer edited America as Utopia, a more encompassing collection of essays on the whole spectrum of relevant literature. This collection ranges from six histor- ical overviews of specific periods by various hands to detailed studies of individ- ual writers and themes, to several statements by utopists on why and how they came to write Utopias. Given the unevenness that inheres in such collections, this one should nevertheless prove indispensible for any student of the Utopian impulse in American culture.