Tensions in Paradise: Anarchism, Civilization, and Pleasure in Morris’s News From Nowhere

Abstract

TENSIONS IN PARADISE: ANARCHISM, CIVILIZATION, AND PLEASURE IN MORRIS’S NEWS FROM NOWHERE R O W L A N D M C M A S T E R University of Alberta i f eter Kropotkin, former Russian prince turned Anarchist, and a leading intellectual in London’s socialist circles of the eighties and nineties, a scien­ tist, scholar, and author of many books and articles on Anarchism, described Morris’s News from Nowhere as “perhaps the most thoroughly and deeply Anarchistic conception of future society that has ever been written.” His comment was part of an obituary tribute to Morris, so some well-meaning exaggeration was allowable, but there is a certain irony in describing News from Nowhere as an Anarchist utopia in light of the war between Morris and the Anarchists within the Socialist League in the months leading up to the publication of News from Nowhere in Commonweal from January to Octo­ ber, 1890. The quarrel led to Morris’s withdrawing with his supporters to Hammersmith, but continuing, for the time being, to pay for the Common­ weal, in which the Anarchists went from depth to depth of violent silliness, as the League became in E.P. Thompson’s words “a fanatic’s playground” (568).1If Kropotkin considered News from Nowhere an Anarchist utopia, he either chose to overlook some aberrations on Morris’s part or missed them. But the fact is that Morris was not single-minded in his idea of utopia. The romance form, a mode characterized by idealization, is congenial to his rep­ resenting what he wishes to believe about human nature. But there is a bleak side to Morris as well, which drew him to the hard and tragic world of Nordic myth, and caused him, when he looked inside himself, to see sinister feelings inconsistent with what he would have wished. It seems profitable to explore his Edenic vision in terms of these inconsistencies and frustrations, where desire speaks and where it hesitates, particularly as they affect his ideas of liberty, civilization, and pleasure. On the Anarchist side, and supporting Kropotkin’s view on News from Nowhere, are such comments as the one Hammond supposes will startle his guest: “I must now shock you by telling you that we have no longer any­ thing which you, a native of another planet, would call a government” (75). Hammond’s words are borne out in the general lack of coercion in education, marriage, and labour. Guest’s view of education, “that you let your children run wild and didn’t teach them anything” (63), though negatively expressed, English Stu d ies in Ca n a d a , x v ii, l , March 1991 is correct — the freedom and theory resembles that used by A.S. Neill at Summerhill. So in marriage, there are “no law-courts to enforce contracts of sentiment or passion” (58). Seen as parts of a nineteenth-century system for the protection of private property, of courts backed by brute force, civil and criminal law are abolished. W.H. Auden (though perhaps his notion is more illuminating for his own attitudes, as in the Vespers section of “Horae Canonicae” ) argued that utopias are of two sorts: the Arcadian and nonprescriptive , looking back to an ideal time; and the prescriptive, looking forward with a coercive agenda. News from Nowhere, though set in the fu­ ture, is nevertheless Arcadian in tone, with its London that is reminiscent of a Pre-Raphaelite medieval vision. In availing himself of the romance mode, Morris was not only adopting a form congenial to his desire and imagination, he was also picking up strains of Edenic thinking already evident in socialist rhetoric.2 “Government,” wrote Thomas Paine, “like dress, is the badge of lost inno­ cence; the palaces of kings are built on the ruins of the bowers of paradise” (69). In the lively and extensive nineteenth-century debate “whether,” as Mill put it, “civilization is on the whole a good or an evil” (18: 119), such archetypal language, with its imagery of innocence, Eden, fall, and cor­ ruption, affords a customary way of describing decayed and desired states of civilization, not only for Christians and poets, but also...