Utopian Geographies & the Early English Novel by Jason H. Pearl

Abstract

Reviewed by: Utopian Geographies & the Early English Novel by Jason H. Pearl Brenda Tooley Jason H. Pearl. Utopian Geographies & the Early English Novel. Charlottesville: Virginia, 2014. Pp. vii + 203. $45. In recontextualizing familiar narratives by placing them simultaneously within the ambit of the novel and of utopian travel narratives, Mr. Pearl creates a frame through which to view the generic antecedents, conventions of formal realism, and increasingly domestic scope of the English [End Page 67] novel. For Mr. Pearl, one strand of the story of the English novel has not received its due: the linkage between utopian travel narratives and narrative fiction that takes up "the possibility—or impossibility—of utopia as a mappable space." In this study, Mr. Pearl focuses on five prose narratives that follow in various ways on Thomas More's Utopia (1516), all exhibiting "travel plots" and "various techniques of documentary realism." Mr. Pearl asserts that "ideas about utopia and geography drove some of the most interesting formal innovations of the period's fiction." Three of the fictions on which he concentrates are not often considered early English novels or included within studies about the emergence of the English novel (the exceptions are Robinson Crusoe and, in some contexts, Oroonoko). The travel narrative receives brief but evocative consideration. The book posits three arguments: 1) that the increasing volume of travel writing and knowledge of world geography dampens speculation about the discovery of utopian communities and the chance that new discoveries will reveal new systems of governance or radically new forms of human nature; 2) that the English novel retains traces of utopian possibility, relocating Utopia within the self or within an intimate circle of friends and family; and 3) that our understanding of the emergence of the early novel increases by considering Cavendish's, Behn's, Defoe's, and Swift's fictions. These early eighteenth-century fictions exhibit "neglected ties with utopian writing" that "distinguish them from" later eighteenth-century novels, even as they shift utopian conventions from geographical to psychic space. Several exemplary narratives define "utopia" as a space of fulfillment and happiness rather than as an explicit exploration of the structure of an ideal society. Behn's Oroonoko, for example, never articulates the structural conditions of a utopian colony, but contains descriptions of nature that evoke the conventions of the idyll. Crusoe's island is a utopia until the colonists and natives become the focus. The heart of the book's contribution are those passages in each chapter that explore the ways in which imaginative utopian geographies that are physically located—an island, a pirate colony, a civilization in the Moon—move from ideal to compromised reality to private realization of a circumscribed utopia achievable at home: in a stable, on a country estate, even within the frenetic commercial society of London itself. The five canonical prose fictions have not been considered as contributors to the development of the early English novel. Their contributions to the emerging generic form are oblique. Although the fictions at the center of this study differ from the novels of formal realism that appear later, they contribute, this study convincingly asserts, to the development of the construction of subjectivity in the novel: "the failure of utopian geography establishes interior space as oppositional and counterfactual, a site of recuperated possibilities." One of this study's resonant conclusions is that the utopian remainder persists as the dream or actuality of private fulfillment and mutually supportive community within the early novel long after all traces of the geographical utopia disappear. The richly compact, informative final chapter briefly considers the ways in which these five prose fictions prepare the ground for utopias that emerge later—enclosed communities of mutual support often created by and for women, charitable project-utopias of like-minded persons, educational and philanthropic establishments [End Page 68] that combine an intimate, ordered community with outreach to a troubled world. There is very little travel, if any, in these later utopias—new lands are not discovered; travelers do not return with exemplary tales of utopian alternatives. However, the educational, political, and religious projects in the later utopian novels are anticipated in these earlier imaginative geographies. The book concludes with...