Mapping Utopia: Solitude, Sociability, and the Subject in Space

Bethany Williamson
Biola University

Fredric Jameson suggests that something anomalous and even scandalous accompanies the utopian impulse, insofar as utopia signals familiarity with real social space alongside a desire to escape from it. In this regard, he writes, the “utopian enclave” serves as a “pocket of stasis within the ferment and rushing forces of social change.”[1] In Utopian Geographies and the Early English Novel (Virginia, 2014), Jason H. Pearl builds on Jameson’s argument about the narrative function of utopia as a “distinct process in its own right.”[2] While much has been written about whether the term Sir Thomas More introduced in 1516 is best defined as a formal genre, a mode of thought, a political vision, or imaginative fantasy, Pearl describes utopia as “a working model with moving parts,” a fluid “genre” defined by texts themselves rather than a “transhistorical category” to impose upon them (15). Situated at the intersection of critical conversations about utopian studies and the history of the English novel, Utopian Geographies offers a useful analysis of how post-Restoration novels mediated a particular set of tensions pertaining to genre and geography. Pearl pinpoints a specific kind of utopian thinking that evolved alongside and within the English novel between 1660 and 1740. He argues that as early novelists wrestled with newly empirical approaches to knowledge, and as “utopia” shifted from its “geographic foundation” to become an “abstract concept,” utopian thinking remained in a residual yet crucial sense “mappable” (1).[3] To demonstrate the narrative function of utopia, Pearl focuses on a set of early canonical novels that describe a “lone voyager finding escape and sanctuary and returning to tell of it” (41). By using the “conceit of the voyage narrative” to depict “alternative realities” that are rooted in concrete yet distant spaces, these novels reflect and reorder seventeenth- and eighteenth-century geography (6). Specifically, they serve as experimental “source[s] of prospective facts” rather than merely responding to a fact-oriented world (8). Rather than posit fantasies about a better future or a reformed present, Pearl suggests, the authors he examines deploy “utopian geographies” to identify and navigate tensions between past and present, here and there, ideal and action.

Throughout his book Pearl charts how early English novels “preserve and reconfigure” what he calls “a durable remainder” of utopia at a moment of “geographic disenchantment” (2–3). The utopian process is tripartite: First, the novel depicts a lone traveler’s physical escape, withdrawal, or distancing from real-world problems. Second, it illustrates the traveler’s disillusioning moment of realizing that he or she cannot find utopia over there, either, for each distant space is in some way haunted by actual crises. Third, and in response to this disillusionment, characters strive to fold utopian ideals into a sense of self, thereby recreating and preserving a limited version of the utopian experience. As utopian ideals are circumscribed within increasingly “narrower spheres of action” (43), writers and characters alike take compensatory comfort in the fact that their dreams become more immediately attainable. Yet utopia remains a structure of ambivalence: the forces of progress—experiment, travel, global commerce—work against the utopian impulse to escape or to seclude. Moreover, because, by definition, it finds itself “at odds with the realities” of the world it engages, utopian thinking contains within it the seeds of its undoing (105). This productive tension shapes the utopian novel, Pearl suggests, allowing writers to represent and reconcile in fiction the competing ideals of their time.

In chapter 1, “Utopia and Geography,” Pearl examines how new genres—including Royal Society records, travel narratives, geographical treatises, maps, atlases, and globes—both undermined and intensified the need for utopian thinking. With the emphasis on empirical experimentation, accumulation of facts, and the mapping of unknown spaces, the geographic locales in which writers once imagined and located alternative realities were increasingly demystified. But it was primarily—and notably—in fiction that this disenchantment occurred, Pearl contends, as the novelist “took readers imaginatively, but often realistically, beyond the known world and brought them back with chastened expectations” (42). By discrediting utopian geographies, the novelist creates space for utopia to be recreated and realized within the individual. Pearl’s argument rests on the crucial “tension between the conjectural nature of utopias and the more empirical basis of geography” (21). By definition “oppositional and insular,” the traditional utopia requires geographic distance: the voyager traverses that distance and lives to tell the tale (21). At the same time, by eliminating the physical distance on which utopian geographies depend, the fictional traveler effectively eliminates—or at least sharply limits—the imaginative possibilities afforded by his escape. Utopian thinking, as it plays out in the early novels Pearl examines—here, Thomas More’s Utopia (1516) and Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis (1627)—pits progress against paradise, reconciling expansionist desires with nostalgia for the past.

Five subsequent chapters offer readings of canonical English novels that represent utopian thinking. Each chapter has three sections that correspond to the tripartite utopian pattern Pearl establishes and “chart the relocation of utopia from wider to narrower spheres of action” (43). Chapter 2, “The Flickering Blazing World,” argues that the hybrid structure of Margaret Cavendish’s 1666 work of prose fiction (which Pearl classifies, admittedly unconventionally, as an experimental novel) parallels the utopian process. Cavendish begins with what she calls a “romancical” tale, deploying the voyage convention to locate utopian ideals in a world that she describes with a “confluence of earthly and unearthly place-names” (47). Her second, “philosophical,” section disenchants this alternate world. As she questions the validity of experimental and mechanistic approaches to nature, Cavendish’s fictional Empress skeptically suggests that the distance between utopia and reality is not, in fact, far. Third and finally, Cavendish “transforms utopia into . . . a state of mind” in which the reader, too, is invited to participate (58). Suggesting that access to new worlds can truly happen only in the mind, Cavendish reframes retirement in terms of a selective sociability. In the process, she proposes a new way of thinking about subjectivity: if sociability undermines—or threatens to undermine—the isolated self, it also “enlarge[s] the bounds of inwardness” (55).

Pearl turns to Aphra Behn’s 1688 novella in chapter 3, “Remembering Paradise in Oroonoko.” With a nod to those critics who emphasize Oroonoko’s engagement with the actual locales of Africa, Surinam, the Orient, and England, Pearl focuses instead on how the text transcends or escapes its geographic settings as it follows the pattern of utopian geography. Oroonoko begins by situating utopian possibility in a distant and idealized place, which, despite its real-world coordinates, Behn describes in idyllic and paradisiacal terms. Oroonoko’s gruesome death represents the loss of paradise and the failure of utopian geography, as the space of Surinam is clearly marked by anti-utopian and “brutal realities of colonial politics” (62). The tale concludes with Behn’s narrator returning to England, where she internalizes a limited version of utopia via the “compensatory powers of memory” (71). Once again, Pearl contends, utopia is reconfigured as a social rather than a solitary experience, as Behn invites her readers to join the narrator in feeling sympathy for her brutalized hero.

In chapters 4 and 5, Pearl turns more explicitly to problems of trade and empire in the work of Daniel Defoe, arguing that utopian thinking allows the novelist to reconcile a celebration of trade with a yearning for seclusion. While critics often read Crusoe’s island as utopian insofar as it is removed from England, Pearl argues in “Urban Solitude and the Crusoe Trilogy” that Defoe’s use of utopia in Robinson Crusoe (1719) is more complicated. The trilogy depicts a clash between expansion and isolation, between a desire for adventure and the virtue of domesticity, between the potential sin of corrupting sociability and a natural wish for companionship. Indeed, after his initial shipwreck, Crusoe “departs and rambles all over the world, [becoming] an instrument himself of the very forces” that threaten to disrupt his solitude (77). The island becomes “both a prison and a sanctuary” for Crusoe, and it is only by transporting a memory of island solitude back to the bustling streets of London that he is able to synthesize competing ideals (91). In chapter 5, “Piracy and Brotherhood in Captain Singleton,” Pearl describes the early eighteenth-century’s “Golden Age of Piracy” and argues that Defoe imagines pirates’ radically egalitarian community to be another model of utopia. The novel again reflects a tripartite utopian process: Singleton initially embraces the pirate society’s “subversive potential” before denouncing and repenting of that lifestyle (102). As he returns to England and attempts to replicate the kinship he experienced in a limited “utopian circle” comprising his friend and his wife, utopia gets reframed as a “subjective state” rather than a geographic one (110).

Pearl’s final chapter, “Misanthropia and Gulliver’s Travels,” contends that Jonathan Swift’s canonical satire, like its predecessors, “converts its utopian geography into utopian subjectivity” (127). Gulliver’s Travels (1726) begins by mapping utopian ideals onto distant spaces, from the fictional Lilliput to real-world Japan. One by one these enclaves are dismantled, as Swift satirizes depraved human nature and its manifestations in projects of natural philosophy, colonial expansion, politics, and religion. Gulliver is left with “alienated idealism” (118) and the memory of Houyhnhnmland, which he internalizes and attempts to recreate in diminished form through his interactions with horses and such “like-minded humans” as Pedro de Mendez (130). Utopia represents for Swift an “escape from humanity” that is decidedly misanthropic, though Gulliver’s disillusionment does make possible a limited communion between “like-minded” individuals.

Utopian thinking persists in the second half of the eighteenth century, Pearl notes in conclusion, but only in deferred and “domesticated” forms (133). Reform-minded novels by Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding, Sarah Scott, and others offer “more feasible but less radical” utopian possibilities, insofar as they are marked not by utopian enclaves of “unsociable eccentricity” (128) but rather by conformity to and “complicity with existing class and colonial structures” (136). In its later form, abstracted and politicized, utopia is a future goal and a possibility to work toward, not a tangible experience to savor and memorialize. By contrast, the earlier, voyage-based novels on which Pearl focuses remain estranged from social convention. The “utopian interiorities” they offer represent subversive ideals made possible by distance. As the spaces in which utopia once resided are dismantled and demystified—violated or conquered, mapped and made known—the ideals these spaces enabled are recovered, remembered, and reconfigured in narrowly internalized forms. Paradoxically, Pearl suggests, utopia’s limits allow it to exist.

Extensively researched and contextualized, Utopian Geographies makes clear contributions to utopian studies and to debates about the rise and function of the novel. Recognizing that the definition of “utopia” is slippery, Pearl focuses on how utopia functions as a narrative strategy for grappling with the social and epistemological shifts of early modernity. By defining utopia schematically—as a framework for thinking and feeling rather than a list of generic criteria—he offers a new way for us to understand how utopian thinking gets folded into the novel, providing a narrative space in which writers can wrestle with tensions between fact and fiction, reality and possibility, home and not-home. Meanwhile, Pearl posits a critical model of subjectivity as sociability. What these novels demonstrate, he suggests, is that English men and women, both readers and writers, were shaped and transformed not only through their encounters with spaces of solitude but also through connecting with “like-minded” people who shared similar memories of utopian geographies (77).

Pearl makes a convincing case for how utopia functions in the early novel as a way to grapple with geographic distance and the dreams that that distance engenders and destroys, although his individual readings vary in their originality and nuance. At times, while demonstrating extensive knowledge of other critics’ work on the canonical texts he explores, he does not unpack claims or ideas that might productively complicate his own analysis. For example, chapter 4 might have benefited from a discussion of how Defoe’s theological paradigm might account for domestic seclusion and commercial intercourse as equally virtuous. Pearl also notes in a footnote to chapter 2 that the intersections of Cavendish’s royalist politics and proto-feminist leanings are “too complex and contradictory to disentangle,” giving Behn’s explicitly gendered perspective a similar short shrift in chapter 3 (146n). Yet the task of unpacking the gendered possibilities of sociable subjectivity seems crucial to understanding the competing desires that structure the utopian vision as Pearl describes it. After all, in the hands of a Penelope Aubin, the “captivity narrative” may be another form for expressing gendered desire, rather than functioning as “utopia’s generic opposite,” as Pearl suggests (40).[4] The promise of Pearl’s readings lies in his ability to account for ambivalence, yet the book’s unifying thread of a “durable remainder” (3)—a residual memory of enchantment and utopian possibility—could be more explicitly theorized. The notion of utopia becomes “something more like desire” (132), Pearl contends, but we are never told exactly what that desire is for or how the “remainder”—which one presumes to be a Derridean “trace” on the threshold of discourse—reinforces the fragmentation, rather than the unification, of the self as writer, as reader, or as critic.[5] If “utopia” is not a clearly demarcated set of generic conventions but rather a way of figuring the desiring subject, then we might ask how desire itself—not in an abstract or universal sense but rather as it gets articulated by nation or narrator, character or reader—shifts within and across the period Pearl considers, as well.

Pearl’s study is a timely and valuable contribution to conversations about how the novel reflected and shaped competing ideas about global and national identities during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Adding to work by Ros Ballaster, Srinivas Aravamudan, and others, Pearl makes a case for thinking of fiction as a framework by which writers navigated geographical and cultural difference and, by doing so, conceptualized England’s place in a changing world.[6] Pearl does so with a keen attention to the ambivalence attending the early modern utopian vision and illumines, in the process, tensions between self and other, individual and community that remain at the heart of “cosmopolitanism” and of our own thinking about the ethics and practice of global citizenship.



[1] Fredric Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions (London and New York, 2005), 32.

[2] Jameson, 27.

[3] Jason H. Pearl follows Michael McKeon in thinking of the novel as a dialectical form for wrestling with “intractable problems” of truth and virtue, knowledge and value. See McKeon, The Origins of the English Novel, 1600–1740 (Baltimore, 1987), 20.

[4] See Eve Tavor Bannet, Transatlantic Stories and the History of Reading, 1720–1810 (Cambridge, 2011); and Edward J. Kozaczka, “Penelope Aubin and Narratives of Empire,” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 25, no. 1 (2012): 199–225.

[5] See Jacques Derrida, Paper Machine, trans. Rachel Bowlby (Stanford, 2005), 151.

[6] See, for example, Ros Ballaster, Fabulous Orients: Fictions of the East in England, 1622–1785 (Oxford, 2005); and Srinivas Aravamudan, Enlightenment Orientalism: Resisting the Rise of the Novel (Chicago, 2012).