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READING UTOPIAN NARRATIVES in DYSTOPIAN TIMES Deborah

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READING UTOPIAN NARRATIVES in DYSTOPIAN TIMES Deborah ABSTRACT Title of Document: READING UTOPIAN NARRATIVES IN DYSTOPIAN TIMES Deborah Taylor, Doctor of Philosophy, 2007 Directed By: Professor Jane L. Donawerth, Department of English This dissertation is a feminist study of the reading process of contemporary utopian novels by women: Ursula K. Le Guin, Octavia Butler, and Toni Morrison. These novels are not utopias, in the sense of place, since they are set in dystopian times. Instead, this study explores the reading process as a part of a text's presentation of utopian desire. The first chapter focuses on Le Guin's 1985 Always Coming Home, set in a future United States polluted by environmental toxins and divided between a patriarchal Condor nation, and a communal, matrilineal, and non-hierarchical Kesh culture. Le Guin uses a made-up language, constructed without hierarchies, concepts from Native American story-telling and Taoist philosophy, and multiple narrators to encourage a collaborative reading process where readers weave a utopian vision from the pieces of Kesh culture, balanced against the Condor. The second chapter examines Butler's Parable of the Sower (1993) and Parable of the Talents (1997). In this future, California has disintegrated into anarchy and violence, and Lauren Olamina survives the razing of her walled community, creates Earthseed – a new philosophy-religion, and founds a utopian settlement that is destroyed by Christian fundamentalists. Butler parodies false utopias--gated communities, company towns, and the Christian Right--and presents Lauren's religion, Earthseed, built on the idea of “God is Change,” as a utopian alternative. Butler merges the genres of diary, scripture, jeremiad, and slave narrative to offer a collaborative reading experience. False utopian ideals of exclusivity, security, and institutionalized religion are resisted by meditating on Earthseed Scriptures. The third chapter considers Morrison's Paradise (1998), set in western United States, and recounts the story of an all-black town, Ruby, and its destruction of an all-women "convent" near the town. Because Morrison tells her story with non-chronological fragments and multiple viewpoints, the reader must become the point of view character, constructing a coherent narrative and image of paradise from conflicting accounts. Morrison explores spiritual connectedness and healing by drawing on the history of all-black townships and all- women communities. The narrative strategies of these novels--defamiliarzation, polyvocalism, fragmented structure, and meditation--encourage readers to collaborate in exploring utopian desire. READING UTOPIAN NARRATIVES IN A DYSTOPIAN TIME By Deborah Taylor Dissertation submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of the University of Maryland, College Park, in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy 2007 Advisory Committee: Professor Jane L. Donawerth, Chair Professor Jeanne D. Fahnestock Dr. Karen L. Nelson Professor Judith P. Hallett Assistant Professor Marta Chico © Copyright by Deborah Taylor 2007 Dedication For my Grandmother, Feebs, who thought I would never finish school. For my partner, Victoria, who worked on and read the chapter on Paradise more times than I hope she ever admits to. For my parents, Jack and Judy Taylor, and for the “creative muse” space they gave me in the final long haul. For the hope and life found in nephews and nieces, sons and daughters, everywhere. For my dissertation advisor Jane Donawerth without whom this project would have died many years ago. And for my dog Max, who had the most delightful personality, hairy paws, and a most ridiculous tail. ii Table of Contents Introduction: Utopia in the Reading Process ………………………………….......1 Chapter One: Reading Utopia: Tapestry in Always Coming Home………………48 I. Summary ………………………………………………………………..51 II. Critical Reception …………………………………………………….. 55 III. Polyvocal Language …………………………………………………..61 IV. Native American Tales and Chinese Taoism as Utopian Process….....67 V. Multiple Narrators and a Utopian Reading Strategy ………………..…81 VI. Reading Fragments and Utopian Practice …………………………….89 Chapter Two: Octavia Butler: Parody and Resistance …………………………97 I. Summary ……………………………………………………………….99 II. Scholarship on Butler’s Parable Novels ………………………………103 III. Parody as Evidence of Utopia A. Gated Communities as Utopia ………………………………....111 B. Corporate Towns as Utopia ……………………………………114 C. Religion as Utopia: A Parody of Christian Fundamentalism…..118 IV. Narrative Forms and Utopian Reading Process ………………………122 A. The Narrative of Scripture: Earthseed and Psalms ……………125 B. Collective Individuality – the Polyvocal Diary And the Utopian Process ……………………………………...129 C. Jeremiah and Utopian Social Dreaming ………………………133 D. Utopian Process in the Neo-Slave Narrative ………………….134 V. Conclusion ……………………………………………………………..139 Chapter Three: Imagining Intersubjectivity as Utopian Practice in Toni Morrison’s Paradise …………………………………………148 I. Summary of Plot and Structure …………………………………………150 II. Scholarship Surrounding the Reading Process of Paradise ……………154 iii III. Reading History into Utopian Practice – Ruby ………………………..162 IV. Reading History into Utopian Practice – The Women ………………..172 V. Practices of Language: Reading Utopia as Process ……………………176 VI. Stepping-In: Intersubjectivity and Reading …………………………...178 VII. Loud Dreaming as Intersubjectivity ………………………………….184 VIII. Utopia and the Reader as Point of View Character …………………186 a. The Yearly Christmas Pageant b. Dead or Alive or Somewhere In-Between …………………….188 IX. Intersubjectivity in the Afterlife Here and Now ………………………190 X. Conclusions: Is it a Door or a Window? ……………………………….192 Chapter IV: Conclusions ………………………………………………………...202 Works Cited ……………………………………………………………………...206 iv Introduction: Utopia in the Reading Process "But isn't it perverse to describe novels quite so alienating as utopian?" Glenn, 2005. My dissertation makes connections between contemporary feminist thought and feminist utopias by considering the novels of three twentieth-century authors: Always Coming Home (1984) by Ursula K. Le Guin, Parable of the Sower (1993) and Parable of the Talents (1997) by Octavia E. Butler, and Paradise (1998) by Toni Morrison. This study adds to the scholarship on utopias and dystopias an analysis of the feminist reading practices implied in late twentieth century feminist utopias. Each chapter covers the work of one author; I analyze how these novels speak to utopian and feminist theory and how their narrative structures imply a strategy of reading. Defining, exploring, and arguing about what is utopia and connecting it to the radical reading practices suggested by these novels is the purpose of this project. Each novel offers utopian desire and a new exercise of the imagination that requires the reader’s activity as co-creator of worlds in relation. Each of the three authors incorporates and yet subverts motifs of the utopian genre. The framing narrative for utopian literature retains the conventions of a narrator (or main character) who reaches a "better place" and views the opportunities the new place offers. The dissertation addresses generic elements, such as the traveler, the direction of travel, how the dialogue affects the reading process, and the character development. These foundational narrative structures continue to influence the fictional genre into the modern era.1 Traditionally, utopias by men, such as Thomas More’s Utopia (1516) and Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward (1888) use a plot where a protagonist leaves "his" world to 1 find utopia; the other important characters are generally male, and they help the protagonist travel to see the benefits of the new place, with the idea that the foreigner would return home and convert his community to utopian ways. Another common element in these traditional male utopias is the exchange between the character who guides and the other who visits or travels; the dialogues are primarily either philosophical or rhetorical tools to move the plot forward and to conceptualize utopia. However, this changes with the advent of the modern novel and the critical utopia. 2 Writers experiment with all of these conventional elements and open the dialogue in feminist utopias, I argue, to the reader’s collaboration. Much of my argument relies on the explicitly political nature of literary utopias.3 In the context of literature, this open association with the political is somewhat unusual (Jameson xi). Because of these political associations, the utopian genre is consistently challenged for its literary value in terms of how it uses language; it is challenged by the readers of more mainstream novels not only for content (the model or practice) but also for its bastardized form. Utopias are a unique hybrid literature drawing from multiple genre forms, including realism, travel narratives, treatises, and tracts; they are also interdisciplinary, drawing on elements of ethnography, anthropology, political science, literature, and sociology. It is in the imagination where - as many theorists have pointed out – the unique function of utopian literature appears.4 In his most recent book, Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions (2005), Frederic Jameson argues that readers who focus on the utopian impulse need to tease out the intersections of utopian desire in content and form. Jameson shows how utopian texts do not work in isolation but instead argue and counter- 2 argue with one another. The need and effort to cross reference
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