In contrast to a certain popular conception that characterizes utopia as the fantasy of an harmonious space, where all evil and discord have disappeared, I would like to explore how many utopian constructions in fact make conflict a central concern.

Whether considering the Empress of the Blazing World’s outright forbidding of all dissent, or the generally agreeable disagreements among the Utopians, or the eternal question of whether to exterminate the Yahoos in the otherwise harmonious land of the Houyhnhnms, the utopian tradition is replete with moments where contest itself becomes contested. A central question seems to be, how are we to deal with conflict in an ideal society? Elimination? Institutionalization? Relegation to private life? And alongside this, what value ought to be placed on discord and dissent? Are they an essential part of freedom? Or rather too dangerous to security and order? Furthermore, as we’ve discussed in class, is it not precisely a function of utopian texts to engender (or quell) debate about large scale social and political issues?

Any feedback on the topic would be great (in particular how to keep the focus sufficiently narrow…), but also, I’m still debating which texts I want to focus on. More seems the obvious choice. There’s so much to work with there: Book 1 is itself a debate, which contains within it other debates, e.g. the exchange between the fool as the friar, as Wootton notes, which may even be a later addition in response to the debates generated by Utopia‘s first draft (28-31 in the Hackett edition).

So I’m wondering, would it be useful to bring in Swift, since he presents a clear counterpoint? For the reasons that the worlds he juxtaposes have little to recommend them, he has a largely negative view of conflict, and seemingly little hope that debate will solve anything or produce positive outcomes. He even seems to take a dimmer view than Cavendish by suggesting that civilized Europeans’ reason only makes them cleverer in committing various atrocities (see, e.g., Gulliver’s pride in Europe’s weapons). However, while trying to not bite off more than I can chew, I’m also very interested in working with Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed since this issue of discord and dissent within utopia is front and center there. Indeed, it drives her whole story since an unresolvable conflict between the protagonist, Shevek, and another jealous physicist is what precipitates his leaving the ambiguous, anarchist utopia of Annares. Additionally, many of the chapters focusing upon Shevek’s back story consist of fiery debates between him and his friends, not unlike the tabletalk in More’s Utopia. Also, as far as I can tell from my research so far, there hasn’t been much written specifically connecting these two texts on this subject, so it seems like it could be a useful new direction.

Though this may be enough, I figured I would throw out some other interesting and possibly useful points of connection between these three texts, including the division between reason and the passions (which figures importantly in so much Enlightenment thought) as well as the role played by friendship. After reading Wootton’s discussion of Erasmus again, I found myself wondering whether Utopia could be read as More’s attempt to present a society of friends. Or, to socialize friendship.

For my final paper, I would like to further explore Rasselas, focusing on the relationship between mind and place (throughout my reading, I was constantly reminded of the following quote from Milton: “The mind is its own place, and in itself Can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven.”). Within Johnson’s text, obtaining a broader knowledge of the external world seems paradoxically linked to retreating inward. Rasselas’ venture into the outside world, when he leaves the Happy Valley, is prefigured by “solitary walks and silent meditation” (6). His bouts of “solitary thought” and his eagerness to “retire[d] gladly to privacy” are what ultimately lead to him “picturing …to himself that world which he had never seen” (7).
The mind/place binary also comes into play when Imlac and Rasselas are discussing why Europeans are more “powerful” (21) than Asians and Africans. Imlac links Europe’s dominance to “knowledge” and wisdom (21) (and not physical prowess or might). In this instance, Imlac draws a connection between mental fortitude and colonialist expansion.
I wonder whether we could interpret the interplay between mind and place in biographical terms, based on what we discussed of Johnson’s life in class. It seems significant that as Johnson’s own mother was facing imminent death, Johnson had his protagonist flee from the Happy Valley, a Garden of Eden- type place, teeming with life. The text’s preoccupation with the mind (and reason) also seems relevant in light of Johnson’s own physical disabilities.
Another idea I had for a paper topic – wholly unrelated: exploring representations of deferred violence in Gulliver’s Travels, focusing on the Houhynmns and their inability to arrive at a definitive conclusion with regard to exterminating the Yahoos. I am particularly drawn to the formal and rhetorical functions of such representations. One way in which the Houhynms manage to seduce Gulliver –to be so persuasive—is through the repetition of deferred violence. Through these acts of repetition and deferral, Gulliver gradually becomes inculcated with the idea that the Yahoos are less-than the Houhynmns and somehow deserving of whatever violence they may have enacted against them.

Does one topic seem more engaging/original than the other?

Winstanely, Gerrard. Law of Freedom and Other Writings, ed. Christopher Hill (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1973).

“I will confess,” said the prince, “an indulgence of fantastick delight more dangerous than yours. I have frequently endeavoured to image the possibility of a perfect government…” -Samuel Johnson, The History of Rasselas.

“True freedom lies in the community in spirit and community in the earthly treasury.” -Gerrard Winstanley, A Watch-Word to the City of London, 1649.

Taking us back in time for a moment, but for hopefully worthwhile and intriguing reasons, this reading is a pamphlet by Gerrard Winstanley published in 1652 during England’s parliamentary interregnum. The Law of Freedom in a Platform; or, True Magistracy Restored was written shortly following Winstanley’s involvement in the Digger, or True Leveller, commune that lasted from 1649-1650. Winstanley writes the pamphlet as a letter to His Excellency Oliver Cromwell. His primary concern is that, though the King is dead, “kingly government” may yet live on in the forms of “the kings’ old law” (280). Therefore, a total reformation is required is England is to have a true commonwealth. Otherwise, the parliamentary boss is the same as the kingly boss.

The prime target of Winstanley’s attack is “that cheating art of buying and selling” (306), by means of which kings, nobles, and the church enrich themselves at others’ expense. Furthermore, this ‘art’ sets people and nations against one another and is therefore not only the cause of oppression by a ruling class, but also of tearing apart communities and of foreign wars. According to Winstanley, this practice is not merely to be regulated; rather, the buying and selling of all things has to be abolished.  Winstanley text is, unlike More’s, an unambiguous argument for a kind of agrarian communism. This utopia is not meant to be debated; it is to be implemented immediately.

Without spending too much time on the details his argument, I think for our purposes it would be especially useful to focus on how this work fits in with and the broader trajectory of Enlightenment-era utopian texts.

Winstanley’s text has interesting parallels to both Bacon and More. Like Bacon, he regularly appeals to biblical authority to justify seemingly incongruous, radically secular ends. For example, in his discussion of the sabbath, which must be kept “according to one of the laws of Israel’s commonwealth made by Moses” (345), he argues that it must be kept so the people can spend the day learning of national and international affairs, and hear lectures on history, the various sciences, and moral philosophy. Furthermore, he argues that “because other nations are of several languages, therefore these speeches may be made sometimes in other languages, and sometimes in our mother tongue, that so the men of our English commonwealth may attain to all knowledges, arts, and languages” (347-8). And no mention is made of spending the sabbath in church or reading the Bible.

Also similar to Bacon, save for three references to “Machiavellian” pursuits of power, there are no references to any text other than the Bible. And with these, the text is shot through. This pervasive use of the Bible, and also his understanding of the rule of society being rooted in the patriarchal rule of the father in the household, also mirrors many contemporary and medieval political theorists. But he turns this strategy completely on its head. Rather than using this notion as a means to justify the rule of the king and use his text to advice on how to be a good father/ruler, he argues instead that because the father should love his children equally, so should there be real, material equality throughout society. There are no slaves or servants here, save for those who have been repeatedly convicted of a crime. For non-violent offenses, convicted criminals are initially reproached in private, then in public, and then if they persist in their criminal ways, they will be forced to work as a servant.

However, to keep everyone in line, and here is one of the similarities to More, there is a vast network of ‘overseers’ facilitating the administration and management of the society. Yet, what is perhaps a unique feature of Winstanley’s utopia, his primary concern is for the poor and oppressed: not some scientific aristocracy, not the artisans, and clearly not the nobility. Thus, even in this work, “to oversee [is]…to remove all grievances and to ease the people that are oppressed” (338). Furthermore, all of these positions are elected by the people and rotate every year so that all over 40-year old men have the opportunity to participate in the government.

If we consider this in relation to our readings as well as those it perhaps resembles more closely (e.g. Plato’s Republic, Augustine’s City of God, or late-Enlightenment utopias like Godwin’s Political Justice, or Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man), is the Law of Freedom part of a subgenre of utopian texts? The political utopia?

Additionally, though I hadn’t intended any tie in with Rasselas, reading the above-mentioned quote from Chapter XLIV on “The dangerous prevalence of imagination” (122), what is so dangerous about this kind of utopian imagining as opposed to Johnson’s?

Secondary Source:

Armintor, Deborah N. “The Sexual Politics of Microscopy in Brobdingnag.” Studies in English Literature 1500-1900 47.3 (2007): 619-640. Web. <https://www.press.jhu.edu/timeline/sel/Armintor_2007.pdf>.

In her 1935 essay “The Microscope and English Imagination,” Marjorie Nicolson argues that in “A Voyage To Brobdingnag,” Gulliver acts as a microscopist, a curious scientist equipped with superior vision in an unknown world. In “The Sexual Politics of Microscopy in Brobdingnag,” Armintor counters that argument by suggesting that Gulliver is not a microscopist but a female-owned “seeing object” that undergoes a three-stage degeneration from “microscopist to miniature microscope to miniature woman-owned microscope and finally to a woman-owned miniature microscope-cum-sexual prop.” She argues that this degeneration mirrors eighteenth-century English anxieties surrounding the “feminization” and commodification of the microscope and the development of “un(re)productive” female sexual toys.

The microscope was invented circa 1600 and in 1665 the prominent scientist Robert Hooke proclaimed, “by the help of microscopes, there is nothing so small as to escape our inquiry” (Armintor, 622). The microscope failed to live up to Hooke’s prediction. In 1680 the Royal Society expressed disappointment over its failure to observe atoms. In 1691 in a speech about the future of microscopes, Hooke describes the microscope’s fall from prestigious instrument of science to tiny popular commodity. He says, “I hear of none that make any other Use of that Instrument, but for Diversion and Pastime and by that reason it is become a portable Instrument, and easy to be carried in one’s pocket.” Hooke is referring to “pocket-microscopes,” which were popular among middle and upper class women and used for both scientific discovery and aesthetic purposes. The once productive and respectable microscope had been “reduced to a mere toy, a literal and metaphorical shrinkage that was, for Hooke, a symbolic castration” (Armintor, 624).

In her article, Nicolson cites Gulliver’s dissection of the wasp and his contribution to Gresham College as evidence that Gulliver is an inquisitive scientific observer but Armintor points out that Gulliver is only able to inspect the insect because his female owner places him in the its vicinity. Like a microscope, Gulliver’s vision is dictated by his female-owners and he is carried around in a “travelling-closet” akin to a carrying case. Also, during this time period, the coach window functioned as a “framed spectacle” for women to showcase their commodities. Gulliver often rode around on Glumdalclitch’s lap in her “open sedan” and recounts that spectators crowded around the car to observe him. According to Armintor, the open sedan does not make a commodity of Glumdalclitch but of the imprisoned Gulliver: her tiny male accessory, an “enlightened man of science turned observing object and object observed” (629).

When Gulliver observes lice crawling on the beggar’s body, he says, “I could see distinctly the limbs of these vermin with my naked eye, much better than those of an European louse through a microscope” and “I should have been curious enough to dissect one of them, if I had proper instruments (which I unluckily left behind me in the ship) although indeed the sight was so nauseous, that it perfectly turned my stomach” (151). Gulliver responds to what he sees in a purely sensory way. Gulliver is emasculated (deprived of his tools), a slave to his magnified vision and objectified by Glumdalclitch and is therefore unable to move from what John Locke calls “perception” (sensory) to “reflection” (intellectual) (630). He misses the “larger picture” and cannot make the connection between his predicament and the predicament of the beggar. Gulliver symbolizes the “enlightened Englishman’s metaphorical reduction to the position of a pocket microscope—a hyper-perceptive but astonishingly unreflective female commodity” (631).

The theme of female consumption is also evident in Swift’s depiction of the queen’s gluttonous appetite and grotesque way of eating and most pointedly in his depiction of Gulliver as a sexual device. When Gulliver is given to the queen’s maids of honor, he recalls that the “ prettiest giantess would sometimes set me astride upon one of her nipples, with many other tricks, wherein the reader will excuse me for not being over particular. But, I was so much displeased, that I entreated Glumdalclitch to contrive some excuse for not seeing that young lady any more” (158). Armintor calls this “the ultimate act of female consumption”— “rendering Gulliver’s own genitalia both physically and symbolically insignificant” (634). Afterward, Gulliver says, “what gave me most uneasiness among these maids of honor… was to see them use me…like a creature who had no sort of consequence” (p. 158). If Gulliver were being used as a sexual prop, his vision would have been restricted to the inside of female genitalia:“an image blown up to abstraction and at the expense of the bigger picture” (634). According to Armintor Swift would probably have been familiar with the Rorschachian image of a magnified fly’s eyes from Hooke’s book Micrographia published in 1665. Armintor links this imagery to earlier incidents in Brobdingnag when Gulliver observes flies.

Armintor’s argument is that Gulliver represents “enlightened Englishmen in the age of pocket microscopy and their imagined degeneration from male giant-among-the- dwarfs” to a tiny objectified commodity controlled by “scientifically and sexually curious female consumers” (634). In “A Voyage to Brobdingnag,” Swift reveals the “gynophobia latent in Enlightenment science’s aversion to the new consumerism”(626) and “satirizes the misogyny behind ‘enlightened’ English masculinity and the castration threat it projects onto the new female consumer who is imagined to have abused and belittled both the microscope and the phallus by wresting them from their original and rightful (male) owners” (635).

Per our discussion of conspiracy theory, here’s a lengthy quote about the Enlightenment and the tendency to see historical events as products of conspiracy. From Gordon Wood’s Creation of the American Republic (my apologies for not copying his footnotes):

“The notion of conspiracy was not new in Western history. From Sallust’s description of Catiline through Machiavelli’s lengthy discussion men were familiar with the use of conspiracy in politics. Yet the tendency to see events as a result of a calculated plot, especially events in times of public tumult, appears particularly strong in the eighteenth century, a product, it seems, not only of the political realities and assumptions of the age, but of its very enlightenment, a consequence of the popularization of politics and secularization of knowledge. Those Americans who continued to see themselves as a specially convenanted people could and did look beyond the earth to Providence for an explanation of the events in the years after 1763: a divinely favored people were being justly punished for their sins. But to those captivated by the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century the wonder-working ways of Providence were not satisfying enough. The explanation of human phenomena lay in the ways of man alone, in human purposes, in political and social science. Whatever happened in history was intended by men to have happened. Enlightened rationalists as well as Calvinist clergy were obsessed with the motives that lay hidden behind deceiving, even self-deceiving, statements, and they continually sought to penetrate beneath the surface of events in order to find their real significance in the inner hearts of men. Yet in replacing Providence with human motivation as a source of historical explanation, men still felt the need to discover the design, “the grand plan,” that lay beneath the otherwise incomprehensible jumble of events. Now it seemed possible to the men of the enlightened age that they would be able, as the scrutinizers of Providence had been unable, “to trace things into their various connections, or to look forward into all their remote and distant consequences,” to disclose at last what had always been in darker days “the hidden and…uncertain connection of events.” It was precisely this task of tracing, predicting, disclosing, and connecting motives and events that American Whig leaders had set for themselves in the debate with Great Britain. And thus their attributing what was happening to the relations between Britain and her colonies to the conspiratorial designs of a few men in high places became another example of their application of science to human affairs, a noble effort to make natural sense of the complexity of phenomena, a humanization of Providence, an impassioned attempt to explain the ways of man to man, the crude beginnings of what has come to be called the Whig interpretation of history (40-1).”

5 Questions in Response to Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels

1. Throughout Swift’s novel, references to the human body—and its various functions—abound. In particular, the text seems especially preoccupied with the scatological. In Part 1, for example, Gulliver tells us that he had been “extremely pressed by the necessities of nature,” causing him to “discharge[d]” his body of an “uneasy load” (35).* Later, he urinates on the Queen’s palace in Lilliput to extinguish a fire (Part 2), describes how the scientists in Lagado turn excrement into food (Part 3), and makes it known that the Yahoos hurl feces at one another (Part 4).

In emphasizing the body/the scatological, is Swift merely trying to entertain his readers? Or, he is making a larger point about aspects of our non-   corporeal selves, that is, the spiritual and/or intellectual? How might the latter fit into an Enlightenment context?

2. Building off of the last question, what are we to make of the ways in which the female body is represented? Gulliver frequently discusses women’s bodies in terms that are less than complimentary. For instance, when Gulliver encounters a nurse breastfeeding, he remarks: “I must confess no object ever disgusted me so much as the sight of her monstrous breast” (97/Part 2). And later, upon seeing a beggar-woman, he states: “There was a woman with cancer in her breast, swelled to a monstrous size, full of holes, in two or three of which I could have easily crept, and covered my whole body” (117/Part 2).

Significantly, such descriptions occur in the land of Brobdingnag, where everything is enlarged, as though seen through a microscopic lens. Thus, it  can be inferred that Swift may be satirizing various scientific innovations of his time, including the microscope. As Chloe Houston confirms in her essay,       “Utopia, Dystopia or Anti-utopia?”, “…scientific experiments…become objects of ridicule” (429) in Swift’s novel. If this is the case, why does Swift choose to express his scientific critique in terms that are gendered?

3. What is the significance of Gulliver addressing the reader? It is not uncommon for Gulliver to say things like, “It was necessary to give the reader this information, without which he would be at the same loss with me,” (163/Ch. 2, Part 3). How do comments like this function rhetorically?

4. What does Swift’s portrayal of the relationship between people and animals suggest? Throughout Gulliver’s Travels, people are often compared to, or contrasted with, animals. In Part One, for example, as Gulliver prepares to leave Blefuscu, he states that he will take: “six cows and two bulls alive, with as many ewes and rams, intending to carry them into my own country, to propagate the breed…. I would gladly have taken a dozen of the natives, but this was a thing the Emperor would by no means permit” (82).   What are the colonial, economic, and/or philosophical implications of such comparisons?

5. In God, Gulliver, and Genocide Claude Rawson comments on a letter that Swift wrote to Pope, in which Swift expresses a “death-dealing sentiment about humans, sufficiently establishing that it isn’t ‘for real’, but in a way near enough.” Rawson writes that, “The words express with unusual explicitness the mixture of meaning it, not meaning it, and not not meaning it” (262). Rawson’s observation underscores the ambiguous nature of Swift’s writing—and of satirical writing in general.  In what ways is the elusiveness of Swift’s satire potentially troubling or problematic, and in what ways does it potentially succeed?

*Page numbers refer to the following edition of Gulliver’s Travels:

 Swift, Jonathan. Gulliver’s Travels. New York: Barnes and Noble, 2003.

What a very strange little text The Isle of Pines is. Three issues leap out from Neville’s deceptively casual narrative style: (i) George Pines’ enthusiastic polygamy, (ii) the severity of punishment and total absence of due process under Henry Pines’ law, and (iii) the racial dimensions of both circumstances. At first I read The Isle of Pines as misogynistic fantasy metamorphosed into racist cautionary tale about overpopulation and idleness, but the historical context explained in Gaby Mahlberg and Peter Stillman’s articles in the assigned issue of Utopian Studies brought my attention to the parody at work and Neville’s more likely agendas. Stillman identifies George Pines’ resemblance to Charles II and his brother James II, both of whom indulged in an array of mistresses and prioritized their polyamorous personal lives and over statecraft and England’s well being (157). Stillman posits Neville’s allegory as a direct warning: “George’s misrule, or failure to rule, leads the Isle of Pines to internal breakdown. Will not, The Isle of Pines suggests, the rule of Charles II do the same to the island of England?” In that light, Neville’s pamphlet reads as a clear reference to the dangers of absolute monarchy and the need for structured government and rule of law.

Establishing the degree of Neville’s political radicalism vis-à-vis monarchy is perhaps essential to understanding how far his parody goes. If, as Stillman suggests, the pamphlet is a “brief but powerful statement against unlimited monarchical power and patriarchal political thought,” to what extent are each of the three issues so startling to present sensibilities called into question (9)? In other words, if George and Henry are flawed monarchs, and the Isle is their flawed kingdom, does it follow that the sexism, racism and draconian system of punishment that are the direct products of George and Henry’s leadership also fall within Neville’s critique?

On the one hand, it seems highly anachronistic to attribute such views to Neville, and the nuances of Neville’s position on monarchy might suggest alternatives. Stillman refers to the “tumble of arguments” over absolute monarchy, constitutional monarchy and republicanism that unfolded during Neville’s lifetime, and indeed it seems impossible that Neville’s republicanism is so straightforward in an era of such complex (and mercurial) political conflict (157). Gaby Mahlberg’s article, “Historical and Political Contexts of The Isle of Pines,” seems to be omitted from the dropbox PDF, but it has a lot to say about this issue so I wanted to mention it in case others missed it too (it’s available in full text via the library website). Mahlberg evidently has published quite a lot about The Isle of Pines and Neville in general, and she points out that Neville’s politics were less radical than “Neo-Harringtonian” desires for a republic without a monarch (112). She never quite pins down the nuances of Neville’s politics, but much like The Isle of Pines, maybe they defy such clear classification. Regardless, if Neville’s views of monarchy were mixed, then we have grounds for excluding monarchy’s allegorical products from his critique.

Yet, Mahlberg’s account of Neville’s political career does portray him as a clear Republican and even a Neo-Harringtonian. Mahlberg notes that Neville fought unsuccessfully for “a new type of government by a ‘single person,’ a ‘senate,’ and a ‘popular assembly’” (121). That sounds familiar, and suggests that Neville’s Republicanism was ahead of its time. After all, the British political debates of this era paved some of the intellectual roads for the founding of the U.S. government 100 years later, and the English Bill of Rights, which forbade cruel and unusual—although not capital—punishment, was passed in 1689, 21 years after the publication of The Isle of Pines and at the end of the Exclusion Crisis. Additionally, the Magna Carta and its due process requirements had been revived recently under Charles I’s reign, and its contents were the subject of ongoing debate. Mahlberg describes Neville’s opposition to Oliver Cromwell (who, according to Lord Woolf, Lord Chief Justice of England and Wales in 2005, dismissed the Magna Carta as the “Magna Farta”—thanks, Wikipedia). The unfortunate consequences of George and Henry’s reign also could be construed as an argument in support of due process and the Magna Carta’s revival and against Cromwell specifically.

Even so, neither the Magna Carta nor the 1689 Bill of Rights were concerned with the connection of race with due process and excessive punishment. It’s notable that both executions that take place in the text are not only of black men, but are also of men accused of sexual crimes. Clause 54 of the Magna Carta stated that no man could be imprisoned on the testimony of a woman, except in the event of her husband’s death. Maybe Neville was less concerned about the targeting of black men as the targeting of men based on the testimonies of women; the Isle’s disorder is inevitable in the absence of laws like Clause 54. Along the same lines, perhaps George’s polygamy functions entirely as an allegory for political patriarchy and distraction from statecraft, and the misogynistic aspects are clear only to our present readings.

I also wanted to mention Stillman’s discussion of the Isle as an arcadia and its Hobbesian engagement of the state of nature, which opens up another line of inquiry. And, as an aside, I’ve always found Restoration politics, with all its crises and parliaments, rather murky, and if anyone with more expertise can recommend a good general history of it, I’d be interested.

Here’s a link to Lord Woolf’s charming discussion of the Magna Carta, in case anyone is curious: http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/+/http://www.dca.gov.uk/judicial/speeches/lcj150605.htm#4

Carey, Daniel. “Henry Neville’s The Isle of Pines: From Sexual Utopia to Political Dystopia.” New Worlds Reflected: Travel and Utopia in the Early Modern Period. Chloe Houston, ed. Farnham: Ashgate Publishing Ltd., 2010. 203-218.

Like many readers of The Isle of Pines (both contemporary and modern), Carey is interested in discerning whether the text is a satire of polygamy and patriarchy, or, a utopian vision of an ideal society. To this effect, Carey finds political readings to be the most useful; as a response to seventeenth-century patriarchal political theory, the narrative of The Isle of Pines “expose[s] the inadequacy of patriarchy to the political requirements of the island’s burgeoning community” (206). Carey believes that Neville fills this gap, in a manner of speaking, thirteen years after the appearance of The Isle of Pines with Plato Redivivus, his own work of political theory. Looking at this text, he suggests, explains why The Isle of Pines turns from a seeming utopia into a dystopia.

The beginning of the text is utopian, Carey believes, but it is satirically so. The story of George Pine and his four wives, procreating in harmonious cooperation with the island’s sole man, “raises patriarchy to the level of fantasy” (208). It recalls the golden age, as described by Ovid in the Metamorphoses and later by Shakespeare in The Tempest. This fantasy dissipates as Henry Pine, the island’s second ruler, faces sexual anarchy and the new phenomenon of non-consensual sexual relations (211). In response, Henry lays down a series of laws based on Mosaic precedent, policing not only sexual activity, but social and religious activity as well. At the beginning of The Isle of Pines, sex is a satiric fantasy; by the end, sex causes chaos and, ultimately, the need for a strong ruler, strong to the extent that he wields the law.

Carey ends the article by turning to the question of the political. In his reading of Plato Redivivus, Carey highlights Neville’s negative view of monarchy, which, he believed, was likely a corruption of a more effective form of governance. Moral deprivation, then, results from weak governance, and it is not surprising that Carey concludes that The Isle of Pines is an intermediary text between monarchical and republican political organization (214). This explains why the Dutch serve as worshipers and saviors of William Pine, the island’s third sovereign. Anglo-Dutch relations slowly deteriorated throughout the seventeenth century, in part, because the Dutch revealed themselves to be royalists. Hence, it is not surprising to see the royalist Dutch supporting the island’s king (215-16). This reading, however, is not to support monarchy; indeed, Neville suggests that the insurrections occurring in William’s reign will be reoccurring nightmares.

Carey’s historical/political reading is strong and covers a lot of the same ground in the special issue we read for this week. Still, I feel there is more to the story. Carey sees the succession of power as causing weak governance and wanton sexuality, which Henry regulates through the Mosaic constitution. If we are looking for causal relationships between the text’s move from sexual harmony t0 sexual discord, from utopian fantasy to dystopian free-for-all, population growth is another big possibility. This plays into The Isle of Pine‘s engagement with discourses of “the natural.” Man is naturally depraved, William says, inclined to fall back to their passions and live in a state of warfare. This is bound to happen as the Pines, Englishes, Sparks, and Phils expand throughout the island. Carey is quite right to negate the racial reading of the text — that the descendants of Philippa (or, the mixed black/white race) are the cause of the island’s moral deprivation. Still, the text seems to harp on the Phils as the instigators of violence, both sexual and martial. If Neville was as committed to republicanism as Carey suggests, then notions of class become that much more important, given that a larger body of the citizenry would be relied upon to serve in political organization. A version of natural law, then, becomes tantamount to political stability — those who can control natural proclivities towards chaos will prove more effective. The Phils, the only family that is really “racialized” in this text, are shown as being recurrently prone to falling back to their animalistic nature. Neville’s version of republicanism, then, is still hierarchical — perhaps it merely substitutes race for patriarchy in its political theory.

Stephen mentioned this book in class, which he had heard about from Karl Steel (during his faculty membership seminar):

http://www.amazon.com/Animal-Capital-Rendering-Biopolitical-Posthumanities/dp/0816653429/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1411063709&sr=1-1&keywords=animals+and+capital