Climates of Words: Charting Utopia / Dystopia from C19 to C21

Leslie Eckel Suffolk University "Climates of Words: Charting Utopia / Dystopia from C19 to C21" In its accounts of cultural renaissance and progressive thinking, much of C19 US literature is animated by the hopefulness... [ view full abstract ]

Leslie Eckel

Suffolk University

"Climates of Words: Charting Utopia / Dystopia from C19 to C21"

In its accounts of cultural renaissance and progressive thinking, much of C19 US literature is animated by the hopefulness and good faith of utopian experiments such as Henry David Thoreau's Walden and Bronson Alcott's Fruitlands. The 1840s in particular were buffeted by waves of utopian energy from abroad, bringing Fourierist ideas, socialist Icarian pilgrims, and revolutionary principles from rapidly nationalizing Europe to US shores. This climate of social change permeates the language of the period, particularly in utopian texts that call for "Justice," "Equality," "Brotherhood," and "Love," making such philosophical ideals seem tangible. This was a time of infinite possibility, a moment "to live deliberately," "to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life."

Yet more recent literary returns to C19, especially by Margaret Atwood, Octavia Butler, and Colson Whitehead, emphasize the co-presence of unfreedom and the conditions of dystopia at the heart of these decades. Their (non)fictional C19 is brutal in its violence, rigid in its imaginative restrictions, and ultimately illegible in its darkness, widening fractures within the era itself. While Thoreau was living deeply at Walden Pond from 1845-47, Frederick Douglass was living in exile in Britain, excluded from US utopian narratives by his decision to name the horrors of his own experiences. This paper, part of a larger book project on Atlantic utopias and countercultures in the long nineteenth century, aims to place the idioms of C19 utopia and C21 dystopia in dynamic relation to one another by considering how our vision of C19 has changed and why linguistic climates mark the difference.