ABSTRACT

Utopias and the Environment explores the way in which the kind of ‘dreaming’, or re-visioning, known as the ‘utopian imaginary’ takes environmental concerns into account. This kind of creative intervention is increasingly important in an era of ecological crisis, as we witness the failure of governments worldwide to significantly change industrial civilization from a path of ‘business as usual.’

In this context, it is up to the artists – in this case authors – to imagine new ways of being that respond to this imperative and immediate global issue. Concurrently, it is also up to critics, readers, and thinkers everywhere to appraise these narratives of possibility for their complexities and internal conflicts, as well as for their promise, as we enter this new era of rapid change and adaptation. Because creative and critical thinkers must work together towards this goal, the idea of the critical utopia, coined by Tom Moylan in response to the fiction of the 1970s, is now ingrained in the common argot and is one of the key ideas discussed in this book. This development in the genre, which combines self-reflexivity and multiple perspectives within its dreaming, represents the postmodern spirit in its most regenerative aspect. This book is testament to such hopes and potential realities. This book was originally published as a special issue of Green Letters.

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Introduction

Guest Editor’s introduction
ByGeoff Berry

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natural, degradable building materials, such as stone and wood. Work has been freed from the economic pressures of capitalism and is now associated with art (which is strongly reminiscent of William Morris’s utopia News from Nowhere, published in 1891), and recy-cling has achieved a status of prime importance in Mattapoisett. Children are brought up in ‘scavenger works crews’, and the level of importance the people of Mattapoisett ascribe to the natural environment is also mirrored on the political level, where every township has its own Earth Advocate, who speaks for the rights of the environment. The Earth Advocate (whose hair colour is, significantly, green) and the environmentally friendly attitude of the people in Mattapoisett have contributed to a landscape that is suffused with gardens and other green areas and is evocative of a bucolic, Arcadian landscape:

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novel is informed by a heightened level of cross-gendered social and biological roles. This ‘mild’ form of androgyny shows that Piercy envisages a less oppositional culture between the sexes. Here, Piercy clearly takes a political-ecofeminist stance. As Maria Mies and Vandana Shiva have observed (cf. 1993: 18), there is an important divide within Ecofeminism between spiritual (or ‘cultural’) ecofeminists and political ecofeminists. While the approach of Spiritual Ecofeminism is to “stress the links, historical, biological, and experiential, between women and nature, and see their joint oppression as the consequence of male domination” (Plumwood, 1993: 10). Political Ecofeminism does “not see women’s differ-ence as either [sic] biologically determined in their relationship to nature or to one another.” (10). Whereas this latter perspective sees nature as a political rather than a natural category, and proposes the construction of a less oppositional culture, Spiritual Ecofeminism hails the creation of an alternative women’s culture as a solution to the bi-dimensional oppres-sion. Instead of abandoning this dualistic tradition, Spiritual Ecofeminism seeks to revalue what patriarchy has devalued, trying to turn a negative into a positive. In trying to overcome problems of sexism and environmental exploitation, Piercy clearly adopts a political-ecofeminist view. Rather than trying to revalue what patriarchy has devalued, the people of Mattapoisett have developed a less oppositional culture between the sexes in which people’s subjectivities are not seen as biologically determined. However, this less oppositional culture has been achieved through a heightened technolo-gisation and control of the reproductive processes. In Mattapoisett, reproduction is ensured by “Mother, the machine” (p. 102), a so-called ‘brooder’, which stores all the genetic mate-rial of the future embryos. With this relocation of reproduction, the society of Mattapoisett largely corresponds, as Lucy Sargisson has observed (1996: 165), to the claims postulated by the feminist scholar Shulamith Firestone. One of Firestone’s main arguments is that misogyny is rooted in reproduction, since woman’s ability to give birth makes her dependent on man. In The Dialectic of Sex, she claims that

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as completely as men on account of their reproductive function (1873: 30–38). During the second half of the twentieth century, however, biology—at least to some extent—seemed to hold the answers to woman’s problems. As Cathleen and Colleen McGuire (1998: 197) have observed, in the 1970s, at a time when the birth control pill helped the women’s liberation movement take off the ground, many women looked to science for further solu-tions to their problems. If bio-technology were wrested from the oppressive hands of patri-archy, so the dogma held, then the fruits of science could liberate women and in turn society, such as in the androgynous society of Mattapoisett. It has been argued, however, that androgyny is not intrinsically and necessarily synony-mous with equality. Luce Irigaray (1993: 12), for example, one of the leading ‘difference feminists’, has argued in her book Je, Tous, Nous: Toward a Culture of Difference that “[w]omen’s exploitation is based upon sexual difference; its solution will come only through sexual difference . . . To wish to get rid of sexual difference is to call for a genocide more radical than any form of destruction there has ever been in History.” Similarly, I would argue that in Piercy’s novel the biological equality of the sexes has not led to egalitarian power relations, which emphasises the importance of Edward Said’s claim that “[i]deas, cultures, and histories cannot seriously be understood or studied without their force, or more precisely their configurations of power, also being studied” (1978: 5). In Piercy’s fictional society, the gain of women’s ecofeminist ideals, of independence and equal gender relationships, has been, I would argue, at the expense of other power relation-ships, particularly the relationship between the individual and society. Reminding the reader of Huxley’s Brave New World, the narrator gives a dystopian description of the ‘bottle-babies’:

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Although it seems that racism has ceased to exist in Mattapoisett, it needs to be pointed out that the elimination of racism has been achieved through a heightened sense of racial sepa-ratism. However, as Angelique Richardson (2000: 38) has argued, a progressive, truly radical feminism, remembering that we are interdependent inhabitants of an increasingly small planet, would favour integration, not separatism. Since the power of human reproduction, the guarantee of the survival of humankind, has been shifted to a machine, humanity is completely dependent on the proper functioning of the machine. If, however, the machine stops, as in E.M. Forster’s dystopian short story The Machine Stops (1909), then humanity is doomed to perish: one realises that gender equality in Mattapoisett is based on a very fragile foundation, where reproduction has little in common with the conditio humana. Instead of giving men and women the chance to give birth, Piercy completely de-humanises reproduction. Although, admittedly, people do lead egalitarian relations in terms of gender, I would question whether the equality between the sexes might not be established without such a drastic intervention in the human genetic stock which sacrifices human independence. Undoubtedly, Piercy aims at eliminating the cultural, frequently deterministic signifi-cance of biology. As one of the characters in Mattapoisett explains, “we broke the bond between genes and culture” (p. 104). It seems ironic, however, that the elimination of the cultural significance of biology is not achieved through the means of culture but biology— through an increased human interference in the biological processes of the body (e.g. the use of eugenics and the ‘brooder’ for biological modelling). Consequently, since Mattapoisett has overcome misogyny and environmental exploitation by biologically breaking the supposedly oppressive nature of heterosexual relations, Piercy’s novel fails to show how to overcome the social structures of oppression. In Woman on the Edge of Time, I would argue, Ecofeminism has been biologized to such an extent that its social meaning becomes eclipsed. Although with the help of the brooder future characteristics of the person to be born can be determined, there is still a debate in Mattapoisett over the issue of selective breeding. As Luciente explains (p. 226), the general debate has polarised between the Shapers, who want to breed for selected traits, and the Mixers, who watch for birth defects and fix the proper gene balance (p. 262). The mere fact that people discuss whether to support the Mixers or the Shapers indicates the broad acceptance of genetics which, in turn, reveals the anthro-pocentric world picture of the society. Instead of minimising the human impact on nature, the people of Mattapoisett readily disturb the balance of natural ecosystems by breeding many varieties of vegetables resistant to drought (p. 210). Disturbingly, a similar kind of the ‘weeding out of negative genes’ in terms of genetics also surfaces in the realm of human relationships. Although Luciente asserts that cooperation is a major feature of her society, she cannot conceal the fact that they still cling to a competitive and selective modus vivendi. As already insinuated by Luciente’s views that always some competing goes on (p. 174) and that they have to struggle to exist (p. 197), the selectivity becomes most important in the context of the initiation ritual, where the child is left in the woods for one week where it must learn how to survive. Asked by Connie what happens if the child is bitten by a snake or gets appendicitis, Luciente coldly replies “We take the risk [. . .] You’re right, accidents happen” (p. 116). This practice. I would argue, is strongly reminis-cent of a Spencerian survival-of-the-fittest attitude that has little in common with what one would expect in a paradise. Against this background, the presence of the so-called ‘drifters’ for whom Mattapoisett does not constitute a paradise does not come as a surprise. The drifters do not subscribe to

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the uniform ideals proposed by the society and, in an atmosphere of cultural phobia, are victimised as scapegoats. Luciente makes very clear what will happen to those who exer-cise a form of power against the society by not showing up at the township meetings. In that case, as Luciente relates, “Friends might suggest you take a retreat [. . .] If too many in a village cut off, the neighbouring villages will send for a team of investigators” (p. 154). A similar form of social ostracism happens when people do not conform to the work ethos of Mattapoisett, as such people are asked to leave (p. 101). The reader realises that non-conformity in Mattapoisett results in exclusion. Similarly, those who resort to violence are also excluded and not given much space for improvement. In an open stigmatisation, the offenders are marked with a tattoo on the back of their hands to indicate the danger they pose to the community (p.272). Urged to sit apart in guest houses, these offenders are clearly defined as the ‘downs’ of the society. Thus, the people of Mattapoisett correspond to what the cultural historian René Girard (cf. 1986) has termed the ‘Generative Scapegoat Mechanism’, which emphasises the inherent need to scapegoat in order to maintain prevalent power constellations. In his book The Scapegoat, Girard claims that human societies are founded on mechanisms of sacri-fice, which provide a community with its sense of collective identity and preserve its cultural values. Usually concealed from human consciousness, sacrifice is initiated by scapegoating and stigmatising the supposedly ‘other’, the ‘different’, in an attempt to prevent a ‘mimetic crisis’, a breakdown of all distinctions of representation. Margaret Atwood (1982: 275) underlines that the fear of this mimetic crisis is not only a frequent structural element within utopian societies, but is also liable to affect the reader, since all utopias suffer from the readers’ secret conviction that a perfect world would be dull. Such readers, however, need not worry about Woman on the Edge of Time, for Piercy’s ecofemi-nist utopia is far from being perfect. The accumulation of social exclusions culminates if drifters relapse into crime: then the society of Mattapoisett conveniently executes them in an exercise of power over power which seriously undermines the status of Mattapoisett as a paradise. Luciente explains: “Second time someone uses violence, we give up. We don’t want to watch each other or to imprison each other. We aren’t willing to live with people who choose to use violence. We execute them” (p. 209). The harsh treatment of those who do not want to serve the ecofemi-nist ideals brings to the fore that equality is not always a positive quality if it is achieved by suppressing or even excluding individuality and imposing an oppressive conformity which makes all differences disappear. At the same time, the phenomenon of the ‘drifters’ clearly proves that the biological eradication of difference is no blueprint for happiness and social equality. On the contrary, the disappearance of difference causes, in an illustration of Girardian theory, a mimetic crisis in Connie. Connie realises that the idyll of the place and the alleged perfection can also be, from another point of view, dystopian:

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