03/2000

     In his description of the religious customs of Utopia, Raphael Hythloday notes, "Women are not debarred from the priesthood, but only a widow of advanced years is ever chosen, and it doesn't happen often" (78). Such self-subverting observations, in many ways the result of a collision between the public transcript and the private transcript (or the symbolic and the practical, the law and its effect) are not unusual in a document like Utopia, littered with paradoxes and philosophical conflicts. Indeed, when the work is finished, and Hythloday has completed his lengthy, detailed narrative, More writes,

When Raphael had finished his story, it seemed to me that not a few of the customs and laws he had described as existing among the Utopians were quite absurd. Their methods of waging war, their religious ceremonies, and their social customs were some of these, but my chief objection was to the basis of their whole system, that is, their communal living and their moneyless economy. (84)

If we assume, as Stephen Greenblatt does, that this "communal living" is the "central innovation" of the text (36), then More's final words denounce it outright and serve to destabilize all contingent aspects of Utopian culture, that is to say, his entire narrative. Greenblatt attributes this destabilization, at least in part, to the myriad factors underlying More's conceptualization of the communal system, which propound communism "less as a coherent economic program than as a weapon against certain tendencies in human nature: selfishness and pride, to be sure, but also that complex, self-conscious, theatrical accommodation to the world which we recognize as a characteristic mode of modern individuality" (37). Dominating the drive to "self-fashion" requires subsuming individual wants and needs to those of a larger group or household, who in turn sacrifice for the good of the culture, a deferential method that perpetually displaces identity and evacuates independence.

     Disputing this analysis of the work as a site for More's personal (and thus political) rejection of the individual self, recent feminist scholars have turned More's penchant for paradox into an often progressive view of gendered rights and privileges. Citing the Utopians' often acquiescent attitude towards women's equality, their opinion that women should not be barred from achieving political or religious power, that women should be encouraged to take up arms, employ themselves professionally and intellectually, and choose their own husbands, scholars such as Peter Iver Kaufman and Lee Cullen Khanna have asserted More's tolerance for women's rights as the resultant conclusion to be drawn from his paradoxical descriptions--the progressive view trumps the conservative.

     Returning to Hythloday's revelation, that "Women are not debarred from the priesthood, but only a widow of advanced years is ever chosen, and it doesn't happen often" (78) we find both analyses operative: the group's will maintains the male-female equality, while it manages to obliterate gender as a preferential category and elect those with experience or seniority instead. Utopia is largely indifferent to the gender discussion, and that, I think, is the reason why the questions being asked by both "sides" of the issue are immaterial: the self is neither obliterated nor taken in particular, gendered account. Communal living, according to More, rather allows for the dissolution of many obligatory familial roles: "No man is bothered by his wife's querulous complaints about money, no man fears poverty for his son, or struggles to scrape up a dowry for his daughter" (82). In this way, male-to-female relationships, traditionally circumscribed almost entirely through financial dependence, are reconstructed in utilitarian terms; gender and familial position are subordinated for the good of all, and each member presents a contribution that is considered egalitarian and largely unremarkable. This kind of gender indifference results in as many limitations as freedoms. Women are "free" to work and achieve a certain degree of indispensable power, but they are consequently forced to surrender those domestic "powers" they traditionally held. The ability to rebuke a husband for insufficient financial funds and thereby secure a domestic influence, and the inherent pressure a daughter carries to "marry well" formerly obligated a husband and father to an inherently female power; within More's Utopia, such power is lost.

     Obviously, much of this indifference to gender springs from the Utopians' aversion to all private property, including all internal emotional behavior, and all traditionally guarded sexual characteristics. The domestic existence, the conventionally female sphere, is entirely private; all of its physical and emotional activities are secreted, throwing an interesting and mysterious light on the lives of women and affording them a conditional degree of power. Utopian culture from birth makes all privacy public, always already disclosing gender and marital status through clothing conventions, the rejection of all ornamentation and cosmetics, and the seating assignments at meals. The final consideration is especially important, as it seems to imply a formidable separation of the sexes. Women are strategically positioned on the outside of the table, "so that if a woman has a sudden qualm or pain, such as occasionally happens during pregnancy, she may get up without disturbing the others, and go off to the nurses," (43) a gesture which many might consider private, maintaining the domestic sphere despite all of More's protestations to the contrary. And yet, a woman's position as a mother is, but a few lines down, considered banal and interchangeable:

Each child is nursed by its own mother, unless death or illness prevents. When that happens, the wife of the syphogrant quickly finds a suitable nurse. The problem is not difficult. Any woman who can gladly volunteers for the job, since all the Utopians applaud her kindness, and the child itself regards the new nurse as its natural mother. (43)

Child-nursing is considered "women's work," but it is checked by the reign of the entire community; its sphere is perpetually under review, and the women who perform such tasks can be substitute mothers, nurses, or caretakers for the ill. Traditional roles for women abound in Utopia, but the culture's self-conscious control lies over privacy, not over gender. Gender is always already acknowledged; any intentional steps taken in women's lives are taken to obliterate the secrecy surrounding their sphere, not to enslave or to liberate their sex.

     Utopian marriage customs, where gender roles are most conventional and thus subject to the greatest degree of revision, provide us with the most striking publications of the private sphere. Premarital intercourse and adultery, the definitive secretive acts, are punished more severely than any other crime. In a country that likens sexual pleasure to defecation, any effort to turn the public, the banal, and the ordinary into the private, the mysterious, and the interesting results in punishment and social disgrace for both the perpetrators and their entire households. Full disclosure prior to marriage, where brides and grooms are shown naked to one another for purposes of inspection, as "deformity may lurk under clothing," (61) is viewed as a preventative measure, decreasing the likelihood that men and women will seek forbidden relationships. Once married, the elders "absolutely forbid a husband to put away his wife against her will for some bodily misfortune" (61) in an effort not simply to perpetuate monogamy (for her withdrawl doesn't necessarily signify his freedom), but to prevent secrecy, abandonment, and solitude. In all cases, privacy is the illegal act, and disclosure and disgrace the salvation and punishment.

     Most significantly, intention is punished as severely as action: "A man who tried to seduce a woman is subject to the same penalties as if he had actually done it. They think that a crime attempted is as bad as one committed, and that failure should not confer advantages on a criminal who did all he could to succeed" (62). While operating on the extreme view that secrecy should be abolished, a view that provides equal punishment under the law for both men and women, such a policy allows women some freedoms as it takes others away. By exposing the often-neglected realm of seduction, a crime that, like rape, was traditionally punished only when discovered, when perpetrated, and if divulged, the lives of women are granted a degree of protection that deters gendered violence and prevents the victim's stigmatization, shame, and co-implication. Alternately, the power of such private mysteries as the bridal bed, the courtship, and the feminine mystique is deflated in favor of full disclosure; those spheres wherein women maintained some degree of domestic control are turned banal and passionless. Both results stem from the obliteration of private property, and as the domestic sphere self-destructs, its freedoms lie in tension with those of the outside world.

     War and religion are two non-domestic spheres where, on the surface, Utopian power seems specifically gendered; women are encouraged, but not forced, to engage in battle, and no women are barred from the priesthood, should they be elected. And yet, neither side of the gender/identity argument can make sense of the laws' self-subversions: Greenblatt's assertion that Utopia opposes self-fashioning cannot account for the religious importance of individual confession and forgiveness leading to self-improvement (a confession from wife to husband), and any assertion that women are "liberated" to any degree by participating in battle doesn't take into account the public retribution they suffer, should they refuse, or should they return from the front without their families. An exploration of the public sphere in these terms brings us inevitably back to the Utopians' disinterested position on the topic of gender and their subsuming interest in the prevention of privacy. Both war and religion require action particular to the individual, every battle is unique and confession requires a specific emotional catalogue. Yet both actions forbid cultural isolation: their religion considers it "sacrilege to worship with a rankling conscience" and thus requires perpetual confession and the publication of private thoughts under fear of punishment, and if women refuse to go to battle with their husbands and remain at home alone, or if they return from war without their families, they will be publicly ridiculed. In both circumstances, as in all domestic socio-economic matters, that which is secreted is forbidden, and punishable by the culture's severest laws. As gender intersects with the private and public spheres, it is restrained or liberated accordingly.

     Thus what I think we see operating in More's Utopia is the metaphor-practice of communal living transforming both the public and private spheres, wrecking havoc on their contingent institutions. Those places where women or men traditionally and exclusively operated are consequently governed by the whole community; gender is a contingent, and largely an afterthought. The self isn't entirely obliterated in Utopia, but communal living encourages the kinds of subordinated identities that apply individual ability to a broader cause. Thus, the potentiality of each individual, regardless of gender, is augmented by a physical and intellectual education that prepares him or her for optimal service in a public sphere. More's socio-political innovation in Utopia is this public, communal sphere, a paradigm that produces a topsy-turvy carnival where riches are melted to construct chamber-pots, and the biological family is deconstructed as a network of utilitarian relationships. When any of these contingent, private forces, such as family, gender, wealth, or sexuality, are pulled from the text and examined in terms of their innovations and subversions, the questions asked are inevitably as immaterial as the Utopians are disinterested. Analyze conditional forces from within their broader, communal paradigms, and the results will be less a matter of paradox than publication.

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Greenblatt, Stephen. Renaissance Self-Fashioning from More to Shakespeare. Chicago: U Chicago Press, 1980.

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