The non-compliant behaviors aren't crimes, not by any credible moral standard. Simply--human nature. Suppose a city-dweller decides to leave the countryside before the 2 years of required labor are up? Suppose a city-dweller doesn't agree to give up a garden plot after the allotted time? Or an artisan doesn't want to leave one family to live with another as expected?
The narrator claims that there are few private disputes in Utopia, which "observation" doesn't correspond to any human society that has ever existed in the course of history.
Granted, More's Utopia is partly a thought experiment--but one imagines that a thought experiment would include some way to enforce the expected social customs/structure. Faced with how often human beings would fall short in More's Utopia, how could it possibly be kept going as described by the narrator?
There are only two ways: totalitarianism or stigma/condemnation.
More falls back on a combination. The ultimate punishment is in fact death--first, the malefactor (breaker of customs) is placed into slavery (from which the malefactor can be pardoned), but if the prisoner/slave continues to rebel, the slave is killed. (How slaves are monitored is bypassed: the necessary number of guards is never addressed.)
Guess all us homebodies will have to go live in one of the colonies (thank goodness!).
Many utopias disguise this inherent bullying with assumptions of compliance. They then rave about harmony and beautiful vistas, rather like small-minded American idealists on a boat ride being ushered about by bored Soviet hospitality managers. Oh, my, everything looks so nice--how can Reagan be so critical of the USSR?!
In Chapter 3 of His in Herland, I have Terry make the following point:
"To be held inside walls without consent is imprisonment, however beautiful the walls or pleasant the food."
In Gilman's Herland, the three men are taken captive by a cohort of tough, athletic women, about forty in number. Terry is carrying a gun but shoots over the women's heads. Interestingly (and I think correctly), Gilman has Terry balk at shooting the women directly. He is a product of his nineteenth-century upper-class culture. "Women and children first" was not quite as common as popular culture likes to argue (on the Titanic, most of the crew simply wanted passengers, any passengers, to get in the lifeboats). But the concept existed. Terry, for all his faults, is a man's man. He won't shoot women. He won't shoot anyone in the back.
I took the guns away since my Terry is somewhat more cool-headed and slightly more ruthless--and is perfectly aware that women can be soldiers.However, I also have my Terry "pull his punches" in
the confrontation with the women. The men have arrived on the island/in
the country, imagining they are tourists who will be shown the
nearest hostelry. The women see them as invaders and behave accordingly.
Terry doesn't want to start an international incident.
Gilman
gives the women a bland, remorseless demeanor, but she also tries to
present them as non-violent. It isn't...force! Oh, no! It's a kind of...herding...
Gilman is a good writer--a point I will refer back to later--and I want to give her her dues. But Terry is my truthsayer and the truth is...Taking people captive is taking people captive.
Bullying is bullying.
It's jealousy and small-mindedness under a veneer of benevolent righteousness.
Likewise, taking people captive--while it might be justified--doesn't transform into something else simply because it is labeled
something else. Violent or not, justified or not, the women ignore the
men's human rights and put them in the equivalent of prison.
In Herland, Van, the social scientist, tries to to explain everything (away); Jeff, the chivalrous, well, boob, thinks the women are pure and noble simply for being women. Both try to excuse the women's behavior by labeling it something else. Only Terry sees it for what it is--and he respects it.
Elizabeth Bathory |
As my Terry states in the next chapter:
"Hopefully, the women’s agenda wouldn’t entail screwing us before chopping off our entrails or sending us on suicidal missions against a prowling enemy or playing games with our disemboweled guts or mounting our decapitated heads on spikes."
My Terry knows more history that Gilman's Terry. Everybody
has the capacity to be nasty. Someone doesn't instantly stop being a
bully because that someone is female or the upholder of a utopia.
Chapter 3
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