In Other Worlds - Margaret Eleanor Atwood [33]
The second part of the thesis was called “The Nature of Power” and was devoted to an examination of the different kinds of societies associated with these two types of female figures—“good” societies, which were always connected to jolly agriculturalists like the hobbits and/or with woodland activities like those of the elvish folk headed up by Galadriel in The Lord of the Rings, and “bad” societies, which were not only disagreeable tyrannies full of Orcs and other nasties but highly industrialized and polluting. The bad societies were destructive toward nature and its creatures, especially trees, thus giving us one of the most satisfying scenes in The Lord of the Rings: the revenge of the treeish Ents. (Though in Tolkien’s work, as in many fictional worlds from The Wonderful Wizard of Oz to Harry Potter, there are hostile trees as well.)
Thus when I went to see the movie Avatar I knew exactly where I was. I was (a) in a Royal Academy exhibition called Victorian Fairy Painting, with the giant luminous plants, the scantily clothed people with big ears, and so forth; and (b) in my own thesis of the 1960s, with the sin of Tree-of-Life burning, the supernatural female figures, the bad machine-makers and forest-despoilers, and the whole ball of wax.
I never finished my thesis, since I got diverted by novel-publication and film-script writing around 1969–70; but in the course of riffling through obscure books that, at that time, nobody but me was interested in, I discovered lots and lots of utopias. The nineteenth century, especially the second half of it, was so cluttered up with them that Gilbert and Sullivan wrote a parody operetta called Utopia Limited. I also discovered—beginning around the turn of the century but gathering steam as the twentieth century progressed, if progressed is the word—a strain of increasingly darker and more horrifying dystopias.
Why this change? In the nineteenth century, there had been many rapid technological, scientific, and medical changes—improved sewer systems and sanitation, antiseptics such as carbolic acid, anesthesia, vaccination, advances in transportation and manufacturing, and many more. The future looked set to continue in this ever-rosier direction, or as Tennyson’s fiery young idealist put it in his poem “Locksley Hall,” “Let the great world spin forever down the ringing grooves of change.” (The metaphor came from trains, but Tennyson hadn’t looked very closely at the tracks: he thought they were concave.)
The nineteenth century’s positive utopias were inspired, as well, by various radical social thinkers, including William Cobbett and Karl Marx, and by Christian socialists such as Charles Kingsley and John Ruskin. Many people still really believed that humankind was almost perfectible if only society could change the way it was organized. People wrote utopias—such as William Morris’s arts-and-crafts socialistic News from Nowhere or Edward Bellamy’s technically advanced utopia Looking Backward—because they really did think that humankind could do better than the inequality, social injustice, vice, dirt, disease, and squalor the writers witnessed all around them. Their utopias are versions of the Before-and-After makeovers you used to see in women’s magazines. Before, a sloppy, sad, run-down failure; but add a nifty haircut, flattering wardrobe, more healthful diet, well-applied eyeshadow, and look! A smiling, energetic, and sexier whole different person! (Though if the whole