Social Utopia in Victorian Literature (based on the novel by W.G. Hudson "The Crystal Age")

Khasieva Mariya Alanovna ORCID: 0000-0002-0179-1874 PhD in Philosophy Associate Professor; Department of Social Sciences and Humanities and Technologies; Federal State Budgetary Educational Institution of Higher Education 'National Research Moscow State University of Civil Engineering' Yaroslavskoe shosse, 26, Moscow, 129337, Russia m9288@inbox.ru Other publications by this author

TShovrebova Bella Filushovna PhD in Philology Associate Professor; Department of Humanities and Natural Sciences; Institute of International Economic Relations 35 Mosfilmovskaya str., office 503-b, Moscow, 119330, Russia tshovrebova@imes.su

The subject of the study is to determine the main features and vectors of development of the Victorian utopia based on the analysis of W.G. Hudson's novel "The Crystal Age". For a long time in the era of antiquity and the Renaissance, one of the main aspects of the development of utopia was the correlation of an ideal society with socio-political, economic transformations and technological discoveries. ^[15] The New European utopia was in many ways a continuation of this trend, increasingly bringing together the social and technological vectors of utopianism, when social well-being was directly correlated by thinkers (Condorcet, A. Turgot, I.G. Herder, etc.) with scientific and technological progress, urbanization and mechanization of labor. ^[5]

W.G. Hudson's novel "The Crystal Age" is a combination of various genres of utopian literature (pastoral utopia, apocalliptic utopia, escapist utopia), and therefore is of particular interest for analysis. The article uses a comprehensive methodological approach combining a descriptive method with a semiotic analysis of the text of the novel, and analyzes the research literature on Victorian utopian literature. The scientific novelty of the research is determined by the little-studied nature of W.G. Hudson's novel "The Crystal Age" in modern cultural and philosophical discourse, despite the fact that the novel contains ideas that were not widespread in the Victorian era, characteristic to a much greater extent for modern post-industrial society (ecosophical consumption strategies that exclude satiation and waste of resources). It is this feature of the novel that determines the relevance of its study in modern socio-philosophical and cultural contexts, and explains the interest in it on the part of some researchers of modern culture. ^{[7, 11]} At the same time, the novel lacks a technotopian view of scientific discoveries and technical inventions as a guarantee of social well-being.

The Victorian utopia belongs to the period of the second half of the 19th century and combines the features of New European progressivism with the cult of nature, characteristic of sentimentalism and romanticism, and also anticipates some utopian ideas of the coming post-industrial era. Utopias of the "pastoral" and "apocalyptic" genre occupy a separate place, without being included in this process. Pastoral utopias for the most part represented a reinterpretation in the spirit of futurology of the traditional genre of literary pastoral, especially popular in Europe in the 16th century. Typical examples of pastoral were the novels "Arcadia" by J. Sannazzaro, "Astraea" by O. d'Urfe. ^[8] The general trend of pastoral in literature is the poetization of life in the bosom of nature, the spread of rustic aesthetics and the glorification of the traditional way of life, with the denial of technization and urbanization. ^[14] In the 18th century, the decline of the traditional genre of pastoral was accompanied by the formation of similar trends in the literature of sentimentalism and the development of a rustic style in fine art, design and architecture. ^[17]

The development of the genre of apocalyptic fiction, in which utopia can be conditionally distinguished as a certain subsection, refers to the period of the early 19th century and correlates with the processes of urbanization and the technization of the way of life. ^[9] A distinctive feature of this genre is the depiction of post-apocalyptic reality, the reconstruction of scenarios of the existence of the world after some global catastrophe, which inevitably and irrevocably led to global changes in the way of life. ^[12] In the 19th century, utopian works of various genres were often mixed, combining elements of different types. Victorian literature as a whole was characterized by a variety of genres. Among many other areas of fiction during this period, the direction of the "family novel" began to actively develop, combining psychologism and the writing of realistic literature. The works, which are examples of a family romance, reflect elements of sentimentalist literature. The development of elements of sentimentalism in Victorian literature took place in certain aspects: for example, some studies claim that the cult of the hearth, family values, motherhood and childhood in Victorian literature were considered as a continuation of the cult of romantic love. ^[20]

An example of the described genre mixing is the novel by W.G. Hudson "The Crystal Age", which at the same time is a reflection of sentimentalist intentions in literature and belongs to the Victorian literary tradition. First published in 1887, it occupies a separate place in the utopian literature of the 19th century. Capable of being considered both a utopia and a dystopia at the same time, it combines the features of apocalyptic and pastoral utopias, differing greatly in its content from other works of a similar genre and era. Hudson sees the main factor of social change not as technical inventions or scientific discoveries, but as the restructuring of the very foundations of human community and natural attitudes in human nature. According to the plot of the novel, the main character, waking up from a loss of consciousness, possibly due to a fall from a height, finds himself in a strange place covered with layers of dirt, in half-rotted clothes. He realizes that he has spent a huge amount of time in oblivion. Then he encounters a group of people who look and behave very strangely, enters into communication with them and realizes that these are people living in a new world for him according to completely different rules unknown to him. The main innovation that distinguishes the new world of the novel from the usual way of life of a person is the change in the social structure: people live in houses that represent something between a community and a family, but at the same time only one couple in the community can produce offspring, the patriarch and the matriarch, or the Father of the house and the Mother of the house. Most people in the house have fraternal-sisterly relations, they do not form a family, which fully corresponds to the eusocial form of organization of colonies of social insects (bees, ants, etc.). In many ways, this plot feature of the described utopia is explained by the fact that, being a naturalist and ornithologist, Hudson had an undoubted interest in how biological The foundations of human nature have an impact on the social structure and way of life of society. Therefore, in the novel he conducts a similar experiment, changing the very sociobiological foundations of human life and the basic principles of human nature. Faced with this world order, the main character feels surprise and rejection: he does not understand how these people can agree to live their lives without wanting to experience romantic feelings and erotic experiences, to have their own spouses and children. Hudson's utopia quite canonically and traditionally depicts the conflict between the desire for personal happiness and freedom of individuals and the idea of universal well-being, a conflict that Plato resolved in favor of the idea of public and state welfare. Residents of communities in the "Crystal Age" are distinguished by absolute honesty, calmness and peaceful friendliness in their relationships, they do not know quarrels and conflicts, because they do not know jealousy and envy, they are distinguished by "crystal" purity of thoughts. The author associates the possibility of such a dispassionate and peaceful coexistence with the absence of private property and a nuclear family. This plot motif must also be considered in the context of the concept of utopian socialism, which was actively spreading in the European culture of the 19th century and also implied the rejection of private property and the traditional model of family and child rearing. ^{[2, 18]}

The novel also presents the idea of the incompatibility of public welfare and personal happiness of people, because as he integrates into society, the hero begins to experience more and more the torments of unrequited love and suffering from the realization of the impossibility of fulfilling his desires. The problem of the perception of women in society is reflected in the image of the Mother at home. In the novel, this heroine is presented ambivalently: from the very beginning of the narrative, she is depicted as seriously ill and does not leave her room, communicating with only a few members of the community, but at the same time actively influences the lives of other characters and the course of events in the novel. Physical concealment, isolation from the general "profane" life are complemented in this image by the motive of spiritual selectivity: The Mother of the House has access to sacred knowledge, understands the true meaning of the traditions of the community and is responsible not only for procreation, but also for the transmission of cultural memory, moral and religious foundations of society. Despite the fact that in the novel the main celebrations of the inhabitants of the community are connected precisely with the feminine principle as a symbol of fertility, abundance, the social system depicted in the novel cannot be called matriarchy: the head of the House is the Father, who is not surrounded by such an aura of mystery and deals with most economic and administrative issues, as well as administers justice. The mother of the House is the only one who can veto his decisions. However, this is not due to the assertion of her supreme position, but rather to the distribution of roles familiar to Victorian society: the father, embodying the masculine principle, is endowed with punishing power, while the Mother, personifying the feminine principle, bears mercy and mitigation of punishments.

Hudson also reflected in many ways in his work the transformation of cultural and moral values of 19th-century British society. The changes in the values and principles of existence of Victorian society were closely related to the rethinking of the role of women in social development that occurred during this period. On the one hand, the Victorian morality of the 19th century largely negates the mores and socio-cultural attitudes of previous eras: the values of libertinage of the 17th and 18th centuries, most widespread in the aristocratic environment, are replaced by Victorian values, which are most correlated with the bourgeois and petty-bourgeois strata of society. ^[1] On the other hand, industrialization, urbanization and the technization of people's lives in the 19th century inevitably changed the position of women in society: the emergence of a number of new professions, the gradual replacement of a traditional, multi-generational family with a nuclear one could not but affect the importance and functions of women in the family and society as a whole. Victorian ideas about family values were determined by the beginning of legal protection of childhood (the first laws restricting the use of child labor, as well as the labor of pregnant women and establishing rules for the protection of workers' health were adopted in Britain in the 30s of the 19th century) and the cult of the mother woman, the keeper of the hearth. Focusing on the reproductive value of marriage, as well as increasing the value of marital fidelity in the eyes of society, was accompanied by a significant transformation of attitudes towards human physicality in the Victorian era, leading to the spread of the prohibition of nudity and the exaltation of the spiritual over the bodily in romantic relationships. Even in the sentimentalist literature of the 18th century, the archetypal image of the "virgin in distress" finds a new refraction: in S. Richardson's novel Clarissa, the main character, who is a model of virtue, is subjected to violence by a Ladies' Man, but even after that refuses to obey him and act contrary to her moral principles and dies. The heroine of another Richardson novel, Pamela, or Rewarded Virtue, reveals the same moral fortitude, but, unlike Clarissa, is convinced of the chastity of her persecutor and enters into a legal marriage with him. The key feature of these plots is the active role of the heroines themselves: if the "maidens in distress" depicted in myths or chivalric novels passively expected salvation from male heroes and often themselves acted only as a trophy—reward to the winner (Andromeda, saved by Perseus, Elsa, saved by Lohengrin, etc.), then in the novel In the 18th and 19th centuries, the heroines actively showed their will and independently made decisions affecting their lives. This plot element is then reproduced in many famous novels of Victorian literature: for example, Jane Eyre in the novel of the same name by Charlotte Bronte, faced with deception on the part of her fiance, Edward Rochester, runs away from him, not wanting to compromise her ideas about moral duty. ^[16] The plot motive of the active choice on the part of the female character in Hudson's novel is not presented in the usual way: significant decisions in the novel are made by only one female character — the Mother of the House, she takes them primarily for other people, actively influencing their lives, gradually directing their thoughts and desires. ^[7]

Hudson's utopia is interpreted by some modern researchers as an ecosophical and techno-philosophical novel, since this utopia significantly rethinks society's attitude to labor, production and consumption, as well as society's attitude to nature and technology. When describing the crystallite society, the hero emphasizes that there is no division into male and female occupations and types of work, but everyone does their best work, most appropriate to their abilities and physical condition. There is no money in the Crystallite society, but at the same time the cost of labor and material goods is calculated differently than in the Victorian society. Having decided to stay in the new world, the hero finds himself forced to work in the field for a whole year to pay for the clothes that members of the community sew for him. These costumes (there are only two of them) are described in chapter 10: "Finally, the joyful day came when I had to, at least outwardly, stop being an alien, because when I returned from the field at noon and entered my cell, I saw my beautiful new clothes — two full suits, except for underwear: one, of the most restrained color, was intended only for working hours; but the second, intended for home, attracted my attention to a greater extent." ^{[10, p. 75]} The book pays much attention to the description of these costumes: their color and finish were selected individually by tailors, in accordance with the characteristics of the hero's appearance, his eye and hair color, and exactly in accordance with his size, while they were made for many months, which by the standards of the hero's world meant low labor efficiency. But in the course of the narrative, it seems that such slow production rates are not associated with the technological backwardness of the Crystallite society, but with a certain attitude towards consumption processes: in society, not the quantity of consumed products is most appreciated, but its quality, consumption is considered not as a process of immediate fulfillment of all desires and the joy of one's own vanity, but as satisfaction needs without satiation and excess, without wasting resources. This idea fully corresponds to the ecosophical strategy of the post-industrial era, but is completely out of character for 19th-century industrialism. The duration of human life in the world of crystallites is much longer than in 19th century London: The father of the house has already turned 200 years old. At the same time, the hero cannot determine what exactly is the reason for this, the way of life of these people, or their very nature. The relationship of the "crystallites" with the environment is generally very peculiar: they all eat exclusively plant food, do not hunt and do not raise cattle for slaughter, although they use animals in agricultural work. Animals are endowed with a special status in the novel, they have an unusually high, almost human intelligence: dogs and horses are fully capable of doing household chores and agricultural work on their own, prompting and reminding people about necessary things. This plot move is reminiscent of the textbook famous novel Gulliver's Travels by D. Swift, where superintelligent creatures that look like horses, Houyhnhnms, were exalted in their moral perfection over the ape-like yehu, who personified human vices and weaknesses. Considering man to be selfish by nature, Swift did not believe in the possibility of the existence of a truly perfect social order,^[3] and therefore his travel novel does not create a picture of an ideal world, rather, it paints and parodies the shortcomings of modern society. Hudson, in his utopia, avoids the misanthropy characteristic of Swift, correlating human vices rather with external, economic, socio-political factors. Hudson portrays people living in a society of crystallists as perfect, freed from the vices of Victorian society and equally beautiful physically and spiritually. In the scene of the protagonist's acquaintance with his beloved Yoletta, there is such a reasoning:

"It's a beautiful name, it sounds so nice that I would like to repeat it all the time," I replied, "and it's fair that you have such a beautiful name because... if I may say so, because you are extraordinarily beautiful. — Yes, but isn't it strange — aren't all people beautiful? I thought of some Londoners from the criminal class, of old women with withered monkey faces and shawls sneaking into or out of inns on street corners; as well as some people of a higher class whom I knew personally, some even in the House of Commons; and I felt that I could not agree with her No matter how much I would like it, without going against my conscience." ^{[10, c. 53]}

During the narrative, the development of the main character's relationship with Yoletta becomes the main element of the plot of the novel, determining its completion: gradually, the hero's feelings become deeper and more serious, while Yoletta is not ready to reciprocate such an alien and incomprehensible feeling for their world. Feeling unable to be content with the modest role of a brother in relation to his beloved, the hero begins to try to put an end to his suffering: after finding a mysterious bottle in the library with an inscription promising deliverance from the burden of years, diseases and passions, he decides to drink the contents, hoping to heal from his feelings. However, the liquid drunk turns out to be poison. At the same time, before giving up the ghost, the hero manages to find out from Yoletta, who came to the library, that his Mother at home was preparing him and Yoletta for the role of future successors and successors of the family, that Yoletta herself, without showing it, began to feel feelings for him, and their mutual love was to become the basis for the continuation of the life of future generations communities.

At the semiotic level, the plot of the novel contains the antithesis of two types of love inherent in human nature: eros comes into conflict with philia, love involving possession, physical passion and the birth of a new life, opposes friendly, intellectual love. In the Crystallite communities, dispassionate and therefore fruitless relationships are linked. The hero's narration seems to push the reader to the conclusion that it is the reduction, if not the complete expulsion of passionate and life-giving love from the society of Hudson's utopia that causes the slowdown in the pace of his life: the longevity of community members is combined with a low birth rate in the community. Thus, describing the way of life of the Crystallite community, the hero is surprised to note the absence of children: the aged Father and Mother at Home are no longer capable of childbearing, and the rest of the people living in the community are deprived of the right to be spouses and parents. The society depicted in the novel "The Crystal Age" is a vivid example of a combination of the genre of utopia and dystopia, ^[4] since the eusocial structure of the crystallite society denies the principle of equality of all people in their sociobiological nature, as well as the absolute value of human freedom. At the same time, the motives behind this subordination of the individual to society are not related to the eugenic project, as, for example, in Plato's state, but to the opposition of two kinds of love in human relations, with the antithesis in which eros is associated with passions and generates strife and jealousy. This correlation is generally characteristic of Victorian literature, which carries the traditional opposition of reason and feelings in a person.^[11]

L. Mumford calls the harmony of the crystallite society in his book "The History of Utopias" "cold lunar bliss", ^{[6, p. 385]} pointing to the dominance of the idea of universal well-being over the desires and personal interests of community members. Mumford examines Hudson's utopia together with W. Morris's novel "News from Nowhere", which also draws a utopian project of an ideal society, but reveals the problem of optimal social structure in economic and industrial aspects, with a bias towards socialism and libertarianism. ^[19] Mumford defines the similarity of these two utopias in their depiction of the "essence of life" of society in its way and traditions. The problem of social inequality is revealed in utopia in unexpected aspects: people are unequal to each other not in material wealth or origin, but in the importance of their functions in society, while any person, including a foreigner, such as the main character, can take the place of the head of the house. It is noteworthy that Mumford classifies Hudson's utopia as "escape utopias", as opposed to "reconstruction utopias". A distinctive feature of escape utopias is the depiction of a fundamentally different scenario of society's life from the current situation, which often requires a change in human sociobiological nature, while reconstruction utopias focus, as a rule, on changing and improving environmental conditions, urban planning, economic and technological aspects. The utopia of escape in Mumford's understanding is associated with the transfer of the hero to a fundamentally new environment with new conditions, while the utopia of reconstruction involves a program of social and technological improvements, potentially capable of implementation in practice. The world of the "Crystal Age" is a priori unrealistic and understands a significant change in human nature: it is unlikely that the social structure represented there could be widespread in the society of a certain era. In the presence of certain typical features of Victorian literature, Hudson's utopia differs from other utopias of Modern times in a number of ways. First of all, the novel lacks a technotopian view of scientific discoveries and technical inventions as a guarantee of social well-being. In the "Crystal Age", technologies that are ahead of the time of writing are not depicted at all. The basis of the utopia of the "Crystal Age" is the anthroposocial transformation of society, the change of human nature along with the social structure.

The sociophilosophical and sociocultural significance of Hudson's novel is very high, since this work reflects the transformation of social relations, lifestyle and value system of the Victorian era: the changing role of women in society and the family, the desire to harmonize man with the natural environment in conditions of rapid industrialization. In the semiotic field of the novel, it is possible to simultaneously determine the inheritance of certain features of 18th-century sentimentalism and the anticipation of some ideas of the post-industrial future.