Genre History and Ideology in Dystopian Literature, 1887–1924

Abstract Although it acquired critical mass only at the end of the 19th century, dystopian fiction would essentially displace its utopian counterpart throughout the 20th century, particularly in terms of cultural resonance and popularity. The reasons for its precipitous rise are multiple. First, the faith in progress underpinning utopianism declined drastically in the last decades of the 19th century, largely because of the decline of the political self-confidence of the ruling classes and the rising fear of working-class self-organization and militancy. This is evinced in the coalescence, within ruling-class ideology, of the view of life as a relentless struggle for survival; the preoccupation with degeneration and decadence; rising anxieties about masculinity, sexuality, and the sustainability of Victorian gender roles; foreign invasion scares; fears of imperial decline; and even cosmological visions of entropy and heat death. Second, the advancement of the process of what Marx calls “real subsumption” meant the increasing disappearance of enclaves of pre-capitalist productive relations and hence the waning of sources of inspiration for utopian alternatives. Finally, by the early 20th century, dystopias had sufficiently decoupled themselves from their utopian antitypes to accommodate the psychological interiority, dynamic temporality, and complex grasp of subjectivity proper to the novel, unlike utopias, which were never able to adapt to this culturally hegemonic form. While a grasp of the historical, structural, and formal conditions of the rise of dystopian fiction is necessary, it is equally important to clarify the relation of the genre to both anti-utopia and utopia. Unlike anti-utopia, which is driven by the ideological negation of utopian premises, dystopia is exclusively fictional and narrative in nature; and while anti-utopia negates utopia(nism) as its universal negation or contrary, dystopia is a negation of specific utopian premises. Thus, dystopian fiction is best grasped in terms of its relative proximity to or distance from an anti-utopian horizon. On the other hand, the evolution of dystopian fiction shows that the critical premises of what could be described as the symmetry, reversibility, and complementarity theses regarding the relationship between dystopia and utopia have limited value. In the 20th century, dystopian fictions break free from the generic and formal boundaries of their utopian counterparts. While there are clearly several different varieties of dystopian fiction emerging in the late 19th century, the anti-socialist and anti-statist dystopia represents both a popular variant and one that would shape the character of the classic dystopias of the first half of the 20th century. The basic ideological grammar of such dystopias was extensively developed in the fiction of Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky, who represents the most philosophically and psychologically rich exploration of anti-utopian and anti-socialist fictional possibilities. Fin-de-siècle dystopias demonstrate the initial dependence of the genre on utopian generic conventions, stylistic features, and concrete references to utopian precursors, even if they attack different aspects of utopian socialist ideology. The excessive power of the utopian socialist state is at the center of their projections of depressing uniformity, lack of individual personality and initiative, economic stagnation, and repression of dissent in future, socialist societies. Tied to such excessive power is a second axis of critique, which concerns the state’s role in engineering the dissolution of the family, the subversion of traditional gender roles, and the threat against normative sexuality. While early 20th-century innovators reshape the genre formally and stylistically, introducing the crucial element of readerly estrangement, the ideological content of their texts remains tethered to the anti-utopian ideological grammar introduced by Dostoevsky and developed in terms of its implications for gender, the family, and sexuality in turn-of-the-century dystopian fictions.