Allusion is not Illusion

A Victorian gentleman named Guest is mysteriously transported forward in time to a society less futuristic than one might expect. A utopia of environmental purity, personal freedom, and peace, it is characterized by small communities of rural artisans modeled after Morris' idealized conception of medieval (communal, not feudal) society. There are no nations and no money. Each individual does the work that he or she finds fulfilling, and the products of labor are shared freely. Rather than perfecting labor-saving technology, people have learned to value work and to prize the quality of objects over mass-consumerism. Possessions are few, but beautifully crafted and food is wholesome and plentiful. Sexual relationships are at the discretion of those involved and there are no social mores other than a general concern for the happiness of others.

Morris’ radical beliefs were grounded in aesthetic rather than political or economic ideas. He himself explained his socialist convictions, perhaps flippantly, but not insincerely, I am a socialist partly because I found out that in these days only rich men can have pretty things about them—which doesn’t seem fair to me. In the utopia dreamt of by Morris, the populace will create and enjoy art as part of the aspirations of the people towards the beauty and true pleasure of life.

Morris had become interested in social amelioration soon after entering the university, when he and his close friend Burne-Jones discussed entering monastic life but instead resolved to dedicate themselves to art and make that art a crusade and Holy Warfare against the age. Morris’ early publications, particularly his long poem-story “Defense of Guenevere”, were notable for their rejection of contemporary sexual mores and interest in social justice. At this early point Morris was not yet involved in the socialist movement and his radicalism was by and large camouflaged by the romantic imagery and ornate decorative motifs that characterized his writing and visual arts. During middle age, when he became openly affiliated with the Social-Democratic Federation, he came to focus more and more on the need to create an egalitarian society, which he imagined as resembling the small communities of the Middle Ages, minus the feudalism, violence and poverty.

Morris imagined a future utopian society in which hard work, creative fulfillment, generosity, and personal freedom would be united in an environment of liberation and creativity. For Morris, socialism meant the freedom for individual pleasure, but time and again his examples of the pleasures of the future society return to art. Pleasure, essentially, was the creation of beauty. Morris stated that he did not want art for a few any more than education for a few, or freedom for a few. By this Morris meant not only the possession of art but also its production. Morris believed that the best and most vibrant art was made by cooperative rather than individual effort. He wrote that popular art…is…the art which is made by the co-operation of many minds and hands varying in kind and degree of talent, but all doing their part in due subordination to a great whole, without anyone losing his individuality… This is Morris’ ideal of the fulfilling communal life, in which no one is excluded from artistic production. This point is especially clear in contrast with some of his other fiction writing, such as his last novel, Water of the Wondrous Isles (1897). One of the locales Morris invents in this story is the Isle of Increase Unsaught, alternately named the Isle of Earthly Pleasure; here limitless production occurs without the intervention of the inhabitants, who gain no happiness from their physical resources because they are all prisoners who no longer have the knowledge or ability to create on their own or to even survive without their magical environment.

Morris was, for his era, extraordinarily optimistic about human nature. Many who shared his utopian ideals did so with a more typically Victorian pessimism, in which community, and the peer pressure that accompanied it, was a necessary restraint to man’s negative tendencies. Morris believed that people really enjoyed work as much as he did himself (he typically worked 14 hours a day and eventually died of overwork) and did not see a need for a mechanism to prevent idleness. He championed sexual freedom but thought most people, left to their own devices, would settle down into nuclear families. Women would probably want to be more involved in the domestic sphere, but if some didn't care to that was also fine. Morris does not delve very deeply into economics, which he admitted to having little interest in or understanding of, and this is the main weakness of his socialist theory. Without a concrete mechanism, it is just a beautiful dream.