Utopian Ecocriticism: Naturalizing Nature in Thomas More’s Utopia

Abstract

Thomas More’s Utopia (1516) has not received a great deal of serious ecocritical attention, despite its representation of a purportedly ideal environment in which nature and society exist in perfect harmony.1 This can be explained in part by the preindustrial character of an early modern economy, which did not have to contend with large-scale exploitation of natural resources, nor with the pollution of air, water, and soil that troubles ecocritics today. Yet one would think that the early modern terrain, not yet blighted by the mediating factors of industry, and permeated with literary, religious, and popular metaphors of nature-culture kinship, would offer ecocritics an especially fertile territory from which potentially to recover a harmonious accord between nature and society. Concepts such as the Great Chain of Being, based on a set of correspondences between nature and human society, although interrogated vigorously by Marxists, feminists, and new historicists to the point that many feel they are now permanently discredited, offer ecocriticism a model for ecological kinship between a widely used early modern set of metaphors and the real. One could say that if Marxists, feminists, and new historicists worked hard to denaturalize nature, then ecocritics are trying very hard to renaturalize nature, and, in the process, to naturalize aspects of human society. This, at least, seems to be what Gabriel Egan recommends in his Green Shakespeare when he boldly claims that E.M.W. Tillyard’s Elizabethan World Picture might “in some surprising ways be objectively true.”2