Erewhon: 150th Anniversary Edition Page 2
first, the New Zealand years and a short period thereafter during which he champions Darwin as a liberator; then, disillusion, reversal of opinion, personal estrangement from Darwin, and finally a thirty years’ war beginning in the later 1870’s [sic] and ending only with death, in 1902.8
While the three-decade “war” that Jones describes occurred after the publication of Erewhon, embedded in Butler’s text is evidence of early anxieties in which effects of natural selection over time and the looming rise of superior machine intelligence are connected.
Before we explore this further, however, it might be useful to briefly place Erewhon in the context of New Zealand utopian thought. The presentation of New Zealand as a utopian destination in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century was based on a number of factors, including isolation, economic opportunity, and political radicalism. In many ways, this advertised the country as a desirable destination, encouraging migration and settlement.9 It was a way of thought which stuck. The utopian scholar Lyman Tower Sargent considers that “utopianism is central to the creation of New Zealand’s identity as a nation,”10 and this centrality is reflected in the national literature. A broad survey of New Zealand utopian literature is beyond the scope of this introduction, but Erewhon has two close contemporaries and it is interesting to consider the similarities—and the differences—between them. These three utopias were all published within a span of seventeen years. Erewhon was the first, and admittedly it is the stand-out of the three. It follows the story of Higgs, a twenty-two-year-old worker on a South Island sheep station—only a little younger than his author was when he did the same. In Higgs’ explorations, he finds a barely navigable route through the Southern Alps and subsequently discovers the land of Erewhon, a satirical construct in which Butler’s latent anxieties about evolution are extended to often-ludicrous lengths.
Similarly, The Great Romance (1881)11, written by the anonymous author known as “the Inhabitant,” shares Butler’s focus on potential future technologies. The protagonist, the fifty-six-year-old John Hope, wakes from an experimental sleep to a future where telepathy is common and space travel has just begun to transport people, soon to include Hope himself, to Venus. The Great Romance consists of two novellas that were published separately; both volumes survived only as single copies in the Alexander Turnbull and Hocken Libraries.12 The existence of a third potential volume is unproven, although the narrative does appear to want a more substantial conclusion than the second novella currently provides.
Finally, Anno Domini 2000, or Woman’s Destiny (1889)13 by New Zealand premier Sir Julius Vogel (1835–1899, and the man for whom our national science fiction awards are named) is a radical feminist text for its time, albeit one whose prose has been described, with some justification, as “abysmally stilted.”14 Vogel, through the character of twenty-three-year-old Hilda Fitzherbert, expressed his own political goals of women’s education and suffrage. There is no character out of time or place in Anno Domini 2000; any criticism of the utopian society at the centre of the text must therefore come from characters who are deeply familiar with it. Such criticism is not especially forthcoming. Anno Domini 2000 is a utopian romance that is, even more than its predecessors, deeply uncritical about the colonial “empire of United Britain,” which is “the most powerful empire on the globe” with no indication “of any tendency to weakness or decay.”15 Indeed, the praise for that empire, and for its young, handsome Emperor, is positively slavish.
It is difficult to look past the fact that all three authors constructed their utopias through the lens of a colonial mindset. This had inescapable effects on the resulting utopias, focused as they were on the possible futures (or alternate presents, in the case of Butler) that could be achieved by settler societies—particularly white settler societies come out of Europe and onto already-inhabited land. The minimisation of Indigenous peoples in all of these New Zealand utopias is not an accident and will be discussed more fully later.
This specific example of political conservatism is notable, especially considering that the positioning of New Zealand as a utopian setting is of relatively long standing. It is not just the geographical isolation mentioned above that sets people to dreaming. New Zealand has an acknowledged history of political experimentation and radical policy reform: the phrases “state experiments” and “social laboratory” have been commonly used in the political and social history of this country. Arguably, this makes it the perfect place for a utopia . . . although a utopia for whom, and in what capacity?
“And this made me wretched; for I cannot bear having much to do with people who think differently from myself”16
So thinks Higgs in Chapter IX, “To the Metropolis,” as he begins to learn about the unfamiliar customs of the people of Erewhon. In this he is not alone; such a response to an alien way of life is not unusual within science fiction, even if it illustrates an attitude that audiences are not meant to admire. Science fiction is the literary genre that has perhaps the most interest in interrogating conformity—if only because it gives characters something to rebel against and audiences a means of predicting if such rebellion will be necessary. Technological advances are opportunities for social change: consider the development of birth control, genetic engineering, or artificial intelligence, and how each has garnered a multitude of responses, from the most reactionary conservative to the most determined progressive. Change comes with conflict, but utopian expressions of science fiction can tend towards the static. No matter what revolutions are necessary to attain utopia, once arrived it is typically both peaceful and stable. That, perhaps, is the most unrealistic thing about them: for an entire community to share in the same utopian vision requires that all populations within that utopia must be sufficiently satisfied with their positions in that utopia to continue supporting it. On the one hand, the prospect of living in a society that is, for everyone, the ideal is a profoundly optimistic one. On the other, this can be a very sinister form of optimism, and one that is, in practice, all too easy to build upon exclusion.
The implication, certainly within these three New Zealand-based utopias, is that the utopian population is a relatively homogeneous one with strongly shared cultural beliefs. There is little place for the competing individual priorities of pluralism, challenges which many of us face in the world today. I find it quietly amusing that Erewhon begins on a sheep station, given that sheep have the popular reputation of being mindless followers. Compounding my amusement is Butler’s description of a shearing shed, which is “built somewhat on the same plan as a cathedral, with aisles on either side full of pens for the sheep.”17 The sheep in the cathedral, penned into a place of imposed order and orthodoxy. Is this not the perfect, cutting setting for a satirical utopia that wishes to criticise a specific kind of cultural conformity?
That cultural conformity, in Erewhon, is foreshadowed by ecology. Butler’s emigration to New Zealand saw him experience a surreally familiar environment. New Zealand is an isolated island nation that was the last major landmass to be settled by humans. As such, the flora and fauna of the country are distinctive; with the advent of European colonisation, however, and the widespread transformation of the land to make it fit for agriculture, that distinctiveness began to wane. The colonists introduced plants and animals from their homelands, in an attempt to recreate both their culture and landscapes, giving their new settlement a sense of familiarity. It is of particular interest that Christchurch, the major settlement closest to Butler’s own farming adventure, has the common reputation of being “more English than England.” Butler may have travelled thousands of miles from his place of birth, but the country he came to was being deliberately shaped by colonists such as himself to conform to the memories of the home left behind.
In Butler’s time, the transformation was well-begun but had not yet reached its peak, and it is interesting to read his book A First Year in Canterbury Settlement (1863)18 and witness his complex and often-inconsistent responses to native and
introduced ecologies. An instance of this can be seen in his lamentation regarding the slaughter of the New Zealand quail (Coturnix novaezelandiae, now extinct). Butler calls the bird a “poor little thing” and blames introduced cats for having “driven the little creatures nearly off the face of the earth,”19 while simultaneously introducing yet another cat in order to keep down the also-introduced rodents on his station. There’s no guarantee, after all, that the cat will stick to rats, but as Butler comments, “I am very fond of cats,”20 and their ruthless destruction of endemic wildlife like the quail, however pitiful, is an example of natural struggle where “all are not of equal strength, and the weaker must go to the wall.”21 On the whole, Butler’s preference is biased towards what he is used to. He denies the prejudice, but nevertheless states that the flora and fauna of his new home are “decidedly inferior in beauty and interest” to that which he left behind and that “anyone, on arriving here, would receive a similar impression with myself.”22
Erewhon opens with Higgs working on a sheep station; this is a clear analogue for Mesopotamia Station, much of the life of which Butler describes in A First Year in Canterbury Settlement. (The station still exists today, although substantial portions of it have been reserved as conservation land.) The transformation of the existing ecology in favour of one perceived as more economically productive limits biological diversity within the bounds of the station. Mesopotamia Station’s land and its native biota are transformed not only by the presence of introduced species but by the practice of burning vegetation. In A First Year in Canterbury Settlement, Butler advocates regular burnings of the land during the process of setting up a sheep station: “The delicately green and juicy grass which springs up after burning is far better for sheep than the rank and dry growth of summer after it has been withered by the winter’s frosts.”23 This regular burning not only favours fast-growing vegetation which can feed sheep but also limits other plant life, reducing ecological diversity in the farmed environment. While Māori also used fire as a hunting and land clearance technique—including in the South Island high country, reducing forest cover and encouraging the spread of the tussock grassland that would prove so alluring to sheep farmers—New Zealand trees are often not fire-adapted, and are therefore ill-suited to a quick recovery after burning.24 The subsequent repeated firing of land by farmers such as Butler (to be kept up until there are sufficient sheep to “keep your feed so closely cropped that it will do without it”25), combined with that grazing, was an ongoing disturbance that discouraged diverse regrowth.
Migration to this manufactured landscape, and to the way of life this landscape requires, prefigures the second migration from sheep station to Erewhon. There, the “straightening” that punishes nonconformist behaviour amongst the people of Erewhon is less ecological than cultural, as counter-opinions are weeded out in order to produce a deliberate monoculture. Notable, too, is that the ecology of Erewhon itself has also been introduced by its settlers. When Higgs first arrives in that utopian nation, he is pleased to notice that “nearly all the plants and birds were very like common English ones: thus, there was a robin, and a lark, and a wren, and daisies, and dandelions; not quite the same as the English, but still very like them.”26 The experience of this familiar ecology, Higgs thinks, is “not at all like going to Japan or China, where everything that one sees is strange.”27 It is, however, extremely reminiscent of his time on the station: “I could have almost fancied myself in a shepherd’s hut upon my master’s sheep-run.”28 Erewhonian ecology, then, is very like the ecology introduced into the New Zealand landscape by English colonists in an attempt to recreate the familiar, and to impose a familiar way of life on an unfamiliar landscape.
This attitude reflects the extreme political insularity of the three New Zealand settler utopias referenced here. Even Anno Domini 2000, the utopia most interested in international relations, is concerned primarily with conflict between the (largely white) colonies of European countries. That shared insularity, in Erewhon, extends to the almost-complete ignorance of other cultures and other nations. This is apparent even when Higgs leaves the sheep station and discovers the nation of Erewhon, filled as it is with people who are at least as racist towards the Indigenous population as he is, if not more so. A society built on biological and cultural conformity, determined to recreate itself in new places, is hardly one to be overly concerned with the peoples and the cultures it may be displacing, and this is certainly the case for Butler.
There is a single Indigenous character in Erewhon, and the presentation of Kahabuka, more commonly known as Chowbok, is not flattering. It should be noted that neither “Kahabuka” nor “Chowbok” are Māori names or words; Butler apparently doesn’t consider the character to merit even the most basic courtesy of accuracy.29 A Māori worker on the sheep station that also employs Higgs, Kahabuka embodies all the prejudicial stereotypes so frequently ascribed to people of colour. Higgs describes him as an ugly, cowardly drunk, but when he runs away instead of accompanying Higgs into Erewhon, frightened by the enormous and hideous statues that stand on the borders of the Erewhonian nation, it seems he has good reason to do so. These monstrous creations were “designed to propitiate the gods of deformity and disease,”30 and there had been historical expeditions mounted by the Erewhonians to capture Māori and sacrifice them to the statues in order to “avert ugliness and disease from the Erewhonians themselves.”31 That practice, which Higgs describes as “detestable,”32 has apparently fallen into disuse. This is partly because the practice of propitiation has fallen out of use, presumably because the accepted response to ill-health has evolved into a legal rather than religious one. It is also, implicitly, due to a lack of opportunity, as no one from Erewhon has encountered any outsider for a substantial period of time. One would argue that this is hardly surprising if they killed off anyone they found, although the Erewhonians appear to concede that, should someone as ugly as Kahabuka wander into Erewhon at the time that Higgs does, segregation from the rest of the Erewhonian population would likely be deemed sufficient. Higgs himself is in no danger of either segregation or sacrifice, with his blond European appearance conforming far more to the national taste.
The treatment of Indigenous peoples in Erewhon, then, is limited—it covers only a few pages—but is distinctly unpleasant, not to mention flat-out racist. Erewhon is not the only culprit here; the absence of Indigenous peoples in all three of these New Zealand utopias is glaring. It is an absence characterised, essentially, by indifference. There was no perceived need to address the position of Māori in any utopian future, as nineteenth-century writers believed them to be dying out. Māori academic Mason Durie summarises the situation in the second half of the nineteenth century, quoting an 1874 edition of the New Zealand Herald, which claimed, “That the native race is dying out in New Zealand there is, of course, no doubt. [. . .] The rate at which they are now disappearing points to their extinction in an exceedingly brief period.”33 Durie, assessing contemporary demographic data, concedes that “there was every reason to believe that survival had come to an end and that the next millennium, if not the next century, would see the passing of the Māori.”34 Butler was certainly labouring under the delusion that Māori were not long for this world. He states, in his A First Year in Canterbury Settlement, that “the Maoris in this island are almost a thing of the past,”35 and that “there are few Maoris here; they inhabit the north island, and are only in small numbers, and degenerate in this, so may be passed over unnoticed.”36
Fortunately, the predictions of the time proved to be grossly inaccurate, and should another New Zealand utopia be written today, one hopes that it would be far more diverse, and far more inclusive, than any of its nineteenth-century predecessors. However, it is not enough to say that the “utopian” assumption of increased racial homogeneity is situated in how white people perceived the demographic realities of New Zealand at the time. There are two corollaries that must be acknowledged. The first is that, had the extinction of
New Zealand’s Indigenous peoples occurred, it would have even further entrenched the primacy of settler culture in this country—a primacy that is even now very well-entrenched. This would have significantly reduced cultural diversity and increased the probability of a resulting monoculture. It’s notable that there is no real sense of loss in any of the utopias at this assumed probability of extinction. The indifference is chilling.
This leads to the second corollary: utopias, with their emphasis on conformity, are positive invitations to rebellion. This is underlined by the frequent choice as narrator as an essential outsider, someone who was raised outside of the utopia in question and who is subsequently able to consider it more critically than those who have never known anything else. Higgs enters Erewhon after scrambling over a mountain range that isolates it from the outside world. Hope, protagonist of The Great Romance, takes an experimental sleeping potion and wakes far in the future before travelling via spaceship to the planet Venus. There is no such outside figure in Anno Domini 2000, admittedly, but authorial choice remains. Vogel was very much interested in creating a utopia that would critique the limited roles allocated to women in the society that he lived in. The Inhabitant posits a society where lies are impossible and telepathy ensures a peaceful, law-abiding society. And Butler, of course, uses satire to critique the influence of Darwinian thought and natural selection and his complex, slowly changing relationship with these ideas. Utopian authors choose which aspects of society to interrogate, and to rebel against. Even if Vogel and the Inhabitant agreed with the New Zealand Herald, and with Butler, that Māori were headed for extinction, they could have chosen to posit a future where that was not so.
Neither of them was interested. Nor was Butler.
Instead, the remnants of Indigenous peoples that survive within the texts are treated distinctly as the Other: Chowbok is routinely described in terms of savagery and inferiority. In Anno Domini 2000, Antarctica is inhabited by Pacific Islanders who are covered in hair as if they had actual pelts, and who are considered “docile, peaceful, intelligent people,” but nevertheless much more “unsophisticated” than the European settlers of New Zealand.37 Finally, the Venusians of The Great Romance are literal aliens ripe for exploitation after human colonisation of their planet, and have been read as a metaphor for the otherwise-absent Māori population within the text.38 Furthermore, The Great Romance considers only some populations advanced enough to attain telepathy, and it is sadly unsurprising that the incapable populations consist of people of colour. These people, note, are also dying out: as one white character notes, “in proportion we are ten to one, and soon shall be a hundred.”39