Problems with Utopia: How Do They Come About?

My Troas backstory connects to the

fantasy world in Kouros Underground.

Utopias almost always have some kind of backstory, though often the backstory is like E. Nesbit's explanation for why the time-traveling children in one of her books can understand languages in the past: "Why pursue the question further? The fact remains [that they could]. You may think what you like." 

Back to the business at hand...

The backstory that I introduce in Chapter 5 of His in Herland (and flesh out in Chapter 14) takes liberties with Gilman's backstory. In sum, I make Herland or Troas a fantasy world rather than an unexplored area of our 2022 world. 

The reason may be self-explanatory. The problem of isolation compelled me to remove the most direct world-building connections. In 2022, what with Google Satellite and so on and so forth, how hidden could a utopia remain? Wouldn't someone come along and tax it? 

So I departed from Gilman's text, but not nearly as much as one would think! Gilman's backstory is that Herland came about when war and various natural disasters shut off the country geographically from the rest of the world. There was a slave revolt. The "would-be masters" (Gilman's phrase) killed off the male overlords, then turned on the women. The remaining women rose up to protect themselves. Eventually, the only people left were "a bunch of hysterical girls and some older slave women" (57). 

"This sounds like Titus Andronicus," Van, the narrator writes, "but that is their account of it" (56-57). (In other words, The fact remains...)

One of Terry's arguments--he is a product of our contemporary age--is that there is absolutely no reason for him to believe the women's account without outside proof. He accepts certain basics after he meets Alim(a), such as reproduction being the result of parthenogenesis. But he is being taught a history in a language he is quickly mastering but only as far as he can with materials and conversations supplied by his captors. Setting aside the problem of history and historical evidence (streamlined narratives are always suspect), why should the women tell the three male invaders the truth anyway? 

Terry would agree with P.J. O'Rourke's point in Holidays in Hell that a bunch of fuzzy liberals being shown carefully selected sites by Soviet Union officials are not going to learn anything  except the official narrative.

Interestingly enough, the "true" version I use--the women escaped Troy when it fell to Agamemnon et al.--matches Gilman's core idea. Archaeologists postulate that the ancient city of Troy was destroyed at one time in battle and at another or around the same time possibly by earthquake. Likewise, some archaeologists trace the myth of Atlantis to a volcanic eruption on Santorini that destroyed, quite literally, half the island. 

The dates are off but they dovetail with the clever use Gilman makes of history, geography, and the classics. I've always been impressed that she didn't create her utopia out of some Shangri-la fantasy--that is, it wasn't created on purpose but by necessity. She was experimenting with a "What if?" not a "Life should be." And I admire "What ifs?" story lines. 

Chapter 5

His in Herland or Astyanax in Hiding