Problems with Utopias: The Need for Individual Grace

At the end of His in Herland, I had to determine Alim's reaction to leaving his hometown and his country. It would have been easy--too easy--to give him a spat of disillusionment: Stupid utopia! Stupid adult authority figures! Stupid everyone! I'm a rebel, yo! 

I didn't. 

Reason 1: Despite my criticisms of utopia, my ultimate point is that Herland or Troas isn't one, no matter how much it wants to be. Like Miss Marple always finding the village corollary to the big bad city murderer, my point is, You thought you were so edgy and avant-garde. You're not. You're just like every other social order. Get over yourself. 

Which means Herland/Troas offers good and bad stuff. In fairness to Gilman, she crafts a world that is gorgeously pro-child. Alim would carry that away with him. 

Reason 2: Blaming parents, God, social orders is easy. Scapegoating is easy. Developing narratives and abstracted theories that shovel the blame onto history,  a being, a specific group is easy. 

Personal responsibility is hard and therefore, more interesting. 

I like Alim. As his creator, I want him to grow up, not trade on a victim narrative and call on a "higher order" that would allow him to hide behind rules/someone else's demands or wallow in how unfair his life has been. 

His father died in ancient Troy. His mother was killed by monsters soon after. He wandered for generations underground. He had to hide his sex when he went to the center of his own country. 

Yet as Terry would say, "So what?" 

As Eugene, The Translator, states:

[W]e are all products of our culture and rarely think to question it. Fish discover water last. It's always easier to point at those other people in that other culture. I think there are a whole lot of unhappy people in the Occident [like everywhere else] who can't divorce themselves from the culture that defines the boundaries of their lives and end up trapped by those expectations.

Like the nature versus nurture debate, splitting the difference is a good place to start. But that means half is on you.

Alim is more reflective than Terry. However, Terry is his mentor. Terry's is the perspective he adopts. 

And it lends him grace. He makes choices, then accepts the outcomes, good or bad. That's life. In the meantime, he can appreciate what he has gained, what he hopes to gain, what life offers.

Chapter 20 & Chapter 21

His in Herland or Astyanax in Hiding