Continuing the “Tradition”: Early Women’s Utopias and Mary Hamilton’s Munster Village

Abstract

This paper will discuss utopias by early women writers, focusing particularly on Mary Hamilton’s Munster Village in light of her predecessors’ works and explore whether the utopian fictions of these early women writers can be said to establish a “tradition” in opposition to the male-centred utopian tradition. Early women’s utopias challenge and subvert the male tradition, playing on the ambiguities and contradictions inherent in the genre, and in a radical departure from the principles of stability, rationalism, order and regulation, they opt for fantasy, freedom, fluidity and sensibility. This paper will discuss the “tradition” only within the light of the more fully realized fictional utopias of Margaret Cavendish and Sarah Scott. Though these two writers are separated by a century’s time gap and seem distinguished not so much by their similarities as by their differences, they share similar concerns and features that are central to early women’s utopias. Rather than “describing” utopian communities that are already achieved, early women’s utopias all reveal utopian communities in the process of being created, at the centre of which stand empowered “utopianising” figures of women. Their utopian communities are grounded on a social philosophy that valorises pleasure, friendship, benevolence and education, and the generic indeterminacy of their utopias supports the freedom and fluidity of their utopian fantasies. However, the challenges these utopias offer to gender identities and roles are found to be limited as the values of patriarchal culture are often reinscribed in them. The first part of the paper will examine some distinguishing features of early women’s utopias and the second will discuss Hamilton’s utopian project and show how she has absorbed widely divergent aspects of antecedent utopias and reworked them to create something that is distinctly her own.