Abstract
Midway through Erewhon, Samuel Butler’s utopian fiction of 1872, the narrator describes the strange opinions and customs surrounding certain musical banks patronized by the inhabitants of the distant society upon which he has stumbled. These opinions and customs having much in common with aspects of religious observance in the England of his day, he offers the following reflections:
It seems as though the need for some law over and above, and sometimes even conflicting with, the law of the land, must spring from something that lies deep down in man’s nature.… When man had grown to the perception that … the world and all that it contains, including man, is at the same time both seen and unseen, he felt the need of two rules of life, one for the seen, and the other for the unseen side of things. For the laws affecting the seen world he claimed the sanction of seen powers; for the unseen (of which he knows nothing save that it exists and is powerful) he appealed to the unseen power (of which, again, he knows nothing save that it exists and is powerful) to which he gives the name of God. (pp. 122–3)
The architects of Butler’s utopia appear to have found a way to negotiate the call of the unseen side of things. But as writers from Sophocles in Antigone to Gauri Viswanathan in Outside the Fold (1998) remind us, religious belief and related forms of devotion may as readily destabilize social orders as support them.
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Mao, D. (2012). The Unseen Side of Things: Eliot and Stevens. In: Gregory, R., Kohlmann, B. (eds) Utopian Spaces of Modernism. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230358300_12
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