Abstract/Summary

Every utopia is an island. Many utopias are geographical islands, bodies of land surrounded by water; all are metaphorical islands, in the sense of being isolated (from the Latin word insulatus, ‘made into an island’), separate, or distinguished from the land or society surrounding them. A utopia, as an island, can only be understood as a separated space. In the sixteenth century, islands themselves were often seen as utopian spaces, and vice versa. The early modern period inherited from the classical age stories of paradise islands like Circe’s in The Odyssey, or the Fortunate Islands, the paradise of the gods. The garden of Eden had in the European imagination always been conceived as insular, represented as ‘either landlocked or sea-girt’. The concepts of the ideal society and the island were of course joined together by Thomas More in his Utopia (1516), with the extraordinary origin story of Utopia having been formed into an island by King Utopus having had it severed from the mainland of which it was originally a part. More’s emphasis on the physical construction of Utopia as an island introduces a fraught complexity to the relationship between utopia and the island space in the early modern period. In any case, the island ‘remained the dominant literary topos for any vision of a better world’ during this time. This chapter will explore the utopian islands of English seventeenth-century literature, focusing on three island utopias in particular: Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis (1626); Walter Hammond’s A Paradox: Proving the inhabitants of the Island, called Madagascar or St Lawrence to be the happiest People in the World (1643); and Henry Neville’s The Isle of Pines (1668). It will examine how islands function as land available for European discovery, apparently ‘new’ spaces which, the history of colonialism reminds us, were not in fact new or empty of people, culture and meaning. It argues that island utopias are inherently contradictory and ambiguous spaces, and that the island’s unfixed status contributed to the early modern utopia’s ironical undercutting of its own idealism.