No Emmas in Amaurotum: Theories of Character and Utopian Literature

Abstract

The narratological category of character has been less successful than others in doing away with assumptions that derive from the historical/ critical usage of the label, particularly in a realistic, novelistic mainstream. The very attempt to build a theory of character that is intrinsic to the utopian genre shows how difficult it is to eliminate these criteria, but also to determine to what extent they should be retained, specially when a strict segregationist logic is applied to utopias and to notions of character in utopias, if the aesthetic superiority of the realistic/ novelistic character still hovers on descriptions. Making the narrative “frame” of utopias a more functional and neutral component has interesting effects in the classification of information about the individuals of utopian fictions, and allows for important intra-generic (aesthetic) distinctions. An analysis of the characters of More’s Utopia and Bacon’s New Atlantis illustrates the relevance of a principle of reflexivity between social ideals and the characters of these two works.