Jackson seems to think that a literary text, or at least a fantasy, should be disturbingly subversive, and that in order to be so, a text needs to be explicitly related to the real, and thus less unreal. What Jackson fails to note is that the more ‘unreal’ texts can be effectively subversive in their own way, partly because they have the ability to sneak past our ‘verbal defences. Jackson tries to trace a historical development in fantastic literature from the marvellous towards the uncanny, but here as well her results are predetermined by the narrowness of her approach:
In what we could call a supernatural economy, otherness is transcendent, marvellously different from the human: the results are religious fantasies of angels, devils, heavens, …show more content…
Contemporary feminist utopian writing can better translate the rising consciousness of women writers who try to establish a critical distance from the traditional static feminist utopias such as Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland. Critical utopia is self-critical rather than self-contradictory as it functions as a counter discourse as it puts emphasis on “heterogeneity instead of emphasis on homogeneity, conformity and uniformity” (Tatiana Teslenko 3). It rebels against closure and an imposed totality by stressing “the contradictory and diverse multiplicity of a broad Utopian dialogue” (210). However, the “deep conflicts of the 1960’s,” make women writers change their perception of the naive idealism in classic utopia. According to Lancaster, “Utopia is no longer the construction of an ideal society but rather a tool for criticism of the present, rendering irrelevant its attainability” (8). Rather than envisioning perfect societies, they hold uncertainty and heuristic answers to produce literary texts interested in dynamic change in order to present societies in transition. Their utopias are engaged in the process of becoming and productivity. Different from their female precursors, women novelists of critical utopias include “expressions of oppositional thought” in order to defy the production of blueprint utopia that has nothing to do with the real World, opening the floor thus to the proliferation of voices and viewpoints (Moylan
In what we could call a supernatural economy, otherness is transcendent, marvellously different from the human: the results are religious fantasies of angels, devils, heavens, …show more content…
Contemporary feminist utopian writing can better translate the rising consciousness of women writers who try to establish a critical distance from the traditional static feminist utopias such as Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland. Critical utopia is self-critical rather than self-contradictory as it functions as a counter discourse as it puts emphasis on “heterogeneity instead of emphasis on homogeneity, conformity and uniformity” (Tatiana Teslenko 3). It rebels against closure and an imposed totality by stressing “the contradictory and diverse multiplicity of a broad Utopian dialogue” (210). However, the “deep conflicts of the 1960’s,” make women writers change their perception of the naive idealism in classic utopia. According to Lancaster, “Utopia is no longer the construction of an ideal society but rather a tool for criticism of the present, rendering irrelevant its attainability” (8). Rather than envisioning perfect societies, they hold uncertainty and heuristic answers to produce literary texts interested in dynamic change in order to present societies in transition. Their utopias are engaged in the process of becoming and productivity. Different from their female precursors, women novelists of critical utopias include “expressions of oppositional thought” in order to defy the production of blueprint utopia that has nothing to do with the real World, opening the floor thus to the proliferation of voices and viewpoints (Moylan