Butler’s Erewhon

A philosophical analysis of Butler’s pioneering novel Erewhon.

Fin-de-siecle tropes of degeneration in Butler’s Erewhon

Butler’s Erewhon is both the reflection and at the same time the reversal of many tropes in vogue during the fin-de-siecle period in Europe. It is at once its product and its rejection; the cause and the effect, the future and the past - all enmeshed as one. It is not by chance that the novel’s very title, Erewhon, is nothing but the word ‘nowhere’ misspelt backwards - a playful literary device Butler uses throughout the novel to alert us towards the unknown but eerily familiar topics discussed throughout. Grossly misunderstood during its time, perhaps due to its paradoxical nature, but most probably due to its uncanny allusions to a vast array of problems faced by fin-de-siecle society, it remains equally misread today, and most certainly under-read. Erewhon may, in fact, be read as a fantastical as well as a pseudo-scientific novel, as a utopia as well as a dystopia and constantly vacillates between the biographical and the fictional through its many anecdotes and stories. In Erewhon, Butler skillfully plays with its Victorian audience by satirising their concepts of sickness, criminality, evolution, degeneration and religion by creating a semi-fantastical world à la Thomas More or Jonathan Swift. What I hope to make evident in this essay is the critical importance of this text within the rhetoric of degeneration. In my opinion, Erewhon is a fertile novel for the picking and dissecting of fin-de-siecle tropes of degeneration - I thus intend to divide this essay into three main sections each focusing on a different trope. In the first, I will explore the trope of evolution and devolution in Erewhon by focusing on the work of Darwin whom Butler was greatly inspired by, and also Galton’s eugenics. Secondly, I will tackle the tropes of sickness and criminality and compare it to those tropes as deployed by Lombroso and also Drysdale, of which Butler possessed a copy of his Elements of Social Science. Finally, in conclusion, I will put forth a view which unfortunately has not been acknowledged academically but that I hope to establish as valid by highlighting the many similarities between the common 19th century tropes on Jews with Butler’s fantastical ‘Erewhonians’. Before delving into each of these sections, I will first set the picture by giving a general overview of both Butler and Erewhon. 

Setting the scene: Who is samuel butler?

Samuel Butler, (1835) came from a bourgeois Victorian family of reverends and headmasters from Nottinghamshire. After completing his education in Classics at St.John’s College, Cambridge, and briefly joining the Anglican clergy (as per his father’s request), Butler calls his faith and along with it the hypocrisies of the Victorian era into question and embarks on a one-way journey to the antipode of the world - New Zealand. Armed with his will to refute his father’s religious ideologies, the tenacity to explore new colonial territories and Darwin’s On the Origin Of The Species in hand, Butler settles near Christchurch and begins the humble life of a sheep farmer. Here, the majestic Rangitata mountains, uncannily British lawns and colonialist clashes make for the perfect backdrop to Butler’s greatest accomplishment: Erewhon, a novel as much about himself than the fatidical ‘other’. Under these conditions, Butler comes to see, with a decidedly clearer mind, the confines and limitations of the Victorian existence: religion, colonialism, race, crime, overpopulation and degeneracy. Partly, the move to New Zealand could be seen as Butler actively partaking into the Victorian colonialist ideal: that of the young, vigorous, strong white male who crosses the oceans to breed the new colony of virile men in savage-torn Oceania. Yet, as much as this “myth of idyllic expansion” which sees the establishment of surplus neo-European populations escaping from the “harsh conditions of life in recently industrialised economies” is true; and as much as one cannot really distance themselves from their socio-genetic past, Butler arrives with a fresh attitude and an open mind to see and experience things somewhat differently. The crux of this novel, I will argue, is precisely in this satiric reversal of values: illness as crime, religion as commerce, education as repression and organic as inorganic. In New Zealand, Butler highlights how “the Erewhonians, like Canterbury sheep farmers, live in a world that could be made superficially to look like England, yet in reality was disturbingly different.” In such a way, Butler’s Erewhon actively asks the reader to “accept none of the platitudes of the Victorian age at face value - not the benefits of machinery, nor the educational primacy of Greek and Latin, nor the sincerity of the clergy, nor the advantage of knowing the future; not even Darwin, Homer, Shakespeare, Dr Samuel Butler [his grandfather, who was Charles Darwin’s headmaster] or the benevolence of the family as an institution for nurturing the young.” Through this radical re-evaluation of values, reminiscent of Nietzsche’s revolt in morality, Butler half-absurdly and half-realistically deploys this reversal of thought throughout this novel, allowing the reader to immerse themselves into a topsy turvy world made of mirror mazes that “reverse, enlarge, exaggerate, isolate, destabilise, subvert and humiliate the most revered and rigid of British institutions and values.” To the apt Victorian reader, Erewhon would have resulted in the unveiling of the Victorian era’s notorious hypocrisy: from the ‘Colleges of Unreason’ being a nod to British educational institutions (perhaps Oxbridge, maybe his grandfather’s high school?) to the ‘Musical Banks’ being a cue to Britain’s sanctimonious Anglican church. Butler not only asks the reader to revert their conception of morality to one that is “based on strength, beauty and good luck, which anticipates elements of the eugenic utopianism promoted by Galton” but also asks us to question whether a human can devolve to become a slave or “a sort of parasite upon the machines? An affectionate machine-tickling aphid?” who is intent in downgrading itself in order to create “our successors in the supremacy of the earth.” Perhaps seeing themselves face to face with the eerie familiarity presented in Erewhon challenged the Victorian reader to think beyond the bounds of the idyllic colonial utopia and more into the all-too-familiar world of dystopia that was unfolding around them in 19th century Europe.  

Themes of Evolution and Devolution

As previously mentioned, Butler embarked on his journey to New Zealand in 1859, the very same year Darwin’s On the Origin of the Species was published. Darwin’s revolutionary theory of evolution didn’t merely inspire the likes of Butler, but also acted as a catalyst towards the “European-wide context of anxiety about degeneration” harnessed by the fast-looming progress of modernisation. In fact, despite On the Origin of the Species not even mentioning the applications of its theory onto humans, it soon became recognised by Victorian society as the explanation for their societal needs. The process of industrialisation had caused a massive influx of people into big cities like London causing overpopulation, disease and social inequality - this had a profound impact on people’s lives and was thought to result in “the reproduction of degeneration, the poisoning of good bodies and races by bad blood.” Victorian Britain became so concerned with the future of its ‘stock’ and its progressive degeneration, that even the usually cautious Darwin, in the later years, became disturbed with the question of “brutal reversion” especially in light of his cousin Galton’s quips about the survival of the fittest actually seeming to “spoil and not improve the breed.” In The Descent of Man, Darwin himself, in fact, seems to acknowledge that in modern society, thanks to our pitiful sense of morality and the advances in science, we now tend to look after the sick, the maimed or the degenerates, thus allowing the “weak members of civilised societies [to] propagate their kind.” Darwin then proceeds to compare the breeding of domestic animals to that of humans: “It is surprising how soon a want of care, or care wrongly directed, leads to the degeneration of a domestic race; but excepting in the case of man himself, hardly any one is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed.” Whilst this statement may suggest that Darwin was indeed a degenerationist intent in ‘breeding’ the best race, he was, in fact, adamant that those better equipped to survive would actually be the healthy, and that a higher mortality rate amongst the unhealthy would even out the seemingly burgeoning ‘degenerate’ population. However, Darwin’s positivist outlook which lead him to take the “more cheerful view that progress has been much more general than retrogression”, undoubtedly had some fierce competition within Victorian society from Thomas Carlyle who thought the “Irish population must either be improved or else exterminated” and also, as previously mentioned, by his cousin Francis Galton. Galton, who is infamous for coining and developing the theory of eugenics, backed his newly founded theories of evolution on statistical scientific methods that were put into practice at his Eugenics Laboratory of which Galton was chair of at University College London. Here, promoted by one of the most prestigious institutions and by the growing fear of a ‘degeneration epidemic’, Galton aimed at “nothing less than ‘to produce a highly bred human race’ capable of arresting ‘the intellectual anarchy’ caused by what he described as a lack of ‘general intellectual capacity.’” Clearly inspired by Darwin but also particularly by Ray Lankester’s Degeneration: a chapter in Darwinism, Galton took Lankester’s theory of ‘retrogressive metamorphosis’ or rather, the process of “suppression of form, corresponding to the cessation of work” whom Lankester exemplified in parasitic animals, further. Galton in fact applied this theory and exploited its parasitic metaphor to use it against the general population claiming that there was a “contrariety of ideals between the beasts that prey and those that prey upon, between those of the animals that have to work hard for their food and the sedentary parasites that cling to their bodies and suck their blood.” Galton firmly believed that the poor, lowly degenerates were in fact destined to be a burden on society and a “drain on the economy [as they] create no wealth.” Degeneracy is just like a parasite, a leech which sucks the vitality, strength and power out of a country reducing the ‘good stock’ and replacing it with a lower, less complex, weak one. Yet Galton remained convinced that through eugenics, “a material improvement in our British breed [would not be] so Utopian an object as it may seem.” I find it peculiar how Galton himself would use a term such as ‘utopia’ to describe his intended ‘good breed’, but what I find even more uncanny is the fact Galton actually wrote a utopian novel, although never published, called ‘Kantsaywhere’ a play on words on the etymology of utopia, from the Greek ou ‘not’ and topos ‘place’ thus meaning ‘nowhere’ - making it eerily similar to Butler’s Erewhon. It is clear that the Darwinian idea of the ‘survival of the fittest’ had taken a twisted turn in Victorian society. It was now not only being used as an answer to determine the biological superiority of some above others but also as a powerful and displacing rhetoric to describe the new competitive capitalist economy that allowed for the widening gap between the extremely wealthy and those who struggled in severe poverty to grow. The teleological progress brought forth by technology, science and the Enlightenment had proved to be an illusion and as Lankester proclaimed, we were “as likely to degenerate… as to progress.” Both Darwin’s positivism and Galton’s utopia had a huge impact on society and that’s reflected in the emergence of many utopian/dystopian science fiction novels in the turn of the century. I will now take a closer look at just how much of this rhetoric made its way into Butler’s ideas.

Whilst in New Zealand and before writing Erewhon, Butler published a number of articles in the Christchurch press inspired by his readings of Darwin such as Darwin Amongst the Machines, Lucubratio Ebra and The Mechanical Creation which later formed the backbone to one of Erewhon’s most compelling chapters: The Book of Machines. Here, Butler presents an argument in the form of thesis, antithesis and synthesis that urges us to question what the implications of Darwinian evolution mean for humanity. Where was evolution leading us? Could we eventually evolve into machines? Or could the machines rather devolve us into being slaves to the machines and “become to the machine what the horse and the dog are to man”? These are some of the questions On the Origin Of The Species sparked in Butler’s mind, who was mostly inspired by “Darwin’s overly mechanical portrayal of the evolutionary process.” In fact, Butler wasn’t sympathetic to the Darwinian idea that evolution was driven by mere chance and error, a position that relegates the living organism to a passive and inactive state, but rather thought of organisms as possessing a form of agency, hinting at the human ability “to control their evolution through the strategic use of tools.” Butler corresponded with Darwin on many occasions to try and reconcile his view of intentionality with evolution, eventually coming to the conclusion that living organisms made small repetitive decisions and were thus “responsible for their own evolution” rather than simply being ‘things’ onto which ‘forces’ randomly acted upon, bringing his view closer to Lamarck’s theory of evolution. In this chapter named ‘The Book of Machines’, Butler tests his evolutionary hypothesis by speculating about “the more disturbing elements of the struggle for existence and extinction of the specie.” He does so by telling the reader that in his semi-fictional land of Erewhon, society became so concerned with the future of their kind and the possible reversion and devolution into subservient ‘parasitic’ forms of life, that all machines built were destroyed because proven to ultimately be “destined to supplant the race of man, and to become instinct with a vitality as different from, and superior to, that of animals, as animal to vegetable life.” This fear of machines taking over, to the contemporary reader may sound somewhat plausible, yet even back in the 19th century, the general population was worried the machine would take over their life, their jobs and replace them. This was the case with the Luddites, a British group who were anti-technology and anti-modernity - and they too, like the Erewhonians, destroyed the machines in textile factories and mills. Butler doesn’t merely describe the Erewhonians as against technology, but also as incredibly concerned with a “materialist morality based on strength, beauty and good luck” which echoes Galton’s eugenic utopianism. Butler allows the narrator of Erewhon to describe the inhabitants by telling us that “the men were as handsome as the women beautiful. I have always delighted in and reverenced beauty; but I felt simply abashed in the presence of such a splendid type—a compound of all that is best in Egyptian, Greek and Italian.” In this world, the promotion of a new morality based on evolution rather than religion takes place so that eugenics becomes a religion. In fact, as the mysterious narrator of Erewhon crosses the ridge of mountains into this new land, he comes across an ancient site composed of huge statues designed as a place of sacrifice “to propitiate the gods of deformity and disease.” Here we learn that the ugly, deformed and diseased were once killed and left to the gods in order to spare the rest of the population from being spoilt with their ‘bad genes’. The statues thus represent the origins of eugenics and its cultic power. In Erewhon, only the strong, the beautiful, the lucky and the healthy are allowed to breed, those who fail to represent nature’s best standard are locked away and punished. In such a society, where having a good physique means being of a good character, there is no space for errors, certainly no room for disease. 

Sickness and Crime

In Erewhon, Butler deploys his satiric reversal of thought throughout the whole novel to challenge and help question the Victorian norms that were taken for granted, such as that of received rhetorics of crime and disease. As previously mentioned, the general rhetoric of degeneration was characterised by what was thought of as an imminent decline in the ‘good stock’ within a population. This was due to overcrowding, technological advances and the propagation of modern vices and with it, a new type of delinquency. The poor, the sick and the ugly were thus all bracketed under one umbrella term: that of degeneration, and collectively referred to as a pathology. Degeneration was treated as a sickness, a disease, a plague that had to be curbed in order to save humanity from regressing. This metaphor of illness was pervasively used in order to bring attention to the body and its fitness; this paved the way for a new type of science called ‘criminology’ which argued that the “criminal is not primarily to be discussed in moral terms but in forensic medical terms, as an evolutionary throwback, a reversion to a more primitive type.” A key exponent of such theory was Cesare Lombroso, also dubbed the ‘father of criminology’, who believed criminality and disease were both caused by a form of degeneration which caused the individual to become atavistic and thus regress to an earlier stage of its evolution following Haeckel’s ‘recapitulation theory’. Lombroso, through his craniological and phrenological studies, claimed to be able to distinguish the ‘born criminal’ from the rest of the population thus allowing for their imprisonment or exclusion. Soon, these scientific ideas were put into practice legally, thus allowing the governments to have the power to “segregate and supervise the unfit [and] attack the ‘evil at its very root’ by regulating reproduction.” In fact, the idea of regulating reproduction became a reality when Drysdale launched the ‘Malthusian League’, which advocated for the practice of contraception in an attempt to curb the overpopulation of the poor. In the Elements Of Social Science, Drysdale called for a re-evaluation of the Judeo-Christian transcendent values with a focus specifically on a scientific religion based on the body. According to Paradis, in Butler, Victorian Against the Grain, Butler possessed a copy of the book and was greatly influenced by it when writing Erewhon, as can clearly be seen by the Erewhonian’s obsession with their physique and health. Drysdale, similarly to Nietzsche, believed that “practically all the sufferings of mankind, were derived from lack of reverence for the human body” following centuries of Christian and religious dogma, and that “beauty of form, that imperishable source of joy and stamp of nobility, under the cruel yoke of the Church, [had] perished.” Drysdale became convinced that physical evils such as disease transposed into moral evils and that "to break the physical law was just as culpable as to break the moral one, and therefore all physical diseases must be regarded as sin”, a concept that certainly takes full form in Erewhon. The idea that the diseased or the criminal could be physically recognised and signalled out from society caught on all over Europe, as well as the belief that “past experience moved down through generations and was inscribed in the body.” The body now represented your entire sociological and genetical history, meaning that one could no longer escape from their past but rather, was culpable because of it. Despite the Enlightenment period shifting the attention away from the biblical notion of ‘guilt’, the modern man was still plagued by its secular interpretation in the form of biological culpability. You were now responsible for your actions not necessarily because of your own free will, but precisely because of the laws of determinism which the diseased and crime-torn could not escape from. Butler picks up this very issue in his novel, where the Erewhonians are held culpable for their bad health and thus sentenced to prison, forced labour or segregation in exactly the same way we treat criminals. 

In Erewhon, the survival of the species and the propagation of health, strength and good luck mean that “ill health is far more of a crime than theft or embezzlement, which in Erewhon are treated simply as lapses.” In fact, people who steal are treated by the rest of society in exactly the way we would treat someone who is ill: they are looked after, cared for and wished a swift recovery. The narrator of Erewhon is at first taken aback by this unusual custom, but then slowly begins to see how, in typical Victorian hypocritical fashion, even the Erewhonians feign health by blaming their weak temperament on some small crime just to ‘keep appearances’. That is the case with one of the characters called Mahaina who “must hide her chronic health problems in an attempt to escape public disgrace” and avoid being arrested. The narrator also realises that, given as the criminal is distinguished in a Lombrosian fashion via their physical look, many Erewhonians “painted their faces with such consummate skill.... that it was really impossible to say whether any one was well or ill ‘till after an intimate acquaintance of months or years.” Butler, intent in showing us just how uncannily the juridical system in Erewhon is similar to that of Victorian times, takes us inside a courtroom where a pathological criminal (an Erewhonian in the last stages of tuberculosis) is being sentenced. During the trial, the judge sternly reminds the defendant that “it is all very well for you to say that you came of unhealthy parents, and had a severe accident in your childhood which permanently undermined your constitution; excuses such as these are the ordinary refuge of the criminal; but they cannot for one moment be listened to by the ear of justice.” Here, it is clear how the criminal cannot get away from the inescapability of determinism - he is culpable because he is of an inferior physical kind and that’s something that cannot be ‘fixed’: “you may say that it is your misfortune to be criminal; I answer that it is your crime to be unfortunate.” Again, Butler wants to wittingly allude back to Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection and its supposed chance-driven ways in which novel characteristics arise. When evaluating justice from a biological, rather than moral standpoint, the worst crimes are those that go against the propagation of a healthy strong race. Measures must thus be kept in place to prevent the “universal dephysicalisation [that] would ensue” meaning that the unhealthy should be punished, segregated and prevented from breeding or, as the judge proclaimed in Erewhonian terms “the unborn must not be allowed to come near you.” Here, we clearly see Galton’s eugenics in action as well as a neo-Malthusian attitude towards childbirth. The sick criminal gets condemned to imprisonment with hard labour and gets secluded from the rest of society in order to preserve the Erewhonian standard as well as “nature’s ideal of health and physical beauty.” Although treating the sick as criminals may strike the reader as fantastical and highly improbable in the ‘real world’, Butler wanted to highlight just how close the science proposed by Lombroso, Galton and other degenerationists of the time was to this dystopian ideal. To segregate, ostracise and prevent a type of person from breeding is simply another way of revoking that person’s right to freedom and that is precisely what the juridical system does in the case of crimes. 

Conclusion and the Jewish hypothesis 

Butler’s Erewhon most certainly does not shy away from the typical fin-de-siecle tropes on degeneration, including, as we have seen: devolution, sickness, crime and eugenics. However, I wish to add a further trope to the novel, but one that hasn’t really been discussed much, certainly not in the literature I came across. Despite not finding much material to work with, I must answer this question that keeps buzzing in my mind so I will now offer my own interpretation. At the very beginning of the novel, when the narrator first sets foot into Erewhon and meets its population, he briefly hypothesises:“ [w]as it possible that they might be the lost ten tribes of Israel, of whom I had heard both my grandfather and my father make mention as existing in an unknown country, and awaiting a final return to Palestine?” Whilst at first glance, the Erewhonians fail to appear particularly ‘Jewish’ their nose being “distinctly Grecian, and their lips, though full.. not Jewish” playing against the usual tropes of the Jew being big-nosed and of generally monstrous unhealthy appearance, the narrator convinces himself that they are indeed the lost tribe and that his discovery is of utmost importance. The narrator, in fact, then sees himself beguiled by the idea that he himself might have been destined to ‘discover’ them and thus sets about their conversion: “But could I not make them change? To restore the lost ten tribes of Israel to a knowledge of the only truth: here would be indeed an immortal crown of glory!” The reader, left with this allusion to a potential conversion and conquering of this new population, is then left to wonder whether the Erewhonians are indeed this long lost tribe. However, Butler gives little to no more attention to the matter throughout most of the text alluding to a potential ‘Jewish’ nature only briefly when mentioning that his narrator “might be learning Hebrew” and that the Erewhonian is a language plagued by “extraordinary perversions of thought”, thus playing into the idea that Hebrew is a secretive, perverse language. The subject is only brought back into attention at the very end of the novel, where Butler allows his now repatriated narrator to devise a devious plan to capture the Erewhonians and “set about converting them” into Christians whilst using them as slaves in Queensland’s plantations thus giving people the “comfort of reflecting that they were saving souls and filling their own pockets at one and the same moment”, embodying the rhetoric of colonialist proselytism. Butler thus ends his novel with this very familiar colonialist twist: leaving us with the message that once again, the survival of the fittest entails the subjugation of the weaker. However, despite the long lost tribes of Israel not explicitly featuring as the main motif in the novel, I believe Butler wrote Erewhon keeping the usual Jewish tropes in mind but playing his ‘reversal of thought’ device. The common trope of the Jew being ugly and weak is subverted by the extreme beauty and physical health displayed by the supposedly Jewish Erewhonians. Butler also plays with the commonly attributed paradoxical trope of the Jew being responsible for both ‘modernity’ and ‘atavism’ by at once establishing the Erewhonians as capable of advancing to the most technological and modern society but at the same time deciding against it, thus regressing back to pre-modern times. Finally, a really curious trope is that which sees the Erewhonians preach a religion based on money which they practice in “Musical Banks’ - the irony being that this religious currency is actually devoid of any monetary value. Unfortunately, for reasons of brevity, I cannot allow myself the privilege to delve too much into this ‘Jewish hypothesis’ which I had originally intended to pursue as the main topic for this essay but that sadly, I could not find enough secondary literature about. In the future, I thus hope to use this opportunity to contribute to this gap in the literature with what I believe would be a novel reading of Erewhon.  

Bibliography

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