The Social Text as Body: Images of Health and Disease in Three Recent Feminist Utopias

^ The Social Text as Body: Images of Health and Disease in Three Recent Feminist Utopias Robert Shelton H. Tristram Engelhardt, Jr., argues compellingly against seeing health and disease as symmetrical concepts.1 Likewise, many scholars of Utopian literature argue that utopia and dystopia are complex, asymmetrical concepts. For example, Krishan Kumar observes that "[l]ike the religious and the secular, utopia and anti-utopia are antithetical yet interdependent. They are 'contrast concepts', getting their meaning and significance from their mutual differences. But the relationship is not symmetrical or equal."2 The analogies between the asymmetrical concepts of health/disease and utopia/'dystopia struck me, almost immediately, as useful explanatory strategies for both sets of terms. Using these analogies in an analysis of two central texts in Utopian studies, Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward (1888) and H. G. Wells's The Time Machine (1895), I acknowledged my explicit debt to Engelhardt when I began by asserting: "Utopia and dystopia, like health and disease, are not symmetrical concepts. . . ." As I continued: Like all dynamic abstractions, "utopia," "dystopia," "health," and "disease" are best defined through simultaneous consideration of both what they are and what they are not. Problems arise, however, when we approach these paired terms only through the models of opposition or juxtaposition. Both approaches—placing the concepts either head to head or side by side—may produce reductive exercises that collapse similarity and difference. Another model is available, one that generates more questions than answers—a virtue, in my opinion. This post-Hegelian model of analysis I will call the process of analogic comparison.3 Literature and Medicine 12, no. 2 (Fall 1993) 161-177 © 1993 by The Johns Hopkins University Press 162 THE SOCIAL TEXT AS BODY In the essay that follows here, I will use this same process of analogic comparison to consider different basic questions, analyze different texts, and reach (to my initial surprise) different conclusions. As in my previous essay, my discussion here will move from the more commonsensical analogy, '"Utopia is to health as dystopia is to disease/ to the more complex, theory-based analogy, 'Health is to disease as utopia is to dystopia.' "4 With these analogies and asymmetries as launching points, I will examine Joanna Russ's The Female Man (1975), Marge Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time (1976), and Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale (1986). These texts are complex linguistic systems in which issues of feminism, postmodernism, and speculative fiction operate. As such, they are clear examples of what Marleen S. Barr calls "feminist fabulation."5 They are also texts formed and informed by images of health and disease. I look at these literary texts and medical concepts through these analogies to defamilarize the usual understanding of health and disease. More directly put, my main purpose here is to examine a class of texts (recent feminist utopias and dystopias) as if their imagined societies could display the bodily symptoms of health and disease. A literary text is not a human body, of course, but a collection of texts on a specific subject is called a corpus, a body. And when examining the economic, political, or cultural conditions of society, writers seem drawn inevitably toward the language of medicine. Without images of health and disease, their texts would be severely impoverished. The claim that social texts have often lent themselves to images or metaphors of the body holds for writers as far back as Plato.6 In a general sense, Russ, Piercy, and Atwood are working within this tradition; however, these recent feminist utopias contain visions of society's ills and its cures informed by newer, more radically feminist insights and images, and thus recent and feminist play as large a role here as does utopia. Furthermore, the concepts of utopia and dystopia are well served when studied through the organic tropes of health and disease. The matrix of utopia and dystopia diverges in this way from that of science fiction, its cousin, which more often favors mechanistic tropes. I. Utopia/Health and Dystopia/Disease What are the first two questions asked about a newborn baby? "Is it a boy or a girl?" and, with some trepidation, "Is it OK...