Erewhon

Erewhon must be understood first of all as a satire rather than as a novel. It is in the tradition of Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726) and Samuel Johnson’s Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia (1759), works that sacrifice unity and development to a vision of the writer’s society in the guise of an imaginary foreign land. Like Rasselas and Gulliver, Higgs of Erewhon is a young man ready for adventure, out to learn about the world. He quickly reveals his image of himself as sharp, cunning, and bold. Before he tells his story, he lets the reader know the things he will hold back, so that no one reading the tale will be able to find Erewhon and thus profit financially from Higgs’s exploration.

His story begins as he is working on a sheep farm in a colony, the name of which he will not reveal. Intending to find precious metals or at least good sheep-grazing land, he journeys alone inland, over a mountain range. On the other side, he finds a kingdom called Erewhon (Nowhere), which looks very much like England. Higgs’s point of reference is England; all aspects of Erewhonian life he measures by that standard.

Many such satires work through the narrators’ quick judgments that the new lands they encounter are either much better or much worse than their native countries: In each case, the narrator’s rather simple view plays against the author’s more complex perspective. In Erewhon, however, the narrator is not quite so naïve. His own failings, rather than his naïveté, become part of the satire, which thus has a dual focus, much like book 4 of Gulliver’s Travels. Higgs, like many good Victorian heroes, is out to make money. It is this prospect that motivates him most strongly. Coexisting with his desire for fortune is his religiosity. Here, Butler’s satire on his character is most pronounced and simplistic. Higgs observes the Sabbath, but he seduces Yram (Mary) with no regret. He plans to make his fortune by selling the Erewhonians into slavery, arguing that they would be converted to Christianity in the process; the slaveholders would be lining their pockets and doing good simultaneously. Butler thus exposes, to no one’s great surprise, the mingled piety and avarice of British colonialists.

Butler satirizes European culture through the Erewhonians more often than through his hero, Higgs, gradually unfolding their lives for the reader to observe. Their lives are, on the surface, peaceful and pleasant; they are a strikingly attractive race. Only through personal experience does Higgs learn the underpinnings of the society: When he is ill, he learns that illness is a crime in Erewhon, while moral lapses are regarded in the same way as illnesses are in England. When his pocket watch is discovered, he learns that all “machines” have been banned from Erewhon. Erewhonian morality is based on reversals: The morally corrupt receive sympathy, while the ill are imprisoned; a child duped by his guardian is punished for having been ignorant, while the guardian is rewarded; children are responsible for their own birth, while their parents are consoled for having been “wronged” by the unborn. This pattern of reversals is of necessity incomplete, a problem noted by reviewers of Erewhon in 1872.

“The Book of the Machines” is the section of the satire that has drawn the most attention, because of its relationship to Darwinian thought. It may well be, as it has often been considered, a reductio ad absurdum of Darwinism, but the chapter also takes on reasoning by analogy as a less complex target of satire. “The Book of the Machines” is Higgs’s translation of the Erewhonian book that led to the banning of all mechanical devices. Its author claimed that machines had developed—evolved—more rapidly than humankind and thus would soon dominate, leaving humans mere slaves or parasites. He argued that machines were capable of reproduction, using humans in the process as flowers use bees. The arguments proved so convincing that all machines in Erewhon were soon destroyed, leaving the country in the rather primitive state in which Higgs found it.

The purpose of “The Book of the Machines” becomes clearer in the following two chapters, which detail Erewhonian debates on the rights of animals and the rights of vegetables. At one point in the past, insistence on the rights of animals had turned Erewhon into a land of vegetarians, but the philosophers went a step further and decreed that vegetables, too, had rights, based on their evolving consciousness. Again, Butler plays with argument by analogy, as the philosophers compare the vegetables’ intelligence to that of a human embryo.

The Erewhonians who believed in the rights of vegetables were led nearly to starvation by their extremism, and it is this same extremism that causes Higgs to leave Erewhon. Fearful that disfavor is growing against his foreign presence, he plans to escape by balloon, taking with him his beloved Arowhena. The perilous escape takes place, and the hero, married to Arowhena and restored to England, becomes a fairly successful hack writer. His account of Erewhon, he says at the end, constitutes an appeal for subscriptions to finance his scheme to return to Erewhon.

Erewhon Revisited

The broad, traditional satire of Erewhon is abandoned in its sequel. Written years later, Erewhon Revisited reflects the maturity of its author, then in his sixties. In the later work, Butler treats Erewhon as a habitation of human beings, not satiric simplifications. Erewhon Revisited is thus a novel, not a satire; its focus is on human relationships. Butler had already written (though not published) The Way of All Flesh, and the preoccupations of that work are also evident in Erewhon Revisited. Both works grew out of Butler’s fascination with family relationships, especially those between father and son.

The narrator of Erewhon Revisited is John Higgs, the son of George Higgs and Arowhena. He tells of his mother’s early death and of his father’s desire to return to Erewhon. This time, however, Higgs’s desire is sentimental; he has grown past his earlier wish to profit from the Erewhonians. He goes to Erewhon, returns in ill health, tells the story of his adventure to John, and dies. The book in this way becomes John’s tribute to his father.

Although Erewhon Revisited may be identified as a novel rather than as a satire, it does have a satiric subject as part of its plot. Upon reentering Erewhon, Higgs discovers that his ascent by balloon has become the source of a new religion. The Erewhonians revere his memory and worship him as the “Sun Child.” Higgs is horrified to find that there are theologians of Sunchildism fighting heretics. Unfortunately, Sunchildism has not made the Erewhonians a better or kinder people. Here is the heart of Butler’s satire: that a religion based on a supernatural event will divide people, place power in the wrong hands, and humiliate reason.

In Erewhon, Higgs was a pious and hypocritical prig, a target of satire himself. In the sequel, he is a genial, loving humanist, appalled by the “evolution” of his frantic escape into the ascent of a god. Much of Erewhon Revisited develops his plans to deflate Sunchildism, to reveal himself as the “Sun Child” and tell the truth about his “ascent.”

Higgs has a special motive that transcends his disgust with Sunchildism. Upon arriving in Erewhon, he meets a young man whom he soon recognizes as his own son, a son he did not know he had. The young man is the product of Higgs’s brief romance with Yram, the jailer’s daughter. Higgs keeps his identity from his son (also named George) for a while, but eventually the two are revealed to each other in a touching and intense scene. To earn his newfound son’s respect, Higgs determines to deflate Sunchildism. Thus, the process of satire in Erewhon Revisited is rooted in its human relationships.

Higgs’s son John, the narrator of the novel, feels no jealousy toward his half brother. Instead, he shares the elder Higgs’s enthusiasm for young George. Following his father’s death, John goes to Erewhon himself to meet George and to deliver a large gift of gold to him. This legacy exemplified one of Butler’s tenets about parent-child relations: that the best parents are kind, mostly absent, and very free with money. This theme is repeated throughout The Way of All Flesh. In Erewhon Revisited, however, it has a simpler expression. The relationship of Higgs and his two sons forms the emotional center of the novel and creates the impetus for some of its plot, but it is distinct from the satire on religion that makes up much of the book.

The Fair Haven

It is fitting that Butler’s last work, Erewhon Revisited, should have presented a genial hero determined to strip away what he saw as ridiculous supernatural beliefs. Much of “Sunchildism” is a response to the religious foment of the nineteenth century with which Butler had begun contending early in his career. The Fair Haven was his first satire concerned with Christian belief. This work is “fiction” only in a very limited sense: Butler creates a persona, John Pickard Owen, whose arguments in favor of Christianity are in fact the vehicle for Butler’s satire against it. The Fair Haven begins with a fictional memoir of John Pickard Owen by his brother. The memoir reveals that Owen moved from faith to disbelief to faith, and that his efforts to prove the validity of his religion pushed him to mental exhaustion and, eventually, death.

The Way of All Flesh

The characters of The Fair Haven are forerunners of the Pontifex family in The Way of All Flesh, Butler’s fullest and most characteristic work. The Way of All Flesh encompasses all of Butler’s concerns: family life, money, sexual attitudes, class structure, religion, and art. This novel too is a satire, but in it Butler does not portray an Erewhon; much more disturbingly, he keeps the reader at home.

The Way of All Flesh is Ernest Pontifex’s story, but it does not begin with Ernest. Butler the evolutionist shows Ernest as the product of several generations of social changes and personal tensions. The genealogical background, as well as the title and biblical epigraph, “We know that all things work together for good to them that love God,” helps to create the ironic treatment of religion that will permeate the novel. What is the way of all flesh? The biblical echo suggests sin and decay; Butler’s fiction, however, reminds the reader that the way of all flesh is change, for better or worse.

Ernest is the product of three generations of upward mobility. His great-grandfather is a simple, kind craftsman who sends his only son into the city. The son, George Pontifex, becomes successful as a publisher and even more successful as a bully. He chooses the Church as a career for his second son, Theobald, who revolts briefly, then acquiesces and evolves into the image of his father. Butler is careful to show personalities as products of environment. George’s bullying is only that of an egotistical, self-made man; Theobald’s is more harsh, the product of his own fear and suppressed anger. The unfortunate object of this anger is Theobald’s firstborn son, Ernest Pontifex.

Ernest’s childhood is dominated by fear of his father. His mother, Christina, is of little help; Butler portrays her as the product of her own family life and the larger social system, both of which make marriage a necessity for her. Like Theobald, Christina becomes a hypocrite pressed into the service of “what is done.” Much later in life, Ernest reflects that the family is a painful anachronism, confined in nature to the lower species. His opinion is shared by Overton, the narrator of the novel, an old family friend who takes an interest in young Ernest and becomes his lifelong friend and adviser. The two of them, in fact, eventually come to constitute a kind of family—an evolved, freely chosen family, not one formed by mere biological ties.

This outcome occurs only after long agony on Ernest’s part. As a child, he believes all that is told: that he is, for example, a wicked, ungrateful boy who deserves Theobald’s frequent beatings. His young life is lightened, however, by the interest taken in him by his aunt Alethea and by Overton, who has known all of the Pontifexes well and who tells their story with compassion.

Ernest is still an innocent and unformed young man when he goes to Cambridge to prepare for a career in the Church. Near the end of his peaceful, happy years there, he comes under the influence of an Evangelical group that alters his perceptions of what his life as a clergyman ought to be. Instead of stepping into a pleasant rural parish, Ernest becomes a missionary in the slums of London. He falls under the spell of the oily clergyman Nicholas Pryor, who “invests” Ernest’s money and eventually absconds with it. Pryor, the Cambridge enthusiasts, and Theobald Pontifex all represent the clerical life; they are radically different kinds of people, and they are all portrayed negatively. Butler took no prisoners in his war on the clergy; his use of the genial Overton as a narrator partially masks this characteristic.

Sexual ignorance, imposed (and shared) by Theobald and his kind, provides Butler with his next target for satire. In despair over his religious life, Ernest seeks a prostitute and approaches the wrong woman, the eponymous Miss Snow. Ernest’s ignorance lands him in prison and cuts him off forever from mere gentility. It redeems him, however, from a life circumscribed by his father: Ironically, Theobald’s strict control over Ernest liberates Ernest at last. In prison, stripped of all his former identity, Ernest begins to come to terms with what his life has been and may be. A long illness serves to clarify his mind; he rejects traditional religion, society, and his family’s condescending offers of help. Overton alone stands by Ernest, and it is at this point in Ernest’s development that they become fast friends. Overton takes on the role of the ideal father—fond, genteel, and moneyed.

It is in this last area that Overton’s role is most important to the events of the book: He keeps Alethea’s substantial bequest in trust for Ernest, allowing him knowledge of it and access to it, according to Alethea’s wish, only when he judges that Ernest is prepared to use it wisely. Ernest’s ill-advised marriage and his decision to work as a tailor cause Overton to hold the money back. Eventually, Ernest’s maturity evolves to a level acceptable to Overton, and the two of them lead a pleasant life of wealth and, on Ernest’s side at least, accomplishment: He has become a writer who, like Butler, writes thoughtful, theoretical books.

In his role as a father, Ernest also has evolved. The children of his marriage to Ellen are reared by simple country people and grow up free of the pressures of Ernest’s childhood. After four generations, the Pontifexes have returned to the peaceful and happy life of Ernest’s great-grandfather.

Liberal amounts of money, however, keep Ernest’s son and daughter from any want that ordinary country folk might experience. Ernest’s son wants to be a riverboat captain: Ernest buys him riverboats. This scenario is nearly as idealized a version of country life as was Marie Antoinette’s. What makes this vision disconcerting is that Ernest’s attitudes are clearly shared by Butler. Early in the novel, Ernest the bullied child is the object of the reader’s pity. As a student and young cleric, he has experiences that create a sense of pity but also create humor. The more fully Ernest evolves, however, the less appealing the reader is likely to find him. The Ernest who finally comes into his aunt’s fortune is a rather dull prig, who, upon learning of his wealth, considers how his emotion might be rendered in music. He tells Overton that he regrets nothing—not his parents’ brutality, not prison—because everything has contributed to his evolution away from the “swindle” of middle-class expectations. Unfortunately, this self-satisfied view makes his character seem shallow, consisting only of words and affectations.

In spite of this problem, Butler’s achievement is considerable. The Way of All Flesh is an immensely ambitious book, and much of it succeeds. Butler articulates fully and convincingly the varied stresses of family life, and that aspect alone makes the novel worthwhile. Erewhon and Erewhon Revisited share some of that evocative power. They also express Butler’s optimism. For all his satiric vision and contentiousness, Butler does offer happy endings: Higgs’s successful escape from Erewhon with his beloved, the reunion of the brothers in Erewhon Revisited, and the pleasant life of Ernest and Overton in The Way of All Flesh. Though societies may often be in the wrong, Butler seems to tell the reader, there is hope in freely chosen human relationships.