South

The sound of the word South is the sound of softness and plenty. South is the preferred aspect for an Emperor's palace in traditional Chinese geomancy. South is the direction in which people of the northern temperate zone turn, when they want to imagine relaxation, warmth, repose. We head south, like the birds in winter, to escape from hardship. The South is a garden world where there is no conflict between nature and culture; where sweet fruits drop from the bough; where food plants grow and domestic animals give their service as if of their own goodwill, without any need for the violence and coercion of the plough that cuts open the earth, the goad that drives the cattle. Feminised utopias, whether or not imagined by women, are full of the warm south. Tolkien's entwives— though their ideal land is criticised by their creator, who prefers a masculine wilderness—are the guardians of a garden world. In the eighteenthcentury idyll Paul et Virginie, a work that profoundly influenced George Sand and the whole pastoral Utopian tradition, a Caribbean island is the paradise in which the children of nature live without sin, nurtured at the bosom of their mother earth. The South is a place where dominating masculine attitudes to the world and to other people (nature red in tooth and claw: you have to be cruel to be kind) are proved unnecessary, and soft feminine values—gentleness, affection, tenderness—can thrive.

Feminised and feminist utopias of the twentieth century have this same character. The best known of early twentieth-century feminist utopias, Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Herland, describes a country in the South (somewhere in Central America, to be more precise) where men have been unknown for two thousand years. Though Gilman's authoritarian and élitist Utopia has its distasteful side for modern readers, the female-only culture presents itself as a commonalty from which violence and coercion have been banished. Herland is a garden world, where compassionate farming and the gentle but intensive education of children are perceived as the most important activities of public and private life. In the period when Ursula Le Guin was producing her most important and most influential Utopian writing so far, examples of the feminised pastorale abound.