58 pages • 1 hour read
Thomas MoreUtopia
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1516A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Summary
Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Character Analysis
Themes
Symbols & Motifs
Important Quotes
Essay Topics
Tools
BetaSymbols & Motifs
Sickness, Health, and Medicine
The motif of sickness, health, and medicine recurs throughout the novel, particularly in the lengthy discourses of Raphael, whose first name in Hebrew means “God has healed” (xii). As a cluster of metaphors, this motif offers an effective illustration of Raphael’s approach to social ills and their solution. In More’s day, the germ theory of disease was not yet prevalent. Instead, disease was explained by an imbalance of certain fluids (known as “humors”) within the body. Social problems are not merely the responsibility of individual actors but express an imbalance within a social system, just as disease was understood to reflect an imbalance within the human body.
In addition to illustrating Raphael’s interpretation of social maladies such as greed, poverty, oppression, and crime, the recurring metaphors of sickness, health, and medicine provide the reader a handy way of understanding how the Utopians solve the social problems they diagnose. Much like a doctor might try to eliminate the cause of disease rather than merely alleviating the symptoms, Utopians seek to eradicate social problems by abolishing the irrational and exploitive relationships that give rise to them.
The Island
As Raphael notes, Utopia is on a remote island in the New World. The text provides no other further specification of its location. The island was artificially cut off from the mainland by its founder Utopos, to make it more defensible. Since this geographical feature separates Utopia from very different regimes on the mainland, it can thus be understood as a symbol of the radical distinction between the communist and democratic society in Utopia and the capitalist and monarchical societies on the mainland and beyond.
The New World
More’s choice of locating the island of Utopia in the New World provides the latter with an overarching symbolic significance. During the Age of Discovery (spanning between the 15th and 18th centuries), Europeans discovered new lands and came into contact with non-European cultures in the Americas, Africa, and Asia. Because of this, it became evident that the European forms of social organization were neither absolute nor universal. There were other possibilities for social, economic, and political life quite distinct from the emerging capitalist system and the monarchical form of government that had prevailed for centuries. Taking its bearings from this historical trend, More’s novel employs the New World as a symbol of new social possibilities.
Gardens
In Raphael’s comments on the organization of Utopian cities, gardens appear as a symbol of a paradisiacal and sinless state. This symbol must be understood in terms of the biblical book of Genesis, in which God creates the first humans and places them within the Garden of Eden, a paradise with no want and no suffering or death. Humanity’s “fall” from paradise occurs when Adam and Eve become struck with the vice of pride and, after eating of the tree of knowledge to become like God, are expelled from paradise.
Within Utopian cities, each household has a garden. Raphael relates that the Utopians are “extremely fond” of these gardens. In fact, they hold an important place within Utopian culture, as is illustrated in the fact that Utopians often hold competitions to honor the household with the best-kept garden. As a symbol, gardens thus express the near perfection of Utopian society, in which various preventable forms of sin and suffering have been eliminated, allowing humans to establish more natural and divinely ordained relationships to one another and to nature.
