The Ambiguities of Utopia Theme Analysis

Utopia is so ambiguous a work that one critic calls it “the most slippery of texts: in no other literary work is the question of authorial intention at once more pressing or more unanswerable.” As such, we can’t take at face value anything we read in the book. Questions the text invites but never resolves include: can a utopia be established on earth, and, if not, why imagine one, especially when philosophy falls on deaf ears in the courts of kings? Moreover, does the Utopia that Raphael Hythloday describes really nurture human happiness, or is it oppressively totalitarian? (The name “Hythloday,” it is appropriate to add here, likely means something like “peddler of triflers,” “kindler of nonsense,” and yet the traveler also shares his first name with Raphael, the angel who helps man understand the ways of God.)

As if to make his own text even slipperier, Thomas More the man led a life dramatically inconsistent with Utopian law and order, in what amounts to an extreme clash between his literary “ideal” and his lived reality. He was a lawyer—but lawyers are banned from Utopia for being too cunning in their interpretations of the law. He was a devout Catholic who, during the Reformation, tortured Protestants and approved of burning them at the stake as heretics—but Utopia is tolerant of all religions (just not the irreligious), and those who “vehemently and fervently” attempt to convert others are banished or enslaved.

There are even internal inconsistencies in the description of Utopia itself, it would seem. One critic, Stephen Greenblatt, argues that, though Utopians are only required to work six hours a day, a close reading reveals that the workday as described in the text would really fill one’s day from sunrise to sunset. At the end of Book II, even Thomas More the character says, “Many things came to mind which in the manners and laws of that people seemed to be instituted and founded of no good reason.”

What are we to make of this literary house of mirrors, of all these maze-like questions, ambiguities, and inconsistencies? Many readers have simply found Utopia to be nothing more, at last, than a grand literary joke, impossible to pin down and so difficult to connect with. But perhaps there is a more fruitful way of engaging with the work. In the first theme we discussed how Utopia is “nowhere,” but the potential for a utopia is everywhere. What More’s ambiguities direct our attention to are the great difficulties that await us as we seek to realize that potential; Utopia cannot be built in a day, as it were. These ambiguities also require that we carefully weigh and examine matters for ourselves, that we awaken and listen to our inner philosophers—which is, after all, the first step all of us must take before any of us can begin the journey to utopia.