Marguerite Young + The Lost Utopia

Los Angeles Review on Angel in the Forest

As with so much of Young’s other writing, her story of utopia demands that one eye look toward the past as the other looks toward the future. The utopian social contract is founded upon a vision for the future; this utopian vision grows from a social contract that hoped to amend a fallen world. Such is the double articulation that Miriam Fuchs sees in all of Young’s books, which are “utopian in the sense that each one recognizes the universal struggle for ideality and the impossibility of reaching it.”

According to Fredric Jameson, the utopian vocation is, historically, one of failure. Its “epistemological value,” however, lies in how it helps us find the limits of what we can imagine. A work of utopian fiction helps us feel “the mud of the present age in which the winged Utopian shoes stick, imagining that to be the force of gravity itself”—an artificial constraint on the imagination that we wrongly take to be natural.

In Angel, Young adheres to Jameson’s vocation for utopia. Though she sees Owen’s and Rapp’s projects as doomed from the start, she deals with both figures in similar terms to her characters in Miss MacIntosh—who, as she told Fuchs and Friedman, were “more complete in their incompletion than if they had been whole.” The two failed communities, for Young, stand as fleeting fragments in an ongoing, unfinished, and ultimately unfinishable process of utopian dreaming that “lies beyond this shifting world,” and so “must be shifting too.” To reach utopia would be to reach harmony and completion—a goal that Fuchs sees as incompatible with Young’s worldview, which consigns all such efforts to “disharmony and fragmentation.”