Beatrice Webb

On 22 February 1883, Beatrice Webb penned the following entry in her diary: “A conflict has been going on within me. Shall I give myself up to Society, and make it my aim to succeed therein, or shall I only do so as far as duty calls me, keeping my private life much as it has been for the last nine months?” For all her intelligence, will power, assertiveness, and individualism, Beatrice Webb’s early diaries testify to the deep rift that runs through this future reformer’s life. The conflict she alludes to, between a public and a private life, is one of many dilemmas Beatrice faces in the pursuit of a social vocation. Often, it is a choice between reason and instinct, liberal and conservative political orientation, love and duty, dependence and independence. But she does not allow them to constrain her; rather, she seeks compromise. As an adolescent, Beatrice claims to have “shaken off the chains of the beautiful old faith” on her ascent to “something higher.” That higher level, as will become increasingly clear, is the calling to an active life in society.

Though Beatrice Webb was a woman with conflicting interests, what is more startling is her recognition of a choice. Despite her womanhood and the patriarchal norms of Victorian England, which she acknowledges in her diary, Beatrice is aware that she can either submit to the narrow world of the “angel in the house,” or assume the prominent role of a public intellectual. Her inclination towards the latter sphere – controlled predominantly by men – strikes many of her contemporaries as audacious and unbecoming of a woman. Indeed, how many could express the sentiment of the following entry from 15 February 1890, on her conversion to socialism: “I have become a socialist not because I believe it would ameliorate the conditions of the masses (though I think it would do so) but because I believe that only under communal ownership of the means of production can you arrive at the most perfect form of individual development, at the greatest stimulus to individual effort; in other words complete socialism is only consistent with absolute individualism. As such, some day, I shall stand on a barrel and preach it.”

For Beatrice, individualism is all-important in the transition from a monarchy to a socialist democracy. While the removal of sexual inequality was certainly a catalyst of her conversion, it became the vehicle for the more comprehensive cause of lifting the barriers to individual happiness. Whether socialism is even compatible with individual development, Beatrice never has to question. It is a given, and for her, eminently worth fighting for.

The Beat Dilemma

The postwar experience of the mid-twentieth century marked a significant turn in global politics and social and economic culture. As the old order passed away, a new one followed, in which cold war, atomic proliferation, competing forms of modernization, and advanced capitalism prevailed. In the United States – which had now become a global juggernaut – an empowered bourgeoisie revitalized the so-called American Dream, turning its archetypal ideals into realizable goals. The nuclear family, a quaint home life, higher education, financial wealth, consumer freedom – all constituted a hegemonic order that demanded conformity while it marginalized dissidents. Among those on the periphery were Communist sympathizers and ethnic and racial minorities, but also an emerging youth movement united by a deep sense of alienation and dissatisfaction, a state Jack Kerouac trenchantly described as “beat.”

The Beat Generation of the 1950s, a precursor of the volatile counterculture of the following decade, seethed at America’s postwar prosperity and the repressive conditions of containment. It emerged, as Malcolm Bradbury points out, in an “affluent, conformist America where the individual seems superfluous, the outsider rages, the dominant culture seems oppressive and hostile.” Unwilling to conform, the Beats – of whom the core members were Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and William S. Burroughs—sought their own values and pursued their own vision in jazz clubs, in experimental art, through alcohol, drugs, liberated sexuality, and the ecstasies of Buddhism and Jewish and Christian mysticism. Insofar as it was a struggle against repressive norms, the Beat-life was an on-going quest, a journey to find a new mode of being in the remote corners of human existence. As John Tytell writes, “The Beat Movement was a crystallization of a sweeping discontent with American ‘virtues’ of progress and power. What began with an exploration of the bowels and entrails of the city – criminality, drugs, mental hospitals – evolved into an expression of the visionary sensibility.”

That sensibility, enshrined predominantly in literature, first entered the American mainstream with Jack Kerouac’s novel, On the Road. Published in 1957, this semi-autobiography became a manifesto for the new generation of dispossessed American youths starved for personal freedom. Without plot, or any other literary restraint, On the Road describes the nomadic life of two characters, Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty, as they crisscross the American continent over a period of two years (from 1947 to 1949), visiting major cities, having love affairs, working odd jobs, experimenting with drugs, frequenting jazz clubs – and always on the go. “We were all delighted,” the narrator Sal declares, “we all realized we were leaving confusion and nonsense behind and performing our one and noble function of the time, [to] move. And we moved!” The theme of mobility is paramount in the text, but unlike other quest narratives, whose heroes strive towards a defined goal, On the Road is irreducible to any end other than the experience of aimless travel and discovery. For this reason it poses an interpretive dilemma, which seeks to answer the question: is On the Road simply an ode to a narcissistic culture, or does it offer an uncommon solution to societal repression?

Yevgeny Zamyatin, We

The ambiguity underlying scientific progress is perhaps no where more creatively expressed than in utopian literature and science-fiction. In both genres, science is depicted variously as: the indispensable element of a perfect society; a field prone to misuse and destructiveness, its product a nightmarish reality; and the conceptual framework of a world—often projected into the future—remarkable not for its moral quality but its metaphysical curiosity. The boundaries between these interpretations are blurred in the dystopian narrative, a hybrid of both genres, of which Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We—a tale set in the twenty-sixth century A.D., in the regimented totalitarian society of OneState—is the modern exemplar.

Written in 1921 and published in 1924, We stakes its claim to the modernist tradition of the early twentieth century by virtue of its experimental boldness in form and content, its open-endedness, and self-reflexivity. These aesthetic strategies also reinforce the novel’s negative image of scientific progress, and by extension, underscore Modernism’s reaction to scientific rationality. Thus, We effectively deconstructs the metanarrative of late nineteenth-century Positivism—a total worldview of human society and the natural environment—by casting it in a dystopian world, in which freedom and individuality have been abolished. Nevertheless, though the novel dramatizes Modernist anxiety over scientific rationalism, it does not repudiate science itself; rather, it cautions against the excesses of science and its potentially dangerous relationship with the state.