From Terror to Grace

Abstract

The very term utopia is fraught with difficulty. Its meanings are various and contested in both academic and lay discourse. Thomas More coined the word as the title and locus of his 1516 Utopia in a pun which conflates outopos or no place and eutopos or good place. Consequently utopia is widely understood as an imagined perfect society or wishfully constructed place which does not and cannot exist. Such imaginings are held to be unrealistic so that utopia has connotations of impossibility and fantastical dreaming, divorced from the hard and the joyful realities of the world and life we actually inhabit and where, as Wordsworth put it, ‘we find our happiness, or not at all’.¹ New generations are inducted into the view that utopia is dangerously escapist through popular children’s literature. In Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, Harry spends two nights gazing at his lost family in the Mirror of Erised, around which runs the inscription ‘Erised stra ehru oyt ube cafru oyt on wohsi’ (I show not your face but your heart’s desire). On the third night, Professor Dumbledore intercepts Harry and tells him that the Mirror of Erised ‘shows us nothing more or less than the deepest, most desperate desire of our hearts. … However, this mirror will give us neither knowledge or truth. Men have wasted away before it, entranced by what they have seen, or been driven mad, not knowing if what it shows is real or even possible’.