The Altrurian Romances

AUTHOR: Howells, William Dean

SUMMARY (Bryn Skibo, revised Deborah Madsen):

Altruria is a utopian society in which meat-eating is linked to capitalism and the brutal treatment of domesticated animals. The Altrurian is glad to hear that in the US there are laws against cruelty to animals (23). Domesticated animals are absent from the capitals of Altruria and horses have been replaced by electric transportation (161).

The narrator of Through the Eye is the American-born wife of Aristides Homos, the eponymous Altrurian of the first novel in the trilogy. She reports a feast held in America at the Makely home, where food and wine was served in abundance, despite everyone being full (314-316). Meals among the Americans are often opulent, featuring at least four or five different meats and plenty of wine. This excess is satirized in the descriptions offered by the Altrurian. Indeed, the American narrator of Through the Eye begins to crave meat during her visit to Altruria, but when she needs to kill a chicken herself, she is so disgusted and so horrified at the spectacle, that she no longer can bring herself to eat it and does not want it anymore (384). Witnessing what the animals suffer in order to be rendered into “meat,” she can no longer consume it for ethical reasons (282-283). In Altruria the crew of a stranded yacht raid the fields and chicken coops of the nearby Altrurians. The dead chickens are given a burial and the Altrurians allow the stranded passengers to kill and eat shellfish and crabs “until they became accustomed or resigned to the Altrurian diet” (415). These “involuntary guests” adapt well to life, save for the Altrurian diet: “The greatest trouble they ever gave us was in trapping and killing the wild things for food; but when they were told that that must not be done, and taught to recognize the vast range of edible fungi, they took not unwillingly to mushrooms and the ranker tubers and roots” (434-435). All food is earned through work and when American upper-class visitors arrive in Altruria, they are surprsied to be told that they cannot pay for their food and housing, but must work for it (3 hours a day, like all Altrurians). When they refuse, the Altrurians capture them "with the sort of net and electric filament which had been employed with the recalcitrant sailors; others were brought to a better mind by withholding food from them until they were willing to pay for it by working” (427).

The privileged form of work, consonant with Altrurian concepts of land usage and their environmentalist values is “the cultivation of the earth. We believe that this, when not followed slavishly, or for gain, brings a man in the closest relations to the deity, through a grateful sense of the divine bounty, and that it not only awakens a natural piety in him, but that it endures to the worker that piece of soil which he tills, and so strengthens his love of home” (162). Care for the land is then closely related to citizenship and nationalism: “There is none of the decay of patriotism among us; our country is our mother, and we love her as it is impossible to love the stepmother that a competitive or monopolistic nation must be to its citizens” (162). Altrurians have “dismissed the complicated facilities and conveniences of the capitalist epoch, of which we are so proud, and have got back as close as possible to nature. … As work is the ideal, they do not believe in what we [Americans] call labor-saving devices” (385).

Last updated on June 17th, 2024

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