Frederick Philip Grove’s Version of Pastoral Utopianism

Despite critical neglect, Canadian SF has produced some interesting texts. Among these is F.P. Grove’s Consider Her Ways (1947), which I analyze in conjunction with its main conceptual antecedent in Grove’s opus, The Master of the Mill (1944). Grove in both quilts together pastoralism, utopianism, and Darwinism in a peculiar ideological synthesis conducing to an utterly bleak (albeit apparently ludic) vision. In The Master a Naturalist framework sustains a meta-utopian morality play: Grove here reads Canadian history as the outcome of the failure of a whole series of utopian projects. This novel in effect denounces the possibility of human agency within history as inherently (self-)destructive: homo sapiens, as homo faber, has divorced itself from the processes of Nature. In consequence, no utopian enterprise is to be expected from within our species—not even from women, who to Grove’s way of thinking are more “ahistorical,” more “natural,” than men. The myrmecological utopia of Consider (which is logically as well as chronologically Grove’s last work) anticipates the solution of much subsequent SF: the non-human society provides a secular escape from history. Utopia is at once affirmed and denied: founded on a literalization of the term “body politic,” the pastoral ant society, with its telepathic mass-consciousness and its biological castes, is “naturally” free from the pitfalls of “culture”; but its biological basis makes it—and, indeed, any utopian horizon—unachievable for humans. Ambivalently and disturbingly, utopianism and nihilism in Consider become two sides of the same coin, and Grove can conceive of a movement toward Otherness only as a movement away front History. (SP)