Utopian Reconciliation Amid Dystopia: America’s Manifest Destiny And Androgyny In Jim Crace’s The Pesthouse

Jim Crace,one of the most popular contemporary British novelists,posted his11 th fiction The Pesthouse in 2007 which continues his incredible originality in representational strategies for space in fiction writing--Crace sets this fiction in the medieval America.This paper makes a close reading of The Pesthouse from the perspective of dystopia and critical utopia,to analyze protagonists’ pursuit of the Promised Land in Europe amid the ravaged medieval America.The paper attempts to excavate and explain what is implied in Crace’s choice of setting the novel in the devastated America in the Middle Ages,combined with Crace’s attitudes towards America shown in the interviews,and what is hidden in protagonists’ final decision to go westward to build a utopia like Old America in their ancestors’ times on their own instead of continuing their eastward journey for the Promised Land in Europe,and thus fulfills a utopian reconciliation,in which androgyny in the main characters plays important roles--an irony of the mainstream of the existing utopian narrative about females.This paper first illustrates that the dystopian narrative in the novel is a reversion of America’s Manifest Destiny--America,the Promised Land,is destined to “lead the world to new and better things”(Stephanson xii),resulting in “the supremacy of the America over other nations and people”(Gutfeld 31).The reversal implies critiques of American ideological supremacy and Crace’s inclination to grant Europe new images different from the negative ones held in America.Then the paper elaborates on protagonists’ changes of the perception of utopia,resonated with Tom Moylan’s idea of critical utopia.Finally,the paper analyzes the androgynous characteristics of protagonists to interpret the significance of androgyny in utopia,which delivers Crace’s critical ideas of the existing utopian narrative about females by male utopian writers.