They're all utopias....or are they?

Can we, as people, discover a true utopia? In Ursula Leguin’s The Dispossessed, the protagonist seeks to discover this for himself. He goes on a searche for that paradise, that perfect place, the utopia. But, nothing is what it seems at first glance.

The story of Shevek, the protagonist of The Dispossessed, takes place on two worlds, Anarres and Urras. The story begins under his assumption that Anarres is a utopia where there is human solidarity, no one owns anything, people share everything, and everyone is free. On the other hand, he detests Urras; he hates it, referring to the people as filthy profiteers and repeatedly stating that he will never go there. Urras is the exact opposite of Anarres; it is a dystopia.

Years of living in Anarres reveals its many problems, including the desolate nature of the earth that can barely maintain its population, the existence of certain selfish profiteers, and most of all, the hidden power and unwritten laws that have created walls around the Anarrastis, limiting their fundamental Odonian right of freedom. Shevek seeks to unbuild these walls. Thinking of Anarres no longer as a utopia, possibly even as a dystopia, he sets off on his mission to Urras.

When he first lands on Urras he says, “This is what a world is supposed to look like.” The world is beautiful, and the people are beautiful and everything about them is glamorous. He comes to believe that “the people were not the gross, cold egoists he thought them to be…they were intelligence; and they were kind…this was home indeed, his race’s world; and all its beauty was his birthright.” He believes that he has found a place where he can fit in, discovering “for the first time in his life the conversation of his equals.” Urras has become a paradise for him, a utopia.

Over time, however, he comes to change his mind about Urras. He realizes that by being a physicist in Urras he is not serving society, he is serving “the State”. “They [the State] owned him. He had thought to bargain with them, a very naïve anarchist’s notion. The individual cannot bargain with the State.” In experiencing Urras, he has lost his freedom; he “had let a wall be built around him and had never noticed.” At one point when he gets sick, Leguin says, “It was not only the alcohol that he tried to vomit up; it was all the bread he had eaten on Urras.” He refers to the experience of Urras like poison, a vile substance that harms him and causes him, for the first time in his life, to feel shame. Initially he believed the people were beautiful, but he soon learns that the people are not beautiful inside. Their need to possess things results in them building walls, creating barriers for him themselves. Urras becomes a “gracious prison cell”, even “Hell” for him. It once again becomes a dystopia.

His realization at the conclusion of the novel, the realization that prompts him to return home, is the realization that for him, Anarres is indeed a utopia or close enough to one. He plainly expresses this sentiment in comparing Anarres and Urras. He tells the Urrastis that Anarres “is an ugly world. Not like this one…And the people aren’t beautiful…Everything is beautiful here [Urras]. Only not the faces. On Anarres nothing is beautiful, nothing but the faces…there you see the eyes. And in the eyes you see the splendor, the splendor of the human spirit. Because our men and women are free- possessing nothing, they are free. And you the possessors are possessed. You are all in jail.”