Ritual Embodiment as Aesthetic Politics Through the Lens of Jameson’s Utopian Criticism

The question that Jameson poses to utopian literature, “Can culture be political?” incites an understanding of cultural embodiment informing the consideration of ritual. While many utopian novels in the period of their late 19th century popularity seem essentially anti-artistic and anti-religious, Jameson’s criticism prompts us to examine the formations and transformations of the body that utopian fiction also explored. In this paper, I argue that Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s *Herland* and William Morris’s *News From Nowhere* imagine aesthetics as a ritualized embodiment of the societal ideal, by which a sacramental power is afforded to everyday utopian life. I aim to elucidate a broader *fin-de-siècle* paradigm in which utopia’s internal and productive challenges were mobilized toward the progressive, political reinvention of the human, by way of the reinvention of religion and art.