“The (Difficult) Arts of Enjoying Life”: Democratic Aesthetics in the Late Nineteenth-Century Utopian Literature of William Morris

While utopian literature’s emphasis on ordered happiness would seem to stand in an antithetical relation to democratic freedom, the late nineteenth-century writer, designer, and socialist William Morris sought to fashion an account of utopian democratic aesthetics. By analyzing Morris’s utopian novel News from Nowhere (1890) and a few of his key lectures, this essay extrapolates Morris’s democratic aesthetic theory grounded in the sensual experience of both aesthetic consumption and aesthetic production. Situating Morris’s work in the progressive, labor, and aesthetic discourses of his time, and considering its numerous historical and contemporary critiques, this essay draws on the theory of ritualization to outline the stakes and dimensions of a utopian politics based upon artistic practice. Though arising out of the individual—their desires, their actions—and thoroughly speculative, Morris’s utopian democratic aesthetics attempted to inscribe artistic practice into a social and political project centered on the free production of subjectivity and the realization of agency through aesthetic experience, both “utopian” and accessible in everyday life. (HH)