Reconstruction 5.4 (Fall 2005)

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Lane, Mary E. Bradley. Mizora: A Prophecy. 1881. Ed. Jean Pfaelzer. New York: Syracuse UP, 2000. 147 pp. Softcover. $14.95. ISBN: 0815628390

<1> “Utopians prefer blondes;” or so argues Jean Pfaelzer in her introduction to Mary E. Bradley Lane’s Mizora, the “first all-female utopia written in the United States” (xi). Pfaelzer’s edition of this late nineteenth-century work of science fiction is one of only two in print and is, in many respects, the superior. Her introduction offers what biographical information is known about Bradley in addition to historically and culturally contextualizing the story and its comments on race, women’s education, religion and motherhood. Specifically, Pfaelzer discusses the ways in which science replaces both Christianity and government in Mizora, the matriarchal aspects of the society, and the “racial anxieties” of the nineteenth century to which Mizora responds. Many consider Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein to be the first work of science fiction, but the history of women authors of science fiction too often jumps from Shelley to mid-twentieth-century authors like Ursula LeGuin. Lane’s Mizora, however, along with other texts like Inez Haynes Gilmore’s Angel Island (1914), Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland (1915), and various novels by Katherine Burdekin, is one of the important missing links in-between.

<2> Pfaelzer’s statement about the pervasiveness of blond women in Mizora points to one of the most troubling aspects of the text: its racial commentary. The utopian land of Mizora is comprised only of women; and women of the “highest type of blonde beauty” at that (15). The book’s narrator, Russian Vera Zarovitch, notices this immediately when finding the world of Mizora—which she stumbles upon when, alone in a boat near the North Pole, she is swept into a swift current and drifts through “a circular wall of amber mist” (14). Vera later learns that Mizoran women have purposely “eliminated” men and “the dark race” (92). Vera, who, as Pfaelzer points out, often emphasizes her own “dark hair and eyes,” is astonished by this knowledge (79). She reveals that she disagrees with their beliefs and is of the opinion that “their admirable system of government, social and political, and their encouragement and provision for universal education of so high an order, had more to do with the formation of superlative character than the elimination of the dark complexion” (92-93). Thus, while Mizora can certainly be read as a troubling endorsement of the eugenics movement, it also (through its “dark” narrator) works against messages of racial purity. After all, by the end of the novel Vera chooses to leave the very blond, “utopian” world she has discovered.

<3> Another major aspect of the novel is its commentary on education. Time and again Vera emphasizes the glories of the Mizoran educational system. In Mizora, education is prized above all else. The “salaries of teachers were larger than those of any other public position,” and “every state had a free college” (23). The advancements of Mizoran society—namely the absence of crime and poverty—are attributed to free, universal education by Vera’s Mizoran guides. In fact, as the story ends and Vera is living in the United States she declares that: “The future of the world, if it be grand and noble, will be the result of UNIVERSAL EDUCATION, FREE AS THE GOD-GIVEN WATER WE DRINK” (147). The emphasis on education in Mizoran culture is one in which she believes whole-heartedly and takes with her when she leaves.

<4> Mizora also offers other advancements for women that differed from Lane’s own experiences in nineteenth-century Ohio. For example, large waists and athletic bodies are esteemed in Mizora. By the time Vera leaves, she looks upon a “tapering waist as a disgusting deformity” (20). Large waists, she is taught, offer greater lung capacity and thus healthier and stronger bodies. Vera also discovers that in Mizora typically “female” or domestic occupations like cooking, cleaning and child-rearing are well-respected. As Pfaelzer points out, “at a time when less than 5 percent of married women were employed outside the home, Mary Lane was a material feminist who believed that housework was significant and skilled labor” (xviii). She refers to cooks as “chemists” and reveals that “the word ‘servant’ did not exist in the language of Mizora” (43, 37). Women are respected in whatever occupation they choose.

<5> Despite its tendency to be repetitious (particularly in its descriptions of the blond, Mizoran women), Mizora is a fascinating book that offers both interesting and troubling observations on government, education, and the eradication of poverty. The novel, enhanced by Pfaezler’s extensive introduction, will appeal to readers interested in nineteenth-century literature, science fiction and early feminism.

Melissa Purdue

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