SOURCE: Armitt, Lucie. “The Grotesque Utopia: Joanna Russ, Jeanette Winterson, Angela Carter, Jane Palmer and Monique Wittig.” In Contemporary Women's Fiction and the Fantastic, pp. 15-38. London, Eng.: Macmillan, 2000.

In the following essay, Armitt discusses the significance and use of utopian fantasy worlds in the writings of several women authors.

And once the old world has turned on its axle so that the new dawn can dawn, then, ah, then! all the women will have wings …¹

Fictional utopias can be deceptively unsatisfactory. Elsewhere I have even claimed they may be threatened by redundancy, being “among the most rigid (and rigidly reductive) of generically bound forms”.² Literary fantasy in general has always had to negotiate the establishment's determination to trivialize it as mere narrative formula. While increasingly successful challenges to these attitudes are mounted by such magic realist writers as Allende, Carter, Márquez and Rushdie, utopia still tends...