Themes
Islandia's culture has many "progressive" features. For example, prostitutes are rehabilitated back into respectable society. Another "progressive" feature is the citizens' love of nature, and their rural lives. Everyone, including members of the upper classes, engages in some kind of useful work, especially farming. The word for city in Islandian, "elainry", literally means "place of many people"; all city families have a country home to which they can return.
Like other writers of speculative fiction, Wright decided to imagine a society that differs from ours in one or several key features. One of these is that, while Islandian civilization is technologically primitive, it is far in advance of Western culture in terms of understanding of human emotion and psychology. Wright wrote much of the story in the 1920s, but set it before World War I, providing a particularly stark contrast between Islandian understanding, and the emotionally unperceptive and self-repressive Victorian world. Immersed in the Islandian culture, John Lang steadily grows in understanding of his emotions and his sexual feelings. He grows accustomed to the sexually permissive Islandian culture. Wright's portrayal may have been intended as a positive comment on the growing sexual permissiveness of American culture in the 1920s.
Another difference between Islandian culture and the West is that Islandians determinedly reject the rush of modern Western life, and most modern Western technology. It is a rural society with an arcadian worldview, which at one point Dorn humorously describes as "enlightened Hedonism". They're not interested in building railroads for quick travel. But they do not blindly reject all Western technology; they use a few Western inventions that they judge to be worthwhile, such as modern rifles, and Singer sewing machines.
Among John Lang's discoveries, he finds that the Islandians use four words for love:
- alia: love of place and family land and lineage,
- amia: love of friends,
- ania: desire for marriage and commitment, and
- apia: sexual attraction
Read more about this topic: Islandia (novel)
Famous quotes containing the word themes:
“I suppose you think that persons who are as old as your father and myself are always thinking about very grave things, but I know that we are meditating the same old themes that we did when we were ten years old, only we go more gravely about it.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“In economics, we borrowed from the Bourbons; in foreign policy, we drew on themes fashioned by the nomad warriors of the Eurasian steppes. In spiritual matters, we emulated the braying intolerance of our archenemies, the Shi’ite fundamentalists.”
—Barbara Ehrenreich (b. 1941)