Wednesday, October 9, 2013

Utopia for Men?

In Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities, the city of Eutropia is constantly moving, literally. The city owns land in a vast area divided into many smaller cities.  The citizens of Eutropia only inhabit one city at a time. The people of Eutropia move to the next city when they are fed up with their professions, relatives, debt, homes and basically life in general.

This sounds like a nice idea in theory. After all, life can get pretty boring and mundane sometimes. The one problem I have with this idea, is that, as the story indicates, men can not only change professions, but also their wives.  Now, the story doesn't say if women can choose to stay with their husbands or not.  In fact, the story doesn't say how the women of Eutropia feel about the idea of being traded in, which is, in and of itself a little sexist. 



The story goes on to say that life is "renewed" from move to move. Again, that sounds nice, but women aren't things that you can pick up and then drop when you get bored with them. Women are also human beings who deserve to have husbands who don't throw them away and trade them in for new wives. I guess in Eutropia, marriage has an expiration date. 

 Apparently having the same wife for life is boring to the men of Eutropia which begs the question, why do the men get married in the first place. My theory is the men of this city have wives so they can have someone to cook and clean for them. The men obviously don't marry for love in this city, because if they did, they would hold on to their first wives for their entire lives. 

Another thing about Eutropia is that it sounds suspiciously like word Utopia. The story makes you wonder if most men would think the idea of living in a city where you continually get new wives is a Utopia, a perfect place to live or not. I'd venture to guess that most of the men in this city would be perfectly ok with this arrangement.

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