Erewhon

Arowhena is an Erewhonian, and she is the daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Nosnibor. She is their younger daughter, and she eventually falls in love, marries, and returns to England with the narrator. She is described as being attractive and kind, just like most Erewhonians, and her work ethic in the household is exemplary, involving chores of all kinds for her parents and elder sister. Arowhena is a devout follower of the Erewhonian religion, and one of her peak moments in the novel is her reversal of the narrator’s proselytizing efforts, in which she claims that the Christian god is a false representation of a human ideal: a precise reversal of the argument that the narrator makes of Erewhonian gods. For the most part, though, Arowhena is a normative example of a “feminine object” in literature, initially expressed by Kelly Sue DeConnick as an extension of the Bechdel Test. Both of these critical models are designed to determine whether female characters are sufficiently developed in any given text. In DeConnick’s view, if a female character can hypothetically be replaced with a lamp, then the work fails the test because it has not sufficiently developed the female character. Arowhena is largely a victim of this trope, as she rarely expresses anything more complex than interest in the narrator, and even her quip regarding Christianity is only a mirror of the narrator’s own argument.

Ultimately, Butler’s purpose in including Arowhena is centered on two common tropes. The first is that love overrides cultural differences, as expressed in famous works like Romeo and Juliet, in which the titular characters fall in love despite pressure from their families. This trope allows Butler to explore a romance arc in an otherwise philosophical novel, introducing a storytelling angle designed to broaden his readership and develop more interest in the narrator. The second trope is that of imperialist/colonized love, in which an imperialist man falls in love with a member of the same group that he is tasked with oppressing. A well-known example of this trope can be found in the story of Pocahontas, and the primary significance of the trope is that it often allows the imperialist to bring their love interest back to the “civilized” world as a “specimen” of the Indigenous population. Arowhena falls neatly into this role, as she escapes with the narrator and returns with him to London.

Chowbok is the only Indigenous character presented in the text, and although the name Chowbok is used in the novel, his real name is Kahabuka. Chowbok is likely Maori, and he is essentially another caricature of the prejudiced English imperialist tendency to label Indigenous people as “savages.” The narrator describes Chowbok as “ugly” and lazy, noting his addiction to alcohol and frequently accusing him of deceit and wrongdoing. Chowbok’s inability to communicate clearly serves both to emphasize his perceived stupidity in the narrator’s eyes, as well as to create a sense of enigmatic or esoteric wisdom, which is often attributed to the Indigenous populations of colonized areas. As such, Chowbok’s imitation of the stone statues outside of Erewhon is ominous, implying a knowledge of something unimaginable to an Englishman like the narrator. This scene also prompts the arrogance of the imperialist tendencies of the narrator in his confidence that he can overcome this unknown force even though the mere suggestion of its presence has terrified Chowbok.

Because the novel is a satire, it is difficult to determine with absolute certainty whether Butler himself perceived Indigenous peoples in the same way as the narrator perceives Chowbok, or if Chowbok is another example of the ways in which Butler uses the biases of the narrator to critique larger social issues such as prejudice and discrimination. In one view, Chowbok is likely only described and perceived as he is by the narrator, and, as such, it is the narrator’s prejudicial views on Indigenous peoples that color these descriptions. In another view, Butler may have fallen into the same prejudices that he elsewhere in the novel seems to argue against, creating a gap in his own reflection on bias and ideology. Chowbok has an alcohol addiction, a common stereotype regarding Indigenous peoples, and he runs away from the border of Erewhon, again playing into a common stereotype of the time that Indigenous peoples are inherently cowardly. These are seemingly concrete events, rather than perceptions on the part of the narrator, and this implies that Butler has inadvertently inserted some unexamined prejudices into the text, even though the text as a whole argues against such prejudices.