Erewhon
Glossary
A
- Arowhena
- The younger Nosnibor daughter, with whom Higgs falls in love during his stay in Erewhon. Erewhonian custom forbids a younger sister from marrying before the elder, complicating their romance and eventually driving the novel's escape plot.
- Related: Nosnibor Family, Zulora, Escape
B
- Birth Formulae
- Elaborate legal documents Erewhonian parents must have their newborn children sign, in which the infant purportedly "agrees" to have been born and absolves the parents of responsibility for bringing it into existence — a satire on legal fictions and the asymmetry of parental authority.
- Related: World of the Unborn
C
- Chowbok
- A native shepherd on Higgs's home station who accompanies him partway on his expedition into the mountains but flees in terror before they reach Erewhon, apparently out of dread of what lies beyond — an early hint of the strangeness Higgs is about to find.
- Related: Higgs
- Conclusion
- The novel's closing chapter, in which Higgs and Arowhena are rescued at sea by the Italian ship Principe Umberto under Captain Giovanni Gianni, and Higgs describes his plan to organize a missionary expedition back to Erewhon.
- Related: Escape, Higgs
E
- Erewhon
- The isolated country beyond the mountain range that gives the novel its title — an anagram of "nowhere" — whose inhabitants have inverted many ordinary moral categories: illness is treated as a crime, crime as an illness, and machines are regarded with deep suspicion as a potential rival form of life.
- Related: Higgs, Straighteners, Colleges of Unreason
- Escape
- The novel's climactic sequence in which Higgs and Arowhena flee Erewhon by hot air balloon rather than face the straighteners' punishment for their forbidden match, an escape that becomes, in the sequel Erewhon Revisited, the founding miracle of a new religion.
- Related: Higgs, Arowhena, Conclusion
H
- Higgs
- The narrator, an English settler-colonist working a sheep station who crosses an unexplored mountain range in search of new pastoral land and instead discovers the hidden country of Erewhon, whose customs he records for the English reader in this book.
- Related: Erewhon, Chowbok, Arowhena
- Hospitals for Incurables
- The institutions to which Erewhonians guilty of severe or repeated "criminal" illness are confined — the feared consequence Higgs is warned awaits him if he attempts to escape his parole, reinforcing the novel's inversion of medicine and punishment.
- Related: Illness as Crime, Straighteners
I
- Illness as Crime
- Erewhon's central moral inversion: a person who falls into ill health or contracts a disease before old age is tried before a jury and punished, sometimes severely, for the offense of being sick, while what Higgs's culture calls crime is instead treated as a misfortune requiring treatment.
- Related: Erewhon, Straighteners, Some Erewhonian Trials
M
- Mahaina
- An Erewhonian woman discussed by the Nosnibor household as a case for a straightener, whose alleged moral failing (possibly drunkenness) prompts a chapter of gossip that exposes the arbitrary, socially constructed nature of Erewhon's inverted diagnoses of vice.
- Related: Straighteners, Nosnibor Family
- Mr. Nosnibor
- Arowhena and Zulora's father, a reformed embezzler undergoing a course of flogging and treatment under a straightener to cure his criminal tendencies, illustrating how Erewhon punishes moral offenses medically rather than penally.
- Related: Nosnibor Family, Straighteners
S
- Some Erewhonian Trials
- A chapter recounting several courtroom scenes in Erewhon's capital — including a young man swindled out of his inheritance by his own guardian — used to illustrate how the country's inverted moral logic plays out in formal legal proceedings.
- Related: Personal Bereavement Court, Illness as Crime
- Straighteners
- Erewhon's version of doctors — consulted not for physical illness, which is a punishable crime, but for moral failings such as embezzlement, envy, or unkindness, which are treated as involuntary afflictions requiring diagnosis and cure rather than punishment.
- Related: Illness as Crime, Mahaina
T
- The Book of the Machines
- Three chapters purportedly translated from an Erewhonian philosopher's treatise, arguing that machines are a form of evolving mechanical life that will eventually surpass and enslave humanity — the argument that led Erewhon to destroy nearly all of its advanced machinery centuries before Higgs's arrival.
- Related: Erewhon
- The Colleges of Unreason
- Erewhon's universities, which train students in "hypothetics" and other deliberately impractical, illogical subjects far removed from useful knowledge — Butler's satire of classical education's uselessness and its disconnect from real-world competence.
- Related: Hypothetical Language
- The Erewhonian Philosopher (Rights of Vegetables)
- A later philosopher who extended the logic of animal rights to plants, arguing that vegetables too have a right to life, pushing the earlier reform to an absurd extreme that eventually collapsed Erewhon's vegetarian movement under its own contradictions.
- Related: Rights of Animals Prophet
- The Erewhonian Prophet (Rights of Animals)
- An unnamed philosopher-prophet who, generations before Higgs's arrival, persuaded Erewhon that eating meat was immoral because animals have rights, triggering a social revolution that Butler uses to satirize the way charismatic moral reformers can sweep a credulous public along through force of reputation rather than argument.
- Related: Rights of Vegetables Philosopher
- The Hypothetical Language
- An abstruse, deliberately impractical academic language taught at the Colleges of Unreason, mastery of which is prized as a mark of a gentleman's education despite (or because of) its total lack of practical application.
- Related: Colleges of Unreason, Ydgrun and the Ydgrunites
- The Musical Banks
- Erewhon's parallel currency system, housed in cathedral-like buildings filled with singing and stained glass, whose currency is universally professed to matter above all else and universally avoided in practical transactions — Butler's satire of organized religion's relationship to everyday commercial life.
- Related: Ydgrun and the Ydgrunites
- The Nosnibor Family
- The Erewhonian household that takes Higgs in during his stay in the capital, comprising Mr. Nosnibor (a reformed embezzler undergoing straightening), Mrs. Nosnibor, and their daughters Zulora and Arowhena, with whom Higgs falls in love.
- Related: Arowhena, Zulora, Straighteners
- The Personal Bereavement Court
- One of Erewhon's specialized courts, which Higgs visits to witness a trial concerning misfortune classified as a personal bereavement — part of the novel's broader satire of a legal system that criminalizes suffering itself.
- Related: Some Erewhonian Trials, Illness as Crime
- The Sheep Station
- Higgs's remote colonial pastoral outpost at the edge of settled country, described in the novel's opening chapters, from which he sets out on the expedition over the mountain range that leads to his discovery of Erewhon.
- Related: Higgs, Chowbok
- The Views of the Erewhonians Concerning Death
- Erewhon regards death with less abhorrence than disease, treating it as a matter beyond the reach of law. The dead are cremated and their ashes scattered over ground of their choosing, which the superstitious believe makes them jealous guardians of that land.
- Related: World of the Unborn, Illness as Crime
- The World of the Unborn
- Erewhonian belief holds that unborn souls actively choose to be born into life, signing an affidavit before a magistrate and accepting harsh conditions (including loss of memory) — a doctrine Butler uses to satirize ideas of consent, birth, and parental responsibility.
- Related: Birth Formulae, The Views Concerning Death
Y
- Ydgrun and the Ydgrunites
- Erewhon's true, unspoken religion of respectability and social convention — a goddess never formally worshipped but constantly obeyed, standing for the unwritten code of "good form" that governs behavior more powerfully than the official Musical Bank religion ever does.
- Related: Musical Banks
Z
- Zulora
- The elder Nosnibor daughter, whom custom requires to marry before her sister Arowhena. Higgs's family hosts hope he will court Zulora instead, but his affections lie with her younger sister, forcing the couple toward secrecy and eventual flight.
- Related: Arowhena, Nosnibor Family