Looking Backward
Edward Bellamy's socialist utopian novel Looking Backward tells the story of a Boston man who is placed in a mesmeric trance in 1887 and awakens in the year 2000. While he was entranced, the United States and much of the world has undergone major transformations, chiefly in economic and social organization. Most of the book is exposition, as the protagonist, Julian West, learns about the new, improved Boston from his rescuer, Dr. Leete. The Boston of the future is a utopia of organization, equality, and freedom. A very small portion of the novel is dedicated to putting this exposition in the context of an actual plot, in which Julian West falls in love (it's not very compelling).
The ideas Bellamy puts forth in this novel are interesting, both for his contemporaries and for myself. Looking Backward was a bestseller in its time, following only Uncle Tom's Cabin and Ben-Hur in popularity. People organized societies to discuss and try to put his ideas into practice, utopian communities were founded based on his principles, and several major thinkers of the late 19th and early 20th century were influenced by the ideas of Bellamy's novel.
For myself, I am drawn to the anti-capitalist rhetoric of the book and its concern with social equality. He builds his argument on the idea of the brotherhood of man, saying, through the voice of Dr. Leete, "Every man, however solitary may seem his occupation, is a member of a vast industrial partnership, as large as the nation, as large as humanity. The necessity of mutual dependence should imply the duty and guarantee of mutual support" (105). Furthermore, he continues, "the solidarity of the race and the brotherhood of man, which to you were but fine phrases, are, to our thinking and feeling, ties as real and as vital as physical fraternity" (106).
Given this, the Boston of the 19th century must be seen in terms of horror and death. During one venture into 1887 Boston, West says,Presently, too, as I observed the wretched beings about me more closely, I perceived that they were all quite dead. Their bodies were so many living sepulchres. On each brutal brow was plainly written the hic jacet of a soul dead within. As I looked, horror struck, from one death's head to another, I was affected by a singular hallucination. Like a wavering translucent spirit face superimposed upon each of these brutish masks I saw the ideal, the possible face that would have been the actual if mind and soul had lived. . . . Therefore now I found upon my garments the blood of this great multitude of strangled souls of my brothers. The voice of their blood cried out against me from the ground. Every stone of the reeking pavements, every brick of the pestilential rookeries, found a tongue and called after me as I fled: What has thou done with thy brother Abel? (266)
Bellamy's description of the inequalities of the 19th century are the most interesting and vivid part of the book; his descriptions of the utopia of 2000 are not only less interesting and vivid (utopias are generally hard to bring to life anyway) but in some crucial ways unappealing. Although the idea of the brotherhood of man and the equality that concretizing this brotherhood brings really appeals to me, the particulars of this society are troubling in their insistent uniformity, apparent authoritarianism, and nationalism. All neighborhoods look the same, the government has absorbed all private interests, and the "national party" aims to "justify patriotism and raise it from an instinct to a rational devotion, by making the native land truly a father land, a father who kept the people alive and was not merely an idol for which they were expected to die" (207). Apparently, I am more of an anarchist than I thought (speaking of which, Bellamy dismisses anarchism as a mere tool of capitalism, a way to keep real reform from occurring).
Another element of Bellamy's utopian future that is both promising and troubling is the place of women in society. On the one hand, he makes an argument for freer personal relationships and the inclusion of women in the workplace, which is a really positive move for an author of the 1880s; on the other hand, however, he manages to remain firmly entrenched in traditional ideas about gender, including separate spheres for men and women and the concepts of women as simultaneously weaker and better than men. Dr. Leete explains that of course women work, just as men do; in fact, he says, they "have a women general-in-chief and are under exclusively feminine regime" andthe hours of women's work are considerably shorter than those of men's, more frequent vacations are granted, and the most careful provision is made for rest when needed. The men of this day so well appreciate that they owe to the beauty and grace of women the chief zest of their lives and their main incentive to effort, that they permit them to work at all only because it is fully understood that a certain regular requirement of labor, of a sort adapted to their powers, is well for body and mind, during the period of maximum physical vigor. (210)
He continues in this vein, saying, "We have given them a world of their own, with its emulations, ambitions, and careers, and I assure you they are very happy with it" (211).
Despite the weakness and separateness this reveals, and despite the condescension that appears to still come from men, women in this utopia "have risen to the full height of their responsibility as the wardens of the world to come, to whose keeping the keys of the future are confided. Their feeling of duty in this respect amounts to a sense of religious consecration. It is a cult in which they educate their daughters from childhood" (220). Together with Bellamy's statements that "women who have been both wives and mothers . . . alone fully represent their sex" (213) and that "it is in giving full play to the differences of sex rather than in seeking to obliterate them, as was apparently the effort of some reformers in your day, that the enjoyment of each by itself and the piquancy which each has for the other, are alike enhanced" (211), this statement about women's responsibility and religious consecration looks ahead to Charlotte Perkins Gilman's glorification of motherhood and women's society in Herland, another major American utopian text that links socialism and a form of feminism.
The ideas Bellamy puts forth in this novel are interesting, both for his contemporaries and for myself. Looking Backward was a bestseller in its time, following only Uncle Tom's Cabin and Ben-Hur in popularity. People organized societies to discuss and try to put his ideas into practice, utopian communities were founded based on his principles, and several major thinkers of the late 19th and early 20th century were influenced by the ideas of Bellamy's novel.
For myself, I am drawn to the anti-capitalist rhetoric of the book and its concern with social equality. He builds his argument on the idea of the brotherhood of man, saying, through the voice of Dr. Leete, "Every man, however solitary may seem his occupation, is a member of a vast industrial partnership, as large as the nation, as large as humanity. The necessity of mutual dependence should imply the duty and guarantee of mutual support" (105). Furthermore, he continues, "the solidarity of the race and the brotherhood of man, which to you were but fine phrases, are, to our thinking and feeling, ties as real and as vital as physical fraternity" (106).
Given this, the Boston of the 19th century must be seen in terms of horror and death. During one venture into 1887 Boston, West says,Presently, too, as I observed the wretched beings about me more closely, I perceived that they were all quite dead. Their bodies were so many living sepulchres. On each brutal brow was plainly written the hic jacet of a soul dead within. As I looked, horror struck, from one death's head to another, I was affected by a singular hallucination. Like a wavering translucent spirit face superimposed upon each of these brutish masks I saw the ideal, the possible face that would have been the actual if mind and soul had lived. . . . Therefore now I found upon my garments the blood of this great multitude of strangled souls of my brothers. The voice of their blood cried out against me from the ground. Every stone of the reeking pavements, every brick of the pestilential rookeries, found a tongue and called after me as I fled: What has thou done with thy brother Abel? (266)
Bellamy's description of the inequalities of the 19th century are the most interesting and vivid part of the book; his descriptions of the utopia of 2000 are not only less interesting and vivid (utopias are generally hard to bring to life anyway) but in some crucial ways unappealing. Although the idea of the brotherhood of man and the equality that concretizing this brotherhood brings really appeals to me, the particulars of this society are troubling in their insistent uniformity, apparent authoritarianism, and nationalism. All neighborhoods look the same, the government has absorbed all private interests, and the "national party" aims to "justify patriotism and raise it from an instinct to a rational devotion, by making the native land truly a father land, a father who kept the people alive and was not merely an idol for which they were expected to die" (207). Apparently, I am more of an anarchist than I thought (speaking of which, Bellamy dismisses anarchism as a mere tool of capitalism, a way to keep real reform from occurring).
Another element of Bellamy's utopian future that is both promising and troubling is the place of women in society. On the one hand, he makes an argument for freer personal relationships and the inclusion of women in the workplace, which is a really positive move for an author of the 1880s; on the other hand, however, he manages to remain firmly entrenched in traditional ideas about gender, including separate spheres for men and women and the concepts of women as simultaneously weaker and better than men. Dr. Leete explains that of course women work, just as men do; in fact, he says, they "have a women general-in-chief and are under exclusively feminine regime" andthe hours of women's work are considerably shorter than those of men's, more frequent vacations are granted, and the most careful provision is made for rest when needed. The men of this day so well appreciate that they owe to the beauty and grace of women the chief zest of their lives and their main incentive to effort, that they permit them to work at all only because it is fully understood that a certain regular requirement of labor, of a sort adapted to their powers, is well for body and mind, during the period of maximum physical vigor. (210)
He continues in this vein, saying, "We have given them a world of their own, with its emulations, ambitions, and careers, and I assure you they are very happy with it" (211).
Despite the weakness and separateness this reveals, and despite the condescension that appears to still come from men, women in this utopia "have risen to the full height of their responsibility as the wardens of the world to come, to whose keeping the keys of the future are confided. Their feeling of duty in this respect amounts to a sense of religious consecration. It is a cult in which they educate their daughters from childhood" (220). Together with Bellamy's statements that "women who have been both wives and mothers . . . alone fully represent their sex" (213) and that "it is in giving full play to the differences of sex rather than in seeking to obliterate them, as was apparently the effort of some reformers in your day, that the enjoyment of each by itself and the piquancy which each has for the other, are alike enhanced" (211), this statement about women's responsibility and religious consecration looks ahead to Charlotte Perkins Gilman's glorification of motherhood and women's society in Herland, another major American utopian text that links socialism and a form of feminism.