SOURCE: “The Reader and Looking Backward,” in The Journal of General Education, Vol. XXXIII, No. 1, Spring, 1981, pp. 69-79.

[In the following essay, Khanna contends that the popularity of Looking Backward is founded on the text's sophisticated projection of an ideal reader, a process that mirrors the narrator's journey to a utopian society.]

Looking Backward, 2000-1887 (1888) is one of the classics of American fiction and was, in its own time, a best-seller. It sparked innumerable imitations in fiction (some 154 utopian novels were published between 1888 and 1900) and exerted an enormous influence on such disparate thinkers as John Dewey, Thorsten Veblen, and Eugene V. Debs. In imaginative, philosophical, and political terms, Looking Backward did, as Joseph Schiffman has said, “profoundly influence the American mind.”¹ Nor was its influence confined to this continent, for as Sylvia Bowman has recently shown, it was translated into numerous languages and influenced European writing and politics.² Only Thomas More's Utopia has had a comparable impact on the literary tradition of the utopian genre, and perhaps no other novel has so affected social and political action.

There is no denying, of course, that historical conditions played an important part in both the writing and popular reception of Looking Backward. For a variety of economic, social, and religious reasons, the times were right. Both the founding of numerous utopian communes and the market for utopian fiction leave no doubt about the receptivity of the age. But of those hundred and fifty novels of the period (most of them combining sentimental plots and specific blueprints for reform; technological innovations and Victorian literary style; popular romance and religious imagery) only Bellamy's book stands out.

Why? I should like to suggest that the reasons for the success of Looking Backward concern Bellamy's literary skill, as much as the social climate in 1888.

Before I begin discussion of the literary qualities of the book, however, I must make clear that I do so as one reader of fiction, rather than as a Bellamy expert. As a non-expert, however, I may be more readily excused if I begin with a basic observation. Looking Backward is a remarkably engaging novel. This is true, I think, even for the modern reader, who has to overcome the surface sentimentality of the style, as well as his own anxiety about too much government control. The book continues to engage readers, despite such impediments, because at a deeper structural level it involves them in a process—a game—of discovery. Although the description of the New Boston seems straightforward and static, it is rendered with surprises which play upon the reader's perception of reality and invite him to readjust his vision.

The reader becomes involved in this game as he makes discoveries that reverse his preconceptions about society, the ways in which it can be portrayed, the nature of the narrator and main characters in the novel itself, and, perhaps most importantly, his own identity. Surprises about the social order begin to affect the reader soon after the novel's hero, Julian West, awakes from his hypnotically-induced trance to a new world—Boston in the year 2000. He is greeted by Dr. Leete, patriarch of the society and his guide to its institutions. Much of the novel consists of dialogue between these two characters. In the course of their dialogue the reader learns of a classless social order, run by a disciplined “Industrial Army” of workers and blessed by material abundance and the spirit of cooperation. Yet it is not only the institutions themselves which engage the reader's attention, but the way they are presented. Although it is not usually discussed by critics, there’s a certain playfulness in the exchanges between Leete and West that teases the reader into an ever-greater curiosity about key aspects of the state.

For example, there is the issue of wages. After a rather lengthy description of the Industrial Army in Chapter 7, West finally exclaims: “‘It is an extraordinary thing that you should not yet have said a word about the method of adjusting wages. … In my day nobody was satisfied with his wages or salary. … ’”³ Dr. Leete's response is laughter, as he notes that a strike against the government as sole employer would constitute a revolution. “‘How then,’” demands West with obvious impatience, “‘do you avoid a revolution every payday?’” Leete's laughter puts West and the reader off again, for when he speaks it is to insist the hour is too late for further conversation. Not until halfway through the ninth chapter does Leete (who begins to seem something of a tease) finally lead West, in true Socratic method, to the answer he has been seeking. When directly confronted once again (“‘How then do you regulate wages?’”), his initial response is silence. Finally he replies, “‘You ask me how we regulate wages; I can only say that there is no idea in the modern social economy which at all corresponds with what was meant by wages in your day.’” West is left to guess again. He returns with “‘I suppose you mean that you have no money to pay wages in. But the credit given the worker at the government's storehouse answers to his wages with us.’” And again he asks his question, “‘How is the credit given, respectively to the worker … by what title does the individual claim his particular share?’” “‘His title,’” replied Dr. Leete, “is his humanity. The basis of his claim is the fact that he is a man.’” With the truth finally revealed, West is incredulous. “‘Do you possibly mean that all have the same share?’” And Leete responds (with what a smile we might imagine), “‘Most assuredly.’” The whole notion that man is motivated primarily by material gain is suddenly thrown into question. This one exchange may serve as example of many surprises, which force the reader to alter his conceptions about familiar workings of the social order. And it also suggests how the apparently straightforward dialogue allows considerable play in the presentation of these ideas.

But the dialogic exchanges about social institutions are not the only source of surprise in Bellamy's book. The reader makes discoveries about the right images for society as well. Metaphorical contrasts throughout the book point the way towards a readjustment of the reader's social vision. For example, a striking metaphor occurs early in Book One as nineteenth-century society is compared to a stagecoach. On the top ride the comfortable few, easy but never secure in their seats, while the mass of mankind sweats and strains to move the tottering coach inch by inch up a steep, sandy hill. It is a striking and memorable analogy because it seems so apt. What makes it apt, of course, are all the ugliest traits of the capitalist system: greed, the exploitation of workers, class consciousness, and injustice. The metaphor forces a recognition of all this, but no remedies are offered. Later, however, after the reader has been introduced to the golden images of Boston in the year 2000, a new metaphor for the old social order is used. At the end of Chapter 19, Dr. Leete compares the old system to an upside-down pyramid.

“Formerly society was a pyramid poised on its apex. All the gravitations of human nature were constantly tending to topple it over, and it could be maintained upright, or rather upwrong (if you will pardon the feeble witticism), by an elaborate system of constantly renewed props and buttresses and guy-ropes in the form of laws. A central Congress and forty state legislatures, turning out some twenty thousand laws a year, could not make new props fast enough to take the place of those which were constantly breaking down or becoming ineffectual through some shifting of the strain” (p. 230).

This metaphor, like the stagecoach analogy, evokes images of toppling, feelings of futility, and the sense of desperate effort, here simply to maintain the status quo. But at this point the new society, so fully described by Dr. Leete, has offered an alternative. In fact, he concludes his analogy for the nineteenth-century social order by saying simply, “‘Now society rests on its base, and is in as little need of artificial support as the everlasting hills.’”

But the clearest metaphorical contrast is reserved for Dr. Barton's sermon, climactically placed in the second to last chapter of the book. Once again, the old social system is portrayed in an image suggesting desperate clinging and falling. The nineteenth century, says Dr. Barton, can be symbolized by an historical event—the entrapment of British citizens in an airless room in Calcutta.

“The unfortunates were gallant men, devoted comrades in service, but as the agonies of suffocation began to take hold on them, they forgot all else, and became involved in a hideous struggle, each one for himself, and against all others, to force a way to one of the small apertures of the prison at which it was possible to get a breath of air. … The Black Hole of Calcutta, with its press of maddened men tearing and trampling one another to win a place at the breathing holes, would seem a striking type of [that] society” (p. 277).

Opposed to these desperate, teetering images, replete with the sense of climbing, clamoring human beings, ever slipping downwards to be trampled on, is Barton's image of the sunburst—light, air, and peace, and the rosebush finally transplanted, flourishing in its sunny garden. Throughout the text the sense of confinement, darkness, and strain strikes increasingly against the sense of open space, infinite possibility, light, and natural growth. Dr. Barton concludes his sermon by saying that “‘the way stretches before us, but the end is lost in light.’” We turn from a “‘dark past’” to a “‘dazzling future. … The long and weary winter of the race is ended. Its summer has begun. Humanity has burst the chrysalis. The heavens are before it.’”

Through the dualism of contrasting metaphors, the reader gradually must learn to perfect his poetic sense. False figures, however striking at first, are to be seen through. The reader must ultimately see, as Julian West does on his return to Boston, that some similes, while they once seemed apt enough, will no longer serve. When West walks through the financial district of the old Boston upon his return, he stares for a while at the activity at a bank: “business men, confidential clerks, and errand boys thronging about, an army of clerks handling money, cues of depositors at the windows.” As he “contemplates the scene” West is accosted by one of the bank directors, who says,

“Interesting sight, isn’t it, Mr. West, wonderful piece of mechanism; I find it so myself. I like sometimes to stand and look on it just as you are doing. It’s a poem, sir, a poem, that’s what I call it. Did you ever think, Mr. West, that the bank is the heart of the business system? From it and to it in endless flux and reflux, the life blood goes. It is flowing in now. It will flow out again in the morning” and, pleased with his little conceit, the old man passed on smiling (p. 302).

West adds, “Yesterday I should have considered his simile apt enough.” But there has been a change in his perception. “Poor old bank director with his poem: he had mistaken the throbbing of an abscess for the beating of the heart. What he called a ‘wonderful piece of mechanism’ was an imperfect device to remedy an unnecessary defect, the clumsy crutch of a self-made cripple.” As West here carefully corrects every single figure the old man used, he directs the reader to the right reading of metaphor. Efficiency in finance does not make a poem, nor business a heart. The reader comes to see that the stagecoach, the inverted pyramid, and the black hole of Calcutta, though not beautiful images, are true figures for a world all too familiar. Society must be recognized in those terms before it can be changed—before such images can be cast aside for the “everlasting hills,” the flourishing rosebush, the infinite light.

The growing dualism in the metaphorical texture of the book perfectly reflects the philosophical dualism expressed in Bellamy's early essay, The Religion of Solidarity. There, too, individual self-seeking was seen as a confinement to be cast aside for a vaster perspective. “We dwell needlessly in the narrow grotto of the individual life, counting as strange angelic visitants the sunbeams that struggle thither. … Spread your wings … there are no barriers to the soul. The dual existence of man is at once infinite and infinitessimal.”⁴

This dualism is both social and personal. Its individual imagery seems to be the contrast between the underground chamber of Julian West (the living tomb of his old self) and the rooftop of Dr. Leete's home, to which he emerges in the twentieth century to view a new world. At moments of stress throughout the novel, West retreats to his underground chamber, and of course he returns to it at the beginning of the last chapter, much to his horror, thinking that he “had but dreamed of that … glorious new Boston with its domes and pinnacles, its gardens and fountains.” Dark underground holes, sunny rooftops and pinnacles; the reader is bounced, through metaphor, between these two Freudian poles throughout Looking Backward.

Bellamy's gift for analogy makes the metaphorical texture of the work a rich reflection of its fundamental dualism, which can be seen as well, of course, in the contrasting realistic views of Boston in the nineteenth and twentieth century. First the reader sees the greed and cruelty of the early Bostonians; then the long middle section of the work spreads out the golden vision of peaceful twentieth-century man; then Bellamy returns the reader to an even more savage picture of the greed of old Boston. Julian West's return takes us through Dickensian scenes of Boston poverty, confronts us with the results of the corrupt economic system, and then overwhelms us with the barbarism lurking beneath the thin veneer of upperclass etiquette as the reformed West is savagely driven from the dinner table of his beloved. Although Bellamy clearly does not believe in the notion of original sin, the two Bostons are contrasted as absolutely as Golgotha and the Garden of Eden.

But if the reader can discover the good and bad society a little too easily, the identity of character and narrator involves a much more subtle game of discovery. There is a slight confusion even at the start, for West is both narrator and hero and introduces his own character. He present himself as a member of the aristocracy in nineteenth-century Boston, an eager suitor for the hand of one Edith Bartlett, frustrated in his hopes for marital happiness by a series of workers' strikes which delay the building of his new home. But his anger at the workers is immediately seen as narrowminded selfishness by Julian West, the narrator, who apologizes for the callousness of his former self. This divided consciousness is explained during a critical moment in the novel, when West nearly goes mad. He has awakened on his second morning in the new Boston. “Starting up on my couch, I stared wildly around the strange apartment. I think it must have been many seconds that I sat up thus in bed staring about, without being able to regain the clew to my personal identity.” After clasping his temples to keep them from bursting, West falls prone upon the couch and wildly fights for his sanity. Then “the idea that I was two persons, that my identity was double, began to fascinate me with its simple solution of my experience.” The protagonist's identity-crisis results in a sense of that “dual existence” so important to Bellamy's philosophy. A dual vision of society follows fast upon it. West rushes out into the Boston streets, but “The mental image of the old city was so fresh and strong that it did not yield to the impression of the actual city, but contended with it, so that it was first one and then the other which seemed the more unreal. There was nothing I saw which was not blurred in this way, like the faces of a composite photograph” (p. 142).

Thus the moment of this identity crisis reveals the dualism of both individual and society which pervades the book. The connection between the two is critical, because only when the individual realizes his greater potential (his nobler self) can society be changed. It is just such a realization, painfully acquired, that accounts for the alternation in narrative stance described earlier. The apparent confusion between the attitudes of the old and new West is now seen to be, like the contrasts in metaphor, as an expression of dual existence.

The moment itself serves as a symbolic fulcrum for the book, because West goes beyond his finite self to assume a grander identity. He does so, rather unconvincingly, through the intervention of Edith Leete. Her sympathy is expressed by an extended hand which West grasps like a drowning man; indeed, his old self is being submerged. The resolution is rather too easy to be realistic. But we recognize that the old Adam has been redeemed by the new Edith, even if his crucifixion has been more symbolic than real.

The reader has yet to discover the double identity of Edith herself. Some secret about her attraction to West is alluded to even at the moment of his awakening in his new home, for she whispers, “‘no, no, promise me you won’t tell him yet,’” to her father before disappearing from the room. In the latter third of the novel, as the romantic plot gains momentum, she again alludes to something secret in their relationship. Finally, of course, the truth is dramatically revealed after West has declared his love for her. She is no other than the great-granddaughter of his old love Edith Bartlett and had, in fact, cherished her great-grandmother's picture of him for years. The narrator makes clear that she actually subsumes the identity of the old Edith, but with none of the trauma involved in the transformation of West's identity. “When,” says West, “I folded the lovely girl in my arms, the two Ediths were blended in my thought, nor have they ever since been clearly distinguished. I was not long in finding that on Edith's part there was a corresponding confusion of identities.” Edith says, “‘What if I were to tell you that I have sometimes thought that her spirit lives in me—that Edith Bartlett, not Edith Leete, is my real name. I cannot know it; of course none of us can know who we really are; but I can feel it’” (p. 292).

To create an uncertainty about identity is a large part of the game and the purpose of Looking Backward. We are forced to re-evaluate not only who Julian West is, and who Edith Leete is, but also who the author-narrator who first introduced the story actually is. At first we are told that he writes from the Historical Section of Shawmut College in the year 2000. He wants to give the reader a better idea of nineteenth-century conditions, so he has created this story, which he hopes has a certain interest of its own. After this preface to the book, the author then stands aside to let Mr. Julian West speak for himself. But we learn that Julian West's birthday is December 26, and think it an odd similarity, perhaps, that the author writes from Shawmut on December 26, 2000. Only much later in the novel (in the second to last chapter, to be exact) do we learn what Julian West is going to do to make himself useful in this new society: he will take up an historical lectureship at one of the local colleges. Putting the pieces together, the reader can now discover the identity of the author—none other, of course, than Julian West himself.

Thus what appeared to be two persons turns out to be but one, while a single character (Edith Leete) seems to split into an old and new person. Through such metamorphoses we begin to see the game Bellamy plays as he involves the reader in a rediscovery of narrator, character, society, and true and false images.

But the greatest game of discovery the reader must play in Looking Backward is the discovery of self. His own identity is called into question as soon as the novel begins. Our enigmatic author, the historian at Shawmut, addresses the reader a little too familiarly. “Living as we do,” he says, “in the closing year of the twentieth century, enjoying the blessings of a social order at once so simple and logical that it seems but the triumph of common sense, it is no doubt difficult. …” It is no doubt difficult; thus sounds a theme that rings again and again in the reader's ear. It is no doubt difficult for the reader to believe that he lives in the closing year of the twentieth century and finds himself in a simple and logical social order. Yet this difficulty—this potential incredulity of the reader—is immediately and consistently deflected.

Instead he hears that it will be difficult for him to believe that men once behaved like beasts, cruelly exploiting each other, fighting for each crumb of bread. And that it is difficult for him to realize that there were once hierarchies in society and an upper class that thought itself, absurdly enough, superior to other human beings. Further, it will no doubt be difficult for him to listen to one of the main characters, Dr. Leete, because the reader is so familiar with the institutions which Leete explains to West.

Thus the reader's real difficulties in imagining utopia are denied in favor of the difficulties of his “ideal” self, that rational and humane reader addressed by the author. Through the preface and first two chapters, the reader is spoken to directly and made to identify with expressions of reason and justice—to adopt, however temporarily, the view that men are good. The confusion of identities so induced serves two important functions—one aesthetic and one moral.

First, it serves the cause, always crucial in utopian novels, of verisimilitude. Bellamy deflects the natural incredulity of his contemporary readers (who might well have exclaimed about the absurdity of utopia) towards disbelief in the bad society rather than disbelief in the good. In other words, our role as readers in the year 2000 encourages a “temporary suspension of skepticism,” to alter Coleridge's phrase.

Secondly, this confusion of the reader's identity not only serves the cause of suspending (or redirecting) his disbelief, but also serves a moral function. It forces him to assume, at least as long as he keeps reading, the mask of a humane, rational utopian citizen. Bellamy was hardly so naive as to imagine that his reader was likely to assume this identity in toto. But perhaps he did hope to induce a tension in the reader between his idealistic and doubting selves. In fact, such a dualism not only perfectly suits the tension of metaphor and character in the rest of the book, but also (if it works) makes the reader conscious of a dualism in himself that Bellamy felt to be fundamental to reform. In The Religion of Solidarity, he stressed the importance of recognizing our double selves in order to behave morally:

Unselfishness, self-sacrifice, is the essence of morality. On the theory of ultimate individualities, unselfishness is madness; but on the theory of the dual life, of which the life of solidarity is abiding and that of the individual transitory, unselfishness is but the sacrifice of the lesser self to the greater self, an eminently rational and philosophical proceeding. … ⁵

To lead us to this “greater self” was certainly Bellamy's goal in Looking Backward as he played with the double identity not only of character and narrator, but of reader as well. As the narrator seems to shift personae, he consistently bestows the mask of a humane, rational, cooperative man on us. To read Looking Backward is to experience a tension in our own natures as our pragmatic, “realistic” selves strain against the reader we “ought” to be. We might first see the dichotomy in terms of illusion and reality, but the book tends, as I have said, to reverse our patterns of perception. This is nowhere more powerfully sensed than in the dramatic conclusion.

Julian West, having finally obtained his new Edith (and with her the old), and about finally to enjoy the romantic peace and social harmony so long denied, is suddenly awakened: “‘It’s a little after the time you told me to wake you, sir. You did not come out of it as quick as common, sir.’ The voice was the voice of my man, Sawyer.” Of course, it was all a dream! As Julian West wakes up to the “real” world at last, he also returns the reader (who has suffered a severe dislocation of identity throughout the text) to his comfortable, familiar self. He may feel some sense of loss, like West, but he knows now again who he is. He can stop playing the game of discovery and surprise. And how well the next scenes of the book accord with our need for the real and familiar. West finds coffee and rolls for breakfast, the newspaper on the table. We read the headlines with him and, even as twentieth-century readers, find the same familiar, predictable social disasters. Then we join West on his tour of Boston, see the familiar social disparities, respond to the advertising on all sides—buy! buy! buy! Yes, we are home indeed. But as we proceed on this tour, the scenes begin, almost imperceptibly, to change character. The familiar starts to become surreal:

As I passed I had glimpses of pale babies gasping out their lives amid sultry stenches, of hopeless-faced women deformed by hardship, retaining of womanhood no trait save weakness, while from the windows leered girls with brows of brass. Like the starving bands of mongrel curs that infest the streets of Moslem towns, swarms of half-clad brutalized children filled the air with shrieks and curses. … No more did I look upon the woeful dwellers in this Inferno with a callous curiosity as creatures scarcely human. I saw in them my brothers and sisters, flesh of my flesh, blood of my blood. … 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 (p. 305).

Dazed, West admits having no clear recollection of what he does next, but he finds himself suddenly in the home of his fiancée, Edith Bartlett. In the dining room “the table glittered with plate and costly china. The ladies were sumptuously dressed and wore the jewels of queens.” This garish scene sends West beyond the bounds of “normal” behavior. In a wild plea for brotherhood, he screams “‘I have been in Golgotha! I have seen humanity hanging on the cross!’” The chalk-faced company is silent, but as West continues desperately to try to arouse their humanity and pity, they begin to shout “‘Madman, fanatic, enemy of society.’” Then his future father-in-law cries, “‘Throw the fellow out!’” As if at a signal, the men spring from their chairs and advance upon him. “Reality” has turned to nightmare. The familiar has become the surreal, yet another illusion, for the reader as well as Julian West.

But Bellamy, as all readers of this always-surprising book know, has not yet played out his game. Groaning and pleading, West suddenly finds himself sitting bolt upright in bed—in Dr. Leete's house. The morning sun shines through the open window into his eyes. Yet another metaphor, echoing the contrasts in the images we have come to know, seals the final surprise.

As with an escaped convict who dreams that he has been recaptured and brought back to his dark and reeking dungeon, and opens his eyes to see the heaven's vault spread above him, so it was with me, as I realized that my return to the nineteenth century had been the dream, and my presence in the twentieth was the reality (p. 310).

For the reader this final discovery calls into question once again, and most intensely, his assumptions about himself and his society. Having just returned to his old self and the familiar world, he is jarred into wondering yet again. The dream seems to be real; reality seems to be a dream (or rather a nightmare); who then is he? The old and new Julian West finds the comfort of the new (and old) Edith. But the reader is left to ponder his dual identity in art and life and to wonder, perhaps for a moment, whether utopia might not become real. Bellamy's literary game—his teasing—can carry us a long way from ourselves, or towards our greater self.

Notes

1. Edward Bellamy, The Duke of Stockbridge, ed. Joseph Schiffman (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1962), p. xxviii.

2. Sylvia E. Bowman, ed., Edward Bellamy Abroad: An American Prophet's Influence (New York: Twayne, 1962).

3. Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward, ed. John L. Thomas (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967), p. 139. All future references to Looking Backward will be to this edition and will be documented in the text.

4. Edward Bellamy, The Religion of Solidarity, ed. Arthur E. Morgan (Yellow Springs, Ohio: Antioch Bookplate Co., 1940), pp. 21-22.

5. The Religion of Solidarity, p. 36.