SOURCE: Roemer, Kenneth M. “The Literary Domestication of Utopia: There's No Looking Backward Without Uncle Tom and Uncle True.” American Transcendental Quarterly New Series 3, no. 1 (March 1989): 101-22.

[In the following essay, Roemer alleges that Bellamy's use of the conventions of domestic fiction contributed to the popularity of Looking Backward among nineteenth-century readers.]

1988 was the centennial of Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward; that's no secret. What may be a secret to many students of American literature and culture is that Bellamy's “A Love Story Reversed” also appeared in 1888. Another little known fact: in the early 1890's, an extensive survey of American public libraries revealed that among the most popular fictions, Looking Backward and Susan B. Warner's The Wide, Wide World (1850) were borrowed with precisely the same frequency (Mabie 509). In and of themselves these two coincidences may not be significant. But they do help to remind us that during the heyday of utopian fiction in America both authors and readers were still captivated by “sentimental” fictions.¹

An awareness of this simultaneous interest is basic to the central claim of this essay: to understand fully why so many readers responded so strongly to Looking Backward, we must acknowledge the central importance of the domestic and sentimental elements of the text that made Bellamy's utopia accessible and meaningful to nineteenth-century readers.² I will focus on several crucial intersections between Looking Backward and popular eighteenth- and nineteenth-century domestic fictions: (1) the narrative structure, particularly the use of the separated lovers' plot and episodes designed to evoke grief and guilt; (2) the domestic locales, notably the dining and bedrooms and the home library; (3) the angelic heroine—Edith Leete is the obvious embodiment of this familiar and nurturing figure; and (4) a narrative voice that bears striking resemblances to the voices of hysterical female heroines and didactic female narrators.

A few clarifications and qualifications will help to define my claims and foci. First, this is not a source study. Rather than suggesting specific parallels between Looking Backward and domestic novels by women that Bellamy knew,³ I'm more interested in establishing the importance of several types of well-known conventions in domestic fiction that would help Bellamy's contemporaries to become what Jonathan Culler would call “competent” readers—competent in the sense that they could experience Looking Backward as a meaningful and moving text, even, to borrow Jane Tompkins' term, as a powerful cultural “agent.”

Second, in my allusions to conventions, I will emphasize three types of domestic novels: the pre-1820 seduction/separation tale defined by Susanna Rowson as a story involving impassioned lovers, seduction, extended separation, intrigues, surprising discoveries, and happy reunions (Petter 27); the “woman's” fiction, described by Nina Baym as flourishing between 1820 and 1870, that narrates the trials, separations, and triumphs of a little child, as in Maria Cummins' The Lamplighter (1854), or a young “pampered heiress” suddenly deprived of support but who eventually triumphs over adversity (35); and the domestic reform novel, such as Uncle Tom's Cabin, that combines, in didactic and melodramatic presentations, specific private and broad public issues such as temperance and abolition. Variations of conventions in these fictions appear frequently in Looking Backward; Bellamy's original readers would be thoroughly familiar with them and could use this competence in their attempts to comprehend Dr. Leete's Boston of A.D. 2000.

Third, Looking Backward was not the first example of an intersection between sentimental and utopian fiction. Barbara Quissell discusses earlier examples of sentimental temperance and abolitionist reform novels and a few sentimental utopian fictions. Bellamy has even been accused of borrowing from one of these works (John Macnie's The Diothas [1883]), which included a sentimental, nineteenth-century descendent named Edith. Fourth, my emphasis on domestic conventions should not obscure the fact that the competence of Bellamy's readers was also defined by their ability to recognize the conventions of the Bible (parables, revelations) and many types of nonfictional (tracts, dialogues, declarations), fictional (utopias, travel accounts) and even oral discourses (sermons, speeches, and lectures).

Understanding the importance of the domestic literary conventions in Looking Backward may suggest new ways to understand the iconoclastic, prescriptive, and idealistic elements of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century domestic fictions. At least my approach to Looking Backward should help us to see that the power of domestic fiction not only lasted beyond the 1870's, but also survived the transplantation to another fictional genre—survived, indeed thrived, and helped to reshape the genre in ways that prepare modern readers to appreciate the emphasis placed on feelings and personal relationships in many of the best utopian fictions written almost one hundred years after the publication of Looking Backward.

NARRATIVE STRUCTURE: SEPARATIONS AND TEARS FOR THE DEAD

Looking Backward abounds in well-known plot formulas, especially the scenarios of utopian fiction (e.g., the strange journey, the confused entry, the socialization via guide and guide's daughter, and the “return”—in this case an imagined return) and of the domestic novel, especially the pre-1820 emphasis on separated lovers reunited after various intrigues and surprising discoveries, and the post-1820 drama of an heiress's sudden separation from emotional supports and familiar surroundings. Actually, there are three types of interrelated separation plots in Looking Backward. In the opening chapters, the wealthy Julian West (who inherited his riches) and his fiancée Edith Bartlett must delay their wedding. West can't properly house his love. He does not want his “dainty bride” to live in his “elegant” and “old-fashioned” family mansion because the neighborhood has been changed by an “invasion [of] tenement houses and manufactories [sic.].” The building of his new home in a less contaminated part of town has been delayed by a strike (104-105). These frustrations dwindle in magnitude when compared to the barriers posed by West's miraculous 113-year sleep that (1) permanently separates him from Miss Bartlett and (2), because he is an anachronism from an evil era, impedes his courtship of Edith Leete, his guide's daughter. His hyperbolic response to this situation recalls the despair of the separated lovers who populated domestic novels: he portrays his fate as one of “utter forlornness, such as no other lover, however unhappy, could have felt” (287).

The “happy accident” that dissolves these apparently impenetrable obstacles is a variation of what Alexander Cowie has called the sentimental “long-lost relative” motif (423): Edith Leete is Edith Bartlett's great-granddaughter. “[Q]uite in the manner of a nineteenth-century sentimental heroine, Edith [Leete] had fallen in love with the Julian West of her great-grandmother's letters” and vowed that she would never wed until she found his equal (Towers 60). Again, in the tradition of domestic fiction, the crucial discovery is withheld until the concluding episodes; in this case the pretext for the delay is the Leetes' fear that a premature revelation might be too much of a shock for someone as bewildered as their time-traveling guest. But once the revelation is made, all barriers seem to vanish. Edith Leete is free to love the Julian of the letters and in the flesh (with proper Victorian restraint, of course), and West can love and marry his two Ediths. Edith does not have to worry about the dilemmas of misinformed choices in love or the threat of cruel parents or guardians that plagued so many sentimental heroines (Davidson 123, 139): West is clearly the right choice and the Leetes bless their (re)union. Indeed, for West the Leete family performs the same functions as the kind “surrogate kin” who nurture the suddenly deprived heroines of domestic novels (Baym 38). Even West's initial housing problem is solved. He is obviously welcome to stay with the Leetes, whose land coincidentally covers the spot where West's old mansion once stood. The two Wests, two Ediths, two lovers, and two homes are now one.

For late twentieth-century readers, Bellamy's love story may seem ridiculously contrived—an embarrassing obstacle to an appreciation of his social criticisms and models for the future. But for those nineteenth-century readers who expected, even desired, such narrative tensions and resolutions, Bellamy's variations of familiar domestic plots would facilitate entry into his estranging world of socialism and high technology. Lee Cullen Khanna has argued convincingly that the withheld information in several of the intrigues of Looking Backward can still entice modern readers into playing the utopian “game” and engage them in acts of textual and self discovery (70, 75, 77-79). Furthermore, the love story reinforces much of Bellamy's social criticism and utopian model (Dowst 95, 99). The separated/(re)united lovers motif especially contributes to the delineation of West's conversion away from a nineteenth-century aristocratic perspective to a utopian world view. West's initial account of nineteenth-century obstacles—invaded neighborhoods and striking workers—portrays West as the victim, and the tenement dwellers and the workers as the victimizers. Near the end of the narrative when (in an ingenious inversion of the sleeper-returns motif) West dreams of his return to the Boston of 1887, his perceptions are reversed. He is the victimizer; they are the victims. In other words, the separation/reunion plot conventions augment the utopists' penchant for iconoclastic contrasts. The melodramatic discovery of Edith's identity and the blossoming of love between Edith and West also helped Bellamy to delineate the nature of his model of a better future. For readers accustomed to domestic romances, the depiction of a powerful love that could quickly obliterate the psychological and cultural barriers between West and Edith Leete could signify the possibility of a good place where love can triumph over artificial and cruel separations, a place where, to quote Dr. Leete, “there are nothing but matches of pure love” (269).

The intersections of Bellamy's domestic and utopian plots do, however, create significant and disturbing inconsistancies. Other than the Edith-West relationship, the only demonstration the narrator offers of the end product of a social structure free of true-love-thwarting obstacles is not particularly loving. John L. Thomas has noted that the “[f]amily life at the Leetes is … disengaged. Father, mother, and daughter move through each other's lives without collision and almost without incident” (255), and, he should add, with very few open expressions of love. Perhaps the utopian conventions that dictated the calm, reserved, and logical demeanor of the guide, or Bellamy's tendency toward paternalism, or his concept of impersonal love, with its emphasis on a selfless identification with humanity (see “Religion of Solidarity”), help to explain the contradictions between claims of “love galore” (205) in utopia and the example of Leete's household. Whatever the explanations, the contrasts between the impassioned story of the separated lovers and the rather separate lives of the Leete family, deprive readers of the opportunity to see, within Bellamy's narrative, how the free and fair passions of utopian youth can function and develop in mature utopian family life.

It would be unfair to Bellamy to suggest that his use of domestic narrative structures was limited to the separated lovers' plot. Overtones of death, sorrow, and guilt, familiar to readers of women's fictions, were also crucial elements of key episodes in Looking Backward. In her provocative interpretation of Uncle Tom's Cabin, Jane Tompkins stresses the importance of little Eva's death as an episode that tapped into the nineteenth-century readers' deep religious beliefs about the “power of the dead or dying to redeem the unregenerate,” especially if the victim is “pure and powerless” (127-128; see also Baym 15-16). Not only was this a significant motif in “popular fiction and religious literature” (Tompkins 128), death- and guilt-evoking episodes were also reflections of what Daniel Walker Howe has called the “great age of prescriptive writing,” which included novels that “legitimated themselves by the morals they taught” (527); what John L. Thomas refers to as a “community of moral discourse,” which articulated a moralistic and eschatological vision of reform (57); and what Barbara Quissell and Kenneth Dowst define as a “rhetoric designed to direct the reader's emotional responses” (Quissell 33) and to persuade them to alter their attitudes (Dowst 8, 12).

Julian West is certainly not a reincarnation of blessed little Eva. The closing scenes of Looking Backward do, however, empower him with the voice of the redeeming dead who is both pure and powerless. In his nightmare he apparently comes back to life in the nineteenth century, only to die, once again, to his contemporaries. He awakens in his bedroom in the Leetes' twenty-first-century home with “the morning sun shining through the open window” (310). He is tremendously relieved to have escaped his nightmare rebirth, and he is soon by his beloved's side. But this is not the “blissful happy ending” (Pfaelzer 207) portrayed in most of the Bellamy scholarship; it is closer to the tearful “might-have-been” formula identified by Herbert Ross Brown (173). West is “pierced” with “pain” and “self-reproach.” His life had been wasted in sinful “indifference to the wretchedness” around him. He had no “right” to utopia. In this guilt- and tear-drenched state of self-hatred and before his final act of throwing himself in the dust before Edith, he delivers a cathartic apostrophe addressed to himself (but obviously intended for Bellamy's first readers):

“Better for you, better for you,” a voice within me rang, “had this evil dream been the reality, and this fair reality the dream, better your part pleading for crucified humanity with a scoffing generation, than here, drinking of wells you digged not. …”

(310-311)

Like many sentimental heroines and some sentimental heroes, West had been purged by trials and tears. He is now purified. He is also powerless. He cannot help to change the past; he is dead to that era.

West's powerlessness was one of Bellamy's powers. Like Stowe, Bellamy could use West's death, purity, and powerlessness to make his readers “feel right” (Uncle Tom's Cabin 2:317). W. D. Howells even argued that Bellamy's greatest strength was his “power to make the reader feel [the fictional experience] like something he has known himself” (254). No doubt, Bellamy believed that the “competent” readers of the conclusion of his narrative would feel and know West's guilt as their own. Of course, the crucial difference was that the readers could do something, since, unlike West, they were alive and had power to change society.

In other words, in Looking Backward, as in many domestic novels and domestic reform novels such as Uncle Tom's Cabin, the plot is not resolved within the text, despite “all the happy [and the sad] endings.” In the domestic and domestic-reform novels, readers were directly or indirectly invited, even implored to read their worlds as continuations of the narratives and, empowered with the right feelings, to articulate their readings in acts as private as helping orphans or warning young women about untrustworthy men, or as public as joining temperance or abolitionist groups. In the case of Looking Backward, textual invitations to feel hope, horror, guilt, and anger could be worked out in Nationalist Clubs or other forms of social action. The original power of Looking Backward depended as much on this concept of narratives that had to be completed with feelings and actions outside the text, as it did on the completed separation/(re)union plots within the text.

DOMESTIC SETTINGS: UTOPIA AS HOME SWEET HOME

Most of the invitations to readers to feel and act outside the text are located within Bellamy's descriptions of events and discussions inside the Leetes' home. Contemporary readers noticed this. Howells even praised Bellamy's ability “to start to heaven from home” (256), and the book was included in the “Home Sweet Home” publication series, which must have gratified Bellamy, who loved home life (Bowman, Edward Bellamy 4). The intersections with the post-1820 and reform domestic novels are obvious. The “happy home”—in contrast to the cruel homes experienced by many of the heroines and slaves—was a utopian goal, an earthly metaphor for the Kingdom of God, and a familiar and reassuring locale for nineteenth-century readers. Domestic reform had even been used by the novelists, Stowe for instance, as a metaphor for social reform (Brown, “Domestic Politics”). Furthermore, like the familiar separation narrative, the domestic settings helped readers orient Bellamy's alternative America within networks of known assumptions and expectations.

Recently R. Jackson Wilson and Arthur Lipow have argued convincingly, however, that the hominess of Looking Backward deprives readers of demonstrations of how Nationalism would affect the daily lives of the members of the industrial army. Wilson points out that on those rare occasions when West strays from his guide's home, the amount of description is inversely proportionate to the distance from domestic activities. We see quite a bit of a public eating hall, a bit less of a retail store, much less of a wholesale store and a library, and nothing of schools, businesses, or factories (xii-xiii). Possibly we could defend Bellamy by reminding Wilson that West's narrative covers only the first week of his visit to utopia. He was still in shock and needed to stay near a home base. But this is a rather lame defense. If the government operations and factories of utopia are as clean and orderly as Leete claims, then a brief peek at a production line under the good doctor's guidance and his daughter Edith's nurturing eye should not pose much of a threat to West's health. Furthermore, the increased emphasis placed on non-domestic settings (e.g., outdoor farm work) in Equality (298-303), the sequel to Looking Backward, suggests that Bellamy eventually realized the importance of indicating in some detail the influence of Nationalism on the daily lives of workers outside their homes. But before we write off the domestic focus of Looking Backward as an example of the embarrassing contamination of “sentimental” conventions or as a reflection of Bellamy's middle-class perspective, we should consider specifically how Bellamy used domestic settings and the impacts of his homes on his contemporary and even modern readers.

As mentioned previously, West's nineteenth-century attitudes about neighborhoods and home construction create a domestic backdrop against which readers can measure his changing perspectives on victims and victimizers in industrial society. Three of the dining scenes also help to dramatize West's and society's progress. (Dining episodes were common in domestic novels [Cowie 416]. Readers even wrote to Warner for recipes from Wide, Wide World [Papashvily 7].) In the first scene, West has been invited to “dine with the family of my betrothed” on May 13, 1887. He tells us nothing about the food, the serving people, the cook, the table setting, or the dinner attire. Instead he focuses on the after-dinner conversation. West dominates the talk; he “lavishe[s]” “objurgations” against the “workingmen,” especially the “strikers.” He recalls that he “had abundant sympathy about [him]”; all his listeners agree with him (103-104).

In Chapters 13 and 14, West describes a very different type of dining experience. In A.D. 2000, the Leetes take him to the Elephant, the general dining-house of their ward. The Leetes consider this place “a part of their house.” As is the case with other families, they have “a room set apart” for them where they eat their evening meal, the two “minor meals of the day” being prepared in their private home. They can order their dinners from a huge variety of excellent but inexpensive food prepared in the hall's “public kitchens.” A young waiter serves the Leetes and West. He, like the other waiters, is in a temporary “unclassified grade” of the industrial army, a grade that requires all entering members of the labor force to do “all sorts of miscellaneous occupations not requiring skill.” Dr. Leete himself had served as a waiter. The after-dinner tour of the hall dazzles West. He sees the building as an enormous “pleasure-house and social rendezvous” open to everyone. As might be expected, the conversation during and after this meal is quite different from the talk following the meal 113 years earlier. We hear about the efficiency and excellence of the public kitchens, the reduced workload for women, the equality of labor and “solidarity of humanity,” and the implications of the contrasts between the “simplicity of our private home life” and the “splendor” of a public life that is “ornate and luxurious beyond anything the world ever knew before” (188, 194-196).

The contrasts between the 1887 and 2000 meals are striking, and at least one scholar has argued that such contrasts had an important impact on Bellamy's readers. Dolores Hayden relates the domestic scenes in Looking Backward to “the pervasive popular concern with domestic reform” during the late nineteenth century (136). She claims that a “broad audience became sympathetic to socialized domestic work for entire urban populations, an audience which had not existed before Bellamy …” (149).

The third dining scene presents a stark contrast to the previous two. In Chapter 28, West's horrifying nightmare-return to the Boston of 1887 culminates in an invitation to “join [the Bartletts] at table.” He now notices many details that he had taken for granted earlier: the Bartletts have a “magnificent” private home with “carved stone steps”; the women are “sumptuously dressed” and wear “the jewels of queens”; the table glitters “with plate and costly china” and displays “costly viands” and “rich wines.” The conversation and group dynamics change drastically. West's altered perceptions compel him to preach to the diners about their role in the creation of the poverty, manifest in the nearby homes and factories, and to predict wonderful changes if they and their government will but see humanity as he does. Instead of giving West unanimous sympathy, his listeners become mortified, scandalized, and furious. At the first meal everything West said was appropriate and meaningful to his audience. Now all his words are infuriating and ultimately “meaningless” to them. Finally, West's prospective father-in-law commands the assembled husbands to throw West out of his house (306-309).

Taken together, these three contrasting dining scenes make strong statements about nineteenth-century ways of organizing labor and interpersonal relations. The contrasts also dramatize Bellamy's emphasis on radical alterations of perception systems as prerequisites for social change. One obvious advantage of expressing this message in a domestic meal setting is that the familiarity of dining situations could lead to repeated reinforcement of Bellamy's ideas. I'm not claiming that every time one of Bellamy's readers sat down to lunch, he or she would be flooded with feelings and thoughts about labor, interpersonal relations, and the necessity of perceptual changes. But the very commonality of the act of dining would make the lessons that Bellamy professed more accessible during the reading process and more reinforceable after the reading experience than if he had chosen to teach his lessons using scenes and actions more removed from his readers' daily lives.

Similar statements could be made about Bellamy's home-library and bedroom scenes. These domestic settings are the backdrops for two of the most important conversion events in the book. True, West's anxious two-hour walk alone in Boston soon after his arrival brings out many symptoms that indicate the early stages of his conversion (142-143). But the crucial changes occur under the Leetes' roof and under the nurturing influence of Edith Leete.

In Chapter 13, in an attempt “to make you feel at home,” Edith takes West to a “cosy apartment,” the home library. Before leaving, she points out many of his “friends,” his favorite authors, including one of Bellamy's favorites, Dickens (188). As he reads Dickens and juxtaposes what he reads against what he has seen in A.D. 2000, he experiences his first major shift in perceptions. “Every paragraph, every phrase, brought up some new aspect of the world-transformation which had taken place …” (190). He also experiences his first clearly articulated feelings of guilt: he “so little deserved” this new world that he had not “toiled” to create (190).⁴ These perceptual and emotional changes foreshadow the devastating and liberating shifts he experiences in his bed during his nightmare-return and as he awakes from that dream and seeks and finds Edith.

A “cosy” home library, a bedroom, and public and private dining rooms certainly lack the grandeur of the expansive prairies, gloomy forests, grand rivers, and majestic oceans that represent the sacred spaces available for masculine transcendental leaps in American literature. But as Helen Waite Papashvily and Jane Tompkins have pointed out, the solitary hero's transcendent experience in the great outdoors was not the only model of personal transformation available to nineteenth-century readers (Papashvily 6; Tompkins 170). The domestic environments of West's conversion bear out their argument. Considering the nature of Bellamy's intended audience (middle- and upper-middle-class readers), he made appropriate setting choices. Experiences such as dining, reading a moving book at home, or having a nightmare in one's bedroom were types of experiences that were very familiar to these readers. At least they were much more common to them than whaling voyages, life among the Mohegans, or raft trips down the Mississippi. By contrasting the relative unfamiliarity of Melville's, Cooper's, and Twain's settings with the relative familiarity of Bellamy's settings, I am not suggesting that West's changes in perception are more profound or more moving than Ishmael's, Natty Bumppo's, or Huck's. But I am suggesting that if a nineteenth-century author intended to write a book that would motivate middle-class readers to change their self-images and their society, it made sense to draw upon the types of settings familiar to readers of domestic fictions—settings that could easily be read into their own lives where they could begin to translate the fictional narrative into real-world action or at least into altered perceptions of their environment.

SENTIMENTAL HEROINES: ANACHRONISTIC ANGELS

One element of Bellamy's domestic environment that was especially familiar to his readers was Edith Leete. The daughter of the utopian guide represented an obvious invitation for nineteenth-century utopists to people their strange and potentially unsettling landscapes with reassuring sentimental heroines. Bellamy accepted the invitation. Edith Leete “embodied all the admirable traits given to the sentimental heroine” (Quissell 25) particularly the attractive pre-1820 heroine:

[she] was in the first blush of womanhood, was the most beautiful girl I had ever seen. Her face was as bewitching as deep blue eyes, delicately tinted complexion and perfect features could make it. …

(Looking Backward 118)

At crucial moments she can “drop her eyes with a charming blush” (207), flash a “quaint smile” (256), and, of course like a good pining female, she cries. Her roles include being an “indefatigable shopper” (155) who loves “pretty clothes” (161) and a patient advisor who offers West advice about retail stores, music, dining, and literature—all proper women's topics. Of course, her most important role is the nurturing mother figure—a figure who, like Alice Humphrey in Wide, Wide World and Emily Graham in Lamplighter, can sooth and advise troubled souls. Edith reassures West with her endless reserves of “sympathy,” one of her favorite words (Pfaelzer 37). This capacity has inspired critics to compared Edith to the Virgin Mary and even to Christ (Stupple 74-78; Suvin, Metamorphoses 174). It is debatable whether Edith's pedestal should tower that high, but it is clear that it would be easy for nineteenth-century readers to perceive her as an emblem of what Tompkins has identified as “the story of salvation through motherly love” (125). Furthermore, her beauty, her mannerisms, and her nurturing powers make her a primary example of the role of utopian women as “icons for men's inspiration, flagellants for masculine ambition, and prizes awarded to the most successful of the men” (Tichi 25; also Looking Backward 267, 271-272).

No doubt, Edith was an inspiring combination of sentimental heroine, nurturing savior, and utopian icon capable of consoling nineteenth-century readers as they encountered Bellamy's alternative America. But some of these very qualities maker her an unconvincing demonstration of the new woman Dr. Leete describes in Chapter 25. In Looking Backward we never see or hear about Edith's job in the industrial army. By contrast, as Quissell and Baym have noted, many of the heroines in domestic novels worked (Quissell 90-92; Baym 28). Even the two non-sentimental qualities Kenneth Dowst praises (96) and West often mentions—Edith's frankness and directness—are not always demonstrated. At a critical point in the separation/(re)union narrative, just after West has finally admitted his love for her, Edith is as coy and indirect as a helpless sentimental heroine in a seduction novel. She blushes, her eyes lower; she sighs, smiles quaintly, and says, “Are you sure it is not you who are blind,” which is her indirect way of saying that she loves him too (289). Edith's mother, an “exceptionally fine looking and well preserved” woman (118), saves her embarrassed daughter by taking West aside and explaining Edith's love and identity (290).

It is ironic that the behavior of Bellamy's “utopian” heroine of 1888 is so different from his “love story” heroine of 1888. Maud Elliott, in “A Love Story Reversed,” is painfully shy, blushes on every page, and cries on every other. Nevertheless, she has the courage to state to a man, with honesty and directness, “I care for you very much,” long before he has any romantic feelings for her (30). The mature relationship that grows out of this courtship reversal expresses Bellamy's approval of frank-speaking women and female initiative. In the familiar nineteenth-century domestic setting of a love story, Bellamy evidently believed that he could successfully dramatize feminine directness and a type of interpersonal relationship different from proper Victorian standards, whereas in his utopian domestic world he conceived of his heroine primarily as a stabilizing, rather than a liberating, agent.

Despite the reassurances Edith must have given Bellamy's first readers, her individual “performance,” as contrasted to Dr. Leete's general descriptions of women's characteristics and occupations, undercuts the “relation between character and environment” (Pfaelzer 35). Her favorite minister, the Rev. Mr. Barton, may orate eloquently about the wonderful effects of transplanting the sickly rosebush of humanity from the swamp of the nineteenth century to the “sweet warm, dry earth” of the twenty-first century (283-284), but Edith's example suggests that Bellamy's variety of sentimental rose, is a rose, is a rose, is a rose, no matter where it is planted. Indeed, one might argue that Edith represents a much less subversive form of criticism and a less idealist model then her mid-nineteenth-century sentimental ancestors who—because of their victimization and triumphs—were at least indirect signifiers of both the suffering and potential of women. During the 1890's, even Bellamy seemed to admit this. In “Woman in the Year 2000” (1891) he called for “self-elected and useful work for women” (3), and in Equality (1897) Edith serves as a worker on a high-tech farm (44).

And yet, the old-fashioned angel who nurtures West through his crises helped Bellamy to create one of the most forward-looking elements of Looking Backward, an androgynous narrative voice. Certainly the sights of the new Boston and the revelations coming from Dr. Leete's masculine voice changed West. But he was also powerfully affected by Edith. Mary Kelley argues that one of the most important functions of the nurturing female figure in domestic fiction is the “feminization of the male”:

Led by the angel of mercy, man's self-concern gives way to concern for others, … and the novel or story concludes with the overwhelmed male bathing his mate in bathetic praise, and the woman, deluged in tears, consenting to continue as his mentor.

(“Sentimental” 443)

Kelly is describing the rare “ideal man” as reformed by a heroine in domestic fiction, but her portrait also illuminates the nature of Edith's effect on West and the conventions that would speak so clearly to nineteenth-century readers of the final scene of Looking Backward.

AN ANDROGYNOUS VOICE FROM “NOWHERE”

One of the most significant changes Bellamy made in his conception of Looking Backward was his decision to alter the narrative viewpoint from a general “twentieth-century perspective to the first-person voice of a nineteenth-century ‘resuscitated man’” (“How I Wrote,” 2). As was the case with most nineteenth-century domestic fiction, a personal voice, which often makes direct appeals to the reader, controls the entire narrative, including the Preface and the footnotes. (The one exception is the Postscript, signed “Edward Bellamy,” that was added to the second edition.)

Barbara Quissell has noted the similarity between the direct addresses and appeals of the female narrators and authors of domestic novels and the “Dear Reader” addresses of utopian fiction (19-23), and several scholars have specifically examined the nature and importance of West's direct addresses in Looking Backward (Dowst 63-75, esp. 72-75; Khanna 75; Roemer “Contexts and Texts,” 216-219; Ruppert 63-64). Pfaelzer has detected differences between West's emotional voice in the love scenes and his “dry” and passive voice during the guide-visitor episodes (30), and there are several fascinating analyses of West's emotionalism and nervous disorders.⁵ An awareness of West's acquisition of stereotypical feminine traits that are strikingly similar to the mannerisms of female narrators and heroines in domestic novels is, in my opinion, crucial to our understanding of the appeal of Looking Backward.

Certain masculine stereotypes characterize West before he arrives in utopia. Tom H. Towers accurately describes the West of 1887 as an “American gentleman” who, despite his agitation about the construction of his new house, is “sober, upright, and responsible” (53). After his arrival in utopia, we can still detect familiar male connotations. West's long sessions with Dr. Leete take on the aura of “men of the world” rituals. Typically when the time comes for an important man-to-man talk, “the ladies retired” (121). Presumably, women are not appropriate dramatis personae for such weighty scenes. (In contrast, women sometimes discussed “politics, law, philosophy, and history” in domestic fiction [Davidson 123].) In Looking Backward the men's stage is set with “our wine and cigars” (243). Dr. Leete takes on the role of the wise paternal guide, while West acts the part of the naive, curious, and impressionable, though rarely emotional, student/foil. He becomes a substitute for the son Leete never had. The sessions are concentrated “facts of life” lessons delivered in a secure domestic setting and designed to enable the son to cope with the manly characteristics of the outside world of A.D. 2000 (e.g., the workings of the industrial army described in Chapter 12).

In the separation/(re)union episodes, the narrative voice has a much more lively and anguished personality, one that manifests numerous stereotypical female reactions familiar to readers of domestic fiction. Soon after his arrival, he feels an “extraordinary mixture of emotions,” which is certainly understandable for someone who has just experienced a 113-year sleep (114). The intensity and duration of these emotions go far beyond the typical range of confusion called for by the conventions of pre-twentieth-century utopian fiction. Admittedly, some of his behavior has stereotypical masculine overtones (e.g., he grinds his teeth, and once he flees the domestic setting and roams the streets of Boston alone). Most of West's outbursts, however, more closely resemble the hysterics of mistreated sentimental heroines separated from their lovers, or the lamentations of destitute orphans and suddenly impoverished and uprooted “pampered heiresses” of the mid-nineteenth century. He shouts, he pants, he cries, he faints and gets dizzy spells, recalling the helplessness of the “swooning heroine” (Cowie 418). In Chapter 8, his awakening disorientation leads to a frenzied collapse that rivals the performances of a Charlotte Temple, a Gerty in Lamplighter, or an Ellen Montgomery in Wide, Wide World:

Leaping from bed, I stood in the middle of the room clasping my temples with all my might between my hands to keep them from bursting. Then I fell prone on the couch, and, burying my face in the pillow, lay without motion.

(141)

Later in the same chapter we find him throwing himself “into a chair”—an act, incidentally, aptly performed by the dismayed Maud in Bellamy's “A Love Story Reversed” (31). He covers his “burning eyeballs with [his] hands to shut out the horror of the strangeness. [His] mental confusion [is] so intense as to produce actual nausea” (143).

Stereotyped male heroes might get upset once in a while, but they should not collapse into pillows and chairs. That is “woman's work.” Moreover, they should not admit to queasy stomachs or to other nervous disorders. Towers has demonstrated effectively that one particular nervous disorder, insomnia, is, nevertheless, a central element of West's character. West's insomnia has obvious psychological (guilt) and thematic (utopia as peaceful sleep) importance. It is also significant because it combines with West's feelings of ignorance about A.D. 2000 and his other emotional and physical problems to render him almost as dependent as the victimized heroine of a seduction romance or the impoverished heroine in the early chapters of a domestic novel. The fact that one of the people upon whom he depends is a male doctor even evokes the connotations of the stereotyped relationships between supposedly hysterical women and supposedly wise male medics addressed in recent studies of Victorian women (e.g., Haller and Haller, and Smith-Rosenberg).

West's sudden awakening in A.D. 2000 and the disorienting effects of what he sees in Boston and hears from Dr. Leete are the primary “causes” of his hysteria. Still, Edith plays a tremendously important role in West's development by, in effect, giving him permission to feel and express strong emotions of despair. Instead of ignoring his plight or hinting that in crisis situations real men should keep a “stiff upper lip,” she gives him endless waves of sympathy. She allows him to cry, indeed, loves him for crying. Of course, such feminine behavior must not occur outside the domestic retreat. Edith is very upset by West's one public outburst of hysteria when for two hours he roams the streets of Boston. West, like a good and pining female heroine, should restrict such displays to settings of domestic isolation often associated with women (e.g., in home libraries reading and in bedrooms dreaming) or to situations of domestic companionship with a nurturing woman.

Nevertheless, in one significant way, West lets his female side go public. His career crisis and its resolution reflect female stereotypes, as well as actual situations confronted by nineteenth-century women. R. Jackson Wilson relates West's career difficulties to Bellamy's own struggles to place himself in the changing world of late nineteenth-century America (xviii-xx). He also concludes that West's decision to become the author of a “romantic narrative” (Looking Backward 94) reveals a “retrospective” element of Looking Backward, since authors in A.D. 2000 gain their living in the old-fashioned way (i.e., competition for readers) instead of working in the ranks of the industrial army (xxxiii). Another way to interpret West's career crisis and decision to write a romance is to imagine that he was speaking for or to many of his women readers who were aware of the numerous old and new occupational opportunities of their era but, because of sexual discrimination and because they had been denied the appropriate training or were “over educated” for the “proper” domestic and public positions, had great difficulty fitting into the “new” occupational world of the late nineteenth century. When the confused gentle man, Julian West, expresses concern about finding a place in his new world (“What can I possibly do? … I never earned a dollar in my life …” [210]), he could be speaking for many helpless heroines and frustrated nineteenth-century women readers.

Other than teaching, which West also does (Looking Backward 93), writing fiction was one public occupation sometimes available to women and to fictional heroines such as Augusta Evans's Edna in St. Elmo (1867). In Private Woman, Public Stage: Literary Domesticity in Nineteenth-Century America, Mary Kelley examines the successes and anxieties of twelve women authors, including Warner, Cummins, Evans, and Stowe. The similarities between West and these “literary domestics” should not be pushed too far, but some commonalities are significant. West, like the women authors, often used the conventions of domestic fiction to engage his readers intellectually, morally, and emotionally. Two of Kelley's general observations about the position of her authors and the dual nature of their works reveal crucial characteristics of West's anxieties and the book he writes: “They found themselves in a world they did not know and that did not know them” (xi). They “reported their own phenomenon and became unwitting witnesses to both the public event and their own private experiences” (viii). West is a homebody. It will take him a long time to know his new world and to be understood. And his attempts to convince his twenty-first-century readers of the grand public achievements of their age led him to reveal many details of his private experiences in that age.

The point of characterizing West as a “literary domestic” and of emphasizing his feminization is not to turn Julian into a Julia West or to claim that he was the first important “female man” of American letters. Domestic fiction had already familiarized American readers with positive images of nurturing and emotional males. Charlotte Temple's father is as nurturing as her mother; John Humphrey is a nurturing surrogate brother for Ellen in Wide, Wide World; and Uncle True (Trueman Flint) is a sympathetic “mother” to the orphan Gerty in Lamplighter. And, of course, there are Stowe's kind-hearted heroes: Augustine St. Clare, whose “marked sensitiveness of character, [made him] more akin to the softness of woman than the ordinary hardness of his own sex” (1:221), and the victimized, nurturing, sobbing, passive, and forgiving Uncle Tom. Furthermore, American readers would have to wait almost three decades before encountering a male utopian narrator who could articulate the benefits of combining masculine and feminine characteristics (Vandyck Jennings in Charlotte Perkin Gilman's Herland) and almost a hundred years to discover more fully androgynous characters in utopian fiction in the works of Ursula K. LeGuin, Dorris Lessing, Marge Piercy, Joanna Russ, Samuel Delany, and several other compelling writers of the 1970's and 1980's. Acknowledging the androgynous character of one of the most famous utopian narrators does, nevertheless, help us to understand why Looking Backward was so recognizable and meaningful to Bellamy's readers.

Especially his women readers. West's career and related crisis no doubt also helped these readers to identify with the narrator. Therefore, it is not surprising that both the Women's Christian Temperance Union and the National Council of Women endorsed Looking Backward, and that the Ladies Home Journal distributed it at a reduced price (Pfaelzer 48). Nor is it surprising that so many women read Looking Backward (Lokke 124, 142) and joined Bellamy Clubs (Lipow 130, 132). Frances E. Willard, the educational and temperance reform leader, even wrote the following to her friend Lillian Whiting, who worked for the original publisher of Looking Backward: “Some of us think that Edward Bellamy must be Edwardina—i.e., we believe a big-hearted, big-brained woman wrote the book. Won't you please find out?” (quoted in Bowman, Year 2000 120). Dr. Leete's discussion of women in utopia in Chapter 25 probably attracted some women readers. I would argue, however, that the androgynous nature of the narrator, along with the familiar separation/(re)union narrative, the domestic settings, and the sentimental heroine, were equally, if not more, important factors in influencing women, who, we should recall, constituted the majority of the fiction readers during the nineteenth century (Tompkins 124).

FAMILIAR ESTRANGEMENT: LOOKING BACKWARD AND FORWARD

Again and again, knowledge of conventions of sentimental romances would allow Bellamy's nineteenth-century readers to perceive as familiar and meaningful certain narrative structures, emotion- and guilt-evoking episodes, domestic settings, and the sterotypical female traits of Edith Leete and the narrator, Julian West. It was crucial that Bellamy establish this rapport with his readers. He did not want to share the fate of West in his nightmare return when his listeners perceived his exhortations as being estranged to the point of meaninglessness. And yet, Looking Backward had the power to unsettle readers, to force them to consider new ways of perceiving the familiar because Bellamy combined reassuring elements both with strong criticisms of the American status quo and with a model of a society that represented a radical alternative to the readers culture.

Nevertheless, the narrative structure, domestic settings, heroine, and narrative voice also reveal how Bellamy's use of conventions of domestic fiction could undermine his criticisms and model. Indeed, for modern readers, his adaptations of domestic conventions may render his utopia more anachronistic, even more conservative, than eighteenth- and nineteenth-century domestic fiction. Today, the separation/(re)union plot can seem contrived and contradictory, and episodes that celebrate variations of the death of the “pure and powerless” or other Christian motifs may be “virtually impossible for us to believe” (Oates 423). The domestic environment does obscure the potential effects of changes in economic, social, and family systems on the daily lives of workers. Most importantly, the notion that in Bellamy's utopia the sentimental heroine has finally found a suitor and parents who will not victimize her, a homelife apparently free of anguish, and opportunities to prove her independence suggests the elimination of the overt and covert expressions of frustration and triumph that instilled late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American domestic fiction with significant subversive and prescriptive elements.

Bellamy's use of “sentimental” conventions to domesticate utopia was, nonetheless, forward-looking. The episodes in Looking Backward that concentrate on West's intense internal struggles, on the emotional relationship between West and Edith, and on Edith's feminization of West anticipate the more sophisticated and dominant focus on internal development and interpersonal relationships found in the powerful feminist utopias of the 1970's and 1980's. West's introspections are rather primitive compared to the ruminations of Margaret Atwood's nameless handmaid in The Handmaid's Tale (1986). West and Edith are certainly crude ancestors of Ursula K. LeGuin's Shevek and Takver in The Dispossessed (1974), Marge Piercy's Connie and Luciente in Woman on the Edge of Time (1976), and Doris Lessing's Al-Ith and Ben Ata in The Marriages Between Zones Three, Four, and Five (1980). Furthermore, Hawthorne's Blithedale Romance (1852) and Daring to Dream, Carol Farley Kessler's anthology of early American utopias written by women, attest to the fact that earlier American eutopias and dystopias by men and women had explored internal struggles and interpersonal relationships. Still, the fact that Looking Backward, the most popular and influential American utopian work, incorporated examinations of intense personal struggles and complex interpersonal relationships, accessible because they were presented through familiar conventions of domestic fiction, no doubt helped to prepare authors and readers of later generations for more sophisticated projections of introspection and personal relations in utopia. Viewed from this perspective, it not only seems plausible to claim that there would be no Looking Backward without the domestic novels, but that the handmaids, Sheveks, Connies, and Al-Iths of late twentieth-century feminist utopian landscapes should also trace their ancestry and much of their emotional impact back to the Charlottes, Uncle Toms, and Gerties of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century domestic fiction.⁶

Notes

1. See Kelley, Private Woman viii. Even eighteenth-century works such as Susanna Rowson's Charlotte Temple (1791) and Hannah Foster's The Coquette (1797) “remained steady sellers into the last half of the nineteenth century” (Davidson 135).

2. Several scholars have made brief comments about the relationships between Looking Backward and works such as Uncle Tom's Cabin. For example, see Aaron 101; Bowman, Year 2000 116, 117; Elliott 108-110; Fromm v; Hart 183; Khanna 69; Lipow 30; Lokke 124, 142; Schweninger 107-109; Tichi 8; Towers 52. A few students of utopia have offered more extended discussions of connections between domestic and utopian fictions. For example, see Pfaelzer 28-39; Roemer, “Perceptual Origins” 17-20; Quissell, esp. 131-141, 163-181; and Dowst, esp. 95-106.

3. Bellamy's early novels, especially Miss Ludington's Sister (1884), demonstrate his knowledge of some of the sentimental conventions, as do several of his short stories (see Griffith 11-14) and literary notices in the Springfield Daily Union (see Griffith 17-34). Sylvia Bowman notes that in an August 15, 1877, Springfield Daily Union essay entitled “What Reading for the Young,” Bellamy conceded that “mushy stories filled with lifeless morality could do little harm” to adolescents (quoted in Edward Bellamy 93).

4. For more detailed discussion of this scene, see Roemer, “Contexts and Texts” 220-221, and Ruppert 64-65.

5. For example, see Dupont 759-763, Roemer, Obsolete Necessity 60-62; Thomas 238-241; Towers 52-63; Wilson xxxii-xxxiii; Winters 29-36.

6. Early versions of part of this article were delivered at the Second International Congress on Utopian Studies, Rome-Ravello-Reggio Calabria, 24 May 1986, and at the Twelfth Annual Conference of the Society for Utopian Studies, Media, Pa., 10 October 1987. I would like to thank Carol Farley Kessler and Janice Radway for suggesting relevant readings in feminist criticism and Jean Pfaelzer for numerous recommendations for revision.

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