SOURCE: “The Text as Tactic: Looking Backward and the Power of the Word,” in Looking Backward, 1988-1888: Essays on Edward Bellamy, edited by Daphne Patai, The University of Massachusetts Press, 1988, pp. 37-50.

Utopian fiction is a hybrid genre, and Edward Bellamy, one of the great utopists, worked its inherent contradictions into a text of surprising social and political power. Although modern readers are likely to dismiss Looking Backward, citing its systematized solutions to social problems, stereotypical characters, and static society, its very clarity in these areas may well have contributed to its remarkable success.

A fuller appreciation of Bellamy's achievement should emerge from a consideration of two contexts: the tradition of utopian discourse and the tradition of Bellamy's own fiction, his early writings. With these two contexts more firmly in mind, modern readers may better understand Bellamy's exploration of archetypal utopian polarities and his evolution as utopian artist.

The problematic character of utopian speculation can be readily ascertained by turning to definition, as well as by recalling important texts. In naming the genre, Thomas More evoked opposition by means of a Greek pun: outopia—no place; eutopia—good place. Even before More's etymological enclosure of generic paradox, however, the conjunction of ideal and real sustained such major texts as Plato's Republic. As the ideal polis took shape in that dialogue, it was intended to clarify the just life for the individual citizen. Thus, such oppositions as public and private, imaginary and real, philosophical and political, contemplative and active, tested and troubled the characters who talked with Socrates.

When Thomas More took up these conflicts in the sixteenth century, his debt to Platonic thought was clear; yet the tension between contemplative and active energies became even more pronounced. In the dialogue that is the first book of Utopia, “Thomas More” and Raphael Hythloday discuss practical social and economic reforms, but the debate centers on the issue of public service. Although Hythloday claims, citing classical precedent, that a philosopher in government will only drive himself mad, the argument remains unresolved at the end of the first book. As a result, the continued opposition between contemplation and action—or theory and praxis—frames the vision of utopia presented in the second book of More's Utopia. It is as if More suggests, by way of his open-ended dialogue, that the tension created by such sustained opposition is necessary in order to “see” utopia.

A recognition that the utopian tradition depends on a balance difficult to sustain may illuminate contemporary scholarly differences. Modern commentary on utopia diverges into two broad disciplinary areas: social science, including, importantly, political theory; and literary criticism. Social scientists have doubted the value of utopian speculation, because it is too unscientific. Indeed, Marx and Engels criticized utopian thought as escapist and detrimental to the practical work of social change. Those scholars of the social sciences who do admire utopian thought still tend to value it in proportion to its practical suggestions for change. They see utopian fictions as blueprints for such change, proposals for “perfect” or “ideal” societies.¹ From such a perspective utopian works are useful in proportion to the viability of the institutions they propose. Raymond Williams has suggested a further index of utility for utopias: their inclusion of methods for transition to a better society. Thus he praises Morris's News from Nowhere, because it contains “the crucial insertion of the transition to utopia” (Williams 1979, 59). Since Looking Backward exhibits no such transition, based as it is on a theory of natural economic evolution, Williams thinks the book less useful. Ironically, however, Looking Backward sparked many reform movements, while News from Nowhere had far less political impact.

Unlike political theorists who look for pragmatic results, literary theorists value hermeneutical complexity. Imaginative inventiveness, subtlety of plot and character, and “openness” of both text and social paradigm have attracted praise from recent critics. This group, too, tends to devalue Looking Backward. Here the reasons are its sentimental plot, one-dimensional characters, and didactic intent. Only very recently have some literary theorists called into question the hermeneutical emphasis of much twentieth-century criticism.²

What I would like to emphasize, however, is not the relative lack of exchange between these disciplines (several utopists do make use of both intellectual traditions), but the way in which this kind of apparent opposition in judging utopian thought reflects, and is perhaps a natural outgrowth of, opposing tendencies within the genre itself. I have suggested the opposition of theory and praxis, but nomenclature varies with fashion and may include contemplative and active, philosophical and historical, abstract and concrete, imaginative and empirical, strange and familiar, or, even, synchronic and diachronic. The key point is that utopian speculation pulls its participants in contrary directions.

Yet a permanent disjunction between theory and praxis, literature and politics, art and life, or text and body is exactly what the utopian enterprise denies. In other words, although readers must confront such oppositions when they engage in utopian speculation, they can come to rest “nowhere.” It is the mental exercise of sustaining images of the “real” and imaginary, the pragmatic and the possible, that allows us to travel beyond binary intellectual habits to utopia.³

The reader of utopian fiction is asked to integrate different planes of experience in order to move from conception to execution in effecting changes that must be both personal and political. If defined by function, utopian literature always aims at transformation. The importance of recognizing utopian fiction as an agent of change is suggested by Williams when he says, “the element of transformation, rather than the more general element of otherness, may be crucial” (Williams 1979, 53). Although I believe he confines this insight too narrowly to the discussion of transition within a work, the observation itself is provocative. This is true despite the prominence of the “element of otherness” in the discussion of utopia in much modern criticism.⁴ The estrangement or “defamiliarization” that Shklovsky saw as imperative in the functioning of all art is more relevant to science fiction and utopian fiction. The other world proposed in such fiction not only stretches the imagination of what is possible in social organization, but also makes us see our present society with new eyes—“defamiliarizing” our “real” world. The “cognitive estrangement” so achieved allows us to see problems in our society that we were able to ignore before.

After this experience of defamiliarization, however, the next step is movement from private response to public action.⁵ Although “otherness” is a crucial element in the utopian process, without agency the utopian enterprise fails. Imaginative experience may lead to new insights, but since the altered vision involves public issues, the solitary reader needs to move towards community. Therefore, more than any other literature, utopian fiction invites holistic responses.

If the power of the word, the transformative function, is particularly important to the utopian genre, novels that provoke political action deserve particular attention. Looking Backward is just such a work. It moved thousands of readers to action, both nationally and internationally, as Sylvia Bowman's useful study, Edward Bellamy Abroad, amply documents. Bowman notes that the work was rarely mentioned in literary histories, but a survey of the international pattern of influence shows that Bellamy was, “if not the greatest literary artist the United States produced, certainly its most influential one from the ideological standpoint.” She adds the following telling observation: “Although Looking Backward has been condemned and praised as a work of art, its artistry was sufficient to present a message about the future which inspired and moved the hearts and minds of men” (Bowman 1962, 436).

I would contend that Edward Bellamy's artistry as a utopist was of a high order, because he was uniquely able to sustain the polarities of the genre and work them toward the end of transformation, both of self and of society. He was well suited in terms of his personality and professional interests and because altered states, experiments with psychic and social transformation, had fascinated him for years before he wrote Looking Backward.⁶ Even a cursory review of Bellamy's life reveals an unusual combination of the practical and romantic. The son of a preacher, young Edward wrote about intense early religious experiences. Although he later rejected traditional Christianity, his mystical bent remains important in his essays, particularly the Religion of Solidarity, his journal entries, and his fiction. Yet he undertook the practical profession of law, where, after distinguishing himself as a brilliant student, he began practice with a prestigious firm. When his first case required him to evict a widow, however, he abandoned this lucrative career forever. His subsequent profession as a writer involved practical journalism and romantic fiction, a fiction comparable to both Hawthorne and Poe in its imaginative extremes. Bellamy's friend and fellow writer William Dean Howells testified to this dual strain: in “Edward Bellamy we were rich in a romantic imagination surpassed only by that of Hawthorne” (Howells 1898, xiii). Yet in the same essay Howells observes of the man himself, “No one could see him, or look into his quiet gentle face, so full of goodness, so full of common sense, without perceiving he had reasoned to his hope for justice. He was indeed a most practical, a most American man, without a touch of sentimentalism in his humanity” (p. xii). The combination of practical and romantic in both his nature and career prepared Bellamy to sustain the comparable polarities of the utopian genre. The transformative effects of such a combination were seen first of all in Bellamy's own life. After he completed his utopian masterwork, Bellamy himself changed from romancer to reformer. The power of his own fictional vision turned him into political activist.⁷

Before this change, however, Bellamy had honed his skills with oppositional modes in his earlier fiction. His stories revolved around issues of altered states, or transformation, and his technique centered on what I shall call the interaction of the fabulous and the familiar. When examining his early fiction, one discovers not complex characters—nor indeed any real concern with characterization, ambiguity, or irony. Rather one meets again and again an inquiry into the nature of reality and its relative stability. By evoking unlikely situations or perspectives, these stories challenge our comfortable assumptions. For example, in “The Cold Snap,” sudden climatic changes test moral strength and familial loyalties. The happy resolution of another story, “At Pinney's Ranch,” depends upon fantastic telepathic powers. The “fabulous” element in each tale not only illuminates but also changes reality.

Brief précis of two stories, “The Old Folks' Party” and “The Blindman's World,” and two novels, Dr. Heidenhoff's Process and Miss Ludington's Sister, should illustrate Bellamy's fascination with processes of transformation and his effort to gain control over change—to direct it—through his own imaginative power. In “The Old Folks' Party” a group of young people propose a surprising idea for a costume party. When Henry Long suggests they all dress as they expect to look in fifty years' time, one character exclaims, “You mean a sort of ghost party, ghosts of the future instead of ghosts of the past” (Bellamy 1898, 61). Henry adds, “Apparitions of things past are a very unpractical sort of demonology compared with apparitions of things to come” (p. 61). This focus on the future is complicated by Henry Long's (and Bellamy's) belief in shifting identities. Because we are all many selves in a lifetime, Long advocates a new linguistic system to represent these changes. Impatient with grammar, however, his friend Jessie Hyde returns the group to planning their costumes. Interestingly, she asserts the value of imagination over logic in dealing with the issues of discreet identities in time.

When the party is held a week later, the power of imagination and art are indeed proved as the young group thoroughly depresses itself with its convincing costumes and assumed mannerisms of old age. Just when melancholy threatens to destroy the whole evening, Henry springs to his feet, tears off his wig, and declares this glimpse of the future only a “nightmare.” His arousal from illusion here anticipates the feeling of relief that floods Julian West as he wakes from his nightmare of the old Boston. In the 1876 story, of course, reality and the present seem to triumph over the future and the visionary. More important, however, for Bellamy's approach to utopian fiction, is the focus on transformations and the effort to gain control over both time and change. That such control is gained through the sudden reversal of a nightmare in the conclusion nicely foreshadows the most effective literary device of Looking Backward.

In another short story, “The Blindman's World,” transformation and the control of time become public issues as well as private games. In that story a utopian society is presented through the dream travel of one S. Erastus Larrabee, professor of astronomy. He has fallen asleep at his telescope on a clear night, with Mars in view, and wakes to find himself on that planet. There Larrabee learns that the one thing distinguishing Martians from earthlings is the gift of foresight. This gift makes Mars utopian, because it can cope so much better with the future, including planning for death. In contrast, earth is dubbed the “blindman's world.”

After this vision Larrabee wakes at his telescope and remembers nothing. Again, only by way of the dreaming state can he regain access to his experience of utopia; when sleepwalking one night he writes down the tale of his travel to Mars. Discovering the papers the next day, Larrabee is astounded both at the experience and his conscious unawareness of it, and queries, “when will man learn to interrogate the dream soul of the marvels it sees in its wanderings? Then he will no longer need to improve his telescopes to find out the secrets of the universe” (Bellamy 1898, 11). Interrogating the dream soul or exercising the imagination may lead to altered states—to utopia. “The Blindman's World” anticipates the utopian impulse more fully realized years later in Looking Backward. In the intervening years, Bellamy came to credit the power of vision over reality. The short story ends with a nostalgic wish for a lost Eden, which may have included foresight. By the time he wrote Looking Backward, Bellamy was not content with nostalgia.

If “The Blindman's World” focused on control of future time, an early novel, Dr. Heidenhoff's Process (1880), focused on the power of the past. Its hero, Henry Burr, loses his beloved, Madeleine Brand, because she cannot shake off the guilt of an early sexual transgression. Although Henry forgives her and urges their marriage, Madeleine bears her scarlet letter with even more dire effect than Hester Prynne. The novel hinges on a technological innovation, a machine that removes unwanted memories. When Burr reads of its invention, he takes Madeleine to the inventor, Dr. Heidenhoff, for treatment, and she forgets her sin. Their marriage plans seem a testimony to technology, but all is suddenly transformed when Henry wakes up to discover that the entire episode with Heidenhoff was a dream. While he slept, his “branded” love committed suicide. The sudden reversal of a dream here again anticipates the device that so effectively concludes Looking Backward, but with what different outcome. Dwelling on the past, the paralysis induced by guilt, and the static acceptance of things as they are lead to tragedy.

It is hard to know whether writing Dr. Heidenhoff's Process, with its exploration and rejection of the possibility of altered states, or the actual alteration of Bellamy's single state in 1882, when he married Emma Sanderson, accounts for the optimistic treatment of the theme of personal transformation in his next two novels. In any case, Miss Ludington's Sister (1884), with its bizarre exploration of discreet identities within the individual personality and of transformations from dream to spiritual vision to earthly happiness, prepares for the much more sure-handed execution of such wonders in Looking Backward several years later. In the 1884 novel Bellamy suggests his theme of altering individual identities in the first few pages, as he presents the transformation of beautiful young girl to ugly crone, because of a scarring illness. In contrast to the permanent psychological damage done to the young Madeleine Brand, however, Ida Ludington finds new life through the power of art. Her portrait preserves her past beauty and inspires her young ward, Paul, with such devotion that he finally believes he has realized his ideal love in the flesh. Although the physical recuperation of the past is shown to be a fraud by the end of the novel, Paul is able to move into the future and a satisfying complete relationship by means of his loyalty to Ida Ludington's youthful identity. Working through this unwieldy plot, a reader may yet discover Bellamy's attempt to effect practical transformation by way of the protagonist's obsessive pursuit of an ideal and his faith in multiple identities.

Bellamy's literary apprenticeship, then, was dedicated to varied explorations of alternative selves and realities, and an ever freer experimentation with the relationship between the practical and the ideal, the familiar and the fabulous. The triumph of fully realized utopian vision is accomplished so persuasively in Looking Backward because transformation, both personal and public, was always Bellamy's concern. Howells again recognized the brilliance of Bellamy's achievement when he said of him that his art is “so singular that one might call it supremely his. He does not so much transmute our everyday reality to the substance of romance as make the airy stuff of dreams one in quality with veritable experience” (Howells 1898, vi).

Edward Bellamy succeeded in making the “airy stuff of dreams” so real in his great utopian novel that many Americans tried to transform his ideas into the stuff of “veritable experience.” In that work he accomplished the utopian aim explicitly in his persistent assertion of the tensions of the genre. The fabulous and the familiar, new Boston and old, are amplified by means of a duality of metaphor, character, narrative stance, and reader response throughout the work. In other words, the paradoxical nature of utopian discourse found expression in every important aspect of Bellamy's narrative in Looking Backward. The very neatness and simplicity, the sharp outline, of Bellamy's dualistic paradigm does much to forward the universal utopian agenda: transformation of readers.⁸

Bellamy's genius in conceiving alternative modes of seeing expresses itself dramatically in the key metaphoric contrasts throughout the book.⁹ No one who has read Looking Backward can forget his likening of nineteenth-century capitalism to a stagecoach on which the comfortable few sit at the expense of the straining masses who struggle to push the coach up the hill. This metaphor for the familiar economic reality is opposed later to the image of the new Boston, a stable pyramid secure on its base of economic equality for all. The dark underground chamber in which Julian West falls asleep sets off the sunny domes of utopia. Perhaps most memorable of all, the shrivelled and moldy-leaved rosebush of a starved people becomes the glowing perfect rosebush transplanted into the light and air of a just society.

The contrast between alternative realities in the utopian city and nineteenth-century Boston is amplified as well by the altered identities of its characters. Realism and complexity are not pertinent to Bellamy's purposes, since the aim of this fiction is not “fully rounded” characters, but rather the fostering of transformation of the self. To this end the reader encounters two Julian Wests, two Ediths, and even the reader's own identity is doubled. In each case the ideal wins out over its lesser alternative, with the most dramatic struggle illustrated in Julian West's crisis upon waking to his first morning in the new world. 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” (Bellamy 1967 [1888], 141). A dual vision of society follows fast upon this crisis. 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).

The “composite photograph” is a striking image for the conjunction of fabulous and familiar that is the crux of utopian fiction. Bellamy's art springs in part from his ability to visualize this opposition, as in this metaphor of photographic double exposure. The two poles of utopian thought alternate in Julian West's vision here, as they must be juxtaposed in the reader's response.

Julian West's moment of identity crisis reveals the dualism of both individual and society that pervades the book. The connection between the two is critical, because only when the individual realizes a greater potential can society be changed. The apparent confusion between the attitudes of the old/new West is seen to be, like the contrasts in metaphor, an expression of dual possibilities. In fact, such a dualism not only perfectly suits the tension of metaphor and character in the rest of the book, but also makes the reader conscious of possible reform in self and society.

To read Looking Backward is to experience a tension in one's own nature as the pragmatic, “realistic” self strains against the reader one “ought” to be. Although this dichotomy might appear first in terms of illusion and reality, the book tends to reverse preliminary patterns of perception. This is nowhere more powerfully illustrated than in the dramatic conclusion.

Julian West eventually obtains his new Edith (and with her the old), and is about to enjoy the romantic peace and social harmony so long denied, when he is suddenly awakened by his former servant to the “reality” of the nineteenth century. Utopia was only a dream, after all. He and the reader are returned to familiar scenes, including the breakfast newspaper with its catalog of social injustice. Later, West, in a remarkable reprise of his walk in the new world, wanders about old Boston. Regarding the people around him, he says:

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. (Pp. 305, 306)

As in his earlier crisis of identity, West views a “composite photograph” of old and new Boston. Yet here his perception of reality and illusion are reversed, as the familiar turns to nightmare.

However, with a final daring risk of verisimilitude, Bellamy describes a third awakening. Testing reader agility in the balance of generic polarities, Bellamy shifts the weight of utopian tensions once more. Instead of leaving protagonist and reader in a “defamiliarized” return to the “real” world, he sets both loose in utopia. 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).

In this final exercise of the dream reversal technique he had so long practiced, Bellamy reached one of the most effective explorations of the generic tension between fabulous and familiar in utopian discourse. Not only is the old world defamiliarized, but the dream becomes real. Indeed, the entire narrative strategy—metaphoric contrast, character doubling, confusion of identities, dream travel—is geared to this alteration of perception. No doubt the timing of the final awakening contributes to its special power, but one cannot underestimate the drama created by the consistent and clear-cut demonstration of polarities throughout the work.

The apparently simple oppositional design that frames Julian West's conversion to a society of economic equality shattered the stasis of many of Bellamy's contemporaries. When readers closed the book they turned to political action, founding hundreds of Nationalist clubs across the country to try to change their society. Within three years Looking Backward had been translated into four major languages, and it sold nearly a half million copies in the first decade after publication. The book's program for reform became the platform for the Populist Party, and even as late as 1935, such disparate thinkers as John Dewey, Thorstein Veblen, and Eugene Debs acknowledged its profound influence.

Bridging the gap between contemplation and action, text and life, Bellamy's book not only spurred early readers into reform efforts, but also spawned dozens of new utopian works. Although often criticized for its lack of aesthetic concerns, Looking Backward triggered creative energies in many subsequent writers. Its generativity on many levels testifies to the power of Bellamy's oppositional techniques.

In our own time the utopian agenda is no less urgent. Our best contemporary utopian novels seem to have progressed beyond direct juxtaposition, however. In the work of Ursula LeGuin (1975; 1985), Marge Piercy (1976), and Doris Lessing (1979-1983), we discover multiplicity instead of duality, ambiguity instead of superior social systems, and complex characters instead of “types.”¹⁰ These novels do afford modern readers a valuable inclusiveness and complexity of vision, and they reflect our familiar preference for relativity in assessing values. As more “open” and “dynamic” worlds, they appeal to us; we analyze their subtleties. Yet I wonder if any one of these intriguing books will achieve the power of the much simpler, starker text written one hundred years ago by Edward Bellamy. In its unequivocal advocacy of absolute economic equality, as well as in its almost diagrammatic structural oppositions, Looking Backward still has much to teach us about the power of the word.

Notes

1. See, for example, the definition of utopias as “models of the perfectly constructed, perfectly functioning society” in Goodwin (1978, 2). For more recent discussion of utopia and political theory, see Goodwin and Taylor (1982).

2. For example, see the important recent work of Jane Tompkins on the cultural “designs” of popular nineteenth-century American fiction. She boldly challenges the notion of literary “greatness” and the possibility of an objective aesthetic. Her redefinition of literature makes the entire discipline more receptive to utopian fiction, for she sees “literary texts not as works of art embodying enduring themes in complex forms, but as attempts to redefine the social order” (Tompkins 1985, xi). Her revision of “value” in literature leads her to embrace, among other literary devices, stereotyped characters, because “they convey enormous amounts of cultural information in an extremely condensed form” (p. xvi). Such a perspective differs substantially from much twentieth-century criticism and its preference for mimetic fiction. This predilection colors the judgments of even such a fine Bellamy scholar as John Thomas. In his introduction to Looking Backward, for example, Thomas calls Bellamy a “moralist rather than an artist” (Bellamy 1967 [1888], 23). He goes on to say that in Looking Backward, “action and character function chiefly as devices for explicating ethical problems which Bellamy's village types carry about with them like so many placards” (p. 24). On the same issue of flat characters or types, however, Bellamy's contemporary, William Dean Howells, acknowledges that Looking Backward presents “types rather than characters; for it is one of the prime conditions of the romancer that he shall do this” (Howells 1898, x). Far from condemning such placard-bearing “types,” however, Howells commends their use as necessary to Bellamy's purposes. It is, in fact, the prejudice of modern criticism that complex characterization and “realistic” action constitute superior fiction, and it is this bias that leads readers to deny the “literary merit” of Looking Backward and, indeed, most utopian discourse.

3. Arguments about generic precedents to utopia often resolve themselves into similar oppositions. R. C. Elliott in The Shape of Utopia (1970) emphasizes the debt to classical satire, while Northrop Frye (1965) defines utopia as “speculative myth”; others note the utopian debt to romance (Pfaelzer 1984, 20). While Frye emphasizes the primacy of “city” in utopian thought, Suvin (1979) claims that the genre has a natural affinity to pastoral. Such discussion underscores the necessarily mixed nature of utopian speculation, which must be both satiric and romantic if it is to fulfill its critical and creative functions.

4. Both Darko Suvin (1979) and Daphne Patai (1983) stress the value of seeing Victor Shklovsky's “ostranenie” as crucial to utopian fiction and demonstrate the usefulness of the concept of defamiliarization in their interesting analyses and applications to that fiction.

5. Both Williams (1979) and Pfaelzer (1984) discuss the importance of historicity in utopian texts and speculate about what may account for the relative stimulus to action provided by different kinds of utopian paradigms. Interestingly, in a recent paper, Darko Suvin (1986) has corrected his emphasis on utopian fiction as “verbal construct” because he wishes to see a connection between “utopian texts” and “utopian practices.” Although his hypotheses about the varied connections conceivable between “locus” (text or signifier) and “horizon” (the variability of the signified that he calls “possible worlds”) seems somewhat schematized, his discussion is provocative and underscores the crucial tensions of the utopian enterprise. Elizabeth Hansot's (1974) study of classical and “modern” utopian thought underscores the different emphases on contemplative or active, private or public responses, according to historical period. Her distinction is surely correct in terms of relative emphases, but the private and public reactions cannot be severed, finally, from each other.

6. Interestingly, even Bellamy's handling of alcohol seems to reflect his enjoyment of altered states. In her biography of Bellamy, Bowman notes that he varied periods of inebriation with total abstinence for the intense opposition of experiences. When he wrote Looking Backward, she says, he approached his desk with a cup of coffee in one hand and a glass of whiskey in the other (Bowman 1979 [1958], 14.).

7. I am indebted to Ken Roemer for making this point with particular force in his paper, “Perceptual Origins: “Preparing Readers to See Utopian Fiction” (1986).

8. Ernst Bloch suggests the value of such clarity to utopian fiction generally when he says, in a discussion of the meaning of utopia, “Action will release available transitional tendencies into active freedom only if the utopian goal is clearly visible, unadulterated and unrenounced” (Bloch 1970 [1963], 92).

9. For further discussion of the handling of metaphor in Looking Backward, see Khanna (1981, “The Reader and Looking Backward”) and Roemer (1983).

10. Differences in gender perspectives may well account for some of this change, since these new utopias are written by women in large part. Recent feminist theory in a variety of disciplines has suggested that women tend to question binary oppositions and affirm multiplicity. The resurgence of positive utopian fiction in the last fifteen years may also owe much to the women's movement. In other words, women's renewed attention to the need for social and political reform may have found imaginative expression in the many new novels depicting the good society. This recent burgeoning of utopian fiction, including novels by Bryant, Bradley, Elgin, Gearhart, and Russ, as well as those of LeGuin, Lessing, and Piercy, has generated considerable interest. For bibliographies and analyses, see the following anthologies: Alternative Futures: The Journal of Utopian Studies 4 (Spring and Summer 1981); Marleen Barr and Nicholas Smith, eds., Women and Utopia: Critical Interpretations (New York: University Press of America, 1983); Ruby Rohrlich and Elaine Hoffman Baruch, eds., Women in Search of Utopia (New York: Schocken Books, 1984). Additional scholarship includes, importantly, the introduction and bibliography in Daring to Dream by Carol Farley Kessler (1984) and the bibliography by Daphne Patai (1981). Also see DuPlessis (1979), Khanna (1981, “Women's Worlds”), Pearson (1977), Russ (1981), Sargent (1983), and Somay (1984).

Works Cited

Bellamy, Edward. 1891 [1880]. Dr. Heidenhoff's Process. Reprint. London: Frederick Warne & Son.

———. 1891 [1884]. Miss Ludington's Sister. Reprint. London: Frederick Warne & Son.

———. 1898. The Blindman's World and Other Stories. London: A. P. Watt & Son.

———. 1940. The Religion of Solidarity. Edited by Arthur E. Morgan. Yellow Springs, Ohio: Antioch Bookplate Co.

———. 1967 [1888]. Looking Backward. Edited by John L. Thomas. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Bloch, Ernst. 1970 [1963]. A Philosophy of the Future. Translated by John Cumming. New York: Herder and Herder.

Bowman, Sylvia E. 1979 [1958]. The Year 2000: A Critical Biography of Edward Bellamy. Reprint. New York: Octagon Books.

——— et al. 1962. Edward Bellamy Abroad: An American Prophet's Influence. New York: Twayne.

DuPlessis, Rachel Blau. 1979. “The Feminist Apologues of Lessing, Piercy, and Russ.” Frontiers: A Journal of Women's Studies 4, no. 1:1-8.

Elliott, Robert C. 1970. The Shape of Utopia. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Frye, Northrop. 1965. “Varieties of Literary Utopias.” Daedalus 94: 323-347.

Goodwin, Barbara. 1978. Social Science and Utopia. Atlantic Highlands: Humanities.

Goodwin, Barbara, and Keith Taylor. 1982. The Politics of Utopia: A Study in Theory and Practice. New York: St. Martin's Press.

Hansot, Elizabeth. 1974. Perfection and Progress: Two Modes of Utopian Thought. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Howells, William Dean. 1898. Introduction to The Blindman's World and Other Stories, by Edward Bellamy. London: A. P. Watt & Son.

Kessler, Carol Farley. 1984. Daring to Dream: Utopian Stories by United States Women, 1836-1919. Boston: Pandora Press.

Khanna, Lee Cullen. 1981. “The Reader and Looking Backward.” Journal of General Education 33: 69-79.

———. 1981. “Women's Worlds: New Directions in Utopian Fiction.” Alternative Futures 4, no. 2-3: 47-60.

LeGuin, Ursula. 1975. [1974]. The Dispossessed. New York: Avon.

———. 1985. Always Coming Home. New York: Harper and Row.

Lessing, Doris. 1979-1983. Canopus in Argos: Archives. 5 vols. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.

Patai, Daphne. 1981. “British and American Utopias by Women (1836-1979): An Annotated Bibliography.” Alternative Futures 4, nos. 2-3: 184-206.

———. 1983. “Beyond Defensiveness: Feminist Research Strategies.” Women's Studies International Forum 6, no. 2: 177-80.

Pearson, Carol. 1977. “Women's Fantasies and Feminist Utopias.” Frontiers: A Journal of Women's Studies 2, no. 3: 50-61.

Pfaelzer, Jean. 1984. The Utopian Novel in America 1886-1896. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press.

Piercy, Marge. 1976. Woman on the Edge of Time. New York: Fawcett.

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