Tunnel Vision in Bellamy’s Utopia:
Looking Backward through the
Lens of Domesticity
For Emily Slater, the present moment
is a particularly auspicious time for
Americans to re-examine Edward
Bellamy’s utopian novel, Looking
Backward: 2000-1887. She finds in
Bellamy’s fictional account of Boston in
the year 2000 a strong expression of
American exceptionalism: the belief
that the swift territorial expansion and
economic development of the United
States attest to the soundness of the
American experiment in liberal political
economy, making it the model for the
rest of the world to emulate. Today, as
Americans debate their stance toward
the rest of the world, Slater finds
Bellamy’s fiction germane on two
related counts: that he advocated a
peculiarly American, individualistic
socialism informed by the perfectionist
impulse in evangelical Protestantism;
and that Bellamy expressed his ideals
by focusing almost exclusively on the
life of a particular household, rather
than on public interaction. If even a
social critic such as Bellamy, in 1887,
conceived of socialism as the extension
of Brahmin gentility to all citizens,
then is it so surprising that political
elites of the present have predicated
the success of the invasion of a foreign
land on the presumed universal allure
of the “American Way”?
This essay began as an assignment
in Troy Dostert’s spring 2004 seminar,
The Search for Utopia.
Emily Slater
A
t the turn of the nineteenth century, the concept of Utopia had
evolved from that of a physically remote Garden of Eden yet to be
discovered toward one in which the perfect society could be fashioned from the raw materials already present in human nature, needing only to be brought to life through the deliberate and rational
efforts of civilized women and men to perfect self and society.1 By the turn of the
twentieth century, Edward Bellamy, arguably the most successful craftsman of what
literary scholar Kenneth M. Roemer has called “the golden era of nineteenth-century
American utopian writing,”2 was well positioned to tap the rich legacy of Enlightenment rationalism. This he brought to bear on the profound political, social, and
economic conflicts of the Industrial Age. For Bellamy and his peers, utopia, whether
defined as an ideal society or, more loosely, as one in which, as political historian
Russell Jacoby put it, “the future could fundamentally surpass the present,”3 was the
attainable end-product of enlightened thinking and rational action.
In his novel Looking Backward, Bellamy presented a utopia that was particularly
attractive to his middle- and upper-class audience because it was born without bloodshed or proletarian uprising, emerging fully formed, as did Athena from the head of
Zeus. No gestational period, no traumatic parturition predated the birth of Bellamy’s
Boston of 2000. The inherent goodness of humankind, and the supreme rationality
and self-evidence of the product itself, were the sole preconditions for a radical transformation of society. Even Immanuel Kant’s “crooked timber of humanity” could not
help but embrace it. Bellamy, however, assembled his product by focusing it through
an economic, social and political lens of domesticity in which stability, efficiency, and
morality were paramount values, proudly put forward for all to emulate. This selfcontained acuity of focus was the source of Looking Backward ’s power and appeal
in its own time. For modern readers, this work permits insight into the sources of our
present-day conflicts over race and class, and our troubled relations with the rest of
the world’s peoples. If the United States has become a far more multicultural society
than Bellamy might have predicted, then the ethnocentrism that suffuses Looking
Backward offers us historical perspective on what we might otherwise dismiss as the
myopia of those who, today, seem so intent on spreading the American Dream
1 Cf. Thomas More, Utopia, in More’s Utopia and A Dialogue of Comfort, rev. ed., with
an introduction by John Warrington (New York: Dutton, 1951) to Joel Nydahl, “From
Millennium to Utopia Americana,” in America as Utopia, ed. Kenneth M. Roemer (New
York: Burt Franklin, 1981). The literature on the perfectionist impulse in American Protestantism is too large to be cited here; undoubtedly, this impulse informed Bellamy’s thinking.
2 Kenneth M. Roemer, “Utopia and Victorian Culture: 1888-99,” in America as Utopia, 305.
16
3 Russell Jacoby, The End of Utopia: Politics and Culture in an Age of Apathy (New York:
Basic Books, 1999), xi-xii.
abroad and “traditional values”— what policy
analyst Stephanie Coontz calls “the way we
never were” — at home.4
The adjective domestic carries three possible meanings. It may refer to issues centered on
the family or household; the condition of being
tamed or “housebroken”; or a nation’s internal affairs. Bellamy’s utopia exemplifies all
three senses of the word. The character of the
Boston of the future emerges exclusively from
the insular pens and on the homebound pad of
the members of the Leete family, protagonist
Julian West’s hosts and guides as he awakens
in, and acclimates to, a radically different
twentieth-century society. This narrow focus
on the domestic serves two purposes. First, a
sentimental, home-based narrative made
Bellamy’s utopia appealing and accessible to
his middle- and upper-class audience without
risking offense to their very American palate
with unprocessed, European socialism.5 Second, it comfortably bridged the gap between
rejection of what political historian Wilfred M.
McClay has called the “perniciousness of
American individualism” and acceptance of
“the supra-personal or collective.”6
In Bellamy’s utopia, isolationism begins,
literally, at home. It is impossible to read
Looking Backward without being struck by
the conflict between the author’s emphasis on
the value of social interactions and the
absolute lack of dialogue among characters
other than West and the Leetes. Within the
Leete household, West’s unexpected arrival in
the twentieth century is the sole trigger for
meaningful interaction or discourse. Bellamy’s
silence on community life beyond the Leete
family proves even more profound. Dr. Leete
comments upon the “splendor of our public
and common life as compared with the sim-
plicity of our private and home life,” and
Edith describes the folly of allowing “the
weather to have any effect on the social movements of the people.”7 Nevertheless, Bellamy’s
only references to public social encounters in
the novel are to a sales clerk, a stream of people pouring into the dining facility, and the
waiter whom West immediately depersonalizes by classifying him as a member of the
industrial army. Bellamy portrays no chance
encounters on the streets, and no enjoyment
of group dining. Technology brings music, as
well as religion, to its audience in the home
rather than through public performance. As
historian Merritt Abrash points out, the only
scenes in the novel that include more than five
people are those set in the teeming, hellish,
nineteenth-century Boston to which West
returns in a nightmare.8 The value that this
society places upon self-containment (alongside intense pride in the “intelligent orchestration of human effort in large-scale combination”9) may seem paradoxical when held
up against Leete’s favorite metaphor of the
advantages of Nationalism’s “umbrella over
all the heads” instead of “three hundred thousand umbrellas over as many heads.”10 The
paradox vanishes, however, if we remind ourselves that Bellamy’s utopia represents not the
leveling of classes by a rebellious proletariat,
but rather, the uplift of the poor through the
application of reason. After Bellamy’s quiet
revolution, all worthy citizens enjoy the bourgeois lifeway of nineteenth-century America.
Had Bellamy presented a grittier transformation, many in his audience likely would not
have found his portrait of “Marxism Americanized” so inviting.11
The inhabitants of Bellamy’s utopia are
genteel — domesticated — and the structure of
The ethnocentrism
that suffuses Looking
Backward offers us
historical perspective
on what we might
otherwise dismiss as the
myopia of those who,
today, seem so intent on
spreading the American
Dream abroad and
“traditional values” —
what policy analyst
Stephanie Coontz calls
“the way we never
were” — at home.
Bellamy’s utopia
represents not the
4 Stephanie Coontz, The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap (New York:
Basic Books, 1992).
leveling of classes by
5 Kenneth M. Roemer, “The Literary Domestication of Utopia: There’s No Looking Backward without
Uncle Tom and Uncle True,” American Transcendental Quarterly 3, no. 1 (1989): 101; Merritt Abrash,
“Looking Backward: Marxism Americanized,” Extrapolation 30, no. 3 (Fall 1989): 237. The activism of
Eugene V. Debs exemplified Abrash’s Americanized Marxism. See, for example, Nick Salvatore, Eugene V.
Debs: Citizen and Socialist (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1982).
a rebellious proletariat,
6 Wilfred M. McClay, “Edward Bellamy and the Politics of Meaning,” American Scholar 64, no. 2
(Spring 1995): pars. [7, 20]; [article online]; available from http://search.epnet.com/direct.asp?an=
9504032649&db=afh; Internet; accessed 1 August 2004.
but rather, the uplift
of the poor through the
application of reason.
7 Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward, 2000-1887, ed. Alexander MacDonald (Peterborough,
Ontario: Broadview Press, 2003), 137, 134.
8 Abrash, “Marxism Americanized,” 239.
9 McClay, “Bellamy and the Politics of Meaning,” par. [3].
10 Bellamy, Looking Backward, 134.
11 Abrash, “Marxism Americanized,” 237.
17
their society facilitates their continued tameness.
Literary scholar Thomas Peyser likens Bellamy’s view
of society to that of the New Urbanism described by
sociologist Peter Katz.12 New Urbanists assert “the
importance of public over private values,” while
Bellamy’s society aims to fashion “ a streamlined and
frictionless kind of human being, one who could not
possibly offend the neighbors — or be meaningfully
distinguished from them.”13
The Bostonians of Looking Backward, however,
are not kept “streamlined and frictionless” by external coercion. Bellamy’s admiration of, and “lifelong
passion for, the Prussian army” produces not a solidarity-enforcing machine but, instead, a collaborative community in which the “martial virtues of
unselfish valor could now be expressed in the ordinary labors of the ordinary civilian.” 14 Bellamy’s
utopians are self-domesticated: scales have fallen
from their eyes, allowing simple reason, conviction
of righteousness, and an intrinsic passion for equality and humanity to triumph over greed and all other
“coarser motives.”15 This shared recognition minimizes the potential for conflict and dissent in
Bellamy’s society. The conduits for such disruptions,
should they occur, are few. The people are the sole
judges of the merit of art; “the newspaper press is
organized so as to be a more perfect expression of
public opinion than it possibly could be . . . when private capital controlled and managed it.”16 Those
individuals who decide they “ought to have a newspaper reflecting our opinions” need merely direct a
portion of their annual credit toward its publication,
choose its editor, and simply “remove him when
unsatisfactory.”17 Although freedom of expression
is not restricted in Bellamy’s society, it is difficult to
imagine how or why disharmony could take root in
an intellectual and social environment in which
what Peyser terms the “traditional American
ambivalence” toward community has been over-
come so successfully.18 Within this environment,
however, it is not difficult to appreciate how a story
such as Edith Leete’s favorite, “Penthesilia,” filled
with “love galore,” but devoid of all conflict or dramatic tension, would eclipse the works of Shakespeare, John Steinbeck, or West’s favorite, Charles
Dickens—but Bellamy portrays the eclipse as a triumph of the human spirit over the base passions.19
The taming of Bellamy’s society is initiated by the
recognition and incorporation of self-evident truths
about equality and fraternity. It is maintained
because the process of social change prevents any
“bubbling up,” cultural or social, from the proletarian masses of the old order. Significantly, in
Equality, the sequel to Looking Backward, Bellamy
refers to the immigrants who seemed to threaten the
Anglo-Saxon character of the America of his own
time as “the lowest, most wretched, and barbarous
races of Europe — the very scum of the continent.”20
Given his difficulty in imagining “ideal citizens
whose ethnic and racial characteristics differed from
his own,”21 it is most fortunate for the Leetes and
for the author that Julian West belongs to a thoroughly familiar social order. If West had been a
member of a “barbarous” race, and not a Boston
Brahmin, his transition into Bellamy’s world might
have been more tumultuous.
In the broadest sense, the nineteenth-century
domesticity that focuses Looking Backward directly
reflects the white American elite’s ethnocentric
stance toward the rest of the world at the time of its
publication. That elite’s perspective on international
order cannot be solely characterized by an inward
shift of focus but, rather, by a dialectical, often paradoxical balance between isolationism and intense,
messianic nationalism.22 Looking Backward clearly
illustrates this tension, both in the self-satisfied pride
of Leete’s answers to West’s questions, and in the
sometimes patronizing way that he addresses West
12 Todd W. Bressi, “Planning the American Dream,” in The New Urbanism: Planning the American Dream, ed. Peter
Katz; cited without reference in Tom Peyser, “Looking Back at Looking Backward,” Reason 32, no. 4 (AugustSeptember 2000): par. [23]; [article online]; available from http://search.epnet.com/direct.asp?an=3323285&db=afh;
Internet; accessed 1 August 2004.
13 Peyser, “Looking Back,” pars. [24-25].
14 Ibid., par. [5]; McClay, “Bellamy and the Politics of Meaning,” par. [30].
15 Bellamy, Looking Backward, 47.
16 Ibid., 142.
17 Ibid., 143.
18 Peyser, “Looking Backward,” par. [27].
19 Bellamy, Looking Backward,145.
20 Edward Bellamy, Equality (New York: D. Appleton, 1933), 313; quoted in Susan M. Matarese, “Foreign Policy
and the American Self-Image: Looking Back at Looking Backward,” American Transcendental Quarterly, n.s., 3
(March 1989): 46.
21 Matarese, “Foreign Policy,” 46.
18
22 Ibid., 48.
These words of
Dr. Leete do, however,
reveal a discomfort
with ethnic pluralism,
and a not-so-subtle
sociopolitical
narcissism.
during his tutorial sessions. When asked to justify early retirement from the industrial army in Bellamy’s
utopia, Dr. Leete addresses Julian as a “child of
another race and yet the same.”23 In comparing
nineteenth- and twentieth-century responses to
members of the service workforce, Leete declares to
West that in the latter’s day, “unequal distribution of
wealth, and still more effectually, unequal opportunities of education and culture, divided society. . .
into classes which, in many respects, regarded each
other as distinct races.”24 Although he expresses the
belief that the progress of “civilization” away from
“barbarism” can be measured against a standard set
by members of his own class, Bellamy is not an
impassioned nativist; he uses race here almost metaphorically, to underscore the socioeconomic disparities of the late nineteenth century. It would be cruel
and misguided, therefore, to suggest that Bellamy,
with what McClay describes as his fervent “desire to
find meaning in life by sanctifying one’s social
world,”25 intended to imply that distinctions according to race, but not class, are permissible because inherent differences separated “advanced”
nations from those not yet able to embrace the
American Creed. These words of Dr. Leete do, however, reveal a discomfort with ethnic pluralism, and
a not-so-subtle sociopolitical narcissism, or hubris,
at work behind the American self-image at the turn
of the twentieth century.
Because, for Bellamy, America simply was best
and knew best, isolationism and messianic nationalism could coexist in his vision of the future.
Bellamy’s utopia stood proudly alone as a “demonstration project” for other peoples to emulate.
Despite its insularity, its “rightness” was, for him,
securely self-evident and required no substantive
accommodation. The society of Looking Backward
captures the ethos of isolationism that coexisted,
however paradoxically, with an imperialistic sense
of the manifest destiny of American ideals at the end
of the nineteenth century. Those ideals, if left to natural, rational order, would diffuse outward to the
“great nations of Europe as well as Australia,
Mexico, and parts of South America” most like
America, while the “more backward races . . . are
gradually. . . educated up to civilized institutions.”26
23 Bellamy, Looking Backward, 159.
24 Ibid., 136.
25 McClay, “Bellamy and the Politics of Meaning,” par. [41].
26
Bellamy, Looking Backward, 126.
19
Visions like
Bellamy’s are,
by no means,
relics of the
past.
Twenty-first century readers, as citizens of
an intensely pluralistic, interdependent, global community, and schooled to regard the
image of utopia produced by the “great ideological storms that have altered the lives of
virtually all mankind”27 — World Wars I and
II and the Russian Revolution—as a tarnished
one, might be tempted to dismiss Looking
Backward as charming, but naive and irrelevant. However, they would be wise to resist
that temptation. While wincing in anticipation of the response that the novel might elicit
from cultural pluralists such as Isaiah Berlin
or Austin Sarat,28 thoughtful readers should
not hesitate to admire how Bellamy’s framing
of radical change in these intensely cultureattentive, thoroughly domestic terms facilitated the widespread middle- and upper-class
dissemination of his vision.29 At the same
time, they should also notice that visions like
Bellamy’s are, by no means, relics of the past.
Now, at the turn of the twenty-first century,
many of America’s current conservative leaders still appear to believe that our nation simply is and knows best; Dr. Leete’s sociopolitical
hubris often persists in the images of America
projected internationally to the present day.
Secure as ever in the “rightness” of its domestic image, these leaders have replaced the
“city on a hill” demonstration project with a
more aggressive, neocolonial “proselytization” project that, perhaps, would generate
an even more negative response from the likes
of Berlin and Sarat. Bellamy’s utopian tunnel
vision, rooted in peculiarly American ideals
and heedless of “all obstacles stemming from
diverse cultures, natural resources, and geopolitical considerations,”30 is best appreciated
today not as a prescriptive, sociopolitical treatise, but as a work of fiction. Like all provocative works of fiction, however, it imitates life,
and contains truths about projected national
image and global community that beg recognition. 27 Isaiah Berlin, “The Pursuit of the Ideal,” in idem, The Crooked Timber of Humanity: Chapters in
the History of Ideas, ed. Henry Hardy (Princeton Univ. Press, 1997), 1.
28 See, e.g., Austin Sarat, “The Micropolitics of Identity-Difference: Recognition and Accommodation
in Everyday Life,” Daedalus (Boston) 129, no. 4 (Fall 2000): 147-68.
29 Looking Backward was one of the most commercially successful books of the nineteenth century.
Within five years of its publication, library circulation surpassed that of The Swiss Family Robinson, A
Tale of Two Cities, Pilgrim’s Progress, and Aesop’s Fables. The Nationalist, as well as at least a dozen
other journals, were founded in response to Looking Backward, and a network of Nationalist clubs
spread across the nation (Roemer, “Utopia and Victorian Culture,” 306-7).
30 Matarese, “Foreign Policy,” 46.
20