57 pages • 1 hour read
Edward BellamyLooking Backward
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1888A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Utopian Concepts as a Way to Motivate Change
Content Warning: The novel harbors offensive ideas about gender and race. It uses dated language to describe people of color and assumes essential differences between men and women in its description of a utopian society. It describes a utopian society in which men hold all major leadership positions, reinforcing a patriarchal view of society. It also suggests that women are romantically interchangeable. It presents a utopian society that has a specific religious leaning and does not favor religious pluralism. It advocates for a utopian society that is patriarchal, misogynistic, trans-exclusive, racist, ableist, imperialistic, heteronormative and implicitly anti-gay, and classist. The novel advocates for a brand of nationalism. It contains references to death by suicide.
Utopian fiction is a genre as old as Western civilization. Some classic examples include Plato’s The Republic (375 BCE), Thomas More’s Utopia (1516), and Samuel Butler’s Erewhon (1872). Utopian fiction invents a world that is completely aligned with the author’s ethos. In the context of the fictional work, every utopian society is perfect. As such, utopias fall into two categories: science fiction, in which a perfect society is imagined to exist in a newly discovered land or in the far future; or satire, in which the perfect society is merely an intellectual exercise that serves to critique the present by comparison. Looking Backward falls into both categories. Bellamy believed that society would continue to progress for the better, both socially and technologically, and that it is only a question of when, not if, society becomes perfected. In fact, Bellamy presents his utopia as inevitable: the next evolution of humanity if it continues to be guided by American values of Protestantism and industry. He uses the analogy of a melting iceberg that gradually and unavoidably churns the sea, ushering forth changes (196).
At the same time, Looking Backward is more a rhetorical gambit than a story. Because Bellamy knew that the middle-class people of his time would resist any utopia that relied on violent revolution, he describes his utopia as attainable through peaceful alliances and the emergence of a national political party. In fact, Bellamy describes the transition to utopia as simple and easy, as if the problem of the 19th century was merely a small accounting error. Indeed, he blames those problems not on the “hard-heartedness” of the people but on their “folly” (191). West and his contemporaries believed that the labor question was impossible to solve: “the Sphinx’s riddle of the nineteenth century” (28); when West finds it solved, he believes that a thousand years had passed (23). By setting Looking Backward only 113 years in the future, Bellamy is essentially arguing that the solutions to the labor problem—and the solutions to all societal ills—are within the United States’ grasp even in 1887. All his readers need to do is buy into the ethos presented by Bellamy and represented by his descriptions of future Boston.
The structural design of Bellamy’s utopia is incomplete. In effort to keep the widespread reform attractive to all his readers, Bellamy stresses that the ideologies of the 19th century remain intact despite the new socialist order: the importance of marriage, freedom of the press, freedom in profession and consumption, and distinctions between sexes. He also claims that this perfect society will not only solve the labor problem; it will lead to “the nurture, education, and comfortable maintenance of every citizen from the cradle to the grave” (52). Proposing such a radical change to society led to new discourses in social reform in the United States, including an increase in new utopian fictions and dystopias responding to Looking Backward. The author uses the concept of the utopia to imagine an alternate, so-called perfect world; the reader then, he believes, will be able to see how attainable it is in the current era. He uses the concept of utopia, in other words, to suggest that this is not really a utopia or fantasy; it is possible to achieve it completely in the regular, ordinary world.
Ideology of Solidarity as a Driving Force
The driving ideology behind Bellamy’s utopia is the idea that all humans, when released from the poor conditions of capitalism, will prioritize the collective good over individual luxury. Throughout the novel, Dr. Leete refers to West’s time as an Age of Individuality, a time when people ignored the suffering of others and plied their trade only for their own benefit (and often at the expense of others). Dr. Leete uses the analogy of umbrellas to illustrate the difference; in the 19th century, people purchased private umbrellas to protect only themselves and their loved ones from the rain. Yet in the year 2000, the state put up shelters from the rain throughout all the sidewalks of the city: one giant, communal umbrella for the benefit of all. The cost of the one giant umbrella is less than millions of individual umbrellas; it also protects more people from the weather. Hence, communal values are not only more ethically virtuous; they are a more efficient premise for governance.
Dr. Leete repeatedly credits the adoption of communal values as the method by which society reaches its utopian form. He refers to “the solidarity of the race and brotherhood of man” as the “key” to progress (78). He explains that the labor unions had to first recognize the importance of fighting for “all classes” before any social reform was possible (149). Bellamy is most likely inspired by the American Transcendentalism of his time, from which the phrase “religion of solidarity” is born. Transcendentalists believed that individuals exist as both separate entities and part of the same universe; enlightened individuals transcend beyond thinking of the world as divided between self and other. Bellamy believes this transcendence is necessary to escape the Age of Individuality.
For Bellamy, this kind of collective thinking can only be accomplished by imagining the entire nation as an extension of one’s physical family. That is why he adopts the military model for his new social order. Even when West returns to 1887 in his final nightmare, amid all the horrors he witnesses while walking through the city of Boston, he is inspired by a military march. Bellamy observed of his own time that patriotism/nationalism was the only communal expression that crossed over class boundaries, and so he designs his utopia as an application of patriotism to the economy. In doing so, Bellamy is able to introduce concepts like sacrifice and duty to aspects of society that are usually determined by profit margins and self-interest. He seeks to introduce a general ideology of solidarity to his readers that will unite them around this cooperative, socialist cause. He wishes to replace individual ideologies with an ideology of togetherness; this will be the driving force, he believes, for change and the achievement of an egalitarian society. This togetherness, however, centers certain values already privileged among the predominant ruling social classes of Bellamy’s time.
A Vision of Utopia That Is Racist and Patriarchal
Bellamy’s utopia, like all claims at perfect systems, remains imperfect. Due to personal biases or strategic omissions, Bellamy could not help but invent a utopia with problems. Most of these problems are papered over by the fact that West hardly sees the utopia in action at all; he walks around town, visits a restaurant, universities, a department store, and a distribution center, but there is more to a society than that. Bellamy never describes how and where the goods are made, and the only two people he encounters outside of the Leete household are one store clerk and one waiter. The only thing the reader learns about either of these individuals is that the waiter does not seem to feel undignified by working in a service profession.
It is a truism that utopias tend to be utopias for some but dystopias for others. While Bellamy’s utopia does not reveal any dystopias at the margins, it is worth noting where it fails to imagine solutions to social ills. For instance, despite the inclusion of a person of color in 1887—West’s servant Sawyer, a Black man—there is no mention of race in the United States in the year 2000. This suggests that everyone in the future is white in Bellamy’s imagination. This betrays Bellamy’s privileged position as a white man writing at a time of great racial inequality. This is exacerbated when Dr. Leete refers to “the more backward races” of Asia and Africa, people who must be “educated up to civilized institutions,” reasoning used to justify colonialism and slavery in Bellamy’s day (82). Where elsewhere in the novel Dr. Leete talks proudly of the free immigration between Europe and America, Bellamy’s utopia inherits the racism of 19th-century imperialism when it comes to other peoples and places.
Women’s place, on the other hand, is described by Bellamy. While certainly women in his utopia are better off than in 1887, the utopia does not seem for women. Dr. Leete only uses masculine pronouns when discussing society, and while he makes room for women in the industrial army and in governance, that position is second-class. Women work less in order to preserve their role as mothers to men’s children, and the women in government are only allowed to contribute when a new law or situation specifically addresses women. Bellamy’s vision of utopia relies on a value familiar to his readers: that the place of women is to solely produce an abundance of children for the next generation. In fact, as Edith demonstrates, women still function as support systems for men while men do not lose any of their privileges. As with race, women are left by the wayside in this utopia and remain largely relegated to 19th-century assumptions about gender.
