Looking Backward

“Although you are a century older than when you lay down to sleep in that underground chamber, your appearance is unchanged. That should not amaze you. It is by virtue of the total arrest of the vital functions that you have survived this great period of time. If your body could have undergone any change during your trance, it would long ago have suffered dissolution.”

While there is plenty imagination in the design of Bellamy’s utopia, much of the technology described in the year 2000—with the exception of the pneumatic tubes—would have seemed reasonable to 19th-century readers. The biggest element of science fiction in the novel, however, is the notion that mesmerism could preserve a human being perfectly for 113 years without sustenance.

“No doubt, as you imply, the cities of that period were rather shabby affairs. If you had the taste to make them splendid, which I would not be so rude as to question, the general poverty resulting from your extraordinary industrial system would not have given you the means. Moreover, the excessive individualism which then prevailed was inconsistent with much public spirit. What little wealth you had seems almost wholly to have been lavished in private luxury.”

Dr. Leete emphasizes the grandeur of the public spaces of Boston in the year 2000, which is later contrasted with the ugliness of 1887 Boston in West’s nightmare. However, Bellamy through Dr. Leete makes it clear that 1887 Boston’s ugliness has nothing to do with the taste of the people who lived then but with the lack of public funding due to capitalism. The future will have much public funding poured into public spaces.

“The movement toward the conduct of business by larger and larger aggregations of capital, the tendency toward monopolies, which had been so desperately and vainly resisted, was recognized at least, in its true significance, as a process which only needed to complete its logical evolution to open a golden future to humanity.”

Bellamy’s strategic gambit—to characterize 19th-century capitalism as a necessary step stone toward socialism—softens his criticisms of the era. He frees his readers from feeling guilty for supporting their economic system or feeling compelled to reform it. This lets his readers relax and defer reform to the next generation.

“In your day governments were accustomed, on the slightest international misunderstanding, to seize upon the bodies of citizens and deliver them over by hundreds of thousands to death and mutilation, wasting their treasures the while like water; and all this oftenest for no imaginable profit to the victims.”

When West asks Dr. Leete how the people can abide by such a large and present government, Dr. Leete argues that it is the opposite. He points out that the government used to intervene to a larger extent. Bellamy portrays West’s government as a monster that “seizes upon the bodies” and sends them to death. Bellamy anthropomorphizes the government into a dangerous predator.

“The principle is that no man’s work ought to be, on the whole, harder for him than any other man’s for him, the workers themselves to be the judges.”

Bellamy’s industrial army is premised on the idea of workers seizing the means of production—deciding for themselves when and how to work and sharing the benefits of labor communally. This idea is central to all concepts of socialism.

“There are no words for the mental torture I endured during this helpless, eyeless groping for myself in a boundless void. No other experience of the mind gives probably anything like the sense of absolute intellectual arrest from the loss of a mental fulcrum, a starting point of thought, which comes during such a momentary obscuration of the sense of one’s identity. I trust I may never know what it is again.”

For the most part, Bellamy ignores the trauma that West would have experienced waking up 113 years later. Bellamy suggests that one’s identity must be anchored by a “mental fulcrum” or “starting point of thought” provided by a place or time—and that without that starting point, the human mind enters a “void,” causing nausea, helplessness, and despair (47). Bellamy argues that, in some respects, a sense of self is contextual to one’s place in time and socio-historical conditions.

“This card is issued for a certain number of dollars. We have kept the old word, but not the substance. The term, as we use it, answers to no real thing, but merely serves as an algebraical symbol for comparing the values of products with one another. For this purpose they are all priced in dollars and cents, just as in your day.”

Bellamy describes the translation of monetary wealth into an “algebraical symbol” that can then be recorded, manipulated, and transferred without the “substance” or physical bill. This description describes the debit system that develops in the 20th century, and increasingly, how e-finance works today. This is one of a few features of modern society that Bellamy predicts.

“According to our ideas, buying and selling is essentially anti-social in all its tendencies. It is an education in self-seeking at the expense of others, and no society whose citizens are trained in such a school can possible rise above very low grade of civilization.”

Dr. Leete, and by extension Bellamy, defines the very act of buying or selling as violence. These small exchanges, even ones when individuals might feel like all parties gain, are the building blocks of the larger capitalist evils that prevent society from progressing. Bellamy advocates for a completely different system in which there is no buying or selling.

“I think there is no feature of the civilization of your epoch so repugnant to modern ideas as the neglect with which you treated your dependent classes.”

Increasingly, Dr. Leete’s rhetoric becomes angrier. As Bellamy’s mouthpiece, Dr. Leete shifts from intellectual critiques of the 19th century to outrage, switching from logos to pathos in his rhetorical efforts to sway the reader.

“To save ourselves useless burdens, we have as little gear about us at home as is consistent with comfort, but the social side of our life is ornate and luxurious beyond anything the world ever knew before. All the industrial and professional guilds have club-houses as extensive as this, as well as country, mountain, and seaside houses for sport and rest in vacations.”

Dr. Leete multiple times notes that their home is humble—despite the fact that their home is multiple stories and includes extra bedrooms, a library, and a music room. By comparison, the public spaces must be “ornate and luxurious” to the level of royalty. The book suggests this century has unimaginable opulence through Bellamy’s vision of socialism.

“When men came to realize the change through which they had passed was not merely an improvement in details of their condition, but the rise of the race to a new plane of existence with an illimitable vista of progress, their minds were affected in all their faculties with a stimulus, of which the outburst of the medieval renaissance offers a suggestion but faint indeed. There ensured an era of mechanical invention, scientific discovery, art, musical and literary productiveness to which no previous age of the world offers anything comparable.”

Contrary to opinions that great suffering produces great art, or that too much peace and comfort would stifle artistic expression and invention, Bellamy’s utopia also includes an arts renaissance. Dr. Leete suggests that this renaissance is due to a collective belief that progress is now unhindered—comparing that feeling to something like heaven: limitless, religious, and extra-dimensional.

“We belong to a future of which you could not form an idea, a generation of which you knew nothing until you saw us. But you belong to a generation of which our forefathers were a part. We know all about it; the names of many of its members are household words with us. We have made a study of your ways of living and thinking; nothing you say or do surprises us, which we say and do nothing which does not seem strange to you.”

Edith explains that while it is strange having a man of the past in their midst, it must be especially strange for West because he arrived in the year 2000 with zero prior notions. At the same time, Edith suggests that every opinion he has, every word he says, is the result of his 19th-century upbringing. West is a product of the unjust society that has been overturned by the future he finds himself in.

“Because we are now social equals, and no man either has anything to fear from another or can gain anything by deceiving him, the contempt of falsehood is so universal that it is rarely, as I told you, that even a criminal in other respects will be found willing to lie.”

Bellamy argues through Dr. Leete that lying would be eliminated if social classes were eliminated. Money is the sole driving force of the darker sides of human nature and the root of the impulse to lie within the world of the book.

“I am for all the world like a man who has permitted an injured limb to lie motionless under the impression that it is exquisitely sensitive, and on trying to move it finds that it is paralyzed.”

Toward the end of the novel, West finally allows himself to confront the fact that he lost his life in the 19th century. However, when he does, he discovers that he has no feelings because they have been “paralyzed.” Bellamy’s simile relies on notions of ableism; the utopian future is a “healthy” and “un-injured” body, while the regressive 19th century is cast as a body with a disability, implied to be inherently negative.

“We used to hold that a certain amount of susceptibility to educational influences is required to make a mind worth cultivating, just as a certain natural fertility in soil is required if it is to repay tilling.”

West tries to make the point that universal education is wasted effort by invoking a 19th-century metaphor. He compares spending the effort educating a person, in his view, of low intellect to trying to grow plants in poor soil. Dr. Leete turns the metaphor back on him, suggesting that there is more to gain in the long run by making that soil more fertile.

“Some time when we have plenty of leisure I am going to ask you to sit down with me and try to make me comprehend, as I never yet could, though I have studied the matter a great deal, how such shrewd fellows as your contemporaries appear to have been in many respects ever came to entrust the business of providing for the community to a class whose interest it was to starve it.”

Dr. Leete seems to know everything not just about the year 2000 but also about West’s time. However, either truthfully or to make a point, Dr. Leete says that even he cannot come up with a reason for something as unwise as privatized but necessary services such as water and food. Those companies, he says, are motivated to make these staples as expensive as possible. His outrage is no less applicable today than in 1887.

“Their system of unorganized and antagonistic industries was as absurd economically as it was morally abominable. Selfishness was their only science, and in industrial production selfishness is suicide. Competition, which is the instinct of selfishness, is another word for dissipation of energy, while combination is the secret of efficient production.”

Bellamy switches his rhetorical strategy from moral outrage (pathos) back to logos, appealing to the reader’s reason. He suggests that even if capitalist selfishness did not lead to the suffering of the poor, it would still be a bad system for making money. This would have made sense to readers in 1888 who were experiencing the recession of that time.

“The root of her disability, as you say, was her personal dependence upon man for her livelihood, and I can imagine no other mode of social organization than that you have adopted, which would have set woman free of man at the same time that it set men free of one another.”

Bellamy identifies that women in the 19th century are dependent on men for their well-being, which limits their freedom. He also argues here that there was no possible reform to improve the condition of women—not even suffrage—other than the totalizing reform of the national party. In doing so, Bellamy comes out against women’s suffrage and similar reform movements that were otherwise sympathetic to his cause.

“It means that for the first time in human history the principle of sexual selection, with its tendency to preserve and transmit the better types of the race, and let the inferior types drop out, has unhindered operation.”

Dr. Leete celebrates the liberation of women by explaining that, because women are now free to choose sexual partners based on their qualities rather than their social position, humanity can re-enter the process of natural selection that would eliminate “inferior types.” This directly contradicts Dr. Leete’s previous outrage regarding the way the 19th century mistreated individuals with illnesses and disabilities. In fact, his delight at how “sexual selection” would lead to “race purification” advocates for an exclusionary nationalism built on eugenics.

“Since then, humanity has entered on a new phase of spiritual development, an evolution of higher faculties, the very existence of which in human nature our ancestors scarcely suspected.”

Mr. Barton sermonizes about the improvements that the United States has made since the 19th century. He focuses on how those improvements have allowed humans to become better people and more “spiritual” people. The sermon vaguely references Christianity without any particular denomination, suggesting a theocratic bent to Bellamy’s utopia.

“After you know who I am, you will be bound to confess that it was nothing less than my duty to fall in love with you at first sight, and that no girl of proper feeling in my place could do otherwise.”

Edith has very little agency in the novel. She responds to West’s needs when he suffers from his identity crisis, does what her father tells her to do, and here, even her choice of romantic partner—despite Dr. Leete’s speeches on the freedom of women to choose—is predetermined by blood and circumstance.

“When at last, in an ecstasy of gratitude and tenderness, I folded the lovely girl in my arms, the two Ediths were blended in my thought, nor have they ever since been clearly distinguished. I was not long in finding that on Edith’s part there was a corresponding confusion of identities.”

Edith replaces her great grandmother in the plot, allowing West to skip grieving the loss of Edith Bartlett. This would be true anyway, but Bellamy describes Edith in the last chapters as if she were undergoing a kind of transformation into a woman with two identities: her own and that of West’s lost fiancé. This suggests that, in Bellamy’s utopia, women are interchangeable and disposable.

“The folly of men, not their hard-heartedness, was the great cause of the world’s poverty. It was not the crime of man, nor of any class of men, that made the race so miserable, but a hideous, ghastly mistake, a colossal world-darkening blunder.”

Bellamy’s strategy in convincing his readers of the horrors of the 19th century is to free them from any notion that their complicity in class struggle is due to something unethical or cruel in their personalities. Bellamy writes directly against socialist tradition, which often identifies the cruelness of the ruling classes as a root cause of class conflict. It is not their fault at all, he argues, but a mistake that happens to be “world-darkening.” A 19th century reader can then hope to contribute to fixing that mistake without considering themselves the blunderer.