The Rise of Multicultural America: Economy and Print Culture, 1865-1915

EIGHT: American Utopias

8 american utopias It is well known that one of the most popular works of American literary utopianism, Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward (1888), was written in the era of capitalist expansion; less familiar is the extraordinary outpouring of utopian novels that appeared between Looking Backward and Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland (1915). From the late 1880s to the turn of the century alone, more than 150 utopian novels were published in the United States, a figure unequalled in any other country or historical period.∞ It may seem paradoxical, from the perspective of literary history, to find a vogue of utopian art and thought in a culture renowned for its practicality and materialism. But it is precisely the intensity and pace of capitalist development that helps to explain the appeal of utopianism. The utopian novelistic form a√orded writers a distance that facilitated an engagement with the economic and social developments that both dazzled and disturbed them. In work after work, narrators and characters tested the institutionalization of extreme principles, sometimes radically enlightened ones, as in William Dean Howells’s A Traveller from Altruria (1894), and sometimes dangerously pessimistic ones, as in Ignatius Donnelly’s Caesar’s Column (1890). They imagined inventions and scientific advances beyond the ken of contemporaries , as in Alvarado Fuller’s A.D. 2000 (1890) and Arthur Bird’s Looking Forward (1899). Or, as in Unveiling a Parallel (1893) by Alice Jones and Ella Merchant, they conceived of societies where probable but still remote political changes—women’s right to vote and occupational parity with men— had been realized. American utopian novels written from the 1880s to the beginning of american utopias :: 257 World War I represented a cultural form that emerged in tandem with economic and industrial expansion and helped to express the mood of Progressive Era reform. Utopian novelists took a variety of positions on the major political issues of the day, from the rise of big corporations and the growing chasm between rich and poor, to immigration and women’s rights. Some utopian authors were themselves businessmen: King Gillette, inventor of the Gillette razor and author of The Human Drift (1894); Bradford Peck, owner of one of the largest department stores in New England and author of The World a Department Store (1900); and L. Frank Baum, traveling salesman with expertise in advertising and author of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900). This convergence between the apparently antithetical fields of business and utopianism does more than confirm the popularity of the utopian novel (even businessmen wrote them). It also confirms one of its central purposes—to reconcile the harsh e√ects of capitalist expansion. Authors like Gillette and Peck argued that the values of innovation and enterprise needed to be reconciled with humanistic and spiritual values. Many utopian novelists were concerned with the renovation of religious ideals they believed essential to alleviating social ills. Bellamy’s Looking Backward registers the influence of his father, a Baptist minister; Donnelly’s Caesar’s Column parodies upper-class Protestantism in the name of a more just Christianity; Howells’s A Traveller from Altruria outlines an ideal Christian Socialism; and Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz reflects his faith in theosophy, which decreed, ‘‘God is Nature; Nature, God.’’ These authors sought a religion free of sectarian quarreling, readily applicable to ordinary experience, and open to Darwinian science. The preoccupation with reproduction, ethnicity, and race in utopian novels was even more pronounced. It reveals how the genre helped to express the distress generated by rising levels of social heterogeneity (with immigration rates unrivalled by those of any previous or subsequent time in the nation’s history). What makes utopian novels a critical point of reference here is the cultural range of their authors and subjects, which included, for instance, African Americans (e.g., Sutton E. Griggs, Imperium in Imperio, 1899), Jews (e.g., Solomon Schindler, Young West, 1894), and Irish (e.g., Ignatius Donnelly, Caesar’s Column). Through its obligatory account of a traveler entering an unknown and wondrous region, confronted with people and customs both alien and familiar, the utopian novel o√ered a literary laboratory for probing the nature of cultural di√erence. Utopian novels typically featured an American or group of Americans as time travelers , most commonly projected forward, like Bellamy’s Julian West, or projected backward, like Twain’s Connecticut Yankee, whose experiences 258 :: american utopias...