The Spectre of Utopia: Utopian and Science Fictions at the Fin de Siècle by Matthew Beaumont (review)

“In the late nineteenth century,” writes Matthew Beaumont, “a spectre haunts history, the spectre of utopia” (17). Despite the predictability of its reference to the Communist Manifesto, Beaumont’s claim works because of the ironic distance between the specter of imminent revolution raised by Marx and Engels and the spectrality of political hope at the fin de siècle. One might even say that the late nineteenth-century specters Beaumont attends to—which include not only the consumerist ideology woven into Bellamy’s Looking Backward but also Madame Blavatsky’s occultism and the notion of telepathy as a sort of mass hypnotic engine for political change that Beaumont discovers in the feminist periodical Shafts—are the farcical repetitions spawned by the tragic failure of the earlier revolutionary one.

At the outset of The Spectre of Utopia, Beaumont defines utopia “as occupying a shifting, often contradictory space between the utopian and the i deological, between fantasy and reality” (2). Much like a self-conscious version of Lévi-Strauss’s notion of myth, utopia, according to Beaumont, “articulates the tension between impossibility and practicality. Its solutions to those social contradictions that it overtly or covertly critiques are imaginable but, in the prevailing circumstances, unrealizable” (3). The social contradictions ruling over the production of utopian speculation in the period involve the opening up of political opportunities by the working class and socialist movements versus the simultaneous deflation of the narrative of history as progress and foreshortening of the horizons of political opportunity in the face of the harsh realities of the sustained economic crisis of 1873 onward. In this conjuncture, utopian speculation became “a delicate compound of optimism and pessimism” (12), its expressions of hope shot through with the symptoms of despair. In an extended act of historical and critical imagination, Beaumont interrogates the fin de siècle’s fascination with the otherworldly in various guises, focusing on the flourishing genre of utopia and, to a lesser extent, on the emergent genre of science fiction.

The book is framed by two theoretical essays, the first, introductory one on the “spectropoetics” of utopian temporality and the final one on the “anamorphic” spatial estrangements of science fiction. Between these essays are nine chapters, beginning with four on different aspects of Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward. A set of three chapters in the middle of the book moves out from this major utopian text to problems of reception and context. Chapter 5 investigates the reprinting of Bellamy’s work within a publication series, the Bellamy Library, oriented toward working-class autodidacticism. Chapters 6 and 7 move away from this materialist reception of utopianism into its commingling with spiritualist ideas, first of all in the feminist periodical Shafts and finally in socialists’ widespread fascination with and participation in the Theosophical movement of Madame Blavatsky. A final set of two chapters shifts the focus from these archival materials back to close reading of more canonical texts, Wilde’s “The Soul of Man Under Socialism” and Wells’s The Time Machine, with the reading of Wells leading into the closing theoretical piece on science fiction.

Nearly half of the entire book is taken up with consideration of Bellamy’s Looking Backward. Beaumont’s emphasis on Looking Backward is ultimately based upon its phenomenal importance as an event in publishing history, but the main focus of the inquiry in the first four chapters is on the text itself. Beaumont argues for the importance of attending to the book’s psychological drama, the plot of disorientation and reorientation worked through by the protagonist and narrator, Julian West. He compares West’s waking up in another time and society than the ones he previously knew to the contemporary psychological disorder known as “psychogenic fugue,” in which someone suddenly abandons his or her...