9 - Realist utopias

Summary

It is well known that one of the most popular works of literary utopianism, Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward (1888), was written during the era of American literary Realism; few are familiar with 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, over 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 afforded writers a distance, which facilitated their profound engagement with the economic and social developments that both dazzled and disturbed them. In work after work, narrators and characters experienced the detached contemplation of the utopian perspective. They tested the institutionalization of extreme principles, sometimes radically enlightened ones, as in William Dean Howells's The Traveler From Altruria (1894), 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.