In Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward, our main character, Julian West, who hails from Boston, Massachusetts, is put into a hypnotic slumber due to his restlessness. Eventually West wakes up, but the city he finds himself in is one that he does not recognize. Prior to his sleep, West’s Boston was a city full of selfishness and greed, heavily focused on money. He slowly comes to realize that the Boston he finds himself in now is one of equality and selflessness. As a result, the city has reached its full potential, and so has the United States as a whole, instituting a new social order. Many factors went into establishing this new form of government, one of the main factors being a nationwide credit system. In doing so, Bellamy critiques today's society on the subject of the wealth gap, and how members of each class look at those below. A currency system is an integral aspect to implement into any nation, …show more content…
The driver was hungry, and permitted no lagging, though the pace was necessarily very slow” (Bellamy 2). Essentially, West is saying the class system was a ride through life. For some people, specifically the lower and middle class, their time is spent pulling the coach and constantly working. For others, it was a smooth and comfortable ride, these being the wealthy. This is comparable to the wealth gap problem we see in today’s society. Lower and middle class members are constantly working, whether it is one job or several. The members of these classes are engulfed in the effort of building their own wealth, with little time for other facets of life. They spend most of their time dedicated to the labor force, with little reward to show for it. On the other hand, you have the wealthy who spend little time working but nevertheless have a large fortune to live off
Looking Backward is a Utopian novel written by Edward Bellamy. The story is about Julian West, an American who falls into a deep hypnosis induced sleep only to wake up hundred and thirteen years later. When he wakes up, he is still in the same location but in a totally transformed world (Bellamy 11). He has also been changed into a socialist utopia. The book illustrates Bellamy’s views about changing and improving the future hence, bringing out four major themes; advantages of a socialist system
Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward People have always wondered what the future will be like. Certainly Edward Bellamy did when he wrote the novel, Looking Backward (1888). Bellamy uses a man named Mr. West as the main character in this novel. He opens by telling who he is and what his social standing is. West is a young man, around the age of 30, and is fairly wealthy. At the beginning, he tells us about his fiancé, Edith, and the house he is having trouble building for her. The trouble comes
In his book Looking Backward, Edward Bellamy gives us some insight into how his contemporaries viewed the world. He writes about the poverty, inequality and corruption of his age, while at the same time lauding the industrial innovations corporations had made. In response to the social strife and uncertainty of his time, he presents social change as peaceful. The United States of Bellamy’s time was a nation of great inequality, both materially and politically. Extensive industrialization had led
Bellamy's Looking Backward: Utopia or Fantasy? Although Edward Bellamy's twentieth century society in Looking Backward appears to be the perfect utopia, it could never exist. The very factors that Bellamy claimed contributed to the society's establishment and success are, in reality, what would lead to its failure. The twentieth century society lacked the possibility for advancements in technology while at the same time lacking competition and appropriate incentives. Even if we ignore these
Looking Backward The book Looking Backward was written by Edward Bellamy and published in the year 1888. Bellamy started off his career as a journalist but then married and decided to devote his efforts to writing fiction novels. Looking Backward was published and Bellamy was famous. The book stirred around the country and had people imagining a world like the one Bellamy created in his book. The idea of a utopia as the one he describes is unbelievable. His book is what people, of even now in the
change in the accepted social order. The framers of the Constitution were looking in the right direction; it is our legacy and responsibility to see that the essence of their vision is amended to accommodate the changes this nation has experienced since its founding and to provide the opportunity for every citizen to express, and possibly achieve, his or her own utopia. Works Cited Bellamy, Edward. Looking Backward: 2000 to 1887. Internet text version copyright 1996 by Geoffrey Sauer
examples being equality of pay for both genders who have the same occupation, In Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward, the role of woman can be seen more or less as the same as in Utopia, however, we see woman taking a more active role within the story itself, particularly with the character Edith Leete. Although even in this context she takes a more passive role when compared with the protagonist, Julian West. In Looking Backward, Dr. Leete explains that
have the same sorts of governments. The freedoms of minority ethnicities, if such minority groups remain unconverted to homogenous American traditions and modes of consumption, are no doubt limited, particularly in the matter of obtaining goods. Bellamy’s scheme of government responding to sufficient consumer demand as evinced by petitions before a new item may be manufactured or imported is quite limiting, and it raises questions about the extent of social control the government holds. When the Leetes
female is the more fragile character in the background. We wonder if the roles could reverse or how can these roles differ in certain societies. In Sir Thomas More’s Utopia, males play the dominant role when it comes to society, whereas in Looking Backward by Edward Bellamy focuses on female-dominated aspects of society. Utopia by Sir Thomas More depicts men to be the deciders when it comes to creating a family of their own. In the section Of Their Slaves and Of Their Marriages, More begins the idea
New York: McMillan Publishing Company, 1986. Huxley, Aldous. Brave New World. New York: Harper Perennial, 1989. Orwell, George. 1984. New York: The New American Library, Inc., 1961. Snodgrass, Mary Ellen. "Dystopia, 179", "Looking Backward, 323-324" Encyclopedia of Utopian Literature. Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 1995. White, T.H. The Once and Future King. New York: Ace Books, 1987.
global involvement because of 1 utopian thinking, 2 business expansion, and 3 changes in foreign policy. The consequences on American society of that greater involvement were 4 America’s development into an “international police power”. Edward Bellamy’s book Looking Backward was a projection of American thinking at this time that compounded on widely held belief of millennialism. This book mainly focused on a fictional future utopia one that many Americans wanted to believe in and develop. In this fictional
probable that he would have seen Frederick Law Olmsted’s garden suburb of Riverside being built outside the city. The Penguin Dictionary says that during his stay in America he read Walt Whitman and Ralph Waldo Emerson and also Edward Bellamy’s utopian Looking Backward and began to think about a better life and how it could be promoted. Moving back to Britain he began to think town-planning through from first principles and in 1898 he published Tomorrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform. This
were open to the middle-class. Yet this modernization was not all for the best, with the result being a decent amount of civil unrest. There were large issues with immigration. Everyday, there were thousands of Europeans who were coming to America looking for work. Despite the fact that the working conditions were awful and the wages weren’t much better, they were better than the work overseas. There was also the rising issue of anarchists becoming more and more of a problem as they were becoming more
Utopias often describe the ideal society as a perfect harmony between male and female, black and white, rich and poor. To begin, an overview of utopian history is needed. The utopian lineage is as old as the Earth itself. Specifically, it started in the Garden of Eden, which is considered the ultimate utopia. After that, the next major utopia is described in Plato’s The Republic. According to Plato, as along as the major people classes live justly with one another, the overall society will be in
everything is in order and nothing is wrong. Such settings are called utopias, which came from the Greek words οὐ and τόπος and was the framework of Plato’s Republic, Thomas More’s Utopia, Johannes Valentinus Andreae’s Christanopolis, and Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward (Hillegas 3-4). This was counteracted, however, by the batch of artists that came thereafter. They have acknowledged