Edward Bellamy and the Weather of Utopia

The last decade of the nineteenth century and the first years of the twentieth saw a great outpouring of utopian novels in the United States, much of it inspired by the extraordinary success of a single work, Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward, 2000-1887 ([1888] 1967). Although the ideal societies they described varied greatly, in their attitudes toward the natural environment most of these novels' authors were in agreement. They envisioned the human reshaping of the earth no less than the reform of human institutions. Supposing, as one literary historian observed, "that man was duty-bound to adjust nature to his comfort rather than to conform man to the delicate balance of nature," one after another of them projected "schemes to alter massively the face of the earth and to change the climate" in particular (Burt 1981, 177-178). In the typical future they portrayed, "excessively hot regions have been cooled and excessively cold ones warmed; excessively wet ones have been made drier and excessively dry ones wetter.... Declares [one character]: 'We have absolute control of the weather'" (Segal 1985, 27). Such successful tinkering with the elements figured in many of the fringe and obscure visions of the future that made up the bulk of the period's output. It appeared too in the work of the foremost American man of letters to turn his hand to utopian fiction in Bellamy's wake. In three novels published between 1894 and 1907, William Dean Howells contrasted the United States of his day with an invented nation, Altruria, which occupied a continent in the Southern Hemisphere. American society as Howells portrayed it was plagued by innumerable evils arising from the unrestrained competition and the class and gender inequalities of the Gilded Age, dominated by corporate wealth. Altruria had removed the chief incentives to greed, selfishness, and crime by abolishing the private accumulation of property, maintaining peace with other countries, reforming the unequal relations of the sexes and the institution of marriage, making divisions of social rank a thing of the past, and rationalizing clothing, diet, architecture, and language in the interests of taste, comfort, and economy. In all of these respects Howells held Altruria up to the American reader as a fit model for emulation. He presented it as equally admirable in its activities of environmental reform, for it had reshaped nature as successfully as it had society. The land had been "cleared of all sorts of wild beasts," water resources were managed intensively, and, most impressive of all, the climate had been vastly improved. The new regime that the Altrurian "Evolution" had installed in power had made bringing the weather under control one of its first priorities. "We had a continent to reform and beautify," an Altrurian visiting America explains to his hosts. "We had climates to change, and seasons to modify, a whole system of meteorology to readjust," and money that had originally been appropriated for wars had been diverted to this purpose. A gigantic channel had been dug through a peninsula that blocked a warm ocean current from reaching the continent's southeastern coast. As a result, a region that in its natural state had been plagued with snow and ice enjoyed "the climate of Italy" and had become beautiful, comfortable, and richly productive (Howells 1968, 156-157, 389-390). To Howells and his contemporaries, the two sets of Altrurian achievements--reform of society and reform of the earth--seem to have gone naturally together. Today, by contrast, one is struck, as a recent reader was, by the apparent incongruity between the ideals of Howells' imagined land and its inhabitants' attitudes toward nature, between its advanced social arrangements and such massive enterprises of environmental engineering (Love 1994, 40). Both of the goals that Altruria had pursued--of making society less competitive and more egalitarian and of subduing nature to human purposes--have their proponents today, but one does not now expect them (or often find them) to be espoused by the same people. …