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The future Americans: race, gender, and citizenship in American utopian fiction, 1888-1912

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The future Americans: race, gender, and citizenship in American utopian fiction, 1888-1912

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THE FUTURE AMERICANS:
RACE, GENDER, AND CITIZENSHIP IN AMERICAN UTOPIAN FICTION, 1888-1912
by
JUSTIN SCOTT BIBLER

A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfilment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(ENGLISH)

AUGUST 2015

Copyright 2015 Justin Scott Bibler

For Andria and Tess
iii

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

As I am sure is always the case, completing my dissertation was a long and arduous task.
Thankfully, I had some wonderful help along the way.
I am grateful to my committee for their guidance and their enthusiasm for my project. My
chair, John Carlos Rowe, has been with me from the very beginning, yet I am still blown away
by his responsiveness, kindness, insight, and candor. I am also indebted to William Handley, was
involved in the evolution of my project since my Field Exam, and Diana Williams, who served
on my Qualifying Exam and Dissertation committees even though I had never taken a class with
her. All three committee members extended great generosity, and their thoughts and
contributions were crucial to the success of my project. Many thanks also to Michelle Gordon
and Tony Kemp for their important contributions as members of my Qualifying Exam
committee.
My family has been wonderfully supportive throughout this entire process. Thank you,
Mom and Dad, for encouraging me to follow this dream and for taking us on amazing trips that
did so much for our mental health! Thank you, Marsha and David, for the interest you’ve shown
in my work and for the help with Tess, the animals, etc. over the years. Thank you, Kevin, for
your humor and your interest in my grad school career. And thank you, Ryan, for going through
this whole thing right by my side (albiet 2500 miles away)! It wasn’t all that long ago that we
were in my backyard, stripping the paint off a Schwinn 10-speed that was older than either of us
and wondering if we’d ever really be able to write dissertations. Now we both have PhDs, and I
believe those conversations were turning points for us both.
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I owe, by far, my greatest thanks to my wife, Andria Bibler. From allowing me to talk
through chapter ideas during walks along the L.A. River, to providing me with unwavering
validation, encouragement, and motivation, to talking me down from the ledge on more than a
few occasions, Andria’s kindness and support (and tough love, at times!) was literally the
difference between finishing and not finishing this dissertation. You really are amazing, Andria;
you made sacrifices and compromises, you helped me shoulder the burdens of stress and doubt,
and yet your love for me and belief in me never wavered. Thank you so, so much. This
accomplishment belongs as much to you as to me.
Finally, I want to thank my daughter, Tess Athena Bibler, who entered my life just before
my final year of graduate school. Thank you, Tessie, for being my companion this last year and
for giving me a very good reason to focus on looking forward.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgements iii
Abstract vi
Introduction 1
Chapter One 18
“Edward Bellamy’s Raceless Utopia”

Chapter Two 57
“Edward A. Johnson’s Utopian Critique”

Chapter Three 95
“Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Authoritarian Feminism”

Chapter Four 136
“Sui Sin Far’s Amalgamationist Utopianism”

Works Cited 188

vi

ABSTRACT

From John Winthrop’s declaration that the English colony in North America would be
“as a city on a hill” to Lincoln’s discussion of the “great task remaining before us” in his
Gettysburg Address, America has long seen itself more in terms of the future than of the past.
This was perhaps never more the case than in the period surrounding the turn of the twentieth
century. In the aftermath of the Civil War and Reconstruction, Americans faced a crisis of
futurity, in which questions about the American citizenry going forward, and especially about the
future of citizenship for African Americans, immigrants, and women, dominated public
discourse.
The Future Americans: Race, Gender, and Citizenship in American Utopian Fiction,
1888-1912 considers this intersection of futurity and citizenship by looking at an explicitly
future-oriented literary genre that, not-coincidentally, rose to great prominence during this
period: the literary utopia. Whereas much of the future-oriented public discourse arose out of
white Americans’ fears of racial amalgamation, cultural corruption, or the loss of white
hegemony, utopian writers presented hopeful visions of the decades to come, in which the
problems of the present are resolved and in which egalitarianism characterizes American
economic and political life. As numerous critics have noted, however, the hopeful future-visions
of turn-of-the-century utopian writers tended to preserve the exclusionary logic of Plessy v.
Ferguson, the patriarchal notion of separate spheres, and the scientific racism of eugenics.
Simply put, the American utopian novel at the turn of the twentieth century has been viewed,
with some justification, as a racist and patriarchal genre; if the projected future in these novels is
a utopia, it is a utopia for white, middle-class men. But this does not tell the whole story, and one
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of the purposes of this dissertation is to recover the utopian voices of writers from groups with
limited or second class citizenship. By beginning with Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward, the
paradigmatic white, middle-class utopian novel, and then looking at three utopian re-visions by
writers from oppressed groups—Edward A. Johnson, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and Sui Sin
Far—my dissertation argues that utopianism served an important role within the activist
programs of African American, Chinese American, and feminist writers. Since my dissertation
focuses on the utility of utopian writing, I also uncover the compromises and hypocrisies within
these works that resulted from the authors’ competing desires both to illustrate an objectively
better future and to avoid alienating readers whose support was crucial the author’s activist
agenda. Finally, my dissertation demonstrates that turn-of-the-century evolutionary thought,
often associated with the oppressiveness and racism of the eugenics movement and anti-
miscegenation legislation, also played an integral role in the utopian theorizing of women and
people of color.
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INTRODUCTION

From John Winthrop’s declaration that the English colony in North America would be
“as a city on a hill” to Lincoln’s discussion of the “great task remaining before us” in his
Gettysburg Address, America has long seen itself more in terms of the future than of the past. In
many ways, a sense of the future, of what lies ahead rather than what came before, is central to
American nationalist rhetoric. John O’Sullivan’s landmark 1830 essay “The Great Nation of
Futurity,” for instance, explicitly identifies futurity as the defining characteristic of U.S.
nationhood. In contrast to European states with long history and ties to “antiquity,” O’Sullivan
argues that “our national birth was the beginning of a new history, the formation and progress of
an untried political system, which separates us from the past and connects us with the future
only; and so far as regards the entire development of the natural rights of man, in moral, political,
and national life, we may confidently assume that our country is destined to be the great nation
of futurity” (O’Sullivan). For O’Sullivan, as for the many American thinkers, writers, and
politicians who would embrace the concept of manifest destiny, the future of the United States
lay in the conquest of the west and in the perfectibility of American civilization through
territorial expansion and the establishment of American institutions across the continent.
American patriots like O’Sullivan (and like Winthrop 200 years earlier) argued that
America’s manifest destiny was divinely ordained and that future greatness was not only certain
but well deserved because the United States was “the nation of progress, of individual freedom,
of universal enfranchisement. Equality of rights is the cynosure of our union of States”
(O’Sullivan). The futurist rhetoric of antebellum American nationalism was therefore both
2

racialized and gendered. For O’Sullivan to speak of “individual freedom,” “universal
enfranchisement,” and “[e]quality of rights” at a time when chattel slavery, coverture, and Indian
removal were officially sanctioned by the United States government reveals the extent to which
American futurity was actually white male futurity.
Futurity persisted as an important element of American nationalist rhetoric through the
Civil War and into the latter half of the nineteenth century. With the Civil War, however, came
important changes to the ways in which American politicians and thinkers imagined the future.
The destruction caused by the conflict, for instance, prompted serious discussions about how best
to reconstruct the south and how to move forward as a nation without the institution of slavery.
Even more importantly, emancipation and the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments radically
changed the concept of futurity for African Americans, both those who had been enslaved and
those who had possessed freedom before the war. In fact, emancipation and the Thirteenth
Amendment literally made futurity possible for millions of previously enslaved African
Americans; the Fourteenth Amendment added to this in 1868 by making it possible for all
African Americans to imagine a future as United States citizens. Black citizenship also affected
the white notions of futurity, and many whites abhorred, and feared, the very idea of black
franchise and political participation. Citizenship, therefore, became crucially tied to futurity in
the United States in the decades after the Civil War.
Citizenship, however, was not a simple concept in the late nineteenth century, and
African Americans were not the only group affected by the many changes and redefinitions in
US citizenship law. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, for instance, made it virtually
impossible for people from China to immigrate to the United States, and prevented Chinese
people already in the country from leaving for fear that they would not be able to return. This
3

Act explicitly sought to restrict American citizenship by excluding Chinese immigrants, who,
many whites feared, constituted a threat to American workers and values. As such, it shows the
extent to which futurity and citizenship were intertwined in the late nineteenth century. Not all
changes to oppressed groups’ citizenship statuses were exclusionary, however. Just five years
after the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act, Congress passed the Dawes Act which actually
extended US citizenship to some Native Americans in exchange for accepting individual land
allotments and adopting Euro-American values of individual property ownership and
participation in the agricultural economy. As with Chinese Exclusion, futurity played a major
role in the Dawes Act. In this case, the futurity in question was the ability of Native Americans
to assimilate to Euro-American ways of life, including the notion of private land ownership.
From the perspective of Congress, Native Americans were destined to vanish in the face of
American westward expansion, their tribal practices being incompatible with the values of
American imperialism (Prucha 662). The only future possible for Native Americans, senators
like Henry Dawes believed, was one in which Indians stopped being Indians, or, as Richard H.
Pratt put it, “Kill the Indian in him, and Save the Man” (Pratt 260).
The Fourteenth Amendment, Chinese Exclusion, and the Dawes Act are just three of the
many legal actions that affected particular groups’ citizenship statuses in the late nineteenth
century. Other acts of Congress and decisions by the U.S. Supreme Court likewise altered the
legal statuses of African Americans, immigrants, and women. These legal changes were
predicated on some vision of the future, some desire to intervene in the trajectory of the nation
with regard to specific groups. Moreover, the futurity that underwrote each of these changes was
of the fearful variety. According to José Esteban Muñoz, in his reading of Ernst Bloch’s utopian
theory, “hope along with its other, fear, are affective structures that can be described as
4

anticipatory.” (3) Although the subject of his book is later-twentieth-century queer utopianism,
Muñoz’s formulation of Bloch’s theory is useful in understanding the predominant varieties of
American futurity around the turn of the century. For many of the loudest voices at the time,
indeed for those responsible for the laws I have so far mentioned, fear was the anticipatory
structure that governed both their visions of the future and their present actions. It was fear of
“negro domination” that prompted Southern whites to suppress the African American vote
(Lynch 95-6). It likewise was fear of “amalgamation” and the corruption of white racial purity
that prompted the passage of anti-miscegenation laws in thirty seven out of fifty states at some
point in their history (Gaines 37). White nativists feared competition in the labor market from
immigrants, incompatibility between immigrant and American cultures, and, again, the
corruption of white racial purity. In response, they passed restrictive laws like the Chinese
Exclusion Act, terrorized immigrants with racial violence, and demonized immigrants in
journalistic and literary representations. Men who feared the loss of male hegemony, along with
both men and women who feared the death of separate spheres and the decline of female
domesticity, strongly opposed woman suffrage. Thomas Dixon, along with writers of his ilk, was
so afraid of the trajectory toward a multi-racial America set in motion by the Reconstruction
Amendments that he felt it necessary to write propagandistic literature that that attempted to
reaffirm the legitimacy of white rule and establish precedent for the segregation and
disfranchisement of African Americans he believed were necessary to protect southern whiteness
for the future.
My dissertation examines literary works that come out of the other of these two
predominant modes of future-oriented thought: hope. In particular, I consider works that are
utopian, whether in their form, their attitude toward the future, or their strategy for offering a
5

critique of the present state of society. Utopia can be a difficult concept to define, in part because
it can be used to refer to distinct but related ideas: utopian literature, utopian communities,
utopian theories. Additionally, scholars of utopianism do not agree on a single definition. Lyman
Tower Sargent, for instance, writes that “I define the broad, general phenomenon of utopianism
as social dreaming – the dreams and nightmares that concern the ways in which groups of people
arrange their lives and which usually envision a radically different society than the one in which
the dreamers live” (3). Krishnan Kumar takes a different view, arguing that utopia “always goes
beyond the immediately practicable, and it may go so far beyond as to be in the most realistic
senses wholly impracticable. But it is never simple dreaming. It always has one foot in reality”
(2). And Ruth Levitas, near the end of her book-length study of the meaning of utopia suggests a
simpler way of understanding utopia. “The essence of utopia,” she writes, “seems to be desire –
the desire for a different, better way of being” (181). While each of these offers useful ways of
thinking about the concept of utopia, I am most drawn to Levitas’s “retheorising” of utopia.
Utopia, for each of the writers I consider in this dissertation, is precisely about the “desire for a
different, better way of being.” Utopia is not just a concept for these writers, however; it is also a
strategy. Thus, Kenneth Roemer’s practical definition of the literary utopia is helpful. “A literary
utopia,” Roemer writes in America as Utopia, “is a fairly detailed description of an imaginary
community, society, or world—a ‘fiction’ that encourages readers to experience vicariously a
culture that represents a prescriptive, normative alternative to their own culture” (3).
Each of the works considered in the following chapters begins with the fundamental
premise that the possibility of a better future exists and that the seeds of this better future are
already present in some aspect of the here and now. Each of them also assumes that the
possibility of bringing this better future into being lies in a single, fundamental change. The
6

utopian form therefore becomes a vehicle for selling this idea to a reading public that is at least
open to the ideas being proposed.
Utopian novels are almost always didactic, and these are no different. In fact, each of the
authors I consider stated explicitly that their utopian works were intended as activism, not art.
Bellamy, for instance, bemoaned the fact that his commitment to Nationalism made it impossible
for him to write the Hawthornian psychological romances he loved and condemned him to a
single-minded career of utopian activism. In response to a solicitation for a story from The
Atlantic, Bellamy wrote that since discovering Nationalism, “I simply ‘can’t get my consent’ to
write or think of anything else. As a literary man I fear I am “a goner” and past praying for.” For
Johnson, the didactic intent of the novel is evident in the book’s own preface, in which Johnson
dedicates the book to “the sympathetic and well wishing friends of the Negro race” (v) and in
which he says of the novel’s plot that “the story weaved into the work is subordinate to the
discussion of facts, and not paramount” (vi). The fact that Johnson’s entire career was dedicated
to improving the conditions of life for African Americans through law, education, and politics
likewise indicates that his foray into fiction was done in the same spirit. Charlotte Perkins
Gilman considered all of her writing didactic and activist, whether or not it was overtly utopian,
and rejected the idea that she was an artist at all, saying of her poetry that “I am not a poet…I am
only a preacher, whether on the platform or in print (Qtd. in Knight 28). Even Sui Sin Far, whose
writing is not in the utopian mode, but whose stories, I argue, are animated by a utopian impulse,
said of her purpose in writing that it is “not so much to put a Chinese name into American
literature, as to break down prejudice, and to cause the American heart to soften and the
American mind to broaden towards the Chinese people now living in America” (Qtd. in White-
Parks 154). Clearly, these four writers hoped to accomplish something through their utopian
7

writings, and one goal of this dissertation is to consider the uses of utopia: why did these writers
employ utopia as a way to persuade readers to join them in their activist missions?
Perhaps more important than the question of why these writers, three of whom were
members of groups with limited citizenship statuses in the United States, used utopia is the
question of what limitations this decision imposed on their activist expression. These limitations
become especially apparent when considering utopia in its less esoteric and more pragmatic
capacities (i.e., how utopia is used strategically by writers to promote an activist reform agenda).
The most salient limitation, one faced by all four authors examined here, is the inherent necessity
of creating a utopian space that appears unquestionably superior to the here and now. Using
utopia as these four authors do is something of a gamble: if, as was largely the case for Bellamy,
readers accept the superiority of the imagined alternate future, the utopian mode can be an
effective means for motivating action toward even significant change.
1
On the other hand,
however, if readers are not persuaded of the desirability of the alternate possibility, the utopian
effort can be read as a cautionary account of what not to do lest society morph into something
dystopian.
2
As I will show in the following chapters, to guard against this, utopian authors made
compromises in their utopian visions intended to reassure readers that their proposed alternate
futures were both desirable and non-threatening. Such is the case, for instance, with Bellamy’s
disavowal of the term “socialism” and his whitewashing of the future through the complete
absence of people of color. Likewise with Johnson, the revolutionary potential of a utopian

1
As I discuss in Chapter One, Bellamy’s novel was appealing enough to spawn clubs and periodicals across the
nation dedicated to its ideas.
2
Despite Bellamy’s efforts, some readers felt this way about Looking Backward. Anti-Bellamy responses testify to
this, examples of which include: John Bachelder’s A.D. 2050. Electrical Development at Atlantis (1890); Richard C.
Michaelis’s Looking Further Forward: An Answer to "Looking Backward" by Edward Bellamy (1890); W.W.
Satterlee’s Looking Backward and What I Saw (1890); Arthur Dudley Vinton’s Looking Further Backward (1890);
J.W. Roberts’s Looking Within: The Misleading Tendencies of "Looking Backward" Made Manifest (1893); and
George A. Sanders’s Reality: or Law and order vs. Anarchy and Socialism, A Reply to Edward Bellamy’s Looking
Backward and Equality (1898). See Roemer 186 – 209.
8

future in which racism is overcome and equality characterizes the relationship between African
Americans and whites is moderated by the fact that the book’s main characters are white and that
benevolent whites are both given credit for the changes that have occurred and reassured that
these changes pose no threat to their accustomed social status. Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s
utopian novels appear more radical than either Bellamy or Johnson’s, but evidence of
compromise and a desire to avoid alienating potentially sympathetic readers can be found within
them as well. In Moving the Mountain, which is the subject of Chapter Three, Gilman assigns
much of the most significant dialogue to male characters, at once reestablishing them as the
knowers/explainers and reassuring male readers that promoting the rights of women need not
entail the emasculation of men. Finally, although Sui Sin Far’s short stories are not utopian in
form, they are subject to some of the same limitations as formal utopian fictions. For Sui Sin Far,
the limitations imposed upon her utopian vision were largely due to her status as a Eurasian
woman writer at a time when yellow peril hysteria dominated the literary representations of
Chinese and Chinese-American people. Sui Sin Far wrote fiction with the intent to refute the
stereotypes of the Chinese in America (both the United States and Canada) and of the
Chinatowns to which so many were relegated. As such, Sui Sin Far needed both to arouse
sympathy for Chinese characters and show them as non-threatening potential citizens. To do so
she relied on domestic melodrama and narratives that rewarded assimilation, both things that she
endorsed to a degree but that diluted the assertive messages about the dignity of the Chinese
people that she expressed in her autobiographical writings.

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Chapter Summaries
My dissertation begins with arguably the most influential American utopian novel,
Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward. Because of the novel’s extreme popularity, and because
of Bellamy’s status as a middle-class, white, New England male, the novel serves as something
of a control for my dissertation, as each of the other authors I consider wrote their utopian
fictions under some degree of Bellamy’s influence. Looking Backward is also a worthwhile place
to start my discussion of utopian future citizenship because it is paradigmatic of the most typical
form of late nineteenth century utopia: it envisions a socialist future in which the problems of the
nation (and to some extent the world beyond the United States’ borders) have been solved by the
transition to a more cooperative economic model, in which the egalitarianism of the economic
system has spilled over into the realms of public and private life. However, as many critics, even
during Bellamy’s own time, have noted issues of racial (in)equality are seemingly ignored in the
novel and the happy, productive citizens of the future are depicted as unmistakably and
invariably white. As I point out in Chapter One, however, Bellamy’s novel is not entirely
raceless. By turning attention to the book’s lone character of color, the almost universally
ignored manservant Saywer, I argue that Bellamy uses blackness as a way of delineating the non-
utopian present in contrast to the perfected, and whitewashed, utopian future. Because the
novel’s blueprint for achieving the perfect society is predicated on a notion of social and
economic evolution, and because Bellamy likewise emphasizes the importance of biological
evolution in producing the physically superior future Americans, I argue that the novel provides
readers with an opening to imagine that the “negro problem” and the “immigrant problem” had
been solved in the future through an evolutionary process by which non-white races are selected
out of existence. This, I further argue, is not simply a consequence of racism on the part of
10

Bellamy (in part because his many other writings reveal no strong antipathy toward non-white
peoples) but is, instead, a concession to his readers’ “most bigoted prejudices.” Bellamy’s single-
minded devotion to the idea of economic Nationalism (his name for the socialism-lite that forms
the basis for his utopian future) and his desire to spread that idea as widely as possible among a
white, middle-class readership, caused him to sacrifice the future of people of color rather than
risk alienating racist and nativist whites.
In Chapter Two, I examine the historically neglected utopian novel, Light Ahead for the
Negro, by Edward A. Johnson. Born into slavery in North Carolina, Johnson advocated for
African American rights throughout a long career as a lawyer, law school dean, textbook author,
and the first African American elected to the New York State Legislature; Light Ahead for the
Negro was his only attempt at fiction. Explicitly dedicated to sympathetic white readers,
Johnson’s novel is a future utopia in the Bellamy mode, with an extremely significant revision:
instead of focusing on the peace and prosperity that accompanies socialist economics in the
future, Light Ahead for the Negro is almost exclusively concerned with the fate of African
Americans one hundred years hence. Because Johnson was one of a very few African American
writers to produce a future utopia around the turn of the twentieth century, his novel has been
cited by several critics in their efforts to establish a genealogy of African American utopian and
science fiction. As I show in the chapter, however, virtually every critic who discusses Johnson’s
novel (and there aren’t many), does so in the briefest possible way, almost never engaging with
the novel on its own terms. Moreover, a number of these critics make basic factual errors about
the book or its author, suggesting that they have, at best, limited familiarity with it and are more
interested in the fact of its existence than in the content of the novel itself. My reading of Light
Ahead for the Negro, which is the first of chapter-length scope, corrects many of the critical
11

misinterpretations and misrepresentations of the novel and shows that previous readings by even
the best-intentioned critics were always doomed because they approached the book as if it were,
like Bellamy’s, about the future. Instead, I argue, Johnson merely uses his sketch of the utopian
future as a device to defamiliarize the present and allow him a platform from which to launch a
harsh criticism of the racist early twentieth century. In this way, Light Ahead for the Negro is
best understood not as a Bellamy re-vision, despite the novel’s superficial similarities to Looking
Backward, but as a work of social critique that draws upon the older utopian tradition established
by Thomas More’s Utopia. From the vantage point of a future in which the issues of
discrimination, lynching, and the economic oppression of African Americans are seen as the
hallmarks of a more primitive time, Johnson eviscerates the proponents of racist ideology (whom
he names in the novel) and exhorts sympathetic whites not to be on the wrong side of history.
Moreover, with the inclusion of an obviously mixed-race character, Johnson satirically undercuts
his own novel’s assurances that a racially egalitarian future need not be a desegregated one and
subtly ridicules the miscegenation phobia that obtained during his own time and that underwrote
the promises of racial purity that the novel makes to its white readers.
Chapter Three focuses on Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s utopian feminism as illustrated in
the first of her three utopian novels, Moving the Mountain. Unlike the second novel in this
utopian trilogy, Herland, Moving the Mountain has been almost entirely neglected by Gilman’s
critics and by scholars of utopianism literature since its publication in 1911. This is due, in part,
to the novel’s lack of originality in comparison to its sister text, published less than four years
later. Gilman herself called the book a “baby utopia,” a sentiment with which critics have
seemed to agree, although Gilman’s self-assessment had more to do with the novel’s near-future
scope than with its ambition or its significance as an illustration of her woman-centric
12

evolutionary theory. Nonetheless, Gilman critics have almost universally preferred the stylistic
and topical innovation of Herland, with its lost race of women who reproduce via parthogenesis
and whose maternalistic society functions like a petri dish in which women’s capabilities can be
observed in their full capacity, without the domineering influence of men. Moving the Mountain,
in contrast, is less satisfying from either a literary or a utopian standpoint. Modelled after
American future utopias like Looking Backward, the novel takes place in the New York just
thirty years in the future. As with Bellamy and Johnson’s novels, one significant change has
taken place in the intervening years, and that change has revolutionized society: the women have
“woken up.” Although this change is different from the ones projected by Bellamy and Johnson,
the book is otherwise barely distinguishable from theirs, either formally or thematically: a man
returns to consciousness after missing the revolution that has led to the utopian state of the future
and is given a guided tour during which he comes to acknowledge the superiority of the new
society. As is the case with Looking Backward and Light Ahead for the Negro, Gilman’s novel
consists almost entirely of exposition, with the central character, John Robertson, engaging in
conversation after conversation with utopian representatives about the virtues of the future and
the process by which they were achieved. Critics’ willingness to overlook this novel in favor of
Herland is thus not surprising: not only is Moving the Mountain less imaginative in its depiction
of a feminist alternative reality, it is also beholden to a patriarchal utopian tradition that limits its
capacity for a truly radical re-vision of American society.
But lack of originality is not the only reason for critics’ disinterest in Gilman’s first
utopian novel. As I discuss in the chapter, Moving the Mountain’s utopianism relies heavily on a
racialized evolutionary theory that makes eugenics one of the prime elements in both the
empowerment of women and the biological perfection of the citizenry of the future. Relatedly,
13

Gilman’s descriptions of the law and governance of the utopian future emphasizes both
authoritarian state control and an unofficial form of authoritarianism that results from women
thinking and acting as an almost hive-minded bloc. The result of these factors in the novel is a
society that is superficially peaceful and progressive. However, the underlying suppression of
difference, denial of sexuality, and heavy-handed manipulation of the natural environment, along
with the explicitly acknowledged elimination of undesirable peoples and the forced
Americanization of immigrants, inflects the novel with a racist, nativist, and imperial dimension
that makes it unpalatable for even Gilman’s most sympathetic critics. These elements in the
novel, I argue, are neither accidental nor a deviation from the feminist and utopian thinking that
characterizes Gilman’s other writings. Instead, they represent a logical culmination of the
evolutionary feminism first outlined in Women and Economics and the racist paternalism of
essays like “A Suggestion on the Negro Problem,” and thus Moving the Mountain provides a
better insight into Gilman’s futurity that the better known Herland. I furthermore argue that this
novel complicates the familiar claim that the early American utopian novel was a racist,
patriarchal genre by showing that woman-authored feminist utopias, often held up as progressive
alternatives to the male-authored status quo, were likewise susceptible to the problematic
evolutionary and eugenic theories that dominated utopian discourse around the turn of the
twentieth century.
The final chapter approaches the intersecting ideas of utopia, citizenship, and the future
from a different angle. Whereas Bellamy, Johnson, and Gilman all wrote novels set in the
perfected future in what is now recognized as the classical American utopian mode, Chapter
Four’s subject, Sui Sin Far, wrote neither novels nor fictions set in the future. Instead, Sui Sin
Far’s stories, in particular those from her now well-known collection Mrs. Spring Fragrance, are
14

a combination of realism and sentimental romance that appear, superficially at least, to be
focused on the here and now of life in early twentieth century North American Chinatowns. As
Sui Sin Far biographer Annette White-Parks points out, however, “Mrs. Spring Fragrance’s
overriding theme is the future of Chinese North American culture” (215). According to White-
Parks, this futurity is most evident in the book’s emphasis on children, the family, and women,
all of which signify the future through the potential for the transmission of culture across
generations. I do not disagree with this (although the repeated endorsement of assimilation
throughout many of Sui Sin Far’s stories problematizes the notion of cultural maintenance
through generational exchange) but I do wish to redirect the focus regarding Sui Sin Far’s
futurity by drawing attention to what I call her “amalgamationist utopian impulse.” This phrase
combines Ernst Bloch’s idea of the utopian impulse, which Bloch argues is present in many
works of art and literature whether or not the work is formally utopian, and amalgamation, a term
for racial mixing that was popular in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Whereas
amalgamation signified the threat of racial dilution to the white writers who most commonly
used the term (or the white characters in novels like Sutton E. Griggs’s Pointing the Way, whose
use of “amalgamation” parodies the frequency with which the term was used in white society),
Sui Sin Far viewed racially mixed race people like herself both as superior and as indications of
the future of humanity. “I believe,” she wrote in her autobiographical essay, “Leaves from the
Mental Portfolio of an Eurasian,” “that some day a great part of the world will be Eurasian. I
cheer myself with the thought that I am but a pioneer. A pioneer should glory in suffering.”
(412). With this idea in mind, I examine the instances of racial mixing in her stories to argue
that, while the characters involved do not always enjoy happy outcomes in the near term, they
15

represent for Sui Sin Far, the suffering pioneers who will pave the way to an amalgamated utopia
in the future.
I also argue in the chapter that Sui Sin Far’s utopianism is evident in her often rosier-
than-reality depictions of Chinatown. Amidst the anti-Chinese fervor of the late nineteenth
century, which resulted in, among other things, the Chinese Exclusion Act, the segregation of
Chinese people into urban ghettos, the inclusion of white-Chinese marriages in anti-
miscegenation laws, and the phenomenon of “yellow peril” literature, Sui Sin Far advocated for
Chinese dignity by humanizing Chinese people and Chinatowns in her fiction. This has been
noted by Sui Sin Far critics ever since her re-discovery in Frank Chin, Jeffery Paul Chan,
Lawson Fusao Inada, and Shawn Wong’s 1974 anthology, Aiiieeeee!. I add to this line of
thinking by showing how, in Sui Sin Far’s stories, the urban environments of West Coast
Chinatowns become utopian spaces for Chinese immigrants and Chinese Americans, places of
community and cooperation, where there always seems to be a festival in the streets, where
Chinese people can associate and conduct business in their native language, and where whites
from outside the boundaries of the district can enter and leave without being threatened or posing
a threat. This is in direct contrast to popular yellow peril dystopian accounts of Chinatowns,
represented in the chapter by Frank Norris’s short story, “The Third Circle,” in which Chinatown
is depicted as the epicenter of corruption, squalor, and savagery and where white women, in
particular, are never more than a step away from drug addiction and sexual slavery. In
utopianizing Chinatown, Sui Sin Far paints over most of Chinatown’s actual rough edges in
order to present a better-than-the-real-thing image, one that both counteracts dystopian narratives
like Norris’s and offers hope that Chinatown can be a place of opportunity for Chinese people in
the United States and a place of cultural exchange between the Chinese in America and
16

sympathetic whites. Moreover, Sui Sin Far consciously draws upon the utopian “Gold Mountain”
myth, common among nineteenth-century Chinese immigrants, to show the United States (and to
a lesser degree, Canada) as a place of opportunity for Chinese workers. Unfortunately, however,
the only beneficiaries of this opportunity are men; for many of the Chinese women in her stories,
America is a decidedly dystopian space. This, I argue, reinforces the urgency of Sui Sin Far’s
amalgamationist utopianism. Problems of assimilation and resistance, of immigration and
exclusion, will be obsolete when “the whole world becomes as one family” (Leaves).
My dissertation contributes to the field of utopian studies by drawing attention to utopian
writing that has been overlooked, ignored, or not recognized as utopian. In particular, I show that
women and people of color used utopia in ways that complicate the idea that turn of the century
American utopian writing was a more-or-less exclusively white male phenomenon. Although a
number of critics have identified works like Gilman’s Herland as examples of a feminist strain in
American utopianism, I show through a reading of her first utopian novel that the nativism and
social Darwinism that is often associated with male authored utopias exerted significant
influence over woman-authored utopian fictions as well. Likewise, while some critics have
looked to late nineteenth-century novels like Sutton E. Griggs’s Imperium in Imperio in order to
establish a genealogy of African American speculative fiction, I argue that Edward A. Johnson
drew upon an even older utopian tradition in an effort both to criticize the racist whites of his
time and to persuade sympathetic white readers to work toward racial equality. And, in the case
of Sui Sin Far, I show that writers from oppressed groups around the turn of the twentieth
century wrote with a utopian impulse, even when their stories were set in the here and now.
This dissertation also contributes to the body of scholarship on each of these authors
individually. Bellamy, for instance, has been discussed almost ad nauseam in conversations on
17

American utopianism since the publication of his influential novel 127 years ago, but gaps in the
scholarship remain. My chapter fills some of these by focusing attention on both the absence and
presence of racially marked characters in Looking Backward, and by drawing upon some of his
less well-known writings to argue that his whitewash of the future was a conscious strategy to
appeal to his readers’ basest prejudices. My second chapter contributes to the body of
scholarship on Edward A. Johnson by being the first chapter-length study of his novel, Light
Ahead for the Negro, and by correcting the critical misconceptions that abound in the very few,
very short critical treatments of his work. It also shows how utopian fiction was, for Johnson, a
strategic tool, targeted explicitly at white readers, in his career-long effort to advocate for
African American rights. My chapter on Charlotte Perkins Gilman addresses some of the
commonplaces in Gilman criticism, including the tendency to overlook Moving the Mountain in
favor of the more satisfying Herland when discussing her utopian writings and the
misconception among some critics that Gilman’s feminism equated to progressive egalitarianism
in other areas, with a troubling tendency toward racist and nativist thought developing only later
in her career. Instead, I show that Gilman’s utopian futurity is indistinguishable from her racial
views, that these views are present in writings throughout the central portion of her writing
career, and that the eugenic evolutionism that underwrites those views is essential not only to her
utopian writing but to her feminism at its core. Finally, my last chapter extends the scholarship
on Sui Sin Far by altering the way her work is understood, moving beyond the notions of
assimilation and resistance and situating her work instead within the discourses of eugenics and
utopianism.

18

CHAPTER ONE

Edward Bellamy’s Raceless Utopia

All men are brothers and owe one another the duties, and have, one upon another, the claims, of
brothers. As to the colors of men, they have nothing to do with the matter. The standard of duty is
not a chromatic one. Nationalists are color-blind.
- Edward Bellamy, The New Nation, 1891

When Edward Bellamy, the thirty six year old journalist and author of Hawthornian
romances, glanced at the world around him in 1886 he was dismayed by what he saw. Locally,
he observed that his beloved hometown of Chicopee Falls, Massachusetts, which in his
memories of childhood had been a “thriving village” (“How I Wrote” 2) peopled by well-
employed middle class families, had become a turbulent, often economically depressed industrial
town inhabited by working class catholic immigrants (Cantor 23).
3
On a national level, he
bemoaned the social stratification, economic injustice, and chaotic urbanization of the Gilded
Age. He called the “existing industrial system…radically wrong in morals and preposterous
economically” (Talks on Nationalism 21) and believed that the capitalism of the late nineteenth
century was responsible for all of society’s ills, from poverty to crime to the oppression of
women.

3
Several critics, such as Milton Cantor in “The Backward Look of Bellamy’s Socialism,” have argued that
Bellamy’s upbringing in Chicopee, which they portray in terms like pastoral, rural, bucolic, etc. was instrumental in
the development of Bellamy’s philosophical and political views, as well as his particular utopian vision. John Robert
Mullin has shown that this view of Chicopee is mistaken and that Bellamy’s hometown had become a “thriving
manufacturing town of national significance” before Bellamy was born (134). Nevertheless, Bellamy’ own memory
of the Chicopee of his youth as a quaint, peaceful village is what ultimately matters when considering his state of
mind in the late 1880s.
19

By his own admission, Bellamy had always been someone who was concerned with the
social problems plaguing his society but who had never ventured to do anything about it. This
changed, he claims, with the birth of his children, when he began to see the “hunger, cold and
wretchedness and all the deprivations, degradations and indignities which poverty implies”
(“How I Wrote” 2) not merely as general ills of society or the sufferings of anonymous
unfortunates, but as potential, even likely, outcomes for his own descendants. “From the time
their children are born” Bellamy explained, “it becomes the great problem with parents how to
provide for and safeguard their future when they themselves shall no longer be on earth” (“How I
Wrote” 2). Capitalism was turbulent, Bellamy recognized, and wealth was insecure. He came to
believe that it was impossible for any individual to protect his or her children, not to mention him
or herself, from the ever looming possibility of a decline into poverty until poverty itself had
been eradicated. Bellamy thus became future-oriented. In 1886, He decided to try to “reason out
a method of economic organization by which the republic might guarantee the livelihood and
material welfare of its citizens on a material basis of equality corresponding to and
supplementing their political equality” (“How I Wrote” 2). The product of this attempt was the
utopian novel Looking Backward, 2000-1887, which became not only Bellamy’s most successful
work but one of the most well-read and influential books in the United States in the nineteenth
century.
Looking Backward was not the first literary utopian fiction published in the United States,
but it was certainly the most popular. At its height, the book was selling 1000 copies per day—
over half a million in Bellamy’s lifetime (Borus 1). It was also undoubtedly the most influential:
shortly after its publication, clubs dedicated to the book’s core principle, a version of socialism
20

Bellamy called “Nationalism”
4
sprang up across the country. It was also the basis for two weekly
periodicals, one of which was edited by Bellamy himself, and, perhaps most importantly, it
inaugurated a new literary movement, the American utopian novel (in fact, there were well over
150 sequels, responses, and imitations published in the decades following Looking Backward)
(Widdicombe 183-211).
For such an influential book, the plot is minimal. In 1887, a wealthy thirty-year-old
member of Boston’s leisure class, Julian West, suffers from severe insomnia. He treats this
condition by hiring a “Professor of Animal Magnetism” to hypnotize him into a deep slumber in
a custom built sleeping chamber located under his house. Only he, his mesmerist, and his faithful
manservant Sawyer know about this chamber and this procedure. One night, after West is placed
into his mesmeric sleep, a fire destroys the house, presumably killing Sawyer in the process, but
does not reach the subterranean sleeping vault (coincidentally, this is the same night on which his
mesmerist has permanently relocated to Philadelphia). With nobody to wake him, West remains
in suspended animation until the year 2000, when he is discovered and awakened by Dr. Leete
and family, who are doing excavations for an addition to their house, which stands on the site of
West’s former home. West is taken in by these people, and the rest of the book consists largely
of conversations in which the organization of American society at the end of the twentieth
century is explained to West and contrasted to the brutality, squalor, corruption, and vice of his
own Gilded Age.
Bellamy’s future-oriented novel was at the forefront of what Fredric Jameson calls "the
well-known shift in Utopias from space to time, from the accounts of exotic travelers to the
experiences of visitors to the future" (1-2; Shashaty 162). As such, it differs from traditional

4
Throughout this chapter, except when quoting, I will refer to Bellamy’s model of socialism as Nationalism
(capitalized) to distinguish it from the political concept, nationalism.
21

literary utopias, such as Thomas More’s eponymous Utopia, in that its function is not merely to
criticize the present day state of things by showing a contemporaneous imagined society with
different, and better, social and political institutions, nor simply to defamiliarize present day
institution by showing them through the eyes of a visitor from another land. Instead, Looking
Backward projects an alternative future in which the problems of the present have been
successfully overcome and the flawed society of today has become the perfected society of the
coming generations. For all his disdain for the state of capitalist late-nineteenth-century America,
with its “wretchedness … deprivations, degradations and indignities,” Bellamy is an optimist. He
believes that Nationalism is the way of the future, the logical next step to the consolidation of
capital taking place by the great trusts of his day, the necessary product of an evolutionary
process that has already begun. Somewhat curiously, though, he also believes that this change
must be worked toward, must be brought about, and his novel is therefore a work of activism.
Nationalism was not just an element of one work of fiction; it was Bellamy’s life’s work.
Rallying supporters to the cause of nationalism through his fictional, editorial, and political work
became Bellamy’s sole professional purpose. In fact, when The Atlantic attempted to
commission a serial novel from Bellamy in 1890, he felt compelled to respond that
It would indeed be a delight to me to revert to those psychologic studies and peculations
which were the themes of my earlier writings. But since my eyes have been opened to the
evils and faults of our social state and I have begun to cherish a clear hope of better
things, I simply ‘can’t get my consent’ to write or think of anything else. As a literary
man I fear I am “a goner,” and past praying for. There is a sense in which I am very sorry
for this, for I had much work laid out to do and should have greatly enjoyed doing it.
(Letter to Mr. Scudder, August 25, 1890)
22

For Bellamy, there could be no purpose in writing fiction that did not contribute to the
movement toward Nationalism. So persuaded was he both of Nationalism’s inevitability and of
the need to work actively to bring it about that he gave himself over entirely to the cause.
In this chapter I will consider Edward Bellamy’s future vision with particular emphasis
on the person of the citizen in Bellamy’s future. The seemingly counterintuitive duality in
Bellamy’s thought—that the future he foresaw was inevitable yet needed to be brought into
being through tireless activism—will figure prominently into my examination. Specifically, I
will look at elements of Bellamy’s future citizenship that have received insufficient attention
from Bellamy critics, namely the status of non-white Americans in his imagined future, as well
the implications of his “Nationalism” for international people of color. Looking Backward,
along with most other American utopias written during the great outpouring of utopian fiction
that occurred toward the end of the nineteenth century, has historically been regarded by critics
as a raceless novel, a book in which the future is imagined only in terms of whiteness. This is
considered a flaw, to be sure, an unfortunate oversight or evidence of Bellamy’s inability to
imagine a future for people unlike himself. I will argue, however, that the apparent racelessness
of Bellamy’s utopia is not merely an unfortunate accident or regrettable blindspot, but instead is
a calculated maneuver within his larger project to advance Nationalism while keeping its
socialist underpinnings palatable for middle-class white Americans. In fact, I will show that
Bellamy’s late-career utopian writing, despite appearing radical in its anti-capitalist
endorsement of socialized industry and a cooperative economy, was undergirded by an
ethnocentric conservatism. Bellamy was a tireless pitchman for Nationalism, and my reading of
Looking Backward, along with his other utopian writings, will reveal both the extent to which
the utopian form served a strategic role in selling his vision of the future to middle and working
23

class white Americans and the ways in which the needs and experiences of people of color, in
the United States and around the world, became subordinated to the goal of promoting
economic equality among white Americans.
To accomplish this, I will begin by establishing exactly what citizenship entailed in
Bellamy’s future. This is useful both because it contributes to our understanding of Bellamy’s
future-vision and because it will suggest some of the ways in which that vision was crafted to
appeal to his intended audience. Next, I will examine the aspect of Bellamy’s futurity that I
believe has been most neglected by critics: his treatment of African Americans. By focusing on
the sole black character in Looking Backward, and by referring to the very few mentions of
African Americans in its sequel, Equality, I will show that Bellamy appealed to the “most
bigoted prejudices” of his likely readers by using the logic of evolutionary theory and eugenics
to suggest the possibility of an all-white utopian future. Finally, I will consider the way Bellamy
discusses immigrants and non-Anglo people outside the United States to show that his vision of
America’s future in relation to the rest of the world was crafted to appeal to a sense of messianic
Anglo-Saxonism carried over from the time of Manifest Destiny to the late nineteenth century
age of American imperialism.

What Citizenship Looks Like in Bellamy’s Future
For someone who opposed the competitive, zero-sum nature of capitalism so thoroughly
that he made a version of socialism the organizing principle of his utopian future vision, it is
somewhat surprising that Bellamy retained much of the rhetoric and terminology of corporate
capitalism in describing Nationalist society. As Dr. Leete explains to Julian West, by the year
2000 “the nation [has become] organized as the one great business corporation in which all other
24

corporations were absorbed; it became the one capitalist in the place of all other capitalists, the
sole employer, the final monopoly in which all previous and lesser monopolies were swallowed
up, a monopoly in the profits and economies of which all citizens shared” (57). Citizens in
Bellamy’s future are thus imagined as stockholders in the great monopolistic corporation that is
the state. As such, each is entitled to a share of the state’s wealth and each is responsible to the
state, and thus to one another, for supplying the labor to drive the state’s productive engines.
Bellamy’s future citizens understand that their material prosperity is directly tied to their own
labor as well as the labor of their fellow citizen, so freeloading is not tolerated. All citizens are
expected to contribute to the nation to the best of their capabilities, Dr. Leete explains, even
though the share of the nation’s material wealth is not tied to the individual citizen’s
productivity. “The way it strikes people nowadays” Dr. Leete tells West, “is, that a man who can
produce twice as much as another with the same effort, instead of being rewarded for doing so,
ought to be punished if he does not do so” (77). Beyond the sense of communal responsibility (or
perhaps shareholder responsibility), citizens of the future are also motivated by a “love of glory”
and the desire to achieve an elevated social position, for although equality of material wealth is
guaranteed, “the value of a man's services to society fixes his rank in it” (77).
Bellamy’s vision of the state as a joint-stock company and its citizens as shareholders
may have appealed to Americans skeptical of conventional socialism, but there are serious issues
with the metaphor. First of all, shareholders in a corporation are involved voluntarily. This is not
the case for citizens in Bellamy’s America. According to the explanations we find in Looking
Backward, there is no option for citizens to remove themselves from the corporation; indeed,
according to Dr. Leete, such removal is inconceivable: “Our entire social order is so wholly
based upon and deduced from it that if it were conceivable that a man could escape it, he would
25

be left with no possible way to provide for his existence. He would have excluded himself from
the world, cut himself off from his kind, in a word, committed suicide” (60). Not only is
participation in a real corporation voluntary, but shareholders can generally sell their stock. Such
is not the case in Bellamy’s future. A citizen’s share of the produce of the state has value only to
the extent that the individual citizen can expect a comfortable living in exchange for his or her
labor. Neither shares nor the profit (livelihood) they earn can be sold, exchanged, or
accumulated; in fact, as Dr. Leete explains the equal availability of property and goods renders
the accumulation of anything in the future cumbersome rather than desirable (since accumulated
possessions must be stored and are of no value for sale).
Beyond the logical inconsistencies inherent in the joint-stock-citizenship metaphor, the
use of the metaphor itself raises an important question regarding Bellamy’s conception not only
of future economics but of future citizenship: why did he hang on to the rhetoric and logic of
capitalism when the very essence of his future vision was a disavowal of the inequality and
competition inherent in capitalism? The answer, I believe, is that Bellamy went to great lengths
to make his utopian socialism palatable to middle-class Americans, people who were generally
suspicions of socialism, which was associated with anarchism and Europe. Frequently
throughout his writings Bellamy conspicuously distances his economic philosophy from
socialism, at least in name. In fact, the word socialism appears only once in Looking Backward,
during a dinner party conversation among wealthy Bostonians in 1887. “The worst of it," West
remembers his potential mother-in-law saying, "is that the working classes all over the world
seem to be going crazy at once. In Europe it is far worse even than here. I'm sure I should not
dare to live there at all. I asked Mr. Bartlett the other day where we should emigrate to if all the
terrible things took place which those socialists threaten” (39). Socialism here is a distinctly
26

European phenomenon, but one that threatens to invade the United States. It is closely associated
with labor unrest and anarchism, both of which were on Americans’ minds in the wake of the
Haymarket Affair of 1886, but which were viewed by those of West’s social circle as un-
American and destructive. Of course, it is important to note the context of this conversation: it
takes place between members of the upper class in the time before the economic and social
revolution that would bring about the utopia of the year 2000. As such, it may seem as if the
novel would repudiate this sentiment—after all, it is the values and practices of this very class of
people that were responsible the problems of the nineteenth century and that would be replaced
by the egalitarian spirit of cooperation through Nationalism. This, however, turns out not to be
the case.
Rather than repudiating the fear of socialism and its European anarchist associations as
voiced by the privileged Mrs. Bartlett, the novel’s leap into the future confirms this distrust of
socialism both by forgetting the term socialism in order to replace it with Bellamy’s own
Nationalism (which, as we have seen, was described in corporate-capitalist terms) and by
portraying nineteenth century anarchists as mere pawns of out-of-control capitalists. Late in the
novel, Julian West asks Dr. Leete, “what part did the followers of the red flag take in the
establishment of the new order of things? They were making considerable noise the last thing
that I knew." Dr. Leete immediately answers that anarchists not only had no hand in the
transition to Nationalism, but that in fact the transition itself was only possible once anarchists
lost their influence. Anarchist rhetoric, Leete continues, “so disgusted people as to deprive the
best considered projects for social reform of a hearing. The subsidizing of those fellows was one
of the shrewdest moves of the opponents of reform” (161). According to Dr. Leete, the
radicalism of the “followers of the red flag,” was antithetical to the reform being pursued by the
27

Nationalists and was in fact so alienating to average Americans that the continued presence of
anarchist demonstrators could only be explained as a kind of false flag operation conducted by
the big capitalists.
Bellamy’s disavowal of the term “socialism” on the grounds of its fearful association
with anarchism and European-style labor unrest in the minds of American readers can be seen
outside of the novel as well. In a letter to friend and literary supporter William Dean Howells,
Bellamy explained his decision to call his system “Nationalism” in favor of the more obvious
“socialism”:
In the radicalness of the opinions I have expressed I may seem to out-socialize the
Socialists, yet the word socialist is one I never could well stomach. In the first place it is a
foreign word in itself and equally foreign in all its suggestions. It smells to the average
American of petroleum, suggests the red flag, with all matter of sexual novelties, and an
abusive tone about God and religion, which in this country we at least treat with decent
respect. … Whatever German and French reformers may choose to call themselves,
socialist is not a good name for a party to succeed with in America. No such party can or
ought to succeed which is not wholly and enthusiastically American and patriotic in spirit
and suggestions.”
Although this letter certainly suggests some genuine misgivings on Bellamy’s part about the
associations between socialism and anarchism, or socialism and Europe, it also clearly indicates
that Bellamy’s creation of “nationalism” as an alternative to both laissez faire capitalism and
traditionally understood socialism was in large part a carefully considered branding decision.
With the term “nationalism,” Bellamy could propose a future model of economic organization
that was both superior to unrestrained capitalism and distinctly American, even patriotic.
28

Moreover, by describing this new, American post-capitalist economic model in terms
reminiscent of the desirable aspects of capitalism (i.e., shareholders, profit, etc), Bellamy sought
to present his version of socialism in a package that would allay fears of workers’ upheaval and
comfort readers with recognizable images of prosperity. Capitalism, for Bellamy, was the
problem to be sure, but its principles and symbols were also so thoroughly ingrained in the
American consciousness that he decided to clothe his vision of American socialist citizenship in
capitalist garb in order to attract followers who may have rejected a plan that was socialist in
name.
If the seeming contradiction between anti-capitalist sentiment and shareholder rhetoric
complicates Bellamy’s notion of the citizen, the picture of citizenship in Bellamy’s future
becomes even more convoluted when we consider that the shareholder metaphor was not the
only way in which future citizenship is represented. Perhaps even more prominent than the
shareholder image, and certainly more provocative, is his concept of the industrial army.
Explained by Dr. Leete as both the natural consequence of the nationalization of industry and the
logical extension of universal military service, the industrial army was the cornerstone of
Bellamy’s social vision. In his 1889 essay for The Nationalist, “How I Came to Write Looking
Backward,” Bellamy describes it as the “idea of committing the duty of maintaining the
community to an industrial army, precisely as the duty of protecting it is entrusted to a military
army,” and goes on to ask: “What inference could possibly be more obvious and more
unquestionable than the advisability of trying to see if a plan which was found to work so well
for purposes of destruction might not be profitably applied to the business of production now in
such shocking confusion?”
29

According to Dr. Leete’s explanations in the novel, the industrial army consisted of all
capable male citizens between twenty one and forty years of age. Women had their own parallel
industrial army. Citizens are described as being mustered into service when they turn twenty one
and discharged at forty five. While they serve, they work at assigned jobs (although they are able
to request assignments that correspond to their interests or self-identified strengths), report to
superiors via a chain of command (complete with military-style ranks like general, etc), ascend
through the ranks via promotion based exclusively on merit, earn salaries that are identical to
their fellow enlistees, and are encouraged to give their best effort not through financial incentive
but by the invocation of patriotic duty and the pursuit of personal honor. In all of these ways,
service in the industrial army does indeed seem to parallel military service.
Where the concept of the industrial army becomes a little confusing, though, is on the
question of compulsion. Knowing that this will be an issue for readers (i.e., whether service is
compulsory for all citizens), Bellamy has Julian West pose the question to Dr. Leete. Leete
responds that “it is rather a matter of course than of compulsion. . . It is regarded as so absolutely
natural and reasonable that the idea of its being compulsory has ceased to be thought of. He
would be thought to be an incredibly contemptible person who should need compulsion in such a
case” (60). Here, as at other points in the novel in which Bellamy’s version of future society
seems to conflict with human nature (at least as it is understood by nineteenth century readers),
Bellamy glosses over that conflict by claiming that the societal improvements brought on by
Nationalism will alter what is understood as human nature. Compulsion to serve in the industrial
army will not be an issue, Leete (and Bellamy) claim, because Nationalism will produce a
citizenry that is so civic minded its members will never need to be compelled.
30

Although Bellamy placed great emphasis on the shareholder metaphor to describe
citizenship, it was the industrial army that truly defined citizenship in the Nationalist future.
“When the nation became the sole employer,” Dr. Leete explains, “all the citizens, by virtue of
their citizenship, became employees, to be distributed according to the needs of industry” (59).
Employment and citizenship are indistinguishable in Bellamy’s future, and work has become the
defining characteristic of a citizen. This does not mean, however, that the specific kind of work
that citizens do is understood to define their character. As Bellamy emphasizes several times in
the novel, no work is considered superior or inferior to any other, and the word “menial” no
longer exists. As Dr. Leete says, for instance, of waiters, “No difference is recognized between a
waiter's functions and those of any other worker. The fact that his is a personal service is
indifferent from our point of view. So is a doctor's. I should as soon expect our waiter today to
look down on me because I served him as a doctor, as think of looking down on him because he
serves me as a waiter” (107). In Bellamy’s future, citizenship equals service in the industrial
army, and as such all work is seen as the execution of a citizens duty to the commonwealth,
which, as West indicates in a footnote, has “imparted to all service the distinction peculiar in my
day to the soldier's” (108).
Beyond the novel’s two chief metaphors of citizenship – citizens as shareholders and
citizens as conscripted soldiers in an industrial army – there are some more concrete indications
of the nature of citizenship in Bellamy’s future. One of these concerns education. Whereas
economically deprived young people of Bellamy’s time frequently had to work and thus forego
advanced schooling, Americans in Bellamy’s future “hold the period of youth sacred to
education” and do not allow child labor. One result of this, according to Dr. Leete, is that citizens
are able to develop themselves according to their natural tastes and talents, and pursue an
31

occupation that is personally fulfilling rather than profitable. “Equal education and opportunity,”
Dr. Leete tells West, “must needs bring to light whatever aptitudes a man has, and neither social
prejudices nor mercenary considerations hamper him in the choice of his life work” (97).
Universally high educational attainment, moreover, leads to a better informed and more
competent citizenry, which in turn limits crime, generates more efficient work, and promotes
excellence in literature and the arts. In fact, education has become a fundamental element of
citizenship in the year 2000 that it is seen more as a responsibility than a privilege. “To put the
matter in a nutshell,” Dr. Leete informs West,
there are three main grounds on which our educational system rests: first, the right of
every man to the completest education the nation can give him on his own account, as
necessary to his enjoyment of himself; second, the right of his fellow-citizens to have him
educated, as necessary to their enjoyment of his society; third, the right of the unborn to
be guaranteed an intelligent and refined parentage. (138)
Citizenship in Bellamy’s future is defined in terms of civic-mindedness and mutual duty, as the
concept of the industrial army makes clear. What this passage on education indicates, however,
is that the notion of citizens’ duty extends beyond the responsibility to serve the state through
labor and includes a responsibility to serves one’s fellow citizens by contributing to the
pleasantness of society.
Overall, the future that Bellamy envisioned included many improvements over life in the
nineteenth century. With promises of income equality, job security, excellent education, the
elimination of poverty and independence for women, not to mention the many technological
innovations Nationalism promised, it is not hard to see why so many Americans were attracted to
the novel and to Nationalism. But in discussing what citizenship looks like in Bellamy’s future,
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the caveat that must be made is that all of this applies only to white, Anglo-Saxon Americans.
The picture that emerges of non-white citizenship is quite different, in part because non-white
people are ignored to the extent that it is fair to question whether they even continue to exist in
Bellamy’s future, and in part because Bellamy left plenty of space for readers to interpret his
future vision through the lens of their own prejudices.

The Future for African Americans
As I mentioned in the previous section, we learn quickly (and often) in Looking
Backward that the solution to virtually every problem of the nineteenth century is Nationalism, a
form of socialism in which the state has become the “sole capitalist” and in which every citizen
is entitled to a portion of the “cooperative product” that, as Bellamy wrote 6 years later, “must be
always and absolutely equal” (qtd. in Patai 13). This principle, along with the concepts and
practices that grow out of it, such as: non-competition, an industrial army, economic
independence for women, and technological innovation, is the heart and soul of the book and the
political movement it spawned. It is what readers in the 1890s responded to, and it is what
virtually all scholars and critics of the book over the last 125 years have focused on. To illustrate,
these are some common themes in Bellamy criticism: the relationship between Nationalism and
religion or Nationalism and transcendentalism or Nationalism and Populism; the authoritarianism
inherent in enforced service in an industrial army; Bellamy’s apparent nostalgia for a pre-
capitalist time; the extent to which Bellamy influenced American socialism; whether Bellamy
really understood economics and human nature; feminism and women’s rights in Bellamy’s
future, and so on. Notably absent from this list, and indeed absent in any serious way from
Bellamy criticism, is any consideration of race. The reason for this is easily understandable: race
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is an issue that Bellamy himself evades and avoids almost entirely in the novel (and in his other
written work). To put it bluntly, there are apparently no people of color in Looking Backward’s
America of the future and no discussion whatsoever of what W. E. B. Du Bois called “the
problem of the twentieth century…the problem of the color line” (Du Bois).
The absence of African American people in Bellamy’s future has been noticed by critics;
but, as Giulia Fabi points out (and she’s one of the very few to have paid real attention to this),
these critics have “too often dismissed such absence as an issue after deploring Bellamy’s
racism” (‘Utopian Melting’ 347). An example of such a dismissal can be found in Franklin
Rosemont’s impassioned defense of Bellamy’s radicalism in his essay “Bellamy’s Radicalism
Reclaimed.” After noting that several important black socialists “found appealing” Bellamy’s
“critique of capitalist inequality and injustice, and his persuasive picture of the coming
brotherhood” (172), Rosemont reluctantly acknowledges that Bellamy’s treatment of racial
issues in both Looking Backward and his columns in The New Nation seems “inadequate” (173).
He then somewhat glibly and dismissively admits that “Bellamy was not in the revolutionary
vanguard of the struggle against racism” before shifting the discussion to Bellamy’s much more
admirable treatment of the “woman question.” The entire discussion of race in Bellamy occupies
just under two pages within a nearly seven page section of the essay bearing the subtitle “‘In this
greatest of all revolutions’: Problems of Race and Gender.”
As Toni Morrison has shown, however, absence can be an issue: “We can agree, I think,”
she writes in “Unspeakable Things Unspoken,” “that invisible things are not necessarily ‘not-
there’; that a void may be empty but not be a vacuum. In addition, certain absences are so
stressed, so ornate, so planned, they call attention to themselves” (Morrison 136). The absence of
African Americans from Bellamy’s utopia, I would argue, is one of these instances.
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Just two years after Looking Backward was published, Bellamy was asked to account for
the racelessness of his utopian vision. In a letter to his periodical, The New Nation, an
anonymous reader tells Bellamy, “I have just finished reading your Looking Backward. I heard a
good deal about it before reading it, and read it principally to see what disposition you make of
the negro. I do not believe that you mention him in any part of the book” (qtd. in Fabi 349). This
is Bellamy’s response:
Our correspondent is very possibly correct in saying that the Negro is not mentioned in
“Looking Backward”; but neither, probably, is the white man…the people referred to in
its pages, so far as we remember, might have been black, brown or yellow as well as
white. Men, women and children are all the book discusses, and as to their rights and
duties the author no more thought of dividing them into classes with reference to
complexion, than as to height, width or weight.
All men are brothers and owe one another the duties, and have, one upon another, the
claims, of brothers. As to the colors of men, they have nothing to do with the matter. The
standard of duty is not a chromatic one. Nationalists are color-blind (qtd in Fabi 349-50)
Not only is Bellamy’s response a bit evasive and convenient, it is also disingenuous. As Fabi
notes, these is (exactly one) black character in the novel: Julian West’s servant, Sawyer.
Sawyer’s blackness is unmistakable; the narrator introduces him to the reader as a “servant, a
faithful colored man by the name of Sawyer” (Bellamy 40).
By clearly marking Sawyer as “colored” Bellamy implicitly identifies everyone else in
the book as white. Moreover, Bellamy uses the racially marked servant to distinguish between
the present and the future. Sawyer is the last person West sees upon going to sleep; when he
awakens a century later West assumes that Sawyer must have died in the fire (or else West’s
35

underground chamber would have been revealed). Significantly, though, this is not Sawyer’s last
appearance in the novel. Near the end of the book, after West has grown to understand and
appreciate the America of the future, after he has discovered and professed his love for Dr.
Leete’s beautiful daugheter, Edith, West has a horrific nightmare. In the dream, he wakes up, not
in the comfortable futuristic home of the Leete’s, but in his old sleeping chamber, under his old
home. West doesn’t just wake up, though; he is startled awake by the voice of his servant,
Sawyer. Sawyer is, therefore, the last person West sees before departing the nineteenth century,
and the first he sees upon returning, and Sawyer’s conspicuous blackness therefore becomes
associated with the anti-utopian present.
Sawyer is not the only way in which Bellamy racializes the present, however, as we learn
throughout the dream. Believing, now that he is back in 1887, that his time in the future was
merely a cruel dream, West looks upon everything in his nineteenth century surroundings with
the revulsion that comes from having seen an infinitely better possibility. Walking through the
streets of Boston, for instance, he becomes aware of tenements for the first time, and notes with
horror that “the streets and alleys reeked with the effluvia of a slave-ship’s between decks”
(188). Continuing, he narrates how “I had glimpses within of pale babies gasping out their lives
amid sultry stenches” (188). Thus, not only is the world of the 1880’s rank and terrible,
compared to the utopian land of 2000, but its degredation is racialized through the comparison to
the slave ship. By emphasizing the “paleness” of the babies, moreover, and placing them within
the metaphorical slave-ship, Bellamy doubles down on the deployment of racialized imagery to
establish the perversity of life under nineteenth century capitalism. Fears of “negro domination”
and racial “amalgamation” were common among racist whites at the end of the nineteenth
century, and Bellamy plays to those fears here. The image of “pale babies” on slave-ships is not
36

scandalous merely because of the suffering of defenseless children, but because of the sexual and
reproductive implication generated by the juxtaposition of white infants with racialized poverty.
So, through Sawyer and the racialized descriptions of West’s nightmate, we know that
not only are there people of color in the book’s nineteenth century, but that, in fact, they are
among the characteristic elements of the time. We also suspect that there are no African
Americans in the future, both because we never see any and because they are never talked about
(and everything is talked about—the book is obsessed with accounting for all the changes that
have taken place in society). We find ourselves, then, back at the anonymous reader’s question to
Bellamy: what became of African American people? The book doesn’t say, exactly, but it does
contain certain elements that open the door to a disturbing possibility. The first of these can be
seen in the manner in which the change in American society comes about. When West questions
his host, Dr. Leete, about the changes that have taken place, he expects to hear the story of a
great revolution. Instead, Dr. Leete explains how the problem of labor (and by extension all other
problems) “may be said to have solved itself. The solution,” he continues, “came as the result of
a process of industrial evolution which could not have terminated otherwise. All that society had
to do was to recognize and cooperate with that evolution” (53). Here, as elsewhere in the novel,
Dr. Leete attributes the perfection of society to an inevitible process of evolution. According to
Mark Pittinger, in his book American Socialists and Evolutionary Thought, 1870-1920, this was
characteristic of Bellamy, whose writings Pittinger claims “imaginatively embodied” “socialist
evolutionism” (64).
Bellamy’s evolutionism is not limited to the natural process of political and economic
change, though. At several points in the novel, we catch glimpses of biological evolution, as
well. During a discussion of how things in the future are less costly than before, Dr. Leete
37

explains that “The number of persons, more or less absolutely lost to the working force through
physical disability, of the lame, sick, and debilitated… has shrunk to scarcely perceptible
proportions, and with every generation is becoming more completely eliminated” (140). Later,
this suggestion of eugenics is spelled out much more clearly. While explaining how the
equalization of wealth has liberated women from marriages of necessity, Dr. Leete points out
that this “means that for the first time in human history the principle of sexual selection, with its
tendency to preserve and transmit the better types of the race, and let the inferior types drop out,
has unhindered operation” (160). "You were speaking, a day or two ago, of the physical
superiority of our people to your contemporaries. Perhaps more important than any of the causes
I mentioned then as tending to race purification has been the effect of untrammeled sexual
selection upon the quality of two or three successive generations.”
What we’re left with, then, is a rather disturbing syllogism in the book: African American
people are visible in, even typify, nineteenth-century Boston; sometime after 1887, though,
American society undergoes a drastic process of evolutionary change, which, among other
things, liberates women from the need to marry for reasons of financial security; this allows
women to choose their mates based on attraction and places women in control of a powerful and
effective system of eugenics. Then, when we fast forward to the year 2000, we suddenly find no
evidence of a black presence in American society and no disciussion of racial issues.
What are we to make of this? Is Bellamy suggesting that the inevitable evolutionary
process that would lead the United States out of capitalism and into Nationalism, would
simultaneously erradicate racial difference and bring about white racial purity? Given Bellamy’s
other writings, this is probably overstating the case. After all, he and his magazine, The New
Nation spoke fondly of abolitionists, and his response to the anonymous questioner about the
38

racelessness of Looking Backward at least pays lip service to racial equality. Moreover,
Bellamy’s 1898 follow-up to Looking Backward, entitled Equality, does address the question of
African Americans in the year 2000 (for a total of one page, in the second-to-last chapter of the
book). “In my day,” Julian West mentions to Dr. Leete, “a peculiar complication of the social
problem in America was the existence in the Southern States of many millions of recently freed
negro slaves, but partially as yet equal to the responsibilities of freedom. I should like to know
just how the new order adapted itself to the condition of the colored race in the South” (364). Dr.
Leete tells West that the problem was solved through a paternalistic “industrial regimen, at once
firm and benevolent,” which served as a “civilizing agent” (364). However, Dr. Leete quickly
assures West, this has not led to the commingling of races in either industrial or social relations.
Instead, the new system is “perfectly consistent with any degree of race separation…which the
most bigoted prejudices might demand” (365).
It is here, I think, that we get our explanation for the raceless future of Looking
Backward: in his zeal for Nationalism and his desire to make the utopian future as broadly
appealing as possible, Bellamy plays to the lowest common denominator, the “most bigoted
prejudices” of his likely readership. In Looking Backward, he uses subtle images of blackness to
denote the servility and poverty of the nineteenth century, while leaving the door open to the
possibilty of a racially pure future. And, a decade later, after Nationalism has become firmly
established, he takes the smallest possible step toward inclusiveness by echoing the
segregationist sentiments of the Atlanta Compromise and the Plessy vs. Ferguson decision.

39

Internationalism, Immigrants, and Imperialism
Midway through Looking Backward, Julian West describes waking up from another
curious dream (this is actually the first of two dream sequences in the novel; West’s nightmarish
return to the nineteenth century, which I discussed a moment ago, was the second):
I dreamed that I sat on the throne of the Abencerrages in the banqueting hall of the
Alhambra, feasting my lords and generals, who next day were to follow the crescent
against the Christian dogs of Spain. The air, cooled by the spray of fountains, was heavy
with the scent of flowers. A band of Nautch girls, round-limbed and luscious-lipped,
danced with voluptuous grace to the music of brazen and stringed instruments. Looking
up to the latticed galleries, one caught a gleam now and then from the eye of some beauty
of the royal harem, looking down upon the assembled flower of Moorish chivalry.
Louder and louder clashed the cymbals, wilder and wilder grew the strain, till the blood
of the desert race could no longer resist the martial delirium, and the swart nobles leaped
to their feet; a thousand scimetars were bared, and the cry, "Allah il Allah!" shook the
hall and awoke me, to find it broad daylight, and the room tingling with the electric music
of the "Turkish Reveille." (97-8)
At first glance, the function of this dream within the novel appears relatively straightforward.
The scene occurs relatively soon after West’s arrival in the future. He has seen some of the
technological wonders of the year 2000, such as electronically delivered on-demand music and
department stores that anticipate modern big box, warehouse, and online mega-retailers in their
selection and efficiency. He has also learned some of the key elements of Nationalism and the
industrial army. And, of course, he has begun to accept that the life he had known, including his
family, fiancée, and place in society, is gone and has been for about a century. Considering this,
40

it is unsurprising that he would have disorienting dreams, dreams of being out of place in a
foreign land, of exotic wealth and exciting yet vaguely uncomfortable pleasures. On one level,
the dream helps to establish West’s sense of defamiliarization and his disquieting perception of
himself as simultaneously an insider and a foreigner, a sense that runs throughout the book.
Indeed, as late as the penultimate chapter West bemoans his feelings of dislocation in time and
culture, lamenting that “the past was dead, crushed beneath a century’s weight, and from the
present I was shut out. There was no place for me anywhere. I was neither dead nor properly
alive” (174).
On another level, however, the orientalism of this dream provides an interesting insight
into how people of other cultures are viewed and understood by Americans in the year 2000. The
dream, we discover near the end, is inspired by a song, the “Turkish Reveille,” which was
written by German composer Theodor Michaelis and published in Boston in 1879 (Michaelis).
The song, moreover, is available to West through the technological innovation of remote
delivery, in which musicians perform in centralized recording studios and the performances are
piped, via telephone, to the homes of subscribing citizens. Technology, in the year 2000, thus
facilitates the experience of foreignness for Americans, introducing traces of distant cultures into
the home lives of typical Bostonians. Of course, the American consumers are ultimately in
control of the extent to which these foreign traces remain in their lives, as the music can be
stopped or changed at any time with “merely [the] touch [of] one or two screws” (74). And, of
course, the foreignness these consumers experience in the comfort of their homes is of the
exoticised, non-threatening variety. West’s dream of immersion in Moorish culture is one of
leisure and beauty, with fragrant flowers and tantalizing Nautch dancers. Also non-threateningly,
it is set in a historically remote time and place, the Islamic Alhambra having been surrendered to
41

the Spanish in the same year that the Spanish monarchs both expelled all Jews from Spain and
dispatched Columbus on his first voyage to the Americas.
There is, however, another mention of Muslims in Looking Backward, one that is used to
very different effect than the safe, if titillating scene in West’s dream of the Alhambra. In West’s
second dream, the one near the end of the novel in which he returns to the squalid, sordid
nineteenth century that he left behind, he describes that “like the starving bands of mongrel curs
that infest the streets of Moslem towns, swarms of half-clad brutalized children filled the air with
shrieks and curses as they fought and tumbled among the garbage that littered the court-yards”
(188). Just as we saw with the “slave-ships” in the previous section, “Moslem towns” are
invoked to signify filth and despair. And, as we saw with the “pale babies,” whose proximity to,
even presence on, the slave-ship amplified the scandal for white readers, children are again the
objects of the degradation associated with the racialized image. Taken together, these two
dreams—the orientalist Alhambra and the mongrel curs—shed light on the way that foreign
cultures are understood in Bellamy’s future: at a distance, and (now) safely subdued by a
European power, they can be beautiful and exotic, but in the United States, in the proximity of
American children, they carry the taint of savagery and squalor.
Outside of these two dreams, the book contains very little discussion of non-Anglo
people either within or outside the American borders. Susan Matarese points out that “one of the
most striking features of Edward Bellamy’s utopian novel, Looking Backward, is the absence of
details about the international order” (45). This is true, but I would argue that the absence of
discussion of foreign peoples, both those residing in the U.S. and those abroad, is even more
striking. There are, however, some indications both of foreign policy and of attitudes toward
foreign peoples in the novel and Bellamy’s other Nationalist writings. By looking closely at
42

these we see that, as was the case with African Americans, Bellamy’s belief in an egalitarian
American future was clouded by Eurocentricsm and compromised by a need to cater to the “most
bigoted prejudices” of his middle-class readers.
In Looking Backward, immigration (or emigration) is portrayed as open and encouraged.
There is a clear process for citizens of one country to take up permanent residence (and
citizenship) in another and to transfer their employment and their stipends from the original
country to the new one. “There is constant emigration” Dr. Leete tells West, clarifying a moment
later that “subject to [certain] regulations, the right of any man to emigrate at any time is
unrestricted” (100). It is interesting to consider this in light of the state of immigration law and
practice in the United States toward the end of the nineteenth century. Immigration was a major
social and political issue in the United States at this time. Immigrants were blamed for eroding
the character of the U.S. people; they were scapegoated as sources of crime and poverty, as well
as carriers of undesirable ideologies like socialism and anarchism. As a result, immigration
restrictions and quotas became common—Bellamy’s novel was published just six years after the
passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act—and controlling immigration became a hot topic in
debates, polemical writings, and political cartoons.
At first glance, it would seem that Bellamy’s position regarding immigration, as it is
expressed in Looking Backward, is relatively progressive. As we have already seen, immigration
in Bellamy’s future is described as simple and unfettered: when citizens of one country desire to
move to another, the responsibility for their maintenance transfers to the new country and these
citizens become members of the destination country’s workforce. Bellamy does not specify
whether the process is the same for men and women, but his insistence on women earning an
equal share of the nation’s total product and his description of the women’s industrial army
43

suggests that there would be little difference in the cases of men and women deciding to
emigrate. Unlike the racist and nativist laws of the late nineteenth century, then, Bellamy’s future
immigration policy is open and welcoming. Furthermore, since the cooperative economy has
brought about widespread prosperity in nations around, since workers no longer work for wages,
and since the industrial army has standardized working hours and conditions, the capitalist need
to import and exploit immigrant workers no longer exists.
If we look closely at the novel’s description of future immigration practice, however, we
see that some of the hot-button issues related to nineteenth century immigration, specifically
related to the immigration of “undesirable” groups like the Chinese, have been avoided rather
than fixed. It is important to note that in Looking Backward’s extremely brief discussion of
international relations, of which immigration is a part, the non-U.S. countries mentioned are
exclusively Western European. To explain emigration procedure, for instance, Dr. Leete uses the
example of “a man at twenty-one [who] emigrates from England to America.” Similarly, to
illustrate the annual settling of balances in international trade (in the same section as the
immigration discussion), Dr. Leete and West once again refer to hypotheticals, this time
imagining a debt owed the United States by France. Finally, to show the transferability of a
citizen’s credit card around the world, and thus the ability to travel to foreign countries for
pleasure, Dr. Leete describes a hypothetical American’s visit to Berlin, where the American’s
credit is as welcome as if he were in the States. “An American credit card," Dr. Leete tells West
"is just as good in Europe as American gold used to be” (100)
In a way that is reminiscent of the novel’s silence on African Americans in the future
United States, Looking Backward appears to avoid entirely the possibility of immigration—or
any kind of international exchange—with nations outside of Western Europe. Of course, the
44

novel’s descriptions of international intercourse depends on inclusive language like
“unrestricted” emigration and “peaceful relations” and does not speak of excluding any less
desirable groups. Yet, the subjects Dr. Leete chooses for his hypotheticals leave a clear
impression: Western European powers – France, England, and Germany – are the United States’s
trading partners, tourist destinations, and sources of immigration in Bellamy’s future. Other
nations appear not even to factor into the discussion, and as with the absence of African
Americans in the American utopian future, this allows Bellamy to pitch Nationalism as an
inclusive, egalitarian program without alienating the middle class whites on whose support his
movement depended and of whose “most bigoted prejudices” he was well aware.
We have already seen that Bellamy considered the likely prejudices of his target audience
in the way that he hedged on the question of African American equality in his second novel.
Silent on the status of African Americans in the first utopian novel, Bellamy felt compelled to
clarify his position in the sequel which he did by asserting the de jure equality of African
Americans while assuring skeptical readers that this equality did not lead to interracial relations
or workforce parity. The same appears to be true regarding immigrants. However, we do not
have to rely on this parallel (i.e., between the novel’s treatment of African Americans and that of
immigrants) to see that Bellamy was mindful of his readership’s likely misgivings about a plan
that would open immigration up to what in the late nineteenth century were considered
undesirable peoples. As part of his grand project of promoting Nationalism to the American
public, Bellamy wrote a series of articles for his magazine, The New Nation, between 1891 and
1893. These writings, collected under the title Talks on Nationalism, each address a typical
American (examples include “A Farmer,” “A Believer in the Bible,” “A Working Man” and
twenty eight others) and attempt either to overcome objections to the Nationalist program or
45

show how Nationalism is in the hypothetical person’s best interest. Each takes the form of a
dialogue, in which Bellamy speaks through the character of Mr. Smith to “A Banker,” “A
Successful Business Man,” or whichever topic he happens to be addressing. One of these
dialogues is entitled “To an Advocate of Restricted Immigration.”
Through the arguments of Bellamy’s “Advocate of Restricted Immigration,” we hear all
of the nativist fears about the future of America’s people and culture distilled into concise, if
stereotypical statements. The Advocate opens the dialogue in no uncertain terms:
My reform comes before yours. There is no use at all in trying to improve the condition
of a nation unless you can put a stop to the stream of undesirable population from abroad.
You might as well expect to purify a pond into which a sewer is all the time emptying its
contents. If you succeed by your nationalism in making the condition of the American
people better than it is, you will only be offering a higher premium to encourage the
degraded of foreign lands to rush in to share your blessings. (151)
Mr. Smith immediately agrees on the need for “reasonable restriction,” but gently suggests that
such restriction should not “bar out honest poverty.” Whereas the Advocate seeks stricter laws,
however, Smith argues that that it is impossible to stop immigration through restriction (close the
ports, he tells the Advocate, and people could still easily cross the Canadian or Mexican border).
The best course of action in the here and now, he suggests, would be to broadly advertise the
actual “difficulty of obtaining employment” in the United States to potential immigrants in
Europe, since they are currently being “duped” by corporations advertising opportunities in
America that do not really exist. Ultimately, though, only Nationalism will fix immigration, he
argues, going so far as to claim that “Laws to restrict immigration will be rendered needless by
nationalism” [153]. Under Nationalism, everything is under public control, which means that the
46

only way to obtain access to a livelihood is by becoming a member of the “industrial force.” This
should not be a problem for immigrants who genuinely desire to be productive since, according
to Bellamy’s formulation of Nationalism, there will always be plenty of work. As a result, the
immigration of “desirable immigrants” will be encouraged (154) and there will be no threat to
the employment of current citizens. This answer seems to ignore the immigration of
“undesirable” persons, but Bellamy’s logic implies that it would remove incentive for
undesirables to immigrate because they would have to join labor force, which would then make
them desirable.
Leaving aside the obvious issue of whether Bellamy’s belief in the infinite productive
capacity of a Nationalist economy can be taken seriously, this exchange both captures the
challenge Bellamy faced in dealing with issues like immigration and clarifies what we have
already seen as his method of addressing such challenges. As much as Bellamy professes
equality, he is clearly aware of the biases and prejudices of his audience. Bellamy knows that
middle class whites blame immigrants for job scarcity and fear that foreign customs will erode
American culture. He understands that foreigners have become associated, in the minds of
middle-class Anglos, with poverty, squalor, vice and anarchism and that many racists believe
that some races are essentially inferior and unassimilable. In this dialogue, he addresses these
fears and concerns by walking a tightrope, balancing an outward commitment to equality against
an understanding reassurance that Nationalism will not open up the doors to undesirable people.
Omission is a chief strategy in this balancing act. Looking closely at Smith’s response to the
Advocate, we see that the real answer being offered is that Nationalism will create so many
employment opportunities that current American workers will have nothing to fear from the
competition of immigrant labor. Moreover, Nationalism’s insistence on service in the industrial
47

army (here called the “industrial force”) demonizes laziness by forcing citizens to work in order
to claim their share of the national product. These arguments, we are led to believe, satisfy the
Advocate, as they do appear to address his primary objections. It is important to note, however,
that both of these arguments ignore the concerns of nativists who argued that certain peoples
(notably the Chinese) were racially inferior and culturally incompatible with American life.
5

Considering that this dialogue was written just as the Geary Act, which extended the Chinese
exclusion policy for ten more years (Smith 363) was being passed, the omission is significant. In
a way, Mr. Smith (Bellamy) is performing a bait-and-switch: when the Advocate complains of
undesirable people, who he compares to the contents of a sewer, Smith offers an answer that
equivocates on the meaning of undesirable. Ignoring the obvious racial and cultural overtones of
the Advocate’s use of “undesirable,” Smith shows how Nationalism will solve the problem of
undesirable immigration, defining “undesirable” as lazy freeloaders. The Advocate apparently
does not notice this equivocation, and Bellamy hopes that readers don’t either.
Returning to Looking Backward, we see that the novel’s avoidance of “undesirable”
peoples in its discussion of immigration and international relations is even more significant than
it first seemed. Talks on Nationalism proves that Bellamy was cognizant of the nativist backlash
toward the immigration of certain groups and the general fear on the part of middle class whites
of immigrant labor and culture. Looking Backward, however, does not engage any of these
issues: immigration in the novel is unrestricted, but is only shown taking place between England

5
Rogers Smith provides several good examples of this kind of thinking, including: California Senator John Miller,
who believed that Chinese laborers were successful because the Chinese were “automatic engines of flesh and
blood”; Senator Thomas Bayard of Delaware, who believed that peoples in different parts of the world had evolved
differently and should be kept separate; and California Representative Romualdo Pacheco who said of the Chinese
that “Family ties and obligations and the sweets of home life are of naught to him. The long course of training which
has gone on for so many generation has made of the Chinaman a lithe, sinewy creature, with muscles like iron, and
almost devoid of nerves and sensibilities. His ancestors have also bequeathed to him the most hideous immoralities.
They are as natural to him as the yellow hue of his skin, and are so shocking and horrible that their character cannot
even be hinted” (Qdt in Smith 360-1).
48

and the United States; international trade is robust, but appears only to involve countries like
France; foreign travel is encouraged, but the only image we have of it is an American in Berlin.
As with the apparent disappearance of African Americans, Bellamy’s description of future
international relations presents a happy picture of egalitarian relations between Western powers
while allowing readers to imagine the future as a time when troublesome “undesirables” have
somehow ceased to exist.
As for how these despised people ceased to exist, to book against hints at a kind of
evolutionary theory. In this case, however, the evolution that occurs is not the result of sexual
selection but instead is driven by colonial imposition. In response to an inquiry from West about
what has become of Europe in the year 2000 – has it adopted Nationalism? – Dr. Leete explains
that
the great nations of Europe as well as Australia, Mexico, and parts of South America, are
now organized industrially like the United States, which was the pioneer of the evolution.
The peaceful relations of these nations are assured by a loose form of federal union of
world-wide extent. An international council regulates the mutual intercourse and
commerce of the members of the union and their joint policy toward the more backward
races, which are gradually being educated up to civilized institutions. (98)
It is here that we see the only real indication of Bellamy’s engagement with the question of what
the Advocate (speaking for all nativist Americans) considered “undesirables.” These, according
to Dr. Leete are “backward” races, not initially ready for the Nationalist utopia, but graciously
guided in the right direction by the benevolent, civilizing hand of the Western, Anglo-European
powers. Looking Backward, it turns out, is not just a novel about a cautiously socialistic utopian
49

future within the borders of the United States; it is also a participant in the paternalist colonial
discourse of white messianism.
In her dissertation, As If: Utopian Desire and the Imagination of History in Nineteenth
Century America, Jill E. S. Shashaty discusses what she calls Looking Backward’s “colonial
origins.” (181) Citing Fredric Jameson, Shashaty notes that the birth of the utopian literary genre
coincided with the early phases of European exploration, and colonization of the “new” world.
Early utopian literature – spatial utopias, as Shashaty calls them – reflect this new way of
viewing the world. As Shashaty puts it, “Born from the discourses and documents of European
colonialism, the utopian genre necessarily carries the imprint of imperial ideology and reiterates
imperial plots of exploration, conquest, and adventure” (180). Shashaty goes on to offer an
elegant and persuasive reading of the novel’s colonial structure in which Julian West is seen
variously as a representative of a “backward” people who is educated and civilized by the
Americans of the future, as the symbol of a new American frontier (even the character’s name,
she points out, suggests this: Julian meaning “youthful” in Latin and West a metonym for
America’s soon-to-be-declared-closed spatial frontier), and as a would-be colonizer of the
nineteenth century. Shashaty’s central concern regarding Looking Backward, however, is
historiography—how the novel’s futurism actually represents a new way of understanding
history—and she is interested in moving beyond what she considers to be an excess of “critical
commentary [that] has focused on the content of Bellamy’s utopian vision” in favor of a closer
consideration of the novel’s “form and structure [in which] the text emerges as one embattled in
a struggle to conceptualize historical change in a new and emancipatory way.” (173)
If we are interested in understanding the future of American citizenship as imagined by
Americans near the turn of the twentieth century, however, we must concern ourselves with the
50

content of Bellamy’s utopia. After all, it was what Bellamy said about the future and its
possibilities that provoked such a fervent following and made his version of socialism acceptable
to so many Americans who might otherwise have distrusted the notion of cooperative economy.
That is not to say, of course, that how he delivered his message is unimportant—indeed, much of
my argument in this chapter concerns what I have described as Bellamy’s salesmanship. It
simply means that, while Shashaty’s argument about the way that Looking Backward suggests a
new way of understanding history is interesting and useful, we should not lose sight of the
book’s possible meanings in an attempt to get at how it makes meaning. And in the case of these
“backward races” there does seem to be a fairly clear meaning.
As we saw earlier in Bellamy’s letter to Howells, Bellamy conceived of Nationalism as a
“patriotic,” distinctly American form of socialism. He drew inspiration from Europe, to be sure,
especially regarding the concept of the industrial army, but he ultimately felt that Nationalism
would be an American innovation. This does not mean, however, that Bellamy was unconcerned
with the fate of the rest of the world or that he favored American isolationism. As we saw just a
moment ago, quite the opposite is true: by the year 2000, trade has become globalized,
immigration is unrestricted, and foreign travel is constant and encouraged. According to Dr.
Leete, the sense of brotherhood and cooperation that animates American society is even
understood to extend beyond national borders, as international commerce is governed by a
“sense of community of interest, international as well as national” (99). In fact, Dr. Leete
explains, a “Nationalist” America is not the end of utopian striving; instead, “we all look forward
to an eventual unification of the world as one nation. That, no doubt, will be the ultimate form of
society, and will realize certain economic advantages over the present federal system of
autonomous nations” (99). For Bellamy, therefore, utopia is clearly not localized in the United
51

States but is a global future. Thomas Peyser labels this Bellamy’s “drive to globalization” (37)
and argues that it was central to Bellamy’s notion of utopia.
According to Peyser, Bellamy’s “globalizing tendencies” were “not exactly imperial,
[but] presaged the emergence of a more or less unified world culture” (29). Considering the
passage from Looking Backward quoted above, however, it is clear that there is something
imperial about Bellamy’s vision of the utopian world future. It is true that neither the book nor
Bellamy’s other writings indicate an interest in acquiring overseas territories for the United
States. But the belief that the entire world will necessarily move toward Nationalism, a system
which he insists will fundamentally alter the social and economic landscape, and that the United
States would drive that evolution, indicates that Bellamy’s imperialism is cultural. Moreover, if
we look at which countries Dr. Leete identifies as having already (in the year 2000) made the
transition to Nationalism – “the great nations of Europe as well as Australia, Mexico, and parts
of South America” – we see that they are all ones that, by 1888, had a significant European
colonial presence and in which indigenous populations had been substantially subdued or
eradicated.
Of course, Bellamy is not proposing that indigenous peoples be wiped out. Instead, his
model of globalization, while racialized, is paternalistic. Bellamy is clear that there are vanguard
peoples (the “great nations of Europe” and their colonies) and “backward races” (everyone else),
but he insists that the great nations will elevate, not massacre, the backward. Susan M. Matarese
calls this attitude “messianic” and notes that it reflects a long-standing American perception of
its role in the world, an “outlook which tends to see the United States as a paradigm for others, a
chosen people destined to redeem the world through their example and guidance” (46). As
Matarese’s language here suggests, this self-perception as the divinely ordained saviors of the
52

world goes back to America’s earliest colonial moments, when John Winthrop declared aboard
the Arbella that the English colony in North America would be “as a city upon a hill” (Winthrop
10). Yet while American exceptionalism did extend as far back as the beginning of the American
colonies, this messianic outlook also reflects changes that were taking place in America’s view
of itself as an imperial power toward the end of the nineteenth century. The writing of Bellamy’s
novel, for instance, coincided with the passage of the Dawes Act by the United States Senate,
which extended US citizenship to Native American heads of households who would accept land
allotments and abandon a tribal life for one that embraced the American ideal of private land
ownership (Smith 392-3). As Francis Paul Prucha describes, the Dawes Act represented the
culmination of more than a decade of attempts to replace Native American tribalism with a
model of individual land ownership through allotment that would protect Native American
property from the relentless incursions of white settlers. According to L.Q.C. Lamar, Secretary
of the Interior at the time of the law’s passage, the Dawes Act was “the only escape open to these
people from the dire alternative of impending extirpation” (Qtd. in Prucha 670). Unfortunately,
along with the extension of citizenship to Native Americans who accepted allotments, the Dawes
Act allowed un-allotted tribal lands to be sold to white homesteaders. Moreover, although the
Dawes Act did not initially allow allotted lands to be leased out, subsequent leasing policies
made this possible, which “was a step toward complete alienation of the allotments by sale, a
process that soon began to appear as a break in the dike of protection erected around the
allotments by the reformers” (673). As a result of both the sale of un-allotted lands and the
alienation of allotments after a period of trusteeship, “the Dawes Act and other federally induced
concessions reduced Native American lands from 155,632,312 acres in 1881 to less than half of
that amount, 77,865,373 acres, by 1900” (Smith 393). Despite this disastrous consequence,
53

though, Prucha reminds us that intent behind the Dawes Act was paternalistic, not rapacious: “it
was an act pushed through Congress, not by western interests greedy for Indian lands, but by
eastern humanitarians who deeply believed that communal landholding was an obstacle to the
civilization they wanted the Indians to acquire” (669).
Of course, Looking Backward was not a book about the Dawes Act (like African
Americans, Native Americans are essentially absent from Bellamy’s future), but its faith in Euro-
Americans leading the charge to unite the world under a common social system while
“educat[ing] up” “the more backward races … to civilized institutions” suggests that Bellamy’s
imperial logic was in line with the paternalist American zeitgeist. As with the novel’s framing of
Nationalism as a patriotic, almost-capitalist form of socialism, and its eugenic whitewash of the
future of the American citizenry, the paternalistic cultural imperialism that characterizes
Nationalism’s global reach made Bellamy’s vision of future America palatable for his late
nineteenth century readership. Just as the book was being written, published, and read, the
United States was beginning its foray into overseas imperialism. While Bellamy may not have
specifically anticipated the Spanish-American War or the annexation of Hawaii, the indications
of a more aggressive foreign policy were there. The United States’s interest in Hawaii, for
instance, was well known by the time Looking Backward was written, with Mark Twain having
written about it as early as 1866 and the United States signing the Reciprocity Treaty in 1875.
Also by this time American Christian missionaries had begun to shift their efforts from
proselytizing to Native Americans toward missions to China, Africa, and elsewhere abroad. And,
in 1885, Rev. Josiah Strong published the influential book, Our Country: Its Possible Future and
Its Present Crisis, which argued that “Anglo-Saxon” Americans represented the highest stage of
human evolution and that only through the influence of these American Anglos could the other
54

races of the world be elevated to civilization. Strong argued for the international spread of
American culture by envisioning Anglo-American cultural imperialism as the telos toward which
human evolution was working: “Then this race of unequaled energy, with all the majesty of
numbers and the might of wealth behind it – the representative, let us hope, of the largest liberty,
the purest Christianity, the highest civilization — having developed peculiarly aggressive traits
calculated to impress its institutions upon mankind, will spread itself over the earth” (175).
Strong, and many like him, believed that the closing of the American frontier (of which he wrote,
“There is no other virgin soil in the North Temperate Zone [168]) should not mean an end to the
expansion of American influence signified by the doctrine of Manifest Destiny, but rather a
jumping off point for the Americanization of the rest of the world.
It is from this class of ideas that Bellamy drew his response to readers like the Advocate
for Restricted Immigration and reconciled his belief in expansive international cooperation with
the strain of xenophobic nativism that ran through his white middle-class readership. Bellamy’s
vision of future citizenship (at least by the year 2000) is one that is national but tending toward
global. It wants to be inclusive and egalitarian, but is also fundamentally hierarchical and
hegemonic (in that Anglo-American culture is assumed to represent an apex of human and social
evolution). Bellamy’s solution to the problem of “undesirable” peoples largely mirrors his take
on African Americans: silence whenever possible, paternalism when silence simply will not do,
and always the strong implication that evolution (in this case evolution driven by cultural
imperialism) will eventually work the problem groups out of existence.

55

Conclusion
Throughout this chapter I have argued that many key elements, both of the content and
the presentation, of Bellamy’s utopia were strategic appeals to a readership that was likely
skeptical, even prejudiced, toward the vision of economic and social reorganization that he was
advocating. I have even referred to some of these strategic moves as ways of selling his patriotic
American socialism to Americans and labeled Bellamy a “pitchman” for Nationalism. The
evidence in Looking Backward and many of his other late-career writings, I think, bears this out.
But Bellamy was no snake oil salesman, and it would be a mistake, and unfair to Bellamy’s real
dedication to social and economic improvement for the lower and middle classes, to interpret
these strategies as evidence of insincerity or hucksterism. Bellamy was nothing if not sincere. As
his pained refusal of a commission to write a novel for the Atlantic indicates, he was not
interested in leveraging the success of Looking Backward into a profitable writing career.
Nationalism became the only subject of his writing after 1888, and his dedication to the
movement he inspired is unquestionable.
Bellamy was not the radical that some critics claim he was, however. His thinking is
generally progressive, Arthur Lipow’s persuasive critique of Bellamy’s “authoritarianism”
notwithstanding, and he really was convinced that a post-capitalist America would bring about
greater freedom, equality, and plenty than ever known before. But many of his central ideas were
underwritten by a rather conservative view of the world. Corporate capitalism was harmful, he
believed, but it contained within it the seeds of its own evolution. Wealth inequality was akin to
a kind of slavery, he proclaimed, but the rich were not to blame. As West tries to tell his
nineteenth-century peers during his nightmare return to their time, “the folly of men, not their
hard-heartedness, was the great cause of the world’s poverty. It was not the crime of man, or any
56

class of men, that made the race so miserable, but a hideous, ghastly mistake, a colossal, world-
darkening blunder!” (191). Immigration, likewise, could be open and free, but only after the
United States and its European allies have “educated up” the “backward races” to their way of
living. There could be racial equality, but of course it would be separate-but-equal.
This underlying conservative tendency is what allowed Bellamy’s socialist utopia to
become one of the top selling books of the American nineteenth century. It was clear to readers
that the author of Looking Backward was no “follower of the red flag,” no rabble-rousing labor
protester or bomb-hurling anarchist. He was a patriotic American, offering an American vision
of a post-capitalist future, but one that managed to hang on to the good parts of capitalism. He
was, moreover, a true believer, but one who was willing to tailor his message to the needs of his
audience.

57

CHAPTER TWO

Edward A. Johnson’s Utopian Critique

The Negro, being held up as a terrible hobgoblin to political white folks, it was necessary to
destroy his citizenship; which was accomplished by wily and cruel means.
- Edward A. Johnson, Light Ahead for the Negro – 1904

We shall rise, not by dragging others down, but by encouraging those who are up to extend down
to us the helping hand, which we must quickly grasp, and by its help lift ourselves up.
- Edward A. Johnson, A School History of the Negro Race in America – 1890

The plot of an American novel published near the turn of the twentieth century: a
privileged, well-educated New England man coming of age near the turn of the twentieth century
enters an almost supernatural state of sleep. He wakes up at the beginning of the 21
st
century to
find that the problems of his time have been solved and that the United States has become a
utopian society. He is taken in by a benevolent doctor and engages in lengthy discussion about
how life was in his own time, how twenty-first century life compares to it, and how the change
came about. By the end of the novel he has fallen in love with the doctor’s beautiful younger
relative and secured her hand in marriage, establishing himself permanently as a citizen of the
utopian United States of the 21
st
century.
Readers familiar with late nineteenth century American literature likely recognize this as
a basic outline of the plot of Edward Bellamy’s classic utopia, Looking Backward, a novel that,
58

as we saw in the previous chapter, kicked off a major literary (and political) movement and
helped found the genre of the American utopian novel. The basic sketch above, however, also
describes the plot of a much less celebrated utopian novel, Edward A. Johnson’s Light Ahead for
the Negro. Johnson was not primarily an author of fiction. Born a slave in North Carolina,
Johnson was at various times a school principal (1883), a text book author (1890, 1899), a
lawyer, an instructor and later Dean of Law at Shaw University (1893-1906), and the first
African American member of the New York state legislature (“Edward Austin Johnson”).
Johnson’s professional history is one of the things that makes his novel interesting—his turn to
fiction in 1904, and his use of the utopian mode, can be seen as a strategic attempt to utilize any
means possible to work toward greater African American rights—education, law, politics, and
culture.
Plotwise, Johnson doesn’t innovate much beyond Bellamy’s formula; in fact, the plot of
Light Ahead for the Negro is even sparser that Looking Backward’s. In the year 1906, Gilbert
Twitchell, a young, white college graduate from New York intends to take a teaching position at
a black school in the South. Before doing so, however, he is persuaded to join a friend on a trip
to Mexico City on a dirigible. On the way, the engines explode, the friend falls out, and
Twitchell loses consciousness as the air ship ascends into the atmosphere. When it returns to the
Earth in Phoenix, Georgia, one hundred years have passed, but Twitchell has not aged. He is
taken in by a Doctor Newell and his lovely niece Irene, and many conversations ensue.
Bellamy’s influence on Johnson’s novel is clear—the time travel, the lengthy explanations of
social changes, even the romantic subplot all draw heavily upon Looking Backward.
It is not terribly surprising to find extreme similarities between the plot of Looking
Backward and another novel written in the decades that followed the publication of Bellamy’s.
59

After all, the genre of the American utopian novel around the turn of the twentieth century
consisted largely of books that imitated, criticized, built upon, or responded to Looking
Backward. It is also not a shock that such a novel has been forgotten. The great majority of
Bellamy knock-offs have been forgotten, for the very legitimate reason that most of them are
merely derivative and offer very little in terms of philosophical depth or aesthetic value.
What is surprising about the neglect of Light Ahead for the Negro is that it is the only known
example of an African American-authored utopian future fiction in the Bellamy mode from the
time period. There were, of course, black-authored utopian novels, including Sutton E. Griggs’s
Imperium in Imperio, Frances E.W. Harper’s Iola Leroy, and Pauline Hopkins’s Of One Blood.
There are also several examples of early black-authored speculative fiction, such as Martin R.
Delany’s Blake; or, The Huts of America, or Charles Chesnutt’s Conjure Tales. Only Johnson’s
novel, however, is set in the future and involves time travel, and thus only Light Ahead for the
Negro provides a direct contrast to Looking Backward.
Because Light Ahead for the Negro is the only African American-authored future utopia,
it is tempting to look to it for a definitive African American vision of the American future, or for
proto-black nationalism like we find in Imperium in Imperio. Johnson’s text makes this difficult,
though. It reads as a conservative argument: it is addressed and dedicated to a white audience,
the main character is almost certainly white, segregation largely persists in the future (the scene
with the mulatto employee essentially paraphrases Washington’s “in all things that are purely
social…” line), women seem to inhabit separate spheres, and many of the attitudes of the
enlightened future whites are paternalistic and condescending.
So what are we to make of this novel? Is it, as John M. Reilly suggests, merely a failed
utopia, an earnest attempt by an early twentieth century African American writer to imagine a
60

more egalitarian future, but an attempt that is doomed from the start by the limitations to the
black imagination that were the unfortunate result of three centuries of oppressive conditions? Or
is it, as Giulia Fabi argues, a “feasible utopia,” an articulation of future conditions that are more
tolerable than the present, but that are not so radically different that they would alienate white
readers?
The few recent critics who have attempted to engage with Johnson’s novel have generally
struggled with how to read the novel. As I will discuss below, critical assessments of Light
Ahead for the Negro tend to be extremely short, to the point of being superficial, and they often
reflect more about the purposes for which the individual critics wish to use the novel than about
what the novel actually says. Many mentions of the novel, moreover, contain basic errors about
the book’s plot, characters, or author, suggesting that these readers have not put much effort into
actually reading the book, and further indicating that the novel has become more of a tool for
critics to advance their own purposes than an object of analysis in its own right. In this chapter I
will review the (scant) recent scholarship on Light Ahead for the Negro in order to detail some of
the difficulties critics face when attempting to interpret it as a utopian future fiction and to show
how some critics have used the novel to advance arguments in ways that are not justified by the
novel’s actual content (and that are often predicated on erroneous “readings” of the novel). I will
then offer an argument about why well-intentioned critics have been baffled by the novel, based
on a reading that, I believe, better attends to both the novel’s actual content and its author’s true
intent. The problem with recent critical approaches to Light Ahead for the Negro, I will show, is
precisely that: the approach. In every case, from mere mentions in anthologies to sustained
discussions in essays and book chapters, critics have approached the novel as if it were what it
appears to be on its surface: an African American future utopia, a black Looking Backward.
61

Unlike Looking Backward, however, Light Ahead for the Negro is not actually about the future,
or at least not primarily. The future in the novel, I will argue, is in fact merely a mechanism to
defamiliarize the Jim Crow present for the liberal white readers to whom the novel is addressed
and for whom it is intended. Johnson’s real purpose with the novel, I argue, is not to paint the
picture of a glorious utopian future but to use the admittedly flimsy conceit of a traveler to the
future as a way to both criticize his own time and warn his white readers not to be on the wrong
side of history.

Critics’ Struggles with the Novel
There is little evidence that Light Ahead for the Negro was well-known or considered
important at the time of its publication, although there is some reason to believe that it was at
least known of. Johnson was, after all, a public figure with a very successful law practice in
North Carolina (“Life Work”). He was also the author of a successful text book, A School
History of the Negro Race in America, which was the “first by a black author to be approved by
the North Carolina State Board of Education for use in the public schools” (Dictionary of North
Carolina Biography). Given this, it stands to reason that his work of utopian fiction would garner
at least some attention, and that does appear to have been the case. The book was listed in the
“Books of the Week” section of the September-December 1904 issue of the Outlook Magazine,
although it was not reviewed (“This report of current literature” an editorial note explains, “is
supplemented by fuller reviews of such books as in the judgment of the editors are of special
importance to our readers”) (625). It was also mentioned in The Charity Organization Society of
New York’s magazine, Charities in its December 17th, 1904 Issue as a part of the “Books of the
Month” list. As for actual discussion of the book in contemporary academic works, there are few
62

examples. One of these is Albert Bushnell Hart, who, in his book The Southern South, looks to
Johnson and the novel for an answer to the question: “How does this feeling strike the Negro?”
Hart continues:
Let an intelligent man, Johnson, in his “Light Ahead for the Negro,” speak for himself.
He complains that the newspapers use inflammatory headlines and urge lynchings—“a
wholesale assassination of Negro character”; that it is made a social crime to employ
Negroes as clerks in a white store; that the cultured Southern people spread abroad the
imputation that the Negro as a race is worthless; that the news agents are prejudiced
against the Negro and give misleading accounts of difficulties with the Whites; that
people thought to be friendly are hounded out of their positions; that there is a desire to
expatriate the negroes from the country of their fathers” (160).
Perhaps the most significant mention of the book in Johnson’s own time comes from W.E.B. Du
Bois. In a review essay for The Dial entitled “The Southerner’s Problem,” Du Bois offers
Johnson’s novel as an answer to the two other books included in the review, Thomas Nelson
Page’s The Negro: The Southerner’s Problem and William Benjamin Smith’s The Color Line,
both of which Du Bois criticizes as inaccurate and racist. “Can the world conquer [racial
oppression] as it has already partially conquered caste and religious persecution and feuds?” Du
Bois asks. “Mr. E. A. Johnson, author of the volume entitled 'Light Ahead for the Negro,'
recently published, believes that we can. His little book, written by a man of Negro blood, is
curiously yet not unattractively pieced together in the form of semi-fiction, and contains the
prophecy of a century hence” (317-18). Du Bois offers no further comment about the novel,
finishing the essay instead with an extended quotation from Light Ahead for the Negro about the
63

“false prophets” of the early twentieth century who foresaw the continued oppression or
annihilation of other races as the only possibility of salvation for the white race.
Du Bois’s appreciation for the novel can also be seen in an exchange between him and
Max Weber. Near the end of 1904, Weber wrote to DuBois that he had read and thoroughly
enjoyed Souls of Black Folk and stated that “I am absolutely convinced that the ‘colour-line’
problem will be the paramount problem of the time to come, here and everywhere in the world”
(Chandler 197). Several months later, in 1905, Weber indicated a desire to produce a “short
review of the recent publications about the ‘race problem’ in America,” and asked DuBois to
recommend recent works on the subject. In response, DuBois informed Weber of Johnson’s
Light Ahead for the Negro, along with Winfiled H. Collins’s Domestic Slave Trade of the
Southern States and William A. Sinclair’s The Aftermath of Slavery (202). From the extant
record of correspondence between Weber and Du Bois, it appears that Weber did not respond
specifically about this. Moreover, according to Nahum D. Chandler, Weber’s interest shifted
very strongly toward the debates preceding the Russian Revolution and he seems to have
abandoned the idea of reviewing works on American race relations. No such articles can be
found in the subsequest issues of his journal, Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik,
although the journal did publish Du Bois’s essay, "Die Negerfrage in den Vereinigten Staaten"
(“The Negro Question in the United States”) at the head of its November 1906 issue.
A final connection between Du Bois and Johnson is the article, “The Life Work of
Edward A. Johnson,” published in the Du Bois-edited April 1933 issue of The Crisis. This short
essay, for which no author is given, celebrates Johnson’s “life of unusual usefulness and
accomplishment. It tells briefly of his early life in education in North Carolina and Atlanta, and
sketches the phases of his career, culminating with his election to the New York State
64

Legislature in 1917. The essay particularly notes that, as a legislator, Johnson he introduced the
Levy Civil Rights Bill, which the essay calls “probably the best bill of its kind in the United
States” (81). Interestingly, the article does not mention Light Ahead for the Negro, although it
does reference his “literary career” as the author of a text books on African American history, a
“negro almanac of statistics, a book on vocational education, and recently, ‘Adam vs. the Ape
Man and Ethiopia” (81).
6
The omission of Johnson’s novel from the Crisis essay suggests that
Johnson’s legacy within the African American rights community was determined more by his
educational and political work than by his foray into fiction, especially because we know that
Crisis editor W.E.B. Du Bois new of the novel.
After 1910, the novel seems to have fallen out of the public and academic consciousness,
although it is mentioned on the title pages of Johnson’s 1911 revised edition of A School History
of the Negro Race in America and his 1931 book Adam vs Ape-Man in Ethiopia. The book is
listed in Lyman Tower Sargent’s 1979 volume, British and American Utopian Literature: An
Annotated Bibliography with the following brief description: “One hundred years from now—
segregated South as Eutopia” (67). It is also mentioned (as Light Ahead for the Negroes [sic]) in
Kenneth Roemer’s 1980 book, America as Utopia, where it is described as a utopia that “argued
for greater freedom and equality for blacks just when their fortunes had reached their lowest
point since the Civil War” (339). Roemer also lists it in his chronological bibliography of utopian
literature in that same volume, with an acknowledgment to Sargent for the citation.
In 1978, John R. Reilly discussed the novel briefly in an essay that argued that “utopian
literature has not flourished in the writing of Afro-American authors…Black literature also has a

6
The books referenced are: A school history of the Negro race in America, from 1619 to 1890 with a short
introduction as to the origin of the race; also a short sketch of Liberia (1890); Negro Almanac and Statistics (1903);
and Adam vs ape-man and Ethiopia (1930). The essay does not mention Johnson’s History of Negro soldiers in the
Spanish-American war, and other items of interest (1899) or Light Ahead for the Negro (1904). I have not been able
to locate the book on “vocational education” attributed to Johnson in the essay.
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utopian strain. There is, however, to my knowledge, no fully developed Afro-American literary
utopia.” (59) Reilly acknowledges that the novel is written in the utopian mode, but he claims
that it is a failure because the image it portrays of the future is too similar to Johnson’s present.
The utopia is incomplete, he argues, and is a failure of imagination. The conditions of
life/citizenship for African Americans, including the long legacy of slavery and the continued
oppression via Jim Crow laws, racial violence, disfranchisement, poverty, etc, made it
impossible, Reilly speculates, for black thinkers and writers to imagine a radically different
future. “The impulse to utopianize arises in history,” Reilly writes by way of conclusion, “and
the impulse can only be fully expressed when there exists in historical experience some social
model adequate to the needs of the imagination. Surely it is dreadful that no such model has yet
seemed sufficient for the Afro-American writer” (71).
Guilia Fabi also talks about the book in her 2000 article entitled “The Poetics and Politics
of a Feasible Utopia: Edward A. Johnson’s Light Ahead for the Negro” and for a few pages in
her 2001 book Passing and the Rise of the African American Novel. She mentions Reilly’s
claims about the impossibility of fully realized black utopian thought and dismisses them without
much discussion. She says:
That an oppressed people could be reduced to such a state of abjection as to lose the
power to imagine a better future seems hard to believe. It is especially hard in the case of
African Americans, a nation within a nation with a long history of political and cultural
resistance and with a narrative tradition that has characteristically thrived on the
subversive revision of popular literary modes. And because the utopian mode was
popular at the turn of the century, it is also hard to believe that African American authors
would not have engaged with this genre, notably because it had become an important
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playground for the racialist, eugenicist, and segregationist discourse of white writers.
(Passing and the Rise 45)
This is not exactly what Reilly is arguing, however, and Fabi casts aside his point a bit too
offhandedly. Reilly is not saying that blacks were in such abjection that they could not imagine
anything better, but that their history in the United States left them with no real precedent for
utopian thinking. I do not necessarily agree with this, but I do think it deserves more
consideration than Fabi gives it, especially because it is not all that far from Fredric Jameson’s
idea that it is generally impossible to imagine a future that is wholly apart from the precedent of
the present. That is, any utopian future imagining will bear some resemblance to the present
because the utopian imagination is bound to some degree by the real conditions of the present
(Jameson xiii). Like Fabi, though, I am skeptical of Reilly’s argument. If it were true, we would
expect to have numerous examples of partial, failed black future utopias. Reilly, in fact, claims
that this is the case, but to do so he discusses several African American novels, including Sutton
E. Griggs’s Imperium in Imperio, that are arguably utopian, but that are not future oriented.
Moreover, his criticism of Griggs’s novel is not that its utopian vision itself is fatally flawed or
incomplete, but that the work is an artistic failure. The plot is incoherent and seemingly
nonsensical, Reilly claims, and thus the novel fails. This strikes me as a different kind of
criticism, one that has nothing to do with Griggs, or any other African American author’s,
capacity to imagine a better future, but instead one that questions Griggs’s artistic abilities in
articulating his vision (which, again, is a vision of an alternate present).
In contrast to Reilly’s pronouncing Light Ahead for the Negro a failure, Fabi argues that
the novel is successful at what it attempts to be: a “feasible utopia.” Fabi claims that the vision of
African American advancement we see in Light Ahead for the Negro is intentionally understated,
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non-threatening, and incomplete. She points to the fact that Johnson dedicated the book to “the
thousands of sympathetic and well-wishing friends of the Negro race” and the fact that, within
the book, de facto segregation in social relations still exists, as evidence that Johnson’s is a
“utopian vision that emphasizes the feasability, rather than accomplished perfection, of social
change” (“Poetics” 309). I do not disagree with Fabi on the notion that Johnson’s novel was
calculated to appeal to a sympathetic white audience, or that part of the the calculation involved
portraying a future that could be palatable to such an audience, in the sense that it allowed whites
to imagine a future in which African Americans are treated more compassionately but without
the threat of amalgamation or social equality. Fabi’s “feasible utopia” thesis, however, requires
her to read the novel in conventionally utopian terms, emphasizing the time travel and the book’s
depiction of the future as its defining elements. As I have already mentioned and will discuss in
greater depth below, Johnson’s novel cannot be fully appreciated when read solely, or even
mostly, as a future fiction.
Fabi also includes Johnson’s novel in her discussion of racial passing, which she argues is
both a foundational element of early African American fiction and a central concept in turn-of-
the-century African American utopian thought. Unlike white utopian authors, Fabi claims, black
authors did not always send their protagonists to distant lands or into the future in order to
explore utopia, although there are examples in which this is the case. More often, she argues,
they employed the trope of racial passing in order to engage in what she calls “race travel” (as
opposed to spatial or time travel). Johnson’s novel, of course, presents a problem for this view
because it not only does not employ passing as a plot element but actually features a white
protagonist. Nonetheless, Light Ahead for the Negro still fits with her concept, she claims,
because it is Johnson the author, rather than one of his characters, who is engaged in the race
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travel. By addressing white readers via the traditionally racist white genre of the Bellamy-esque
future-utopia, Fabi suggests, Johnson is engaged in a kind of passing.
While Fabi is right to note the importance Johnson’s intended audience, and while his
excursion into the future-utopia is uncharacteristic of African American writers at the time, her
claim that Johnson is therefore “passing” is problematic on several levels. The first of these is
that such a claim relies on Fabi’s overdetermined passing theme rather than actual evidence.
Passing can be many things: subversive, shameful, opportunistic, born of necessity/desperation,
self-preservational. Johnson, as an author and public figure, is none of these. His name appears
on the title page alongside the identifier: “Author of School History of the Negro Race.” His
book, moreover, is dedicated to the “friends” of the African Americans—phrasing that suggests
that he does not include himself as one the white friends of the race to whom the book is
directed. Of course, Fabi does not mean that Johnson is literally concealing his racial identity and
passing for white; she simply means that he is writing in a white genre using conventions
established by white writers. This is true, but by labelling it “passing” she’s unfair to Johnson by
misrepresenting his intentions and work in order to fit her theory (which is surprisingly common
among people who mention this book—more on that in a moment). It also causes her to read the
novel as a traditional Bellamy-esque future utopia, which forces her to neglect key elements of
the book, especially its criticism of the past.
Like most recent discussions of Light Ahead for the Negro, Mark Bould includes it in an
essay that traces the prehistory of African American science fiction. Bould calls Johnson’s book
an “anomalous text, both in terms of being only cursorily a novel and, in this context, of arguing
that gradual reform will produce a revolutionary transformation in the condition of the African-
American” (63) and offers a reading that, while short, makes a number of astute points. Unlike
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Reilly and Fabi, Bould pays some attention to the backward-looking elements of the novel,
noting that Johnson, speaking through the novel’s protagonist, offers “some rather pointed
commentary” about the racial landscape of the early twentieth century, including criticism of
widespread racism in newspapers, the “ludicrous positions espoused by racist demagogues,” and
the efforts by southern states to unconstitutionally disfranchise African Americans (64). Bould
also notes the extents to which Johnson’s novel appeals to white audiences through flattery and
supplication, pointing out that several elements of the novel “reinforce the white role of
educating, shaping, and thinking for the African American, and of the gratitude and devotion that
will flow from this” (64). Overall, however, Bould is quite critical of the novel and, in particular,
its futurity, which he says is “so whitewashed one might think that a genocide has occurred”
(65). As with Reilly, this negative assessment derives from Bould’s interest in reading Light
Ahead for the Negro as a future utopia. Writing for the science fiction journal Extrapolation,
Bould is primarily concerned with reading the novel as a proto-science fiction in order to
establish the genealogy of African American speculative fiction that preceded the black power
sci-fi of the 1960s and 70s. As such, he is forced to focus on the book’s science fictional
elements, which are thin even by turn of the century utopian standards.
In addition to Reilly, Fabi, and Bould, there have been a few other mentions of Johnson’s
novel in recent scholarship on African American utopianism and speculative fiction.
Unfortunately, most are passing mentions at best, barely more than listing the book as an early
example of afrofuturism, African American utopian fiction, or African American proto-science
fiction. One such example occurs in an essay by African American science fiction author Samuel
R. Delany, entitled “Racism and Science Fiction.” In the essay, which was written for Sheree R.
Thomas’s, anthology Dark Matter: A Century of Fiction from the African Diaspora, Delany
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attempts to counter the notion that he is the first African American writer of science fiction by
citing several nineteenth century novels that he identifies as proto-science fiction. One of these is
Johnson’s Light Ahead for the Negro, which he says is the tale “of a black man transported into a
socialist United States in the far future” (384). Lisa Yaszek’ 2006 article, “Afrofuturism Science
Fiction and the History of the Future” provides a similar description. “Johnson’s 1904 novel
Light Ahead for the Negro” Yaszek writes, “depicts an African American man who travels into
the future and explores a racially-egalitarian socialist America (S.R. Delany 383f).” Since
Yaszek cites Delany as the source for her description of the novel, and since her description is
virtually identical to his, it seems likely that she has not actually read the book. And, since
Delany unhesitatingly refers to the novel’s protagonist as a black man, despite the fact that
evidence in the novel indicates that the main character is almost certainly white, and describes
the time travel destination vaguely as the “far future” when the novel makes it very clear that the
destination is the year 2006, precisely 100 years after he begins the flight, the extent of his
engagement or familiarity with the novel is questionable as well. Somewhat similarly Jesse
Rhines attempts to use Light Ahead for the Negro in his essay, “Agency, Race, and Utopia,” to
argue that the novel reveals a contrast to future-fictions like Looking Backward and Brave New
World in which white authors depict blacks as having limited, if any, agency. Unlike his reading
of the other novels, however, Rhines’s discussion of Light Ahead for the Negro consists entirely
of quotations from Johnson’s book, with virtually no analysis of these passages. Even more
problematically, Rhines identifies Johnson as “a late 19
th
-century white person,” which of course
is not accurate and suggests very limited familiarity with Johnson’s actual biography or body of
work.
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Reviewing the recent critical attention paid to Johnson’s novel, then, we find that a very
few people have paid actual attention to the book (Reilly, Fabi, Bould), although always only for
a few pages, usually as part of a larger essay. They always struggle with the frustratingly
moderate, “whitewashed” nature of Johnson’s future, either pronouncing it a failure (Reilly,
Bould) or trying to justify it (Fabi). Several other people have mentioned it very briefly as an
example of early African American utopianism or proto-science fiction (Delany, Yaszek,
Rhines). This is always done in an attempt to establish a genealogy of black speculative fiction,
but these mentions often indicate very little actual engagement (or even familiarity) with the text,
and in each case the authors make such basic errors about the novel’s plot or author that one is
tempted to question whether they have even read the book. For these writers, Light Ahead for the
Negro has become an empty title, a book that is valuable because it exists and can be mentioned
when convenient, but not valuable for what it actually says (hence the extremely superficial
“readings” of it in these essays).
Why is it that all of these critics have been so flummoxed by this book? Why is it so
tempting to include in essays about African American speculative fiction, yet so frustrating for
even critics like Fabi who dedicate time and energy to engaging with it honestly? The answer, as
I have indicated, is surprisingly simple: because they are all attempting to read it (or use it) as if
it really were about the future. It is not, though--it’s about the present. It uses the future, to be
sure, but not the way Bellamy does. It is not really trying to paint a picture of what the future
(hopefully) will look like. Instead, it uses the future as a vantage point from which to look
critically at the present.
We have to remember that the book was dedicated to sympathetic whites. That is no
accident. Neither is it a coincidence that the protagonist is white, nor that the future depicted is
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one that is likely to be unthreatening to sympathetic whites, nor finally that the solution to the
race problem, the thing that gets the United States from the brutal lynch culture of Johnson’s Jim
Crow era to the relatively harmonious, if unsatisfyingly modest, society of the twenty first
century, is the better-late-than-never actions of benevolent whites, the very class of people to
whom the book is dedicated.
Johnson’s novel is putting white readers on notice: do not be on the wrong side of
history. It is showing early twentieth century culture, especially Southern culture, as unjust and
rotten, and doing so from the defamiliarized perspective of a fair-minded Northern white man
(with whom the reader can identify) in conversation with future whites who have difficulty
comprehending the oppressiveness, unfairness, and violence of the protagonist’s, and Johnson’s
(and the readers’) own time. Moreover, it is naming names and assigning blame as well as
ridiculing arguments from prominent white figures from the present day (as well as prominent
news outlets). It even includes documentation of the injustice in the form of newspaper clippings
and speeches.
It is important to note that when Johnson was writing to an African American audience,
he wrote histories that celebrated black achievements. In his 1890 textbook, A School History of
the Negro Race in America, for instance, Johnson asserts African American capability and
fitness for citizenship in part through short character studies of important African Americans
such as Phillis Wheatley, Frances Ellen Watkins, Benjamin Baneeka, and Frederick Douglass.
He also highlights often overlooked achievements and notable contributions by African
Americans. In a chapter entitled “Negro Heroes of the Revolution,” for instance, Johnson
emphasizes the fact that an escaped slave, Crispus Attucks, was among the first to give his life in
the Revolutionary War, and points out that a black slave, Prince Whipple, is included as a
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bodyguard in the famous painting “Washington Crossing the Delaware.” In these and many other
cases, Johnson self-consciously portrays African Americans throughout history both as
American patriots and as a people willing to make grave sacrifices for a nation that denied them
even the most basic freedoms. Johnson’s strategy of emphasizing African American patriotism
and valor also includes juxtaposing these examples of courage and dedication with the injustice
and oppression that endured despite them. For instance, Johnson writes that “many of the brave
Negroes who shed their blood and helped to win America's liberty from England were, as soon
as the [Revolutionary] war closed, put back into bondage. They were in the ‘Land of the free,’
but themselves slaves” (71). Johnson’s use of irony in passages like this belies his stated
intention in the book’s introduction to provide nothing more than a “fair, impartial
statement…without bias or prejudice” (5), although the bias he evinces is only the desire to hold
the United States accountable for its shameful record of profiting off the lives of African
Americans.
Johnson’s personal feelings likewise come through in the book’s discussion of slave
revolts, in which he celebrates Nat Turner as “undoubtedly a wonderful character” of “immense
courage” (89) and describes Madison Washington, the leader of a successful slave-ship mutiny,
as “brave” and “a magnanimous foe” (90). Although Johnson never explicitly calls for violent
protest against white oppressors, his endorsement of historical slave revolts in a textbook
intended for African American schoolchildren further indicates that the conservative passivity
we find in Light Ahead for the Negro was a function of his desire to appeal to white audiences.
These books emphasize bravery, sacrifice, intelligence, manliness. They are not openly
militant or aggressive, but they are also not concerned with flattering white readers with images
of white magnanimity or reassuring whites that black civil rights need not equal racial
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amalgamation and social equality. In contrast to Light Ahead for the Negro, these books are
explicitly addressed to African American readers, they are non-fictional, and they take place in
the past and present. They chart an African American tradition, although it is not exactly the
same tradition that Du Bois defines in Souls of Black Folk. As John Carlos Rowe points out, “Du
Bois carefully constructs African-American history in Souls to situate himself at the forefront of
a progressive development that virtually demands his intellectual leadership. Thus, he may claim
in the concluding chapter to give voice to the “half-articulate” message of his forebears under
slavery by making that message intelligible within the Western tradition” (224). Johnson, in
contrast, is less concerned with portraying African American history in terms of progressive
development and more invested in establishing that African Americans had been valuable,
patriotic contributors to American life since before the Revolution. Even more unlike Du Bois,
Johnson never positions himself as the intellectual leader of African American modernity,
preferring instead to aggrandize the great, and lesser-known, African American figures from
history and his own time as a way to stimulate the race-pride of his African American readers.
Only when he wants to reach a white readership does Johnson use fiction, and specifically the
very white-bread form of the future utopia.

A Future Fiction about the Present
Despite the novel’s title and its ostensibly future-oriented frame narrative, Light Ahead
for the Negro is deeply rooted in the conditions and problems of Johnson’s early twentieth
century present. This is one of the key features that differentiates Johnson’s novel from Looking
Backward, and one of the indications that the novel cannot be read simply as a (failed) attempt at
articulating an African American version of Bellamy’s famous utopia. Of course, the residents of
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Bellamy’s year 2000 do show some interest in Julian West’s recollections of his own time, even
making him a professor of history in order to legitimate his place in their new society. Overall,
though, Looking Backward is more concerned with West’s experience in the future than in his
commentary about the past. This makes the book’s title ironic: although West occasionally looks
backward at the late nineteenth century, he, Dr. Leete, Bellamy, and the reader are actually more
concerned with looking forward to the year 2000 and beyond. In fact, the denizens of the year
2000 are generally well informed about the conditions of life in West’s time and need relatively
little from West to complete their historical understanding. This fits with Bellamy’s notion of the
evolutionary progress of American society toward utopia. Since the utopian future had its seeds
in the chaotic world of Bellamy’s (and his protagonist West’s) present, and since the bright
future grew organically out of the very conditions that made the late nineteenth century so bad, it
is not surprising that the citizens of the future are well acquainted with life in West’s time. After
all, while their perfected society is vastly different from the society of West’s day, it is derived
from, and thus closely connected to the conditions of the late nineteenth century.
This is not the case in Light Ahead for the Negro, however. Although Johnson’s future is
more recognizably similar to his present than Bellamy’s, Johnson keeps the future recognizable
to early twentieth century readers so that the differences in the treatment of African Americans
will be unmistakable. This forces the (white) reader see that the primary difference between the
messy present and the obviously better future is the way that society treats blacks. Johnson
makes racism the only variable. Whereas much of Looking Backward is predicated on not-yet-
invented technology, an international order that can barely be imagined in his time, a socialist
economic system that upends present day capitalism, and an industrial army that constitutes a
drastic change in the way labor is understood, such changes in Johnson are hardly mentioned, if
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they exist at all. Instead, Johnson shows a future in which things look more or less like the
present, with the exception that African Americans are no longer subject to the social and
political oppression of Jim Crow racism.
Considering the extent to which Light Ahead for the Negro emphasizes the brutality and
racism of the Jim Crow era, the title of Johnson’s novel is ironic as well. Certainly, the book is
intended to point toward the better possibilities of a more egalitarian future. But as much as the
book does indicate a light ahead for the “negro,” it is just as, if not more, concerned with the
present moment. In fact, many of the so called flaws in Johnson’s future vision (e.g., that the
future is not different enough from the present, that his utopian imagination seems limited and
conservative) acquire strategic significance when viewed in this light. As I have already
mentioned, Johnson’s book is directed to a white audience, and specifically one that is at least
open to the idea of working toward greater racial equality. His preface makes this perfectly clear:
THE author dedicates this work to the thousands of sympathetic and well-wishing friends
of the Negro race. He is trying to show how the Negro problem can be solved in peace
and good will rather than by brutality. His idea is that the Golden Rule furnishes the only
solution…There are two factions striving for the mastery of the south to-day, one seeking
political power on the idea that Negro manhood is to be crushed and serfdom established,
and the other willing that the Negro should have a freeman's chance and work out his
destiny as best he can with the powers God has given him. This faction is ready to give
its sympathy and help, and it is the efforts of this class that the author desires to endorse
and encourage. (v-vi)
As the preface indicates, Johnson is concerned not only with addressing a sympathetic white
audience, but also with confronting the members of that audience with the reality of their racist
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counterparts. This latter group is targeted for criticism throughout the novel, often individually
by name, and the effect of this is both to ridicule its cruel and illogical arguments and to force
progressive white readers to differentiate themselves from those who would argue “that Negro
manhood is to be crushed and serfdom established.” Noting this appeal to sympathetic whites,
Fabi argues that the limited utopianism of the novel is intended to appeal to this group by
suggesting a future that is recognizably more egalitarian but not so radically different from
present society that it would frighten white readers. It is why Fabi calls the book a “feasible
utopia” and it is what she argues is the essence of the book’s purpose. What this ignores,
however, is the specter of the present that lingers throughout all of the novel’s descriptions of the
future, and, more importantly, the sharp criticism of the present that constitutes the majority of
the novel. The book’s title may be Light Ahead for the Negro, but Johnson’s true purpose is to
turn a spotlight back onto the injustices of his present moment.

Now and Then
By far the largest single portion of Jonson’s novel is a chapter entitled “Now and Then.”
Occupying 78 of the novel’s 132 pages, “Now and Then” embodies, in some ways, the standard
utopian technique of comparison via conversation, in which the traveler and his host discuss the
differences between their respective home worlds. In this case, time travelling Twitchell
converses with host Dr. Newell about the changes that the United States has undergone in the
hundred years since Twitchell began his abortive dirigible ride. Although there is some
discussion of general industry and economics, the focus of this exchange rests almost exclusively
on the resolution of the “Negro problem.” That is unsurprising, given the novel’s title and stated
intention. What is curious, though, is that the majority of this long section is concerned not with
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the state of affairs at the beginning of the twenty-first century (i.e., in utopia, where the “light
ahead” of the title lies) but in Twitchell’s own Jim Crow era.
The chapter begins with Twitchell explaining that as soon as he regained some of his
faculties in the year 2006 he was called upon by the Chief of the Bureau of Public utility to
“make a statement about the Negro problem in my time” (21). The statement is included in full
and occupies the next thirty three pages of the novel, complete with footnotes, some of which
include full newspaper articles and span several pages in their own right. Throughout the
statement we learn, in great detail, what Johnson’s priorities are, as certain elements of life for
African Americans in the early twentieth century are emphasized, while others are ignored.
Twitchell’s statements begins by noting that one of the chief differences between his time and
the future is the way that newspapers report on African Americans. “One of the most notable
instances to me,” he writes, “is the absence of slurs at individual Negroes and at the race as a
whole in your newspapers” (21). The next few pages of the statement describe numerous ways in
which newspapers in his day “assassinated” the “Negro character” in a deliberate effort to
“prejudice the race in the eyes of the world and thus enable white supremacy advocates, North
and South, to perfect the political annihilation of the Negro” (23).
Twitchell will return to newspapers several times throughout the paper, indicating that
the corrupt, racist state of early twentieth century journalism is one of the central targets of his
criticism. “The character of no individual,” Twitchell’s essay asserts, “and indeed no race, can
long endure in America when under persistent fire of its newspapers. Newspapers mould public
opinion” (22). Many of the problems for African Americans stem, the essay suggests, from
malicious newspaper reporting. The myth of black racial violence, for instance, was perpetuated
by news reports in which “fights between three white men and two Negroes were published,
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under glaring headlines, as 'Race Riots' (22). Newspapers, the novel suggests, were instruments
of manipulation, perpetuating stereotypes of African Americans in the minds of white readers.
But it was not only white readers whose attitudes and opinions were being controlled by
deceptive news reporting. The impulse among many African Americans to leave the south in
order to seek more equitable treatment in northern cities (as Johnson himself would do shortly
after writing Light Ahead for the Negro), the essay claims, was often thwarted by manipulative
newspaper stories that emphasized anti-black injustice in the North while celebrating acts of
goodwill toward blacks in the South. As proof, Twitchell (obviously standing in for Johnson)
supplies a lengthy footnote that consists of two full articles taken from the same issue of “a
Southern newspaper”: “Negro Torn From Jail by an Ohio Mob” and “A Negro Honored:
Colombus, Georgia Erects a Monument to a Heroic Laborer” (36-39).
Despite the novel’s emphasis on the role of newspapers in perpetuating the oppression of
African Americans in the early twentieth century, there is no corresponding discussion of future
news reporting. This is a good illustration of the fact that the novel is actually more a criticism of
the present than a projection of the future. Whereas Looking Backward tends to detail the future
with occasional comparative reference to the past, Johnson’s novel uses the future as little more
than a defamiliarizing device. Since it is taken for granted in the novel that future newspapers are
not guilty of the racist and deceptive practices of news outlets in Johnson’s own time (hence the
need to educate future Americans about the state of the news media in the early twentieth
century), Johnson is able to present present-day newspapers as artifacts of a more primitive time.
And since the novel’s target readers are clearly intended to identify with the enlightened future
Americans, they are forced to consider the news reports they encounter on a daily basis through
the eyes of people in the future to whom such reporting practices appear barbaric.
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In addition to newspapers, Twitchell’s statement takes on several other problems for
early twentieth century African Americans. One of these is employment for African Americans,
with Twitchell noting that even after receiving good educations, the only employment
opportunity open to many African Americans was teaching. The reason for this was that “in the
professions the white professional man was by habit and custom very generally employed by the
colored people, while the colored professional man, by the conventional laws of society, was
rarely or never employed by white people” (24-5). This state of affairs, the essay asserts, allowed
whites a great deal of control over educated African Americans. Schools, especially those in the
South, served the purpose of “quieting many a Negro who might otherwise have been disposed
to talk too much” (24) because, as a footnote explains, “the white supremacy people
accomplished this by employing them as teachers. If they continued to talk too much, they lost
their jobs” (24).
Throughout the remainder of Twitchell’s essay, as well as two additional papers that are
included in the novel (both of which are clearly written by Johnson, although they are presented
as histories from Twitchell’s time), the novel continues its critique of early twentieth century
racial politics. Along with the condemnation of the manipulative newspaper industry, Johnson
spends a significant amount of time discussing lynching, the disfranchisement of African
Americans, and the various wrongheaded solutions to the “negro problem” propounded by
(usually white) speakers, writers, and politicians. In each of these instances, Johnson employs an
acerbic tone that belies the seemingly meek, accommodationist position he adopts when
describing the future. To emphasize the savagery of lynching, for instance, he describes that
the method of lynching Negroes was usually by hanging or by burning at the stake,
sometimes in the presence of thousands of people, who came in on excursion trains to see
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the sight, and, possibly, carry off a trophy consisting of a finger joint, a tooth or a portion
of the victim's heart. If the lynching was for a crime committed against a woman, and she
could be secured, she was consigned to the task of starting the flames with her own
hands. This was supposed to add to the novelty of the occasion (42).
This description is another clear example of the future being used as a defamiliarizing device.
Under the pretense of describing an unknown practice to an enlightened future audience, Johnson
shows his present-day readers a familiar act in such a way that it becomes impossible to deny its
barbarity or the perversion necessary to not only condone it but to treat it as spectacle. If the
description alone is not enough, moreover, Johnson includes in a footnote a speech from Booker
T. Washington entitled “Burning of Negroes,” in which Washington accusingly notes that
within the last fortnight three members of my race have been burned at the stake; of these
one was a woman. Not one of the three was charged with any crime even remotely
connected with the abuse of a white woman. In every case murder was the sole
accusation. All of these burnings took place in broad daylight, and two of them occurred
on Sunday afternoon in sight of a Christian church. (42-3)
Here, Johnson uses Washington both for authority (since Washington was an extremely well-
known and respected figure) and for an African American voice (since throughout the novel
Johnson speaks through Twitchell, a white man). With the phrase “of my race,” Washington
provides a personal reference point for the issue of lynching for Johnson’s sympathetic white
readers, removing it from the abstract and grounding it in the experiences of a known and
admired figure. Washington also supplements Johnson’s description of lynching with
unmistakable evidence of the practice’s lawlessness when he notes that there was no formal
accusation or trial for any of the victims. Finally, by emphasizing the fact that one of the
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lynching victims was a woman, Washington plays upon the readers’ paternalistic sense of
chivalry and thus attempts to increase the feeling of moral outrage.
Johhnson’s critical tone is even harsher in his discussion of disfranchisement. This occurs
in the novel’s second included paper. After Twitchell has delivered his report on the race
problem in the early twentieth century, Dr. Newell offers him an article from an old book
(published in 1902 and republished in 1950). The article is harshly critical of the “white
supremacy advocates” who wish to deprive African Americans of their constitutional rights, and
one of its central strategies is to ridicule these white supremacists’ fear of black voting. “The
Southern states,” the article declares, “seem to live in mortal fear of the Negro with a ballot”
(60). The article goes on to show that such fears are driven by desire for political office and are
unfounded, since whites had never failed to win the vast majority of elections in the South, even
when African Americans were able to vote. The implication, then, is that the white supremacy
advocates in the South are both greedy and cowardly. Johnson then amplifies this by explaining
how the Ku Klux Klan terrorized black voters and how lawmakers circumvented the 15
th

Amendment with legal frauds like grandfather clauses. Summing up, Johnson writes in a
footnote that
the Negro, being held up as a terrible hobgoblin to political white folks, it was necessary
to destroy his citizenship; which was accomplished by wily and cruel means. About one
and a half million citizens were disfranchised and yet we have a paradox. This vast mass
of manhood is represented in Congress in what way? By arbitrarily nullifying the
constitution of the Nation. It was the boast in 1861 that one Southern man could whip ten
Yankees. May not this same class of Southern politicians now proudly and truly boast
that one Southern vote is equal to ten Yankee votes?
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This passage, which, more than elsewhere sounds like Johnson rather than Twitchell or an
anonymous essay writer, succinctly captures many of Johnson’s criticisms on this topic: it
ridicules white fear, denounces efforts toward disfranchisement, and asserts African American
citizenship. It also reminds northern readers that one consequence of African American
disfranchisement in the South is that the voting power, and thus congressional representation, in
Southern states concentrates in the hands of the same whites who had seceded barely a
generation before.
The essay on “Reconstruction and Negro Government” also includes a list of white
leaders who were responsible for the political leadership of the reconstruction. The purpose of
this is to counter the claim that African Americans were responsible for the failure of
reconstruction, but it also serves to hold specific white political figures responsible for the
injustices done to blacks. Elsewhere in the novel, Johnson is even more pointed in his criticism
of white individuals. In Twitchell’s essay on the race problem, for instance, he notes that “many
a mediocre white man who thirsted for a little newspaper notoriety, or political preferment, in
both the North and the South, had his appetite in this direction satisfied by writing or saying
something on the negro question” (28-9). He then goes on to mention Thomas Dixon, whom he
says “tried to out Herod Herod in taking up the exceptional cases of Negro criminality and using
them in an attempt to convince his readers of the Negro’s unfitness for citizenship” (29), as well
as John Temple Graves, about whose advocacy of African American deportation and whose
opposition to African American education Twitchell declares: “all honest white people must
regard [them] as a base slander on their Christianity” (33). The naming of individual names is
one of Johnson’s most confrontational strategies, and it, again, shows how Johnson’s book uses
the future, rather than being about the future. This technique of assigning blame to the present-
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day perpetrators of injustice from the vantage point of the future thus places Johnson within the
satirical utopian tradition of Thomas More and Jonathan Swift, a tradition that far predates
Bellamy’s more earnest, future-oriented utopianism. The fact that Johnson’s critics fail to
acknowledge his satirical use of the future to criticize the present, insisting only that the book
provides a timid or inadequate vision of the future while ignoring its trenchant critique of
Johnson’s contemporary moment, confirms that the book is being misread.
Although as I have shown, Johnson is often very sharp in his criticism of the present day,
he is also engaged in a balancing act, choosing at times to back off of or soften potentially
contentious criticisms so as not to risk alienating his audience. One such moment is when, on the
subject of lynching, he states that “This evil custom, for a while, seemed to threaten the whole
nation. While Negroes were the most common victims, yet the fever spread like a contagion to
the lynching of white criminals as well” (41). Here, by including whites as victims of lynching
and by describing the practice as a contagion, Johnson moderates his criticism of the practice as
exclusively racist. His strategy is clear: since he is addressing white readers he wants to force
them to identify with lynching victims. White readers, he seems to calculate, would more likely
be invested in stopping lynching if they were confronted with the possibility of whites being
lynched. The price of this strategic choice, however, is that it waters down his critique of
lynching by reclassifying it as a problem of general lawlessness rather than a symptom of brutal,
systematic racial terrorism. A similar example occurs in the essay on reconstruction. After
attempting to disprove the charges that African Americans were responsible for reconstruction’s
failure, Johnson blandly states that “the evils of reconstruction were due to the general
demoralization which followed the Civil War, rather than to the Negro. War is ‘hell’ and so is its
aftermath” (61). Clearly, the purpose of this statement is to exonerate African Americans for the
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problems with reconstruction, but to accomplish this, Johnson also lets whites off the hook.
While elsewhere in this essay he is critical of cowardly white supremacy advocates and the
measures they took to oppress and disfranchise African Americans during reconstruction, here he
declines to assign any responsibility, relying on the clichéd notion that war is hell and the
apolitical assumption that its aftermath will always be messy. Although both of these instances
are disappointing to modern readers who hope the read the novel as an assertive African
American utopia, both clearly reinforce the notion that the book is in fact a measured and
calculated critique of the present day, one whose explicit purpose is to enlist the support of
sympathetic, progressive white readers.

So what about when the novel does talk about the future?
Although the novel is, as I have argued, primarily concerned with criticizing the state of
affairs at the beginning of the twentieth century (i.e., Johnson’s present moment), and with
suggesting to sympathetic white readers what steps might be taken in the near term to improve
conditions for African Americans, there is of course some description of what life in the future
holds for Americans and particularly for black Americans. It is these moments, however, that
have presented so many problems for readers who attempt to read the novel as a true black
utopia. This is because the attitude of progressiveness we see being expressed by the white
characters in the novel is frequently accompanied by an air of condescension.
Early in the novel, shortly after Twitchell has awakened from his century-long slumber,
we learn that the future United States (and, in particular, the future U.S. South) is no longer
characterized by racism and the oppression of African Americans. This does not mean, however,
that notions of racial difference have disappeared, or that the future is fully equal and integrated.
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Instead, twenty-first century Southern whites view African Americans with condescending, if
well-intentioned, interest. “All Southerners,” Irene tells Twitchell,
are interested in [the race question]. I am a teacher in a Sunday School for Negro children
and a member of a Young Ladies Guild which was organized expressly for reaching
Negro children that may need help. We visit the families and talk with the parents,
impress on them ideas of economy, direct them in caring for the sick, and instruct them in
the most scientific methods of sanitation. I am really fond of these people and the
happiest moments of my life are spent with them. They are of a different temperament
from us, so mild and good natured, so complacent and happy in their religious worship
and their music is simply enchanting!” (15)
Here, as elsewhere in the novel, Johnson’s depiction of future life in the American South
suggests an improvement over the conditions of the early twentieth century, but clearly
paternalism defines the relations between whites and African Americans. Blacks are no longer
objects of fear to whites, nor scapegoats for crime and vice. Instead, they are “mild and good
natured,” “complacent and happy,” more in need of instruction in hygiene than of discipline or
oppression.
Another issue that critics have with the novel’s depiction of the future is the extent to
which its model for African American success appears to draw more from the docile, apolitical,
agricultural approach of Booker T. Washington than from a more assertive one like that of Du
Bois. In fact, Johnson was an admirer of Washington. Not only is Washington mentioned
approvingly in the book, but a speech of his is included in its entirety (42-44). Johnson even
wrote to Washington in 1905 to discuss Johnson’s desire to start a newspaper that would be “pro-
Booker Washington in policy” (Booker T. Washington Papers 407). An example of
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Washington’s influence on the novel comes in a late chapter, when Twitchell rides with Irene to
Chattahoochee farm, which he finds to be “a paying institution entirely under the management of
Negroes. The superintendent was a graduate from the State Agricultural College for Negroes,
near Savannah” (108-9). Twitchell is impressed and shortly learns that “a majority of the
landowners of the state had found it profitable to turn vast tracts of land over to these young
Negro graduates, who were proving themselves adepts in the art of scientific farming, making
excellent salaries, and returning good dividends on the investments” (109). Relations between
rural African Americans and landowning whites are thus harmonious in the future not so much
because Southern whites realize the basic humanity of African American people, but because
these whites have come to appreciate the value of black workers with industrial education. This
is reminiscent of some of Washington’s positions, such as the idea expressed in Up From Slavery
that “I believe that my race will succeed in proportion as it learns to do a common thing in an
uncommon manner; learns to do a thing so thoroughly that no one can improve upon what it has
done; learns to make its services of indispensable value” (280-81). Of course, Washington also
argued that land ownership and the acquisition of wealth would be essential for African
American efforts to improve their position in American life. Thus, the fact that Johnson’s
workers remain employees in the future while wealthy whites continue to own the land and profit
off of black labor suggests that Johnson was even more conservative than Washington. However,
given that Johnson was himself a successful business owner (Ingham 157), and that Johnson
published an essay on the importance of African Americans owning businesses, it is more likely
that this apparent conservatism is actually yet another instance of Johnson moderating his
message to appeal to white readers. Interestingly, Mark Bauerlein argues that at least some of
Booker T. Washingtons’s conservatism should be read the same way. According the Bauerlein,
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“to cast Washington as a post-Reconstruction Uncle Tom toadying to wealthy whites and
checking rival blacks is to ignore two contexts: first, the complex, heated circumstances in which
Washington moved; and second, the many activist efforts Washington fostered on the sly.” In
Johnson’s case, this strategic conservatism is intended to reassure white readers that African
American education will not lead to greatly increased land ownership and economic power,
despite Johnson’s own life as evidence to the contrary. Instead, it will benefit both races by
making blacks more self-sufficient and by providing white land owners with more productive
and profitable labor.
Not all of the novel’s depictions of the future are conservative, however, even when they
appear to invoke Washington’s ideas. In a rather curious scene late in the book, Twitchell is
discussing issues of labor with Dr. Newell at the his place of business. The Doctor gets called out
of the room, and while he’s gone, his African American secretary enters to type a letter.
Twitchell is astounded to see a black man in such an occupation, only to learn from this secretary
that it is now common for “Southern white men of large affairs to employ Negroes for higher
positions in their offices, counting rooms and stores” (79). Twitchell furthermore learns from this
young man, that there is no question of social equality, or even social relation, inherent in such
an arrangement—“he simply wanted to do his work faithfully and neither expected nor asked to
sit by his employer’s fireside” (79). The secretary even tells Twitchell that this arrangement, this
mutually agreed upon theory, is what has allowed the two races to remain “pure” and to
“preserve the best traits of each.” On the surface, there is nothing subversive about this scene.
Rather, it seems to be the most accomodationist and conservative moment in the book. Except,
when the young man first enters the room, he is very specifically described as “a Negro; not full
black but mixed blood—in color between an Indian and a Chinaman.” Obviously, in light of
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this, the ensuing claims of voluntary separation and racial purity seem absurd. What appears at
first to be a statement of appeasement, a gesture intended to assuage white fears of
“ammalgamation,” is in fact a covert way of ridiculing those very fears.
Precedent for this kind of ridicule can be found in Charles Chesnutt’s essay “The Future
American: What the Race is Likely to Become in the Process of Time.” In the essay, Chesnutt
criticizes the “popular theory” among white writers that the American race of the future “will
consist of a harmonious fusion of the various European elements which now make up our
heterogeneous population” (121). Chesnutt finds several flaws with this theory, the first of which
being that it requires “some alchemy” to preserve only the desirable traits, while eliminating the
undesirable. The even more significant issue, according to Chesnutt, is that white racial purity is
impossible, both because the very notion of a pure Aryan race has been scientifically debunked
and because the sheer number of people of color in America make racial mixing inevitable.
Chesnutt even suggests that the forced mixing of whites and African Americans would solve
problems of racial inequality because “there would be no inferior race to domineer over; there
would be no superior race to oppress those who differed from them in racial externals” (125),
although he acknowledges that such a “mechanical mixture” would never happen. Instead, he
concludes the essay with the claim that the same result will be achieved naturally over the course
of many generations.
Written just four years before Johnson’s novel, Chesnutt’s vision of the future Americans
provides an interesting context for Johnson’s mixed-race office worker. At the most basic level,
it shows that these African American authors both clearly see racial mixing in the future as both
inevitable and benign (even desirable, in the case of Chesnutt). It also highlights the difference in
purpose for which the two authors wrote. For Chesnutt, who published the essay in the Boston
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Evening Transcript, the stated intent was to call attention to the fallacious Eurocentric theories of
racial amalgamation and to “explode” “some old theories of race” (125). For Johnson, on the
other hand, the novel’s purpose is both to show sympathetic white readers a non-threatening
image of a more egalitarian future and, more importantly, to use the vantage point of the future
to criticize the present. Johnson’s use of the mixed-race character, therefore, functions like a
satirical version of Bellamy’s assurance that improved conditions for African Americans in the
future need not infringe upon white hegemony.

Conclusion
Johnson’s novel is curious in part because of the position it, and its author, occupies
along the spectrum of African American activism represented on one end by Booker T.
Washington and on the other by W.E.B. Du Bois. As I have mentioned, Johnson was known to
both Washington and Du Bois, although there is no evidence that he was personally acquainted
with either of them. Johnson’s writings do not indicate a complete identification with either
Washington’s or Du Bois’s positions, although some evidence exists to suggest that he was
philosophically closer to Washington. This can be seen in the fact that he quotes Washington at
length in Light Ahead for the Negro and in letters he wrote to Washington expressing a desire to
start a journal that endorsed Washington’s ideas. It is also suggested by the assurances in Light
Ahead for the Negro that African American advancement need not lead to social equality
between blacks and whites, which virtually references Washington’s declaration that "in all
things that are purely social we can be as separate as the fingers, yet one as the hand in all things
essential to mutual progress" in the famous Atlanta Compromise speech (Washington 100). Yet
Johnson the man seems to embody Du Bois’s notion of the “talented tenth,” and his lengthy
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career in higher education, law, and politics sharply contrasts with Washington’s beliefs that
African Americans should eschew political office and that the path to African American
empowerment lay in industrial and agricultural, rather than liberal arts, education. More
importantly, Johnson’s harsh criticism of racial injustice in Light Ahead for the Negro, including
his willingness to assign blame to whites for the violence and oppression inherent in Jim Crow
America, places him closer to Du Bois than Washington. In Souls of Black Folk, Du Bois writes
that “Washington apologizes for injustice, North or South, does not rightly value the privilege
and duty of voting, belittles the emasculating effects of caste distinction and opposes the higher
training and ambition of our brighter minds” (Du Bois 50). As my reading of Light Ahead for the
Negro has shown, Johnson does none of these things. This may explain why, despite the novel’s
frustratingly modest vision of the future and its open appeal to sympathetic white Americans as
the key to ending radial discrimination, Du Bois spoke approvingly of the book.
It is also strange because of its use of the far-future utopian genre. Although I have
argued that Light Ahead for the Negro is really a novel about the present, a book that only
appears to be a utopian future fiction, it is undeniable that the book does employ that utopian
form. We are still left, then, with the fact that Johnson’s novel is the only known example of a
turn of the century African American-authored future utopia in the Bellamy mode. This is
surprising since, as we saw in the last chapter, the future utopia became a staple of American
literature (or at least American writing—many of these novels were pulpy and not very literary)
in the decades following the publication of Looking Backward. Why didn’t more African
Americans participate in this genre? Of course, the answer is not that black writers were not
thinking of the future or that they lacked a utopian impulse which, as Ernst Bloch describes it,
does not need to manifest in the form of a future fiction but can be detected in seemingly
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realistic, present-oriented writings as well. Slave revolts, spirituals, activism/protest toward Jim
Crow, speeches, discussions of whether or not to emigrate to the North or to Liberia, etc. all
indicate both a capacity to imagine a better future and a desire to work toward it. One of Booker
T. Washington’s most important books is called Future of the American Negro. Charles Chesnutt
wrote several essays over a span of nearly forty years that considered what lay ahead for African
Americans, including: “The Future of the Negro” (1882), “The Future American: What the Race
is Likely to Become in the Process of Time” (1900), “The Future American: A Stream of Dark
Blood in the Veins of Southern Whites” (1900), and “A Solution for the Race Problem” (1916),
which ends with the line “the progress of the last fifty years makes the future brilliant with
promise” (400).
Reilly argues that African Americans’ experience of slavery and oppression in America
left them with no precedent for truly utopian thinking. William Nichols and Charles P. Henry
similarly suggest that “the utopian imagination may well require a sense of open space, a land
base; and that requirement has never seemed a genuine likelihood to black American writers”
(43). I think the better theory to explain why there were so few examples of Bellamy-esque
future utopias by African -American writers is that a) the future-utopia genre was not hospitable
to African American writers (after all, it was characterized, from Looking Backward onward by
the absence of racialized peoples at best or by the continued oppression, segregation, and
scapegoating of blacks, Chinese, “backward races,” and others at worst), and b) the most
prominent African American thinkers were much more concerned with their much more
immediate future. Long term utopian thinking was a luxury that writers like Bellamy could
afford. Privileged, well-educated, middle-class Anglo-American writers like Bellamy could
afford to look to a time in the distant future when the problems of the present had been worked
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out, when the natural course of evolutionary change (as Bellamy envisioned it) had led the
United States away from the injustices of capitalism and toward a utopian society ordered around
a cooperative economy. However, for people dealing, on a daily basis, with the threat of
dispossession or lynching, with the realities of segregation and disfranchisement, and with the
injustices of discrimination in employment, public service, incarceration, and education,
fantasies of a harmonious world in the distant future may have seemed idle and unproductive.
Thus, when Booker T. Washington discussed the future for African Americans he did not jump
ahead a century or more and paint a picture of utopian black life in America. Instead, he argued
that African Americans in the present moment should take tangible steps to improve their lives
by obtaining industrial or agricultural education so that they could secure long-term employment
and acquire property, thus paving the way for a more secure future for their children. Likewise,
although he did write speculative fictions like Dark Princess and “The Comet,” W.E.B. Du Bois
did not concern himself with possible technologies and lifestyles that might exist in the twenty
first century, but instead argued powerfully that the most talented and promising members of the
race in the present day must fight for access to higher education and political office, so that they
could lead a process of African American uplift that would benefit the race in the present and in
the generations to come. In both of these cases, the future is obviously at issue, but it is the near
future, the future that abuts the present, that matters, not the century-distant future of Bellamy
and his followers.
In light of this, Johnson’s novel seems even more curious. If African American writers
and activists were more concerned with pragmatic interventions to improve the near future, why
did he, a man who was deeply committed to improving the conditions of life and citizenship for
African Americans through law, politics, and education, write a distant-future utopia after the
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fashion of Looking Backward? If we continue to view Johnson’s novel in this light, this question
becomes impossible to answer. Reading the novel as a genuine future-utopia, a black Looking
Backward, as all Johnson critics up to this point have done, we are left with little choice: we can
label it a failure, we can almost apologetically call it a feasible utopia, or we ignore the book’s
actual content and include it in prehistories of African American science fiction, valuing it
because it exists but not because of what it says. None of these, however, understand the book on
its own terms. Light Ahead for the Negro is not a future-utopia, not a black Looking Backward. It
is an attempt by an African American scholar-lawyer-businessman-politician-historian-activist to
offer a trenchant critique of his own Jim Crow era. It uses the future to do this, but we should not
take that to mean that it is about the future. We may not approve of the conservatism it evinces in
its discussion of the future or its willingness to pander to its contemporary white readers, but we
should try to understand why it does these things and at times we should look through them to
the sharp criticism that lies beneath.

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CHAPTER THREE

Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Authoritarian Feminism

Our Past we cannot help. Our Present slips from us in the making. Only the Future can be
molded.
– Charlotte Perkins Gilman, “What May We Expect of Eugenics” – 1914

Between the years 1911 and 1916, Charlotte Perkins Gilman published a trilogy of
utopian novels serially in her journal, The Forerunner. Although each of these novels is written
in a different form and for a specific purpose, only the middle book, Herland, has received
significant critical attention, and that only after more than six decades of neglect. “Rediscovered”
and published for the first time as a single volume in 1979, Herland became an inspiration for
second-wave feminist critics who valued its satiric wit, its woman-centric ethos, and its portrayal
of harmonious relations between women and nature. This chapter, however, is not about
Herland, or its sequel With Her in Ourland, but about the much less popular and more
problematic first novel in the series, Moving the Mountain (1911). Whereas Herland helped
establish Gilman as a utopian foremother of American feminism, Moving the Mountain tends to
be ignored by Gilman critics, especially those most enamored of the later novel.
Moving the Mountain is a Bellamy-esque future utopia that shows a fairly realistic,
achievable utopian future. The book begins in Tibet, where an American man is greeted by his
sister after thirty years apart. The man, John Robertson, has no recollection of his time in Tibet,
having wandered from his traveling party in a fugue state and been taken in by benevolent
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Tibetans. Being returned to consciousness is jarring for Robertson, who describes that “when one
loses his mind, as it were, for thirty years, and finds it again; when one wakes up; comes to life;
recognizes oneself an American citizen twenty-five years old -- No. This is what I find it so hard
to realize. I am not twenty-five; I am fifty-five” (38). This is not nearly as jarring, however, as
the society he finds when he returns with Nellie to the United States. In just thirty years,
American has transformed into a post-socialist utopia in which women enjoy legal and social
equality with men.
Like Looking Backward and Light Ahead for the Negro, Moving the Mountain imagines a
utopian future in which one fundamental change has occurred (in this case women’s equality,
along with socialism) that has brought about myriad other changes. I believe that this accounts
for much of the critical neglect of this book in comparison with Herland—it is far less ambitions
and far more recognizably derivative than Herland. It is also less satisfying as a feminist call to
arms. Since it is largely a Looking Backward re-vision, it is inextricably linked to a male-
authored novel that was part of a patriarchal utopian tradition, only with women substituted as
the central beneficiaries of the changes that have occurred between the present and the future. It
is, of course, hopeful, positive, optimistic, and pro-woman, but its narrow scope and its
connection to the patriarchal utopian tradition limit its capacity for feminist inspiration. Herland,
on the other hand, appears far more radical, although as Gould, Rudd, and Ferns point out, it is
still, in many ways stuck in a patriarchal mindset. Just as Moving the Mountain is derivative of
Looking Backward, Herland draws upon the even earlier, and still quite patriarchal, tradition of
travel narrative utopias like Thomas More’s Utopia. It is also reminiscent of Gulliver’s Travels
(as Ferns points out, citing Elizabeth Keyser’s “Looking Backward: From Herland to Gulliver’s
Travels” [Kerns 30]). Keyser’s comparison is apt. Gulliver’s Travels is unquestionably a work of
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satire, meaning that the travel narratives within it are not intended to show possibilities for better
ways of organizing/operation a society, but are instead ways of facilitating criticism of Swift’s
own society. As Ferns notes, Herland tends to work in this way as well (as does More, who,
Ferns points out, “devotes nearly half of Utopia to an attack on the abuses and corruption of his
own society” [30]), although it is not merely a satire. In this way, it departs significantly from
Looking Backward and Moving the Mountain, and is, in many ways, more satisfying than both.
Although critics rarely discuss Moving the Mountain (at least rarely in comparison to the
amount of attention Herland receives), when they do they often regard it as little more than a
precursor to Herland. Frequently citing Gilman’s own assessment of the novel as a “baby
utopia,” these critics tend to see Moving the Mountain as an early step in Gilman’s utopian
theorizing, with Herland representing the more fully realized utopian vision. While this may be
true to a degree, it is worth considering the ways in which Moving the Mountain really is a
different project from Herland. This is especially true if we are concerned with understanding
how Gilman envisioned America’s future, and particularly the future of gender and citizenship in
America. Herland may be the more fully realized novel; it may be wittier, more original, more
complete. It may be more satisfying from a feminist point of view. But it is not directly about the
future and it certainly is not an image of what is achievable. Herland is a combination of thought
experiment (what would society be like if women were the ones to fashion it instead of men?
What would a world without men and their violence and competitiveness look like?) and
Swiftian satire. Moving the Mountain, on the other hand, is what Carol Fairley Kessler calls a
“pragmatopia” (Kessler 7-8), an ostensibly realistic vision of what could lay in store—if only.
The fact that Moving the Mountain is a pragmatopia is largely why I am examining it in
this chapter instead of its better-known and more celebrated successor. By looking closely at the
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vision of the supposedly achievable near future that Gilman depicts in Moving the Mountain, we
can gain greater insight into her specific desires for the future of American society. In its
pragmatism, as was the case with Johnson’s “feasible utopia” in the previous chapter, we can
also see some of the limitations of the utopian form for writers from oppressed groups. By
examining the aspects of Moving the Mountain that have made it less popular with Gilman
critics, especially its reliance on eugenics in creating a superior future population, its dismissive
treatment of immigrants and people of color, and its coldly heavy-handed methods of social
control, we see that these attributes are not unfortunate shortcomings in this novel but essential
elements of Gilman’s theory of utopian feminism, a theory that was first outlined in Women and
Economics and expanded in the racist paternalism of essays like “A Suggestion on the Negro
Problem.” This novel, moreover, complicates the familiar claim that the early American utopian
novel was a racist, patriarchal genre by showing that woman-authored feminist utopias, often
held up as progressive alternatives to the male-authored status quo, were likewise susceptible to
the problematic evolutionary and eugenic theories that dominated utopian discourse around the
turn of the twentieth century.
I will begin with a review of relevant Gilman criticism, both with regard to her
utopianism, her racial and eugenics politics, and this novel in particular. Then I will move into
my reading of the novel, first by discussing Gilman’s idiosyncratic evolutionary and utopian
theories and then by looking at the nature of her utopian future with particular emphasis on the
people of the future, including the presence and treatment of racialized peoples. Finally, I will
discuss how the novel is not merely feminist, but authoritarian feminist, by which I mean that
imagined future state has all the characteristics of an authoritarian regime, but apparently without
the regime. Instead, I will show, Gilman substitutes “the women,” collectively, as the power-
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weilding authority and depicts a society in which women’s liberation is accompanied by
extensive social engineering on the part of women who think and act as a unified, almost hive-
minded bloc.

Gilman Criticism, or Letting Charlotte off the Hook
Although there has been relatively little critical attention paid to Moving the Mountain by
Gilman critics, it is worth spending a moment to review the critical responses to the novel
because my own argument is, at least in part, concerned with the question of why this novel is
neglected in favor of Herland when discussing Gilman’s utopianism. If Charlotte Perkins
Gilman’s work has had a unique and interesting publication history, it has had an even more
singular history of critical reception. Many critics, for instance, feel a very personal connection
with Gilman, often much more so than we see with criticism of other authors. Polly Wynn Allen,
for instance, in the Preface to Building Domestic Liberty: Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s
Architectural Feminism, states that “I have been personally rewarded by becoming well
acquainted with Charlotte Perkins Gilman. She died just fourteen months before I was born, and
I have a strong sense of being able almost to touch her historically” (vii). This sentiment seems
to be shared by a number of Gilman critics, especially those writing about her work in the period
shortly after its major revival in the 1970s.
7
Many critics feel so connected to Gilman that they
refer to her by her first name throughout their work, instead of the conventional last name.
Perhaps the most prominent of these is early Gilman biographer Ann J. Lane, who refers to
Gilman as “Charlotte” in her biography, To Herland and Beyond: The Life and Work of
Charlotte Perkins Gilman, as well as in her introduction to the 1979 edition of Herland, and her

7
Consider, for example, the title of Ann J. Lane’s essay: “What My Therapist, My Daughter, and Charlotte Taught
Me While I was Writing the Biography of Charlotte Perkins Gilman.”
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chapter “What My Therapist, My Daughter, and Charlotte Taught Me While I Was Writing the
Biography of Charlotte Perkins Gilman,” in The Mixed Legacy of Charlotte Perkins Gilman.
Elaine Showalter likewise refers to Gilman as “Charlotte,” in Inventing Herself: Claiming a
Feminist Intellectual Heritage. And, lest it be supposed that this was merely an artifact of
Gilman’s rediscovery in the 1970’s that has gone away with time, Cynthia Davis refers to
Gilman by her first name throughout her 2010 biography, Charlotte Perkins Gilman: A
Biography.
This feeling of personal connection has tended to make some critics excessively forgiving
of Gilman’s less savory ideas, especially with regard to race, nationalism, and eugenics, a fact
that makes Herland much easier to celebrate and relegates Moving the Mountain to the status of
a minor work, unworthy of much discussion. Lane, in particular, goes to great lengths to point
out that the racist views expressed in Gilman’s writing were quite mainstream during Gilman’s
time and that Gilman’s indulgence in such views, although disappointing to modern readers,
should not tarnish her reputation of feminist activism. This is a remarkably common attitude in
Gilman criticism, with several critics actually citing Lane’s argument in the course of their own
Gilman apologetics. The obvious problem with this line of thinking, however, is that the same
argument could be used to justify or excuse contemptible racial attitudes in any work from the
past (one wonders if Lane et al. would apply this logic to the writings of Thomas Dixon).
Moreover, the rationale that a writer’s racism is an unfortunate but excusable function of their
historical moment could just as easily apply to historic sexism. Judith A. Allen subscribes to this
interpretation of Gilman’s problematic take on race and class, although she claims that both the
critics who love Gilman “unreservedly” and those third wave critics who denounce her for
classism and racism “stand in need of some correction,” because they both indulge in
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“presentism,” defined as “a mode of analysis in which present-day ideas and perspectives are
anachronistically introduced into depictions or interpretations of the past” (331).
Other sympathetic critics minimize Gilman’s racism by noting that such attitudes exist in
Gilman’s writing, but then immediately following these acknowledgments with examples from
Gilman’s writings that seem to condemn racial bigotry. Mina Doskow, for instance, in her essay
“Charlotte Perkins Gilman: The Female Face of Social Darwinism,” mentions Gilman’s
“problematic views of race, religion, and nationalism,” but then immediately counters this notion
with a list of examples of Gilman’s disgust with American racial and ethnic injustice:
Recognizing the historical iniquities of racial and ethnic oppression, she condemned the
"glaring evil" (WE 78) of slavery in America and its lasting deleterious effects in race
prejudice … She equally condemned the "hideous injustice of Christianity to the Jews"
(WE 78) and the limitation of Jews to commercial activity "under the social power of a
united Christendom—united at least in this unchristian deed" (4). She characterized the
destruction of Native Americans and their culture as "one of our national shames"
("WHiO," 7 [Apr. 1916]: 105) and presented a scathing picture of the dispossession and
exploitation of Hawaiians "approaching extermination" by missionaries turned
imperialists (107). In addition, she recognized the limitations of ethnocentrism: "each
racial stock, assuming itself to be 'the norm' by which to measure others.” (“The Female
Face”)
For Doskow, Gilman’s “problematic” attitudes about race and nationalism are mitigated, though
not excused entirely, by her record of decrying injustice elsewhere in her writings.
Doskow also makes the claim, common among sympathetic Gilman critics, that Gilman’s
“later writing is less optimistic and more exclusionary” (“The Female Face”) than her earlier
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work, with the strong implication that the racism in Gilman’s thought is an unfortunate effect of
advancing age and not indicative of Gilman in her prime. As I will show in my reading of
Moving the Mountain, however, this is not the case. And one need not rely on a close reading of
this early utopian novel to see that racism was an important component of Gilman’s philosophy
throughout her career. For instance, her first major work, Women and Economics, consistently
invokes non-white, non-American peoples as contrasts to the level of civilization achieved by
white Americans, most commonly referring to such peoples as “savages.” Even more clearly, in
1908, Gilman wrote published an essay in the American Journal of Sociology entitled “A
Suggestion on the Negro Problem,” which called for the conscription of all African Americans
“below a certain grade of citizenship” into a pseudo-military service designed to promote their
evolution into decent citizens while providing the side benefit of their agricultural and industrial
labor. This scheme, she believes, would solve the “negro problem,” which she describes thus:
“we have to consider the unavoidable presence of a large body of aliens, of a race widely
dissimilar and in many respects inferior, whose present status is to us a social injury. If we had
left them alone in their own country, this dissimilarity and inferiority would be, so to speak, none
of our business” (78).
Although early Gilman scholars tended to turn a blind eye to her racist, eugenic, and
nationalist views, more recent critics have noted Gilman’s racism and its role in her feminism.
Judith A. Allen provides an excellent summary of the state of Gilman scholarship, which she
calls “Gilmania today,” and notes that recent critics from a number of fields often “find [Gilman]
almost criminally negligent on issues of class and, most notably, race and ethnicity” (328). As
good examples of such critics, Allen mentions Tracey Fessenden, Bernice Hausman, Susan
Lanser, Louise Newman, Thomas Peyser, and Alys Eve Weinbaum. According to Allen, Gail
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Bederman was the first to insist that Gilman’s feminism was thoroughly racist and that the
feminism and racism were inseparable in her work and worldview. As Bederman puts it,
“Gilman’s contributions as a feminist foremother have been widely acknowledged, but historians
have not recognized that her work was firmly based on the raced and gendered discourse of
civilization and, as such, was at its very base racist” (Bederman 122). Moreover, Bederman
makes the same observation that I discussed above, that “one problematic result [of historians’
failure to recognize the racism at the core of Gilman’s philosophy] has been that scholars have
seen Gilman’s blatant racism as merely an unfortunate lacuna in an otherwise liberal philosophy.
Although they find her racism surprisingly inconsistent with her sexual egalitarianism, Gilman
herself would have seen no inconsistency. Her feminism was inextricably rooted in the white
supremacy of ‘civilization’” (122).
When it comes to Moving the Mountain, most critical analyses are short and amount to
little more than mentions within longer works on Gilman’s feminism and utopianism. Polly
Wynn Allen, for instance, talks briefly about the novel in her book Building Domestic Liberty:
Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Architectural Feminism. Much of Allen’s discussion of the novel is
plot summary, describing the aspects of the utopian future that pertain to urban space and the
daily lives of inhabitants, such as living and eating arrangements. Because Allen is almost
exclusively focused on the architectural and urban planning aspects of Gilman’s utopia, she
doesn’t address the racial, eugenic, or authoritarian elements of Moving the Mountain. She does,
however, imply that Moving the Mountain represented an early stage in Gilman’s “evolving”
utopian thought, a stage that would be surpassed as she got into the later utopias like Herland,
which she calls Gilman’s most “dreamlike” and which she likes very much.
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Judith Allen also discusses the novel very briefly in her book, The Feminism of Charlotte
Perkins Gilman, and has relatively little to say about it other than to describe the plot and the
image of utopia the book conveys. She does note, however, that “Moving the Mountain was
Gilman’s most detailed exposition of an imagined future incorporating the most urgently needed
changes in sexual, social, economic, and civic relations… If suffrage underpinned the narrative
momentum, Gilman stressed that changes were already in train. The matter was no longer
hypothetical: women were embracing race work. Though an advocate, she was merely a
prophet” (Allen 220). Although she discusses Gilman’s problematic attitudes toward race and
eugenics at points in the book, she makes no mention of these issues in her limited discussion of
Moving the Mountain.
Cynthia Davis likewise discusses the novel briefly in her biography of Gilman, although
her treatment of the book is extremely short and consists mainly of plot summary along the
observation that Moving the Mountain, along with Gilman’s two other utopian novels,
“adopts…[an] ostensible philanthropic agenda.” Davis does mention the novel’s eugenics, but
she does so very gently and she leaves out any discussion of the coercive or authoritarian
qualities of Gilman’s utopian future. Elsewhere in the biography, however, Davis does have
more to say about Gilman’s embrace of eugenics. Noting that early in Gilman’s career, free will
was important to her, Davis laments that “the more she embraced eugenics, the more will seemed
to drop out of her equation,” and that “as she aged, she came to believe that, for some people or
peoples, there was neither will nor way” (300). Like many other Gilman critics, Davis subscribes
to the narrative that old age caused Gilman to gradually abandon egalitarianism in favor of racial
exclusivity and coercive eugenics. As to why eugenic theories eventually won Gilman over,
Davis argues that Gilman embraced anything labeled “scientific” and that eugenics gave her a
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neat and tidy scientific explanation for why people were different and why some people appeared
to succeed where others did not.
Gary Scharnhorst, on the other hand, is more willing than Davis or Allen to engage with
Gilman’s eugenics and authoritarianism in his brief discussion of Moving the Mountain. In his
reading of the novel, Scharnhorst notes that “unfortunately, Gilman’s millennial vision was
blurred by a willingness to sanction gross violations of individual rights to realize the mass
ideal” (89). Scharnhorst then goes on to mention (very briefly) a number of areas in which
Gilman “sanctioned” such violations, including: immigrants (“compulsory socialization”),
professionalized child care (or, less generously, women not allowed to care for their own
children) (Deptartment of Child Culture), people with venereal disease (Deptartment of
Eugenics), and the government-controlled press. Scharnhorst actually expresses shock at the
extent of Gilman’s eugenic authoritarianism: “Incredibly, moreover, severely handicapped
people, and ‘certain classes of criminals and perverts’ are not merely sterilized, a measure
repugnant in its own right, but occasionally executed by order of the state” (89, italics in
original). Ultimately, Scharnhorst concludes that “[Gilman’s] dream of America circa 1940 was
a curious blend of the bucolic and despotic” and he points out that the book was published in
1912, “at the height of the eugenics craze, and reviewers in such periodicals as the Independent
and the New York Times ignored her implicit authoritarianism to remark in particular upon the
ease with which the inert mountain had been moved” (89).
Darby Lewes is likewise critical of Gilman’s authoritarianism in Moving the Mountain,
although she too mentions the novel only briefly in her book, Dream Revisionaries: Gender and
Genre in Women's Utopian Fiction, 1870-1920. “In some texts,” Lewes argues, “elitism takes
the form of xenophobia. Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Moving the Mountain, for example, treats
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foreigners as physical and social hazards who must have their foreignness scientifically extracted
before they can be accepted into American society” (9). With stronger language than any other
critic of Moving the Mountain, Lewes also points out the fascistic elements of Gilman’s utopian
vision in a way that associates Gilman’s views with Nazism. In particular, Lewes refers to the
harsh negative eugenics employed in the novel to deal with “defectives and degenerates” as
“final solutions.” “Those fortunate enough to survive the moral Holocaust face grim
alternatives,” Lewes writes,
Drunkards are removed from society and placed in austere concentration camps, where
they receive ‘hospital treatment and permanent restraint.’ The morally weak face even
bleaker futures: those oversexed unfortunates who cannot conform to the new model of
marriages ‘on a much purer and more lasting plane’ are perceived as ‘cases for medical
treatment or even surgical "intervention, and must frequently be ‘incapacitated for
parentage and place where they can do no harm.’ Surprisingly, intemperance and
promiscuity are not widespread in Gilman's Utopia. (10)
Although Lewes’ criticism of Gilman’s authoritarian approach in Moving the Mountain
anticipates what I am arguing in this chapter, her focus is not entirely on this novel or even on
Gilman. As is so often this case when it comes to Moving the Mountain, the novel receives only
a few lines in Lewes’s book.
In addition to these short discussions of Moving the Mountain within larger works, there
are a few examples of critics who dedicate an entire essay to the novel. One of these is Naomi
Zauderer and her essay “Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Moving the Mountain: A Response to
Looking Backward,” published in Utopian Studies in 1992. Pointing out that Gilman was
influenced by Bellamy and a follower of Nationalism, Zauderer argues that Moving the Mountain
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is largely a response to Looking Backward. Specifically, she argues that with Moving the
Mountain, Gilman attempted to “reveal the inadequacies of Bellamy’s utopia where women are
concerned” (53). Zauderer notes that both Moving the Mountain and Looking Backward are
“incomplete” utopias, and points to the authors’ prefaces of both books to show that even they
acknowledged the incompleteness of their utopian visions (or at least of their utopian
representations). Zauderer further argues that the two books ought to be compared because they
both “try to appeal to a largely female audience,” although she also argues that they go about
appealing to women differently: Bellamy by relying on “conventions of sentimental and
domestic fiction” and Gilman by doing the opposite. “In contrast to Bellamy,” Zauderer points
out, “Gilman eschews the use of scenes to evoke grief and guilt, and she makes minimal use of
domestic locales” (54). Rather than appeal to reader’s emotions, Zauderer claims, Gilman
“appeals directly to their rational faculties.” This is not merely a stylistic difference, according to
Zauderer, nor an outgrowth of either writer’s individual personality. Instead, she argues, it is
directly related to Gilman’s didactic intent: “[Gilman] is educating her predominantly female
audience for citizenship, and the citizens of the new social order that she envisions should not be
manipulable through emotional appeals” (54).
As is somewhat common among Gilman critics (though by no means universal),
Zauderer severely downplays the novel’s Social Darwinism and authoritarianism, stressing
instead the “self-empowerment” that Gilman offers women and that, she claims, Bellamy’s
utopia lacks. She mentions eugenics, for instance, but very briefly and only in the context of
women’s empowerment. Gilman substitutes marriages based on love, Zauderer claims, for
marriages based on economic necessity. This leads quite naturally to women selecting men on
the basis of genuine attraction, and this attraction is based on fitness for good fatherhood. Thus,
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according to Zauderer’s reading of the novel, the race (meaning human race, although as I
discuss later there are strong white-racial overtones in the novel, overtones that go completely
unremarked by Zauderer) improves with time because women are choosing good mates rather
than mates forced upon them due to economic necessity. This is the softest possible reading of
Gilman’s eugenic sensibilities, and completely ignores the coldly calculated social and biological
engineering that is quite out in the open in the novel. Zauderer also argues that Gilman’s
depiction of sexual selection is equivalent to the eugenic program outlined in Looking Backward,
which is only true if Zauderer’s description of Gilman’s eugenics is complete, which it is not.
Zauderer also shows a strange willingness to augment her reading of Moving the Mountain
(which is a relatively minor Gilman work) with elements from other Gilman writings like The
Man-Made World or Our Androcentric Culture (an even more minor Gilman work) while at the
same time banishing to the endnotes information about the progress of Bellamy’s ideas and the
evolution of his feminism that can be found in his follow up novel Equality on the grounds that
Equality is a minor Bellamy work.
The modern critical consensus regarding Moving the Mountain seems to be that the book
is at best a minor Gilman work, almost a footnote in her canon. It contains unfortunate and
unsavory elements that warrant mention, but that do not truly reflect Gilman’s egalitarian
feminist philosophy, at least at that stage of her career, and should not diminish her stature as a
foremother of utopian feminism. What I will argue, however, is that Moving the Mountain, while
perhaps a lesser achievement than Herland, is nonetheless representative of Gilman’s particular
brand of utopian feminism. The elements of the book that modern critics have found
regrettable—its racism, nationalism, and authoritarianism—do not set it apart from the rest of
Gilman’s canon, as some critics seem to suggest, but mirror key themes in her other work and
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personal writing. In fact, since it is a “baby utopia,” set just a short distance into the future,
Moving the Mountain provides exceptional insight into the direction Gilman hoped the country
would move if only women could achieve liberation, and thus into Gilman’s own feminist vision.

Gilman’s Utopian Theory
Interestingly, for Gilman, a glance into the near future begins with a look to the distant
past, to the beginning of human history, to the very “protoplasm,” as she calls it. In her first
major work, Women and Economics, Gilman explains her evolutionary theory of “sex
distinction” as the basis for both women’s economic dependence on men and for the oppressed,
inferior status of women in all human societies. At the very beginning, Gilman claims, humans
evolved as two sexes for the purposes of reproduction. Because one of each sex was needed to
reproduce, opposite sexes became attracted to one another, and the basis for this attraction was
the sex-distinction between the two. This sexual attraction and sexual desire is fine, according to
Gilman, as long as it exists only in the context of reproduction. Sex for reproduction is, after all,
a biological need, like eating or breathing. But when someone has an excessive appetite for food,
she points out, we say that it is unhealthy and call it a disease. The same is true if people have
excessive appetite for sex, which basically means any desire for sex that isn’t purely procreative,
and which Gilman believes that virtually all men do. Over time, sex distinction has increased and
evolved due to men’s excessive desires for sex. This increase of sex distinction (specifically,
overdevelopment of secondary sex characteristics, like a peacock’s plumage) becomes injurious
when done to excess (if a peacock’s glorious tail got so big that that it prevented the bird from
doing the necessities in life—he would die). For animals, natural selection prevents excessive
sex distinction (because over-sex-developed peacocks can’t function and survive, for example).
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Since human women are economically dependent on men, however, they do not have natural
selection to check the development of their sex distinction. In fact, it is the opposite. Because
women do not need to, and cannot, provide for themselves, they are forced to modify themselves
to find and please men, who will provide for them. These modifications are passed down to their
children (a la Lamarck), and eventually the result is a two sex system in which the women are
economically dependent and physically (and mentally?) incapacitated because of excessive
development of secondary sex traits (i.e., sex distinction). “Because of the economic dependence
of the human female on her mate,” Gilman states early on in the book, “she is modified to sex to
an excessive degree. This excessive modification she transmits to her children; and so is steadily
implanted in the human constitution the morbid tendency to excess in this relation” (38-9).
Gilman’s entire utopian philosophy derives from this idea, making evolution a
fundamental element of it. Since the bad present-day state of affairs is the result of a long
evolutionary process, one that was corrupted by men who deemed it easier to subdue women and
select meek, passive women for mating than to compete with other males to be selected by
women, improving the conditions and opportunities for and status of women in the future will
require deliberate intervention. Intervening in evolution, whether by altering the way people
select their mates or by preventing some people from mating while encouraging others, leads
directly to eugenics. As we will see, eugenics does indeed play a very important role in the
novel, a fact that undermines some Gilman critics’ attempts to downplay the significance of
eugenics in Gilman’s utopianism and more broadly in her feminism.
Before we can see the effect of evolution or the importance of eugenics in Gilman’s
utopian vision, we must first consider what the future looks like in Moving the Mountain.
Throughout the novel we find descriptions of infrastructure, institutions, and social practices that
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are familiar to turn of the century utopian fiction. Examples of these include: a socialist
economic system, universal education, improved efficiency in production along with a shortened
workday, and the elimination of pollution, poverty, and crime. We also see changes that reflect
Gilman’s particular priorities. Most broadly, this includes the extension of franchise to women
and the apparent equality of women in terms of social status and occupational opportunities.
When Robertson expresses surprise that women work and asks incredulously, “What kind of
work do they do?" Nellie off-handedly reply, "all kinds — anything they like." A more specific
concern of Gilman’s is the manner in which women dress in the future. Dress reform was an
important issue for Gilman, who felt that women’s impractical and uncomfortable clothing
prevented them from engaging in many activities and contributed to their isolation and
oppression. In response to Robertson’s question about what the women of the future wear, Nellie
again responds simply, "whatever kind of clothing their work demands" (45). The simplicity and
nonchalance of Nellie’s responses to these questions, however, belies their importance to
Gilman’s overall philosophy, which, as I mentioned above, maintained that women’s
confinement to household work, and concomitant economic dependence on men, was a primary
factor in their oppressed condition. Other priorities of Gilman’s that we see in the novel include
the removal of kitchens from houses and the eradication of prostitution and sexually transmitted
diseases. Always, however, the future is kept recognizable to readers, with major changes being
presented as natural outgrowths of the new utopian mentality and the liberation of women, not
the products of future technology.
The pattern of familiarity alongside innovation also applies to the way Gilman goes about
selling her utopian vision. Although Gilman’s novel clearly draws upon the utopian form of
Bellamy’s Looking Backward, she does make significant changes even beyond the shift of focus
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from economic to gender equality. Whereas Bellamy dazzled readers with modern technology
and other marvels, Gilman has little investment in those kinds of things. Instead, she makes great
effort to show a world that is extremely recognizable, but very different in key areas. Those
differences, of course, are what make the new world an eutopia, in contrast to the oppressive and
dysfunctional world of the present, and thus it is those differences that are the focus of the book.
By keeping other things the same, Gilman forces readers to acknowledge that the objectively
better future is not due to technological advancements but to a fundamental change in attitude.
As Nellie explains in an important exchange, “The thing that has happened…is just this. The
world has come alive. We are doing in a pleasant, practical way, all the things which we could
have done, at any time before — only we never thought so. The real change is this: we have
changed our minds” (53, italics added). Moreover, by keeping it close in time (only thirty years
in the future), Gilman makes it impossible for readers to attribute the improvements of the future
to natural evolution, but instead forces them to see the value and necessity of a major change in
mindset and in deliberate intervention.
Also in contrast to both Bellamy and Johnson, Gilman uses a very familiar tour guide,
familiar to the traveler, that is. While utopian hosts in the turn of the century utopias tend to be
kind to their visitors, they are also always somewhat detached from them. In Looking Backward,
for instance, Dr. Leete is detached from Julian West by time and family, although it is revealed
that Edith Leete is descended from Julian’s fiancé, but this happens at the very end of the novel,
after all the tour-guiding and acclimation has taken place. Similarly, Dr. Newell in Light Ahead
for the Negro is separated from Gilbert Twitchell by time (roughly a century, like in Bellamy)
and place (Twitchell is a yankee from New York, Newell is from Georgia, the South). This plays
a significant role in Johnson’s novel, because it shows the South of the future as infinitely more
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progressive than the North of the present. In Moving the Mountain, however, there is no
detachment other than the time elapsed; instead there is a family bond.
Robertson is hosted by his sister, which changes the experience of the utopian tour in
several important ways. Not the least of these is that she has genuine concern for him. She
explains changes gently, knowing what his life was like before and understanding that the
changes will be hard to accept. She also pokes fun in a sibling way, which is endearing and helps
ease him through the changes. “When you get too utterly upset and lonesome” Nellie tells
Robertson early in the novel, “I’ll wear my hair down, put on a short dress, and let you boss me a
while—to keep your spirits up” (42). She likewise responds glibly to John’s shock at the idea
that people’s nature could be changed, an idea she views as a quaint and outmoded: “‘That was
just the phrase, wasn’t it?— you can’t alter human nature!’ and she laughed again” (42). Her
gentle ribbing here shows a calm confidence in herself as a woman (person) as well as an
understanding attitude towards John’s backwardness, an attitude that is also characteristic of the
women of Herland.
Unlike Looking Backward and Light Ahead for the Negro, the utopian traveler in Moving
the Mountain is resistant to the changes. Initially, he not only sees the world of the future as a
violation of nature (most particularly with regard to the power and freedom that women have, but
also, to a lesser extent, with regard to socialism, temperance, etc), but also as a world in which
his accustomed place has been eradicated and his male hegemony threatened. One of Gilman’s
key strategies in selling her utopian vision to readers is to naturalize the new, improved state of
things by having Robertson express shock and even disapproval of them. This may seem
counterintuitive: since Robertson is a visitor from the present, and a representative one at that,
shouldn’t his impressions of the new world reflect the attitudes of the 1915 readers? If readers
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see some of themselves in Robertson, wouldn’t his reaction to the new order be their reaction as
well? Wouldn’t that accomplish the opposite of naturalizing Gilman’s vision of the future? The
answer, of course, is no, in large part because the people of the future are portrayed as eminently
rational and levelheaded in contrast to Robertson, whose strong negative reactions to the changes
he encounters, despite their obvious benefits, comes to seem almost comically irrational.
A good early example Gilman’s use of Robertson’s reactions to the new world as a way
of naturalizing the change for readers can be seen in the very minor incident of him reading a
magazine story about two women in business together: “I looked through it carefully,” Robertson
narrates, “They were not even girls, they were not handsome, they were not in the process of
being married—in fact, it was not once mentioned whether they were married or not, ever had
been or ever wanted to be. Yet I found it amusing!” As Gilman established in Women and
Economics, as well as many of her other writings, a major impediment to women’s happiness
and full humanity is the fact that they are responsible for house work and defined by their
marriages. If women had more access to the economy outside of the home, Gilman argues, this
would be better for women and for society as a whole. As she writes in Women and Economics,
“the change in the economic position of woman from dependence to independence must bring
with it a rearrangement of these home interests and industries, to our great gain” (224). So, in
this scene she depicts that as the reality of the future and seeks to normalize it (or rather to show
that it is already normalized in the future) in part by insisting that the women’s marital status is
totally inconsequential to their business success story--even suggesting that they may not be
interested in being married at all.
In addition, John's reaction to the story serves as a helpful guide for the reader. Initially,
John is shocked by the story and its utter lack of concern for the women's romantic lives or their
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relationships with men. Gilman knows that this is likely her early twentieth-century readers'
reaction, or at least she establishes John as a version of a recognizable early twentieth-century
type. The fact that John is able to swallow and process the shocking elements of the story, and
eventually find it amusing, shows readers that the shock of New Womanhood is neither too great
to be borne by even the most traditional people nor something that will remain shocking for long.
Of course, this change is not easy for John: in the next moment he finds "a queer, sick feeling
came over" him because the magazine's editor is a woman, along with most of the contributors,
despite it not being a "woman's" magazine. By this point, however, Robertson’s reactions are
becoming so severe that they seem almost comical, and thus readers perceive him as less of a
simple representation of the pre-utopian mainstream and more of a caricature whose amplified
responses expose the irrationality of the mainstream attitudes he holds.
Gilman does not rely entirely on Robertson’s reactions to naturalize the way of life in the
future. She also uses her other male characters to deliver key elements of the feminist utopian
message in conversation with Robertson, a strategy that serves both to reassure male readers that
the changes have not worsened life for men and to further shift the reader’s identification from
their supposed contemporary, Robertson, to the citizens of the future. The most prominent of this
type of character is Nellie’s husband, Owen. “Owen,” we learn upon meeting him, “was a big
man with a strong, wholesome face and a quizzical smile of his own” (74). This description is
significant because it establishes Owen as a masculine, intelligent man, not at all enervated or
feminized by the changed world of women’s liberation he is about to describe. What Owen does
describe, moreover, is not merely the relatively mundane, though still important, advancements
made by women in fields like commerce or publishing that are represented by the magazine
article Robertson reads. Instead, it is the gynocentric theory, first expounded by Lester Frank
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Ward and taken up by Gilman. “You’ll have to swallow it,” Owen tells Robertson, “the female is
the race type; the male is her assistant. It’s established beyond peradventure.” Robertson’s
reaction to this is unsurprising: “I meditated; painfully. I looked at Owen. He had just as happy
and proud a look as if he was a real man—not merely an Assistant” (74). Coming from the
mouth of a large, masculine man like Owen, Gilman’s gynocentric theory has a much different
impart on Robertson, and presumably on early twentieth century readers, than it would if spoken
by Nellie. The idea that woman is “the race type” and man is “her assistant” has been accepted
by men in the future, and even Robertson is forced to admit that this acceptance has not
diminished their masculinity but has actually made them happier.
The other key male character to deliver important information to Robertson is
Robertson’s old friend, Dr. Frank Borderson. Like Owen, Dr. Borderson is a man who
wholeheartedly embraces the new world without being diminished by the revolution in gender
relations. Whereas Owen’s physical manliness signals to Robertson and the reader that women’s
liberation has not destroyed manhood, Dr. Borderson’s narrative of personal redemption is even
more compelling. Meeting Dr. Borderson, Robertson is shocked to find that the man is his old
friend. Once a notorious playboy, “a God-forsaken rascal” and the embodiment of patriarchal
sexism, Dr. Borderson has evolved into an upstanding citizen of the utopian future, a professor of
Ethics. As with the familiarity between Robertson and Nellie, Robertson’s acquaintance with and
affection for Dr. Borderson softens the blow of the information delivered by the professor.
Because of their shared sexist background, moreover, Dr. Borderson is able to testify to the
benefits of the new order and offer himself as an example of the possibility for change.
Interestingly, however, we learn throughout the discussion that Dr. Borderson’s conversion was
not entirely voluntary. “It is really astonishing to see how much can be done with what we used
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to call criminals,” Borderson explains, “merely by first-class physical treatment. I can remember
how strange it seemed to me, having elaborate baths, massage, electric stimulus, perfect food,
clean comfortable beds, beautiful clothes, books, music, congenial company, and wonderful
instruction. It was very confusing. It went far to rearrange all my ideas” (136). In Dr.
Borderson’s cheerful account of his own deprogramming, we see one of the book’s many
instances of benevolent authoritarianism. This authoritarianism becomes especially prominent
when considering how the population of the future is represented in the novel.
The society that Robertson finds upon returning from Tibet is improved in more than its
social institutions; the people themselves are better. The Americans of the future are physically
stronger and healthier than those of Robertson’s time thirty years before. They are more
intelligent due to better education and less prone to vices like alcohol and tobacco. Venereal
diseases are much rarer, and shorter work days have led to fewer work related medical conditions
and greater physical fitness. These changes are even reflected in which traits are now considered
desirable. As Owen tells Robertson, “there's a new standard of physical beauty — very Greek —
you must have noticed already the big, vigorous, fresh-colored, free-stepping girls" (81)
Some of these changes are attributed to environment and education. “When women were
really free of man's selective discrimination,” Nellie explains, “they proved quite educable, and
learned to be ashamed of their deformities. Then we began to appreciate the human body and to
have children reared in an atmosphere of lovely form and color, statues and pictures all about
them, and the new stories” (92). In other cases, laws, such as the ones criminalizing the spread of
syphilis, helped ensure the health of the population. By far the largest factor responsible for the
physical changes in the population, however, is eugenics and population control.
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The eugenics we see in Moving the Mountain far surpasses anything found in Bellamy,
although the improvement of the population through sexual selection as a result of women’s
liberation is an important feature of both books’ utopian outlooks. For Gilman, however, the
positive eugenics of sexual selection is not sufficient to rid society of the corrosive elements that
threatened the achievement of utopia. As Mr. Pike explains, “our first step—or one of our first
steps, for we advanced like a strenuous centipede—was to check the birth of defectives and
degenerates. Certain classes of criminals and perverts were rendered incapable of reproducing
their kind” (86). As many of Gilman’s sympathetic critics point out, this policy of involuntary
sterilization was an important platform of the eugenics movement that was extremely popular in
Gilman’s time. For instance, in her essay “Eugenic Feminism: Mental Hygiene, The Women’s
Movement, and the Campaign for Eugenic Legal Reform, 1900-1935,” Mary Ziegler notes that
sterilization laws became popular when earlier eugenic interventions, such as preventing the
issuance of marriage certificates to “defectives,” were deemed ineffective. “Eugenicists,” Ziegler
explains, “turned next to sterilization laws, which they viewed as a more practicable and humane
approach to proscribing procreation. Between 1909 and 1930, thirty-three states enacted
compulsory eugenic sterilization laws” (212). The laws Ziegler describes almost perfectly mirror
the eugenic sterilization policies in Moving the Mountain, and the time frame Ziegler provides
for these laws’ enactment corresponds almost exactly with Gilman’s writing and publication of
the book. Both of these suggest that Gilman was strongly influenced by the American eugenics
movement and drew upon its legal efforts as a blueprint for her own narrative of the transition to
utopia. However, some Gilman critics attempt to distance Gilman from the legal activities of the
official eugenics movement. Doskow, for instance, argues that “Gilman was not part of [the
eugenics] movement and, in fact, criticized it” (“The Female Face”). Whether or not she was
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formally affiliated with the eugenic movement, though, Gilman’s reliance on involuntary
sterilization in Moving the Mountain indicates that she was influenced by, and amenable to, early
twentieth-century eugenic theories in their most authoritarian forms.
Gilman’s desire to control the population of her utopian future through negative eugenics
does not end with compulsory sterilization of the unfit. In the most extreme cases, people
deemed beyond redemption are actually executed. Dr. Borderson explains this to an unbelieving
Robertson, first with a euphemism—“Sometimes we had to amputate”—and then in more
explicit terms: “We killed many hopeless degenerates, insane, idiots, and real perverts, after
trying our best powers of cure” (136). Chilling as this admission is, it is not the only time in the
novel Robertson hears of the extent to which the Americans of the future are willing to go to
mold the population to their liking. In an especially revealing passage that warrants quoting at
length, Nellie “soberly” explains the ruthless eugenic tactics necessary to cleanse the gene pool
of contaminants:
One of our inherited handicaps was that great mass of wreckage left over from the
foolishness and ignorance of the years behind us. But we dealt very thoroughly with
them. As I told you before, hopeless degenerates were promptly and mercifully removed.
A large class of perverts were incapacitated for parentage and placed where they could do
no harm, and could still have some usefulness and some pleasure. Many proved curable,
and were cured. And for the helpless residue; blind and crippled through no fault of their
own, a remorseful society provides safety, comfort and care; with all the devices for
occupation and enjoyment that our best minds could arrange. These are our remaining
asylums; decreasing every year. We don't make that kind of people any more. (98)
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This passage, which touches upon all three of the eugenic practices discussed above—sexual
selection, sterilization, and elimination—removes any possible doubt about Gilman’s investment
in eugenics, her belief in the importance of eugenics to the achievement of her utopia, or her
willingness to sacrifice individual liberty in favor of authoritarianism in order to perfect the
human population. We see further evidence of this in the way immigrants and people of color are
depicted and discussed in the novel.
Like Looking Backward, Moving the Mountain is relatively silent on the subject of race
in the transition to the utopian future and on the presence or absence of people of color in the
realized utopia. However, also like Looking Backward, there is strong evidence to suggest that
the people of Gilman’s near-future are white and that the apparent absence of racially marked
people, especially African Americans, in the utopian future is the result of non-white people
being bred out of existence. The best clue to this occurs late in the novel, when John Robertson
makes a trip to visit his Uncle Jake and Aunt Dorcas on their family farm. Already in the novel,
Uncle Jake and Aunt Dorcas have been established as holdovers from the old way of living. In
the book’s first chapter, for instance, Nellie suggests to John that, if the changes he encounters
ever become overwhelming for him, he can always escape the world of the new with a visit to
Uncle Jake. “He and Aunt Dorcas haven't moved an inch,” she tells him, “They fairly barricade
their minds against a new idea — and he ploughs and she cooks up on that little mountain farm
just as they always did. People go to see them” (41). Jake and Dorcas represent the retrograde
lifestyle of pre-utopian America in every way: they maintain a private, isolated, subsistence
farm, in contrast to the “comfortable and pretty groups [of farmhouses], each in its home park,
with its standard of convenience as high as that in any town” that characterize the majority of
agrarian dwellings in the new order (141); their household is defined by old-fashioned
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patriarchy, with Jake at the head and his wife and daughter placidly subservient to him; even the
three family members’ names -- Jake (presumably short for Jacob), Dorcas, and Drusilla – are
drawn from the Bible and thus represent the patriarchal Christianity that has been supplanted in
the utopian America by the “new religion” of “pleasant, practical” happiness (53).
When Robertson arrives at Jake and Dorcas’s farm, however, it is not the sight of his
elderly aunt and uncle that most strongly evokes a sense of the past. Instead, it is experience of
being greeted by the same African American field hand who had worked the farm since before
Robertson’s voyage to Tibet. “I stood still and drew in a long breath of utter satisfaction”
Robertson narrates, “here was something that had not changed. There was an old negro plowing,
the same negro I remembered, apparently not a day older” (143). The presence of this African
American farm worker at this point in the novel is important in several ways. Not the least of
these is the fact that this man, later identified as “old Joe,” is the only character in the novel to be
assigned a race. While other races are alluded to in the book, particularly in discussions of
immigration, there are no other interactions with non-white characters.
8

What Gilman hoped to achieve with the inclusion of Old Joe is unclear. On the one hand,
as I have mentioned, this character is very clearly associated with the past, and because he is the
only black character in the novel, blackness itself becomes associated with the pre-utopian time.
This is reminiscent of Bellamy’s treatment of the Sawyer character in Looking Backward, whose
black face is the last thing Julian West sees before going to the utopian future, and the first thing
he sees upon his return to the past in a dream.
9
Moreover, the Old Joe character does not simply
suggest that African Americans were characteristic of the past, but that the African American

8
The closest we come elsewhere in the novel to an interaction with a non-Anglo person is a reference to the narrator
meeting people who take for granted the changes that have occurred in American society, and “even some who
grumbled. These were either old persons with bad digestions or new immigrants from very backward countries”
(123).
9
See Chapter One.
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race was evolutionarily unfit for the transition to utopia. When Robertson first encounters Old
Joe, for instance, he remarks about the man’s physical appearance that “it is wonderful how little
they do change with years” (143). Since Gilman’s utopianism is predicated on theories of both
social and biological evolution, Old Joe’s apparent lack of physical change implies that African
Americans are resistant to evolution. This is emphasized a moment later in the novel when Uncle
Jake remarks that “Old Joe…was here before I was born. Joe must be eighty or over — there's no
telling the age of niggers” (146). While Joe may not have changed much over the years,
however, he certainly cannot live forever; the fact that he is likely more than eighty years old
suggests that he will die sooner than later, and with him, by implication, will die traditional
blackness.
Old Joe’s presence in the novel also hints at African American stasis in more than just his
resistance to physical change. We learn, for instance, that upon meeting Robertson, Joe “doffed
his ragged cap and greeted me with cheerful cordiality as Mass' John” (143). By addressing
Robertson as “Mass’ John,” Joe affects a subservient position that is reminiscent of slave times.
This is compounded in Joe’s only spoken line of dialogue, in which he remarks on Robertson’s
long absence: “We all been hearin' about you, Mass' John. We been powerful sorry 'bout you
long time, among de heathen,’ he said. ‘You folks'll be glad to see you!’" (143-4). By speaking
in stereotypical plantation dialect, Joe evokes a sense of cultural and linguistic backwardness that
is unique to him, the only African American character in the novel. Since every other character
in the novel, including the former reprobate Dr. Borderson, speaks in a urbane dialect, Old Joe’s
manner of speaking identifies him, and by extension his race, as culturally resistant to evolution.
On the other hand, however, there are indications in this scene that plantation-speaking
Old Joe is not the only African American to make it to the utopian future after all. In fact, there is
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reason to believe that, contrary to the subservient, pre-utopian African American field hand that
Joe seems to represent, other African Americans have made advances in power and status.
According to Uncle Jake, old-fashioned African American workers like Joe are actually rather
rare. "There's no getting any help nowadays,” Jake complains to Robertson, “even if we needed
it…but the young ones are too uppity for any use. They want to be paid out of all reason, and
treated like white folks at that!" (146). Spoken by the novel’s unambiguous symbol for
patriarchal, pre-utopian backwardness, this sentiment is clearly not endorsed or promoted by the
novel. If anything, the novel seems in favor of the advancement of the “uppity” young African
Americans of the future, if for no other reason than because Uncle Jake takes umbrage to it. This
fits with Gilman’s sentiments regarding African American people expressed in her 1908 essay,
“A Suggestion on the Negro Problem.”
The central premise of Gilman’s essay is that there are some gifted African Americans
who have managed to evolve into decent citizens, but that the majority are utterly backward and
incapable of caring for themselves, much less contributing to society. The solution to this,
according to Gilman, is to conscript all but the most successful African Americans into a
civilizing army, complete with “its uniforms, its decorations, its titles, its careful system of
grading, its music and banners and impressive ceremonies” (81). These drafted citizens are to be
educated in “personal initiative and responsibility,” drilled in the workings of civilization, and
forced to do agricultural and industrial labor until they evolve into productive citizens, at which
time they will be discharged. The essay reads a bit like “A Modest Proposal,” but Gilman is
serious, musing about African Americans that “he is here; we can’t get rid of him; it is all our
fault; he does not suit us as he is; what can we do to improve him?” (80). Its basic premise, and
its suggestions, have interesting implications for our reading of the depiction of African
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American people in Moving the Mountain, written just three years after the essay was published
in The American Journal of Sociology. Although the essay does not propose eugenics as a
solution to “the negro problem,” its fundamental assumption is that whiteness represents a higher
level of evolution than blackness, and that African American people require the guiding
(coercive) hand of whites in order to achieve a comparable level of evolution. In this, the logic
behind Gilman’s essay resembles the civilizing logic of federal Indian policy at the turn of the
twentieth century represented most clearly by the Dawes Act of 1877. As I discussed in Chapter
One, the Dawes Act granted U.S. citizenship to Native Americans who were willing to abandon
tribal living and accept individual land allotments. This, as Francis Paul Prucha explains, was
intended to “civilize” Native Americans by converting them from tribalism to individualism and
by assimilating them to agricultural economy. “It was an article of faith with reformers,” Prucha
writes, “that civilization was impossible without the incentive to work that came only with
individual ownership of a piece of property” (Prucha 659). Although Gilman does not discuss
Native Americans in Moving the Mountain,
10
her solution to the “negro problem” employs the
same civilizing logic as the Dawes Act and the same core belief in whiteness as the pinnacle of
social evolution.
Moving the Mountain likewise relies on the idea that people must evolve beyond their
early twentieth century state of being, but as we have seen, this evolution is accomplished largely

10
Elsewhere in her writings, Gilman’s attitudes toward Native Americans (and indigenous peoples) is conflicted and
inconsistent. In Women and Economics, for instance, Gilman uses “savages” as foils to true civilization. Similarly,
the achievements of the women of Herland (who are specifically identified as “of Aryan stock” [54]), are regularly
contrasted with the ignorance and backwardness of the “savages” who live in the lands surrounding them. On the
other hand, in With Her in Ourland, Jennings admits with deep shame that Native Americans had been grossly
mistreated by the United States: “I hate to tell you…we did not arrange with those savages. We killed them…It is a
long story, and not a nice one, I’m sorry to say. We left some, hemming them in in spots called ‘reservations.’”
(Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Utopian Novels 303). Jennings goes on to note, however, that as a result of education
and missionary work, “some Indians have become fully civilized—as good citizens as any” (303), confirming the
notion that Gilman viewed whiteness as the apex of civilization and that facilitating the evolution of other races
toward white civilization was the white (wo)man’s burden.
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through authoritarian eugenics policies. Given the absence of African American people in the
novel, except on Uncle Jake’s farm, which represents the old ways, it is not a huge leap to
imagine that Gilman has shifted her solution from conscription to eugenics. This is, of course,
not to say that African Americans were killed or sterilized in the novel or in the transition years
that precede the novel’s action. Instead, it suggests that, like Bellamy, Gilman leaves space for
the reader to imagine that blackness, as represented by Old Joe and as understood by early
twentieth-century whites, has been eliminated through evolution, and she provides a conceptual
framework throughout the novel to support that assumption. Importantly, when Uncle Jake
bemoans the unavailability of black labor he refers only to Old Joe and the “uppity” young
African Americans who demand respect and decent pay. This suggests a kind of generational
rupture: the only African Americans left in the utopian future are young and have been brought
up from childhood in the ways of utopia.
When it comes to other non-white races in the Moving the Mountain, Gilman is less
contradictory: throughout the novel, non-white and non-American people are consistently
referred to (they never actually appear) as inferior to white Americans and in need of white
assistance in achieving full evolution (the pinnacle of which is, of course, whiteness). This, of
course, corresponds to Gilman’s nationalist and white supremacist views expressed in her other
written work,
11
despite what her more forgiving critics would like to acknowledge. The very first
sentence of the novel, when Nellie finds Robertson and returns him to “civilization,” establishes
an us vs them, savage vs civilized mentality that will characterize the rest of the novel: “On a
grey, cold, soggy Tibetan plateau stood, staring at one another, two white people—a man and a
woman. With the first, a group of peasants; with the second, the guides and carriers of a well-

11
See, for instance, her repeated use of “savages” and “African[s] or Oriental[s] as contrasts to white civilization in
Women and Economics.
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equipped exploring party” (37). The two “white people” in this passage are clearly the bosses;
the unnamed non-white peasants and guides exist only to serve them and disappear from the
novel as soon as their utility is exhausted. Even the physical description of the foreign
landscape—grey, cold, soggy—contrasts sharply with the perpetual warmth and cloudlessness of
the America to which Robertson and Nellie return.
As soon as he is discovered and begins his return to the United States, Robertson begins
to describe Tibet in derisive terms. He remarks, for instance that he cannot remember a single
day of the thirty years, “nor do I wish to. I have those filthy Tibetan clothes, sterilized and
packed away, but I never want to look at them. I am back in the real world” (40). For Robertson,
Tibet is not the “real” world, and it is not civilized. It is associated with filth (through the
clothes) and the people and customs that used to be so appealing to John are now no longer of
any interest (in fact, the thought of them now seems aversive). This is obviously not because of
bad memories; he has no memories of the time at all. Nor is it because he was mistreated, since
he declares that he was well cared-for by the “good people.” Instead, the thought of Tibet is
aversive to Robertson because it represents not only savagery in contrast to the civilization of the
United States, but also his absence from civilization during its utopian revolution change.
After the early discussion of Tibet and the Tibetan people, virtually all other talk of non-
white peoples occurs in the context of immigration. As in Looking Backward, Gilman’s utopia
projects the appearance of openness to immigration, but the only examples we see are Western
Europe. When ships bringing immigrants arrive, for instance, there are “gates” for each
nationality: “There’s the German Gate, and the Spanish Gate, The English Gate, The Italian
Gate—and so on. There is welcome in their own language—and instruction in ours” (57). There
is no mention of gates for immigrants from countries outside of Western Europe, and certainly
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none of gates for non-white immigrants. Although the book was written during the Chinese
Exclusion period and in the same decade as the 1917 Immigration Act, also known as the
“Asiatic Barred Zone Act,” it does not address Asian immigration or indicate whether such
policies survived the transition to utopia. It does, however, reiterate the idea that non-Americans
are inferior and need to be elevated and improved if they are to be allowed a place in the United
States: “we have a standard of citizenship now—an idea of what people ought to be and how to
make them so’” (57). As with the novel’s eugenic policies, the immigration process is likewise
authoritarian. The process begins with a “physical examination—the most searching and
thorough—microscopic—chemical. They have to come up to a certain standard before they are
graduated, you see?” (57). This examination is extremely important because immigrants are
viewed by the Americans of the future as a potential menace and described in terms usually
reserved for wild animals: “No immigrant is turned loose on the community till he or she is up to
a certain standard, and the children we educate." As for potential immigrants who fall short of
the American standards, they are not turned away, although they are also not “turned loose on the
community” either. “We refuse no one” Nellie informs Robertson, “we have discovered as many
ways of utilizing human waste as we used to have for the waste products of coal tar.” How
exactly these people, viewed by enlightened utopians as “human waste,” are utilized is not
explained, but the clear suggestion is that they are segregated from the rest of the population and
put to work.

“The Women” as Authority
As we have seen, it is a fact that the large-scale, fundamental societal improvements in
Gilman’s near-term utopia are largely attributable to eugenics, which even Gilman’s most
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apologetic critics acknowledge (although some, like Lane, downplay the importance of eugenics
in the novel and emphasize instead the change in thinking that has occurred). Moreover, the
eugenics depicted in Gilman’s utopia consists not simply of the sexual selection that occurred
naturally in Looking Backward as a consequence of women’s liberation, but also the negative
eugenics of state control, complete with involuntary sterilization and even the extermination of
the unworthy. Closely related to this model of negative eugenics is the policing of non-white
populations illustrated by the immigration process.
What is especially strange about the authoritarianism in Gilman’s future, however, is that
there does not appear to be a strong central authority behind it. Not only is there no mention of a
totalitarian regime or ruthless dictator in the novel, there is not even a single reference to the
president, congress, or any other sovereign figure or body. There is also virtually no description
of the United States government of the future. That is not to say that the book makes no mention
whatsoever of government, or that the United States is implied to have passed into anarchy, only
that discussions of it are extremely vague, especially considering the seemingly fascistic
eugenics policies that exist. While the novel offers little to no description of the structure of
government or the people responsible for it, it does mention a number of government agencies
and government responsibilities. There are, in fact, seven governmental departments or bureaus
mentioned in the novel: The Food Bureau (food department – where the actual food ordering and
production takes place), the Department of Child Culture, the Department of Eugenics,
Department of Production, Department of Agriculture, the local Transportation Bureau, and the
also apparently local Bureaus of Employment. The prevalence and variety of departments and
bureaus mentioned in the novel suggest that the utopian world of the future is a strictly regulated
one, but also that the origin and enforcement of these regulations is decentralized.
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Throughout the book, there are also numerous references to laws, although, again, there
is little to no discussion of the legislature or the legislative process behind these laws--most
often, when the genesis of a law is discussed it is attributed simply to “we.” Many of these laws
regulate the relationships between people, such as the one that existed in every state “requiring a
clean bill of health with every marriage license. Diseased men had to die bachelors — that's all."
Marriage laws also protect women from the very exploitation and oppression that marriage had
formerly caused. As Nellie tells Robertson, a woman “does not 'belong' to anyone in that old
sense. She is the wife of her husband in that she is his true lover, and that their marriage is
legally recorded; but her life and work does not belong to him. He has no right to her 'services'
any more. A woman who is in a business — like Hallie, for instance—does not give it up when
she marries" (75). Other laws police the way children are parented, forbidding parents to care for
their children unless they can show “proof of capacity” (76). Laws have also helped eradicate
prostitution and have criminalized the transmission of venereal disease (79).
These laws, along with policies and practices such as the strict regulation of the press, the
domination of the natural environment (including the deliberate extinction of species), and the
large scale re-writing of history, are always presented as benevolent and popular. They are
unquestionably authoritarian, but they are never attributed to a political regime and their official
agents of enforcement are virtually absent from the novel. We are left, then with the question: if
the utopian society of the future is an authoritarian one, but there is no apparent regime or central
authority figure, who wields the authoritarian power? The answer, the novel suggests repeatedly,
is women. Importantly, though, it is not just women, but the women.
Over and over in the novel we hear the refrain that “the women woke up” – in fact, this
idea comes up so frequently that Robertson jokes that “if you have said that once since we met,
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my dear sister, you’ve said it forty times” (65). What happened after this awakening is that “the
women” began exerting power within society, both through their sexuality and through
legislation, and they did so as a unified bloc. About the prohibition on marriages between healthy
women and syphilitic men, for instance, Owen tells Robertson that “The young women learned
the proportion of men with syphilis and gonorrhea and decided it was wrong to marry them. That
was enough. They passed laws in every State requiring a clean bill of health with every marriage
license. Diseased men had to die bachelors — that's all." Here we learn that, prior to restrictive
marriage laws, marriages between healthy women and men with venereal diseases were
prevented by young women learning about the prevalence of infected men and deciding not to
marry them. Importantly, this passage implies that these young women attained this knowledge
and made this decision at the same time and of one mind (a phrase used to describe women
voters elsewhere in the novel). Once the young women made this decision, laws soon followed
“in every State.” Obviously, these laws would have resulted from state legislatures and would
have been drafted and voted upon by legislators, but that process is entirely absent in passages
like this. Instead, what we get is “they passed laws” with a pronoun vague enough to refer
obliquely to the lawmakers responsible for the legislation while also maintaining the suggestion
that the laws were made by the young women themselves. The unanimity of the women is
reinforced a moment later when Robertson asks whether men actually submitted to such laws.
Owen responds, “Why not? It was so patently for the protection of the race — of the family — of
the women and children. Women were solid for it, of course — And all the best men with them.
To oppose it was almost a confession of guilt and injured a man's chances of marriage” (78).
Here we see once again that change not only occurred because the women thought and acted as a
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bloc, but also that the men felt compelled to submit to this female authority or risk social
ostracism and the impossibility of marriage.
The idea that women thought alike and acted as a coalition is reiterated frequently in the
novel. This is especially true in the few instances where women’s suffrage is discussed. “The
new religion urged work,” Dr. Harkness informs Robertson at one point, “normal, well-adapted
work — as the duty of life — as life itself; and the new voters accepted this idea as one woman”
(85). “New voters,” of course, refers to women who have won the vote in the time the John has
been away. It is one of only a few mentions of voting in the novel, which suggests that Gilman
set her sights on greater things than suffrage, and that while she felt woman’s suffrage was an
essential part of the progress toward utopia, suffrage alone was not the key to achieving it. The
real key, this passage suggests, is that when women do get the vote, they vote together. The idea
that the new voters accepted the “new religion” – meaning the new set of values that governed
life in the utopian near future – as “one woman” thus implies extreme solidarity among women
and reinforces the notion that the authoritarian power in the new society was not an individual
sovereign or regime, but women as a whole, thinking and acting as one. Dr. Harkness goes as far
as to declare that, along with a new economic model, “the sudden uprising of half the adult
world— the new voters — to carry out the new ideas; these were what changed things!” (86).
Once again, we see more evidence that women both thought as a bloc when they got the vote,
which brought the changes about, and continue to think as a bloc in the new society. Again,
giving the headless authoritarianism of the novel, women come to be seen as the authority figure
collectively rather than individually.
The great solidarity of women and the power that they wield as a result of it can be seen
in other ways than voting. The women waking up, for instance, is credited with reforming the
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way food and consumer products are produced and sold (89) and with “stamping out”
prostitution (79). “The women” are likewise responsible for putting hunting out of fashion,
Nellie telling Robertson that “as to the sport, why, we had never greatly admired it, you know —
the manly sport of killing things for fun — and with our new power we soon made it
undesirable." When Robertson suggests that she must mean that women enacted legislation
against hunting, Nellie tells him that "we found means to enforce it without much legislation"
(93). These means, according to Nellie, included changing the way children are educated in order
to forestall a taste for hunting in future generations. And for adult men who already enjoyed to
hunt for sport? Nellie informs Robertson that they were broken of the habit "mostly by
disapproval, consistent and final." The same was true for tobacco, Robertson learns, which
remains legal though no longer popular because women almost universally disapprove of its use.
Owen, explaining how men came to give it up, tells Robertson that “men like tobacco, but they
like love better” (82). With each of these, women have exerted their authority through their
disapproval and the threat to withhold marriage and sex. As with voting, however, this is not an
individual phenomenon. Gilman consistently portrays women as sharing a unified vision of the
desirable society and taking unified action to achieve it; there is no suggestion of dissent or
variation in thought among women anywhere on the novel.
Ultimately, Robertson comes to realize, “the women” share a grander vision than merely
policing unhealthy or unsavory behaviors. As the following passage indicates, there is more at
stake in utopia than altering the structure of American society; there is the re-modeling of the
entire male gender:
Robertson: Are you — do you mean to tell me, Nellie, that you women are trying to
make men over to suit yourselves?
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Nellie: Yes. Why not? Didn't you make women to suit yourselves for several thousand
years? You bred and trained us to suit your tastes; you liked us small, you liked us weak,
you liked us timid, you liked us ignorant, you liked us pretty — what you called pretty —
and you eliminated the kinds you did not like.
Robertson: How, if you please?
Nellie: By the same process we use — by not marrying them. (93-4)
Gilman’s grand design in her utopia thus hearkens back to her view of human history, expressed
in Women and Economics and elsewhere. Eons of sexual selection by men have stunted the
development of women and relegated them to subservient and ornamental positions. By “waking
up” and using their collective power, her novel suggests, this process will not only be halted but
turned back on men, eliminating their hegemony and refashioning them into the companions and
citizens that women want them to be.
Here we see Gilman at her most radical, much more so even than in Herland, I would
argue. Whereas Herland postulates a harmonious, productive society of women in the absence of
male competitiveness and aggression, it is able to do so only through the extreme contrivance of
asexual reproduction. Herland, therefore, can be exciting as a thought experiment or
enlightening as an allegory, but it can never be a blueprint. Moving the Mountain, on the other
hand constitutes a powerful argument for women’s liberation and suggests that women already
hold the key to both their own liberation and to the social evolution of Western society. Its
underlying logic is entirely consistent with the evolutionary theory of Women and Economcs,
and its near-future setting argues that great changes can happen, and happen quickly, if only
people’s thinking could change. Gilman may have described the book as a “baby utopia,” but
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there is nothing infantile about its ambitions to remake not only American society but also the
entire male gender.
Unfortunately, it is impossible to isolate Gilman’s revolutionary feminism in this novel
from the authoritarianism, racism, and xenophobia that go hand-in-hand with it. This goes a long
way to explaining why Moving the Mountain has been ignored by Gilman critics and why it is
commonly regarded as a footnote in the catalogue of American utopian literature. This tension,
however, between liberation for women and the forced “evolution” of undesirables and people of
color, is what makes the novel especially interesting in the context of citizenship in the utopian
imagination. In Moving the Mountain we are confronted with a vision of an American future in
which an alternate model of citizenship prevails, and in which the power dynamics of Western
patriarchy have been upended in favor of authoritarian feminism. In this way, the book imagines
a greater departure from the world of the present than either of the others I have thus far
considered. Bellamy projected a socialist future of economic equality, but he clung to the
rhetoric of capitalism, the notion of separate spheres for women, and the ideology of “separate
but equal” in the social relations between African Americans and whites. Johnson describes an
egalitarian twenty-first century in which the violence and discrimination of Jim Crow are merely
memories of a more primitive time, but he does so in a way that is calculated to reassure white
readers that these changes will neither threaten their status in the future nor lead to social
interaction between the races. Gilman’s novel goes further than either of them by suggesting not
only that a full-scale revolution in the concept of American citizenship is possible, but that it will
be the oppressed people themselves (i.e., the women) who lead it. Citizenship for Gilman,
however, is a zero-sum game, and the advances made by (white) women come at the expense of
undesirable people and people of color. However much we may recoil at this notion today,
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though, the novel is worth remembering both because it clarifies our understanding of Gilman,
the foremother of utopian feminism, and because it complicates our understanding of the turn-of-
the-century utopian novel as a gendered phenomenon.

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CHAPTER FOUR

Sui Sin Far’s Amalgamationist Utopianism

I believe that some day a great part of the world will be Eurasian. I cheer myself with the
thought that I am but a pioneer. A pioneer should glory in suffering.
- Sui Sin Far, “Leaves from the Mental Portfolio of an Eurasian” – 1909

Sui Sin Far is not an author likely to be found on many lists of American utopian fiction.
In fact, Sui Sin Far’s short stories appear, on the surface, to be anything but utopian. They are all
set in the present day or recent past in realistic, recognizable locations; they never depict a
perfect society and are often tragic; they are simultaneously sentimental and realistic, often
viewed, even during her own time, as merely local color. Despite this, I will argue in this chapter
that many of these stories, indeed much of her work in general, are driven by a utopian impulse
and make use of utopian strategies. As Sui Sin Far biographer Annette White-Parks points out,
“Mrs. Spring Fragrance’s overriding theme is the future of Chinese North American culture”
(215). According to White-Parks, this futurity is most evident in the book’s emphasis on
children, the family, and women, all of which signify the future through the potential for the
transmission of culture across generations. I do not disagree with this (although the repeated
endorsement of assimilation throughout many of Sui Sin Far’s stories problematizes the notion
of cultural maintenance through generational exchange) but I do wish to redirect the focus
regarding Sui Sin Far’s futurity by drawing attention to what I call her “amalgamationist utopian
impulse.” This phrase combines Ernst Bloch’s idea of the utopian impulse, which Bloch argues
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is present in many works of art and literature whether or not the work is formally utopian, and
amalgamation, a term for racial mixing that was popular in the nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries. Whereas amalgamation signified the threat of racial dilution to the white writers who
most commonly used the term (or the white characters in novels like Sutton E. Griggs’s Pointing
the Way, whose use of “amalgamation” parodies the frequency with which the term was used in
white society), Sui Sin Far viewed racialy mixed race people like herself both as superior and as
indications of the future of humanity. “I believe,” she wrote in her autobiographical essay,
“Leaves from the Mental Portfolio of an Eurasian,” “that some day a great part of the world will
be Eurasian. I cheer myself with the thought that I am but a pioneer. A pioneer should glory in
suffering” (412). With this idea in mind, this chapter examines the instances of racial mixing in
her stories to argue that, while the characters involved do not always enjoy happy outcomes in
the near term, they represent for Sui Sin Far the suffering pioneers who will pave the way to an
amalgamated utopia in the future.
In opting to use the term “amalgamationist” to describe Sui Sin Far’s utopianism, I am
deliberately eschewing the similar term “assimilationist,” although at times Sui Sin Far’s vision
of the future for Chinese in America does appear staunchly assimilationist. Especially for the
men in her stories, successful assimilation offers the promise of financial security, social status,
and some degree of acceptance within the non-Chinese American culture. Although this
endorsement of assimilation is a conservative position, especially by the standards of modern
cultural studies and immigrant rights movements, it was at least somewhat defiant in her own
time because it refuted the common claim that the Chinese were fundamentally different from
whites and therefore unassimilable and unsuitable for American citizenship. But Sui Sin Far’s
stance on assimilation is not consistent throughout her stories and is not uniformly pro-
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assimilation. In particular, assimilation is unambiguously gendered in her fiction, with Chinese
men tending to embrace American culture, and particularly American capitalism, with a
relatively high degree of success, while Chinese women often wither under the pressure to
assimilate, eventually resorting to drastic and even melodramatic measures to resist abandoning
their Chinese cultural and linguistic identity. The exception to this is the collection’s titular
character, Jade Spring Fragrance, whose embrace of western culture has her quoting Tennyson
(whom she misidentifies as an American poet) and playing matchmaker for her white Seattle
neighbor. Mrs. Spring Fragrance shows that assimilation is possible for Chinese women and,
because she is easily the collection’s happiest Chinese woman character, suggests both that
assimilation is ultimately desirable and that women like Pau Lin, who resist assimilation with
drastic consequences, are at least partially responsible for their own misery.
That being said, it is impossible to deny that stories like Pau Lin’s are tragic and are
intended to be so. The infanticide that Pau Lin commits at the end of “The Wisdom of the New,”
justified in her mind by the idea that she is protecting her child from becoming American and
forever losing his Chinese heritage, calls to mind similar acts by enslaved mothers in Toni
Morrison’s Beloved (in which the infanticide is carried out) and Mark Twain’s Pudd’nhead
Wilson (in which Roxy contemplates killing her child to save him from being sold down the river
but is spared of having to do it when an opportunity to save her child arises). This, of course,
does not make Pau Lin’s act any less melodramatic—after all, the prospect of attending an
English-speaking school is hardly analogous to the prospect of a life of slavery—but it does
illustrate Sui Sin Far’s ambivalence toward assimilation for Chinese women. Although some
Chinese women, she seems to argue, will be able to make the transition successfully like Mrs.
Spring Fragrance, others will suffer like Pau Lin and in their suffering will take even the most
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drastic actions to ensure that they and their children remain un-Americanized. Thus, while Jade
Spring Fragrance represents the happy possibilities for Chinese women who can assimilate, and
while the collection’s title indicates that Mrs. Spring Fragrance is intended to serve as a model
for assimilated Chinese American citizenship, the abundance of, and emphasis on, instances of
tragic failures to assimilate indicates that assimilation alone does not offer the promise of a
utopian future for Chinese people in America.
In contrast, the possibility of a racially amalgamated populous, led by Eurasians, does
offer Sui Sin Far the hope of an egalitarian future, even if interracial relationships are fraught and
dangerous in her own time. Thus, as with the other authors I have discussed, Sui Sin Far’s
utopianism is directly tied to a concept of biological evolution and the perfectibility of the
citizenry through good breeding. Unlike Bellamy and Gilman, Sui Sin Far’s stories are not
overtly social Darwinist and they do not advocate eugenics as such. For Sui Sin Far, the path to
amalgamationist utopia has less to do with the quality of the individuals engaging in
relationships and producing children and more to do with the combination of mutually beneficial
races.
Although I argue that amalgamation is Sui Sin Far’s ultimate, long term utopian vision,
she also uses utopian strategies in her depictions of the here and now. In particular, Sui Sin Far’s
utopianism is evident in her often rosier-than-reality depictions of Chinatown. Amidst the anti-
Chinese fervor of the late nineteenth century, which resulted in, among other things, the Chinese
Exclusion Act, the segregation of Chinese people into urban ghettos, the inclusion of white-
Chinese marriages in anti-miscegenation laws, and the phenomenon of “yellow peril” literature,
Sui Sin Far advocated for Chinese dignity by humanizing Chinese people and Chinatowns in her
fiction. This has been noted by Sui Sin Far critics ever since her re-discovery in Frank Chin,
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Jeffery Paul Chan, Lawson Fusao Inada, and Shawn Wong’s 1974 anthology, Aiiieeeee!. I add to
this line of thinking by showing how, in Sui Sin Far’s stories, the urban environments of West
Coast Chinatowns become utopian spaces for Chinese immigrants and Chinese Americans,
places of community and cooperation, where there always seems to be a festival in the streets,
where Chinese people can associate and conduct business in their native language, and where
whites from outside the boundaries of the district can enter and leave without being threatened or
posing a threat. This is in direct contrast to popular yellow peril dystopian accounts of
Chinatowns, represented in the chapter by Frank Norris’s short story, “The Third Circle,” in
which Chinatown is depicted as the epicenter of corruption, squalor, and savagery and where
white women, in particular, are never more than a step away from drug addiction and sexual
slavery. In utopianizing Chinatown, Sui Sin Far paints over most of Chinatown’s actual rough
edges in order to present a better-than-the-real-thing image, one that both counteracts dystopian
narratives like Norris’s and offers hope that Chinatown can be a place of opportunity for Chinese
people in the United States and a place of cultural exchange between the Chinese in America and
sympathetic whites. Moreover, Sui Sin Far consciously draws upon the utopian “Gold Mountain”
myth, common among nineteenth-century Chinese immigrants, to show the United States (and to
a lesser degree, Canada) as a place of opportunity for Chinese workers. Unfortunately, however,
the only beneficiaries of this opportunity are men; for many of the Chinese women in her stories,
America is a decidedly dystopian space. This, I argue, reinforces the urgency of Sui Sin Far’s
amalgamationist utopianism. Problems of assimilation and resistance, of immigration and
exclusion, will be obsolete when “the whole world becomes as one family” (“Leaves” 412).

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Gold Mountain/Yellow Peril
According to Ronald Takaki, Chinese immigration to the United States during the
nineteenth century followed a push/pull model. According to this model, factors at home, such as
“the British Opium Wars of 1839-1842 and 1856-186, the peasant rebellions such as the Red
Turban Rebellion (1854-1864), the bloody strife between the Punti (“local people”) and the
Hakkas (“Guest People”),” pushed people of lower economic classes to seek a better life
elsewhere (32). At the same time, factors in the United States, first the gold rush in the Western
U.S. and later the availability of work constructing the transcontinental railroads, enticed these
emigrants to make their new life in North America. The pull of gold was so prominent, in fact,
that California, and more generally the Western United States and Canada, came to be known in
China as Gam Saan, or “Gold Mountain.” A good example of this attitude toward the American
West can be seen in a letter sent by a young Chinese man in Canton to his brother who was
working at the time in Boston: “Good many Americans speak of California. Oh! Very rich
country! I hear good many Americans and Europeans go there. Oh! They find gold very quickly,
so I hear…I feel as if I should like to go there very much” (Qtd. in Takaki 34). America became,
in the working class Chinese imagination (especially among those living in the Guangdong
Province), a utopian destination, a place where gold and good employment opportunities were
freely available, where Chinese labor was valued, and where temporary immigrants could learn
English and return to China with money, skills, and experience that would elevate their social
and economic standing.
When they arrived, however, many found the reality to be much more dystopian than
utopian. As Iris Chang puts it, “Gold Mountain dreams came true for a few, but many more
Chinese immigrants found only heartbreak, failure, and loneliness” (45). Working conditions in
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mines and on railroads were extremely harsh. As Chang describes of railroad work, for instance,
“The Chinese labored from sunrise to sunset six days a week, in twelve-hour shifts…the tedium
of their lives was aggravated by the systematized abuse and contempt heaped on them by the
railroad executives. The Chinese worked longer and harder than whites, but received less
pay…worst of all, they endured whippings from their overseers, who treated them like slaves”
(61-2). Because Chinese labor came to be seen as a threat to white laborers, moreover, immigrant
workers were subject to prejudice and extreme violence. After the depletion of the gold mines
and the completion of the transcontinental railroad, things got even more difficult for Chinese
laborers. The sudden lack of railroad and mining jobs, along with the prejudice and violence that
workers faced in agricultural and industrial labor, forced the majority of immigrant Chinese to
major cities on the West coast, where they experienced segregation, economic deprivation, and
continued racial violence. As Iris Chang describes, Chinese immigrants faced a “gauntlet” of
racial violence from the moment they arrived. In the words of an observer, whites would “follow
the Chinaman through the streets, howling and screaming after him to frighten him. They catch
hold of his cue [sic] and pull him from the wagon. They throw brickbats and missles at him and
so, often these poor heathen, coming to this Christian land under sacred treaty stipulations, reach
their quarter of this Christian city covered with wounds and bruises and blood” (qtd. in Chang
126).
The dystopian nature of life in the United States was compounded by the legal
restrictions placed on their immigration and citizenship status in the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries. In the middle of the nineteenth century, the U.S. encouraged the immigration
of Chinese workers for mining and railroad work and sought to facilitate that immigration
through the Burlingame Treaty of 1864. This treaty, which granted China “most favored nation”
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status for trade with the United States, also declared “the inherent and inalienable right of man to
change his home and allegiance and also the mutual advantage of free migration and emigration
of their citizens and subjects respectively from one country to the other for the purposes of
curiosity or trade or as permanent residents” (Qtd in Chang 57). After the completion of the
railroad, however, sentiment toward Chinese immigration began to shift, as white American
workers feared and resented the competition Chinese labor presented for agricultural and
industrial jobs. The United States shifted policy, first by renegotiating the Burlingame Treaty in
1879, the new treaty stating that the United States had the right to restrict Chinese immigration to
the U.S. (Chang 129). This paved the way for the most well-known and far-reaching Chinese
immigration policy, the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which prohibited the immigration of all
skilled and unskilled Chinese laborers for ten years. At the expiration of the Act in 1892, the law
was replaced with the Geary Act, which extended exclusion for another ten years and added the
new provisions that Chinese people already living in the United States must register and obtain a
certificate of residence and that Chinese people in the United States were denied protection from
U.S. courts (Chang 136).
The Chinese Exclusion Act and the related Acts that followed it had profound
consequences for Chinese people in the United States, beyond even the ban on new Chinese
immigrants. One of the most significant of these was the drastic curtailment of Chinese mobility,
especially between China and the United States. The Act prevented Chinese working men from
bringing their families to join them in the U.S., while also effectively barring these men from
returning to China to visit because they would likely be unable to return. This was compounded
by the fact that the Naturalization Act of 1790 prohibited nonwhite immigrants from acquiring
citizenship via naturalization (Chang 44), which meant that even longtime Chinese immigrants
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lacked the legal protections of citizens and made the prospect of visiting China and returning to
the United States risky.
Chinese immigrants quickly developed strategies for circumventing the restrictions of the
Exclusion Act, including crossing the Canadian border (which Sui Sin Far writes about in several
stories) and the phenomenon of “paper sons” or “paper daughters,” in which Chinese immigrants
would purchase forged identification papers identifying them as the American-born offspring of
a current Chinese legal resident in the United States (which, after the Wong Kim Ark case in
1898 would make them U.S. citizens). This was possible because the Chinatown records office
in San Francisco was destroyed in the earthquake of 1906. These “paper sons” could then travel
to and live in the United States as citizens under the assumed identity. As Madeline Y. Hsu
points out, however, while the Exclusion laws failed to prevent working-class Chinese people
from immigrating to the United States, they did insure that those who did immigrate did so
illegally and thus remained alienated from both formal citizenship and true immersion in
American civic life. Exclusion laws, as Hsu puts it, “made it extremely difficult for those who
did [immigrate] to sink roots, establish families, and attempt to become Americans” (89).
Chinese immigrants also found ways to cope with the dystopian elements of living in
America. Some Chinese laborers led and participated in strikes, attempting with greater and
lesser degrees of success to extract concessions from their white employers (Chang 62; Takaki
86). Many Chinese immigrants and Chinese Americans sought justice and redress through the
courts. The most famous of these was Wong Kim Ark, whose victory in the Supreme Court in
1898 established birthright citizenship for second generation Chinese Americans (Chang 138).
As Hyung-Chan Kim shows, however, many other Chinese immigrants and Chinese Americans
petitioned the courts, again with greater and lesser degrees of success. Additionally, for some
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immigrants, Americanizing was a strategy to improve the quality of life in America. How people
did this varied greatly, from learning English and adopting American dress to attending
American universities.
Chinatowns also helped many Chinese immigrants and Chinese Americans cope with the
oppression they experienced in American society. Although generally poor and lacking in public
services, these segregated spaces provided some sense of community as well as some social and
political representation via a three-level structure that included family relations, larger regional
groupings (Sze Yup/Sam Yup) and ultimately the Chinese Six Companies (Wu 72-4). Joss
Houses in Chinatowns facilitated the practice of traditional religion, and the streets and alleys of
Chinatown became a place of communal celebration during festivals times. Chinatowns also
provided opportunities to work after the railroads were finished and to buy partial interests in
stores and businesses, which made it possible for laborers to attain merchant status, which then
allowed them to leave and reenter the US and bring their families.
Despite these coping mechanisms, however, America was, for many Chinese immigrants,
more dystopia than utopia. As Takaki puts it in his description of the experiences of immigrants
two Chinese immigrants, “something had happened to Ing Weh-teh and Liang Kau-tsi and
thousands of their fellow Chinese in the new land. They had come to America ‘extravagently’ in
search of Gam Saan, but only found themselves ‘eating bitterness,’ hec fu. For many of the Gold
Mountain men, the venture was a sad failure” (129-30).
Meanwhile, as many Chinese immigrants followed their utopian impulse to Gold
Mountain only to find a much more dystopian life of “eating bitterness,” in the U.S. (and
Canada), white Americans began to speak and write about the very presence of Chinese people
in America as the first step toward a dystopian American future. This particular strain of
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xenophobic dystopian rhetoric was so prevalent it acquired the generic label of “Yellow Peril”
literature. Most aggressively promoted by labor activists like Dennis Kearney, the idea of a
yellow peril, of the threat of an imminent invasion of North America by the Chinese, was an
effective message for political rallies and a frequent rallying cry used to incite racial violence.
The “yellow peril” also manifested in a popular sub-genre of dystopian fiction focused on
Chinese invasion, in which “the United States is shown to be seriously threatened, clearly
doomed, or destroyed” by massive waves of Chinese immigration (Wu 30).
In addition to the dystopian fear of future Chinese invasion, Chinatown itself came to be
seen by most of white society as a dystopian space in the present moment. This was largely due
to lurid, exploitative, sensationalist journalism that focused on the poverty and crime that existed
in Chinatowns and that portrayed Chinatowns as places of filth and depravity. Dystopian
Chinatown was also a popular theme in naturalist fiction, with authors especially capitalizing on
the fears of white sexual slavery, drug addiction, and other threats to the purity of white people,
and especially white women, who visit Chinatown. Frank Norris’s 1909 story, “The Third
Circle,” is an especially clear example of this. The story begins with a young white couple,
Harriet Van Eyck and Tom Hillegas, on a self-guided tourist excursion to San Francisco’s
Chinatown. After impulsively getting a tattoo from a street vendor, Miss Ten Eyck waits in a
restaurant while Hillegas goes to find the waiter who took their tea order. Delayed by a Chinese
merchant, Hillegas returns after an extended interval to find Miss Ten Eyck gone, the narrator
stating ominously that “he never saw her again. No white man ever did” (21). The story jumps
ahead twenty years, and the narrator, now speaking in the first person happens to mention the
well-known Hillegas-Ten Eyck episode to an alcoholic friend named Manning near Chinatown,
who informs the narrator that the phenomenon of white women being kidnapped into sexual
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slavery by the Chinese is now common. Remembering that he has seen a white woman working
as a prostitute in an opium den in Chinatown, Manning suggests that they visit her, ply her with
gin, and ask if she has ever heard of Harriet Ten Eyck. Sadie, the prostitute, who is described as
“a dreadful-looking beast of a woman, wrinkled like a shriveled apple, her teeth quite black from
nicotine her hands bony and prehensile like a hawk's claws — but a white woman beyond all
doubt,” becomes flustered when she hears the name Ten Eyck, but denies ever having heard it
and claims to have almost no memory of the past due to constant opium use. In the story’s
dramatic conclusion, however, Sadie notices a small butterfly tattoo on her finger, revealing her,
in fact, to be Harriet Ten Eyck.
Norris’s story is not subtle in its labelling of Chinatown as a site of danger, depravity, and
evil. Even the story’s title indicates Chinatown is an almost supernaturally vicious place.
According to the narrator, “there are three parts of Chinatown — the part the guides show you,
the part the guides don't show you, and the part that no one ever hears of. It is with the latter part
that this story has to do” (13). The “third circle” of the title also, however, clearly draws upon the
third circle of Hell from Dante’s Inferno, suggesting that Chinatown is a place of gluttony, in
which people’s appetites for alcohol, opium, and sex inevitably lead to the hellish loss of
identity, including the loss of memory, language, beauty, and freedom. The story is also unsubtle
in its use of Chinatown as a boogeyman for white people. It is constructed as a horror story, with
young, naïve lovebirds making an ill-advised tourist excursion into a district known for its
danger, oblivious to signs that are all too clear to the reader. When the reveal occurs at the end, it
is not shocking: everything in the story prepares us to find Harriet Ten Eyck, with her aristocratic
European name and her chic butterfly tattoo, as a withered, opium-addicted sex slave. In fact, the
impact of the story comes not from a surprise twist but from the inevitability of the white
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woman’s corruption. Norris’s Chinatown is the ultimate dystopia for his white American readers,
a physical space of temptation and defilement, where whiteness offers no protection and white
women’s purity had no hope of survival, located in the heart of American cities.

Utopianizing Chinatown
Chinatown plays a major role in Sui Sin Far’s fiction, but it is not the Chinatown of Frank
Norris and the “Yellow Peril” nativists. Sui Sin Far’s Chinatown is a place where Chinese
immigrants maintain their traditional culture while gradually “Americanizing;” a place where
humanized immigrant characters live out their lives with dignity and where vices like
drunkenness, opium use, and prostitution exist but do not dominate. It would be tempting to
suggest that Sui Sin Far counters “Yellow Peril” dystopianism by portraying Chinatown as a
utopia, but that would be an oversimplification and would require both overlooking the realistic,
dystopian, and neutral elements of her writings. What I argue, instead, is that Sui Sin Far writes
with a utopian impulse and that she is, as Annette White-Parks argues, always mindful of the
future for Chinese people in America. The utopian impulse that animates much of her written
work manifests not in a formal adoption of the conventions of the utopian genre, or in
descriptions of a perfected time or place, but in moments in which elements of Chinese
American life are self-consciously depicted in a better-than-the-real-thing way. In these
moments, Sui Sin Far renders Chinese American life and culture utopian, although this is a
selective process of utopianizing rather than a process of writing a utopian fiction.
These moments of utopianizing do not occur in all of Sui San Far’s stories; they are often
not even the most prominent features of stories in which they do occur. In fact, in many instances
the prospect of an American future for Chinese Americans seems desperately hopeless.
However, the existence of such moments of despair, moments in which the bleakness of the
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likely future looms over characters so profoundly that they cannot endure the thought of
remaining, or raising their children, in the United States does not disprove or negate the
utopianizing that Sui Sin Far does elsewhere. Instead, it is these moments of near-total
hopelessness that make the utopian version of Chinatown and Chinese American life within it
necessary and that reveal just how crucial utopianizing is in Sui Sin Far’s overall political
project. One of the most recognizable ways in which Sui Sin Far utopianizes in her writing is in
her depictions of Chinatown. As we have already seen, Chinatown was an unambiguously
dystopian space in the white American imagination around the turn of the twentieth century.
Through exploitative journalism and racist literary portrayals like Norris’s “The Third Circle,”
Americans developed a notion of Chinatowns as cesspools of corruption, vice, squalor, crime,
and danger. They were districts to be avoided by decent people except as titillating destinations
for voyeuristic “slumming” tourism.
As racist as they were, these dystopian images of Chinatown did contain some grains of
truth, especially concerning the portrayal of Chinatown as a place with few women. As Victor
Nee points out in Longtime Californ’, late nineteenth-century Chinatowns largely were bachelor
societies (17-19). The populations were primarily male, both as a result of the natural course of
frontier immigration (as Wu notes, “as with most other groups entering the frontier area, the
young men came first” [72] ) and as a consequence of legislation like the Page Law of 1875,
which prohibited the immigration of prostitutes and discouraged the immigration of women in
general (Takaki 40), and the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 (and its subsequent extensions),
which limited Chinese immigration to “diplomats, merchants, tourists, teachers, and students”
(Ling 13), forbidding laborers (a class that was extremely broadly defined and included artists
and engineers). This law prevented the immigration of Chinese women in several ways. One,
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because Chinese women were unlikely to be merchants in their own right, the Exclusion Act
barred them from immigrating on their own. Two, the Exclusion Act made it illegal for Chinese
laborers residing in the US before 1882 to return to the United States if they left for any amount
of time. Chinese working men were thus unable to return to China to marry and wives of Chinese
workers in the United States could not legally come and join their husbands
12
.
A single Chinese American laborer living in the United States had very little possibility
of marrying a woman. The previously mentioned laws largely prevented Chinese women from
entering the United States (except for those who were married to merchants, etc., obviously
taking them out of the dating pool), which led to a 20-1 ratio of men to women in Chinese
America during the 1880s (Ling 13) and thus created an extremely small pool of eligible
bachelorettes. If the extreme imbalance in the ratio of men to women made it difficult for
Chinese American men to court and marry Chinese American women, the law made it
impossible for such a man to marry a white woman. Even if a white woman could overcome the
racial prejudice that prevailed in America, even if she were impervious to the fear mongering of
anti-Chinese journalism and dystopian fiction and fell in love with a Chinese man instead of
viewing him as a rat-eating potential kidnapper, she could not legally marry him. According to
Hrishi Karthikeyan and Gabriel Chin, “the California legislature prohibited the licensing of
marriages between ‘Mongolians’ and ‘white person s’ in 1880” (26), a move that was followed
by other states. As Karthikeyan and Chin point out, by the year 1910, seven states (including

12
This became even more restrictive with the Immigration Act of 1924, which established quotas for the
immigration of certain nationalities and was especially discriminatory toward Chinese women (Ling 13; Nee 25).
While this law came after Sui Sin Far’s death, and thus did not play a direct role in her writing, it is emblematic of
the attitudes toward Chinese people, and specifically Chinese women during the early twentieth century. Moreover,
it represents the legal embodiment of the dystopian attitude with which white Americans viewed the Chinese; the
law, Ling points out, was “ostensibly [intended] to reduce the number of prostitutes, but actually to prevent the
proliferation of an undesirable alien race” (13).
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California) specifically outlawed marriages between whites and Asians within their anti-
miscegenation statutes (twenty eight states had such statutes at the time) (14).
13

Even if the gender imbalance were not so extreme, Chinese American workers would not
have had much time to pursue romantic relationships; as Iris Chang illustrates in The Chinese in
America, the life of a single working man in a Chinatown was extraordinarily difficult. “The
typical washer-man,” Chang describes, “not only worked in his laundry but slept there at night.
He rarely left the premises because suppliers, sensing quick profits, came to him…On some
days, a laundryman might labor twenty hours without stopping to eat” (Chang 169). It is not
surprising, therefore, that prostitution and opium use did exist in Chinatowns; after all, these
were spaces populated largely by single men, living in oppressive, impoverished conditions
without the possibility of marrying, starting a family, or returning home.
As White-Parks and others have pointed out, one of Sui Sin Far’s central concerns was to
counter the impression that most white Americans had of the Chinese in American, which
necessarily involved correcting the concept of Chinatown in the white American imagination.
According to White-Parks, Sui Sin Far “presents portraits of turn-of-the-century North American
Chinatowns, not in the mode of the ‘yellow peril’ literature popular in her era but with an
empathy that has caused critics from her time to the present to recognize her as the first to write
from an insider viewpoint on Chinese in North America” (1). William Wu likewise notes Sui Sin
Far’s insider status with regard to her depictions of Chinatowns. Discussing her 1899 story “A
Chinese Ishmael,” Wu notes that “this particular story is one of her lesser efforts, but even here
her understanding of the Chinese immigrants is clearly that of an insider” (54). Similarly,
although she does not mention Chinatown specifically, Amy Ling argues that “most of the

13
As an additional deterrent to interracial marriages between white women and Chinese men, the Expatriation Act
of 1907 stated “that any American woman who marries a foreigner shall take the nationality of her husband,”
meaning that marriage to a Chinese man would cost a white woman her citizenship (Seckler-Hudson 274-275).
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stories in Mrs. Spring Fragrance sought to counter the prevailing notions that the Chinese were
heathen, unassimilable, hatchet-waving rat eaters and pipe-smoking opium addicts who had no
right to live in the United States or Canada” (Ling “Introduction” 13). My purpose is not to
refute the claims of sympathetic representation of Chinatowns in Sui Sin Far’s writing made by
White-Parks, Wu, and Ling (or the numerous others who have argued that Sui Sin Far attempted
to counter white racism with her depictions of Chinatowns and the Chinese). Upon even a
cursory glance at Sui Sin Far’s writings, both fiction and non-fiction, it is clear that she is both
sympathetic to Chinatown and its residents and opposed to the stereotypical dystopian
representation of it in “yellow peril” literature. What I intend to show, however, is that Sui Sin
Far goes beyond merely correcting the negative images of Chinatown in most American writing
by actually idealizing Chinatown as a space of Chinese cultural preservation while eliding many
of the sad or unsavory aspects of actual Chinatown life. I am not arguing that Sui Sin Far makes
a utopia of Chinatown but rather that she intervenes in the dystopian discourse surrounding the
Chinese in America by selectively utopianizing elements of Chinese American life. As we will
see, these gestures are often small and are in many cases undercut by decidedly non-utopian
events within the stories themselves. Similar to Edward A. Johnson’s use of utopia in Light
Ahead for the Negro, then, I argue that this reveals the limits of utopianism for a Eurasian writer
and the limitations of pure utopia as an activist tool for members of oppressed and disfranchised
groups.
Although the first (and titular) story in Mrs. Spring Fragrance is not set in a Chinatown,
it contains the collection’s first description of a Chinatown, and in it we see the first instance in
which Chinatown is rendered utopian. Mrs. Spring Fragrance, the charming Americanized wife
of a successful merchant in Seattle has gone for a visit to her cousin, “the wife of the herb doctor
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of Clay Street” in San Francisco. The visit to San Francisco’s Chinatown is delightful to Mrs.
Spring Fragrance; we learn that
She was invited everywhere that the wife of an honorable Chinese merchant could go.
There was much to see and hear, including more than a dozen babies who had been born
in the families of her friends since she last visited the city of the Golden Gate. Mrs.
Spring Fragrance loved babies. She had had two herself, but both had been transplanted
into the spirit land before the completion of even one moon. There were also many
dinners and theatre-parties given in her honor. (20)
In this passage we see an image of Chinatown that is pleasant and urbane, not a world of crime
and depravity but one of dinner parties and excursions to the theater. The environment is worlds
away from the greasy restaurants and opium den/whorehouses of Norris’s Chinatown and the
residents could never be mistaken for rat-eaters.
Even more strikingly, the mention of “more than a dozen babies” directly refutes the
notion of Chinatowns as bachelor societies that was not only a persistent characteristic of racist
Chinatown literature but that was largely true in real life as well. Here, Sui Sin Far goes beyond
correcting the stereotypes of “yellow peril” literature and actually improves upon the historical
record. Of course, this serves a strategic purpose: by emphasizing children being born she asserts
the permanency of the Chinese in America. Families with children are settled. The persistent
myth of the sojourning Chinese worker—in America temporarily, just long enough to undercut
white labor and send good American money away to China—is incompatible with family the
picture of traditional family life drawn in this passage. This scene also implies a future for
Chinese Americans. These dozen babies, born into middle class Chinatown families, are
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American citizens, even if their parents can never be.
14
The fact that these babies have been born
in the time since Mrs. Spring Fragrance’s last visit to San Francisco also implies that the Chinese
are continually becoming more entrenched in San Franciscan, and American, life. It indicates
progress, perhaps suggesting that the era of sojourning and bachelorhood in Chinese America has
come to an end and Chinese Americans have entered into a new period of settled,
multigenerational, permanent presence in the United States. The profusion of new babies,
mentioned so casually in this story, is also striking in relation to the dystopian narratives of
Chinese invasion that had been popular for at least three decades prior to the publication of Mrs.
Spring Fragrance and that would remain popular for at least two more decades. Finally,
Chinatown is utopianized in this scene by the contrast drawn between Mrs. Spring Fragrance’s
fertile friends and her own terrible fortunes with children. Not to be too overdetermined, but Mrs.
Spring Fragrance, a Chinese woman who does not live in Chinatown, has lost both of her babies
in their first month of life; her Chinatown friends, however, appear to have nothing but success
bearing (and presumably raising) children. Of course, this does not mean that Chinatown has
some mystical power to ensure safe childrearing, or that leaving Chinatown condemns Chinese
couples to tragic childlessness. It does, however, associate Chinatown with fertility, family,
permanency, and community.
Just as the juxtaposition of Mrs. Spring Fragrance’s difficulty bearing children with the
fertility of her Chinatown friends establishes Chinatown as a place of rootedness, family, and
fertility, the experience of the white narrator in “The Story of One White Woman Who Married a
Chinese” depicts Chinatown as a safe haven for white women and a space in which some
protection is available to interracial couples. This is an instance of utopianizing that radically

14
While Chinese immigrants were denied the possibility of U.S. citizenship by the Naturalization Act of 1790 and
the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1888, the children of Chinese nationals born on American soil were citizens according
to the 14
th
Amendment and the Supreme Court Decision in United States v. Wong Kim Ark (1898).
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refutes the dystopian images those of Norris’s “The Third Circle,” in which Chinatown is a place
where white women are virtually assured of being kidnapped into sexual slavery. This story,
which, along with its sequel “Her Chinese Husband,” is unique in its first person narration, tells
of a white woman named Minnie who leaves her domineering husband and begins a relationship
with a kind, gentle-yet-masculine Chinese man. The most salient features of the story are the
characters: the first husband who dedicates his life to women’s suffrage despite, ironically, being
a misogynist; the assertive, physically masculine woman who assists him, and who knocks him
down when he aggressively propositions her; the narrator, a typist and mother who leaves her
abusive husband and contemplates suicide, and of course Liu Kanghi, the Chinese merchant who
rescues her and whom she eventually marries. Place, however, is equally important.
In the first part of the story, Minnie is unhappy in her marriage and her life. It is only
when she is welcomed into the Chinatown home of the Liu family that she finds comfort. There
she is not merely cared for, but allowed to develop economic self-sufficiency and encouraged to
rediscover her artistic/creative side. “The days, weeks, and months” she remembers of her time
in Chinatown, “passed peacefully and happily” (74).
It is only when Minnie returns to the world outside of Chinatown that she again
experiences intimidation and violence. The first instance of this occurs before her marriage to
Liu Kanghi, during a period when she has moved with her young child into a place of her own
“in a part of the city far removed from the outskirts of Chinatown where my home had been with
the Lius” (75). Returning home alone one night she is accosted by her former husband, who
threatens to take her child. Although she stands her ground and Carson eventually leaves, the
experience clearly leaves her feeling unsettled and vulnerable. In fact, is shortly after this
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incident that she decides to marry Kanghi and live happily with him and their children in
Chinatown.
The other, far more severe, instance of violence befalling Minnie and her family outside
of Chinatown happens at the end of the story. Minnie and Kanghi have moved out of Chinatown
to “a cottage in the suburbs,” a fact that she discloses without further explanation. All seems to
be going well until one day, without provocation, Kanghi is murdered. “He was brought home at
night,” Minnie narrates matter-of-factly, “shot through the head. There are some Chinese, just as
there are some Americans, who are opposed to all progress, and who hate with a bitter hatred all
who would enlighten or be enlightened” (83). Although the perpetrators of the crime are
Chinese, the cause is rage over miscegenation. But it is important to note that the information
about the family’s move to the suburbs comes just a few sentences before the news of Kanghi’s
murder. This suggests that, whoever committed the murder, an underlying cause was the fact that
Minnie and Kanghi took their taboo relationship out of the safe space of Chinatown and into the
treacherous rest of America. In Chinatown, the story seems to argue, people live according to
their best impulses; outside of Chinatown, hatred, jealousy, and violence prevail. It also suggests
that the physical space of Chinatown offers some measure of protection for interracial couples,
and by extension, their mixed-race children.
In this story, Minnie shows no concern for the anti-miscegenation laws that would have
made her marriage to Liu Kanghi illegal in California. More importantly, the author shows no
concern for them either. This is another instance of utopianizing, and one that shows just how
limited Sui Sin Far’s use of utopia is. Sui Sin Far was perfectly aware of the challenges that a
racially mixed relationship like the one between Minnie and Liu Kanghi would pose and she
wanted these (and the way the couple overcomes them) to be the focus of the reader’s attention.
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So, she does away with the threat of anti-miscegenation laws and thus, in the Chinatown (and,
more broadly, the California) of this story, social stigma and racism are the only barriers to
interracial love—not law. The tragic ending, however, is a stark reminder that while the world of
Sui Sin Far’s Chinatown stories may be utopianized in important ways, it is by no means an
accomplished utopia.

Man’s Utopia/Woman’s Dystopia
If, as I have argued, Sui Sin Far selectively utopianized elements of Chinese America, it
is important to note that the benefits of this utopianizing were not distributed evenly: Chinese
men in Sui Sin Far’s fiction generally fare much better than Chinese women. This is not to say
that Sui Sin Far’s fiction is sexist, however. Instead, the suffering that Chinese immigrant
women often experience in her stories draws attention to the multiple layers of oppression these
women endured and offers a note of caution to readers who might assume that the utopian
moments in her Chinatown fiction implied an easy life for Chinese immigrant women. In fact,
many of the most dystopian portrayals of women’s experiences are juxtaposed with images of
successful Chinese men, suggesting a dichotomy in Sui Sin Far’s perception of Chinese
America: a man’s utopia, but a woman’s dystopia. Although this is the case in several of Mrs.
Spring Fragrance’s stories (especially “The Americanizing of Pau Tsu” and “In the Land of the
Free”), I will focus on “The Wisdom of the New” because it draws an extremely clear contrast
between the utopian and dystopian experiences of immigrant men and women.
Unlike most of Sui Sin Far’s fiction, “The Wisdom of the New” begins in China, and
from its Chinese setting immediately establishes an image of America as a Gold Mountain-
utopia in the eyes of the men there. The story begins with the following exchange between an old
man and Wou Sankwei, one of the main characters in the story:
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Old Li Wang, who had lived in the land beyond the sea, was wont to declare: ‘for every
cent that a man makes here, he can make one hundred there.’ ‘Then, why,’ would ask
Sankwei, ‘do you now have to move from door to door to fill your bowl with rice?’ And
the old man would sigh and answer: ‘Because where one learns how to make gold, one
also learns how to lose it’ (42).
This exchange plays upon the idea of Gold Mountain, the utopian image of ultra-prosperous
America held by many people in nineteenth century China. In fact, it sounds very similar to a
nineteenth century Chinese saying that, as Takaki describes, “promised that if a sojourner could
not save a thousand dollars he surely could obtain at least eight hundred. But even with the
saving of three hundred dollars, he could return to China and become a ‘big, a very big
gentleman’” (34). Of course, it does so ironically, placing the rhetoric of Gold Mountain
utopianism in the mouth of a broke beggar. His answer to the question of how he could be poor
when money is so easily obtainable in America seems to suggest that Sui Sin Far is interested in
undercutting the sense of utopianism that becomes associated with America (and specifically the
United States) in the minds of the Chinese in China. Indeed, the story ends on a note of tragedy
and ultimately involves the main characters leaving the United States to return permanently to
China, but it is not the tragedy foreshadowed by the ironic utopianism of Li Wang. Material
prosperity is not a problem in the story, and if Sankwei’s story ends with a tragic loss and the
abandonment of his life in America, it is not because of a failure to accrue wealth.
Li Wang’s utopian attitude toward the possibilities of wealth in the United States are
actually validated by another man who has spent time in America. “Ching Kee, like old Li
Wang, had also lived in the land beyond the sea; but unlike old Li Wang he had accumulated a
small fortune” (42). Ching Kee’s experience shows Sankwei that the prophecies of wealth in
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America really are possible and inspire him to make his own trip to the US. More important even
than his fortune, though, are the words that Ching Kee says to Sankwei: “’Tis a hard life over
there,’ said he, ‘but ‘tis worth while.. At least one can be a man, and can work at what work
comes his way without losing face.’ Then he laughed at Wou Sankwei’s flabby muscles, at his
soft, dark eyes, and plump, white hands. ‘If you lived in America,’ said he, ‘you would learn to
be ashamed of such beauty’” (42-3).
America here is portrayed as more than simply a place of boundless economic
opportunity. It is also a place of rugged manliness; a place where one is proud to work hard to
earn a living, where honest labor is considered virtuous while overfed laziness earns nothing but
shame. America is thus a masculine utopia, and it is directly contrasted to the traditional class
structure in China that prevents Sankwei from working to help his family because his late
father’s occupation and social position has placed the family above physical labor. “Should you
become a fisherman,” Sankwei’s mother tells him when he thinks of adopting the profession as a
way to feel useful and help support his family, “your family would lose face. Remember that
your father was a magistrate” (42).
Ching Kee’s invocation of masculinity is what ultimately persuades Sankwei, who, after
receiving Ching Kee’s criticism of his soft muscles and pale skin, “made up his mind that he
would go to America, the land beyond the sea. Better any life than that of a woman man” (43).
There is some orientalism in the narration here. Unlike most of the action in Sui Sin Far’s stories,
this section of this one takes place in China, and some of the deviations from Sui Sin Far’s
normal narrative style indicate a desire to distinguish China from America stylistically. For
instance, whenever the third person omniscient narrator refers to America, the term used is “the
land beyond the sea.” The first time the actual word “America” is used is in quoted dialogue
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from Ching Kee, a man who has lived “many years” in America and who has only recently
returned to the small village in China. After that, interestingly, both terms are used to relate
Sankwei’s resolution to go to America: “he made up his mind that he would go to America, the
land beyond the sea.” At this moment, the narrator has come much closer to Sakwei’s own
perspective, and the use of both the exotic-sounding “land beyond the sea” alongside the more
prosaic “America” suggests that Sankwei is at a moment of transition between the traditional
Chinese and the new America. This notion of America as new, progressive, oriented toward the
future is alluded to in the story’s title and will be discussed more explicitly later in the story
when the question arise about whether to raise a Chinese child with American or traditional
Chinese values.
The sense of America as a masculine utopia for the male Chinese immigrant is borne out
in Wou Sankwei’s early experiences in San Francisco. Jumping forward seven years in the
narrative, the second section of the story begins with Sankwei enjoying the success of his
endeavors in America, having been named “junior partner of the firm of Leung Tang Wou & Co.
of San Francisco.” His time had been industriously spent, we are told, and Sankwei had been
driven toward success from the moment of his arrival. “Self-improvement had been his object
and ambition,” we learn, “even more than the acquirement of a fortune, and who, looking at his
fine, intelligent face and listening to his careful English, could say that he had failed?” (43). To
some extent, the narrator attributes Sankwei’s success to the benevolent intervention of a
“motherly” white woman, Mrs. Dean, “who had taken him under her wing shortly after his
arrival in America” (44). This suggests that one of the element of utopianized America for
Chinese immigrants is fortuitous and positive interchange with white Americans (actually, at
first it is not really even interchange with Americans, which implies mutuality and exchange of
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culture. In the case of Wou Sankwei and Mrs. Dean the relationship is one of patronage, in which
Mrs. Dean, the “native” and thus the holder of the power in the relationship reaches out
benevolently to assist the young, foreign man. There is, however, some sense of interchange later
in the story, such as when Mrs. Dean explains elements of Chinese culture to Adah or when the
two white women attend the Harvest Moon Festival in Chinatown).
That Mrs. Dean takes Sankwei under her wing is no accident; the narrator informs us that
she has had a pseudo-missionary dedication “to the betterment of the condition and the uplifting
of the young workingmen of Chinese race who came to America. Their appeal and need, as she
had told her niece, was for closer acquaintance with the knowledge of the Western people, and
that she had undertaken to give them, as far as she was able. The rewards and satisfactions of her
work had been rich in some cases. Witness Wou Sankwei.” (52) It is interesting to note that the
narrator says this and, while not explicitly endorsing the sentiment, does not refute it either. That
being said, Sui Sin Far is careful to make it clear that this passage is from the perspective of Mrs.
Dean, not necessarily the narrator. The only deviation from that is the last line, when Wou
Sankwei is offered as proof of the success of Mrs. Dean’s approach. On one level this does imply
support for that Mrs. Dean’s belief in the need for white patronage to elevate Chinese workers.
On another, the last line can be read as proof that Mrs. Dean, and the patronizing white
missionary types that she represents, is wrong. “Witness Wou Sankwei,” the narrator says, and
by the end of the story we realize that this was not a triumphant example but a warning of the
downfall that was to come for Sankwei and his family as a direct result of his excessive
Americanization.
Just as Sankwei’s success is attributable in part to his association with white Americans,
an even greater part is due to his willingness and ability to “Americanize.” Whereas he had
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originally planned to return to his family in China, Sankwei has, after seven years, become
permanently established in San Francisco. He speaks English fluently, dresses like an American,
and has removed his queue. He converses easily with white Americans and maintains platonic
friendships with American women. So Americanized, in fact, is Wou Sankwei, that he intends to
enroll his son in American schools, an ambition that reaffirms the sense of progress, in this case
cross-generational, that the story implies is the utopian ideal for Chinese men coming to
America. This becomes a major problem later in the story, but for now it is evidence both of
Sankwei’s “Americanization” and of the progressive, almost teleological sense of utopianism
that the story constructs for America.
As much as America becomes a masculine utopia for Wou Sankwei and other bootstrap-
pulling Chinese men in this story, it becomes a dystopia for Chinese women like Pau Lin, his
wife. Before Pau Lin even arrives, there is a sense of foreboding and a hint that the experience of
immigrating to America, which has been so fortunate for Wou Sankwei, will be far less
propitious for a Chinese wife. After informing Mrs. Dean and Adah that he has sent for his wife,
Sankwei tells them “rather stiffly” that he has not written a single letter to Pau Lin in the seven
years that he has been away. Adah is aghast at this, and Mrs. Dean explains to her that Pau Lin
can neither read nor write and that this is not uncommon for women in China. Moreover, she
explains, Sankwei’s marriage to Pau Lin is one of duty, not of love, and that his sending for her
is simply one more part of that duty. Seeming to anticipate the helplessness and alientation that
Pau Lin will experience when she arrives, Adah muses: “I wonder if it is all a duty on her side.”
Adah can already see what Sankwei and Mrs. Dean cannot: Pau Lin, as a woman, will not have
the same immigration experience that Sankwei has enjoyed. She will not be in control of her
household and will not possess real autonomy. She will have decisions made for her without her
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input and she will have expectations thrust upon her that she cannot, and does not wish to, fulfill.
Immigrating to America as the wife of a Chinese man may in fact be her duty just as sending for
her had been Sankwei’s, but it is a duty that she requires more from her than it ever did from him
and one that demands that she efface herself and relinquish her rights or motherhood in order to
carry it out.
Hsuan L. Hsu notes that Adah is something of a stand in for Sui Sin Far, and she does
indeed function as a truth-teller in this story (Hsu 63). Just as her premonition of Pau Lin’s
unhappiness here foreshadow the tragedy that will come later in the story as a result of
Sankwei’s failure to see her as a person and America’s inhospitality to a Chinese woman who
wishes to remain Chinese, her admonishment of Sankwei later in the story (along with the other
Adah’s admonishment of Lin Fo in “The Americanization of Pau Tsu”) establishes a sense of
understanding between woman that transcends race. That a white woman can better understand
the needs of a Chinese woman with whom she cannot even speak than can the Chinese woman’s
own husband suggests that the gulf between men and women may be greater than the gulf
between white and Chinese and emphasizes the dystopian experience of being a Chinese woman
immigrant.
Adah’s misgivings are given greater illustration just a few lines later when Pau Lin
arrives on a steamship and has to be pointed out to Sankwei. Before long, the couple falls into a
routine that is comfortable, or at least seems so to Sankwei. The change to the life of a family
man, for Sankwei, is “not such a great one after all.” He continues about his business and
maintains his normal social routine with little interference from Pau Lin, while she occupies
herself with household tasks and limited social interaction with other wives in her building. She
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plays the role of the submissive wife that she has been taught be her mother-in-law in China, and
he indulges her with gifts and petty acts of generosity.
Pau Lin shows “no disposition to become Americanized," we learn, "and Sankwei
himself had not urged it.” As he tells Mrs. Dean, “I do appreciate the advantages of becoming
westernized…but it is not as if she had come here as I came, in her learning days. The time for
learning with her is over” (47). So opposed to Americanization is Pau Lin, in fact, that she
physically punishes their son for speaking English. She specifically describes his offense as
“speaking the language of the white women”’ which suggests that Pau Lin’s resistance to
“Americanizing” for herself and her son are motivated by jealousy as much as by a desire to
preserve her own culture. Pau Lin’s jealousy, however, is not rooted in the simple fear that her
husband may be sexually attracted to another woman, but the knowledge that she is destined to
remain both socially inferior to women like Adah and alientated from her own culture as well as
the white American culture such women represent. Pau Lin’s apparent jealousy of Adah also
reinforces her traditionalism by showing her discomfort with American gender roles. At a later
point in the story, Pau Lin indicates that her problem with Sankwei’s relationship with Adah is at
least partially due to her feeling that it is wrong for a man to worship a woman, especially a
woman other than his wife, and especially a white woman. Thus, the jealousy aspect of Pau Lin’s
resistance to Americanization has roots in her Chinese traditionalism. It serves to show both the
extent to which traditional Chinese ways are being abandoned in America (and cannot compete
with American ways, just as she cannot compete with Adah for her husband’s attention) and the
fact that she is a woman with feelings and desires, even if those desires are to be the traditional
Chinese wife of a traditional Chinese husband.
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The strength of Pau Lin’s feelings is dramatically displayed in the conclusion of the story
when she melodramatically poisons her child rather than allow Sankwei to enroll him in an
English-language school and set him on a path toward Americanization. This is obviously a
tragic moment, and it can be read as Pau Lin’s ultimate punishment for failing to assimilate.
Remaining Chinese in America is hard for a woman like Pau Lin and impossible for her
offspring, the story seems to suggest; attempting to do so can only bring suffering and the
destruction of her family.
It is also possible, however, to read the ending as a perverse expression of Pau Lin’s
power. In Pau Lin’s mind, the act of killing her son is compassionate; it saves him from a fate
that, to her, is even worse than death: losing his Chineseness. Because of the great power
disparity between Pau Lin, the unassimilated immigrant woman, and her Americanized husband,
she believes that killing Yen is the only way that she can intervene to help him. Confessing the
act to Sankwei, Pau Lin indeed takes the role of a savior: "he is saved," smiled she, "from the
Wisdom of the New." Moreover, by murdering her son, Pau Lin also exerts power over Sankwei
in three ways. First, by taking away his son, “the thing he loved the best in all the world,” Pau
Lin punishes Sankwei for ignoring her wishes and demanding that their son become what she
can never be. Second, her act overrules Sankwei’s imperious edict that Yen be Americanized
regardless of Pau Lin’s desire to keep him out of American schools. And finally, the murder of
their child ultimately gets Pau Lin what she wanted in the first place: she and Sankwei leave the
United States and return to China.
As I mentioned above, Pau Lin’s murderous act at the conclusion of “The Wisdom of the
New” is both melodramatic at the narrative level and problematic in terms of Sui Sin Far’s
attitude toward assimilation. What the story unquestionably shows, however, is that, in Sui Sin
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Far’s fiction, the United States, and Chinatown in particular, is no Gold Mountain utopia for
Chinese women. Although a character like Jade Spring Fragrance may be able to assimilate and
live happily in America, the American experience of Chinese women in Sui Sin Far’s stories
more often resembles that of Pau Lin. Moreover, the fact that Mrs. Spring Fragrance, the one
successful example of assimilation, has no children suggests that assimilating is not the key to
Sui Sin Far’s future-oriented utopianism. But that does not mean that, in Sui Sin Far’s mind,
there is no possibility of a multi-generational future for the Chinese in the United States. For Sui
Sin Far, the real utopian possibility lies not in cultural assimilation but in biological
amalgamation.

Amalgamationist Utopianism
So far in this chapter I have shown how Sui Sin Far countered racist “yellow peril”
dystopianism by utopianizing Chinatown in her fiction (and to some degree in her journalism),
and I have argued that, despite these utopian elements, she often depicts America as a dystopian
place for Chinese women who endure more layers of oppression than their male counterparts. I
turn my attention now to her future vision, which I am calling “amalgamationist utopianism.” As
I mentioned at the start of the chapter, my use of the term “amalgamationist” to describe her
future-oriented utopianism instead of the perhaps more obvious “assimilationist” is intentional.
In discussing the future that Sui Sin Far envisions for the Chinese in America, I want to
emphasize not merely the cultural assimilation that she often appears to endorse, but the more
fundamental biological fusion of races that she believes will ultimately end the oppression of the
Chinese in America by diminishing the biological/racial differences between Chinese and white
people and replacing differentiated races with “one family” (Leaves). My use of the word
“amalgamation” is also significant because of its popularity in the late nineteenth century as a
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bugaboo for racist, nativists whites who insisted that the expansion of citizenship and basic rights
to non-white peoples would lead to interracial coupling, which would generate mixed-race
offspring and lead to the corruption of whiteness and the erosion of white-dominant American
culture. Sui Sin Far’s utopianism turns this amalgamation hysteria on its head by insisting that
racial amalgamation would both improve the racial stock of the citizenry and eliminate racial
tension and oppression. Interestingly, as Emma Teng points out, there is precedent for this kind
of thinking in Chinese utopianism around the time that Sui Sin Far wrote, although it is unclear
whether she was aware of this body of Chinese-language literature.
The key to understanding Sui Sin Far’s eugenic utopianism is her autobiographical essay,
“Leaves From the Mental Portfolio of an Eurasian,” published in The Independent in 1909. This
essay, in which Sui Sin Far reflects on the experience throughout her early life that crafted her
identity and established her purpose as a writer and an advocate for the Chinese in America,
provides excellent insight into Sui Sin Far’s self-perception, racial identity, and motivation.
“Leaves” makes it clear early on that, despite her choice to adopt a Chinese name in place
of her Anglo birth name, Sui Sin Far identified as Eurasian, not simply Chinese. Moreover, she
suggests several times throughout the essay that this hybrid identity was actually more
challenging than being purely Chinese, even though her Eurasian-ness allowed her to pass for
white if she chose to, thus potentially sparing her from some of the discrimination and violence
experienced by the Chinese. The source of this extra difficulty is the fact that she could not
racially identical to either of her parents and is thus alienated, to some degree, from both.
Describing the confusion she experienced as a child, Sui Sin Far explains that “the question of
nationality perplexes my little brain. Why are we what we are? I and my brothers and sisters.
Why did God make us to be hooted and stared at? Papa is English, mamma is Chinese. Why
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couldn’t we have been either one thing or the other?” (410). Being “either one thing or the
other,” the young Sui Sin Far suggests, would not only provide stability in her self-perception; it
would also allow her parents to understand her. As it is, however, she feels that she is “different
to both of them—a stranger, tho their own child” (410). Even her Chinese mother, who
presumably knew the experience of prejudice and discrimination in North America, could only
empathize so much with her mixed-race children. Sui Sin Far notes that although her mother
supported her children in their “battles” with racist white children, “I doubt whether she
understands the depth of the troubled waters thru which her little children wade,” implying,
again, that to be Eurasian is more difficult than to be Chinese in America (409).
While Sui Sin Far always saw herself as Eurasian, “Leaves” shows that the process of
coming to terms with that hybrid identity involved self-directed education in Chinese history and
culture. Raised in England and Canada and white enough to pass, Sui Sin Far decided at an early
age that she would have to actively cultivate the Chinese side of her identity. “Whenever I have
the opportunity,” she remembers, “I steal away to the library and read every book I can find on
China and the Chinese” (411). Her research into Chinese history and culture inculcate in her a
defiant pride in being half Chinese. She describes how, upon learning of the historical
achievements of the Chinese, she develops a “great vanity”: “I learn that China is the oldest
civilized nation on the face of the earth and a few other things. At eighteen years of age what
troubles me is not that I am what I am, but that others are ignorant of my superiority" (411
emphasis added). This might seem to suggest that she means that the Chinese are superior.
However, because her entire purpose in writing this essay is to explain and discuss what it is to
be a Eurasian, we should read this as a suggestion that Eurasians are actually superior to either
wholly white or wholly Chinese people. This is the first indication in the essay that Sui Sin Far
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sees amalgamation as preferable to racial purity, a view that will shortly become the basis for an
amalgamationist utopianism.
One of the interesting features of “Leaves” is the way that it hops from episode to episode
in Sui Sin Far’s life, at times juxtaposing apparently contradictory scenes in a way that illustrates
that she does not view her personal development as a linear teleology. An example of this is the
way that she follows up her scene of nascent pride in her Chinese roots and her Eurasian identity
with a reminder that, as she has expressed several times already, being racially mixed was
singularly challenging. Shortly after recounting her delight at learning of Chinese culture and her
“vanity” at being Eurasian, and thus superior to racially pure people, she writes that she learned
shorthand and began working in newspapers. She is assigned “most of the local Chinese
reporting,” through which “I meet many Chinese persons, and when they get into trouble am
often called upon to fight their battles in the papers” (411). Sui Sin Far takes great pride in
fighting these battles, and writes of being elated when she reads an article by a Chinese writer
declaring that “the Chinese in America owe an everlasting debt of gratitude to Sui Sin Far for the
bold stand she has taken in their defense” (411). Shortly thereafter she meets the writer of that
article and learns that he is married to a white woman with whom he has “several children.” “I
am very much interested in these children,” she recalls, “and when I meet them my heart throbs
in sympathetic tune with the tales they relate of their experiences as Eurasians. ‘Why did papa
and mamma born us?’ asks one. ‘Why?’” (411-12). Here we see sympathy with other Eurasians
and a return to the idea that being Eurasian is somehow tragic. Like Sui Sin Far, these children
are so troubled by their mixed racial identity that they question their own existence, even
implying that their parents made a mistake by having them. On its own, this reads almost like an
argument against amalgamation and in favor of racial purity, on the grounds that producing
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mixed-race children is cruel to them and that the children themselves see it this way, which of
course contrasts sharply with the almost overwhelming sense of pride in her racial identity that
she had described just a moment before.
In yet another quick reversal, however, Sui Sin Far refutes this notion just a few
paragraphs later in what happens to be the clearest articulation of her utopian vision anywhere in
her writing. She begins with a statement of equality, although the kind of equality we may
expect: “Fundamentally, I muse, people are all the same. My mother’s race is as prejudiced as
my father’s” (412). As a Eurasian, neither all white nor all Chinese, Sui Sin Far is able to take a
third-party view of both cultures and judges them both equal in prejudice toward others. This
statement suggests, moreover, that it is not just her mother’s race and her father’s that are equally
guilty, but all people. Just as all people are equally guilty of prejudice and intolerance, she
suggests that all people are responsible for fixing them: “Only when the whole world becomes as
one family will human beings be able to see clearly and hear distinctly” (412). This is Sui Sin
Far’s ultimate solution to discrimination and prejudice, and clearly it is utopian, both in the sense
that it foresees a time in which the problems of the present are overcome and in the sense that it
seems like wishful thinking. The next sentence of the essay, however, modifies this simplistic
expression of utopia: “I believe that some day a great part of the world will be Eurasian. I cheer
myself with the thought that I am but a pioneer. A pioneer should glory in suffering” (412). Here
is the counterargument to the anti-amalgamation argument that seemed to be creeping into via
the quote from about poor Eurasian children a moment ago. Racial mixing is the way of the
future, Sui Sin Far argues; it is inevitable. She sees this as a good thing; as she indicated before,
she feels superior to pure-blooded people as a result of her mixed identity and it is strongly
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implied that more prevalent mixing in the future, more amalgamation, will lead to the
compassionate understanding that she identifies just one line before as the utopian ideal.
Although Sui Sin Far’s prediction of the utopian amalgamated future specifically rests on
the notion of a growing number of Eurasians, her mixed-race ideal is not restricted to Eurasians.
In relating episodes during her travels to Jamaica, she describes seeing acts of racism committed
toward black Jamaicans, and indicates that she feels a kind of kinship with them: “Occasionally
an Englishman will warn me against the ‘brown boys’ of the island, little dreaming that I too am
of the ‘brown people’ of the Earth” (414). Here Sui Sin Far expresses solidarity with other
oppressed people, identifying more with the black Jamaicans than with the Englishman (her
father’s people). By aligning herself with black Jamaicans (with whom she shares no ancestry)
against the white English (which are her father’s people) she suggests that mixed race status is
not actually half white and half “brown,” but in fact all brown. By referring to the “brown people
of the Earth,” moreover, she extends the notion of solidarity beyond the island of Jamaica,
beyond even North America, to include oppressed and colonized people around the world. As
this essay was published in 1909, Sui Sin Far presumably included people from Africa, the East
Indies, Africa, and Hawaii (areas colonized by England and the U.S.) in this “brown” alliance.
Thus, although her fiction focuses on the present and future conditions of the Chinese in
America, her utopian ideal of greater understanding and human unity, brought upon in part
through racial intermixing, includes people of all races.
Of course, this is a radical rejection of the eugenics theories that were circulating at the
time, both in America and China. As we have seen, scientific racism in the U.S. prompted calls
for eugenic policies intended to maintain white racial purity and threatened of the dystopian
future that would result from amalgamation. In China, as Emma Teng has shown, theories of
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eugenics were also being considered, although in most of these the suggestion was to encourage
the intermarriage of whites and "yellows" so as to maximize genetic potential by combining the
best traits of these two supposedly superior races. The "browns," according to Chinese eugenic
utopianism, were inferior to both white and yellow, and should either be bred out of existence or
elevated to the level of the "better" races through intermarriage with benevolent volunteers who
would sacrifice (in the sense of parenting a child with an inferior race) for the greater good (Teng
138-9). By asserting the equality of the "brown people of the Earth" with her Eurasian self, Sui
Sin Far proposes an alternate eugenic theory in which free intermarriage of equal peoples will
lead to a future in which humanity is defined by inclusion and understanding rather than
segregation and prejudice. This goes along with the emphasis on romantic love, grounded in
mutual respect, in her fiction. Note also her description of "Chinese men who compare favorably
with the white men of my acquaintance in mind and hear qualities." She observes that many of
these men are attractive and possess physical qualities that are different from white men but in
some ways superior (and in others inferior). This suggests that mixing actually has the potential
to improve on both of the races.
As if to remind us that the harmonious, racially integrated and amalgamated, society to
which she has alluded is in fact a utopian projection of the future and not a present reality, Sui
Sin Far describes being the object of discrimination and prejudice when she visits Chinatowns: “I
find that the Chinese merchants and people are generally inclined to meet me with suspicion”
(415). By this point, Sui Sin Far has made her way to the West Coast and is doing journalistic
work in San Francisco’s Chinatown, and this shows passage recalls the sense of alienation she
described earlier. As much as she may believe in the utopian potential of Eurasian-ness, she is
faced with the reality that Eurasians do not fit neatly into either society: that of the white
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American or that of the Chinese American. It does not help that “save for a few phrases, I am
unacquainted with my mother tongue. How, then, can I expect these people to accept me as their
countrywoman? The Americanized Chinamen actually laugh in my face when I tell them that I
am of their race” (415). Here she shows one of the real barriers to acceptance for Eurasians:
language. She suggests that language is an essential part of a national (and thus racial) identity.
Also, the play on mother tongue, which is also her mother’s tongue, feminizes the language and
thus places the guardianship of the race in women’s hands. This is confirmed in the following
sentences when “some little women discover that I have Chinese hair, color of eyes and
complexion, also that I love rice and tea. This settles the matter for them—and for their
husbands” (415). It is the women who recognize her as a member of the race and who offer her
acceptance. In an inversion of traditional Chinese patriarchy, the men follow the women in
accepting her. As we saw in “The Wisdom of the New,” women in Sui Sin Far’s fiction take this
role seriously.
As Sui Sin Far’s experience with the women of Chinatown suggests, there is acceptance
possible for Eurasians, both from Chinese people and whites. She illustrates the latter through the
story of a young Eurasian woman, passing as Mexican, who is outed to her fiancé by a friend.
“When the young man hears that the girl he is engaged to has Chinese blood in her veins, he
exclaims: ‘Oh, what will my folks say?’ But that is all. Love is stronger than prejudice with him,
and neither he nor she deems it necessary to inform his ‘folks’” (416). Some white men, this
passage suggests, are accepting of mixed race people; more importantly, in noting that the man’s
only problem with his fiancé’s race is his parents’ judgment, Sui Sin Far suggests that the
prejudice against Eurasians is generational and will work itself out in time.
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Sui Sin Far ends the essay with a reiteration of her amalgamationist utopian vision, this
time emphasizing that the perfected future will be post-national in addition to post-racial. “After
all” she writes in the concluding lines of the essay, “I have no nationality and am not anxious to
claim any. Individuality is more than nationality. ‘You are you and I am I,’ says Confucius. I
give my right hand to the Occidentals and my left to the Orientals, hoping that between them
they will mot utterly destroy the insignificant ‘connecting link.’ And that is all” (418). As she
mentioned earlier, Sui Sin Far sees herself, in her proud acceptance of mixed-race identity, as a
pioneer, one who was willing to suffer in order to bring about the future of greater understanding
and compassion that would result from intermarriage. Here she hints at something more. Not
only is she a pioneer in the inevitable transition toward a Eurasian (or more broadly, a racially
amalgamated) future, she is also a pioneer in post-nationality.
In 1911, two years after the publication of “Leaves from the Mental Portfolio of an
Eurasian,” and one year before Mrs. Spring Fragrance, Sui Sin Far published another essay in
The Independent which offers additional insight into her utopianism. As with “Leaves,” “The
Persecution and Oppression of Me,” which is not attributed to Sui Sin Far by name, but instead
bears the inscription, “By a Half Chinese,” focuses on the experience of being racially mixed.
Unlike, “Leaves,” though, this essay does not attempt to relate the formative experiences of Sui
Sin Far’s life, or the facts of her personal background. Instead, it strikes an almost bitter tone of
defiance and explicitly seeks to mount a protest. “Because I dare to be happy in my ‘shame,’”
she writes early in the essay, “everything has been said and done which possible could be said or
done to humiliate me.” These offenses, she continues, are too numerous to recount, but she
wishes to provide a few examples because “I am convinced they merit record as a protest against
American race jealousy and prejudice” (422).
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The notion of “race jealousy,” is an important part of this essay. “I attribute this
persecution and oppression of me,” Sui Sin Far writes near the beginning of the piece, “to a
peculiar combination of jealousy and prejudice. It is not the ordinary persecution of race, I am
convinced” (421). By noting that she suffers a persecution beyond the “ordinary persecution of
race,” and by declaring that this special persecution is motivated by jealousy, Sui Sin Far once
again suggests that being mixed race, or Eurasian, is actually superior to being either/or. This
reaffirms the notion of utopian amalgamation in the future that she discussed two years earlier in
“Leaves.”
This sense of the mixed-race superiority, and the idea that it generates jealousy and
hatred among the non-mixed whites she encounters, is a controlling force in the essay, and it is
something that Sui Sin Far describes as being more or less unique to her. Most in her situation,
she implies, fall victim to “the temptation which assails the half Chinese who goes out into the
world, as I have done… to pass as wholly white” (421). Sui Sin Far will not pass, however, and
her refusal to conceal the Chinese half of her racial identity earns her the scorn of “jealous”
whites. This she makes very clear, writing that “the Persecution and Oppression of me in
America is because I will not be that sort of half breed, and prefer to reflect honor upon those
who are of mixt Asiatic and European nationality.”
The instances of “persecution and oppression” that she relates in the essay are usually
verbal slights and racist exchanges; they are occasionally comical and they generally take place
in her place of residence. One of these is the story of a landlady who thinks that Sui Sin Far is
practicing witchcraft because she hears Sui Sin Far practicing Chinese in her room. Confronting
a confused Sui Sin Far, the landlady demands that she “stop exercising occult powers over me;
compelling me to like you against my will.” Although this is a relatively minor incident in the
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essay, likely included for comic effect and to emphasize the absurdity and ignorance of white
racism, it is still interesting in that it contains hints of mixed-race superiority. The thing that most
flummoxes the white landlady is fact that, despite her irrational, racist feelings, she cannot hate
her Eurasian tenant. It must be Chinese witchcraft, the woman believes, that compels her to like
a part-Chinese woman against her will. Sui Sin Far, however, implies that it is her Eurasian
superiority that makes the woman like her despite her obvious racism toward the Chinese.
This episode is followed by a similar, though more substantial series of incidents at
another rooming house, this time on the east coast. Sui Sin Far lives in a rooming house run by a
racist teacher who says things like: “but tho I despise and have the utmost contempt for the
negroes, yet I hate worse the Chinese, who have such horrible ways.” Hearing this, Sui Sin Far
tells the teacher that she herself is half Chinese. “She told me she would never have guessed it,”
Sui Sin Far recounts, “which she expected me to take as a great compliment.” The teacher begs
Sui Sin Far not to tell anyone about her racial identity because it would be bad for business to
have a Chinese boarder, but also begs her not to leave.
After this exchange, the teacher is cordial to Sui Sin Far in private, but “congealed,
dignified and remote,” when others are around. For example, Sui Sin Far notes that “I heard her
say to a teacher from the South, ‘I’m polite to her, but would not think of treating her as an
equal,’ and the teacher from the South returned, ‘The only way is to keep them down and order
them about. That’s how we manage the negroes, even the whitest blooded.’ As with the black
Jamaicans in “Leaves,” Sui Sin Far aligns Eurasians with other oppressed races, in this case
African Americans, against white oppressors. The Southern teacher’s response indicates a one
drop mentality, which applies to mixed Chinese/white people as much as to African Americans.
Interestingly, on this she and Sui Sin Far seem to agree, although it has very different
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significance for the two women. For the Southern teacher, it means that any amount of non-white
blood makes a person impure and inferior to any white person; for Sui Sin Far, racial mixture in
any proportion both unites the individual with all other “‘brown people’ of the Earth” and makes
the individual superior to single-raced people. In fact, the notion of mixed-race superiority comes
out again in very explicit terms during a later exchange between Sui Sin Far and the teacher.
“One day,” she writes, “my landlady inquired if I did not think that the reason why I was brighter
than the ordinary Chinese was because I had white blood in my veins. I answered that I hadn’t
the slightest doubt that the reason I was superior to a great many whites was because I had
Chinese blood in my veins.” In this important moment, Sui Sin Far states unambiguously what
she has been alluding to throughout the essay and what underlies the utopianism in “Leaves”:
racial mixture and amalgamation is superior to “purity.” This idea, along with the utopian vision
of a racially mixed, and therefore more accepting and understanding future, is key to detecting
the utopian strategy in Sui Sin Far’s stories of mixed-race Americans.
One such story, in which, Sui Sin Far's amalgamationist utopianism is evident through
her depiction of a mixed-race character is “Its Wavering Image.” The story, which takes place in
San Francisco’ Chinatown, is about a mixed-race girl who gets duped by a cruel white journalist
into giving him insider access to Chinatown. The journalist is portrayed as a kind of colonizer
who not only wants to expose inner Chinatown to his white readers but also seeks to rescue a
mixed race girl from Chinese-ness. She pushes back, though, and asserts both her authority to
define her own identity and the legitimacy of Chinese culture.
The mixed-race of the story’s heroine is so central to the story that it constitutes the entire
substance of the story’s opening sentence: “Pan was a half white, half Chinese girl.” Despite
being half white and half Chinese, Pan identifies more with the Chinese side of her parentage.
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“All her life,” the narrator informs us, “Pan lived in Chinatown, and if she were different in any
sense from those around her, she gave little thought to it. It was only after the coming of Mark
Carson that the mystery of her nature began to trouble her” (61). As this passage indicates, it is
only when a white man enters into her life that she has any reason to question her race. In
contrast to her assertion in “Leaves” that Chinese and white people are equally intolerant of
racial difference, and especially racial mixing, Sui Sin Far here places the blame for racial
intolerance on whites while portraying Chinese culture as welcoming and hospitable: Pan
“always turned away from whites. With her father’s people she was natural and at home; but in
the presence of her mother’s she felt strange and constrained, shrinking from their curious
scrutiny as she would from the edge of a sword” (61). This is another example of what I
discussed earlier: Chinatown rendered utopian. Racial amalgamation is the utopian future for Sui
Sin Far, and in this story Chinatown is portrayed as the safe haven for racially mixed pioneers.
Interestingly, being Eurasian gives Pan a certain power: “She was born a Bohemian, exempt
from the conventional restrictions imposed upon either the white or Chinese woman” (62). This
is, in some ways, a contrast to the experience of being biracial that Sui Sin Far relates in
“Leaves,” where she describes feeling like an outcast from both the Chinese and white
communities. It is consistent, however, with the Eurasian superiority that Sui Sin Far espouses in
both “Leaves” and, especially, “The Persecution and Oppression of Me.”
Throughout their courtship, which is really nothing more than a con intended to
manipulate Pan into granting Carson access to Chinatown, Carson pushes Pan hard to admit that,
though mixed and living in Chinatown, her “true self” was white. One important strategy he
employs to this end is “teaching” Pan that “all unconscious until his coming, she had lived her
life alone” (62). Drawing upon one of the favorite strategies of domestic abusers, Carson
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attempts to alienate Pan from the people who have cared for her for her entire life and convince
her that she is entirely dependent on him. Initially, this works: “So well did she learn this lesson
that it seemed at times as if her white self must entirely dominate and trample under foot her
Chinese” (62). One thing that makes this line particularly interesting is that it mirrors a
memorable moment in “Leaves’ in which Sui Sin Far describes being attacked by childhood
bullies, only to survive because the “white blood in our veins fights valiantly for the Chinese half
of us” (Leaves). That the fighting blood image is inverted here really illustrates the extent to
which Sui Sin Far wishes to portray whiteness as corrosive, abusive, and cruel.
After his article comes out, Mark Carson cannot imagine that Pan will be upset by it:
“why should a white woman care about such things? Her true self was above it all. Had he not
taught her that during the weeks in which they had seen so much of one another?” Carson’s view
of racial identity is especially interesting in light of how mixed-race people were usually seen in
the U.S.. Ordinarily the presence of any non-white “blood” was seen as a taint upon an
individual’s whiteness. This was true in the law as well as the popular attitude. Many court cases,
at the state and federal level, the most significant being Plessy v. Ferguson, established that even
very distant mixed ancestry rendered a person non-white. Here, however, Mark Carson, the
story’s representative of exploitative whiteness, inverts the one drop rule by insisting that Pan’s
white ancestry overrules her Chinese blood. In effect, he claims Pan on behalf of whiteness,
asserting that the Chinese part of her is not “her true self” and taking it upon himself to educate
her of this. Carson believes that his status as a white male gives him the authority to determine
other people’s racial identity and the right to coerce a mixed race person to whiteness if that is
what he sees fit. Of course, the legal and cultural history of the United States up to that time gave
him very good reason to think this, which suggests that Carson, the character, is Sui Sin Far’s
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stand in for the white legal, cultural, and news-media establishment. Initially, Carson’s coercive
gesture appears to work: Chinatown is exposed to white audiences and the Chinese people
(represented by Pan’s father, Man You) hold Pan responsible. Pan, however, resists Carson’s
attempts to coerce her into whiteness, and chooses instead to identify as wholly Chinese.
When Carson and Pan finally meet again, “Mark Carson felt strangely chilled. Pan
seemed not herself tonight. She did not even look herself. He had been accustomed to seeing her
in American dress. Tonight she wore the Chinese costume. But for her clear-cut features she
might have been a Chinese girl. He shivered.” Carson’s physical revulsion seeing Pan choose a
Chinese identity so emphatically suggests that he was truly invested in reclaiming her for
whiteness, and mirrors the teacher Sui Sin Far describes in “The Persecution and Oppression of
Me.” White people like Carson, the story implies, feel as if they are diminished by the mixed-
race person’s rejection of whiteness. In response to Carson’s inquiry about her dress, Pan
answers simply: “Because I am a Chinese woman.” Seeing that his long-running effort to coerce
Pan to whiteness has failed, Carson desperately insists that Pan is a white woman. Pan, however,
strikes back with her most defiant and assertive statement of the story. “‘A white woman!’
echoed Pan her voice rising high and clear to the stars above them. “I would not be a white
woman for all the world. You are a white man. And what is a promise to a white man!’” (66)
Pan’s triumph is short-lived, however. In the very brief concluding section of the story,
Pan falls ill as a result of the confrontation with Carson. A woman with a toddler comes to visit
and the toddler’s embrace brings Pan to tears. The toddler’s mother says to Pan, “Lo…Thou wilt
bear a child thyself some day, and all the bitterness of this will pass away.” Hearing this, “Pan,
being a Chinese woman, was comforted” (66). This idea that having a child will solve Pan’s
problems of both identity and alienation reinforce in her fiction the utopian ideal that is
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articulated more explicitly in “Leaves.” Pan is comforted in the prospect of having a child
because, according to the logic of Sui Sin Far’s amalgamationist utopianism, greater mixing
between races will result in a future population that is superior in both capability and morality to
the “pure” whites or “pure” Chinese of the present day. This is especially reassuring to Pan
because, as a mixed race woman who resides in Chinatown and who identifies as Chinese, she is
subject to oppression on at least four levels: as a Chinese person in America, as a woman in
America, as a woman in patriarchal Chinese culture, and as a mixed-race individual not totally
accepted or understood by either community. This quadruple oppression will not exist in the
amalgamated future of Sui Sin Far’s utopian vision, the future that is foreshadowed for Pan by
the prospect of having a child.
The last story of the “Mrs. Spring Fragrance” section of the book also deals with a
mixed-race young woman, although it does so in a way that threatens to undercut the
amalgamationist utopian argument Sui Sin Far has made in “Leaves” and “Its Wavering Image.”
As with “Its Wavering Image,” "The Sing Song Woman" involves a girl of mixed white and
Chinese ancestry living in Chinatown and involved romantically with a white man. In this story,
however, Mag-gee, the young woman, is not free to pursue her romantic relationship because her
Chinese father has arranged for her to be married “to a Chinaman whom I have never seen, and
whom I can't bear” (126). For Mag-gee, the outrage of having her marriage arranged without any
input from her is only part of the problem. Although she lives with a Chinese father who is
clearly traditional enough to arrange her marriage to a stranger from China, Mag-Gee sees
herself as not only thoroughly American, but thoroughly white. “I was born in America,” she
protests to Ah Oi, the Sing Song woman of the story’s title, “and I'm not Chinese in looks nor in
any other way. See! My eyes are blue, and there is gold in my hair; and I love potatoes and beef,
182

and every time I eat rice it makes me sick, and so does chopped up food” (126). Being white and
being American are one and the same for Mag-gee, and both are confirmed, in her mind, by
superficial physical traits and cultural preferences. Mag-gee’s insistence on her Americanness
and whiteness, moreover, implies that being white/American is a zero-sum calculation. It is not
enough for her to like Euro-American food, she must also hate, to the point of physical revulsion,
the Chinese equivalent.
Unlike Pan in “Its Wavering Image,” Mag-gee’s mixed-identity conflict is not resolved
by an assertive resolution to claim Chineseness, but through a defiant trick by which she claims
whiteness. Together with Ah Oi, Mag-gee executes a trick that frees her from the arranged
marriage, allows her to be with the white man she loves, and allows Ah Oi to return to China,
which has been her desire from the beginning of the story. The trick is simple and exploits the
some of the very marriage traditions that were to condemn Mag-gee to Chineseness in the first
place. According to Sui Sin Far’s description of Chinese marriage in her short article, “Half-
Chinese Children,” tradition dictates that the groom should not see the bride until the wedding
dinner, “for although the marriage ceremonies may have commenced in the morning early, the
bride wears until the evening a thick veil which completely covers her face” (191). It is this thick
veil that allows Ah Oi to go through the marriage ceremony in place of Mag-gee, a fact that is
only finally discovered during the ceremonial unveiling. Of course, this causes an uproar and
Mag-gee’s father attempts to declare the marriage invalid. The groom, however, insists that the
marriage between himself and Ah Oi will stand, and it is her, not Mag-gee, that he takes back
with him to China.
Seemingly in opposition to “Its Wavering Image” and “Leaves,” the events of this story,
including Mag-gee’s despair at being forced into permanent Chineseness and the trickery that
183

ultimately frees her, seem to argue in favor of racial separation. The Chinese man ultimately
marries a purely Chinese woman and they return to China. Ah Oi, the Sing Song Woman, is
finally able to overcome the shame of being “a despised actress in an American Chinatown” and
return to her romanticized homeland only by marrying a racially pure, non-immigrant Chinese.
The mixed-race woman, on the other hand, marries a white man and they live outside of
Chinatown, just as Mark Carson intended for Pan. But ultimately, Mag-gee’s decision to marry a
white man and leave Chinatown portends the same outcome as Pan’s hope for a child in
Chinatown: by marrying and, presumably, having children, both women will contribute to the
proliferation of Eurasian people that Sui Sin Far foresaw as the hope for the future in “Leaves.”
Whether a mixed-race person chooses to identify with the oppressed side of their ancestry (as do
Pan and Sui Sin Far) or with the white (as Mag-gee does) is less important than the fact that
these “pioneers” hold the key to the amalgamationist utopian future.
Sui Sin Far's amalgamationist utopianism is given different expression in “Pat and Pan;”
in this instance, the conclusion of the story is not positive because it affirms amalgamation, but
tragic because it does not. While this story is not about a mixed race person, it is about racial
indeterminacy and it seems to refute the essentialism that threatens to emerge in “The Sing Song
Woman,” although the way it does so is tragic. As in that story, “Pat and Pan” appears to end
with a racial resolution: the white boy is returned to white society while his Chinese companion
remains in Chinatown. The difference here, however, is that this is distinctly portrayed as tragic
in “Pat and Pan.” Whereas the deception and trickery in “The Sing Song Woman” allowed both
women to achieve their true desires, the setting right that occurs in this story destroys a
friendship and undoes the potential acceptance and understanding that is promised by the
childhood relationship of a white boy and a Chinese girl in Chinatown. So, whereas Sui Sin Far
184

offers hope for generational change in the utopianized amalgamation of “Its Wavering Image”
and “Leaves From the Mental Portfolio of an Eurasian,” she presents here the dystopian alternate
possibility in which racial purity is enforced and racial segregation maintained.
The story begins in utopianized Chinatown. A white mission woman notices two young
children sleeping contentedly in one another’s arms in the entrance to a joss house. The woman
notices that the boy appears white and questions a nearby fruit vendor. “Yes, him white,” the
fruit man replies, “but all same China boy” (160). To the Chinese fruit vendor, the boy’s ancestry
does not determine his race; he lives in Chinatown among the Chinese, he speaks Chinese and
sees himself as Chinese, and thus he is a “China boy.” Of course, the fruit vendor immediately
realizes that Anna Harrison, the white mission woman, will require further explanation, and tells
her in a single matter of fact sentence how this boy came to be taken in by a Chinese man after
the death of the boy’s mother. As if to display how inconsequential the boy’s background is in
determining his identity, the fruit vendor follows his brief explanation with a question of much
greater importance to him: “Lady, you want buy lichi?” (160).
Anna Harrison, however, cannot so easily accept Pat’s adopted racial identity.
“Amazing!” she exclaims after attempting to speak with him, “A white boy in America talking
only Chinese talk!” Miss Harrison is more than amazed at this, though, and determines shortly
thereafter, that Pat must learn to speak English: “for a white boy to grow up as Chinese was
unthinkable.” Upon opening a school for white and Chinese children in Chinatown, Miss
Harrison persuades Pat and his adopted father that it would be best for him to enroll at the school
and learn, as Lum Yook puts it, “the speech of his ancestors.” At the school, Pat is initially slow
to learn, while the younger, Chinese Pan picks things up easily, despite being separated from the
rest of the class and given baby’s toys.
185

Before too long, likely because of the mixed race school that Miss Harrison has opened
and placed Pat and Pan in, the fact of a white boy being raised by adoptive Chinese parents
becomes known outside of Chinatown, a further indication that Sui Sin Far’s utopian Chinatown
offers protection to mixed-race subjects, but that Chinatown’s protection is both tenuous and
unequal in strength to the prejudice coming from outside. Although Pat’s parents love him, Mrs
Lum Yook begins to take notice of the “many tongues wagging because he lives under our roof.”
They anticipate trouble, which comes in the form of a well-off white couple wishing to adopt
Pat. Mr. and Mrs. Lum Yook give Pat up without a fight, “but deep in their hearts was the sense
of injustice and outraged love” (164). In one of the story’s most poignant moments, Lum Yook
explains to Pat that he must leave their home, using the same essentialist logic that has motivated
whites like Miss Harrison to intervene in the first place: “I will not leave my Pan! I will not leave
my Pan!” shouted Pat. “But you must!” sadly urged Lum Yook. “You are a white boy and Pan is
Chinese.” “I am Chinese too! I am Chinese too!” cried Pat (164). Pat’s declaration of Chinese
identity, virtually identical to the explanation offered by the lichi man at the beginning of the
story, no longer suffices, and he is turned over to the white family and removed from Chinatown.
After Pat is adopted away from the Lum Yooks, he encounters Pan twice more. In the
first instance, Pat and Pan recognize one another and converse in a friendly, if somewhat strained
fashion about familiar topics: the family cat, the new curiosities at neighborhood shops,
“father’s” new glass case. Already, though, there is distance between the two, and Pat asserts a
sense of superiority over Pan now that he has spent a year living as white. In response to her
inquiry about his new school, Pat replies that "I don't like it very much. But, say, Pan, I learn lots
of things that you don't know anything about." Though not necessarily mean-spirited or
aggressive, it is clear that Pat’s training in whiteness has begun replacing his brotherly love for
186

her with an almost automatic need to dominate her. In their last exchange, this dismissive
superiority gives way to outright hostility, as the last vestiges of his Chinatown upbringing yield
to domineering whiteness. Accompanied this time by heckling white friends, Pat rejects Pan’s
“joyful” greeting: “Then Pat turned upon Pan. "‘Get away from me,’ he shouted. ‘Get away from
me!’" Not surprisingly, Pan is hurt by this, though her reaction is not one of anger but of pity.
"Poor Pat!" she says to end the story, "he Chinese no more; he Chinese no more!"
Unlike Mag-gee and Ah Oi in “The Sing Song Woman,” whose racial realignment was
the realization of their own desires, the separation of Pat and Pan cannot be seen as anything
other than a tragic injustice done to innocent children. It is an anti-essentialist argument, in
which the characters only take on the typical behaviors of their “true” races when they are forced
artificially into a program of racial training. And unlike Mag-gee, whose marriage to a beef-and-
potato eating white man still carried the potential for future generations of Eurasians, this story’s
tragic resolution forestalls the possibility of amalgamationist utopianism by removing Pat from
the society of Chinese people.
Although these three stories, “It’s Wavering Image,” “The Sing Song Woman,” and “Pat
and Pan” are the ones that deal most obviously with mixed race people (or in the case of “Pat and
Pan,” the threat/potential for race-mixing), Sui Sin Far’s clearest statement of amalgamationist
utopianism comes in the paired stories discussed earlier, “The Story of One White Woman Who
Married a Chinese” and “Her Chinese Husband.” In the latter story, which also ends tragically,
Minnie and Kanghi have a son, and Minnie, knowing the intolerance that her mixed-race son is
going to encounter in America, cries over him. Kanghi, however, sees it differently, and it is
through him that Sui Sin Far delivers the utopian message. "What is there to weep about?”
Kanghi asks, “we will bring him up to be proud that he is of Chinese blood; he will fear none
187

and, after him, the name of half-breed will no longer be one of contempt." Kanghi, echoing Sui
Sin Far in “Leaves,” sees his son as a pioneer who will lead the way toward an amalgamated,
utopian future. Also like the Sui Sin Far of “Leaves,” Kanghi does not believe that mixed-race
people are merely equal to the racially pure--he thinks they are superior. Speaking of “several
half Chinese half English lads” he had known in Hong Kong, Kanghi declares that "they were
the brightest of all…but they lowered themselves in the eyes of the Chinese by being ashamed of
their Chinese brood and ignoring it." For Kanghi, the problem is not in being racially mixed, but
in failing to recognize the superiority of that identity and in lacking the courage to declare it
assertively. Aware of the hostility of whites toward the Chinese, and toward the half Chinese,
Minnie is not so confident, and her fears seem justified when Kanghi is murdered at the end of
the story. But Kanghi’s death merely proves that utopia has yet to be achieved. The real hope for
the future in this story, and in Sui Sin Far’s utopian outlook overall, lies in the mixed-race child
of Minnie and Kanghi who, raised by a loving white mother and imbued with the memory of a
noble Chinese father, represents the hope of future generations that will combine the best of
both.

188

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Creator Bibler, Justin Scott (author)

Core Title The future Americans: race, gender, and citizenship in American utopian fiction, 1888-1912

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Publication Date 07/16/2015

Defense Date 05/13/2015

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag African American literature,American Literature,Charlotte Perkins Gilman,Chinese American literature,Citizenship,Edward A. Johnson,Edward Bellamy,eugenics,Future,OAI-PMH Harvest,Sui Sin Far,utopian literature

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Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Access Conditions The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the a...

Repository Name University of Southern California Digital Library

Repository Location USC Digital Library, University of Southern California, University Park Campus MC 2810, 3434 South Grand Avenue, 2nd Floor, Los Angeles, California 90089-2810, USA