SOURCE: “‘Swept away by One Breath’: Selfhood and Kenosis in Edward Bellamy's ‘A Love Story Reversed’,” in Texas Studies in Literature and Language, Vol. 32, No. 2, Summer, 1990, pp. 329-44.

In the essay that follows, Hammond studies Bellamy's redemptive vision of an “internalized utopia” that would free both men and women from the restrictions of social convention.

Edward Bellamy, writing amid the political and economic corruption of the Gilded Age, forged in Looking Backward, 2000-1887 a prophecy with the “power to make the reader feel,” as his friend William Dean Howells claimed, a utopian society “like something he has known himself.” Invoking what Howells called “that imagination which revived throughout Christendom the faith in a millennium,” Julian West's initiation into a utopian Boston dramatizes humanity's projected transposition to a higher moral key. As the utopian Dr. Leete tells West in one of his secular sermons of the new age, “humanity...