SOURCE: Widdicombe, Richard Toby. “‘Dynamite in Disguise’: A Deconstructive Reading of Bellamy's Utopian Novels.” American Transcendental Quarterly New Series 3, no. 1 (March 1989): 69-84.

In the following essay, Widdicombe claims that the literary devices in Looking Backward and Equality undermine Edward Bellamy's message.

Ever since its publication in 1888, Looking Backward has been read as a particolored text, an admixture of the doctrinaire and the romantic, and while contemporary approaches, which have offered Marxist, feminist, and reader-response analyses of Bellamy's best-known novel, have widened our understanding of it, they have not changed the critical consensus. Yet, this consensus is misleading: Looking Backward presents a more complex spectacle than that of didacticism made marginally palatable by a sprinkling of romance, and the novel itself is infinitely more fascinating qua novel than its vaguely Hawthornesque appearance suggests. Looking Backward fails as didactic literature, but does so not because Bellamy's proposals are flawed or...