aegis of a Dr. Leete, who -228- discovers him, and Dr. Leete's daughter, Edith. Julian spends some time becoming oriented to the fact that his new life in the future is not really a dream, and even once he assimilates this fact he actually does dream that he is back in the year 1887, bemoaning the myriad social ills attendant to the full-scale industrial capitalism of the era. He is awakened from this nightmare by Edith Leete, learns that she is actually the great-granddaughter of Edith Bartlett, who had been his fiancée in 1887, becomes engaged to her, and is installed in a university position as a lecturer in history so that they might live happily ever after into the twenty-first century.
It is the nightmare of Julian's reentrance into the nineteenth century that actually provides for the novel's transcendence of the standard representation of utopian bliss as a social impossibility, and transforms it into a novel of reform. By the time that Julian has this horrific vision, he — and the reader — has been thoroughly convinced of the superiority of twentieth-century society, so much so that, given the choice, he — and, again, the nineteenth-century reader — would clearly opt for the socialist state. It is this presentation of choice that characterizes Bellamy's novel as a reformist work, in that it implies that United States citizens must take the initiative if they hope to bring about the Edenic society Looking Backward depicts. This choice is made clear in an excerpt from a speech Bellamy gave on 'Nationalism — Principles and Purposes,' in Boston in 1889. As Caroline Ticknor, daughter of Bellamy's publisher remembered it, Bellamy addressed the issues of ''Plutocracy and Nationalism,' expressing his belief that one, or the other, must be the choice of the American people at the end of ten years' time.' As commentators have noted, however, Looking Backward is prevented from being a call for revolution through an aspect of Bellamy's philosophy that actually runs counter to this notion of choice — that is, his sense that his brand of socialism will be an inevitable evolutionary outcome of the capitalist development characteristic of the late nineteenth century. There is a contradiction here, then, but the two elements that constitute the paradox might alternately be seen as the means by which Bellamy's novel is made to fit the bounds of reform fiction.
It is worth noting, however, what happens to the conventions of the reform novel as identified thus far once Bellamy takes up the genre. Structurally, Bellamy's framing of his tale within the conven-229- tional plot of romantic marriage seems to recapitulate the strategy already identified as operative in the other works under discussion, whereby reform is constituted through the introduction of the consideration of the public good into the context of the private, domestic sphere. Thematically, however, this public/private dynamic is not played out nearly so forcefully as it is in the earlier works. Indeed, if it is true that Julian comes to a realization of the correctness of socialist principles right in his own home, it is equally true that his never stepping out of that home indicates a striking passivity in his relation to social reform — he, personally, never has to do anything, inside his home or out of it, in order to bring about social transformation. Thus Looking Backward, while using the domestic locale as a structural device in the narrative, actually evacuates that locale of any real political significance, and, consequently, reduces the significance of the feminist impulse that is implicit in the works by Stowe, Davis, and Phelps. Looking Backward actually effectively contains its feminism by dislocating it from a domestic space that is the primary stage for the novel's action, and in which concrete reformist activity takes place, and resituating it in the relatively more limited scope of a particular character in the story: the federal government of Bellamy's twentieth- century United States provides for one female elected official who works in the federal government — an official who has the authority to veto any legislation that concerns the well-being of women.
This dislocation of feminist politics within Bellamy's novel signals' a parallel reconception of the reform fiction genre during the time of Bellamy's writing. Specifically, the domestic setting itself — which in the earlier fiction had been the locus within which any number of social concerns might be considered and acted upon, and thus implicitly linked with feminist politics — is by the 1880s reconceived as the locus specifically for the treatment of particular issues pertaining to women's social status. Thus feminism, rather than continuing to function as a fundamental guiding principle with respect to the reform activities depicted in social protest fiction, became instead merely one more issue among others, to be treated in individual works that focused on women's status in the domestic sphere. Works such as Kate Chopin's The Awakening (1899) and, especially, Charlotte Perkins Gilman's story The Yellow Wallpaper (1892) — which -230- were not necessarily even considered as reform fiction at all, but rather as stories of personal complaint, until their resurrection in the late twentieth century — exemplify this emergent genre beautifully.
The Awakening provides what commentators have identified as a Whitmanesque portrayal of the evolution of a woman's sensual life and her concomitant rebellion against the restrictions of marriage through her abandonment of her husband and children and her attachment to a charming but licentious rogue. 'The Yellow Wallpaper' depicts the plight of another young married woman whose physician husband has diagnosed her as suffering from hysterical nervousness and has prescribed a cure of complete inactivity and bedrest that frustrates her energetic character. Both Chopin's Edna Pontellier and Gilman's unnamed protagonist come to tragic ends: the former, overcome by the constraints of social convention, finally opts for release from her stifling situation by walking into the sea, which act represents both her death and her giving herself over to the sensuality for which she has developed such a passionate craving; the latter, baffled by the patriarchal rule that keeps her confined to her chamber and suppresses her creative impulses, becomes obsessed with decoding the pattern on the wallpaper that covers her room. She begins to see that pattern as representing a hunched, deformed, 'creeping' woman struggling to escape from behind a series of bars that entraps her. As time goes on, she determines to get the woman free, and the story ends in a frenzied climax in which she maniacally strips large portions of the paper from the wall with her bare hands while her alarmed husband and sister-in-law try to reach her through the bedroom door, which she has locked. When they finally enter the room, the woman has gone completely mad, envisioning herself as the one who had been trapped in the yellow wallpaper, and who now 'creeps' freely around the room, refusing ever to be put back into her prison.
These works are reformist insofar as they imply the need for change in the social conditions that constrain women to the detriment of their psychic well-being. Indeed, Gilman's work is a very specific indictment of the practices of Dr. S. Weir Mitchel l, a Philadelphia physician (and novelist) of the time who became famous for developing the cure of enforced rest for 'neurotic females,' and under whose care Gilman herself was once placed by her well-meaning but -231- paternalistic husband. At the same time, while the works by Gilman and Chopin graphically illustrate the difficulties women faced within the society about which they wrote, they do not explicitly outline programs for change that might be taken up by social reformers. This omission undoubtedly prevented these works from being perceived as serious reform fiction for decades, and facilitated their rejection by readers as the private idiosyncratic (and shocking) visions of their authors. But if the florescence of a vital feminist scholarship during the 1970s provoked readers to reassess the genre of sentimental fiction as a primary means by which the most pressing social and political issues of the day were taken under consideration, so too has it provided for a new conception of these two works as classics of political fiction, crucial to a full understanding of the turn-of-thecentury literary depiction of United States social life.
In the meantime, female protagonists continued to represent the moral center of much reform fiction 'proper' through the turn of the century. Just as Perley Kelso seeks a way, in The Silent Partner, to ameliorate the lives of the millhands of Five Falls, so too does Annie Kilburn, in the novel of that title by William Dean Howells (1889), seek the most effective way to uplift the masses from their degraded social level. Annie is the daughter of the late Judge Kilburn, with whom she had lived for eleven years in Rome, far from her home in the Massachusetts manufacturing town of Hatboro'. When she returns to New England, she is faced with a newly ascendant merchant class whose social agenda conflicts with the old aristocracy of which she is a member. This new bourgeoisie is represented by the shopkeeper, Mr. Gerrish, who clashes with the Reverend Mr. Peck about the latter's refusal to espouse a Christianity that conforms to capitalist ideology. When Peck's plan to leave Hatboro' for a ministry among the working classes in Fall River is thwarted by his sudden death in a train accident, Annie takes up his moral standard and works to establish the Peck Social Union. Even in this context, however, Annie's contributions amount to little, as she occupies herself with keeping the books for the organization rather than actually ministering directly to the needs of the working classes, a point that the narrative makes clear in a bitingly satirical reference to Annie's dwelling 'in a vicious circle' in which she 'mostly forgets, and is mostly happy.' -232-
The cul-de-sac in which Annie finds herself at novel's end typifies the irresolvable moral questions that Howells raises about the privileged individual's responsibility for the general social welfare. The reformist nature of
