Copyright by Ivan Angus Wolfe 2009 The Dissertation Committee for Ivan Angus Wolfe certifies that this is the approved version of the following dissertation: Arguing In Utopia: Edward Bellamy, Nineteenth Century Utopian Fiction, and American Rhetorical Culture Committee: Jeffrey Walker, Supervisor Mark Longaker Martin Kevorkian Trish Roberts-Miller Janet Davis Gregory Clark Arguing In Utopia: Edward Bellamy, Nineteenth Century Utopian Fiction, and American Rhetorical Culture by Ivan Angus Wolfe, A.A.S.; B.A.; M.A. Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of English The University of Texas at Austin in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy The University of Texas at Austin May 2009 Dedication To Alexandra Acknowledgements I would like to thank my entire dissertation committee for their invaluable feedback during every step of my writing process. Jeffrey Walker was an invaluable director, always making time for my questions and responding with feedback to my chapters in a timely manner. Martin Kevorkian, Mark Longaker, Janet Davis, and Trish Roberts-Miller all also gave excellent advice and made themselves available whenever I needed them. Gregory Clark not only provided the initial impetus for my interest in this area, but graciously joined the committee despite his numerous commitments. Most graduate students would feel blessed to have such a conscientious and careful committee. I would also like to thank my wife, Alexandra, for her help. She has likely read this dissertation more times than anyone but me. Elizabeth Cullingford also deserves special thanks for being an excellent English department chair and making me feel welcome my first semester at UT as her Teaching Assistant for E316K. Linda Ferreira-Buckley also has done a remarkable job in her capacity as the chair for the department of rhetoric and writing, and Wayne Lesser has been very helpful as a graduate advisor. I could name several more people here, but overall I would like to thank the entire community in the UT-Austin English and Rhetoric departments for being supportive, helpful, and welcoming. v Arguing In Utopia: Edward Bellamy, Nineteenth Century Utopian Fiction, and American Rhetorical Culture Publication No._____________ Ivan Angus Wolfe, Ph.D. The University of Texas at Austin, 2009 Supervisor: Jeffrey Walker As Aristotle wrote, rhetoric is an art or faculty of finding the available means of persuasion in a given circumstance, and the late nineteenth century was a time in American history when many authors used utopian fiction as the best available means of persuasion. For a few years, the utopian novel became a widespread, versatile and common rhetorical trope. Edward Bellamy was the most popular of these writers. Bellamy’s utopian novel Looking Backward was not only the third best-selling book of nineteenth century America, it inspired over a hundred other utopian novels and helped create a mass movement of “Bellamy clubs” along with a political party (Nationalism). During the latter part of the nineteenth century, American public discourse underwent a general shift from a focus on communal values to a focus on individuals as the source of truth. Utopian fiction of the era helps illuminate why and how this shift occurred. In nineteenth century America, literature was generally not considered to be rhetorical. At most, critics treated fiction as a form of epideictic rhetoric, aiming only to vi delight, educate, or create discussion. When fiction was used to promote legislative agendas and thus entered into the realm of deliberative rhetoric, critics argued that its transgression of rhetorical boundaries supposedly ruined its appeal. Utopian literature came the closest to breaking down the barriers between literature and rhetoric, as hundreds of utopian novels were published, most of them in response to Edward Bellamy. A close rhetorical reading of Looking Backward details its rhetorical nature and helps account for its rhetorical success. I treat each of the novels as participants in the larger cultural conversation, and detail the ways in which they address Bellamy, each other, and issues such as the temperance movement and the decline of classical languages in higher education. In modern times, though Bellamy has faded from the public memory, he has proven useful in a variety of contexts, from a political punching bag to a way to lend an air of erudition to various types of popular fiction. vii Table of Contents Introduction....................................................................................................... 01 Chapter 1: Setting the Stage: Edward Bellamy in a Rhetorical Context.............. 08 Chapter 2: Looking Closely at Looking Backward ............................................. 30 Chapter 3: Booth, Burke, and Bellamy: Utopian Conversations ......................... 78 Chapter 4: Utopia Comes to an End..................................................................155 Chapter 5: Bellamy as Rhetorical Trope ...........................................................193 Afterword.........................................................................................................234 Works Cited .....................................................................................................236 Vita... ...............................................................................................................252 viii Introduction Rhetoric is, as Aristotle said, “the faculty of observing in any given case the available means of persuasion,” and while that definition is subject to clarification (Kenneth Burke’s claim that rhetoric also includes “identification,” for example), I find this to be the best available definition of rhetoric. This dissertation deals with a time when one of the best “available means of persuasion” came in the form of utopian novels. Thus, I have two primary audiences in mind. And when one has more than one audience to address, the “available means” of presenting your case in order to persuade that audience can become complex. In your attempts to appeal to one audience, you may bore or offend another. The first audience I aim to address are rhetoricians, and more specifically those who study the history of rhetoric. In the history of rhetoric, literature (including utopian literature) receives scant attention. At most, poetry receives some attention because of the historical connection between the two disciplines (along with shared material in historical handbooks that teach rhetoric and poetry). Literature sometimes receives consideration as a form of epideictic rhetoric, but rhetorical historians often pass it over in favor of the other two major branches of rhetoric, judicial and deliberative, usually with a focus on pedagogy. Reading through George Kennedy’s Classical Rhetoric and Its Christian and Secular Tradition from Ancient to Modern Times, Thomas M. Conley’s Rhetoric in the European Tradition, Thomas P. Miller’s The Formation of College English: Rhetoric and Belles Lettres in the British Cultural Provinces, or any other standard history of rhetoric makes this point quite clear. All of the aforementioned works mostly skip over literature, often relegating it to the realm of belles lettres or leaving it 1 out of the picture. Even more focused discussions of the history of rhetoric, such as Gregory Clark and S. Michael Halloran’s Oratorical Culture in Nineteenth-Century America: Transformations in the Theory and Practice of Rhetoric and Thomas W. Benson’s Rhetoric and Political Culture in Nineteenth-Century American may mention literature in passing, but they mostly focus on speeches and writing outside the realm of literature. There are, of course, many academic attempts to look at literature from a rhetorical perspective, or in the context of rhetorical practices of the time. Janet Gabler- Hover’s Truth in American Fiction: The Legacy of Rhetorical Idealism uses ideas of rhetorical truth in nineteenth-century America as a way to understand the writings of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Mark Twain, and others. However, even there a wall separates rhetoric and literature, and they are treated as two separate entities. Steven Mailloux’s excellent books Rhetorical Power and Reception Histories, which introduce his idea of “rhetorical hermeneutics” or “us[ing] rhetoric to practice theory by doing history” (Reception Histories ix), allow for valuable insights into the way that literary (and other) texts were received by American culture – but he still does not place literature into the history of rhetoric. For Mailloux, rhetoric is a way to analyze history, but he does not treat literature as part of the history of the practice of rhetoric. Even Wayne Booth’s justifiably celebrated The Rhetoric of Fiction only treats rhetoric as one way to discuss literature – Booth approaches literature through rhetoric, rather than as rhetoric. In the end, we are left with rhetoric and literature as separate domains that only occasionally cross over. However, there are some works that do help detail the ways rhetoric and literature are not completely separate. Jeffrey Walker’s Rhetoric and Poetics in Antiquity 2 details the relationships between the two and helps show the boundaries are not as clear cut as they often seem. This dissertation is done with much the same aim. Literature can not only do rhetorical work, it can function as the type of rhetoric histories of rhetoric tend to discuss. Utopian fiction explicitly functions as both literature