Looking Backward

Doctor Leete is a retired doctor in the year 2000. He is a father and husband, though very little can be understood about his career and personal relationships aside from the fact that he seems to get along well with his family. He is very generous to West, too, both out of kindness and due to his own curiosity about the 19th century. In the context of the novel, he is the person who explains to West how the utopia works. He represents the rational thinking man of the 20th century; as such, he believes science explains everything.

Dr. Leete is also an avatar for Bellamy. He is the mouthpiece for Bellamy’s utopia and opinions about the 19th century. The conversation between West and Dr. Leete, which takes up the majority of the novel, runs parallel to the conversation between Bellamy and his readers. When West raises a question or objection, he expresses the sentiments and biases of Bellamy’s audience; when Dr. Leete responds, he expresses Bellamy’s own responses to the skeptics that he imagines are reading his novel. Dr. Leete is mostly flat and static. 

Edith Leete is the daughter of Dr. Leete and Mrs. Leete as well as the great granddaughter of Edith Bartlett, after whom she is named. When the Leetes discover Julian West’s body, Edith recognizes him because she has long romanticized the story of her great grandmother and her fiancé who tragically died. Because of the story, she immediately falls in love with West and makes her father promise not to tell him her lineage, because she does not want that knowledge to influence West’s opinion of her.

Like most characters in the novel, Edith’s character is one dimensional. One of her functions is to offer sympathy and comfort to West when he suffers identity crises due to time travel. Where Dr. Leete is West’s intellectual guide, Edith is his emotional support. Her second function is to replace Edith Bartlett in West’s life. Not only does she share the same name and look like West’s 19th-century fiancé, Edith Leete is also more attractive to him, with “abounding physical vitality” and still feminine graces (25). Within a week, West transfers his affections from one Edith to another without ever needing to grieve. Edith is mostly flat and mostly static, although she shows some dynamism.

Mrs. Leete is Dr. Leete’s wife and Edith Leete’s mother. She is also the granddaughter of Edith Bartlett. Despite her presence throughout the novel, Mrs. Leete is hardly ever mentioned. She attends breakfast and dinner with the family, but she only rarely contributes to the conversation. The reader never learns what her profession was during her time in the industrial army, nor how she spends her free time in retirement. Her most important function in the novel is to tell West about her family lineage. The lack of agency between her and her daughter suggests that this utopian society still has the gender oppression and inequality that the 19th century had. She is a flat and static character.

Edith Bartlett is West’s fiancé at the start of the novel. She is beautiful and belongs to the same social class as West. As such, she shares West’s original ignorance. When West has a nightmare at the end of the novel, imagining himself returned to 1887, Edith Bartlett is appalled by his reform ideas, just as he would have been before his experience in the year 2000. When West’s house burns down, she grieves his death for 14 years before marrying someone else. Nothing else is known about her life or personality. She is a flat and static character.

Sawyer is West’s servant in 1887. He is an African American man who attends to West on a daily basis. Part of his job is to wake West up after nights when he uses mesmerism to sleep. Because that is a matter of life and death, the reader knows that West trusts Sawyer completely. Despite this, West shows very little sympathy when he realizes that Sawyer must have died in the fire that buried his sleeping chamber. Sawyer is also the only character of color in the novel. Because Bellamy mentions Sawyer’s race, it is telling that he does not mention the race of any characters in the year 2000. Considering that Dr. Leete and West have a discussion about service work and pride, the fact that Bellamy never mentions race beyond West’s servant is a glaring omission. This also suggests that racist oppression and inequalities exist in the “utopian” society as they did in the 19th century. Sawyer is a flat and static character as well.

Dr. Pillsbury is a mesmerist in 1887 under West’s employ. Mesmerism, named after F. A. Mesmer and also known as animal magnetism, is a method of therapy invented in the 18th century, and it was still popular in Bellamy’s day. Mesmer believed that there exists an invisible life force in all living things that can be manipulated to improve health.