Transcendental Utopias: Individual and Community at Brook Farm, Fruitlands, and Walden

276 Pages·1997·14.911 MB·English

by  Richard Francis

TRANSCENDENTAL
UTOPIAS

TRANSCENDENTAL
UTOPIAS
Individual and Community at
Brook Farm, Fruitlands,
and Walden
RICHARD FRANCIS
Cornell University Press
ITHACA AND LONDON
Copyright© 1997 by Cornell University
All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or
parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in
writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University
Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850.
First published 1997 by Cornell University Press
First printing, Cornell Paperbacks, 2007
Printed in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Francis, Richard, 1945-
Transcendental utopias : individual and community at Brook Farm,
Fruitlands, and Walden I Richard Francis.
p. em.
Includes index.
ISBN 978-0-8014-7380-7
1. Utopias-Massachusetts-Case studies. 2. Brook Farm Phalanx
(West Roxbury, Boston, Mass.) 3· Fruitlands (Harvard, Mass.)
4· Walden Woods (Mass.) 5. Transcendentalism (New England)
I. Title.
HX655.M4F73 1997
355' .02' 09744-dc21 96-46314
Cloth printing 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2
TO JO, WILLIAM, AND HELEN

Contents
Preface IX
CHAPTER ONE
Nature versus History
CHAPTER TWO
Brook Farm and Masquerade 35
CHAPTER THREE
Brook Farm: The Law of Groups and Series 67
CHAPTER FOUR
Brook Farm as Sacrifice 100
CHAPTER FIVE
Fruitlands: Convergence 140
CHAPTER SIX
Fruitlands: Divergence 17 4
CHAPTER SEVEN
Walden: The Community of One 2 18
Index 251
VII

Preface
I
n the introduction to The American Renaissance, F. 0. Matthiessen
writes that his subject is the artistic achievement of the mid-nine
teenth century in America, particularly the way in which the great
practitioners fused form and content. As if worried that his monumen
tal study might not be regarded as adequate, he goes on to confess that
there were two other books that he might have written but had not.
The first of these would have been called The Age of Swedenborg, and it
would have dealt with the way the midcentury had "embraced the sub
jective philosophy that 'the soul makes its own world.'" That subjective
philosophy, however, had objective repercussions. The individual's
sense of self-worth made him conscious of his social rights, and this
awareness in turn made possible Orestes Brownson's extraordinary an
ticipation of "some of the Marxist analysis of the class controls of ac
tion.'' The unwritten book necessary to explore these and related issues
Matthiessen calls The Age ofF ourier. These two (non) titles point to what
Sacvan Bercovitch has more recently termed, in his discussion of Emer
son in The Puritan Origins of the American Self, "the paradox of a litera
ture devoted at once to the exaltation of the individual and the search
for a perfect community."
This paradox is the central problem one encounters when confront
ing the thought of the New England Transcendentalists. The most ob
vious way to view it is in terms of the duality of subjective and objective
worlds, of the internal vis-a-vis the external. This dichotomy manifests
itself in many of the actual titles of works devoted to participants in the
movement, classic studies such as Stephen Whicher's Freedom and Fate:
lX