Fuller’s epochal book influenced a wide spectrum of reformers. One was Caroline Sturgis (1819–88), her young protégée and one of Emerson’s closest female friends. The daughter of wealthy Bostonians, after meeting Fuller in 1832 she began to move in Transcendentalist circles, had a brief dalliance with the poet Ellery Channing, and eventually married into the Tappan family of prominent Boston merchants. She contributed poetry to The Dial and remained a confidante of Fuller’s and an admirer of Emerson’s, with whom she had an epistolary exchange that indicates her engagement with Fourier’s radical notions of love (as well as her conflicted feelings for the Concord sage).
Early in February 1845 she lent Emerson a volume of Fourier’s Oeuvres, which he had read through, he told her, “with surprising ease, considering what courage it cost him to begin.” Displaying a rather prurient cultural chauvinism, he told her that he doubted Fourier’s ideas could have much effect outside of France, for his was “a French mind speaking to French minds.” Still, he admired Fourier’s probing social criticism and asked Sturgis if she could spare another volume as well as let him lend the current one to his friend Sampson Reed. He also assured Sturgis that, as he had learned from Fourier, he did not forget women’s “loneliness & privation” in their current domestic arrangements, and he added, cryptically, “How many things are there not, my dear friend, which dear friends cannot say to each other.” 51
Sturgis’s frank reply was remarkable, for she playfully chastised him. “Still seizing everything in the claws of morality, dear Waldo?” “Why may we not live like grasshoppers? Must we be so good?” “Why not wish Fourier to make the finest arrangements possible!” she continued, for as “we must eat our dinners every day, why not eat them in the best way?” She continued her assault on his repressed sensibilities with other scarcely veiled provocations. “Now our barks are stranded upon the shore or puddle about in lakes from which there is but a narrow outlet,” she teased. “Would it not be better to be borne along on a wide stream where with vigorous arm we could row to every island & wild-flower that should attract us?” Invoking a Fourierist trope, she asked rhetorically, “Would there be any moralist if all were in harmony with all?” and added suggestively, “Let us learn the scales here & tune our instruments for the great symphonies.” 52
Noting that she recently had seen their mutual friends Ellery Channing and Louisa Weston, Sturgis also hoped that Emerson would “always be a good father confessor for all these young ladies & gentlemen” and allow her to see their “confessions.” This was a scarcely veiled allusion to the personage, the “father confessor,” whom Fourier placed in charge of arranging young lovers’ relationships in the new amorous world. Tellingly, Sturgis continued, “Sometimes I can interpret them [the confessions] better than you,” because Emerson did not like to “admit possibilities—all must be absolute with you, but I know very well there is something besides blue sky in the universe.” Emerson’s affection, she implied, if noble, remained too pure, too distant. People “think you like nothing but diamonds & feel friendless while you are their friend,” she lamented, “friendless in being loved above themselves or not at all.”53 She was not alone in her frustration at Emerson’s emotional frigidity. His friend Ellery Channing put it this way. “Emerson is a terrible man to deal with,” he told Franklin Sanborn. “Those nearest him feel him hard and cold.” “Women do not like him,” Channing continued, for he “cannot establish a personal relation with anyone,” even as he “can get along agreeably with everyone.” 54
Emerson’s response to Sturgis displayed his uneasiness at her not so subtle hints about wanting a different relationship with him. “I am somewhat puritanical in my way of living, you will think,” he told his young admirer, “but I am not in my theory.”55 A contemporary journal entry further clarifies how much Fourier’s ideas about sexuality unnerved him. In his talk about women, Emerson observed, Fourier “seems one of those salacious old men who are full of the most ridiculous superstitions on the matter [of women’s desires],” for in his head “it is the universal rutting season.” Anyone who has lived with women, he continued, knows “how false & prurient” Fourier’s ideas were, and “how chaste” women’s “organization.”56 Fourier’s prognostications clearly excited women like Sturgis and Fuller, but Emerson would not walk into these woods with them. He believed that men and women were far from the virtue that made such relationships possible.
No Transcendentalist was as buffeted by utopian dreams as the ethereal Bronson Alcott, but he had a very different view of where sexual gratification fitted into his own brave new world. After the debacle of the Temple School, he had moved to Concord and held his own series of “conversations,” depending as well on the largesse of friends like Emerson. Then, in 1842, again with help from Emerson and others, he traveled to England to meet a group of English acolytes centered on James Pierrepont Greaves, who shared Alcott’s vegetarian diet and whose experimental school he had named Alcott House.
On Alcott’s return, Emerson described the kinds of books and pamphlets his friend had brought back. “Here are Educational Circulars,” he wrote, “and Communist Apostles; Alists, Plans for Syncretic Associations, and Pestalozzian Societies, Self-supporting Institutions, Experimental Normal Schools, Hydropathic and Philosophical Associations, Health Unions and Phalansterian Gazettes, Paradises within the reach of all men, Appeals to Man and Woman, and Necessities of Internal Marriage illustrated by Phrenological Diagrams.” He also noted that Alcott had attended a convention of such reformers at the school and heard them debate (among other things) “reliance on Commercial Prosperity,” man’s right to inflict pain on another, “the reign of Love in Man instead of human Opinions,” “the restoration of all things to their primitive Owner, and hence the abrogation of Property, either individual or collective” and “the Divine Sanction, instead of the Civil or Ecclesiastical authority, for Marriage.” 57 Several of these ideas found their way into Alcott’s subsequent utopian venture.
One English reformer, Charles Lane (1800–70), one of Greaves’s disciples who arrived at Alcott House in 1841, particularly impressed Alcott. They quickly became fast friends, and soon thereafter Lane accompanied Alcott to the United States, where the two made plans for a communal experiment whose chief hallmark would be its participants’ withdrawal from complicity with the corrupt world, distinguishing it from Brook Farm, whose members traded with outside communities. Alcott and Lane also were much interested in dietary and health reform as well as in versions of the associative family life. On land that Lane purchased in Harvard, Massachusetts, ten miles west of Concord, they intended to put their theories to the test. 58
In June 1843 Lane and his son, the Alcott family, and a few others moved to Fruitlands, as they named the ninety-acre farm on the slope of Prospect Hill. The basic principles on which they based this experiment were a hodgepodge of health and reform ideas circulating in England and America, but what chiefly underlay the venture was Lane’s articulation, in 1841, of what he termed “The Third Dispensation.”59 He identified the first dispensation as that of family union or “connexion by tribes.” A second and higher one appealed to the “unitive principle” in man, which Lane termed “the state of union called national.” But as much as this dispensation improved the first, it still did little to elevate humanity from the “narrowness” of its condition. Men and women had to find their way to a third union, the “Universal,” in which they realized their shared nature and interests.60
Lane’s lengthy letter to a prospective member regarding his and Alcott’s plans to live as a “Consociate Family,” subsequently published in such reform journals as the Herald of Freedom, the New Age, and in Greeley’s Tribune, revealed the practical parameters of their plans. In order to purify themselves, members of Fruitlands sought simplicity in diet and valued “plain garments, pure bathing, unsullied dwellings, open conduct, gentle behavior, kindly sympathies, and pure minds.” They also hoped to have as little to do with trade as possible be
cause of its evil propensities, and they sought radical agricultural reform. To restore the land to its “pristine fertility,” they plowed under vegetation rather than filthy animal waste. They also did not wish to drive cattle “beyond their natural and pleasurable exertion,” for they regarded this as a form of abuse that elicited the “animal and bestial natures in man.” Neither did they eat animal substances: flesh, butter, cheese, eggs, and milk did not pollute their table. In all these choices, Lane explained, they relied not so much on “scientific reasoning or physiological skill, as on the Spirit’s dictates.”61
Unfortunately, as at Brook Farm, these ideals were far from ever being realized. Fruitlands’ land was poor, and the group’s arrival in early summer meant a very late start in cultivation. They sought to practice “spade agriculture,” that is, turning the soil by hand rather than using animals for plowing or cultivating, a principle on which they finally had to compromise. They abjured leather and wool, because they derived from animals, and cotton, because of its complicity in chattel slavery, so this left flax as the only alternative for clothing. When Lane visited Emerson in July, for example, Emerson wrote that his new acquaintance “was dressed in linen altogether, with the exception of his shoes, which were lined with linen, & he wore no stockings.”62 Even more impractically (and incomprehensibly), members of Fruitlands ate only “aspiring” vegetables, not those whose edible part grew underground; squash, peas, and beans were fine, but not carrots or beets. Most problematic, after a visit to the nearby town of Shirley’s Shaker village, Lane was converted to their principle of celibacy, and he tried to convince Alcott to unite with that group or at least to adopt sexual abstinence at Fruitlands, something that did not sit well with Mrs. Alcott. Further, because the community’s chief male members often were absent proselytizing, the burden of the work fell to her and her four daughters and contributed to her general disenchantment with Alcott’s venture.
Compared with Brook Farm, Fruitlands was tiny, with never more than twelve members, all under one roof. Lane and Alcott had expected this, noting in their prospectus in The Dial that because they were “Pledged to the spirit alone,” they anticipated “no hasty or numerous accession [sic] to their numbers.”63 They were more right than they knew. In addition to the Alcotts and Lane, there was the eccentric Joseph Palmer from nearby No Town (near Fitchburg), who quite literally was persecuted for his hirsute face, a rare thing at that time. Another resident was Brownson’s friend Isaac Hecker, who also had been at Brook Farm and who, like his mentor, later became a Roman Catholic and the founder of the Paulist Fathers. Other of the odd assemblage (there was no common denominator among the Fruitlands group, except perhaps views more eccentric than those of the Brook Farmers) were the nudist Samuel Bower; Samuel Larned, a former Brook Farmer originally from Providence, Rhode Island, who claimed to have subsisted for a year on crackers; and Wood Abram, whose sole distinction was that he had changed his name from Abram Wood.64
By late fall, their small harvest was lost to an early frost, and as the Alcott women were tiring of the diet and the daily regimen of cold baths and “flesh brushing” with rough towels, the community began to disintegrate. Mrs. Alcott wanted the family to give up the experiment, and she threatened to take the children and leave. She also asked her brother, the abolitionist Samuel J. May, to stop the mortgage payments on the house and barn at Fruitlands, property he had generously subsidized. By year’s end Lane left for the Shaker community, and the Alcotts, too, quit the farm. Alcott was depressed and debilitated, and a few months later he resumed family life in Concord, unable to substitute his strong attachment to the conjugal family for what Lane had envisioned as the “consociate” one needed for the “third dispensation.” Emerson’s assessment the previous summer had proved prophetic. “They look well in July; we will see them in December.”65
Despite the demise of Brook Farm and Fruitlands, others among the Transcendentalists continued to proselytize for Association. William Henry Channing assumed a prominent role in the movement through founding the Religious Union of Associationists in Boston and another reformist journal, The Spirit of the Age. Fuller, who soon moved to New York and then to Europe, also became more deeply interested in socialism. In New York fellow traveler Greeley continued his efforts to inform the public about the direction of social reform, even reprinting the European columns of a young social theorist, Karl Marx. The Red Bank Phalanstery in New Jersey and a few other communal experiments strove to realize Fourier’s vision. Eventually, Victor Considérant, one of Fourier’s chief disciples, even attempted a short-lived phalanstery in the new state of Texas.
But overall, in the United States the Associationists’ dream seemed ever more distant, in large measure because of the nation’s enshrinement of free-market capitalism and the individualism on which it was based. Emerson spoke for his culture more than he realized when he observed that although the “world is waking up to the idea of Union,” this state was attainable only “by a reverse of the methods” the Associationists counseled. “Each man being the Universe,” he continued, “if he attempt [sic] to join himself to others, he is instantly jostled, crowded, cramped, halved, quartered, or on all sides diminished in proportion.”66 Association, for all its beauty and promise, went against what by now had become part of the American grain.
There was another reason for Association’s failure to take hold in America. By 1850, Transcendentalists who disagreed with Emerson and still believed in the possibility of widespread, organized social reform were pulled into the accelerating crisis over slavery. They began to draw back from their focus on broadly humanitarian issues and gaze inward, horrified at the sin they saw at the heart of the nation. Now their writing, as well as their labors, acquired a more nationalistic cast, typified by Theodore Parker’s heroic commitment to abolitionism. Before describing this pivotal development, however, it is worth considering several exemplary individuals whose activities—religious, moral, and artistic—epitomized the variety and complexity of what Transcendentalism made possible by the late 1840s.
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VARIETIES OF TRANSCENDENTALISM
Through the 1840s, Transcendentalism touched a great many individuals. There were many prime movers who worked out its implications in a variety of activities, from biblical criticism to utopian reform. But there were many others, fellow travelers who one way or another came into contact with and were affected by the New Thought. While never committing themselves fully to the movement, they were indelibly marked by it, and they illustrate its internal tensions. They may have come upon Transcendentalist ideas through attending Fuller’s Conversations, hearing Brownson preach, visiting Ripley’s Brook Farm, meeting with an issue of The Dial or The Harbinger at a local bookshop, or following the newspaper accounts of Emerson’s latest lecture series. Some encounters were mere dalliances, fodder only for ridicule—at the expense of Alcott for his “Orphic Sayings,” say, or for disgust at the Associationists’ critique of marriage and at their purported licentiousness. Other encounters had more long-lasting effects: when Unitarians at Harvard’s Divinity School learned of a classmate’s rejection of the personal authority of Christ, setting them to reading the Higher Criticism; or when a middle-class couple wandered into Boston’s Melodeon on a Sunday morning, emerging two hours later transformed to social activism by one of Parker’s electrifying sermons.
Above all, Transcendentalism greatly affected young people, encouraging them to reexamine their inherited beliefs. “The key to the period,” Emerson recalled, “appeared to be that the mind had become aware of itself.” There was “a new consciousness,” for the new generation had “with knives in their brain, a tendency to introversion, self-dissection, and anatomizing of motives.”1 O. B. Frothingham concurred. He had observed a feeling abroad “that all things must be new in the world,” with the thinker called upon “to justify himself on the spot by building an engine, and setting something in motion.” The first test of a truth, he declared, was its “availabilit
y.”2 In this chapter we meet four people—the businessman, mutual banking advocate, and one-time Unitarian clergyman William B. Greene; the amateur poet and lay Transcendentalist Eliza Thayer Clapp; the Unitarian minister, novelist, and poet Sylvester Judd; and the writer and natural historian Henry David Thoreau—who exemplify the various kinds of intellectual “engines” Transcendentalist ideas enabled and set in motion. Caught as much as Emerson, Parker, and others in the struggle to define Transcendentalism and its implications for American democracy, these individuals were linked by their interest in and contact with a novel view of self-consciousness that was transformative.
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