utopia science fiction Hawthorne

Buchreihe zu den Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik

Herausgegeben von Walter Bernhart, Peter Bierbaumer, Alwin Fill,
Arno Heller, Walter Hölbling, Annemarie Karpf, Bernhard Kettemann,
Otto Rauchbauer und Wolfgang Zach

Bandl

Utopian Thought

in American Literature

Untersuchungen zur literarischen Utopie
und Dystopie in den USA

edited by Arno Heller, Walter Hölbling
and Waldemar Zacharasiewicz

Gunter Narr Verlag Tübingen

CIF'-Titelaufnahme der Deutschen Bibliothek

Utopian thought in American literature : Unters, zur literar. Utopie u. Dystopie
in d. USA / ed. by Arno Heller ... - Tübingen : Narr, 1988

(Buchreihe zu den Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik ; Bd. 1)
ISBN 3-87808-400-5

NE: Heller, Arno [Hrsg.]; GT

Gefördert mit Mitteln der Kulturabteilung der Amerikanischen Botschaft in Wien,
des österreichischen Fonds zur Förderung der Wissenschaftlichen Forschung,
des österreichischen Bundesministeriums für Wissenschaft und Forschung,
der Steiermärkischen Landesregierung, der Stadt Graz, und der Vereinigung
österreichischer Industrieller.

Das Werk einschließlich aller seiner Teile ist urheberrechtlich geschützt.
Jede Verwertung außerhalb der engen Grenzen des Urheberrechtsgesetzes ist ohne
Zustimmung des Verlages unzulässig und strafbar. Das gilt insbesondere für
Vervielfältigungen, Übersetzungen, Mikroverfilmungen und die Einspeicherung
und Verarbeitung in elektronischen Systemen.

Druck: Müller + Bass, Tübingen
Printed in Germany

ISBN 3-87808-400-5

INHALTSVERZEICHNIS

Preface / Vorwort l

Editors' Preface / Vorwort der Herausgeber iii

Arno Heller Introduction / Einleitung 1

Kenneth M. Roemer Perceptual Origins: Preparing American Readers

to See Utopian Fiction 7

Carl D. Malmgren Worlds Apart: A Theory of Science Fiction 25

Michael Draxlbauer Utopia 'Re-Membered': Nathaniel Hawthorne's

Brook Farm Romance 43

Uwe Böker Naturbegriff, ökologisches Bewußtsein und

utopisches Denken: Zum Verständnis von
E. Callenbachs Ecotopia 69

Heinz Tschachler Apologie für die Ökalypse, oder wie auch die

Ökologie das Abendland nicht vor dem Untergang
retten kann: Ein Beitrag zu Edward Abbeys
utopischem Roman Good News (1980) 85

Gudrun Grabher Der lyrische Dialog mit der Natur: A. R.

Ammons' ökologische Vision 111

Maureen Devine Woman on the Edge of Time and The

Wanderground: Visions in Eco-Feminist Utopias 131

Hans U. Seeber Tradition und Innovation in Ursula Le Guins The

Dispossessed 147

Keith Byerman "Dear Everything": Alice Walker's The Color

Purple as Womanist Utopia 171

Arno Heller Die literarische Dystopie in Amerika mit einer

exemplarischen Erörterung von Margaret
Atwoods The Handmaid's Tale 185

Bernd Schäbler Wirklichkeit, Möglichkeit und Utopie. Die

Verflechtung von Melancholie bei B. F. Skinner,
Richard Brautigan und Ronald Sukenick 205

Autorenverzeichnis 223

PERCEPTUAL ORIGINS:

PREPARING AMERICAN READERS TO SEE

UTOPIAN FICTION

Kenneth M. Roemer

"Perceptual Origins" offers an overview of historical, cultural, and liter-

ary traditions and circumstances that helped nineteenth-century American
readers to respond strongly to Utopian fiction. The article begins by exami-
ning how historical circumstances not only sensitized readers to particular

issues but also to a particular style of discourse that emphasized contrast and
order - hallmarks of traditional Utopian fictions. Technological developments
(that made radical change seem plausible), middle-class attitudes (including
approval for constructive guilt), and centuries-old Euro-American traditions
(especially millennialism) provided the vocabulary and perspectives that
made Utopia meaningful for the readers. Finally, the paper discusses particu-
lar literary conventions from, for instance, the sentimental romance, and
general concepts of reading, notably the celebration of moral/didactic fiction
that helped to familiarize the unfamiliar landscapes of Utopia for the readers.

Long before Darwin's famous voyages, origin hunting was a common intellectual

pursuit commonly justified by commonly-held assumptions about cause and effect,

linear time progressions, and the notion that no entity could be fully understood
unless we knew its beginnings. Unfortunately, in their attempts to define coherent
patterns of influences, origin seekers sometimes ignore or misrepresent sources that
do not fit their patterns and thus reduce the complexity of origins to a parade of
objects, people, and events that line up neatly pointing toward an end product.

One possible way to minimize this tendency is to pay close attention to the circum-

stances, values, traditions, and attitudes that enable people to recognize and to give
meaning to particular phenomena. ' Conceiving of origins as dynamic perceptual
processes does not insure the elimination of reductionist studies; furthermore, an
emphasis on perception may require us to go over the same ground and reach some
of the same conclusions as would be covered and reached during the course of more
traditional surveys of origins. Stressing the importance of perceptual origins,

nevertheless, allows us to see familiar origins in new and interesting ways. Specifi-
cally it may allow us to see new functions for influences and to see that some
influences have been overemphasized and other important influences either
obscured or ignored. A perceptual approach to origins also helps us to understand
why certain ideas that seem so obvious and meaningful to one generation can be

invisible to other generations.

The pre-twentieth-century origins of American Utopian fiction offer a provoca-

tive arena for an investigation of the junctures between circumstance and percep-
tion. Despite the importance of many forms of utopianism in early American culture

8 Utopian Thought in American Literature

(e.g., see Fogarty, Nydahl, Parrington, and Sargent), including a body of Utopian

and speculative fiction written by authors such as Charles Brockden Brown, James
Fenimore Cooper, Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Herman Melville,
it was not until the appearance of Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward in 1888 that
a large number of American readers "saw" Utopian fiction and that a significant
number of these readers perceived of reading and discussing Utopian fiction as
meaningful ways of understanding past, present, and potential realities and as
involving urgent and just appeals for action. Origin studies that focus primarily on

the events and the early American Utopian fictions that "lead up" to Looking Back-

ward do help us to understand the American origins of and responses to the out-

pouring of Utopian literature during the late nineteenth century. But defining these
and other historical, cultural, and literary origins as agents that allowed American
readers to recognize, give meaning to, and even act out Utopian fictions help us to
gain a better understanding of why Utopian fiction became highly visible for

thousands of Americans. The following overview takes this approach and begins
with a discussion of immediate historical circumstances, which is followed by
examinations of more general historical and cultural influences, literary genres, and
attitudes about reading. I certainly cannot pretend that I cover "all" possible
perceptual origins. I do hope, however, that my approach helps us to understand the
evolution of an "interpretive community" of readers, to borrow Stanley Fish's term,
that transformed Utopian fiction from being an obscure form of American letters into
an important literary, political, and cultural force.

Since the appearance of early reviews of Looking Backward (e.g., "A Look

Ahead") and continuing through recent studies of American Utopian literature by
Charles Rooney and Jean Pfaelzer, specific events and trends during the post-Civil
War period have been presented as origins that explain the existence and popularity,
the strengths and weaknesses, of American Utopian fiction. Included in the typical
historical litany are events such as the financial panic of 1893, the Haymarket riot

of 1886 and the numerous strikes and labor disturbances, especially those at Home-

stead and Pullman; and trends such as the unequal distribution of wealth, political

corruption, unrest among women and farmers, new immigrations from Southea-
stern Europe, rapid urban sprawl, and challenges to traditional intellectual and reli-
gious beliefs. Scholars who emphasize the historical connection to Utopian fiction
often justify their approach by pointing to references to historical contexts within
the Utopian texts and to theories about the social functions of Utopian fictions. For
example, Rooney's content studies of explicit statements in Utopias published from

1865 to 1917 demonstrate the high frequency of references to contemporary econo-

mic, social, and political problems (41-86), and Pfaelzer and I have argued that the
Utopias served the dual purpose of offering dramatic articulations of anxieties about
historical conditions and of presenting hopeful future possibilities that promised
escape from the present, which was often depicted as a transitional stage leading to

a permanently better future (Pfaelzer 3-25; Obsolete Necessity 15-34).

Roemer: Perceptual Origins of Utopian Fiction 9

If we view the post-Civil War historical circumstances as perceptual origins, then

these general conclusions can be reworded to emphasize that events and trends

helped readers to see the need for visions of better worlds and to be receptive to a
literature that speaks through contrasts and seeks order. Henry George's popular
book Progress and Poverty (1879) certainly helped readers to see the contradictions
of unequal distribution of wealth. When placed within the contexts of many familiar

American attitudes and expectations, the above mentioned events and trends
highlighted economic and numerous other contrasts: thousands of men and women
unable to find work or even refusing to work in the land of opportunity that
celebrated the work ethic; the loss of influence by the farmer and rural America in

Nature's Nation; and the swelling numbers of urban immigrants who declined to
dissolve into the Protestantized melting pot of American lifestyles. As historians
and political scientists have demonstrated, many middle-class Americans
perceived these contrasts as signaling a basic loss of order.

Writing orders reality and most writing involves contrast. But very few forms of

writing emphasize the desirability of order and organisation to the degree seen in
the descriptions of physical and human relationships found in the typical late nine-
teenth-century American Utopia.

And few forms of writing depend so heavily

upon explicit and implicit contrasts, particularly between what is and what should
be, to the degree found in the descriptions and the visitor/guide dialogues of Utopian

fiction. Hence, historical circumstances were important origins of Utopian fiction
not only because they provided familiar topics that would both ground and energize
Utopian narratives and because they helped readers to see the need for a better world,
but also because they sensitized readers to the meaningfulness and usefulness of a
literature that viewed the world in terms of contrasts — contrasts that spoke urgently

for orderly resolutions of contemporary problems.

This sensitivity was heightened by the successes of nineteenth-century reform

organizations that appeared to demonstrate that specific historical problems could
be solved in an orderly and organized way. The extent of the reform impact might
be as limited as the effects of a small temperance group assailing the local represent-

atives of liquor manufacturers, the saloon, and politicians or as large as the crushing
impact of Grant's industrialized military forces that, from a Northern viewpoint,
assailed the evils of slavery. But the basic message was the same: specific problems

could be resolved by reform organizations .This message would allow readers to find
meaning in the numerous descriptions of reform organizations found in the Utopian
fictions, and it is not surprising that a significant response to the most popular Uto-
pian work was the formation of Bellamy Clubs and Nationalist Clubs from coast to
coast and the eventual participation in national reform organizations, specially the

Populist and Democratic parties (see Lipow and Mac Nair).

If we step back from specific historical conditions and reform movements and

broaden our view of influences to include technological developments, middleclass
value systems, and general American and European attitudes often depicted as

"sources" of Utopian thought, we can again see how these origins helped to develop

Utopian Thought in American Literature

an interpretive community inclined toward recognizing and giving meaning to Uto-
pian fiction. The inventions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in combina-

tion with developing production and distribution systems (and the imaginations of
early science fiction writers such as Jules Verne) inspired late nineteenth-century
utopists to envision various degrees of technological Utopias. There were flashy

gimmicks tacked on to the narratives (e.g., prototypes of polaroid cameras), com-
plex communication and distribution systems (e.g., Bellamy's television screens

and pneumatic tubes), and enormous urban complexes such as those imagined by
King Camp Gillette, Will N. Harben, and Chauncey Thomas.

As Neil Harris,

Mulford Q. Sibley, and Howard Segal have argued convincingly, technological
developments also helped readers to see Utopia as a "real" possibility. Actual devel-

opments may not have always "rescued far-reaching schemes from improbability"
(Harris, 219), but only when "technology advanced sufficiently to offer the prospect
of an 'affluent society' for many did most Utopian schemes begin to appear at all real-
istic" (Segal, 56). There was a shift in emphasis in the perception of the traditional

functions of Utopian fiction — the critical, contemplative, and prescriptive func-

tions. The reality of technological developments made the prescriptive functions of
the Utopias more believeable, more visible, more applicable.

Thus for American

readers, Utopias such as Looking Backward, whose second edition included an after-
word that stressed the practicality — indeed, the inevitability — of Utopia, were
more meaningful than were Utopias, such as William Morris's News from Nowhere
(1890), that stressed the critical and contemplative functions of Utopian fiction.

During the past fifteen years, there has been a revival of interest in the study of

Victorian middle-class value systems in America, as evidenced by the December

1975 special issue of American-Quarterly. According to Daniel Walker Howe, spe-

cific values frequently stressed by Victorian spokesmen and spokeswomen inclu-
ded: cleanliness, punctuality, repression of sexual urges, postponement of gratifica-

tion, specialization, efficiency, hard work, devotion to duty, competitiveness, seri-
ousness, self-improvement, a future orientation, rationality, orderliness, emphasis
on order and stability, and a Christian (notably Protestant) outlook (Howe, espe-

cially 521-28). Many of these values were implied in the responses to nineteenth-
century historical events and technological developments already discussed. These

values helped middle- and upper middleclass readers (i.e., the bulk of the reading
audience and of the Nationalist Clubs' membership) to recognize Utopian fiction in
the sense that they enabled these readers to see numerous elements of the fictions
— the clean and quiet streets, the efficient department stores and warehouses, the

stable family relationships and controlled desires, the loyalty to industrial organiza-

tions and to the future America, the orderly administration of the economy and the
government

as signs that signified a reinforcement of cherished values. This rea-

der/text relationship is especially obvious when we compare the Victorian values
to most of the values implied by Looking Backward. But we need not restrict our
view to this one Utopian fiction. Rooney's content analysis of approximately 100

works published between 1865 and 1917 and my examination of 160 late nineteenth-

Roemer: Perceptual Origins of Utopian Fiction 11

century works reveal a striking congruence between the Victorian and Utopian
values, especially in the areas of efficiency, hard work, seriousness, self-improve-

ment, future orientation, rationality, emphasis on order and stability, and a Chris-
tian outlook (Rooney, 141-65; Roemer, "Utopia" 315-17).

Nevertheless, as I have argued elsewhere ("Utopia", 317-24), there was not an

exact correspondence between the Victorian and Utopian values. If there were, then
the Utopias would not have been truly Utopian; they would not have functioned as

critiques of the status quo nor would they have offered truly alternative models of
a better world. There are two areas where the differences seem especially obvious:
the Victorian celebration of competition and the utopists' emphasis on cooperation

and equality, and the Victorian stress on postponement of gratification and the near
future settings of many of the Utopias, particularly Looking Backward and its sequel
Equality (1897), and the technological Utopias, published between 1883 and 1933,
examined by Segal.

But even in these two areas the influences of the Victorian values can be seen; or

rather the values inclined the readers/authors to see/present the critiques in ways that
could be perceived as being compatible with competition and postponement of gra-
tification. First of all, as Lyman Tower Sargent has demonstrated ("Capitalist Euto-
pias"), beginning in 1836 with Mary Griffith's "Three Hundred Years Hence," there

is a significant tradition of American Utopian fiction that advocates the preservation
of most elements of a competitive, free enterprise system. Furthermore, even
though the majority of nineteenth-century American utopists advocated economic
cooperation and some form of a more equitable distribution of wealth, their Utopias

were not devoid of competition, though the motivation for the competition had
changed. The goal was not profit; the goals were self-improvement, public esteem,
and a sense of an expanded identity gained through the experience of contributing,

to the best of one's ability, to the public good. We find the culmination of this view
of competition in Looking Backward in a series of observations by Dr. Leete and
Julian West about motivation in A.D. 2000. Leete notes that administrators are

"overrun with volunteers" for "extra hazardous"' duty because the "young men are

very greedy of honor, and do not let slip such opportunities" (135). Later he adds
that it is certainly not money (since all receive equal wages) nor even awards and
badges that motivate workers. The "higher motives" of "service to the nation,

patriotism, passion for humanity" spur the workers on to compete (154). West
eventually concludes that the incentives and competition were almost "too strong"
and "too hot" (176-77).

Both before and after the publication of Looking Backward, there were American

utopists who envisioned the postponement of the gratification of experiencing Uto-
pia to the distant future. The predictions ranged from three-hundred years (Mary

Griffith in 1836) to a few thousend years (David A. Moore in 1856 and Milton Worth
Ramsey in 1891) to thirty centuries (Chauncey Thomas in 1891). But most of the
nineteenth-century American Utopias were either set only 50 to 100 years in the

future or were set in the present, the Utopias being located in isolated idealistic com-

Utopian Thought in American Literature

munities, distant islands or, in a few cases, other planets, and even inside the earth.
(In these latter cases the conventions of travel literature, the existence throughout

the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries of American Utopian communities, the
increase in transoceanic travel facilitated by the steamship, and John Cleves Sym-

mes's theories about the inner earth all were important perceptual origins that ena-
bled readers to recognize these Utopias of the present.) Another characteristic of the
Utopias that suggests an unwillingness to postpone gratification is, as Jean Pfaelzer

has convincingly pointed out, the tendency of the utopists to avoid detailed descrip-
tions of the transition to Utopia (3-25, 112).

Still the Victorian value of postponement of gratification did help readers to see

and to feel the negative effects of swift and apparently easy transitions to Utopia in
at least two important works. In Rabbi Solomon Schindler's Young West (1894) Julian

West's son finds his father's "Confessions." As he reads them, he is surprised to dis-
cover that his father had been very unhappy in Utopia. He simply could not adapt

to the sudden transition to Utopia. The implication in this text is that a sudden gratifi-
cation without proper preparation can be too much of a shock for the average human.
(Schindler places strong emphasis on the importance of educating people to appre-

ciate Utopia.) The moral dimension of quick gratification, complete with all the con-
notations of a sudden and undeserved conversion experience, is clearly implied in

the final sentences of the most popular American Utopia, Looking Backward. Too
many scholars overlook West's concluding remarks. Of course he is delighted to
"return" from his nightmare visit to the Boston of 1887. Of course he is glad to find

that his love, Edith Leete, is still with him. But this return is strongly and painfully
colored by the culmination of nagging doubts about how unworthy he is to be in Uto-

pia. Instead of ending with a celebration of the nearness and inevitability of Utopia
(themes frequently sounded by Dr. Leete), Bellamy chose to leave the reader with

the image of a guilt-ridden narrator who wishes that he could have postponed his
gratification by transporting himself back in time so that he could work for Utopia:

But in that moment, while yet I mused with unspeakable thankfulness upon

the greatness of the world's salvation and my privilege in beholding it, there
suddenly pierced me like a knife a pang of shame, remorse, and wondering

self-reproach, that bowed my head upon my breast and made me wish the

grave had hid me with my fellows [nineteenth-century Americans] from the
sun. For I had been a man of that former time. What had I done on the

deliverance whereat I now presume to rejoice? (310)

"Better for you, better for you," a voice within me rang, "had this evil

dream been the reality, and this fair reality the dream; better your part
pleading for crucified humanity with a scoffing generation, than here,

drinking of wells you digged not, and eating of trees whose husbandmen you
stoned;" and my spirit answered, "Better, truly." (310-11)

Kneeling before (Edith), with my face in the dust, I confessed with tears

how little was my worth to breathe the air of this golden century. (311)

Roemer: Perceptual Origins of Utopian Fiction

To begin to grasp Looking Backward as a "text-as-read," to use Janice Radway's

term, we must be aware of Bellamy's ability to create episodes that invited nine-
teenth-century American readers to see their value system supported even when he

is explicitly or implicitly criticizing it. Of course, this type of reader/text relation-
ship could have never occurred without generations of readers learning a shared
value system. Only then could readers see an attack on competitive economics and
a sudden and unearned trip to Utopia as signifying a reinforcement of familiar and

just American values.

The perceptual origins of American Utopian fiction were not, of course, limited

to American events, American technological developments, and American values.

European influences were crucial — influences such as the legacy of the
Enlightenment, scientific and social evolutionary theories, socialism, and
Christianity. All of these have received attention from Frank and Fritzie Manuel and
many other students of Utopia;

and all can be viewed as perceptual origins. The

continuing influence of Enlightenment thought and the newer impact of popular
evolutionary ideas conditioned readers to perceive humans as being basically good,
though corruptible by "bad" environments, and to perceive time as a linear process

leading toward improvement. Both these perceptions would help readers to
recognize what Pfaelzer calls "progressive Utopias" and Segal labels

"technological Utopias." (These groups are not identical, though Bellamy appears

in both.) The word "socialism" carried such strong negative connotations for
nineteenth-century American readers that almost none of the nineteenth-century
American utopists, including Bellamy, used it. Still, an awareness of socialism,

however misinformed, helped readers to imagine the possibility of national systems
of production and distribution that represented alternatives to capitalism. This
awareness made the Utopias depicted by late nineteenth-century utopists — most of

which involved cooperative, planned economies — more blessedly or terrifyingly
believable (depending on the readers' economic biases) than if Americans had

shared no knowledge of socialism. Perry Miller, Ernest Lee Tuveson and
more recently Sacvan Bercovitch, Joel Nydahl, and Lyman Tower Sargent

("Utopianism") have emphasized the importance of Christian millennial
expectations in early American culture. This heritage enabled Americans to
perceive their history as a specially commissioned drama of "elect" actors and to
see specific historical events as signifying or at least foreshadowing an alternative,
better history, which might, however, be preceded by apocalyptic disasters. These

habits of perception would certainly help readers to recognize the warnings and
hopes encoded in a book such as Ignatius Donnelly's Caesar's Column (1890) and
other apocalyptic Utopias identified by Pfaelzer (112-40, 174-75), in Mark Twain's

Connecticut Yankee (1889), and in the volcanic imagery and all-or-nothing

historiography of many late nineteenth-century Utopias (Roemer, Obsolete
Necessity 22-34). More important, millennial expectations conditioned readers to

accept both the nationalism of the Utopias

and the tendency of Utopian narrators

and guides to present the past and present of America primarily as pretexts leading

Utopian Thought in American Literature

to more significant times. Even the "conservative" Utopias, with the possible
exception of David H. Wheeler's nonfictional Our Industrial Utopia (1895),
incorporated some improvements that were grounded in the past and present and

would blossom in the future. History was to be "seen through". Millennial

expectations required that, and Utopian historiography fulfilled the requirement,
thus becoming visible and meaningful to American readers.

Centuries-old expectations and clusters of Victorian values combined with tech-

nological developments and historical trends to create an interpretive community

of readers that was ready to accept Bellamy's invitation to Utopia. But what about
these readers' reading? One does not have to be an avid promoter of theories of inter-

textuality to assume that the Victorian readers' exposure to Plato, More, and other

"classic" utopists would help them to recognize the potential importance of Utopias

and to accept, or at least to see as intelligible, the primary conventions of Utopian
fictions, notably the "flat" characters, the guide/visitor dialogues, the various fan-

tastic and coincidental ways of transporting visitors to Utopia, and the general form
of the apologue — a narrative form that alternates between fable sections (storyline)

and manifesto sections (explicit normative and prescriptive discourse) (Pfaelzer,

18). Of course, American readers did not have to look solely to European models

to acquaint them with the reading conventions of Utopian fiction. As Joel Nydahl
("Early Fictional Futures"), Charles Rooney, and Lyman Tower Sargent (Biblio-

graphy) have demonstrated, there is a tradition of American Utopian fiction going
back at least to 1715 that included works by well-known authors, for instance, Char-
les Brockden Brown's Alcuin (1798), James Fenimore Cooper's The Crater (1847),

and Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Blithedale Romance (1852). A few scholars have
even suggested inconclusively that Bellamy plagiarized one of these early works,

John Macnie's The Diothas (1883) (Morgan).

We should be careful, however, not to overemphasize the importance of American

and non-American Utopian fiction written before Looking Backward if we are
attempting to delineate the perceptual origins of the strong response to late nine-

teenth-century Utopian fiction. The authors of the later works obviously did not
think that it was essential that they draw attention to their knowledge of previous Uto-

pias; with the notable exception of W.D. Howells in the Altrurian Romances, very
few of them did so. More important, none of the American Utopias that preceded

Looking Backward had a wide readership. Therefore, it would be difficult to argue
that the early works significantly affected the nineteenth-century readers' ability to
recognize and give meaning to a work such as Looking Backward.

But the obscurity of early American Utopias should not convince us that we should

ignore other types of fiction as important perceptual origins. Popular travel/adven-

ture stories that introduced readers to alternative lifestyles were certainly significant
pretexts for future readers of Utopias, especially popular works such as Defoe's

Robinson Crusoe (1719), which was still in great demand in late nineteenth-century
American libraries (Mabie 509), and Melville's best-seller Typee (1846). Cooper's
Crater, which appeared a year after Typee, is an excellent example of a transitional

Roemer: Perceptual Origins of Utopian Fiction

work that incorporates the conventions of a shipwreck narrative and the history of
an ill-fated Utopian community. As noted previously, even after the publication of
Looking Backward, there were many Utopias, including Howells's Altrurian

Romances, that were set on distant islands, continents, and planets, or within the
earth.

Only a few scholars, notably Pfaelzer and Barbara C. Quissell, have explored the

relationships between eighteenth- and nineteenth-century sentimental romances
and late nineteenth-century Utopian fiction. These relationships deserve more
attention, not only because elements of the sentimental romance incorporated into

the Utopias made the latter more recognizable, especially to women readers who
dominated the romance reading audience, but also because they had conditioned

readers to perceive certain character types, plot structures, and direct appeals to the
reader as signals calling for particular emotional and behavioral responses.

The familiar and reassuring characteristics drawn from sentimental romances are

fairly obvious. Prefaces and sometimes afterwords that stressed the didactic func-
tions of fictions and the close ties between fiction and reality were well known to
American women readers at least since the publication of Susanna Rowson's best

seller Charlotte, A Tale of Truth (1791). By the time Julian West voiced his direct
address to "my lady readers" (99) and Bellamy wrote his afterword to the second
edition of Looking Backward, American readers were well acquainted with author-

ial comments about the nature, truthfulness, and applicability of fiction. (It may also
be significant that the binding and cover of this edition were a distinct improvement
over what Mark Twain called the "scrofulous-looking and mangy" first edition ("A

Chat", 4). This allowed Victorian housewives to display, with some taste, Bellamy's
appeals.)

Having sentimental heroines move across the Utopian landscape helped to

familiarize strange Utopian cultures. Of course, Bellamy's Edith, Howells's Evelith,
William H. Bishop's Stella and Alice, and certainly the women characters in the
early, mid, and late nineteenth-century Utopias written by Mary Griffith, Jane

Sophia Appleton, Mary Lane, and Alice Ilgenfritz Jones and Ella Merchant, as well
as the many other women utopists studied by Barbara Quissell, Daphne Patai and
Carol Farley Kessler, were not mirror images of the helpless Charlotte Temple. The
economic and social changes that came with Utopia had made them more frank and

outspoken, better educated, and much more self-sufficient. Nevertheless, they still
exhibited many of the trappings of the sentimental heroine. Like Edith Leete, some
of them sing or play the piano, and of course they are beautiful. They often speak,

write, or think in the hyperbolic rhetoric of a sentimental heroine. In Milan C.
Edson's Solaris Farm (1900), for instance, Fern Fenwich gushes to her lover, "Ah,
chosen one; So manly; so noble; so true; [...] my hero" (171, 176). They are

frequently ensnarled in what Henri Petter has identified as the primary narrative
situation of the early American sentimental romance: the challenge of obstacles
placed in the path of true love. In the Utopian fictions barriers such as cruel or greedy
parents, rival lovers or rival passions are replaced by obstacles such as a fear that

Utopian Thought in American Literature

the time-traveling narrator will be overwhelmed by shock if he learns of the heroine's
love and, in the case of Edith Leete, her identity; the difficulties experienced by
males confronted by a woman who wants to shed her female stereotype (Bishop's
Stanley and Stella); and the seemingly insurmountable distance created by

differences between Utopian and non-utopian backgrounds (Howell's Mr. Homos
and Eve, and in the early twentieth century, Charlotte Perkins Gilman's three male
explorers and the inhabitants of an all-female Utopia). Jones and Merchant's

Unveiling A Parallel (1893) — a sex-role reversal satiric Utopia — appears to be a

striking exception to the use of characteristics of the sentimental heroine. A male
narrator discovers a Martian country where many women are ambitious

businesspersons and professionals. Women also vote, drink, inhale valerian root,
box, and frequent brothels stocked with attractive males. But in the last part of the
book the narrator visits another more elevated Utopia where both men and women

are equally free of "vulgar" ambitions and desires. They are neuterized sentimental
heropersons.

Decades of reading sentimental romances helped to make American readers,

especially women readers, alert and competent readers of Utopian fiction. This read-
ing tradition also helped them to know how they should/ee/ and act upon their inter-
pretations of certain cues in the fiction. As Quissell has argued convincingly ("Sen-

timental"), sentimental romances, especially sentimental reform romances such as
Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852), created a tradition of fictional

"rhetoric designed to direct the reader's emotional responses"; they offered an
"emotionalized treatment of social issues" (33,138). Hugh Kenner might belittle
Uncle Tom's Cabin by calling it that "famous eleven-Kleenes tract" (Donald, 16),

but Stowe did not conceive of her book as an aesthetic object to be admired as a self-
contained artifact apart from its social contexts. In the heads of prepared readers,

Uncle Tom's Cabin was to become a dynamic three-step process that linked the text

and the reader to society. The first job was to have the reader take away from the text
an awareness of serious problems. This awareness should evoke many emotions,

especially guilt, assuming that the readers had done little or nothing or not enough
to halt slavery. This guilt would in turn compel readers to seek outlets for their feel-
ings in acts of atonement (such as those outlined by Stowe in her "Concluding
Remarks" to the reader) that would lead to the abolition of slavery in the real world.

Bellamy's views on race relations are less than praiseworthy (e.g., Equality 179),

and there are no Topsies in the Leete's household. But viewing the sentimental
reform romance as a crucial perceptual origin of Looking Backward does help us
to understand why this book was the most recognized nineteenth-century American
Utopia. Scholars have stressed that Bellamy's use of implicit and explicit contrasts

made his readers aware of serious problems in their society and that his descriptions
of A.D. 2000 and the transition period, and his direct appeals in the postscript gave
his readers outlets for their reform desires. But even scholars such as V. Dupont,

Tom Towers, R. Jackson Wilson, and John Thomas, who have offered excellent
interpretations of the fictional and real emotional struggles of Julian West and his

Roemer: Perceptual Origins of Utopian Fiction

creator, have not emphasized the tremendous importance of West's guilt and its
probable effect on readers conditioned by an Uncle Tom's Cabin, which was still
popular during the late nineteenth century (Mabie, 509). After only a few confusing

days in Utopia, West can articulate one of the fundamental sources of his suffering.
As he reads another master of emotional reform fiction, Dickens (whose "great
heartbeat forthe poor"), he is struck by a "deepening wonder" that someone "who

so little deserved it" had suddenly been given all the benefits of a "new world"
(190,191). As indicated earlier, this sense of guilt culminates in the last sentences of
the book. West wishes he could go back to the past and help with the transition and
finally falls to his knees before Edith. With his face "in the dust" and tears

streaming, he confesses his unworthiness to be in Utopia and his infinite un-
worthiness to "wear upon my breast its consummate flower," Edith, who is also his
merciful "judge" (311). The elevated position of Edith has been compared to the
position of Henry Adam's Virgin (Stupple, 74-78), and her heroic stature and her

love story may have inspired women readers to urge their husbands to change the
world. (As Virgil Lokke has put it, possibly man could be "led [...] through the
bedroom door into Utopia" (142). But the emotion of the final scene goes beyond

specific appeals to either sex. A central implication of West's guilt is that the readers
are the lucky ones. They can alleviate guilt, which might grow out of an awareness
of social problems and of their past unwillingness or inability to solve the problems
of their era, by helping to lead their society in the directions Bellamy had indicated

in his Utopia. The guilt is the central link, the catalyst between the awareness and
the action. But without the legacy, the conditioning, of decades of the "emotional
treatment of social issues" in sentimental reform fiction, it is doubtful whether
many readers would have perceived West's guilt as an appropriate element of fiction

or a meaningful call for action, and those who did might have had as much trouble
communicating their interpretations as West did when he introduced his viewpoint
to Edith's family and friends in his nightmare return to 1887.

It is also doubtful that the elements of the sentimental romance found in Utopian

fiction could have become so significant had it not been for the gradual development
of a particular type of interpretive community that John L. Thomas has called the

"community of moral discourse" (56). In part this development relates to innova-

tions in the publishing industry and to attitudes about books and reading. Victorian
leaders hoped that their world views could be passed on to present and future genera-
tions through a powerful yet inexpensive system of didactic publications. Technolo-

gical improvements hadhelped to fosterthishope. "In 1811 the steam-powered print-

ing press was invented. Its impact was enhanced by the economic manufacture of
paper from woodpulp and improvements in the transportation system facilitating the
dissemination of printed materials" (Howe, 521). A strong faith in the power of
books to shape lives was expressed in nonfiction, prescriptive writing — "child-

rearing manuals, books on household management, etiquette books, even joke
books to tell people how to be funny" (Howe, 527) — and in fiction, especially popular
sentimental reform fiction that covered issues ranging from slavery (Uncle Tom's

Utopian Thought in American Literature

Cabin) to treatment of Indians (Ramona) to temperance {TenNights in a Barroom).

Henry Demarest Lloyd, a leader in the community of moral discourse and author
of Wealth Against Commonwealth (1894), particularly emphasized the power of fic-
tion. "It's not the stern and accurate thinkers who wield humanity directly, but the

philosophers who can weave truth into a moving fiction or story." These were the
people who could "move mankind and make history" (Thomas, 216). Lloyd's
impressions are, at least indirectly, supported by a very interesting and extensive
survey of library withdrawals throughout the country during the early 1890s. Based

on the data collected, Hamilton W. Mabie concluded that'Tiction is, on the whole,
the most representative kind of literature, that is, that appeals to the greatest number
of readers and the distribution that covers the widest area" (511). Of course, sales
figures could also be cited to support Mabie's claim.

Considering the general faith in the power of didactic fiction and the library with-

drawal and sales figures, it should not be surprising that American readers could
see a work such as Looking Backward — whose "manifestos" are didactic and
whose "fables" are didactic, familiar, and moving — as a powerful guide to thought

and action in the present and future. Nor is it surprising that at least twenty-two au-
thors of Utopias written between 1888 and 1900 incorporated into their fictional nar-
ratives descriptions of books, including Utopian fiction, that inspired reformers. In

Equality Dr. Leete even tells West that the popularity of reform literature published

just before The Change practically explains the timing of the transformation of

America (336).

Beyond the general attitudes about the power of didactic books, especially fic-

tions, the community of moral discourse was also characterized by a certain "style
of inquiry and a mode of analysis" (Thomas, 55). The style could be recognized in
the manifesto sections of the Utopias as an adaptation of the "oral conventions of the
pulpit, the lecture platform, and the stage" (Lokke, 141). As the long sermon by the

Rev. Mr. Barton in Looking Backward indicates, this rhetorical style was firmly
grounded in the parables and imagery of the Bible, which was for American Chris-
tian readers the primary example of book power. Seen through this network of reli-

gious rhetoric (which has been examined quite closely),

the presentation of prob-

lems and solutions became a form of "moral inquiry" (Thomas, 56) and visionary
prophecy. Hence Bellamy's American readers were well prepared to give powerful

meanings to Dr. Leete's characterizations of social problems as evils and to Rev. Bar-
ton's claim that, although the "material" progress represented by their Utopia could
be compared to the progress made in past epochs of history,' 'history offers no prece-

dent , however far back we may cast our eye" for the "moral aspect" of their progress
(275).

The foregoing attempt to define significant factors that created an interpretive

community that was prepared to recognize, give meaning to, and even act out Uto-
pian fiction is incomplete and at times rather speculative. But if, in general, the
study of perceptual origins does help us to understand how Utopian fictions such as

Looking Backward were transformed by readers into such powerful social and

Roemer: Perceptual Origins of Utopian Fiction

cultural forces during the late nineteenth century, then possibly the four primary
assumptions that underlie this overview can be used to direct other studies of

popular and influential works.

First of all, presenting a text from the past as the culmination of perceptual origins

that prepared readers to interpret it robs that text of its status as a fixed object
containing inherent meanings intended by the author and accessible to "correct"

readings by modern scholars. But the emphasis on perceptual origins and their
effects on readers does not render the author invisible and the text totally malleable.
The concept of perceptual origins assumes that certain authors — who are
themselves members of "prepared" reading audiences — are capable of inviting

readers to construct particular meanings by presenting them with networks of
characters, episodes, settings, and other "signs" that, because of their readers'
preparation, will direct them toward predictable intellectual, emotional, and, in the

case of Utopian fiction, behavioral responses." In this sense the process of reading
the text itself becomes an important perceptual origin of the meanings the readers
give to the texts.

A second important assumption is that an analysis of perceptual origins should

not necessarily be limited to the time period that defines the generation that made
the text popular and influential. We do not have to go back to the first human attempts
to interpret cave drawings every time we hunt for a text's perceptual origins. But too

narrow a time scope can lead to narrow views of how readers create meaning. Post
Civil War events did influence how readers interpreted Looking Backward. But there
have been other disruptive eras in American history, notably the Great Depression

years, when similar historical events did not prepare great numbers of American

readers to find significant meanings in Utopian fiction. In other words, in spite of
the great impact of the panics, strikes, and other wrenching circumstances of the
late nineteenth century, without the existence of other perceptual origins (including

some that were centuries old and others, like sentimental romance interpretive
conventions, that seemed to have little to do with current events), Bellamy's Utopia
would have been an invisible nowhere that had no place in the purview of the

American reader.

The third assumption is closely related to the second. It is essential to consider

the probable influences of many different types of perceptual origins: those as broad
as millennial expectations and Victorian value systems and as specific as

conventional interpretations of the heroines' diction or the connotations of a
particular style of book binding. Avoiding such diversity may lead to the delineation
of coherent and convincing theories that are easy to communicate to the members

of a specific academic discipline, but an overly narrow focus can also greatly limit
our understanding of the rich and complex network of influences that shape

interpretive communities of readers.

The other assumption is practically self-evident: the central question to be asked

of every potential influence is, "How might this influence prepare readers to

recognize, to pay attention to, and to give meaning to the text?" This general question

Utopian Thought in American Literature

spawns numerous specific questions related to the text being examined. For
instance, if a Utopian fiction articulates its critiques through contrasts, are there

discoverable circumstances that sensitize readers to seeing meanings in contrasts?
If the Utopia is meant to be a practical blueprint for the future, what helps readers
to perceive of Utopias as feasible prescriptions? If the text evokes guilt, what reading

conventions make this evocation acceptable and significant? These and other
similar questions were assumed to be important in the foregoing discussions of
historical, technological, attitudinal, intellectual, religious, and literary origins of

late nineteenth-century reader responses to Utopian fiction.

These underlying questions also suggest that no matter how "objective" scholars

attempt to be, their investigations of perceptual origins will be biased by how they
were prepared to read texts by a wide diversity of perceptual origins that are probably

quite different from the perceptual origins of the readings of the era and culture being
analyzed. Consequently, their own prepared readings will determine which aspects
of the text are significant enough to merit investigation, which will in turn determine
what types of historical, cultural, and literary origins will be examined. Someone

who did not deem as important in late nineteenth-century Utopian fiction references
to historical, economic, and technological developments, the use of contrasts and

the emphasis on order, the values implied by the text, and the other characteristics
I discussed, would, of course, construct a very different set of perceptual origins.

The inherent biases of perceptual origin studies should not be read as

justifications for abandoning this approach to interpreting historical texts, though

an awareness of these biases should remind us that it is impossible to arrive at an

"objective" construct of a "text-as-read" by readers from another era. Actually, the

biases demonstrate the power of perceptual origins, since the investigators are
experiencing their prepared readings as they study the prepared readings of the past.
Furthermore, the study of perceptual origins does at least get us closer to the text-

as-read than do a spectrum of other approaches ranging from an emphasis on

"universal" interpretations of fixed texts to reader-response criticism that narrowly

limits the types of actual or theoretical responses worthy of examination.

Notes

1 Reader-response criticism has strongly influenced my concept of perceptual

origins. I especially benefited from the following concepts: Stanley Fish's

"interpretive communities," Steven Mailloux's "interpretive conventions,"

Jonathan Culler's "intertextuality" and "literary competence," Janice
Radway's "text-as-read," and Wolfgang Iser's text that "invites" readers to fill
in its "gaps."

2 Segal and Lipow emphasize this sense of loss within the contexts of

technological utopianism and the Nationalist movement. Wiebe places his

Roemer: Perceptual Origins of Utopian Fiction

examination of the desire for order within the general historical/cultural context
of the years 1877 to 1920.

3 The desire for order was especially obvious in the utopists' descriptions of

economic and governmental systems, city plans, and the activities of daily life

(Roemer, Obsolete Necessity 91-93, 100, 136-38, 151-52, 160-61, 172-73, 175,

180).

4 Harben's Land of the Changing Sun (1894) was dystopian. Hence he offered a

negative view of such vast technological developments.

5 Hansot presents several types of explanations for the general transition to

prescriptive Utopias in her broad overview of several centuries of Utopian
literature represented by selected works.

6 The "technological" Utopias described by Segal (19-32), the "progressive"

Utopias described by Pfaelzer (26-51), and many of the "cooperative" Utopias
described by Rooney (102-11) strongly reflect these values, as do most of the
other late nineteenth-century Utopias (Roemer, "Utopia", 315-320). Significant

exceptions are found among the conservative Utopias (e.g., Wheeler) and the
agrarian Utopias (e.g., Howells), as well as in the few Utopias that indicate an
advocacy of premarital sex (e.g., Albert Waldo Howard's The Milltillionaire

[1895].

7 For example see Rooney (19-36), Segal (56-73), Nydahl ("Millennium' 237-51),

and Manuel and Manuel (33-63, 413-531, 697-756, 773-787).

8 Only a few late nineteenth-century works were dominated by an international

outlook, most notable Looking Forward (1899), written by Arthur Bird, an
exVice Consul-General of America at Port-au-Prince, Haiti.

9 For example see Hart (306-10).

10 For example see Roemer {Obsolete Necessity 22-25, 32, 44, 50, 59, 87-89,

95-101), Rooney (24-27, 152-56), Schiffman (716-32), and Thomas (237-61).

11 For interpretations of how Bellamy did this see Cornet, Khanna, and Roemer

("Contexts").

Works Cited

Appleton, Jane Sophia, "Sequel to the "Vision of Bangor in the Twentieth

Century'", "Voices from the Kenduskeag, ed. Jane Sophia Appleton, Bangor:

David Bugbee, 1848, 243-65.

Bellamy, Edward, Equality, New York: Appleton, 1897.

Looking Backward 2000-1881, ed. John L. Thomas, Belknap Press of Harvard

UP, 1967.

Bercovitch, Sacvan, "The Typography of America's Mission", American Quarterly

30 (1978), 135-55.

Bird, Arthur, Looking Forward: A Dream of the United States of the Americas in

1999, Utica: L. C. Childs, 1899.

Utopian Thought in American Literature

Bishop, William Hfenry] The Garden of Eden, U. S. A. A Very Possible Story,

Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 1895.

Brown, Charles Brockden, Alcuin: A Dialogue, New York: T. & J. Swords, 1798.
Cooper, James Fenimore. The Crater, New York: Burgess, Stringer, 1847.

Cornet, Robert J. "Rhetorical Strategies in Looking Backward", Markham Review

(1974): 53-56.

Culler, Jonathan, "Literary Competence", Reader-Response Criticism: From

Formalism to Post-Structuralism, ed. Jane P. Tompkins, Baltimore: Johns

Hopkins UP, 1980, 101-17.

Donald, David Herbert, Rev. of Uncle Tom's Cabin and American Culture, by

Thomas F. Gossett, New York Times Book Review, 8 Sept. 1985, 16.

Donnelly, Ignatius, Caesar's Column: A Story of the Twentieth Century, Chicago:

F. J. Schulte, 1890.

Dupont, W.,L'Utopie et le Roman Utopiquedans laLitteratureAnglaise, Cahors:

A. Coueslant, 1941.

Edson, Milan C., Solaris Farm: A Story of the Twentieth Century, Washington, D.

C: Author, 1900.

Fish, Stanley, Is There a Text in This Class"? The Authority of Interpretive

Communities, Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1980.

Fogary, Robert S., Dictionary of American Communal and Utopian History,

Westport: Greenwood P., 1980.

George, Henry, Progress and Poverty, [1879] New York: Modern Library, n.d.
Gillette, King C[amp], The Human Drift, Boston: New Era, 1894.

Gilman, Charlotte Perkins, Herland, 1915; New York: Pantheon, 1979.
Griffith, Mary, "Three Hundred Years Hence," Camperdown; or, News from Our

Neighborhood, Philadelphia: Carey, 1836, 9-92.

Hansot, Elisabeth, Perfection and Progress, Cambridge: M.I.T. Press, 1974.

Harben, Will N., The Land of the Changing Sun, New York: Merriam, 1894.

Harris, Neil, "Utopian Fiction and Its Discontents", Uprooted Americans: Essays

to Honor Oscar Handlin, ed. Richard L. Bushman, etal., Boston: Little Brown,

1979, 209-44.

Hart, James D., The Popular Book: A History of America 'sLiterary Taste, Berkeley:

U. of California P., 1961.

Hawthorne, Nathaniel, The Blithedale Romance, Boston: Ticknor. 1852.

Howe, Daniel Walker, "American Victorianism as a Culture", American Quarterly

27 (1975), 507-32.

Howells, William Dean, The Altrurian Romances,cds. Clara Kirk and Rudolf Kirk,

Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1968.

Iser Wolfgang, The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response, Baltimore:

Johns Hopkins UP, 1978.

[Jones, Alice Ilgenfritz, and Ella Merchant] Unveiling a Parallel. A Romance,

Boston: Arena, 1893.

Roemer: Perceptual Origins of Utopian Fiction

Kessler, Carol Farley, ed., Daring to Dream: Utopian Stories by United States

Women, 1836-1919, Boston: Pandora P., 1984.

Khanna, Lee Cullen, "The Reader and Looking Backward", Journal of General

Education 33 (1981), 69-79.

[Lane:, Mary E.] Mizora: A Prophecy, New York: G.W. Dillingham, 1889.

Lipow, Arthur, Authoritarian Socialism in America: Edward Bellamy and the

Nationalist Movement, Berkeley: U. of California P., 1982.

Lokke, Virgil L., "The American Utopian Anti-Novel", Frontiers of American

Culture, eds. Ray B. Browne, et al., West Lafayette: Purdue U.Studies, 1968,

123-53.

"Look Ahead, A", Rev. of Looking Backwardby Edward Bellamy, Literary World

17 Mar. 1888, 85-86.

Mabie, Hamilton W., "The Most Popular Novels in America", Forum 16 (1893),

508-16.

Mac Nair, Everett, Edward Bellamy and the Nationalist Movement 1889 to 1894,

Milwaukee: Fitzgerald, 1957.

[Macnie:, John], TheDiothas: or, A FarLookAhead, New York: Putnam's, 1883.

Mailloux, Steven, Interpretive Conventions: The Reader in the Study of American

Fiction, Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1982.

Manuel, Frank, and Fritzie Manuel, Utopian Thought in the Western World.

Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard UP, 1979.

Melville, Hernam. Typee, London: Murray, 1846.

Miller, Perry, Errand into the Wilderness, 1956, New York: Harper Torchbook,

1964.

Moore, David A., The Age of Progress, New York: Sheldon, 1856.

Morgan, Arthur E., Plagiarism in Utopia, Yellow Springs: Morgan, 1944.

Morris, William, News from Nowhere, 1890; New York: Monthly Rev. P., 1966.

Nydahl, Joel, "Early Fictional Futures: Utopia, 1798-1864", America as Utopia,

ed. Kenneth M. Roemer, New York: Franklin, 1981, 254-291.

"From Millennium to Utopia Americana." ibid., 237-253.

Parrington, Vernon Louis, Jr. American Dreams: A Study of American Utopias,

Providence: Brown UP, 1947.

Patai, Daphne, "British and American Utopias by Women (1836-1979): An

Annotated Bibliography", Alternative Futures 4 (1981), 184-106.

Pfaelzer, Jean, The Utopian Novel in America 1886-1896: The Politics of Form,

Pittsburgh: U. of Pittsburgh P., 1984.

Quissell, Barbara, "The New World That Eve Made: Feminist Utopias Written by

Nineteenth-Century Women", America as Utopia, ed. Kenneth M. Roemer,

New York: Franklin, 1981, 148-74.

"The Sentimental and Utopian Novels of Nineteenth Century America:

Romance and Social Issues", Diss. U. of Utah, 1973.

Utopian Thought in American Literature

Radway, Janice, "American Studies, Reader Theory and the Literary Text: From the

Study of Material Objects to the Study of Social Processes", ASA Convention,
Philadelphia, 4 Nov. 1983.

Ramsey, Milton Worth, Six Thousand Years Hence, Minneapolis: Roper, 1891.
Roemer, Kenneth M., "Contexts and Texts: The Influence of Looking Backward",

Centennial Review 27 (1983), 204-23.

The Obsolete Necessity: America in Utopian Writings, 1888-1900, Kent: Kent

State UP, 1976.

"Utopia and Victorian Culture: 1888-1899",/l/nericaöw Utopia, ed. KennethM.

Roemer, New York: Franklin, 1981, 305-332.

Rooney, Charles J., Jr., Dreams and Visions: A Study of American Utopias,

1865-1917, Westport: Greenwood P., 1985.

Rowson, Susanna, Charlotte, A Tale of Truth, London: Minerva Press, 1791.
Sargent, Lyman Tower, British and American Utopias 1516-1975: An Annotated

Bibliography, Boston: G. K. Hall, 1979.

"Capitalist Eutopias in America", Americaas Utopia, ed. Kenneth M. Roemer,

New York: Franklin, 1981, 192-205.

"Utopianism in Colonial America", History of Political Thought 4 (1983),

483-522.

Schiffman, Joseph, "Edward Bellamy's Religious Thought", PMLA 68 (1953),

716-32.

Schindler, Solomon, Young West, Boston: Arena, 1894.

Segal, Howard P., Technological Utopianism in American Culture, Chicago: U. of

Chicago P., 1985.

Sibley, Mulford Q., Technology and Utopian Thought, Minneapolis: Burgess, 1971.
Stowe, Harriet Beecher, Uncle Tom's CaW«,Boston: Jewett, 1852.
Stupple, A. James, "Utopian Humanism in America, 1888-1900", Diss.

Northwestern U., 1971.

Thomas, Chauncey, The Crystal Button, ed. George Houghton, Boston: Houghton

Mifflin, 1891.

Thomas, John L., Alternative America: Henry George, Edward Bellamy, Henry

Demarest Lloyd and the Adversary Tradition, Cambridge: Belknap Press of

Harvard UP, 1983.

Towers, Tom H., "The Insomnia of Julian West", American Literature 47 (1975)

52-63.

Tuveson, Ernest Lee, Redeemer Nation, Chicago: U. of Chicago P., 1968.
Twain, Mark. "A Chat with Mark Twain," Johannesburgh Star, 18 May 1896, 4.

A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, New York: Webster, 1889.

Wheeler, David H[ilton] Our Industrial Utopia, Chicago: McClurg, 1895.
Wiebe, Robert H., The Search for Order, 1877-1920, New York: Hill and Wang,

1967.

Wilson, R. Jackson, Introduction, Looking Backward. By Edward Bellamy, New

York: Modern Library, 1982, vii - xxxv.

WORLDS APART: A THEORY OF SCIENCE FICTION

Carl D. Malmgren

As a genre, science fiction can be defined as presenting a fictional world

whose system of actants and chronotopes contains at least one factor of
estrangement from the world of empirical fact and which inscribes that factor
in a naturalizing or scientific discourse. The factor of estrangement, or
novum, can be either extrapolative or speculative in nature. Extrapolative SF

is created by metonymy, by a logical projection or extension from existing
actualities; speculative SF is more metaphoric, the product of poetic vision
or paralogic, involving an imaginative leap towards an other state of affairs.

In order to create a theoretical model of SF, we must identify the

components of fictional worlds in general. They are four; a set of actants, a

social structure informing the actants' interactions, a physical domain or
topos, and a system of natural laws. Sf inserts its novum into one (or more)
of these systems. By charting the components of a world, and overlay-
ing it with the extrapolation/speculation distinction, we can create a
comprehensive typology of possible science-fictional worlds. Examining the
resultant SF types, we can begin to specify areas of thematic concern for each
type and thus to circumscribe the cognitive dimensions of SF in general.

He, who through vast immensity can pierce,

See worlds on worlds compose one universe,
Observe how system into system runs,
What other planets circle other suns,
What varied being peoples every star,
May tell why Heaven has made us as we are.

Alexander Pope, "Essay on Man," 11. 23-28

1. Science Fiction and Its Worlds

Science fiction [...] gives some of us hope. We have come to suspect any-

thing that speaks of the Truth. We suspect that we are being lulled to sleep
by these marvellous truths, always inapplicable to ourselves. An instinct tells
us that the truth is likely to be stumbled on in unlikely places. And what more
unlikely place than in science fiction, which claims many things but does not
claim to be literally true?

Robert Sheckley, "The Search for the Marvellous"

At the root of narrative genre theory lies the relationship between Fiction and

Reality. Any study that attempts to establish generic distinctions between fictional

forms frequently relies on comparisons between the fictional world and the "real
world". This has been the case for narratology ever since Clara Reeve used this

Utopian Thought in American Literature

relationship in The Progress of Romance (1785) to distinguish between Novel and
Romance.' It follows then that the subgenre of science fiction can best be described
by reference to its fictional worlds, a truth that many readers of science fiction come

to intuitively. Science fiction can be defined by its peculiarly "science-fictional"
worlds. The essential question then becomes, How can we describe the worlds of
science fiction?

The first step is to determine the components of fictional worlds in general.

Working inductively, we can say that a fictional universe invariably consists of two
major components or systems, roughly equivalent to the lexicon and syntax of a
language — a world and a story. The former includes the total repertoire of possible
fictional entities; that is, the characters, settings, and objects (in science fiction

these would include gadgets, inventions, discoveries, and so forth) that occupy the
imaginal space of the fiction. The story connects and combines the various entities
that make up the world; at an abstract level it consists of a systematic set of rules
governing the order and arrangement of those entities and concatenating their
interactions.

A marked tendency in the critical analysis of science fiction has been to define

it on criteria essentially based on story. One notes this tendency in the names for
various story types which are employed to discuss science fiction or to organize
science fiction anthologies — the voyage extraordinaire, the time-travel story, the

postholocaust story, the alien encounter story, the space opera, the gadget story. It
is not that these categories are totally irrelevant to the definition of science fiction,

but rather that they tend to derive from what happens in the fiction, from its story.
But the generic distinctiveness of science fiction lies not in its story but in its world.
The various plots of science fiction, once divested of their alien, otherworldly, or
futuristic appurtenances, tend to coincide with the plots of realistic fiction. Thomas
Clareson gives the following example of what can happen when one locates the

uniqueness of science fiction at the level of plot: "The protagonist, an alien creature,
invades and struggles to survive amid a hostile society which dominates the planet
— as in Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison." As Clareson points out, "the same old story

can be told in a number of ways."

A similar confusion occurs when one tries to

generalize about the essential narrative kernel of science fiction, as when Gary
Wolfe argues that "the transformation of Chaos into Cosmos, of the unknown into

the known, is the central action of a great many works of science fiction."

One

might point out that it is also the "central action" (itself a word connected with plot)
of all mystery stories, of many initiation stories, of other types of stories. It follows,
then, that in order to understand the nature of science fiction and its cognitive
possibilities, we must examine the unique configuration of its worlds. When

discussing a fictional world, to avoid the implicit assumptions that the characters
are human and the settings terran, I shall use the terms, actants and chronotope; I
borrow the latter term from Bakhtin, who defines it as "the essential connection of

temporal and spatial relationships, as shaped in literary art."

By this term I intend

not only the settings through which the actants move, the time frame (historical,

Malmgren: Theory of Science Fiction

futurological, etc.) of the action, and the operative natural laws, but also the
systematic sets of relations that inform the topological domain. To summarize, then,
a world consists of a number of actants who populate, occupy, or exist in certain
implicit or particularized chronotopes.

The second step in our definition involves establishing a standard with which to

compare the object of inquiry. In this respect, Lubomir Dolezel offers the following
suggestion: "The study of possible narrative worlds will be facilitated, if we can
define a basic narrative world to which all others will be related as its alternatives.
It seems natural to propose for this role the narrative world which corresponds to

our actual, empirical world."

We need, however, to make a minor revision of this

formulation in order to accommodate science-fictional worlds. Following Suvin,
we must specify that the basic narrative world corresponds to "the 'zero world' of
empirically verifiable properties around the author"** (emphasis added). It
happens in science fiction that narrative motifs or entities which, at the time of their

inscription, represent a departure from the author's empirical environment,
become actualized in a later empirical environment (e.g., submarines, space flight,
atomic energy). In this respect, it is also useful to borrow from Eric Rabkin the term
grapholect to designate a writing practice whose discourse is diacritically marked
by the imprint of a specific historical, sociological, and cultural matrix.

"Grapholects," according to Rabkin, "mark the writing 'voice' as coming from a

particular time, place, and social group. The date of publication may or may not be
active in one's mind during the reading of any given text, but the grapholect ofthat
text, and the associated set of perspectives it vivifies, is [sic] always present."

Verne's Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea, for example, could perhaps be
read today as a possible, if implausible, sea adventure story if its grapholect did not
identify it for all competent readers as a nineteenth-century science fiction.

Armed with these postulates, we can begin to make some discriminations about

the nature of science-fictional worlds. Samuel Delany, in a seminal article entitled

"About Five Thousand One Hundred and Seventy Five Words," notes that all fiction

exists at a certain level of subjunctivity. Realistic or naturalistic fiction, which
accepts as its domain the basic narrative world, exists at a level of subjunctivity
defined by the phrase, could have happened. Other forms of fiction exist at other

levels of subjunctivity; the mood for fantasy fiction, for example, is could not have
happened. Delany identifies the mood of science fiction as has not happened and
goes on to enumerate the possibilities that inhere in this particular narrative
ontology.

His general point is well taken. The distinctiveness of science fiction

rests in its generic license to create worlds other than the basic narrative world. This
license identifies science fiction as a narrative species belonging to what is
traditionally known as Romance (and remember that Wells referred to his fictions
as "scientific romances").

When we pick up a science fiction text, we

automatically make certain assumptions about that text, among them that it will not
re-present (represent) reality, that it will rather constitute an addition to reality.

Several writers have made note of this particular quality of science fiction: Ursula

Utopian Thought in American Literature

LeGuin, inaprefaceto The Left Hand of Darkness, refers to the disjunction between
science-fictional and basic narrative worlds as the product of a "thought

experiment"; Darko Suvin, in his theoretical study of the genre, argues that "SF
is distinguished by the narrative dominance or hegemony of a fictional 'novum'
(novelty, innovation)"; and Robert Scholes asserts that science fiction creates its

worlds by means of a "representational discontinuity."

For our immediate

purposes Scholes's formulation is most pertinent in that it specifies that the
fundamental discontinuity is representational, which suggests that the essential
transformation involves the fictional world.

A science-fictional world, then, contains at least one factor of disjunction from

the basic narrative world created by an actantial or chronotopological
transformation. One of the advantages that accrues to this type of narrative ontology
has to do with the imaginative latitude granted the author. The author who inscribes

a science-fictional world is cut loose from some of the exigencies of mimesis; he
or she is free to speculate, to fabulate, to invent. But the conventions of science
fiction do not grant total license to the fictionist. Once the author has posited the

representational discontinuity (and there may be more than one such factor), the

conventions of the genre dictate that the author thereafter adhere to the laws of nature
and the assumptions of the scientific method (like the validity of cause and effect,
the irreversibility of time, and the concepts of verifiability and repeatability). Brian

Aldiss, noted science fiction author and critic, has charged that "most science
fiction is about as firmly based in science as eggs are filled with bacon."

This

simile is misleading in that it suggests that science constitutes a kind of side order
in any science fiction concoction; Aldiss thus passes over the telling fact that science

fiction is firmly grounded in a discourse that assumes the validity of a scientific
epistemology. Moreover, the SF writer must provide a scientific rationale for the

discontinuities that he or she introduces into the fictional world.

As another

science fiction author puts it, "You cannot contravene a known and accepted

principle of science unless you have a logical explanation based on other known and
accepted principles."

The science in science fiction is not merely a matter of

embellishment; it informs the epistemology of the narrative, subtends the rhetoric
of the fiction, and constrains the aesthetic configuration of the tale.

A science-fictional world is thus to a certain extent oxymoronic; it incorporates

supernatural, estranged, or nonempirical elements, but grounds those elements in

a naturalizing discourse which takes for granted the explicability of the universe.
According to John Huntington, SF possesses a "deep structure that unites in some
way scientific necessity and imaginative freedom."

Science fiction is thus

characterized by a fictional world whose system of actants and chronotopes contains
at least one factor of estrangement from the basic narrative world of the author and
which inscribes that factor in a discourse predicated upon the validity of the

scientific episteme. The factor of estrangement, or novum,

at once defines the

genre and determines the range of aesthetic and cognitive functions that science
fiction is able to serve.

Malmgren: Theory of Science Fiction

As Horace, among others, has observed, the primary functions of art of any kind

are to entertain and to instruct. The unique narrative ontology of science fiction
particularly enables it to answer these functions. The simple fact of SF's otherness

(predicated on the informing novum) insures to some degree that the fiction exerts
a certain fascination — whether sympathetic, xenophobic, or disinterestedly
intellectual. The strangeness of science-fictional worlds guarantees to some extent
that they will satisfy some sublimative or affective needs.

But it is not enough that fiction speak to our unspoken dreams, fears, and desires;

we also insist that it in some way help us to know ourselves or teach us something
about the way we live now. In even the best of times we ask that fiction give us "an

adequate notion of what it is to be alive today, why we are the way we are, and what
might be done to remedy our bad situation."

A fiction that takes as its domain the

basic narrative world can presume that the lessons learned by its actants obtain in
the "extratextual" world (which is, after all, contiguous and coterminous with the

textual world). The epiphanies of the characters are valid insights into the "nature
of reality " both within and without the text. Jonathan Culler has argued that making

sense of fictional texts consists in discovering and applying the correct culturally
sanctioned models of vraisemblance (an untranslatable word connoting the

systematic nature of correspondence between literary texts and the text of the real).
The first two such models he discusses derive directly from experiential reality; they

involve an awareness either of what is "real" or of what is general human
knowledge.

Clearly these models of vraisemblance are not available to the reader of science

fiction who is confronted by a world that proclaims its difference from the basic
narrative world. The reader must discover or invent other models in order to

recuperate or "naturalize" a science-fictional world. And it is just this process of
recuperation which constitutes SF's cognitive value. The fact that the text adheres
to the logic of the scientific method and the constraints of natural law in part assures

the reader that retrieval is possible, that relations of correspondence do exist. The

world of the fiction has all of the predicates that we associate with the basic narrative
world — logical consistency, predictability, regularity, comprehensibility — and

standards of comparison between the two worlds can therefore be established. But
at the same time that world is structured by its novum, a distancing element which
forces the reader to look at the basic narrative world from the estranged perspective
of a new optic. Ernst Bloch has said that the "real function of estrangement is —

and must be — the provision of a shocking and distancing mirror above the all too
familiar reality."

So it is with the novum of science fiction, which distances the

reader from the empirical world, generating a cognitive space which the reader must
negotiate. A science-fictional world is thus less a reflection of than a reflection on
empirical reality. Indeed, part of the attraction of the genre rests in the fact that

systems of correspondence between real and fictional worlds are generated
primarily by the labor of the reader. The reader knows that he or she must work to
achieve cognitive satisfactions. The challenge of all serious science fiction lies in

Utopian Thought in American Literature

the working out of its vraisemblance. Mark Rose has said that "the familiar in
relation to the unfamiliar, the ordinary in relation to the extraordinary, is always,

at least at one level of generalization, the subject of SF."

I would add that this

relation, since it must be articulated by the reader, warrants for science fiction the

title of the "literature of cognitive estrangmement."

2. Extrapolation and Speculation

It is the policy of Science Wonder Stories to publish only such stories that

have their basis in scientific laws as we know them, or in the logical deduction
of new laws from what we know.

Hugo Gernsbeck, Editorial, June 1929

I make use of physics. He [H.G. Wells] invents.

Jules Verne

A science-fictional world by definition contains at least one novum, or factor of

deviation from the basic narrative world, a factor which in-forms that world and its
unfolding events. We must now examine the creation of this novum as a mental

process and make a further discrimination. The degree of "newness" or alternity
of the novum is, as some critics have suggested,

dependent upon the kind of

mental operation the author employs in generating it. The author may, for example,
proceed by extrapolation, creating a fictional novum by logical projection or

extension from existing actualities. What might happen, John Brunner asks in Stand
on Zanzibar, if the world population keeps increasing at near geometric rates? Or

the author may rely on what I term speculation

in the generation of a novum. A

speculative discontinuity involves a kind of quantum leap of the imagination, itself
the product of poetic vision or paralogic, towards an entirely other state of affairs.

In Solaris, for example, Stanislaw Lern depicts the mystery and grandeur of an
almost completely nonhuman sentient planet.

Extrapolation, as is implicit in the word's etymology, is basically a logical and

linear process. The author accepts the current state of scientific knowledge, projects
from it either in time or space, and tries to imagine and articulate the resultant

situation or conditions. In "pure" extrapolation one must adhere strictly to the

current state of scientific theory and fact. A writer firmly committed to extrapolative
science fiction occasionally finds himself in an embarrassing position when
subsequent scientific discoveries invalidate the facts which he had presumed to be

true while writing the story. Thus Poul Anderson feels compelled to make the
following admission in his "Author's Note" to the reprinted story, "Life Cycle":

A science fiction writer may, of course, speculate about things that science

has not yet discovered. But whenever he deals with what is already known,
he should get his facts straight.

Malmgren: Theory of Science Fiction

That's what I tried to do in this story. The planet Mercury was depicted as

accurately as possible by me, according to the best available data and theories,
as of 1957.

The trouble is, scientific "facts" won't stay put. In the spring of 1965, radar

and radio observations indicated that Mercury does not eternally turn the
same face toward the sun and that the dark side — even in the course of a very
long night — does not get especially cold.

So perhaps this story should not now be reprinted, or perhaps it should at

least have been rewritten.

Extrapolative science fiction has sometimes been labelled the "if this goes on"

variety while speculative SF is contrasted as more of the "what if variety.
Unfortunately, the two phrases, though catchy, are not really helpful. True, some

extrapolative science fiction does derive from the "if this goes on" formula (stories
of population problems, fuel or food shortage, increasing technologization, even
Cold War confrontations), but much of it does not. Heinlein's The Moon Is a Harsh
Mistress is basically extrapolative SF based on a "what if premise — what if the

Moon is used in the relatively near future as a penal colony. Part of the attraction
of that novel lies in the rigor and detail given to its extrapolated world, including

its language, customs, and economic and social arrangements.

Speculation, as has been suggested, is a more "creative" or "freer" mental

operation, in that the writer who chooses to speculate is cut loose from the current

state of affairs (but not from the convention which dictates that any novum must be
grounded in scientific necessity). An ethnologist, Henri Frankfort, has defined
speculation as follows:

Speculation — as the etymology of the word shows — is an intuitive, an

almost visionary, mode of apprehension. This does not mean, of course, that

it is mere irresponsible meandering of the mind, which ignores reality or
seeks to escape from its problems. Speculative thought transcends
experience, but only because it attempts to explain, to unify, to order
experience.

The emphasis here upon the intuitive nature of speculation and upon its desire to

transcend experience, to discover as it were a deep structure of reality, I think
pertains to the creation of science-fictional worlds. Working metaphorically rather
than metonymically, the speculative writer tries to inscribe a world whose relation

to the basic narrative world is less logical than analogical or even anagogical; there
are systems of correspondence between the two worlds, but they are not linear or

one-to-one, and they are consequently more problematic, more difficult to establish
with certainty. A speculative writer can assume new scientific principles or make

innovative hypotheses (like parallel universes, alternate time-tracks, the existence
of hy perspace) as long as they do not contravene existing scientific principles or laws
and are inscribed within a naturalizing discourse. The limit case or "pure"

speculation, admittedly an ideality, would present the reader with an articulated

Utopian Thought in American Literature

novum essentially free of the vestiges of anthropomorphism and anthropocentrism.
This, of course, is impossible; as one critic points out, "any meaningful act of
defamiliarization can only be relative, since it is not possible for man to imagine
what is utterly alien to him; the utterly alien would also be meaningless. To give

meaning to something is also, inescapably, to 'humanize' it or to bring it within the
bounds of our anthropomorphic world view."

So speculation is necessarily a

relative phenomenon, since the absence of any correlation or resemblance between

a speculative SF world and the basic narrative world would render the fiction
incomprehensible; one needs a background in order to distinguish the salient
features of the foreground.

The above analysis perhaps suggests that the distinction between extrapolation

and speculation is clear-cut and stable; such is not the case. It sometimes happens
that a particular novum, at the time of its inscription within a particular grapholect,
can be characterized as speculative, but that with subsequent usage in other science-
fictional texts, it becomes part of the repertoire of science-fictional conventions,

thus losing its speculative "force". Examples might be faster-than-light travel, time
machines, and the like. In these cases it should be noted that these devices have
generally become just that — devices — and that they serve as a means to an end,
namely the introduction of the dominant or foregrounded novum in the fiction. In

other words, the conventionalized novum has in fact lost its status as novum and now
serves as simply a device subtending the introducion of the "real" novum, as when
faster-than-light travel is used to transport the reader to an alien world (which may

be predicated upon either an extrapolative or speculative discontinuity). The
distinction between extrapolative and speculative discontinuities is also obscured
by borderline cases, like ESP. There does seem to be some evidence that

parapsychological phenomena do exist, but that evidence is suspect, in large part
because it is nonrepeatable. So how should fictions which employ as their dominant
novum the existence of telepathy or other "psi" powers, like Van Vogt's Slan or
Sturgeon's More Than Human, be characterized, as extrapolative or speculative?

I would argue that in some cases the discourses in which these discontinuities or
nova are embedded help to determine their status — are these powers treated as
logical extensions of human faculties or are they seen as a radical departure from

existing actualities? — and that even these problematic examples do not subvert the
heuristic value, the usefulness, of the distinction between the two mental operations.

There remains only to relate extrapolation and speculation to some of the other

binary oppositions that have been used to characterize science fiction. One
temptation is to equate this distinction with that between "hard" and "soft" science
fiction. But if we understand the epithets "hard" and "soft" to refer to the sciences
in which the fictional novum is grounded,

then this equation does not work. That

is, if we understand by "hard SF" that species rooted in the "hard" sciences — those

dealing with "objective" data, whose results or findings are predictable, repeatable,
and verifiable, like physics, chemistry, or biology and if we understand by "soft SF"
those fictions based on the "soft" sciences those whose findings are more

Malmgren: Theory of Science Fiction

"subjective," probabilistic, less subject to prediction and verification, like

anthropology, sociology, and psychology — then we cannot set up the homology
Hard: Soft:: Extrapolative: Speculative. For it is very possible to conceive of an
extrapolated science fiction based on the soft sciences (Asimov's Foundation, for

example) or, for that matter, of a speculative science fiction grounded in the hard
sciences (Gregory Benford's The Ocean of Night or Stanislaw Lem's The
Invincible). It is certainly true that hard science fiction frequently focuses on the

changes wrought by the physical sciences or by technology and that it therefore relies
on the extrapolative mode. Hard SF, after all, tends to endorse wholeheartedly the
basic premise of the physical sciences, "that the universe could be understood by

an organized application of observation and thought."

Such a view lends itself to

objectivity, logical prediction, and extrapolation. It is also true that soft SF tends
to deal with problems of human consciousness and identity and that it not

infrequently locates itself in alternate worlds and dimensions and therefore relies
more on visionary or speculative modes of world-building. But despite these
affinities, we should not confuse the mental operation employed with the sciences
in which it is grounded.

Turning from synchronic analysis to an examination of the history of science

fiction, we can say that the distinction between extrapolation and speculation
supplies for us a critical tool of some value. For example, it is clear that
Gernsbeckian "scientifiction" of the early pulp era was, by design, meant to be
extrapolative. In his Amazing Stories journal, Gernsbeck featured a spectrum of

"scientific romances," from the fictions of Poe, Verne, and Wells to those of his

contemporaries, but he seemed to prefer "gadget" or "hardware" stories, in which
an extrapolative invention of some sort brought about marvellous changes in the
human condition. But soon after Gernsbeck began promoting "scientifiction" there

appeared the "superscience" story (dating, according to some, from the publication
of E.E. "Doc" Smith's The Skylark of Space in 1928), in which the constraints of
time and space, scientific possibility and narrative plausibility were exploded; the

result was the galactic "space opera" story, decked out in "unstoppable forces and
immoveable objects, in hyper-spatial tubes and superweapons and planets full of
stupefying life armed with terrible mental capabilities."

Superscience stories

were, I would argue, a juvenile form of speculative science fiction, created in part
as a "freer" alternative to the more plausible, rationalistic scientifiction. One

science fiction writer has compared the two as follows: "Superscience is not simply
scientifiction made more of, although it was arrived at by commercial pressure to
find something that would sell bigger. Scientifiction is a cool, intellectual form;

superscience is hot, and despite all naivete, fundamentally artistic"

(by which I

assume he means "imaginative"). One might pursue this line of argument by
suggesting that the main difference between Verne and Wells, within the grapholect
of their time, can be subsumed under the extrapolation/speculation polarity, or that
one might distinguish between the Golden Age and the New Wave, i.e. between

American SF of the 40s and that of the 60s according to their respective propensities

Utopian Thought in American Literature

to favor extrapolative or speculative modes of world-building. As a matter of fact,
one can construct a valid history of science fiction around the genre's oscillations
between these two poles. This in itself argues for the heuristic value of the

extrapolation/speculation distinction. But this distinction also has typological
value, as will be shown in the next section.

3. The Model Articulated

The important thing in a scientific work is not the nature of the facts with

which it is concerned, but the rigor, the exactness of the method which is prior
to the establishment of these facts, and the research for a synthesis as large

as possible.

Freud, quoted in Todorov, "The Structural Study of Narrative"

Our task, on the other hand, is the description of that hollow structure

impregnated by the interpretations of critics and readers [...] We are

concerned here [...] to describe a configuration rather than to name a
meaning.

Todorov, The Fantastic

Drawing on the postulates and distinctions made in the previous sections, we can

construct a tentative model of science-fictional worlds. We have argued that a
fictional world consists of a set of actants who exist continuously in an implicit or

particularized chronotope. Now the latter includes or incorporates both the social
system which structures the interaction of the actants and the topography through
which they move. In addition both the configuration of those topoi and the

morphology of the actants presuppose an operative system of natural laws. A world
then is comprised of four interlocking and interanimating sets of systems, as shown
in the following diagram:

WORLD

- (1) Actants

' Chronotope;

(2) Social Order
(3) Topography

(4) Natural Laws

It should be clear that in any well-constructed and consistent world these systems

are interdependent and self-regulatory and that any analysis such as the above is to
a certain extent ex post facto.

Science fiction is characterized by the introduction of a novum into one of these

four systems, a factor of estrangement which transforms the basic narrative world
into a science-fictional world. This factor may be introduced into any of the four

systems. For that matter there might be more than one such factor; a science fiction

might be characterized by actantial, societal, and topological transformations (as
in Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness, which features ambisexual aliens, two

Malmgren: Theory of Science Fiction

contrastive nation-states, and a world caught in the grip of an ice age). It can be
argued, however, that in any particular fiction one set of transformations serves as
the narrative "dominant," thus establishing the typological identity of the text. The
dominant, as defined by Roman Jakobson, "rules, determines, and transforms the

remaining components" of a given literary system.

Within a science-fictional

world one set of transformations, by virtue of its precedence, instrumentality, or
centrality, takes priority over the others. In the aforementioned novel, for example,
the actantial system is the dominant one, and Le Guin's central drama involves the
encounter between terran self and alien other. It follows, then, that any particular

science-fictional world can be classified according to the type of novum which
generates it, serves as its dominant, and establishes its typologic identity. Using the
novum as the distinguishing feature, we can construct the following typology of
science fiction:

TYPOLOGY OF SCIENCE FICTION

WORLD

Component

Actants

Social Order

Topos:

Object

Planet

Natural Law

Science

Scientific
Fact

Historical
Fact

Natural
Actant

Novum

Alien/
Robot/
Monster

Alternate
Society

Gadget

Imaginary
Planet

Magic

SFType

Alien
Encounter

Utopia/
Dystopia

»Hardware«
Fiction

Planetology

Counter-scientific
Fact

Science

Counter- Fantasy
historical

Fact

Counter-natural
Actant

Representative Examples

Extrapolative Speculative

McElroy
Plus

Zamiatin,

Asimov,
/, Robot

Niven,
Ringworld

Lern, Solaris
Stapledon,
Starmaker

Delany,
Dhalgren

Clarke,
Rendezvous

with Rama

Lindsay,

Voyage toArcturus

Heinlein, "Waldo"

Bradbury, Martian Chronicles

Dick, The Man in the High Castle

Sturgeon, More• Than Human

Themes

Self and
Other

Self and
Society

Self and
Technology

Self and
Environment

Utopian Thought in American Literature

To the model elaborated above, we have, in the chart, overlaid the distinction

between extrapolative and speculative discontinuities, supplied representative

examples, and tendered some tentative remarks about the thematic thrust of the
various science fiction types. For it can be argued that the nature of the novum

determines to some degree the cognitive concerns of each science fiction type. In
this respect it is useful to examine each type in turn.

The transformation of the system of actants involves the introduction of an alien

entity into a system that is totally human in realistic fiction. One or more of the
actants are nonhuman or superhuman or subhuman. The alien novum can take the
form of a sentient computer (Harlan Ellison's "I Have No Mouth and I Must

Scream"), a monster (Mary Shelley's Frankenstein), or an extraterrestrial (Don

Stuart's "Who Goes There?", or, for that matter, "E.T."). The story paradigm for
fiction using this transformation would be "encounter with an alien." The reader
recuperates this type of fiction by comparing human and nonhuman entities. In

general, the fiction tends to broach the question, "What is it to be human?" and the
cognitive thrust involves a better understanding of Self and Other. Given her abiding

concern with this issue,

it is not at all surprising that many of Le Guin's fictions

are of this type. This theme also tends to figure largely in Arthur C. Clarke's work;
in Childhood's End, for example, he stages for the reader the successive encounters

between humanity and an extrapolated Other (the Overlords) and humanity and a
speculative Other (the Overmind).

Science fiction presents the reader with a societal novum when it locates its story

within an estranged or alternative social order. The story paradigm here typically
entails the excursion to a utopic or dystopic elsewhere, a "brave new world" or a
"new map of hell," and the reader is invited and encouraged to make comparisons

between the fictional society and his or her own and to establish normative
frameworks. The basic thrust of this SF type is toward better understanding of the

dialectic between the Self and Society. Clearly to this type belong many of what are
considered SF "classics" — like Huxley's Brave New World, Orwell's 1984,

Zamiatin's We, Brunner's Stand on Zanzibar, Pohl and Kornbluth's The Space

Merchants, and Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 — in part because the estranged feature
(the social order) figures so heavily in any criterion of relevance and significance,
in part because the estranged element invites the kind of particularization that gives

a fiction weight or density. It is also true that the majority of these fictions are
extrapolative in nature, perhaps because it is difficult to imagine a social order that
is quintessentially Other. Nevertheless, I would argue that Stapledon (Last and First

Men) and Delany (especially in Dhalgren and Stars in My Pocket like Grains of
Sand) and other writers have undertaken radical, speculative re-visions of possible
social orders.

The third type of transformation involves the insertion of a novum into the

topological domain of the fiction. Here we must distinguish between possible levels

of transformation. If we understand the topos of a fiction to include both the physical

Malmgren: Theory of Science Fiction

settings and the objects (in the broadest sense), then a topological estrangement can
be effectuated at either level. At the local level, the estrangement occurs when an
unknown and transformatory object (gadget, invention, discovery) is postulated.
The simplest form that this type could take would be the "gadget story," in which
the invention of a single piece of hardware creates new possibilities, change the

social order, or causes narrative complications. A good example of such a story is
Lewis Padgett's "The Proud Robot," in which a brilliant but erratic inventor devises
a robot in a drunken stupor, but loses control over it because he cannot remember
what he programmed it to do. Once he remembers its programming, he is able to

reassert control over it. The story seems to say, as one critic notes, that "if we lose
sight of the simple purposes of our machines, [...] the machines will turn in on
themselves and rebel against human control."

A simple and perhaps obvious

message, but an instructive one as far as gadget SF is concerned, for in general
gadget SF takes as its basic subject the possibilities and dangers of the products of
technology. By its very nature, it explores the relation between man and machine,
between Self and Technology. Asimov's /, Robot, for example, can be seen as an

extended series of gadget stories, meant individually to puzzle and entertain, but
collectively to mediate the general problem of the correct relation between
humanity and its technologies.

For the purposes of our typology, we must distinguish between a simple gadget

story and what might at first be mistaken for a gadget story, namely one which
introduces an invention or process which catalyzes a metamorphosis in society or
in the human condition. Kate Wilhelm's Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang, for
example, employs as its dominant novum the process of cloning in a world stricken
by catastrophe and sterility. But the novel focuses not on the process itself, but on

its products and its repercussions, on the conflicts that develop between clones and
humans in subsequent generations. Here the process of cloning serves only as a
device within a science fiction whose narrative dominant is the encounter between
clone and human, Self and Other. Not infrequently, an SF writer relies on a gadget

or invention in order to create a world whose typologic identity is not that of gadget
science fiction.

There is, however, another level of possible topological estrangement which

corresponds to that of gadget SF, the global level of an imaginary planetology. Here
the writer posits, not an innovative object within a familiar world, but an entire world

itself. This may be a totally natural, if highly unusual, imaginary world, like the
disk-shaped planet Mesklin in Hal Clement's Mission of Gravity. Or it may be an
artificial construct, the product of "terraforming" or planetary engineering, as in
Larry Niven's Ringworld. In both cases, and in all "planetological" SF, the author
is more concerned with working out the nature, properties, and idiosyncracies of
the imagined planet than with examining the actants who populate it or the social
order that governs those actants. In general, planetological fiction addresses

questions dealing with man and his environment, like how the environment shapes

Utopian Thought in American Literature

and conditions all forms of life, how humanity might adapt itself in order to
accommodate new environments or how humanity might re-make or modify alien

environments in order to make them amenable to human existence. Planetological
fictions thus survey actantial struggles to survive in the diverse topographies of an
indifferent universe.

Actants, social system, and topography all presuppose a system of natural laws

which in general remain consistent and universal in all science fiction proper (this,
of course, is implicit in that part of our definition of SF which specifies that it adheres
to a scientific epistemology). The final possible vwrM-transformation, involving as
it does the universal natural laws which subtend SF in general, results in an
"impure" science-fictional form which I call science fantasy. Science fantasy is an

unstable hybrid form combining features from science fiction and fantasy. Like
fantasy, science fantasy contains at least one contravention of natural law or

empirical fact, but, like science fiction, it grounds its discourse in the scientific
method and in scientific necessity. It assumes "an orderly universe with regular and
discernible laws,"

but allows at least one violation of the laws derived from the

current state of science. Because a science-fantasy world has all of the predicates
that we associate with science-fictional worlds, an organized or "scientific"

explanation can be formulated for whatever happens, even if that explanation draws
on questionable analogies, imaginary science, or counterfactual postulates.
Because science fantasy is a hybridized form, it can take many shapes, but I do think
that some sort of classification is necessary, even if it is not exhaustive. At this point
I think that a science fantasy can violate or contravene four different kinds of
"scientific givens": the epistemology of science itself or an accepted scientific

theory, an accepted scientific fact, a given historical fact, and "natural" actantial
possibility. A science fantasy violates the epistemology of science when it presumes
that magic is the operative discipline in humanity's relation with the external world;
it violates scientific theory when it explicitly ignores basic scientific principles (like

the unidirectionality and irreversibility of time); it reverses a given scientific fact
when it assumes, for example, the viability of sentient or humanoid life on Mars,
and a historical fact when it posits the existence of alternate time-tracks based on
such a reversal; finally, it violates actantial possibility by introducing a counter-
natural actant into the system of actants, an entity whose morphology, powers, or

existence itself contravenes scientific possibility. All of the above impossibilities,

it should be remembered, appear in a world otherwise compatible with scientific

necessity and inscribed in a scientific discourse.

Turning back to the chart on p. 33, we notice first that science fantasy cannot be

modally either extrapolative or speculative. This is because its defining feature, a
reversal of natural law or empirical fact, obviates this kind of distinction; a reversal
is by definition 180 degrees and does not admit of gradation. It should be noted,

however, that the reversals of science fantasy share affinities with the imaginative
strategies of speculative SF and that cognitively the two forms work in similar
fashion. This last point brings the discussion to the last column on the chart, where

Malmgren: Theory of Science Fiction

I have declined to fill in the thematic concerns of science fantasy. C.S. Lewis has

suggested that science fantasy worlds are created mainly to serve sublimative ends,
that readers visit these "strange regions in search of such beauty, awe, or terror as
the actual world does not supply."

This is certainly true, but it passes over the very

real, if problematic, cognitive functions that science fantasy serves. The situation
is complicated, and not simply because science fantasy can take some very diverse

forms and pose a wide range of questions. Perhaps it is because any reversal of
natural law seems so arbitrary, so unmotivated, so unscientific. Nevertheless, I

would submit that science fantasy does have a somewhat circumscribed area of
thematic concern. In taking on the laws and principles which we take for granted,

it tends to ask ultimate philosophical questions having to do with metaphysics,
epistemology, ontology, metatheory (both scientific and literary), mythopoeia,

theology, and cosmology. It approaches these thematic fields obliquely, and

generally in a more exploratory than definitive way, so that its meanings are
generally multiple and problematic. But science fantasy ultimately does speak to

both our hearts and minds.

In closing, I should like to make some remarks about the advantages and strengths

of the model articulated above. First of all, it can accommodate the seemingly

inexhaustible and admittedly multifarious forms that science fiction takes, because

it is rooted in an elaboration of fictional worlds. Indeed, it enables us to locate certain
problematic cases, like the voyage extraordinaire, which, given its historical
pedigree, is sometimes lumped in with Utopie fictions, or, more frequently,

identified as proto-science fiction. Texts like Poe's The Narrative of Arthur Gordon
Pym and Verne's Journey to the Center of the Earth should rather be seen as science

fantasies (within the contexts of their respective cultural grapholects) and can
profitably be studied as such. The model also enables us to re-frame questions that

were heretofore unanswerable, like the difference between the "what if extra-
polation Heinlein uses in The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress and the "what if

extrapolation Clement uses in Mission of Gravity. The difference lies in the
dominant extrapolated novum; the former novel focuses on the extrapolated society,

the latter novel on the extrapolated world itself, its topography and idiosyncracies.

The distinction helps us to read these novels.

More important than the discriminations and identifications that the model makes

possible are the "deep structural" affinities between apparently disparate science

fictions that it makes manifest. The model lumps together science-fictional motifs
which are elsewhere treated as separate storylines or "icons" (in Wolfe, The Known
and the Unknown). In the model, for example, stories featuring sentient computers,

robots, aliens, nonhuman monsters, mutants, or clones are revealed to have as a
common denominator a structure involving the encounter between Self and Other.

It follows that these stories can be read in a similar fashion, using a limited number
of models of vraisemblance (e.g., Other-as-Enemy, Other-as-Object, Other-as-

Other). This kind of grouping obtains not only for stories which share an obvious

structural feature (like the encounter), but also for stories whose ground situations

1 1 ?

"3 5? |

.. &s I I g

2 s- "a s> gK

0) tN U

° E I 2

E c

2 a

Utopian Thought in American Literatur:

"innovation" to designate the more creative mental process. I find this usage just

too vague.

24 POul Anderson, in Earthmen and Strangers, ed. Robert Silverberg (New York:

Dell, 1966), pp. 78-79.

25 Quoted by Wolfe, The Known and the Unknown, p. 5.

26 Patrick Parrinder, "The Alien Encounter: Or, Ms Brown and Mrs Le Guin," in

Science Fiction: A Critical Guide, p. 150.

27 These terms are not always construed in this way. See, for example, George E.

Slusser, "The Ideal Worlds of Science Fiction," in Hard Science Fiction, pp.

214-246.

28 James Gunn, "The Readers of Hard SF," in Hard Science Fiction, p. 76.
29 Brian Aldiss, Billion Year Spree (New York: Schocken, 1973), chap. 9.
30 Algis Budrys, "Paradise Charted," TriQuarterly 49 (Fall 1980), 24.

31 Roman Jakobson, "The Dominant," in Readings in Russian Poetics, ed. L.

Matejka and K. Pomorsk (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1971), p. 83.

32 See, for example, her essay, "Science Fiction and Mrs Brown," in Science

Fiction at Large, ed. Peter Nicholls (London: Victor Gollancz, 1976), pp. 13-33.
Cf. p. 32: "[...] when science fiction uses its limitless range of symbol and
metaphor novelistically, with the subject at the center, it can show us who we

are, and where we are, and what choices face us, with unsurpassed clarity, and
with a great and troubling beauty" (emphasis added).

33 Wolfe, The Known and the Unknown, p. 157.
34 Allen, Science Fiction: A Reader's Guide, p. 7.

35 C.S. Lewis, "On Science Fiction," rpt. in Science Fiction: A Collection of

Critical Essays, p. 111.

36 Mas'ud Zavarzadeh, The Mythopoeic Reality: The Postwar American

Nonfiction Novel (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1976), p. VII.

UTOPIA 'REMEMBERED': NATHANIEL

HAWTHORNE'S BROOK FARM ROMANCE

Michael Draxlbauer

Nathaniel Hawthorne's Blithedale Romance is usually (mis-)read as a

roman ä clef and/or a thinly veiled quasi-autobiographical rendering of the
author's stay at Brook Farm. This (very Gothic) satire on misdirected
reformist idealism is thus interpreted as a condemnation of George Ripley's
Utopia, and the failure of Bl ithedale as the failure of Brook Farm. Yet nowhere

in his private writings does Hawthorne condemn or ridicule that experimental
community. Concentrating on the relevant correspondence of the years

1841-42 and on Hawthorne's journal written during the time that he, in

retrospect, called the "most romantic" of his life, this essay tries to show that
his motives for joining, and for leaving, Brook Farm were purely personal and
pragmatic. Hawthorne wrote The Blithedale Romance as a romance about the

writing of a "hell-fired" romance. While making use of some scenic and
atmospheric details, he "re-membered" the actual Brook Farm Institute of
Agriculture and Education, peopling it with the phantasmagorical creatures
of an American romancer's imagination.

In The Blithedale Romance (1852) Nathaniel Hawthorne "re-membered" Brook

Farm (1841-47). This is to say, he took the well-remembered and, for his artistic
purposes, suitably "romantic" setting of Brook Farm and peopled it with fictional
characters typical of his imagination.

Originally, "Blithedale" may have been meant to signify the actual Utopian

community which Hawthorne was one of the first to join in April, 1841, and one of
the first to leave in November of the same year. Ten years later, on July 24, 1851,
the author wrote to his friend of Boston Custom House days, William Pike, about
the new plan for his next book: "When I write another romance, I shall take the

Community for a subject, and shall give some of my experiences and observations
at Brook Farm".

Two days earlier, when he had apparently not yet found his

"subject", he had already made an important decision concerning the make-up of

the projected text. "I don't know what I shall write next", he told Horatio Bridge.

"Should it be a romance, I mean to put an extra touch of the devil into it; for I doubt

whether the public will stand two quiet books in succession, without my losing
ground." Hawthorne had just finished the "thoroughly jubilant"

Wonder Book —

which he regarded as one of his finest achievements — yet a writer's instinct may
have persuaded him to turn back to the less "quiet" (and much more complex) genre
of the romance, as he had perfected it in The Scarlet Letter (1850) and The House

of the Seven Gables (1851). The choice of form thus preceded the choice of theme:

The Blithedale Romance was to be another hell-fired story.

Utopian Thought in American Literature

This "extra touch of the devil" is, of course, Nathaniel Hawthorne's favorite

Gothic ingredient.

He put it liberally into his tales and romances, deliberately

balancing the light and the dark, the "Indian-summer sunlight" and the "blackness,

ten times black" that so fascinated Herman Melville.

The letter to Bridge

furthermore proves how carefully the author calculated both narrative strategy and

readers' response in terms of his marketability, at home and in England. Standard

elements and patterns in his fiction, such as the isolated-impotent Paul Pry figure
(Miles Coverdale) and the pervasive themes of sin and guilt (the violation of the

human heart) shape also The Blithedale Romance, thus linking that text to the

preceding tales and romances rather than, thematically, to Brook Farm.

In order to avoid misreading the romance as autobiographical chronicle — the

pathetic fallacy of organicist criticism — it is necessary to see that these are literary

devices typical of Hawthorne's extremely self-conscious narrative art which
sometime during the early stages of composition were superimposed on the Ur-
subject of "the Community". The Blithedale of the romance cannot be identified

with Brook Farm; Miles Coverdale is not Nathaniel Hawthorne.

The Lenox notebooks indicate that at that time Hawthorne was already

considering a fictional structure larger than any rendering of his actual participation
in the Brook Farm enterprise. In August, 1851, alone in the Little Red House with

his son Julian (and Little Bunny), "Papa" borrowed some volumes of Charles
Fourier "with a view to my next Romance" (C,VIII,446). In a different notebook

ofthat year, the date is August 7, Fourier is mentioned again, as is Coleridge's (and
Southey's) Pantisocracy, "in connection with the subject of communities" (C, VIII,

310).

By the time Hawthorne had actually sat down to write the romance, at the end

of November, the personal "experiences and observations" that he had originally
intended to render, had suffered a sea-change. They had become the text's substra-

tum. For scenic passages in chapters such as 'A Modern Arcadia', 'Coverdale's
Hermitage' or 'Eliot's Pulpit', he could make use of material from his Brook Farm

journal. Local details surely also went into the descriptions of 'The Supper-Table'

and 'Coverdale's Sick-Chamber'. To these genuine Brook Farm elements he added
large parts from notebooks written long after his sojourn there, most notably his

haunting description of the rigid corpse of Martha Hunt, a young schoolmistress
who, on July 9, 1845, had drowned herself in the Concord (C,VIII,261ff.). "This

wonderful photograph of the terrible night"

(the author had participated in the

search for the body) Hawthorne could include, with hardly any retouching, in the

climactic 'Midnight' chapter. Observations recorded in Boston in 1850, of suburban
scenes and Parker's "drinking and smoking shop" (C,VIII,494ff.), went into

chapters such as 'The Hotel', 'The Boarding-House' and An Old Acquaintance'.

The great many parallels between fact and fiction have furnished the text with a

deceptively suggestive appeal of authenticity. The Blithedale Romance can be read,
like so much else in Hawthorne, as a criticism of misdirected Reformist idealism.

It can thus also be read as a criticism of the ideals and aims of Brook Farm, especially
in its later, less attractive Fourierist phase, when life there was organized according

Draxlbauer: Hawthorne's Brook Farm Romance

to the French Romantic's "laws" of Attractive Industries and Passional Harmonies.
It is not possible, not even in parts, to be read as autobiography. Whatever

autobiographical elements Hawthorne incorporated in the text, in the nine months
between conception and the writing of the last page they became fictionalized in the
total structure of the very Hawthornian Hollingsworth plot, a story "of failed
possibilities and multiple human betrayals".

Maybe the similarity of the names

HoUingsworth-Chillingworth and Coverdale-Dimmesdale is not quite accidental.

Julian Hawthorne remembers that his father's book was "more than h a l f written

as "Hollingsworth".

The title of the Pierpont Morgan Library manuscript, upon

which the Centenary text is based, originally read "Hollingsworth: a Romance"
(C,III,xxxi). Other titles the author had considered were "Blithedale", "Miles
Coverdale's Three Friends", "The Veiled Lady", "Priscilla", "The Arcadian

Summer" and "Zenobia". Hawthorne, as usual, had his problems "finding an
appropriate and attractive title."

"Hollingsworth" would have been the most

appropriate title, but "The Blithedale Romance", possibly chosen by Hawthorne's
friend and critic, Edmund Percy Whipple, is certainly the most attractive. In any
case, from the very first, readers have tended to identify Blithedale, the setting of
the Hollingsworth plot, with Brook Farm.

While one early reviewer suggested that anyone who expected to find portraits of

the actual Brook Farmers in the book "had better reserve his coin in his breeches-
pocket", as a romance by Nathaniel Hawthorne meant "no such literal or
decipherable interpretation of the real world", another one, in a singularly

uninspired condemnation of the author's unfaithfulness to historical fact, held that
the reader would still get "essentially a delineation of life and character as presented
at Brook Farm."

James T. Fields himself, Hawthorne's American publisher, had

little doubt: for him the scene of the book was "laid at Brook Farm"." A British
critic in the Westminster Review (commonly held to be George Eliot), commenting
on the "adoption of the autobiographical form (now so common in fictions)", even

ventured to say that "we may have in the career of Zenobia [...] a missing chapter
in Margaret Fuller's life".

From 1852 to the present day it has been a popular game to interpret the romance

as a roman ä clef, with Margaret Fuller as Zenobia the critics' undisputed favorite

in the search for the Blithedalers' real-life models. Most recently, Catherine
Clinton, in her study of American women in the nineteenth century, states that
although "the belle of Transcendentalism" "was more of an observer than a
participant in the activities of Brook Farm [...] Hawthorne's literary portrait of

Fuller in The Blithedale Romance firmly places her in the landscape of America's
Utopian past".

This place she certainly deserves, but would she have recognized

herself in Hawthorne's literary portrait?

Other candidates for Zenobia include Sophia Ripley, Almira Barlow, both at

Brook Farm in Hawthorne's time, and the actress Fanny Kemble, the Hawthornes'
neighbor in Lenox. Hollingsworth, the monomaniac philanthropist, "whose
attitude to the world", in Henry James' lovely phrase, "is that of the hammer to the

Utopian Thought in American Literature

anvil"

, has been identified, among others, as Branson Alcott, Albert Brisbane,

Orestes Brownson, Horace Mann, Theodore Parker, even Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Miles Coverdale, of course, has usually been taken to be a fictional self-portrait of
Hawthorne himself, the author's "mouthpiece"

, reformulating at Blithedale his

creator's own view of Brook Farm. Here is a chronologically arranged selection of
some (mis-)readings of the text:

After his immersion for some months in the Utopian dreams of Brook Farm,
Miles Coverdale in The Blithedale Romance discovered that he had drifted

far from reality.

Wenn man außerdem noch in Miles Coverdale den Dichter selbst wieder-

erkennt, so kann man "Blithedale Romance" nicht nur als Gegenwartsro-
man, sondern in gewissem Sinne auch als einen Teil einer Autobiographie

ansprechen. Das beste und beinahe einzige, was Brookfarm ihm geben
konnte, war das Material zu einem Roman, den er selbst dort erleben und

beobachten konnte.

Hawthorne's Brook Farm associates serve as models in The Blithedale

Romance (1852) for a group of people who feed upon one another's hearts as
they attempt to construct a social Utopia.

Deutlich zeigt der biographische Hintergrund von The Blithedale Romance

die Bedingtheit der dem Roman eigenen Struktur [...] The Blithedale

Romance hat seine historische Entsprechung in dem Brook Farm-Projekt,
einem Experiment, das, wesentlich inspiriert von Fourier, von trans-

zendentalistischen Kreisen Neuenglands in Angriff genommen wurde [...]

gilt noch heute der Roman als historisches Denkmal für Margaret Fuller und
das Brook Farm-Projekt. Eine Berechtigung dafür ergibt sich aus der

Tatsache, daß Hawthorne die geistige Situation, die sich in dem Experiment

und dem Schicksal der großen Frau repräsentativ äußerte, in einem ihr

adäquaten fiktiven Geschehen einzufangen versuchte.

Blithedale was suggested by Brook Farm, and the character Zenobia by
Margaret Fuller, while Miles Coverdale is a fictional self-portrait.

Sometimes statements made by Miles Coverdale, the narrator, have found their way

illegitimately into the mouth of his *~~

creator:

Brook Farm had come to seem a Bedlam of unsubstantial opinions and
irresponsible visions, detached from the world and existing in a private and

slightly ridiculous vacuum. Once more Nathaniel felt that he was losing touch
with the actual world. "I was beginning to lose the sense of what kind of world

it was, among innumerable schemes of what it might be our ought to be," he
wrote long afterward.

Hawthorne had saved at least $1,500 in his three years of toil in the Custom

House. He invested it in Brook Farm without a moment's regret. The greatest

Draxlbauer: Hawthorne's Brook Farm Romance

obstacle to being heroic, he thought, is the doubt whether one may not be
going to prove oneself a fool.

Like other Brook Farmers, [George Curtis] later recalled only the gay dances
and masquerades and forgot the discomfort of milking the cows in a cold,
wintry barn on a cold, wintry morning. It remained for Nathaniel Hawthorne,
of course, to look back realistically — "how cold an Arcadia was this!"

— and sometimes biographical information is simply carelessly phrased (we
remember that Brook Farm lasted for six and a half years and that Hawthorne stayed
there for roughly six and a half months):

A year of it was enough for him; the Farm lasted five years.

[...] after little more than a year there he left [.. . ]

2 5

An interpretation of The Blithedale Romance depends then on an interpretation

of Brook Farm, or, more precisely, on an interpretation of Hawthorne's
interpretation of Brook Farm. In the following, I will not analyze the text, although
this much-debated romance needs and deserves re-interpretation. Rather, I will
refer to Hawthorne's letters and journal written during the time that he, in retrospect,
and with his fiction-mongering purposes in mind, called the "most romantic"
(C,III,2) of his life. Only when one understands what Brook Farm meant to him,
why he decided to join, and why he decided to leave, can one return to The Blithedale

Romance and read it as its author wanted it to be read: "Do not read it as if it had

anything to do with Brook Farm (which essentially it has not) but merely for its own
story and characters."

In a "very stampede for Utopia"

, the Brook Farm Institute of Agriculture and

Education was only one among many contemporary projects for the revolution (or
at least amelioration) of social conditions in America. Radical Christian rather than
Transcendentalist, New-light Socialist rather than Fourierist, Brook Farm was
George Ripley's slightly bohemianized vision of the City of God as the Community
of Man. Ripley, an energetic Unitarian minister, editor of the Transcendentalists'
ambitious group project Specimens of Foreign Standard Literature and co-founder
of The Dial, had had to watch his Purchase Street parish grow into a slum. Unlike
his cousin Emerson (and the Emersonians), who preferred to remain aloof, he felt
it was his Christian duty to act. What was needed was, as he explained to his
parishioners, a revolution of commercial, political, and domestic relations rather

than a mild chat on Sunday morning. He decided to leave the ministry and establish,
with his wife Sophia, a model community at a dairy farm they knew nine miles from
Boston, in the gently rolling countryside of West Roxbury. It seemed the perfect
place. West Roxbury was the parish of Theodore Parker, "this Paul of the
Transcendentalists"

, and Margaret Fuller herself had rented a farm nearby.

Utopian Thought in American Literature

Ripley discussed the project with Dr. Channing, the gray eminence of Boston
liberalism, and, in October, 1840, he introduced it to his friends at the Symposium,

the Transcendentalists' "club of clubs".

Soon the news spread. At about the time that Hawthorne, then still at the Boston

Custom House, made his decision to join "Mr. Ripley's Utopia",

Samuel

Osgood, a young clergyman, wrote to Northampton, to his colleague John Sullivan
Dwight, soon to be one of the most dedicated Brook Farmers:

I was in Boston last week, and saw Ripley and our other friends. What exciting
times these are. Do you hear of the New Harmony, which is probably about
to be established by him, Emerson, etc.? [...] I hope we shall soon see their

projected Utopia realized.

Yet for all the initial excitement, the leading Transcendentalists were skeptical. For
Bronson Alcott, who was already thinking of a community of his own, the design

was "too worldly, too pedestrian" (Crowe, p.138), Margaret Fuller, although
honestly supporting Ripley, felt she would be out of place among the "coral insects"
and "fledglings of Community",

and Emerson declined politely.

His famous cousin's decision against joining must have particularly disappointed

Ripley, not least because to have Emerson at the farm would ensure a much wider
public appeal, more pupils in the school, and stronger moral and financial support.

However, Ripley struggled on. On March 28, 1841, he delivered his farewell
sermon:

I cannot behold the degradation, the ignorance, the poverty, the vice, the ruin
of the soul, which is everywhere displayed in the very bosom of the Christian
society in our city, while men idly look on, without a shudder. I cannot

witness the glaring inequalities of condition, the hollow pretensions of pride,
the scornful apathy with which many urge the prostitution of man, the burning
zeal with which they run the race of selfish competition, with no thought for

the elevation of their brethren, without the sad conviction that the spirit of
Christ has wellnigh disappeared from our churches, and that a fearful doom
awaits us.

Three days later, the Ripleys opened Brook Farm. On April 12, Nathaniel
Hawthorne followed.

Unfortunately, there are no records of what made him decide to do so. Certainly,

he had none of Emerson's ideals concerning an agrarian Utopia ("The farm, the
farm is the right school!"

) and educational reform (Emerson's and Alcott's

Brook-Farmesque Concord University project, for which they had hoped to have
Ripley, Fuller and Parker as lecturers: »What society we shall not have! We shall
sleep no more & we shall concert better houses, economics, & social modes than

we have seen!"

). Considering the absence of any similar document in Hawthorne

biography, it is perhaps instructive to take a look at Ripley's long, almost
Emersonian letter to Emerson, in which he, realizing that his cousin was hesitant,
decribed in great detail the shape of the venture. Obviously, this program Ripley

must at one point have also outlined to Nathaniel Hawthorne.

Draxlbauer: Hawthorne's Brook Farm Romance

Our objects, as you know, are to insure a more natural union between
intellectual and manual labor than now exists; to combine the thinker and the
worker, as far as possible, in the same individual; to guarantee the highest
moral freedom, by providing all with labor, adapted to their tastes and talents,

and securing to them the fruits of their industry; to do away with the necessity
of menial services, by opening the benefits of education and the profits of
labor to all; and thus to prepare a society of liberal, intelligent, and cultivated
persons, whose relations with each other would permit a more simple and

wholesome life, than can be led amidst the pressure of our competitive
institutions.
To accomplish these objects, we propose to take a small tract of land, which,
under skillful husbandry, uniting the garden and the form, will be adequate

to the subsistence of the families; and to connect with this a school or college,
in which the most complete instruction shall be given, from the first

rudiments to the highest culture. Our farm would be a place for improving
the race of men that lived on it; thought would preside over the operations of
labor, and labor would contribute to the expansion of thought; we should have
industry without drudgery, and true equality without its vulgarity.

Hawthorne, then, was one of those willing to aid the realization of Ripley's

communitarian vision — without necessarily subscribing to it. He did this for
different reasons. Once again, a look at Emerson's letter of reply to Ripley, of
December 15,1840, may help to put Hawthorne's decision — which surprised Ripley

— into perspective. Knowing that he would hurt his cousin, Emerson wrote this
letter very carefully, elaborately rephrasing what in a journal entry two months
earlier, on October 17, he had described more bluntly as his reluctancy to move from
his "present prison to a prison a little larger":

I have decided not to join [the enterprise] & yet very slowly & I may almost

say penitentially. [...]

The ground of my decision is almost purely personal to myself. I have some

remains of skepticism in regard to the general practicability of the plan, but
these have not much weighed with me. That which determines me is the
conviction that the Community is not good for me. Whilst I see it may hold
out many inducements for others it has little to offer me which with resolution
I cannot procure for myself. It seems to me that it would not be worth my while
to make the difficult exchange of my property in Concord for a share in the

new Household. I am in many respects suitably placed [...] in an agreeable
neighborhood, in a town which I have many reasons to love & which has
respected my freedom so far that I may presume it will indulge me farther if
I need it. Here I have builded & planted.

Nathaniel Hawthorne, on the other hand, had no such home, and nowhere had

he yet "builded & planted". He was interested in neither labor conditions nor "the
talisman Education"

, but, given the same information as Emerson, he could see,

in the winter of 1840/41, in the Brook Farm project a share in a completely new

Utopian Thought in American Literature

household, for himself and for his fiancee, Sophia Peabody. The prospect was
promising.

Every man and woman who has money puts it in, and it is understood each
shall have five percent interest. They also put themselves in as labourers;
whose labour is worth the same number of cents an hour, whatever is the office

or service. [...]
The Community as such provides gratuitously for all the individual members
houses, medical attendance, nursing, education in all departments,
amusements; [...]
Family integrity is also to be sacred. Any married couple with children may

live together, eat together, and have a paramount right to each other; or they
may go to the commons.

Hawthorne must have learned about the project in the Peabody house at 13, West

Street. Upstairs Dr. Peabody had his dental surgery and Sophia her studio.
Downstairs, in her avantgarde bookshop, Sophia's bluestocking sister Elizabeth

brought together the cream of Boston's intelligentsia. Here she published The Dial
(for six numbers), here Margaret Fuller held her classes in feminism ("out came the
battered chairs which had seen service in many a Peabody schoolroom"

) and here

George Ripley and his friends discussed the details of Utopia. Perhaps the story of
Brook Farm (and Hawthorne's biography) would read differently, if we had any
record of how Sophia Peabody responded to the plan (as it would be interesting to
know how Lidian Emerson counseled her "dangerous husband"

). Did she

persuade her fiance to join? Did she need to persuade him? Did they both believe
in the possibility of starting their married life at the farm? It seemed to guarantee
comparatively secure financial and social support, and with Ripley's original
estimate of each member having to work for only three hours per day (for 300 days

per year), there seemed plenty of time for privacy and art.

Sophia was keen on

going to Brook Farm, where she would have all the opportunities to concentrate on
her painting and modeling, and where she would teach in the school, which (planned
by Ripley after Pestalozzis Neuhof and Holbrook's Lyceum models) emphasized
the arts and mechanical skills in its refreshingly progressive curriculum.

Brook Farm, then, seemed ideal. Hawthorne agreed to invest $ 1.000 he had been

saving at the Custom House in two Brook Farm shares. He would go ahead and with
what his son later described as his father's customary "common sense" he would

prepare a home

, the long-dreamed-of cottage of their courtship letters, for his

semi-invalid wife. Surely Louisa Hall Tharp (p. 144) is mistaken in saying that "it
was the farming idea that fascinated Hawthorne", as is Robert Cantwell (p.321), who

holds that although "the project threatened to delay their marriage", "the outlandish
and impractical dreams of the visionaries were what he liked about them". Haw-
thorne's decision to join Mr. Ripley's Utopia has to be seen as a positive choice, not

as a "quixotism"

. It was a purposeful and calculated move, not an "escape"

Draxlbauer: Hawthorne's Brook Farm Romance

III

"Ownest love", Hawthorne wrote to Sophia Peabody on April 13, 1841, the day

after his arrival, in a snowstorm, at the farm, "Here is thy poor husband in a polar
Paradise!" Although he preferred to keep their engagement secret, he had, in his
love letters, used the terms "husband" and "wife" ever since July 1839. Which

reminds us that the Brook Farm letters to Sophia, written by a "poor husband", are
essentially love letters, and that they need to be read as such:

[...] the unregenerated man shivers within me, and suggests a doubt whether
I may not have wandered within the precincts of the Arctic circle, and chosen
my heritage among everlasting snows. Dearest, provide thyself with a good
stock of furs; and if thou canst obtain the skin of a polar bear, thou wilt find

it a very suitable summer dress for this region. Thou must not hope ever to
walk abroad, except upon snow-shoes, nor to find any warmth, save in thy
husband's heart.

Randall Stewart, who through his pioneer work on the letters, did so much to

modify the popular Castle Dismal cliche of the haunted lover of seclusion (a kind
of Fanshawthorne), draws attention to the "allowance" the reader of such love letters
must make "for the hyperbole of love and the natural tendency of the lover to exalt

his present bliss by contrasting his former misery".

The same holds true for the

Brook Farm letters, although here Hawthorne's tendency is rather to exalt his/their
future bliss by contrasting his present misery. The tone is generally playful and self-

mocking, but nowhere at all "wholly disrespectful" to the community, as Alfred
Kazin describes it.

Complaints about appalling weather or disagreeable labor

conditions are strategically exaggerated by Hawthorne, as if to prove to Sophia how
much he misses her. "I love thee; I love thee; I would thou wert with me; for then

would my labor be joyful — and even now, it is not sorrowful." The joys and sorrows
of labor are the recurrent theme in these letters, and it is important to bear in mind
that Hawthorne physically labored to realize, at Brook Farm, his and Sophia's

courtship dream of a "cottage, somewhere beyond the sway of the East wind, yet
within the limits of New England".

From the playfully phrased first letters

through the summer complaints recording Hawthorne's painful "brutification"
through over-work, to the final statements of impatience and doubt, the dream of

a place of their own prevails. "Think that I am gone before, to prepare a home for

my Dove, and will return for her, all in good time", he had written on April 13, and
on September 25, describing the abundance of vines in the area, he wrote: "If we
dwell here, we will make our own wine." By then, Utopia had become uncertain.

In the beginning, however, the enthusiasm was strong and genuine. He liked his

"brethren in affliction" very well, and he was excited by the fact that the whole

community (then altogether only about a dozen people) shared a common table. He
had, he said, the best room in the Hive (this was the name the Brook Farmers had
given to the original farmhouse). In his first letter to Sophia he described, tongue-

in-cheek, a "transcendental heifer" (supposedly) belonging to Margaret Fuller:

Utopian Thought in American Literature

"She is very fractious, I believe, and apt to kick over the milk pall. Thou knowest

best, whether, in these traits of character, she resembles her mistress." He

announced his intention to take his "first lesson in agriculture" and "to convert
himself into a milk-maid". On the morning of the following day, he continued:

April 14th, 10 A.M. Sweetest, I did not milk the cows last night, because Mr.
Ripley was afraid to trust them to my hands, or me to their horns — I know

not which. But this morning, I have done wonders. Before breakfast, I went

out to the barn, and began to chop hay for the cattle; and with such "righteous
vehemence" (as Mr. Ripley says) did I labor, that, in the space often minutes,

I broke the machine. Then I brought wood and replenished the fires; and
finally sat down to breakfast and ate up a huge mound of buckwheat cakes.

After breakfast, Mr. Ripley put a four-pronged instrument into my hands,
which he gave me to understand was called a pitch-fork; and he and Mr. Farley

being armed with similar weapons, we all three commenced a gallant attack
upon a heap of manure. This affair being concluded, and thy husband having

purified himself, he sits down to finish this letter to his most beloved wife.
[...] Dearest, I shall make an excellent husbandman. I feel the original Adam

reviving within me.

In his first letter to his mother and sisters, after three weeks at the farm, Hawthorne
again told the highly stylized story of the "instrument with four prongs, commonly

called a dung-fork" and proudly signed himself "Nath. Hawthorne, Ploughman".

And he had every reason to be proud. On April 26, Elizabeth Peabody reported,

from Boston, to John Sullivan Dwight, at that time still minister at Northampton,

about the progress of the Ripleys' Utopia, mentioning Hawthorne, who had "taken
hold with the greatest spirit, and prove [d] a fine workman". On May 6, Sophia
Ripley, in a letter also to Dwight, wrote enthusiastically that "Hawthorne is the one

to reverence, to admire with that deep admiration so refreshing to the soul. He is
our prince — prince in everything — yet despising no labour and very athletic and

able-bodied in the barnyard and field".

Hawthorne, then, seems to have settled in at the community very well. True, life

was harder than expected, and the long hours in the "gold mine" (Ripley's

euphemism for the dung heap) exhausted him. Yet he knew why he was doing it.
When, in his letter to his sister Louisa, on May 3, he had praised the farm as "one

of the most beautiful places" he had ever seen, he had, for obvious reasons, omitted
what he had earlier, on April 16, written to his "wife": " [ . . . ] this is a beautiful place.

The scenery is of a mild and placid character [... ] There is a brook, so near the house
that we shall be able to hear its ripple, in the summer evenings; and whenever we

lie awake in the summer nights". Late in May, Sophia came to visit Nathaniel. She,

too, quickly fell in love with their prospective home. In a letter written from Boston,
she expressed her pleasure: "My life — how beautiful is Brook Farm; I was

enchanted with it & it far surpassed my expectations. Most joyfully could I dwell
there for its own beauty's sake! [...] I do not desire to concieve [sic] of a greater
felicity than living in a cottage built on one of those lovely sites, with thee."

Yet

Draxlbauer: Hawthorne's Brook Farm Romance

she felt that the place was, if anything, too busy, and she admonished her "husband"
not to work too hard. In these first months Hawthorne worked continually and with
righteous vehemence in the bean and potato fields and in the "abominable gold
mine". Even if this life was giving him, as he wrote to Sophia, on June 1, "an
antipathy to pen and ink", he realized that the seasons would not wait, that the basic

farm work simply had to be done, if there was to be any chance of getting on with
the project.

In mid-July, however, there seems to have been some disagreement between

Hawthorne and Ripley concerning the far too long work hours and the poor
prospects of securing enough capital to buy the farm. At this point of crisis, on July

18, Hawthorne wrote a letter, from Boston, to David Mack, at Brook Farm. This

extremely important document is, as a rule, neglected in Hawthorne biographies.
It is important, because it not only describes the actual relationship between fellow

Utopians at that time (it is useful to keep in mind that Ripley was Hawthorne's senior
by only two years), but also illustrates Hawthorne's sincere loyalty and dedication
to Brook Farm. Here is a lengthy quotation:

I have never felt that I was called upon by Mr. Ripley to devote so much of

my time to manual labor, as has been done since my residence at Brook Farm;
nor do I believe that others have felt constraint of that kind, from him
personally. We have never looked upon him as a master, or an employer, but
as a fellow laborer on the same terms with ourselves, with no more right to
bid us perform any one act of labor, than we have to bid him. Our constraint

has been merely that of circumstances, which were as much beyond his
control as our own; and there was no escaping this constraint, except by
leaving the farm at once; and this step none of us were prepared to take,
because (though attributing less importance to the success of this immediate

enterprise than Mr. Ripley does) we still felt that its failure would be very
inauspicuous to the prospects of the community. For my own part, there are
private and personal motives which, without the influence of those shared by
us all, would still make me wish to bear all the drudgery of this one summer's

labor, were it much more onerous than I have found it. It is true that I do not
infrequently regret that the summer is passing with so little enjoyment of
nature and my own thoughts, and with the sacrifice of some objects that I had
hoped to accomplish. Such were the regrets to which I alluded, last Sunday;
but Mr. Ripley cannot be held responsible for the disagreeable circumstances

which cause them.

I recollect speaking very despondently or perhaps despairingly, of the

prospects of the situation. My views in this respect vary somewhat with the
state of my spirits; but I confess that, of late, my hopes are never very
sanguine. I form my judgment, however, not from anything that has passed
within the precincts of Brook Farm, but from external circumstance — from
the improbability that adequate funds will be raised, or that any feasible plan
can be suggested, for proceeding without a very considerable capital. I

likewise conceive that there would be some very knotty points to be
discussed, even had we capital enough to buy an estate. These considerations

54 Utopian nought in American Literature

have somewhat lessened the heartiness and cheerfulness with which I
formerly went forth to the fields, and perhaps have interposed a medium of
misunderstanding between Mr. Ripley and us all. His zeal will not permit him

to doubt of eventual success; and he perceives, or imagines, a more intimate
connection between our present farming operations and our ultimate
enterprise, than is visible to my perceptions. But, as I said before, the two
things are sufficiently connected, to make me desirous of giving my best

efforts to the promotion of the former.

Hawthorne, Brook Farm's prince in everything, was obviously determined to do

his utmost to help the community succeed. As this letter to Mack proves, he had
sufficiently strong personal motives — however secret their true nature may at that

time still have been to his "brethren" — to make him endure unfavorable conditions.
He believed in Brook Farm, but not so much in farming. He believed in communal
life, but not so much in "personal labor". Ripley's original program had, after all,

promised "a more natural union between intellectual and manual labor" in a fruitful
combination of "the thinker and the worker". In August, after four months of hard
labor in the gold mine, Hawthorne had enough of his "present farming operations".
"After the first of September", he wrote home on August 3, "I shall cease laboring

for my board, and begin to write". He, who had set out to be free and child-like again,
was again struggling to loose himself from "bondage", and so he decided to take a

"holyday":

I do think that a greater weight will then be removed from me, than when
Christian's burthen fell off at the foot of the cross. Even my Custom House

experience was not such a thraldom and weariness; my mind and heart were
freer. Oh; belovedest, labor is the curse of this world, and nobody can meddle
with it, without becoming proportionably brutified.

The proportionable brutification of Nathaniel Hawthorne was due to a mistake

George Ripley had made at the very beginning. In the tranquil summer of 1840,
which he and his wife had spent at the farm, it had seemed an enticingly pastoral

place. He would lie "for hours on green banks, reading Burns, and whistling to the
birds".

But he did not see — and all the books on fanning he borrowed from the

Boston Athenaeum to study, did not tell him — that the soil was deplorably poor.
It needed fertilizing. The gallant attack upon the gold mine (120 wagonloads of
manure) was of vital importance. It would take the Brook Farmers a long time to

turn their place into a fertile and prosperous farm — and with the many lecture
tours, Ripley, Dwight, Charles A. Dana, John Orvis and John Allen tirelessly
campaigning for their great Cause of American Associationism, farmhands were

chronically scarce. But when finally Brook Farm products were being sold on
the Boston markets,

when the community was even financially successful,

Hawthorne was no longer a member.

Thus Ripley had miscalculated. A typical work-day at Brook Farm left very little

time for leisure and writing. On top ofthat, Hawthorne began to worry in case he

Draxlbauer: Hawthorne's Brook Farm Romance

had labored in vain. So, in a sense, "Romantic enchantment had given way to sweaty
disenchantment",

as one critic called it a bit too glibly, but too much sweat made

Hawthorne only decide to change his status at the community from full member to
cash boarder. What finally made him decide to leave was his fear that, for all his

sweat and money, the dream cottage would not materialize at Brook Farm. Ripley,
who had only rented the farm from a Mr. Charles Ellis, seemed to have difficulties
in bringing the price down. Funds were low. "Dearest wife", Hawthorne wrote on

August 22,

it is extremely doubtful whether Mr. Ripley will succeed in locating his
community on this farm. He can bring Mr. Ellis to no terms; and the more
they talk about the matter, the farther they appear to be from a settlement.

Thou and I must form other plans for ourselves; for I can see few or no signs
that Providence purposes to give us a home here. I am weary, weary, thrice

weary of waiting so many ages. Yet what can be done? Whatever may be thy
husband's gifts, he has not hitherto shown a single one that may avail to gather
gold.

This, then, is the core of Hawthorne's disillusionment and "disenchantment". It

has nothing to do with any theoretical disagreement with Brook Farm reformism

— which a misreading of The Blithedale Romance tends to imply — nor with any
practical failure of Utopia. The "poor husband" and not quite so "excellent
husbandman" had, understandably, become impatient. He realized that he would
have to look elsewhere for that cottage. Writing for money became more urgent than

ever:

Other persons have bought large estates and built splendid mansions with

such little books as I mean to write; so perhaps it is not unreasonable to hope
that mine may enable me to build a little cottage — or, at least, to buy or hire
one. But I am becoming more and more convinced, that we must not lean upon
the community. What ever is to be done, must be done by thy husband's own

individual strength. Most beloved, I shall not remain here through the winter,
unless with an absolute certainty that there will be a home ready for us in the

spring. Otherwise I shall return to Boston, — still, however, considering
myself an associate of the community; so that we may take advantage of any
more favorable aspect of affairs.
Dearest, how much depends on those little books!

Clearly, Hawthorne intended to keep all the doors open. He would not quit the
community altogether, just in case their cottage was ready in the spring.

He spent his holiday from the farm in Salem. His mother and sister (and

Beelzebub, the cat) had disapproved of his participation in the Brook Farm
enterprise all along. Though he had briefly visited them in late June, Louisa, in a
letter written on August 3, had scolded her brother: "What do you mean by such

conduct, neither coming nor writing to us [...] We do not like it at all [...] Mother

is very vehement about it".

Back in Salem he could also intensify his literary

Utopian Thought in American Literature

contacts, although his negotiations concerning the editing of "a series of volumes,
a library of foreign and American authors" (Mellow, p. 188) for James Munroe, the
Boston publisher, came to nothing. Although Salem depressed Hawthorne, it felt
good to be away from the farm. The letter which he wrote to Sophia, on September
3, has become, in the standard biographies, something like a key witness in the case
against Brook Farm:

If it were not for my Dove, this present world would see no more of me forever.
The sunshine would never fall on me, no more than on a ghost. Once in a
while, people might discern my figure gliding stealthily through the dim
evening — that would be all. I should be only a shadow of the night; it is thou
that givest me reality, and makest all things real for me. If, in the interval since
I quitted this lonely old chamber, I had found no woman (and thou wast the
only possible one) to impart reality and significance to life, I should have
come back hither ere now, with the feeling that all was a dream and a mockery.
[...] Sweetest, it seems very long already since I saw thee; but thou hast been

all the time in my thoughts; so that my being has been continuous. Therefore,
in one sense, it does not seem as if we had been parted at all.

In the context of such factional stylization of Dichtung und Wahrheit, deploring

their long separation, yet emphasizing that because of his deep love for his fiancee,
his true "being", his "real Me", had been "continuous" all along, Hawthorne makes
the often quoted, so-called confession that his life at Brook Farm, his life without
Sophia, "was an unnatural and unsuitable, and therefore an unreal one":

It already looks like a dream behind me. The real Me was never an associate
of the community; there has been a spectral Appearance there, sounding the
horn at daybreak, and milking the cows, and hoeing potatoes, and raking hay,
toiling and sweating in the sun, and doing me the honor to assume my name.
But be not thou deceived, Dove of my heart. This Spectre was not thy
husband. Nevertheless, it is somewhat remarkable that thy husband's hands
have, during this past summer, grown very brown and rough; insomuch that
many people persist in believing that he, after all, was the aforesaid spectral
horn-sounder, cow-milker, potato-hoer, and hayraker. But such a people do
not know a reality from a shadow.

The "real Me", we must realize, is not Hawthorne a Dystopian, but Hawthorne the
lover who wants to let his "wife" know that he cannot truly be complete without her
company. The same "hyperbole of love" (in Stewart's phrase) can be found in many
other courtship letters, as, for instance, in the one of January 13, 1841 ("Without

thee, I have but the semblance of life. All the world here-abouts seems dull and
drowsy — a vision, but without any spirituality — and I, likewise an unspiritual
shadow, struggle vainly to catch hold of something real. Thou art my reality [...]"),
in the one of October 4(?), 1841 ("Thou art my only reality — all other people are
but shadows to me; all events and actions, in which thou dost not mingle, are but

Draxlbauer: Hawthorne's Brook Farm Romance

dreams"), and in the one of November 27, 1841 ("I love thee — I love thee — and

I have no real existence but in thee").

The "real Me"-letter is then not at all the devastating attack upon the unreality

of the Utopian community for which it is usually taken. While the negative

overtones are there — the impatience and the "brutification" described in the

summer letters — it is, basically, a statement of love, in typical Hawthorne style,

with his favorite autostereotype of the Salem ghost now as Brook Farm spectre. The

generally neglected conclusion of the letter, following immediately after the real-

Me passage quoted, offers further proof for such an interpretation: "Enough of

nonsense. Belovedest, I know not exactly how soon I shall return to the Farm.

Perhaps not sooner than a fortnight from tomorrow".

The real-Me passage, a strategic burlesque and humorous "nonsense", says much

more about Hawthorne's love for Sophia than about his relationship to Brook Farm.

He wanted to go back there, to that supposedly unreal life, and he wanted to go

because he could still picture there the reality and significance of life with Sophia,

in one of the cottages the Brook Farmers were preparing to build.

When he returned from his three-week holiday, however, he did so no longer as

a full member. Brook Farm's prince was tired of the "gold mine", still without

Sophia, and skeptical. He decided to remain an outsider in what he now, on

September 22, called a "queer community":

Thou knowest not how much I wanted thee, to give me a home-feeling in the

spot — to keep a feeling of coldness and strangeness from creeping into my
heart and making me shiver. Nevertheless, I was most kindly received; and
the fields and woods looked very pleasant, in the bright sunshine of the day

before yesterday. I had a friendlier disposition towards the farm, now that I

am no longer obliged to toil in its stubborn furrows.

With conditions still very much unsettled at the farm ("everything is but

beginning to arrange itself), he complained that writing — and writing for money

— was impossible. Although nobody intruded into his room, he did not have "the

sense of perfect seclusion" which he felt was "essential to [his] power of producing

anything". He decided to wait until November: "Meantime, I shall see these people

and their enterprise under a new point of view, and perhaps be able to determine
whether thou and I have any call to cast in our lot among them". He discussed matters

with the Ripleys, but deplored, in his letters, Sophia's absence, for, whatever the

Ripleys may have said, he felt he needed his "wife's" counsel and comfort: "What

shall I do? What shall I do?", he wrote to her on September 25. "Would that thou

couldst be here — or could have been here all summer — in order to help me think
what is to be done". Only one thing he was certain about: he would not stay the winter

at the farm. "The time would be absolutely thrown away, so far as regards any

literary labor to be performed, — and then to suffer this famished yearning for thee.
all winter long! It is impossible". Yet in the same letter — again, a love letter —

Utopian Thought in American Literature

Hawthorne draws once more a picture, noticeably less enthusiastic this time, of their

private paradise, at a Brook Farm that still offered that prospect.

Oh, what weather! It seems to me as if every place were sunny, save Brook
Farm. Nevertheless, I had rather a pleasant walk to a distant meadow, a day

or two ago; and we found white and purple grapes, in great abundance, ripe,
and gushing with rich juice when the hand pressed their clusters. Didst thou
know what treasures of wild grapes there are in this land. If we dwell here,
we will make our own wine — of which, I know, my Dove will want a great

quantity.

The day after, on September 26, Hawthorne started to keep a journal. The entries

in this Brook Farm journal are ten-finger exercises in preparation of the books he

meant to write "after the beginning of October", the "little books", perhaps
children's literature, that would enable him to build the dream cottage, or, at least,

to buy or hire one. He had written so little since 1839. In the Custom House he had
almost bidden "farewell to literature"

— and on July 16 he had admitted to

George S. Hillard of The Token that he could not force himself to write the story he
had agreed to contribute, "because stories grow like vegetables". The simile is that

of a Brook Farmer.

With habitual attention to detail, Hawthorne recorded in the Brook Farm journal

his long walks in the farm grounds and in the surrounding countryside. Needing
little or no tonal change, many of these scenic details would find their way into The

Blithedale Romance, the white pine tree, the four swine, the hollow in the woods,

"a hollow chamber of rare seclusion" (C,III,98), the huge Pulpit Rock, "known to

us under the name of Eliot's pulpit" (C,III,118). The colorful impressions gathered
from a picnic party in the woods, "in honor of Frank Dana's birthday, he being six

years old" (C,VIII,201), Hawthorne could use for chapter XXIV, 'The
Masqueraders', and the "little sempstress from Boston, about seventeen years old"
(C,VIII,209), a "lightsome little maid [...] well worth studying" (C,VIII,210), lent
some of her features to Priscilla.

Characteristically, there is not anywhere in these journal pages even the slightest

hint of any disagreement between the author and his fellow Utopians. Nothing spoils
the pastoral idyll of Brook Farm, nothing foreshadows the miserable failure of
Blithedale. Hawthorne still joined in the many communal activities, he drove with

William Allen, the farm's headman, to the Brighton cattle fair, and he helped with
the harvesting: "This morning I have been helping to gather apples" (September
8; C,VIII,203), "The farm business, to-day, is to dig potatoes. I worked a little at

it" (October 8; C,VIII,207).

On September 29, the day they finally drew up their "Articles of Association of

the Subscribers to the Brook Farm Institute of Agriculture and Education", the
Brook Farmers elected Hawthorne a Trustee of the Estate and Director of Finance.
Proudly, and with the usual playfulness, he wrote to Sophia:

Now dost thou not blush to have formed so much lower an opinion of my
business talents, than is entertained by other discerning people? From the

Draxlbauer: Hawthorne's Brook Farm Romance

nature of office, I shall have the chief direction of all the money affairs of the
community — the making of bargains — the supervision of receipts and
expenditure &c. &c. &c. Thou didst not think of this, when thou didst
pronounce me unfit to make a bargain with that petty knave of a publisher [=

James Munroe]. A prophet has no honor among them of his own kindred, nor
a financier in the judgment of his wife.

Obviously Ripley, Dana and the others must have thought that by entrusting such
important tasks to the hands of Hawthorne, they could fully reintegrate him into their
association. The new "financier" now even advanced $500 toward the construction
of the "Eyrie", the first house to be built by the community. Yet in November

Nathaniel Hawthorne, ex-Ploughman, left Brook Farm, telling Ripley that it was

"quite uncertain" whether he would return in the spring.

He did not return in the spring and on October 17, 1842, he took the "final step"

and resigned as associate of the Brook Farm Institute of Agriculture and Education.

With all this autobiographical and biographical material in mind, can we still say

that Hawthorne's decision to throw his lot in with the Utopians was an act of escape,

a quixotism, or, generally, a mistake? The picture we get of Nathaniel Hawthorne,
Brook Farmer, is of a much saner, much more likeable man than the autostereotype
of the Salem ghost presents, the image of the dark, lonely, brooding connoisseur
of guilt, that, unfortunately, too many critics have chosen to take at face value:

This is the true Hawthorne, who joined the communistic experiment at Brook

Farm neither to reform the world nor to escape it, but only in the hope of
making a living in the least uncongenial circumstances. This was the
Hawthorne who, like the woodchuck, never came out of his hole except to

eat.

Hawthorne's later letters from the farm certainly convey the impression of an
impatient "husband" who again and again turned to his distant "wife" for advice
and support in a time of growing dissatisfaction with the proportionable
brutification through over-work and of dwindling hopes of seeing their dream

cottage materialize at Brook Farm. However, for an interpretation of The Blithedale
Romance it is crucially important to realize that Hawthorne did not leave the

community because of any disagreement with its Utopian scheme for the
regeneration of society.

"A democrat by hesitation rather than conviction"

, Hawthorne never thought

of himself as a reformer. In much he wrote, before and after Brook Farm, in tales
and romances, even in the Pierce campaign biography, he expressed his deep

skepticism of any attempt at external reform. He knew that the human "heart" was
the great conservative and that this heart had to be reformed first, that "little, yet
boundless sphere" (in the words of the narrator of "Earth's Holocaust") "wherein

Utopian Thought in American Literature

existed the original wrong, of which the crime and misery of this outward world were
merely types" (C,X,403f.). He had not joined Brook Farm as a Utopian — and he
did not leave it as a Dystopian. It is simply not true that Hawthorne left the
community because of his "passion for isolation" (Arvin, p. 105) or because "he

had little use for the ingrown unanimity of a Brook Farm, when the world he knew
was plainly and inevitably full of contradictions"

. Nor did Brook Farm "ruin"

him (Cantwell, p.335). And George William Curtis' retrospective explanation that
his friend left their community because "his genius was stirring in him"

, is pure

hagiography. The round unvarnished tale of Hawthorne's stay at Brook Farm must
also be saved from a teller like D. H. Lawrence, who, in his Studies in Classic

American Literature, gives one of the major misreadings of The Blithedale

' This novel is a sort of picture of the notorious Brook Farm experiment. There

the famous idealists and transcendentalists of America met to till the soil and
hew the timber in the sweat of their own brows, thinking high thoughts the
while, and breathing an atmosphere of communal love, and tingling in tune
with the Oversoul, like so many strings of a supercelestial harp. [...]

Of course they fell out like cats and dogs. Couldn't stand one another. And

all the music they made was the music of their quarreling. [... ]

Never did Nathaniel feel himself more spectral — of course he went

brookfarming- [...]

Oh, the brittle-nerved brookfarmers! [...]
There you have a nice little bunch of idealists, transcendentalists,

brookfarmers, and disintegrated gentry. All going slightly rotten. [...]

These people in Blithedale Romance have sinned against the Holy Ghost,

and corruption has set in.

All, perhaps, except the I, Nathaniel.

This says more about Lawrence himself than about either the romance or the

"blue-eyed darling Nathaniel" (p.78) at Brook Farm. Lawrence, too, makes the

common mistakes of equating Coverdale and the author and of reading the highly
stylized "nonsense" of Hawthorne's "real-Me"-letter to Sophia, in which he

describes the "spectral Appearance" that was "not thy husband", as straightforward
autobiography: "Never did Nathaniel feel himself more spectral".

In the spring of 1842, far from feeling himself spectral, Hawthorne — at that time

nominally still a Brook Farmer, with $ 1.500 invested — again considered joining a
community. His friend David Mack, who had left Ripley to join another Utopia, the
newly founded Northampton Association of Education and Industry, had invited

him, yet Hawthorne (and Sophia?), after some deliberation, declined.

On July 9, after three years' postponement, "husband" and "wife" got married

at last, by the Reverend James Freeman Clarke,

in the Peabody house on West

Street. They rented the Old Manse in Concord. The garden had been prepared for
the newly-weds by Henry David Thoreau, whom Emerson, as a rather halfhearted

contribution to the general experiment in communal living, had taken into his house,
shortly after the Ripleys had opened Brook Farm. The Hawthornes, too, thought

Draxlbauer: Hawthorne's Brook Farm Romance

for a while of taking George Bradford into their new household (see C,VIII,347),
but finally preferred to retain, as Hawthorne had explained to Mack, on May 25,

1842, "the ordinary relation to society". This private Eden was quite a long way from

the Brook Farm Paradise, though some journal entries of the first year in the Old

Manse are resonant of Brook Farm:

The natural taste of man for the original Adam's occupation is fast developing
itself in me. I find that I am a good deal interested in our garden; although,

as it was planted before we came here, I do not feel the same affection for the
plants as if the seed had been sown by my own hands. (August 10, 1842;

C,VIII,328)

I bought a load of manure, yesterday, for six dollars, and shall soon begin

gardening. There is, besides, an abominable quantity of labor to be done, or
which ought to be done — principally in clearing away the last year's rubbish

from the garden, yard, and orchard. I hate all labor, but less that of the hands
than of the head. (April 27, 1843; C,Vm, 386)

Daily work in the garden, however, took Hawthorne only about two hours. Fruit

grew wild and in abundance. "It has been an apophthegm, these five thousand
years", he wrote in "The Old Manse", that quasi-autobiographical, again essentially

factional sketch of the place (written half a year after the Hawthornes had had to
leave it), "that toil sweetens the bread it earns. For my part, (speaking from hard

experience, acquired while belaboring the rugged furrows of Brook Farm,) I relish
best the free gifts of Providence" (C,X,13). "In the most delightful little nook of a

study" (C,X,5), Hawthorne now tried to resume his writing. After dinner he would
take a short nap, "with the Dial as a soporific", and then he would "journalize"

(C,VIII,371). April 8, 1843: "Mr. Emerson came, with a sunbeam in his face [...]
We talked of Brook Farm, and the singular moral aspects which it presents, and the

great desirability that its progress and developments should be observed, and its
history written" (C,VIII,371).

Here, again, there is no sign of a disenchantment with the idea of Brook Farm,

which was now, at the beginning of its third year, successfully established, running
a famous school (accredited by Harvard) and attracting thousands of visitors. "Let

itlive", Emerson wrote ofthe association in his journal on January 30(?), 1844, "its
merit is that it is a new life. Why should we have only two or three ways of life, and

not thousand and millions? This a new one so fresh and expensive [sic] that they are
all homesick when they go away", and he added that a collection ofthe Brook Farm

correspondence would make "a historiette of the Spirit of the Age".

That historiette we now largely have. The history remains to be written.

Certainly Hawthorne himself never attempted to write that history. Generations

of readers have been mistaken in interpreting The Blithedale Romance as the

Utopian Thought in American Literature

"literary classic" (Stewart, p.60) of Brook Farm, as historical record, as chronicle,

as roman ä clef, as part of an autobiography. The book is none of these. It is an
allegorical romance. "To allegorize life with a masquerade, and represent mankind
generally as masquers. Here and there, a natural face may appear." This notebook
entry of summer 1842 (C,VIII,240) may itself have been inspired by the Brook
Farmers' charade at their picnic party "in honor of Frank Dana's birthday", of
September 28, 1841, in which Hawthorne had participated as "a mere spectator"
(C,VIII,202), yet there are no indications whatsoever that the idea of Blithedale was

conceived at Brook Farm.

The true subject of Hawthorne's "masquerade" is not Mr. Ripley's Utopia, but

the failure ofthat Utopian community par excellence, America. In a sense it can be
read as a retelling of the twice-told tale "The May-Pole of Merry Mount",

and of

The Scarlet Letter, with Zenobia another Hester Prynne, the Dark Lady "bruising

herself against the narrow limitations of her sex" (C,III,2). Or it can be read as a
cynical satire on the cultural situation of nineteenth-century America, full of social

"realism" — for which it was praised by William Dean Howells, Robert Browning,

and Henry James. According to his own theory of the romance, however, the author
needed to translate any such topical content into an essentially "romantic"
atmosphere of "strange enchantment". The preface to the romance, written after the
completion of the manuscript, explains the nature ofthat need.

Given the paucity of native materials, Hawthorne maintained — as did Charles

Brockden Brown and Washington Irving before him, as would Henry James, and
Van Wyck Brooks, after him — that the American romancer had to create his own
tradition:

In the old countries, with which Fiction has long been conversant, a certain
conventional privilege seems to be awarded to the romancer; his work is not
put exactly side by side with nature; and he is allowed a license with regard
to every-day Probability, in view of the improved effects which he is bound
to produce thereby. Among ourselves, on the contrary, there is as yet no such
Faery Land, so like the real world, that, in a suitable remoteness, one cannot
well tell the difference, but with an atmosphere of strange enchantment,

beheld through which the inhabitants have a propriety of their own. This
atmosphere is what the American romancer needs.(C,III,lf.)

In order to achieve this desired "old world" effect Hawthorne ventured, as he
explained in this Blithedale preface, "to make free with his old, and affectionately
remembered home, at BROOK FARM, as being, certainly, the most romantic

episode of his life — essentially a daydream, and yet a fact — and thus offering an
available foothold between fiction and reality." With his fictional purposes in mind,
Hawthorne thus consciously transformed an autobiographical episode into the
aesthetic material of a romance. Aware of the danger that readers would mistake
Blithedale for Brook Farm, he carefully emphasized the compositional function of
the private recollections used in the text:

Draxlbauer: Hawthorne's Brook Farm Romance 63

The Author does not wish to deny, that he had this Community in mind, and
that (having had the good fortune, for a time, to be personally connected with

it) he has occasionally availed himself of his actual reminiscences, in the hope
of giving a more lifelike tint to the fancy-sketch in the following pages.

(C,m,l)

Brook Farm was thus, in Hawthorne's concept, both suitably "remote" and

suitably "real". Serving two aesthetic purposes simultaneously, the actual Brook
Farm Utopia became its own romantic paradigm, a kind of ironic locus amoenus,

situated in an atmospheric medium, at the meeting-point of "daydream" and "fact".
This "available foothold" Hawthorne had defined, elsewhere, in "The Custom
House", as "a neutral territory, somewhere between the real world and fairy-land,

where the Actual and the Imaginary may meet, and each imbue itself with the nature
of the other" (C,I,36). This meeting of the Actual and the Imaginary, the aesthetic

matrix of The Scarlet Letter and The House of the Seven Gables, becomes now, in
Hawthorne's third romance, thematic. The Blithedale Romance is, above all, a meta-

romance.

Miles Coverdale, that curiously modern figure of an unreliable narrator, arrives

at one "plausible conjecture" (C,III,8) after the other, in his almost absurd attempt
to solve the riddle of the Hollingsworth plot, the mystery of Blithedale. At the
beginning of his narrative he had himself "propounded, for the Veiled Lady's

prophetic solution, a query as to the success of our Blithedale enterprise." With a

fine trick, Hawthorne draws the reader into the epistemological mystery of his art
of fiction-mongering. The Veiled Lady's "response", Coverdale narrates, "was of
the true Sibylline stamp, nonsensical in its first aspect, yet, on closer study,

unfolding a variety of interpretations, one of which has certainly accorded with the
event" (C,III,6). This complex "response" is The Blithedale Romance itself,

Hawthorne's experimental text about the texture of an American romance.

On closer study, then, Blithedale can be interpreted as Brook Farm neutralized.

It lies in Faery Land, not in Massachusetts, thus affording, like Italy, the
quintessentially "romantic" setting of The Marble Faun, "a sort of poetic or fairy

precinct, where actualities would not be so terribly insisted upon, as they are, and
needs must be, in America" (C,IV,3). Seven years earlier, Hawthorne had made use

of Brook Farm, paradoxically, for precisely this "un-American" "poetic or fairy"
quality. "In short", we read in the Blithedale preface, the author's "present concern

with the Socialist community is merely to establish a theatre, a little removed from
the highway of ordinary travel, where the creatures of his brain may play their
phantasmagorical antics, without exposing them to too close a comparison with the

actual events of real lives" (C, 131,1).

Neither Miles Coverdale nor his Three Friends are Brook Farmers, nor is

Hawthorne's Gothic "devil". In The Blithedale Romance Nathaniel Hawthorne re-

membered "Mr. Ripley's Utopia", peopling it simply with the creatures of an

American romancer's imagination.

Utopian Thought in American Literature

Notes

1 Hawthorne's letters will be quoted, by addressee and date, from vols. XV and

XVI of The Centenary Edition of the Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne (here cited
as 'C'), ed. William Charvat et al. (Columbus: Ohio State University Press,

1962ff.).

2 Nina Baym, The Shape of Hawthorne's Career (Ithaca and London, 1976),

p. 184.

3 See, e.g., his note in the Septimius Felton manuscript: "Septimius must have a

weird, half supernatural genealogy, in which the devil is mixed up" (C,XIII,3).

4 Herman Melville, "Hawthorne and His Mosses. By a Virginian Spending His

Summer in Vermont", literary WörW(August 1850), repr. inJ. Donald Crowley,
ed., Hawthorne: The Critical Heritage (London, 1970), pp.111-26, p.115.

5 While Fourier's theories were discussed by the Transcendentalists as early as

1840, when Albert Brisbane published The Social Destiny of Man, Fourierism

as a reformist scheme was introduced at Brook Farm long after Hawthorne had
left, in 1844, when George Ripley and Brisbane attemped to reorganize the

community as a model Phalanx.

6 Letter from Sophia Hawthorne to James T. Fields, ca. May, 1867, quoted by

Claude M. Simpson in his "Explanatory Notes" to the Centenary edition of The

American Notebooks (C,VIII,620).

7 Annette Kolodny, in her excellent introduction to the Penguin edition of The

Blithedale Romance (Harmondsworth, 1983), p.xviii.

8 Julian Hawthorne, The Memoirs of Julian Hawthorne, ed. by Edith G.

Hawthorne (New York, 1938), p.34.

9 Roy Harvey Pearce, in his "Introduction" to the Centenary edition of the

romance (C,III,xix).

10 From an unsigned review in the Library World(24 July, 1852), repr. inCrowley,

pp.249f., p. 249; from an unsigned review in the Christian Examiner
(September 1852), repr. inCrowley, pp.250ff., p.250. See also p.251: "Seeing
that many readers obtain all their knowledge of historical fact from the incidental
implications of history which are involved in a well-drawn romance, we

maintain that a novelist has no right to tamper with actual verities. His obligation
to adhere strictly to historic truth is all the more to be exacted whenever the

character and good repute of any real person are involved. Now Mr. Hawthorne
is a daring offender in this respect."

11 Letter from Fields to Bayard Taylor, June 5,1852, quoted by Pearce (C,III,xxiii).

12 From an unsigned essay, "Contemporary Literature of America", in the

Westminster Review (October 1852), repr. in Crowley, pp.259ff, pp.262f.

13 Catherine Clinton, The Other Civil War: American Women in the Nineteenth

Century (New York, 1984), p.62.

14 Henry James, Jr., Hawthorne, English Men of Letters Series (London, 1883),

p. 133.

Draxlbauer: Hawthorne's Brook Farm Romance

15 From an anonymous essay in the Dublin University Magazine (October 1855),

partly repr. in B. Bernard Cohen, ed., The Recognition of Nathaniel
Hawthorne: Selected Criticism Since 1828 (Ann Arbor, 1969), pp.71ff., p.73.
The same phrase is used by Edward Wagenknecht in his Cavalcade of the
American Novel: From the Birth of the Nation to the Middle of the Twentieth

Century (New York, 1952), p.56.

16 Vernon L. Parrington, The Romantic Revolution in America, 1800-1860 (New

York, 1927), p.442.

17 Lina Böhmer, Brookfarm undHawthornes ' 'Blithedale Romance'', Diss. Berlin

1936 (Jena, 1936), p.5, p.10.

18 Robert E. Spiller, The Cycle of American Literature: An Essay in Historical

Criticism (New York, 1955), p.86.

19 Franz H. Link, Die Erzählkunst Nathaniel Hawthornes: Eine Interpretation

seiner Skizzen, Erzählungen und Romane (Heidelberg, 1962), p.120, p.121.

20 The Oxford Companion to American Literature, 5th edition, 1983, s.v.

'Blithedale Romance'.

21 Lloyd Morris, The Rebellious Puritan: Portrait of Mr. Hawthorne (1927,

reissued Port Washington, N.Y., 1969), p.137.

22 Robert Cantwell, Nathaniel Hawthorne: The American Years (New York, 1948,

repr. 1971), p.320.

23 Gordon Milne, George William Curtis and the Genteel Tradition (Bloomington,

1956), p. 11.

24 Mark van Doren, Nathaniel Hawthorne (New York, 1949), p.109.
25 HyattH. Waggoner, Nathaniel Hawthorne, University of Minnesota Pamphlets

on American Writers, no. 23 (Minneapolis, 1962), p.7.

26 Letter to George W. Curtis, July 14, 1852.

27 Charles Crowe, George Ripley: Transcendentalist and Utopian Socialist

(Athens, Ga., 1967), p.124. For a discussion of the impact of the nation-wide
financial panic of 1837 on the formation of associationist Utopias see Zoltän
Haraszti, The Idyll of Brook Farm, as Revealed by Unpublished Letters in the
Boston Public Library (Boston, 1937), pp. 9-12; and J.B. Wilson, "The

Antedents of Brook Farm", NEQ, vol. XV, no.2 (June, 1942), pp.320-31.

28 David Aaron, Men ofGoodHope.A Story of American Progressives (New York,

1951), p.25.

29 Letter from Ralph Waldo Emerson to Margaret Fuller, May 8,1840. Emerson's

letters will be quoted from Ralph L. Rusk, ed., The Letters of Ralph Waldo
Emerson, in 6 volumes (New York, 1939).

30 Letter from Hawthorne to Sophia Peadbody, November 27, 1840.

31 Letter from Samuel Osgood to John S. Dwight, November 21, 1840, quoted in

Haraszti, p. 14.

32 First phrase from a letter to William H. Channing, October 25 and 28, 1840;

second phrase from a letter to Ralph Waldo Emerson, May 10,1841. Both letters

Utopian Thought in American Literature

quoted from Robert N. Hudspeth, ed., The Letters of Margaret Fuller, in 2
volumes (Ithaca and London, 1983).

33 Quoted in Cantwell, p.330. See also Crowe, pp.119-23. Ripley's parishioners

held no grudge against their "much esteemed pastor": "It is with sincere regret,
and with a sense of personal loss, that we notice Mr. Ripley's retirement from
the ministry of this city. (...) His immediate object, as we understand, is the

gathering of a cooperative association for the purpose of practical education.
We can discover nothing chimerical or 'Transcendental' in this scheme. On the
contrary, it seems to us both practical and practicable." Quoted from an article,

"Rev. George Ripley", in The Monthly Miscellany of Religion and Letters (May
1841), repr. in Henry W. Sams' admirably edited Autobiography of Brook Farm

(Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1958), pp.15-17.

34 Emerson, in his Journal, September 14,1839, quoted from A.W. Plumstead and

Harrison Hayford, eds., The Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph

Waldo Emerson, vol.VII (Cambridge, Mass., 1969).

35 Letter from Emerson to Margaret Fuller, August 16, 1840.

36 Letter from Ripley to Emerson, November 9, 1840, repr. in Sams, pp.5-8, p.6.
37 Van Wyck Brooks, The Flowering of New England 1815-1865, rev. ed. (New

York, 1941), p. 172.

38 Quoted from an article, "The Community at West Roxbury, Mass.", in The

Monthly Miscellany of Religion and Letters (August 1841), repr. in Sams,
pp.24-29.

39 Louisa Hall Tharp, The Peabody Sisters of Salem (Boston, 1950), p.136.

40 On November 15,1840, Emerson wrote a letter to his wife, playfully urging her

to hurry home from her vacation: " [...] the 'Community' question is in full
agitation betwixt Mr Ripley Mr Alcott & me & if you wish to have a voice in
it & not to find your house sold over your head or perhaps a troop of new tenants
brought suddenly into it you must come & counsel your dangerous husband."

41 Larzer Ziff, in his Literary Democracy: The Declaration of Cultural In-

dependence in America (New York, 1981), draws attention to the fact that
Hawthorne had not, like Irving and Cooper, succeeded in relying upon his craft
for his income:' 'But the Brook Farm community appeared to offer a writer some
chance of earning his keep through a working schedule that took into account

the fact that he was a writer. An actual subsistence from writing alone, especially
the writing of fiction, did not appear to be within easy reach of an American"
(p.114).

42 " [ . . . ] before taking a wife thither, he would test its possibilities as a bachelor"

(Julian Hawthorne, Memoirs, p.209). See also Hawthorne's letter to Sophia,
April 28, 1841: "Oh, how I long for thee to stray with me, in reality, among the

hills, and dales, and woods, of our home."

43 Newton Arvin, Hawthorne (Boston, 1929; repr. New York, 1961), p.95.
44 James R. Mellow, Nathaniel Hawthorne in His Times (Boston, 1980), p.179 and

p. 181.

Draxlbauer: Hawthorne's Brook Farm Romance

45 Randall Stewart, Nathaniel Hawthorne: A Biography (New Haven, 1948), p. 54.

See also Baym, Shape, p.86: "The letters are full of affectation and pose.
Although they are deeply sincere, they are also elaborately artificial. Indeed,
the writer gets sincere delight from their very artificiality. In love at last,
Hawthorne was playing at being a lover, playing at being in love, and the entire

correspondence is evidently a game in which both he and Sophia were
participating with the greatest enthusiasm."

46 Alfred Kazin, "Introduction" to the New American Library (Signet Classics)

edition of The Blithedale Romance (New York, 1981), p.xii.

47 Letter to Sophia Peabody, August 21-23, 1839. See also the letter to Sophia of

June 22, 1840: "Would that we could build our cottage this very now, this very

summer [...]."

48 Both letters repr. in Haraszti, pp.14 and 17, and pp.l7f.
49 Letter from Sophia Peabody to Hawthorne, May 30/31,1841, quoted in Thomas

Woodson's "Introduction: Hawthorne's Letters, 1813-1853" (C,XV, 3-89),
p. 31.

50 Letter to Sophia Peabody, August 12,1841. The passage is typical of Hawthorne,

whose imagination had been nourished on Bunyan and Spenser. It is interesting
to see that also in the "thraldom" of the unblest Custom House, where his mind

and heart had not been freer at all, he had automatically compared himself to
Bunyan's pilgrim: "I am convinced that Christian's burthen consisted of coal;

and no wonder he felt so much relieved when it fell off and rolled into the
sepulchre. His load, however, at the utmost, could not have been more than a

few bushels; whereas mine was exactly one hundred and thirty-five chaldrons
and seven tubs" (letter to Sophia Peabody, May 29, 1840).

51 Letter from Sophia Ripley to John S. Dwight, August 1, 1840, repr. in Sams,

pp.3f.

52 John Van Der Zee Sears, whose book, My Friends at Brook Farm (New York,

1912), contains a wealth of first-hand information on life at the Farm, gives the

following, perhaps not completely objective account (pp.l46ff.): "In Boston
markets Brook Farm products were at a premium and found quicker sale at better
prices than the West Roxbury fanners and gardeners could command. They sent

potatoes in the bottom of a wagon; apples in a soap box; berries in a battered
tin pail and butter in an old cracked crock; none of these things being particularly
clean. Our girls put our garden stuffs in neat, regular parcels. The quality of the

orchard and farm and dairy products was invariably the best; and everything was

fresh as possible, and neat and attractive in appearance. I will venture to say we
got more money from an acre of ground in five days than any of our neighbors
did in six. Perhaps that was another reason why they did not like us."

53 Terence Martin, Nathaniel Hawthorne (New York, 1965), p.29.

54 Letter from Louisa Hawthorne to Hawthorne, August 3,1841, quoted in Mellow,

p. 186.

55 Letter to Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, May 16, 1839.

Utopian Thought in American Literature

56 Henry Seidel Canby, Classic Americans: A Study of Eminent Writers from Irving

to Whitman (New York, 1931), p.229.

57 Irving Howe, Politics and the Novel (New York, 1957), p. 164.
58 Millicent Bell, Hawthorne's View of the Artist (New York, 1962), p.7. See also

Lloyd Morris' equally awkward statement (p. 133): "To Brook Farm was due
[Hawthorne's] perception of the ultimate relativity which pervades all life."

59 George William Curtis, "Hawthorne and Brook Farm", in FromtheEasy Chair,

Third Series (New York, 1894), pp. 1-19, p.7.

60 D.H. Lawrence, "Hawthorne's 'Blithedale Romance'", in Studies in Classic

American Literature, Phoenix edition (London, 1964), pp.95-104.

Incidentally, James Freeman Clarke owned Brook Farm from 1855 to 1868,
apparently cherishing "a vague project to colonize the place with desirable
companions, though the difference between his scheme and an ordinary land
speculation is not obvious" (Swift, p.26).

62 Trying (mistakenly, I think) to explain "the odd appearance of a somewhat

immature first-person narrator so late in Hawthorne's work", Jac Tharpe, in his

Nathaniel Hawthorne: Identity and Knowledge (Carbondale, 1967), suggests

that "Coverdale and the whole of the Blithedale Romance were probably
conceived long before the novel was published, that is, during Hawthorne's stay
at Brook Farm" (p.31). "Some preconception, surely, caused Hawthorne to use
the first-person narrator in the Blithedale Romance, when he must have known
that he would be accused of dealing with real and personal events, a

consideration that would have delayed the publication of the Blithedale
Romance if it was indeed written during the Brook Farm sojourn" (p.37).

63 Sixteen years before TTie Blithedale Romance, in 1835, Hawthorne had found

"an admirable foundation for a philosophic romance in the curious history of

the early settlement of Mount Wollaston, or Merry Mount. In the slight sketch
here attempted ["The May-Pole of Merry Mount"], the facts, recorded on the
grave pages of our New England annalists, have wrought themselves, almost
spontaneously, into a sort of allegory" (C,IX,54).

NATURBEGRIFF, ÖKOLOGISCHES BEWUSSTSEIN

UND UTOPISCHES DENKEN:

ZUM VERSTÄNDNIS VON E. CALLENBACHS

ECOTOPIA (1975)

Uwe Böker

As one of the first ecologically orientated Utopian novels ever written,

Ernest Callenbach's Ecotopia (1975) is considered within the framework of
the European, as well as the American, view of nature and an emerging "eco-
logical consciousness" (parts one and two of this essay). The novel itself is

then shown to be the depiction of life in a future society, based on certain eco-
logical root essentials which include an economy of biological abundance and

variety, as well as a highly emotional and erratic human behaviour. On the
one hand, Callenbach tries to convince his readers of the empirical founda-

tions of an ecological system which is said to guarantee the survival of man-

kind; on the other hand, he superimposes certain mythological concepts of

nature worship and femininity as givens. These concepts and the contra-
dictions resulting from them are elucidated, as are the more or less con-

ventional literary form and the narrative technique of this novel.

1. Die Problemstellung

Im Vorwort zu seinem Buch The Making of a Counter Culture bemerkt Theodore

Roszak 1969:

If the resistance of the counter culture fails, I think there will be nothing

in store for us but what anti-utopians like Huxley and Orwell have forecast
— though I have no doubt that these dismal despotisms will be far more stable

and effective than their prophets have foreseen [...] the capacity of our emer-
ging technocratic paradise to denature the imagination by appropriating to

itself the whole meaning of Reason, Reality, Progress, and Knowledge will
render it impossible for men to give any name to their brothersomely unfulfil-
led potentialities but that of madness. '

Diese Äußerung Roszaks zeigt: Orwells und Huxleys Schreckensvisionen führen

nicht nur zur Frage nach dem "Ist es schon so weit?". Sie aktivieren — und das ist
die wahre Funktion von Dystopien — Resistenzpotentiale einer inzwischen histo-

risch andersartigen, gewandelten Gegenwart. Roszak setzt Ende der sechziger Jahre

seine Hoffnungen auf die Nichtrealisierung einer Zukunft ä la Huxley oder Orwell
in das anti-technokratische Denken einer Jugend, die seit der Beat-Generation der

fünfziger Jahre an der Ausarbeitung von Gegenkulturen beteiligt ist.

Technokratiekritik ist jedoch auch 1969, da Roszaks Buch erscheint, nicht auf die

"Youthful Opposition" beschränkt. Sie findet sich auf gleiche Weise etwa bei älte-
ren Vertretern der amerikanischen Wilderness Preservation-Bewegung wie Sigurd
Olson, und bezeichnend ist wohl, daß auch hier wiederum Huxley und Orwell als

Wyszukiwarka

Podobne podstrony:
utopia science fiction Hawthorne p40 41
utopia science fiction Hawthorne p40 41
32a Antyutopia, baśń, fantasy, science fiction, utopia Słowo dialogowe a dialog jako forma kompozycy
32b Antyutopia, baśń, fantasy, science fiction, utopia Słowo dialogowe a dialog jako forma kompozycy
Swanwick Periodic Table of Science Fiction
Judges Guild Science Fiction Action Campaign Pack 2(1)
Asimov's Science Fiction [2001 04] (v2007 05 RTF)
MAgazyn Science Fiction 3
Magazyn Science Fiction nr 1 (2)
!Magazyn Science Fiction nr 1 (rtf)
Antologia Droga do Science Fiction 3
Swanwick ?ter Science Fiction Died
040 Science fiction lat 50 , czyli ziemskie problemy w kosmicznym kostiumie
Antologia Droga do Science Fiction 4
Magazyn Science Fiction nr 1 v 1 1
MAgazyn Science Fiction 2
MAgazyn Science Fiction 9
MAgazyn Science Fiction 5

więcej podobnych podstron