In Search of the Utopian States of America: Intentional Communities in Novels of the Long Nineteenth Century [1st ed.] 9783030602789, 9783030602796

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PALGRAVE STUDIES IN UTOPIANISM

In Search of the Utopian States of America Intentional Communities in Novels of the Long Nineteenth Century

Verena Adamik

Palgrave Studies in Utopianism Series Editor Gregory Claeys Department of History Royal Holloway, University of London London, UK

Utopianism is an interdisciplinary concept which covers philosophy, sociology, literature, history of ideas, art and architecture, religion, futurology and other fields. While literary utopianism is usually dated from Thomas More’s Utopia (1516), communitarian movements and ideologies proposing utopian ends have existed in most societies through history. They imagine varied ideal beginnings of the species, like golden ages or paradises, potential futures akin to the millennium, and also ways of attaining similar states within real time. Utopianism, in the sense of striving for a much improved world, is also present in many trends in contemporary popular movements, and in phenomena as diverse as films, video games, environmental and medical projections. Increasingly utopia shares the limelight with dystopia, its negative inversion, and with projections of the degeneration of humanity and nature alike. This series will aim to publish the best new scholarship across these varied fields. It will focus on original studies of interest to a broad readership, including, but not limited to, historical and theoretical narratives as well as accounts of contemporary utopian thought, interpretation and action. More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/15242

Verena Adamik

In Search of the Utopian States of America Intentional Communities in Novels of the Long Nineteenth Century

Verena Adamik University of Potsdam Potsdam, Germany

Palgrave Studies in Utopianism ISBN 978-3-030-60278-9    ISBN 978-3-030-60279-6 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-60279-6 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

For my parents

Acknowledgments

This book is based on a dissertation submitted in 2018 at the Philosophische Fakultät of the Universität Potsdam; orig. title: “Utopian States of America. Utopian Communities in US American Fiction from the Long Nineteenth Century.” First, I would like to express my sincere gratitude to Prof. Nicole Waller for supervising my PhD thesis, for enabling me to rework my thesis into this book, for the trust she placed in my abilities, for helping me in defining my research objective, for her continuous motivation and enthusiasm, for her patience, her unwavering support, and, of course, her immense insight and analytic skill. I could not have imagined having a better supervisor and mentor for this project. I would also like to thank my second advisor, Prof. Gregory Claeys, whose experience and comments were invaluable for focusing and situating my research. I feel much honored that such an acclaimed utopian scholar agreed to take on my project, that he provided his advice and guidance, and that he believed in this book. To have such mentors and friends means everything in academia. They have not only influenced my research, but their exemplary kindness and integrity keep on teaching me. This project would have never thrived without funding. For one, a two-­ year scholarship of the University of Potsdam, procured via the Potsdam Graduate School, allowed me to immerse myself fully into my work, a privilege that I truly appreciate. Various travel grants gave me the chance to present my work and gather insight and feedback, and I am very grateful for the financial means provided by the Society of Utopian Studies, the vii

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Society for Communal Studies, the German Academic Exchange Service, and the Potsdam Graduate School. My sincere thanks go to all my colleagues and friends at the Institute of English and American Studies of the University of Potsdam. Countless students have played big and small parts while I worked on this project: I would here especially highlight the contributions of Franziska Martin, Pia Quast, and Anja Söyunmez. Throughout this project I learned again and again that a PhD, and any academic work, is a communal effort, even if the concept of an academic author may suggest otherwise. Members of the Society for Utopian Studies, in particular Lyman Tower Sargent and Etta M. Madden, supplied me generously with crucial knowledge and encouragement whenever needed. I want to make special mention of Dr. Hannah Spahn and Dr. Judith Coffey for their friendship and their guidance, and Dr. Jens Temmen, to whom I refer as my Doktorbruder for good reasons and with pride. Without them, I would have by now perished, not published. Another crucial influence is Dr. Kristina Baudemann, who I am lucky to call my friend since my days as an undergraduate, and whose insights and diligence are truly inspirational. With deepest gratitude for her friendship, her advice, and her work, I want to mention Katherine Williams, and commend her for her talents as a lector and muse. I would be amiss if I did not explicitly thank another member of my PhD ‘community’: Dr. Udo Mai, who co-labored and co-suffered at my side in the library and the cafeteria for years. I could never have done this without all my friends who were there along the way and all the people who provided shelter, food, and companionship. Last but not least, I thank my family: my grandparents, my brothers, my ever-helpful sister, and my parents, who have given me ambition and passion for reading and for questioning the non-utopian reality, and who have supported me in this project, as in all my endeavors, unwaveringly.

Contents

1 ‘The Optimal State of a Republic’: Introduction  1 References  12 2 ‘That Excellent Perfection’: A Short History of Utopia 15 ‘Far from Us’: The Psychology of Utopian Production  16 ‘In the Beginning, All the World Was America’: European Origins of US American Utopianism  32 References  41 3 ‘Idle Speculation’ and Utopian Practice: Gilbert Imlay’s The Emigrants (1793) 49 ‘Antipathy to Control’: Challenges to Nationhood and the Early Republic  55 ‘Societies of This Kind Established Throughout a Great Community’: The Emigrants’s Separatism  61 ‘All the Comforts of Living in the Most Superfluous Abundance’: Geographical Determinism  66 ‘Most Dangerous to the Safety of Society’: Romantic Relationships and Utopia in The Emigrants  72 ‘Decisive Action’: Establishing Utopia in The Emigrants  81 References  82

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4 ‘Between Fiction and Reality’: The Utopian Past in The Blithedale Romance (1852) 87 ‘Numberless Projects of Social Reform’: The Communal Wave of the Nineteenth Century  89 No ‘Conclusion Favorable or Otherwise’: Blithedale’s Utopianism  94 ‘Better Air to Breathe’: Blithedale’s Promising Beginnings  99 ‘A Cold Arcadia’: Utopian Aspirations Unfulfilled 101 ‘Faery’ Instead of ‘Virgin’ Land: The Fate of Utopia in The Blithedale Romance 111 References 118 5 ‘A Great Republic of Equals’: Postbellum Utopia in Marie Howland’s Papa’s Own Girl (1874)123 ‘A Story of American Life’: Utopianism, Women’s Rights, and Marie Howland 125 ‘Papa Is a Radical, They Say; So Are We’: Gender and Collaboration 132 ‘Love is Not All that There is to Life’: Romance and the Utopian Narrator 140 ‘Never a Possible Question of Equality’: Utopia Surviving the Civil War 147 References 158 6 ‘Shrouded in an American Flag’: Sutton E. Griggs’s Imperium in Imperio (1899)163 ‘A Contest of Two Ideologies’: Conflicting Solutions in Imperium in Imperio 165 ‘Make the Separation Physical’: Race and the Lack of Closure 175 ‘Beneath the American Flag’: Utopian States for African Americans 178 ‘Our Race as an Empire’: US American Empire in the Imperium  182 ‘Mightier Weapon’: Final Appeals in Imperium in Imperio 189 References 193

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7 ‘A Bold Regeneration’: W.E.B. Du Bois’s The Quest of the Silver Fleece (1911)197 ‘Of the Whole Nation’: Systemic Complexities and FarReaching Solutions 198 ‘Field of Dreams’ and ‘Toil beyond Exhilaration’: Geographic Symbolism 207 ‘The Real and Mighty World’ and the ‘Old and Shaken Dream’: Combining Literary Traditions 213 ‘A New National Errand’: Appropriating the National Tradition 223 ‘The Battle Scarcely Even Begun’: Decolonizing Utopian Space 228 References 231 8 ‘To Begin the World Over Again’: Conclusion235 References 242 Index245

About the Author

Verena  Adamik  Dr. phil. is a research and teaching assistant at the Department of American Studies of the University of Potsdam. Her PhD thesis, on which this book is based, was supervised by Prof. Dr. Nicole Waller, University of Potsdam, and Prof. Dr. Gregory Claeys, Royal Holloway, University of London. Her work has appeared in More After More. Essays Commemorating the Five-Hundredth Anniversary of Thomas More’s Utopia (2016) and in COPAS—Current Objectives of Postgraduate American Studies (2014). Forthcoming in 2020 are publications in Utopian Studies and in The Encyclopedia of Contemporary American Fiction (Wiley-Blackwell). Aside from the topics addressed in this publication, her research interests include contemporary fiction, horror, and the far-right. In 2017, she was selected for the Arthur O. Lewis Award of the Society for Utopian Studies. She is the creator and host of the academic podcast Talking American Studies.

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CHAPTER 1

‘The Optimal State of a Republic’: Introduction

To begin, here is a short sojourn into the academic discourse of the United States and utopia: “The utopian ideals of certain of the original colonists and of the revolutionary generation, … assert that this New World is to be liberated from the dead hand of the past and become the scene of a new departure in human affairs” (Slotkin 1973, 3). Utopianism is a “persistent mode of self-definition in America” (Roemer 1976, xii–xiii) and, thus, “to know America, we must have knowledge of America as utopia” (Roemer 1981, 14). The United States are the “material utopia of the way of life” (Baudrillard 1989, 76). Disneyland is a “degenerated utopia” (Marin 1984, 241). “Utopian discourse has been a crucial component of American political practice” (Berlant 1991, 15). “Utopia was discovered at the same time as America” (Hatzenberger 2003, 125). “Throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, the notion of America as utopia has remained highly attractive for a variety of groups and newcomers” (Paul 2014, 142). A recent publication by the renowned literary and cultural critics Fredric Jameson and Slavoj Žižek is entitled An American Utopia (2016). It seems as though any “passing acquaintance with literary and cultural-history scholarship … is enough to suggest how central the concept of Utopia has been to American culture” (Guarneri 1994, 72). Wherever scholars investigating US history and culture look, they find something called utopia. However, some of these statements do not seem to refer to the same concepts: how the Puritans or nineteenth-century pioneers connect to © The Author(s) 2020 V. Adamik, In Search of the Utopian States of America, Palgrave Studies in Utopianism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-60279-6_1

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Disneyland probably eludes most of us. The problem lies with the multiple definitions that come with the term utopia. The term first appeared in 1516 in a book with the eye-catching title Libellus Vere Aureus, Nec Minus Salutaris Quam Festivus, de Optimo Rei Publicae Statu deque Nova Insula Utopia, which translates into A Truly Golden1 Small Book, No Less Useful than Enjoyable, on the Optimal State of a Republic and on the New Island Utopia, commonly abbreviated as Utopia. Famously, the author, English philosopher, and statesman Thomas More (1478–1535) created the word ‘utopia’ using morphemes from Ancient Greek, endowing it with a double meaning: depending on how one pronounces it, it is either a combination of εὖ and τόπος (resulting in eu-topia, i.e., ‘good place’) or of οὐ and τόπος (uh-topia, which means ‘no place’). Likely, More did this intentionally, as the book is rife with puns that those versed in Latin/Greek could pick up on: for example, the name of the main river Anydrus means ‘no water,’ the leaders are called Ademos, ‘without people,’ and the name of the Utopian traveler himself, Hythlodaeus, translates to ‘speaker of nonsense.’ The term utopia can then refer to the book by More; and to the republic and the island that he describes; to a good place; and/or a non-existent place, hence the common use of the term to call something ‘nice but impossible.’ Utopia also denotes the utopian literary genre, that is, literature that describes a system which is stylized as radically different, and usually follows a certain set of narrative conventions—some kind of journey in, and often out, of the utopia, a guide of some sort, lengthy dialogues, and detailed explanations of the political, economic, and cultural institutions within the system.2 In fact, excessive detail is a characteristic part of utopian fiction because the ‘good place’ has reformed most aspects of life: institutions, finances, private life, marriage, shopping, clothes, and various household items may have been reinvented and therefore necessitate description. All of these building blocks can be found within More’s Utopia. However, when people talk of the United States as utopian, they rarely refer to the genre, even though they might gesture to works of utopian 1  ‘Golden’ in the title of Thomas More’s Utopia (1516) is probably used figuratively to mean ‘valuable’ or ‘delightful.’ It may also be one of More’s jests; the utopians themselves do not value gold at all, so Vere Aureus may mean that the book is truly worthless, or that those who appreciate it are fools. 2  While the origins of the dystopian genre are intimately connected to utopian literature, dystopian literature draws on a different set of literary conventions (see Baccolini and Moylan 2013).

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fiction written in or about the United States as a piece of evidence that underpins their argument. Instead, their use of the word utopia denotes the style of thinking that More has engaged in for writing his work: utopianism, that is, the “social dreaming” about “the ways in which groups of people arrange their lives and which usually envision[s] a radically different society from the one in which the dreamers live” and “focuses on everyday life as well as matters concerned with economic, political, and social questions” (Sargent 2010, 4). In the examples above, the United States are utopian because they strike people either as a ‘radically different society’ or as a nation of ‘social dreaming,’ or as both. Utopian studies commonly differentiate between three interrelated ‘faces of utopianism’: literary utopia (the literary genre), utopian practice, and utopian social theory (Sargent 2010, 5). Hence, utopia denotes (among other definitions and applications to which I will turn later) the societies described in the literary genre and the genre itself; also, the societies laid out in utopian social theories, which propose the details of an imaginary society, usually to resolve the central flaws the author identifies in her environment, without employing most of the narrative strategies of the literary utopia (and without its propensity for satire and uncertainty). Finally, utopia also refers to the sociopolitical phenomenon of utopian practice in the form of utopian communities, so it also may denote attempts at actualizing a utopian vision. One oft-cited manifestation of utopianism in the United States is the large number of utopian communities founded on its grounds. Such “insular, self-sufficient communit[ies] of dissidents who are opposed to and alienated from the established social order, often on religious or political grounds” (Hogan 1985, 40), are said to have “have mushroomed in the fertile ground of America” (Balasopoulos 2004, 4). Even though scholars like to quibble over the terminology—utopian communities versus intentional communities versus communes versus model communities3—they by 3  The term utopian communities was especially prevalent in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, which is the historical time span explored in this book. The idea that these communities are somehow utopian marks the overlap of communal studies and utopian studies to this day (e.g., Claeys 2011, 2017; Madden and Finch 2006; Miller 1998; Sargent 2010). It goes without saying that situating the upcoming analysis within the field of utopian studies is only one of multiple approaches possible. Instead of utopian community, terms such as cult, drop-out, secessionist, communal, grass-roots, counterculture, dissent, and so on could be used to describe subsets of the communities depicted in the narratives, and each of these descriptions brings with it a different set of contexts and theories. On that note, utopia

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and large agree that such communities are comprised “of five or more adults and their children, if any, who come from more than one nuclear family and who have chosen to live together to enhance their shared values or for some other mutually agreed upon purpose” (Sargent 2010, 34).4 Scholars denote such communal efforts to be utopian practice, as these communities attempt to realize their social dreams of a good place. Utopian communities existed on North American grounds even before the foundation of the United States, for example, the Labadist settlement in Maryland (ca. 1683–1720). Such communities enjoyed popularity and publicity especially in the early nineteenth century—when they were inspired by social theories and visions of, for example, Robert Owen (1771–1858), Charles Fourier (1772–1837), Étienne Cabet (1788–1856), and John Humphrey Noyes (1811–1886)—and again in the countercultural context of the 1960s. Utopianists were not idle in the meantime: in fact, scholars such as Robert S. Fogarty (1990) and Timothy Miller (1998, 1999, 2015, 2019) have collected ample data to illustrate that utopian communalism was practiced continuously throughout the history of the United States. It may seem that there is ‘something’ that inspires the foundation of utopian projects.5 Furthermore, scholars that have studied utopian communities in the United States seem to agree that “a tradition of idealistic social reform has grown and even become embedded in the political culture of the region” (Van Bueren and Tarlow 2006, 1), that is, that

is a problematic choice, the implications of the term being distinctly Eurocentric, nationalist, and imperial. However, recent archipelagic and postcolonial enquiries into utopianism enable me to take, and further develop, a critical approach regarding the grand narratives that underlie utopianism. 4  This is a very condensed definition which includes the main points that accomplished scholars of utopian communities have drawn up: Timothy Miller, for example, outlines his field of study by the following criteria: “A sense of common purpose and of separation from the dominant society. … Some form and level of self-denial, of voluntary suppression of individual choice for the good of the group. … Geographic proximity. … Personal interaction. … Economic sharing. … Real existence … Critical mass … Generally, it seems reasonable to think that an intentional community should include at least five individuals, some of whom must be unrelated by biology or exclusive intimate relationship” (1998, xx–xxii). Chapter 2 provides a more extensive discussion regarding the definition of the subject at hand. 5  While working on this project, I learned of long-standing traditions of utopian practice in, for example, England, France, Germany, Greece, India, Italy, New Zealand, Spain, and Wales. I am sure that most nations have seen their fair share of utopian communities.

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these attempts to live radically differently have left an enduring impression on the United States. Viewing utopian communities as part of the United States is, however, somewhat paradoxical, as utopian practice is an expression of dissent. Utopian communities stand in an ambivalent relationship to the nation. Their appearance does both, “support and undermine the nation as a eutopia. On the one hand, the willingness of people to try to create a better life for themselves certainly suggests that utopian impulses are alive and well in the country. On the other hand, the very fact that people believe that they must leave mainstream society to live a good life clearly signals that there is something amiss” (Sargent 2007, 100). It is this complex interaction between dissent expressed in utopianism and the United States that I am tracing through a series of novels from the nineteenth century. The following chapters are ultimately concerned with the relationship of nation and utopia—the former an ‘imagined’ (Anderson 1983) and the latter an ‘imaginary’ community (Wegner 2002; Sargent 2007). Each of the works I have chosen has a different take on the state of ‘social dreaming’ in the United States, how likely they are to be turned into a radically different good place and by what means and at what costs this can be brought about. The novels that I am reading are not utopian fiction. They do not give fictional accounts of entire societies that are long-established and smoothly running. Nonetheless, the narratives discussed are linked to utopianism in so far as they describe the attempt to realize a vision of a good place. They are looking at utopian practice, at the possible beginning of the road to utopia. Precisely because these communities are not fully developed utopian societies, they offer insights into the state of the utopian imagination: that is, if people thought their society could be changed drastically, and what dreams they had; which aspects of society and human nature they regarded to be immutable; which conditions already existed that would enable or hinder this change; and how swiftly this would be possible. After all, these communities try to live by a social order diverging from the implicit and explicit rules that the normative majority around them adheres to, and therefore provide an appropriate setting for discussing dissent, ideology, sovereignty, territory, agency, and so on. For this purpose, I have selected five novels: Gilbert Imlay’s The Emigrants (1793), Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Blithedale Romance (1852), Marie Howland’s Papa’s Own Girl (1874), Sutton E.  Griggs’s Imperium in Imperio (1899), and W.E.B. Du Bois’s The Quest of the Silver

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Fleece (1911). The primary criterion for these texts was that they fictionalize utopian practice. However, there are of course more that were not included: for example, Rebecca Harding Davis’s novel Margret Howth: A Story of To-day (1862); The Undiscovered Country (1880), and New Leaf Mills: A Chronicle (1913) by William Dean Howells; Louisa May Alcott’s Transcendental Wild Oats (1873); Harold Frederic’s Gloria Mundi (1898); and Caroline Dale Snedeker’s Seth Way (1917).6 Ultimately, I have chosen texts that I found to provide a productive comment on utopianism, the nation, and the relationship between the two of them. To give a multifaceted account of these issues, I deliberately selected works that offer different perspectives on US American utopianism: a novel aimed at a European readership (The Emigrants), a work by an author who is widely credited with having shaped the national narrative (The Blithedale Romance), a work by a working-class, feminist author (Papa’s Own Girl), and two works by African American authors, one by a preacher from the South (Griggs’s Imperium in Imperio), the other written by one of the key figures of Black7 philosophical thought to the present day (The Quest of the Silver Fleece). Notably, all of these novels are not widely known; even The Blithedale Romance is considered one of Hawthorne’s lesser works of fiction. There are of course multiple reasons as to why each of these novels enjoys relative obscurity, yet they all have in common that they provide complex answers to the question in how far the United States can become the site of a realized utopia. I will discuss them in chronological order, tracing how the connection between utopia and United States develops over the course of the long nineteenth century.8 As the nation expanded, 6  For those in search of more suggestions, especially of less well-known works, I recommend Lyman Tower Sargent’s Utopian Literature in English: An Annotated Bibliography from 1516 to the Present (2016 and ongoing), as well as the lists compiled by Nan Bowman Albinski (1988), Carol Farley Kessler (1985, 1989, 1995), and Darby Lewes (1989). 7  Throughout this book, I am capitalizing Black, Indigenous, Native, and the like as well as White, when referring to the respective ethnic/racial groups. Writing the former set with an upper case is, for one, honoring the wish of various BIPoC activists and in accordance with a set of contemporary style manuals. Capitalizing White has nothing to do with me honoring Whiteness but is informed by arguments from those who have critically investigated White privilege: a lower case would obscure that Whiteness is very much an identitary category— one that thrives on invisibility, presenting itself and its habitus as ‘natural’ and as the ‘norm.’ Kwame Anthony Appiah (2020) makes this point more eloquently than I ever could, so I would refer interested readers to his article. 8  With the term long nineteenth century I am referring to the time period that starts approximately with the writing of the Constitution of the United States and ends with its entry in

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waged war against other nations, went to Civil War, industrialized, abolished slavery, and entered the twentieth century segregated along racial lines, the relationship between United States and utopia underwent significant changes. The narratives illustrate this in the uncertain circumstances of the utopian communities they depict. Neither quite utopian nor completely within the non-utopian present, the communities are in friction, making the limitations for arriving at the good place visible. The readings therefore contribute to what Jameson calls “a psychology of Utopian production: a study of Utopian fantasy mechanisms” (Jameson 2005, xiii), with special attention given to the relation of these utopian fantasy mechanisms and the formation and variation of the national narrative of the United States. This is especially interesting when we consider the power that the idea of nation still has. In recent political events of Europe as well as of North America, protectionism, patriotism, and nationalism, with a decidedly racist undercurrent, have proven themselves ever powerful, despite transnational networks (positive and negative), and allegedly cosmopolitan imageries. Instead of considering more nuanced and complex retellings of history and identity, people continue to adhere to “the traditional authority of … national objects of knowledge—Tradition, People, the Reason of State, High Culture, for instance—whose pedagogical value often relies on their representation as holistic concepts located within an evolutionary narrative of continuity” (Bhabha 1990, 2–3). In other words, the so-called grand narratives9 of nations endure, inspiring notions of a monolithic,

the First World War. Obviously, I am evoking Eric Hobsbawm’s terminology for the long nineteenth century in Europe, starting with the French Revolution and ending with the outbreak of the First World War, with the modification that the foundation of the United States is the relevant date within a US American context. 9  I am here employing Jean-Francois Lyotard’s terminology. In The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (1979), Lyotard made the seminal argument that in postmodernity, because everything is perceived as a narrative, grand narratives have lost their power: “Simplifying to the extreme, I define postmodern as incredulity towards metanarratives” (xxiv). However, especially postcolonial scholars, such as Edward W. Said, have pointed out that grand narratives remain potently active (1996, 18); further, even the recent evocation of a ‘post-factual age’ does not seem to detract from the power of grand narratives as they manifest in nationalism, racism, class, gender binary, and so on: quite to the contrary. While the analyses provided below focus on the nineteenth century, I understand the general framework to be applicable beyond the end of modernity, following Michel Foucault’s suspicions that comparable orders of discourses via such narratives can be found in every society (1970,

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time-honored national character that supposedly derives from a shared history and culture. This book follows one essential aspect of the United States’ ‘grand narrative’ in order “to encounter the nation as it is written” (Bhabha 1990, 2; emphasis in original) and how it came to be perceived as ‘utopian.’ I am therefore considering it as a part of the ongoing academic effort to unsettle and further nuance the way that people think about the idea of nation, the United States in particular, and to contemplate the relationship between utopian theory and practice. This work is also a testament to the fascination inherent in dreaming of a thoroughly restructured society, and to the temptation of setting out with likeminded people to ‘just’ live differently and better. The United States are especially interesting for such an investigation because its national narrative includes ‘diversity’ as part of their identity (Kaplan 1999, 15),10 and because utopian communities, being anti-­ systemic by their very nature, strain this idea of a diverse-yet-united community. The novels reflect on this, and on the turbulent history of the United States in the course of the long nineteenth century: the formation of the nation via the ratification of the Constitution in 1788; expansion across the North American continent, which meant genocide and displacement of entire nations and cultures in the process; seizing territory beyond these geographic borders; mass chattel slavery and its abolishment; the Civil War, Reconstruction, and the subsequent nadir of race relations (Logan 1954); religious revivals, reform movements, scientific theories, and fads. The biographies of the novels’ authors differ starkly, and so their works were created under very different circumstances. All the more fascinating, therefore, are their manifest parallels. After a brief overview of the historical relationship between North America and utopia prior to the American Revolution, the chapter on Imlay’s The Emigrants (1793) provides a point of departure for the discussion of the utopian/national imagination. The novel showcases the European American construction of North America at the very birth of the United States as the place for putting utopia into practice and touches 56) and that articulating anything outside of them is at best an illusion (1970, 57). Their examination is nonetheless the intellectual’s duty (Said 1996). 10  Of course, in light of various historical and contemporary examples of systemic discrimination on the grounds of race, ethnicity, class, gender, and sexuality this claim of ‘diversity’ has been and is in dire need of reexamination.

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upon a range of issues that the later novels will complicate and discuss: the idealization of the American landscape and its deterministic power over the people that occupy it; dissent with the European American society in the (still infant) United States; calls for wholesale, radical change as opposed to reform; women’s rights and the role that romance plays for and within utopia; American Independence as an act of utopian secession; and, nonetheless, an antagonistic relationship between United States and utopia. Imlay seems to interpret the American Revolution as an invitation to secede from the United States. Thus, the chapter unfolds how Imlay’s novel casts the American continent as the site for putting utopia into practice; inspired, but in no way limited, by the infant United States. The metafictional self-awareness already displayed in The Emigrants is heightened in Hawthorne’s The Blithedale Romance (1852), which takes up motifs of land and nation, but literally buries utopia on American grounds. Instead of envisioning a utopian future for the United States, Hawthorne delineates how different floundered utopian projects in the country’s past can be wrought into a national narrative. After Hawthorne’s bleak take on utopianism, Howland’s Papa’s Own Girl (1874) provides a surprisingly optimistic outlook on the utopian future of the nation. Seemingly unfazed by the Civil War, the novel envisions a utopian community that will result in harmonious collaboration between the working class, capitalists, and even European aristocracy, as well as radically change the lot of women and the makeup of romance. In order to conceptualize such happy unions and in particular to advance the cause of White11 women, the novel focuses on breaking open the ‘domestic sphere’ while still offering romantic bliss. Glossing over anti-black systemic violence, it avoids addressing the pressing question of how to unite and fully include different races in the nation; an evasive strategy that foreshadows the racial homogeneity of many utopian novels of the late nineteenth century. Griggs’s Imperium in Imperio (1899) engages with utopian practice to showcase the limitations that White supremacy, as expressed in Howland’s work, imposes on African American utopianism. In Imperium in Imperium, the national narrative inhibits the utopian imagination of African American. The novel warns that African American full inclusion into the nation and full access to its utopianism cannot be put off much longer, or the United States will face a devastating war. With this, Griggs also comments on the  For an explanation as to why I am capitalizing White, see footnote 7.

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many utopian novels that were published at the end of the century, which mostly exclude Black people from the future. Like Imperium in Imperio, Du Bois’s The Quest of the Silver Fleece (1911) emphasizes the urgency for change and shows how utopianism is effectively denied to Black people at the turn of the century in the US American framework. Yet, the utopian practice that The Quest depicts is in the spirit of nineteenth-century utopian socialism, and  opts for the abolition of the color line, and more. Reworking the connection between utopia and the United States by writing the Black community and the novel into a distinctly US American tradition, the nation becomes the place destined for and saved by African American utopianism. Just as “tightly organized intentional communities frequently exaggerate characteristic American values or carry particular concerns to their extreme logical conclusion, [and therefore] vividly highlight issues easily overlooked when studying more conventional movements” (Pitzer 1997, 6), these fictional renditions of communities provide insights because the authors imagine how utopian practice would play out. Neither simply containing dissent as a national ‘reflex,’ nor sketching a radically different society far removed from the non-utopian reality, the narratives draw and re-draw the map for utopia within the United States. The novels complicate the rather simplified equation of a national narrative that promotes the United States as offering so-called virgin land (as famously described by Henry Nash Smith 1950) for utopian strivings. Each text, from a different perspective, demonstrates that the ongoing construction of a discursive link between utopia and United States was not unnoticed, naturalized, or uncritically accepted and replicated throughout the nineteenth century. As the examples provided throughout the book demonstrate, many ideas that utopians had in the nineteenth century remain alive and well today; many problems that utopian communities faced back then also challenge their successors. However, I have to disappoint anyone who reads this book in order to get an insight on how communes (mal)function. While I will signpost to various historical communities, Utopian States of America remains a work of literary analysis. I will not belabor the question of whether the communities described offer viable alternatives to ‘mainstream’ society, nor do sociological reasons for the failure of any historical community present a central concern of mine. Additionally, the utopian social theories that inspire and shape the communities, their wholesale justifications, explanations, and detailing of a new social order

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and its benefits, only inform my approach in so far as they provide context. Instead, I venture to unfold the national/utopian psychology12 of these works. In other words, the following readings trace how and if the authors thought that a utopia can be imagined within the respective historical, specifically the national, framework. Fiction is able to move more freely between utopian intention, the non-­ utopian reality, and the discourses that negotiate the two. After all, “a utopist, the author of a literary utopia, is free to imagine any setting that will adequately express his concepts of goodness or, in a dystopia, badness. The founders of utopian communities, on the other hand, are severely constrained by nagging realities” (Roemer 1981, 4). Novels that are set in intentional communities can then highlight what they perceive to be the ‘nagging realities’ that limit the practice, and ultimately the utopist’s supposed freedom of imagination. Approached in this way, works of fiction set in intentional communities provide insights into the conception of utopias and are all the more complexly related to utopianism because they give fictional accounts of the attempt to put an imaginary construct into reality. In effect, these narratives are composed of three levels: the utopian intention, that is, a utopian social theory that inspired the fictional community on the one hand; the non-utopian reality on the other, mimetic to a historical reality; and a third located between the preceding two, the fictional utopian community, inspired and limited by its context. Following the movement of the narratives between those levels, the upcoming chapters reveal the way in which the novels comment on, and interact with, the mechanisms of utopian production. Strikingly, all the novels propose answers to this question by commenting on writing and imagining: they employ a metafictional discourse. They all argue that the radically good place also needs a radical narrative that tells its beginnings. Consequently, all chapters expound on three interlinked issues: in how far the communities are utopian, how they relate to the United States, and what role they assign to writing and imagining within a national utopianism. Writing about utopian practice reflects on the reciprocal relationship of environment and subject and casts a spotlight on how far the authors think that a good place can be created, and by what means. The interpretative potential of the novels lies in how they treat the friction between the 12  Fredric Jameson employs the term utopian psychology to denote the approach he takes in Archaeologies of the Future (2005), which underlies my approach to these novels. The next chapter provides a more detailed discussion of utopian psychology.

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non-­utopian present and the imaginary good place. Instead of theorizing about agency and change from the perspective of a system that is up and running, these narratives specifically represent an uncertain moment of utopian production in which the members of the communities and their utopian visions immediately encounter their historical context. In this friction, or uncertainty, the texts relate the road to utopia on a practical level, as well as the mechanisms of the utopian imagination. Ultimately, each chapter provides another insight into the historically perceived possibilities and limitations of the utopian imagination—a historicized study of utopian psychology—and another answer to the question what role utopianism plays in the grand narrative of the United States and vice versa.

References Albinski, Nan Bowman. 1988. Utopia Reconsidered: Women Novelists and Nineteenth-Century Utopian Visions. Signs 13 (4): 830–841. Alcott, Louisa May. [1873] 1981. Transcendental Wild Oats and Excerpts from the Fruitlands Diary. Harvard: Harvard Common Press. Anderson, Benedict. 1983. Imagined Communities. Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso. Appiah, Kwame Anthony. 2020. The Case for Capitalizing the B in Black. The Atlantic, 18 June. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/06/ time-to-capitalize-blackand-white/613159/. Accessed 1 July 2020. Baccolini, Raffaella, and Tom Moylan. 2013. Dystopia and Histories. In Dark Horizons: Science Fiction and the Dystopian Imagination, ed. Raffaella Baccolini and Tom Moylan, 1–12. Hoboken: Taylor & Francis. Balasopoulos, Antonis. 2004. Unworldly Worldliness: America and the Trajectories of Utopian Expansionism. Utopian Studies 15 (2): 3–35. Baudrillard, Jean. 1989. America. New York: Verso. Berlant, Lauren G. 1991. The Anatomy of National Fantasy. Hawthorne, Utopia, and Everyday Life. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Bhabha, Homi K. 1990. Introduction: Narrating the Nation. In Nation and Narration, ed. Homi K. Bhabha, 1–7. London: Routledge. Claeys, Gregory. 2011. Searching for Utopia. The History of an Idea. London: Thames & Hudson. ———. 2017. Dystopia. A Natural History. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Davis, Rebecca Harding. 1862. Margret Howth. A Story of To-Day. Boston: Ticknor and Fields. Du Bois, William Edward Burghardt. 1911. The Quest of the Silver Fleece. Chicago: A. C. McClurg & Co.

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Fogarty, Robert S. 1990. All Things New. American Communes and Utopian Movements 1865–1914. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Foucault, Michel. [1970] 1981. The Order of Discourse. Translated by Ian McLeod. In Untying the Text: A Post-Structuralist Reader, ed. Robert Young, 48–78. Boston: Routledge. Frederic, Harold. 1898. Gloria Mundi. Chicago: Herbert S. Stone & Company. Griggs, Sutton E. 1899. Imperium in Imperio. A Study of the Negro Race Problem. Cincinnati: The Editor Publishing Company. Guarneri, Carl J. 1994. The Americanization of Utopia: Fourierism and the Dilemma of Utopian Dissent in the United States. Utopian Studies 5 (1): 72–88. Hatzenberger, Antoine. 2003. Islands and Empire: Beyond the Shores of Utopia. Angelaki. Journal of the Theoretical Humanities 8 (1): 119–128. Hawthorne, Nathaniel. 1852. The Blithedale Romance. Boston: Ticknor, Reed, and Fields. Hogan, Richard. 1985. The Frontier as Social Control. Theory and Society 14 (1): 35–51. Howells, William Dean. 1880. The Undiscovered Country. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Company. ———. 1913. New Leaf Mills. A Chronicle. New York: Harper and Brothers. Howland, Marie. 1874. Papa’s Own Girl. New York: Jewett. Imlay, Gilbert. 1793. The Emigrants, or the History of an Expatriated Family. 3 vols. London: A. Hamilton. Jameson, Fredric. 2005. Archaeologies of the Future. The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions. New York: Verso. Kaplan, Amy. 1999. ‘Left Alone with America’: The Absence of Empire in the Study of American Culture. In Cultures of United States Imperialism, ed. Amy Kaplan, 3–21. Durham: Duke University Press. Kessler, Carol Farley. 1985. Notes Toward a Bibliography: Women’s Utopian Writing, 1836–1899. Legacy 2 (2): 67–71. ———. 1989. Women Daring to Speak: United States Women’s Feminist Utopias. Utopian Studies 2: 118–123. ———. 1995. Daring to Dream. Utopian Fiction by United States Women Before 1950. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press. Lewes, Darby. 1989. Gynotopia: A Checklist of Nineteenth-Century Utopias by American Women. Legacy 6 (2): 29–41. Logan, Rayford Whittingham. [1954] 1997. The Betrayal of the Negro, from Rutherford B. Hayes to Woodrow Wilson. New York: Da Capo Press. Lyotard, Jean-François. [1979] 1989. The Postmodern Condition. A Report on Knowledge. Translated by Geoff Bennington and Brain Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Madden, Etta, and Martha L.  Finch, eds. 2006. Eating in Eden. Food and American Utopias. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.

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Marin, Louis. 1984. Utopics. Spatial Play. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Miller, Timothy. 1998. The Quest for Utopia in Twentieth-Century America. 1900–1960. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press. ———. 1999. The 60s Communes. Hippies and Beyond. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press. ———. 2015. The Encyclopedic Guide to American Intentional Communities. 2nd ed. Clinton: Richard W. Couper. ———. 2019. Communes in America, 1975–2000. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press. More, Thomas. 1516. Libellus Vere Aureus, Nec Minus Salutaris Quam Festivus, de Optimo Rei Publicae Statu deque Nova Insula Utopia. Leuven. English edition: More, Thomas. [1551/1556] 1912. The Utopia of Sir Thomas More. Translated by Ralph Robinson. New York: Macmillan Company. Paul, Heike. 2014. The Myths That Made America. An Introduction to American Studies. Bielefeld: transcript. Pitzer, Donald E. 1997. Introduction. In America’s Communal Utopias, ed. Donald E. Pitzer, 3–13. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Roemer, Kenneth M. 1976. The Obsolete Necessity. America in Utopian Writings, 1888–1900. Kent: Kent State University Press. ———. 1981. Defining American as Utopia. In America as Utopia, ed. Kenneth M. Roemer, 1–15. New York: B. Franklin. Said, Edward W. 1996. Representations of the Intellectual. The 1993 Reith Lectures. New York: Vintage. Sargent, Lyman Tower. 2007. Utopianism and National Identity. Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy 3 (2–3): 87–106. ———. 2010. Utopianism. A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———, ed. 2016 and ongoing. Utopian Literature in English. An Annotated Bibliography from 1516 to the Present. The Pennsylvania State University Libraries. Slotkin, Richard. [1973] 1996. Regeneration through Violence. The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600–1860. New York: Harper Perennial. Smith, Henry Nash. [1950] 1971. Virgin Land. The American West as Symbol and Myth. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Snedeker, Caroline Dale. 1917. Seth Way. A Romance of the New Harmony Community. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Van Bueren, Thad M., and Sarah A. Tarlow. 2006. The Interpretive Potential of Utopian Settlements. Historical Archaeology 40 (1): 1–5. Wegner, Phillip E. 2002. Imaginary Communities. Utopia, the Nation, and the Spatial Histories of Modernity. Berkeley: University of California Press. Žižek, Slavoj, and Fredric Jameson. 2016. An American Utopia. Dual Power and the Universal Army. London: Verso.

CHAPTER 2

‘That Excellent Perfection’: A Short History of Utopia

But King Utopus, whose name as conqueror the island beareth (for before his time it was called Abraxa), which also brought the rude and wild people to that excellent perfection in all good fashions, humanity, and civil gentleness, wherein they now go beyond all the people of the world, even at his first arriving and entering upon the land, forthwith obtaining the victory, caused the fifteen miles space of uplandish ground, where the sea had no passage, to be cut and digged up. (More 1516, 87)

The introduction gave a taste of the many meanings that  have been attributed to the term utopia since Thomas More invented it in 1516. Indeed, the word ‘utopia’ has been incredibly productive: utopian scholar Arthur Blaim in a talk on “Dystopianising More’s Utopia” (2016) aptly observed that utopian categories “have multiplied like gremlins.” In addition to the aforementioned three ‘faces’ of utopianism—literary utopia, utopian practice, and utopian social theory (Sargent 2010, 5)—one finds utopia expressed in “Utopian politics” (Jameson 2005, xii) and Ernst Bloch’s influential concept of the ‘Utopian impulse’; in “utopian activism” and “utopian longings” (Harvey 2000, 10, 30); and in a “Secondspace … of utopian thought and vision” (Soja 1996, 67). Not content with using utopia solely as a modifier, writers have added a plethora of neologisms (some more, some less established): dystopia, heterotopia, eutopia, euchronia, alotopia, anti-utopia, satirical utopia, critical utopia (Moylan 1986), gynotopia, cacotopia, Trumptopia, critical dystopia, hyperutopia, and intopia (Vieira 2010; Pordzik 2001); not forgetting that modern © The Author(s) 2020 V. Adamik, In Search of the Utopian States of America, Palgrave Studies in Utopianism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-60279-6_2

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advertising also co-opts the term, as in shoetopia and Zootopia, and that, in common parlance, ‘utopian’ means illusory. Dystopia is also often (incorrectly) used as a synonym for catastrophe or apocalypse. Certainly, “utopia is notoriously a tricky term” (Elliott 1970, 2).

‘Far from Us’: The Psychology of Utopian Production The abundance of terms and associated theories necessitates a working definition of utopia for any project that deals with the term, and this book is no exception. As many scholars before me, I am basing my definition on More’s Utopia, and am thus defining utopia as an “imaginary, ideal society” (Tally 2013, 3), “a system radically different from this one” (Jameson 2005, xii), brought about by human “willed transformation” (Williams 1980, 199). Thus, I am treating utopianism as a product of early modern thinking, which also allows the upcoming discussion to touch upon some of the links between America and utopianism that predate the United States. Firstly, defining ‘utopia’ as merely synonymous with ‘good place’ invites many misunderstandings and useless debates, as this criterion is obviously highly subjective and vague. Plus, by the same logic, calling an intentional community ‘utopian’ would mean that the community’s values and goals, or at least its intentions, are objectively positive or ‘good’—whatever that may mean. Clearly, “utopia cannot be reduced to its content. To do so would be to cut short the process and limit utopia to a closed set of images, character activities, or ideological expressions. Instead, the utopian process must be held open as a symbolic resolution of historical contradictions that finds its importance not in the particulars of those resolutions but in the very act of imagining them, in the form of utopia itself” (Moylan 1986, 38–39). Therefore, this book follows the tenets of what could be called ‘utopian formalism’ (a term popularized by Fredric Jameson; I would argue that the work of other scholars, among them Tom Moylan, underlies this approach), a sort of “psychology of Utopian production: a study of Utopian fantasy mechanisms” (Jameson 2005, xiii). Utopian formalism does not solely focus on utopian content—on what is constructed—but endeavors to look at how it is constructed. For one, the notion of what constitutes a good place must be discussed with the respective historical context in mind, and not according to one’s own convictions. Moreover, a utopia’s ‘goodness’ may manifest itself in its

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form, in the way it is described, even if its layout/content is outrageously contemptuous of human dignity and basic human rights. For example, Shadows Before; or, a Century Onward (1893) by Fayette Stratton Giles describes a society in which “Racism is in evidence …; war has been abolished largely because the ‘inferior races’—blacks, Chinese, and ‘Hindoos’— have been impressed into ‘willing and contented’ servitude; eugenic breeding is encouraged among the upper classes in order to maintain their superior status” (Lewes 1989, 37), yet the visitors to this future laud the society they are observing.1 Defining utopia primarily as a good place results in what I would call a broad definition of utopia, “part of a complex of ideas that includes the Golden Age, the Earthly Paradise, the Fortunate Isles, the Islands of the Blest, the Happy Otherworld, and so on” (Elliott 1970, 5). Yet, this does not quite describe what utopias are: being a ‘good place’ is a necessary but not a sufficient trait for a utopia. The biggest issue is that this broad definition conflates the secularized form of utopia with millennial visions that grant unconditional felicity through supernatural intervention, such as Eden, Heaven, Walhalla, Svarga, as well as any comfort zone imaginable: a home, a refuge, a vacation resort, a park, and so on.2 Furthermore, focusing solely on the good-place attributes means to sideline the critical and satirical aspects of the literary utopia, which some scholars compellingly argue to be an essential part of the genre (e.g., Elliott 1970). After 1  Right-wing, White supremacist utopias and dystopias are a fascinating topic, although reading them can certainly be fatiguing. To my knowledge, this field has yet to be studied in depth. Taking online publications into account, Lyman Tower Sargent speculated in a talk on “Themes in U.S. Eutopias and Dystopias in the Twenty-First Century” (2016) that the right-wing utopia may be the fastest-growing segment of literary utopias, which underlines the importance of further research. Michael Orth’s “Reefs on the Right: Fascist Politics in Contemporary Libertarian Utopias” (1990) and Peter Fitting’s “Utopias Beyond Our Ideals: The Dilemma of the Right-Wing Utopia” (1991) offer a starting point. Kenneth M. Roemer notes that blatant White supremacism was common in late nineteenth-century utopias (Roemer 1976, 71; see also Chap. 5). Fitting draws attention to one problem regarding studying right-wing utopias: researchers are often reluctant to label right-wing literary utopias (as well as right-wing utopian communities) utopian because they think of utopianism as a feminist, and/or left-wing tool; hence, they do not want to apply utopian theory to these phenomena. 2  Parks, monasteries, vacation resorts, cemeteries, and a range of other places designed by humans link to utopianism, a point that Michel Foucault persuasively argued in “Of Other Spaces” (1967) but they are not utopian as such. As Foucault speculates, all societies are structured to include different spaces, some of which resemble utopias to a certain degree and thus are ‘Other,’ so-called heterotopias.

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all, More’s Utopia is not only the archetype of the literary utopia but the namesake of the entire concept, and More’s narrative does not unambiguously propose an improved world. Utopia is commonly acknowledged to be “quite playful and satirical” (Sargent 2010, 22) as the many puns imply—even though the traveler from Utopia (Hythlodaeus, the ‘talker of nonsense’) insists that the island and its population are perfectly organized (More 1516, 82). Thus, to the second meaning of utopia: no place. Utopias only exist in an imaginary realm, are immaterial and non-existent, and are no places because they are “one of those rare phenomena whose concept is indistinguishable from its reality, whose ontology coincides with its representation” (Jameson 2004, 35). Descriptions of utopias are not mimetic, that is, they do not represent real places—hence the generic relationship between sf (speculative fiction/science  fiction) and utopian fiction. Utopian societies are created by their description. Therefore, literary utopias constitute what they portray. Thus, as, for example, Dohra Ahmad has argued, results a peculiarly close relationship between the ‘representation’ and the ‘represented’, that is, between the signifiers and the signified: “since ‘the utopia’ may refer either to the work of fiction or to the world it portrays, form and content constantly bleed into each other” (Ahmad 2009, 25). Accordingly, examining utopianism means to pay special attention to the way that the form (the way the words are ordered in the utopian narrative/manifesto) and the content (the system described) are entwined. Yet, not every imaginary place is a utopia: there are numerous non-­ utopian places that are likewise non-existent. Consider, for example, the realms of fantasy fiction: J.R.R.  Tolkien’s Middle Earth, George R.R. Martin’s Westeros, or N. K. Jemisin’s Stillness are great fictional settings, but few (I hope) would argue that they present a way to radically restructure our society. Religious paradises may also be interpreted as no places and good places; yet, utopias have to do without elves, witches, or angels. In this respect, utopias are quite realistic, although sf and fantasy may blur this line, using aliens, orcs, and so on, as metaphoric beings in a utopian setting. To differentiate the millennial from the secular, definitions of utopia commonly conclude that utopia is human made, that is, within the capabilities of humanity (whatever the author thinks those capabilities may be). This does not mean that the established order is secular—utopias may well be designed to realize a ‘higher’ will. However, the radical difference of utopias does not come about by direct intervention of

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a supernatural entity (aside from maybe supplying the blueprint via prophecy) but from systemic changes in the organization of human life. Utopian communities relate to utopianism because they set out to effect such changes. The link between intentional community and utopianism lies in the community’s utopian intention. While definitions vary from scholar to scholar, most agree that one crucial criterion (for my purposes, it is the crucial criterion) is the community’s motivation to realize a good place (Jameson 2005, 5; Miller 1998, xix, 2002a, 104; Sargent 2010, 34, 2013, 55). As they are “governed by explicit ideological tenets that had a pervasive influence on how they manipulated the material world” (Van Bueren and Tarlow 2006, 3), such communities are also utopian in that they are creative, bringing forth a new community and ordering it. In a sense, then, the vision of the community precedes its ontological existence, even though this vision may be frequently discussed and revised. Consequently, whether a community qualifies as utopian does not hinge on whether they actually achieve radical modification or improvement. Instead, the explicitness of the ideological tenets of their conception makes them utopian; hence the term shared by literary genre and communal practice. Importantly, utopianism revolves around the question how, and how far, human behavior can be modified by social, cultural, and political conditions. Conceiving a utopia “provides an opportunity to invent wholesale every institution through which people experience their lives” (Ahmad 2009, 5) and to ponder their effects. In More’s Utopia, Hythlodaeus assures More that “you never saw people well-ordered but only there” (1516, 82). This order reveals whatever the utopian visionary holds to be ‘human nature.’ At their most extreme, utopian practice reflects the conviction that “man’s character is formed by his circumstances” (Noyes 1870, 90) entirely, and that therefore the newly arranged living conditions would alter the desires and behaviors of the community members, sometimes even instantly. To construct a utopia is to ‘order’ society, to organize institutions for a complete and unified effort for a desired effect—such as a godly life, economic stability, economic equality, ecological living, gender equality, complete pacifism, or the erasure of all conflicts on accounts of race—and a smooth and unperturbed continuance of this system. Hence, Raymond Williams’s apt description of utopianism as a “willed transformation” (1980, 199). Such faith in human capabilities and human subjecthood is historically specific; humans must be deemed capable enough to construct such a system and bring about change, and on the

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other hand, the general populace must be viewed as subject to its environment, malleable/directable to a certain degree. Utopias being “by-­ products of Western modernity” (Jameson 2005, 11) they function without a superhuman entity to ‘magically’ put things right. They are thus “linked historically with that time of the flowering of human agency to create its own world, free of subservience to nature or supernature” (Williams 1980, 199; see also Moylan 1986, 32). While utopianism as defined here does not necessarily preclude the existence of god(s), the societies envisioned propose a system created by probable and human-­ made institutions. Early modern utopias such as More’s, Thomas Lupton’s Siuqila (1580–81), and New Atlantis by Francis Bacon (1627) are crucially entwined with the ‘Age of Discovery’ and were early harbingers of the Enlightenment.3 Utopianism links to Enlightenment thought in so far as it promotes that there is a reasonable solution to the social equation, a solution that can be realized by humans. Identifying central problems in their contemporary societies, utopias suggest that “to extirpate [a] specific root of all evil” (Jameson 2005, 12; see also Jameson 2004, 36) will lead to a radically different system and maybe even to different behaviors in humans—common examples would be abolishing money, abolishing private property, abolishing monogamous relationships, abolishing temptation, abolishing governmental institutions, abolishing domesticity, abolishing private childcare, and so on. In order to remove this ‘root of all evil’, the society is reshaped thoroughly, from governmental structures and institutions which will in turn affect social interactions, individual attitudes, and day-to-day products. In this, utopianism implies that earthly society and humans are transformable and improvable. In More’s Utopia, this transformation is prepared by cutting the nation off: King Utopos turns the peninsular he rules into an island by having the isthmus removed. The systematic organization of the society suggests that it is likewise “malleable” (Vannini et al. 2009, 126) and can be neatly planned. Thus, the island offers ideal experimental conditions, removed from outside influences and historical complications. The utopians can proceed without old burdens or external disruptions and the systemic changes can run their course. Therefore, closure is constitutive of the radical difference between utopian system and 3  Sir Isaac Newton’s Principia Mathematica rang in the Enlightenment in 1687, one and a half centuries after More was beheaded in 1535.

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non-utopian reality. Utopias are, to put it in More’s words, “far from us” not merely geographically, but in “life and manners” (1516, 168). Geopolitically and culturally insulated, Utopos can set up this system, and have it unfold in its totality until it is firmly established down to the particulars of everyday life. The result is a society that radically differs from that of sixteenth-century England regarding its legal system, its marriage customs, the economic and cultural value of gold, and its chamber pots (famously, utopians despise gold, rare stones, and other materials that symbolize wealth in Europe; cause for and effect of making chamber pots and children’s toys from these costly materials). Other utopias, from Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis (1627) to B.F. Skinner’s Walden Two (1948) and Ernest Callenbach’s Ecotopia (1975) are likewise emphasizing the necessity for seclusion. In utopian fiction, this can be achieved geographically, as on More’s island, or temporally, by moving far into the future, as, for example, in Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward (1889), or by moving into outer space or cyber-space (Moylan 1986, 6). The frequently used analogy of utopia as a form of experimentation, or some kind of laboratory (e.g., Ahmad 2009, 12; Hatzenberger 2003, 120; Moylan 1986, 3; Pitzer 2013, 38, 49), similarly suggests the necessity of having a controlled ‘environment’ in which to conceptualize the utopian society. This is not to say that utopians do not travel, trade, or allow visitors. Rather, various mechanisms protect the utopian system from uncontrollable influences from the outside. Utopian social theories, while refraining from using fictional means of removal, work within the same closure when drawing up all the institutions and effects of the system they propose, instead of suggesting piecemeal improvements to a current situation. Secessionism can also be observed in the construction of utopian communities. A level of isolation is usually part of the definitions given by communal scholars; they are “group[s] whose members deliberately separate themselves from the dominant society rather than [being] simply [groups] of people who live near each other” (Miller 2002b, 335); they are “partly isolated and insulated from the general society,” “microcosms, form[ing] unique and instructive social laboratories” (Pitzer 1997, 5). Utopian communities may also try to highlight their sense of unity and closure by rituals and symbols (renaming, clothing, celebration of the founding date, etc.). Their separation may not be as drastic as that instigated by Utopos, yet a sense of withdrawal and distinction suggests the need for closure in which the radical change is to be effected.

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Within this controlled environment, utopianism makes visible the anthropological convictions of the respective authors. With outside influences regulated and confounding variables removed, utopian visions reveal what their originators think is fundamentally human, and in how far humans are shaped by their surroundings. It is here that the grand narratives on the human condition become visible: for example, do humans need excessive legal regulation (More 1516), psychological conditioning (Huxley 1932; Skinner 1948), the help of artificial intelligence (Hopkinson 2000), or is racism so deeply ingrained that racial segregation is the best course of action (Bellamy 1888, 1897; Callenbach 1975)? Closure and totality also directly affect the way time passes within utopias. This is reflected in the typically slow-paced plots of utopian fiction. What they lack in action, they make up in lengthy explanatory passages. Due to the detailed accounts, given in exhausting dialogues and descriptions, the genre does not excel in terms of suspenseful story lines—unless action is introduced by the visitor to the utopian society as she/he experiences trouble adapting, conflicts of allegiance, or budding romance (Roemer 1976, 14–15; Elliott 1970, 77–79). This deficiency of action corresponds with the content of literary utopias, as the worlds they portray are cohesively running societies. These systems do not induce conflict, at least no rapidly unregulated change, uprisings, and so on. Elliott summarizes this correspondence of form and content: “Utopian society systematically attempts to eliminate social conflict, accident, tragedy. … Under the new dispensation which eliminates conflict from society, the angularities of human character upon which the novel so much depends would inevitably be softened” (1970, 78–79).4 Furthermore, the seemingly perfect society has no need for drastic altercations. Once all the institutions are ordered so that the utopian subject and its environment relate to each other perfectly, there are hardly any agents of dramatic change 4  In order to illustrate this idea of utopian harmony that amounts to the absence of dramatic elements, Robert Elliott relates the following story (which he, in turn, took from Michael Harrington in Cacotopias and Utopias; Ferry et al. 1965): “at a writers’ conference in Moscow in the early 1930s André Malraux caused consternation by rising to ask, ‘What happens in a classless society when a streetcar runs over a beautiful girl?’ Gorky was hauled out of a sick-bed to deliver the answer, arrived at after a long debate: in a planned and classless society, a streetcar would not run over a beautiful girl. Years before, Etienne Cabet’s Icarians had come to similar conclusions; they had a law decreeing that there should be no accidents to pedestrians, whether caused by horses, vehicles, or anything whatever” (1970, 79).

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imaginable.5 More’s Utopia serves as a prime example, since interactions with the potentially unstable ‘outside’ are closely controlled, while “the internal spatial ordering of the island strictly regulates a stabilized and unchanging social process. Put crudely, spatial form controls temporality, an imagined geography controls the possibility of social change and history” (Harvey 2000, 160). Dystopian fiction, on the other hand, usually gets more action because the main characters are discontent and maybe even try to break out or revolt (imagine how a dystopia of your choice would read were it told entirely from the point of view of a completely conformist character). As utopias forestall conflict and fractures, they are “destined to surmount the fragmentation of the world and bring wholeness, integralite” (Elliott 1970, 67), and stability. In the case of utopian communities, the utopian vision has to contend without such a controlled space and faces an unstable, non-utopian reality. While, for example, people in More’s Utopia have already been trained to despise gold and other ostentatious displays of wealth for generations, a utopian community might struggle with its members having to modify their aesthetic preferences and their habits. They may be attacked or mocked for their non-normative lifestyle or tempted by memories of the comforts the ‘old’ system still offers. Thus, utopian communities cannot claim the same closure as the societies are drawn up in the utopian genre and utopian social theory. Correspondingly, narratives set in utopian communities feature conflict, which usually revolves around the contrast between a utopian vision and the uncontrolled non-utopian reality (including the existence of multiple utopian visions). Utopianism means to attempt radical difference. This radical difference is so grand that it amounts to totality—that is, a coherent social, economic, ecological, political order—which is ensured by closure. Attempt is, however, an important qualification. The ambiguity of the word utopia, with its two meanings an ever-shifting signifier, already suggests that the

5  In A Modern Utopia (1905), the British author H.G. Wells criticized utopian conventions, taking issue with their tendency to stasis and their flat characters in particular: “The utopia of a modern dreamer must needs differ in one fundamental aspect from the Nowhere and Utopias men planned before Darwin quickened the thought of the world. Those were all perfect and static States, a balance of happiness won for ever against the forces of unrest and disorder that inhere in things. … But the Modern Utopia must be not static but kinetic …. This is the first, most generalized difference between a Utopia based upon modern conceptions and all the Utopias that were written in the former time” (xvi).

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good place/no place is in constant negotiation6: utopianism is the attempt of conceiving a no place, something outside of what can be imagined. No such vision (literary or otherwise) is independent from the social, cultural, and political environment in which it was created. The supposed alternative system imagined reflects7 its historical context, is informed and bound by it. As with any play of the imagination, grand narratives (or master narratives, or metanarratives) prevail. Thus, utopianism must also be understood negatively for what it cannot do. The utopian imagination is always limited by “our imprisonment in a non-utopian present” and thus, utopias ultimately “reveal the ideological closure of the system in which we are somehow trapped and confined” (Jameson 2004, 46). Just like any other cultural production, utopias draw from their historical context and are informed by it. Approaching utopianism critically means to acknowledge, and to illustrate, utopia’s unintended relation to its historical context, tracing the limitations of the social dreaming set by the sociohistorical reality. Utopian authors have to navigate this issue when they discuss the evolvement of any utopian system, that is, how to embark upon “the road to utopia” (Roemer 1976, 58) from a non-utopian present with non-­ utopian people in it. Any utopia faces this rather ‘practical’ problem of where to start the transition: Which came first, the new subject that defecates on gold or the new system that furnishes golden chamber pots? The utopian chicken or the utopian egg? On a metafictional level, this transfers to the question of who can conceive of the good place, that is, the issue of the epistemic production of the utopia itself.8 In other words, one may ask 6  I myself could have never put it this smoothly and thank Kristina Baudemann for sharing this turn of phrase in a conversation. 7  To illustrate how utopias relate to the historical context of their creation, scholars like to draw on the image of the mirror. For example, Michel Foucault argues that utopias “have a general relation of direct or inverted analogy with the real space of Society. They present society itself in a perfected form, or else society turned upside down” (1967, 24). Lyman Tower Sargent writes that “utopia is a mirror to the present designed to bring out flaws, a circus or funfair mirror in reverse” (2010, xiii). 8  I develop this idea from various comments made by utopian scholars, specifically Dohra Ahmad, Antoine Hatzenberger, and Fredric Jameson. In Archaeologies of the Future, Jameson does not explicitly consider such self-referential commentary in literary utopias. However, his analysis of the symbolic closure in literary utopias implies that form and content are intertwined to the point where they stand in for one another: “to confront the way in which the secession of the Utopian imagination from everyday empirical Being takes the form of a temporal emergence and a historical transition, and in which the break that simultaneously secures the

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where the vision has originated: for example, with a king that pays heed to his learned councilmen (More 1516), within an entire nation as a result of industrialization (Bellamy 1888), by scientific discovery and genius (Hopkinson 2000;  Skinner 1948) or born out of the countercultural, green, and technophile scene of California (Callenbach 1975). Essentially, this is the question after who is truly visionary, who has the diegetic power to create a smoothly functioning society.9 Investigating utopian origins ultimately enquires into the mechanisms of utopian production, of how (far) it is possible to even imagine another society, to enter the imaginative utopian space and create the no place from a non-utopian present, to challenge the limits of the historically confined imagination. Regarding the subversive potential of utopian communities, contemporary cultural critics are often doubtful at best and issue warnings not to conflate ‘other’ with ‘subversive’ (Castro Varela and Dhawan 2006, 244; Franke 2013, 18; Harvey 2000, 185). In my experience, people outside of communal and utopian studies seem to be mildly fascinated by the topic but are quick to dismiss utopian practice as the ventures of unrealistic dreamers, or of susceptible fools, likely to fall into the hands of an authoritarian leader. Furthermore, those objecting to utopian communities often argue that utopianism exacerbates contemporary problems and nurtures the worst in the human psyche. In short: “Where utopia strives for perfection, then, it invites dystopia” (Claeys 2017, 277). The allegations range from impracticality, naivety, escapism, myopia, elitism, extreme power imbalances, and totalitarianism. These risks are, admittedly, abetted in part by the sectarian setup of many utopian communities. The very closure and totality that enable the utopian fantasy mechanism can easily be used for radical difference of the new Utopian society makes it impossible to imagine” (2005, 85–86, my emphasis). The secession that occurs in utopian narratives (such as the trench that created Utopia) then symbolizes the act of creating, that is, trying to imagine, the no place. A similar parallel is drawn by Antoine Hatzenberger in “Islands and Empire: Beyond the Shores of Utopia” (2003): “When reflecting on the question of the frontiers of utopia, it is necessary to engage with the problem of its limits—in the two senses of the term. Drawing the boundaries too sharply is indeed a way to avoid addressing some important difficulties intrinsic to the communication between a community and that which lies outside and to the implementation of principles of justice in international relations. Following the theorists who reflect today on how democracy can be better institutionalized on a global level, and on how to create a global citizenship, utopians should consider this possible opportunity for expanding the framework of utopia” (126). 9  I am here adapting metafictional theory, as developed, for example, by Linda Hutcheon (2013), Madelyn Jablon (1999), and Patricia Waugh (2003) to utopian studies.

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dystopian goals. Early European American examples would be the Salem witch trials, and the penalization of those putting forth unconventional visions such as Anne Hutchinson (1591–1643) and Thomas Morton (ca. 1580–1647). To people of the early twenty-first century, the idea of a total vision of course also evokes “the perverted, private utopias conceived in the minds of Stalin, Franco, Hitler, Mussolini, Mao, Hussein” (Pitzer 1997, 4). The general revival of utopianism and communalism from the 1960s onwards provides further examples of dystopian practice, as, to this day, the Manson Family, Jonestown, and the Branch Davidians under David Koresh evoke images of utopia gone very wrong. Indeed, there is a lot of evidence to corroborate the anti-utopian standpoint that any utopia is bound to create a dystopia; after all, More’s Utopia is built on slavery, colonialism, and oppression (Claeys 2017, 6–7). As will be illustrated throughout this book, the mistrust toward utopian communities has a long tradition. True, utopian communities are, just like other forms of utopianism, structurally part “of the system in which we are somehow trapped and confined,” to recall Jameson (2004, 46). They are “human constructs, and they are not free from human failing, and we must recognize that fact” (Sargent 2013, 71). On the other hand, categorically dismissing utopian communities may as well be “practical thinking which everywhere represents a capitulation to the system itself, and stands as a testimony to the power of that system” (Fitting 1998, 8). Given that utopianism relies on believing that radical alternatives can be imagined and even enacted, it is very susceptible to pessimism. A dominant discourse of ‘no alternatives’ (the inevitable Margaret Thatcher reference) precludes utopianism. For example, if human beings are understood to be incapable of anything better than the current system because they will always strive to abuse power, then, “it is difficult, if not impossible, even to imagine radical alternatives to the status quo” (Tally 2013, vii). Famously, Jameson once observed that “it seems to be easier for us today to imagine the thoroughgoing deterioration of the earth and of nature than the breakdown of late capitalism; perhaps this is due to some weakness in our imaginations” (Jameson 1994, xii). This ‘weakness’ seems fueled by denunciations of utopian discourse as unreasonable: “any challenge to the glories of the free market … is to be mercilessly put down or mocked out of existence. The power of these ideas lies, I suspect, at the core of our current sense of helplessness” (Harvey 2000, 154). As these discussions of utopianism in times of globalization illustrate, the production of utopian visions is vulnerable to

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assertions that there is no alternative: Utopian fantasy mechanisms are in this way highly sensitive to their historical context. Another common objection to utopian practice is that it is a prerogative of the privileged (see, e.g., Boal 2012, 185; Deloria 2002, 160; Hogan 1985, 38; Fred Turner 2013, 46). Practically speaking, utopian new beginnings in the United States were, if at all, more likely in the reach of those who had the means to acquire lands, housing, and other resources. One might presume that utopianism may not be as attractive for those that were discriminated on the grounds of race, class, or gender, and that they would rather turn to practical solutions and strive for equal rights instead of overturning the whole system.10 Yet, such assumptions need careful examination. They are, to a certain extent, based on a tautology. If we stipulate that only those who are privileged found utopian communities, then we will overlook any utopian communal practice that does not resemble the communities of the ‘privileged’ because some strategies are out of reach: such as renting or buying a large piece of land, setting up a range of new buildings, ‘dropping out’ of employment, experimenting with different approaches to education, or engaging in illegalized practices. Such a bias is particularly risky as one may even falsely conclude that those less privileged have no grand visions and do not express dissent and discontent through the choice of a different lifestyle—that the dissent of the ‘Other’ is reactionary, while the dissent of a heterosexual White middle class is visionary. Only relatively recently, researchers have begun to unpack this privilege paradigm of communal/utopian studies.11 Utopian 10  A related oversight can be observed in literary and cultural studies, which took considerable time to acknowledge futurisms and utopianisms in African American and Native American literature, for instance. 11  Early exceptions to the erasure of Black utopian practice are Zora Neale Hurston’s posthumously published study on Africatown (2018), Sadie Smathers Patton’s The Kingdom of the Happy Land (1957) on the settlement of that name (1865–ca. 1900), Promiseland by Elizabeth Rauh Bethel (1981) on Promiseland, South Carolina (1870–ongoing), and William H.  Pease and Jane H.  Pease’s Black Utopia: Negro Communal Experiments in America (1963). For more recent studies on utopian practice outside of the White privilege paradigm consider, for example, Melvin Patrick Ely’s Israel on the Appomattox: A Southern Experiment in Black Freedom from the 1790s through the Civil War (2005). Charles Price et al. (2008) have discussed the Ghost Dance movement, the Rastafari, and the long-durée Maya movement as utopian. The collection West of Eden: Communes and Utopia in Northern California (2012) includes an essay that views the Occupation of Alcatraz by a pan-Indigenous group of activists as utopian practice (Stone 2012), while another considers the communalism of the Black Panthers (Spencer 2012). Nele Sawallisch (2016) touches upon the

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communities by marginalized groups do exist but may struggle even more with monetary limitations and face systemic violence. One question to be addressed by utopian psychology is who decides to access utopian space (mentally or in practice) and why they do so or choose not to do so. Assertions that utopianism is an exclusive prerogative of the privileged initiate a circular reasoning that excludes subjects from the historical context, and that has led to an oversight of utopianisms that challenge precisely these exclusionary mechanisms. To undermine the elitist notions regarding utopianism necessitates including forms of utopian practice that may only loosely resemble the utopian communal movements popular in the 1820s, the 1840s, or the 1960s. For example, Daniel O.  Sayers’s (2014) pioneer archaeological research on maroon communities (i.e., communities that consist largely of people that have escaped slavery, and their descendants) in the Great Dismal Swamp (North Carolina/Virginia) suggests that these communities may be regarded as utopian: “they formed permanent or long-term communities that collectively were the core social elements of a heretofore underrecognized social world and related mode of production” (2014, 4), contributing to “thoughtful and influential transformational social resistance” (2014, 5). In addition, in an effort to utilize communal practices for the advantage of Black people in the United States, abolitionists founded intentional communities to educate African Americans, most of them enslaved or formerly enslaved, to provide them with competitive skills for the (racially rigged) economies of the United States or Canada, and some of these projects were continued and expanded under the leadership of Black people (Pease and Pease 1963; Sargent 2020). The issue of how privilege or the absence of it influences the utopian psyche is a field still largely unexamined, to which this book offers a small contribution. It discusses two African American novels and one work by a White female working-class author. Furthermore, each chapter pays attention to the respective novel’s stance regarding the accessibility of the described utopian enclaves and the utopian fantasy mechanisms at work. subject in her work on Black people moving to Canada in the nineteenth century, for example, by discussing the Dawn settlement in Ontario (founded 1841). Very recently, Lyman Tower Sargent (2020) has compiled an extensive overview of African American utopianisms, including utopian practice, which may provide a useful starting point for those who want to contribute further to the field. Freedmen’s towns and settlements by Exodusters certainly merit further investigation and discussion, and such research will likely yield more examples of African American utopian practice.

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Given the modern European and imperialistic entanglements of utopianism, it would of course be a crass Eurocentric and imperial act to frame any vision of a better place as a utopia.12 Drawing on the definitions provided above, utopian terminology should be applied to texts and practices that envision a complete, nonexistent society, set within a closed space that is intentionally organized in a matter that, in many respects, makes the daily life of the voluntary inhabitants appear radically different. A naturalization of the alignment of White, male, US American, and utopian, is to be rejected: such tacitly assumed correlations that exclude all other groups from utopia have to be made visible whenever possible in order to challenge the underlying grand narratives that maintain the dominance of these groups and categories to the present day. The utopian genre has been a popular tool for White female authors. From early modernity onward well-known utopias, critical utopias, and dystopias were authored by women making the case for (more) equal treatment: for example, Margaret Cavendish’s The Blazing World (1666); Sarah Scott’s A Description of Millennium Hall (1762); Mary E. Bradley Lane’s Mizora (1880–1881); Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland (1915); Joana Russ’s The Female Man (1975); Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1986) (Johns 2010). The recently unleashed mass of dystopian young adult fiction with its emphasis on female protagonists and gender roles is epitomized by Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games (2008–2010) and the popular serialization of Atwood’s dystopia. Utopian literature thus appears to have contributed to the space for the “imaginative speculation necessary for generating new liberating strategies” (Johns 2010, 176), for empowering women and groups suppressed on the grounds of their non-conformity to gender norms—within the limits of the mechanisms of utopian production discussed above. However, when it comes to the transition to utopia via utopian practice, female rights may be championed according to the community’s intention while often non-utopian gender roles remain entrenched, highlighting the power of the master narratives of the patriarchy—an issue that will be addressed again in subsequent chapters.13 12  For this reason, I am reluctant to haphazardly apply a utopian framework to Native American settlements here without an alternative genealogy. I offer some small tentative suggestions on the complicated relationship between Native American cultures and utopianism in Chaps. 6 and 8. There, I am also pointing to scholars who have more fruitfully pondered the issue. 13  There are, of course, exceptions to this observation: Feminist utopian communities do exist. Those in the Womyn’s Land network, for example, are exclusively female.

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Conversely, utopian novels are authored disproportionally by White writers, and most canonical examples of utopian literature were written by White authors. In May 2020, Sargent’s (ever expanding) online bibliography of “Utopian Literature in English” listed 4858 titles by US American authors (presumably White), well over 300 of which were published in the time span that this book is concerned with. By contrast, the bibliography lists just under 170 works by African American authors, only ten of which were written in the long nineteenth century. It only includes a little over thirty utopias by Native American writers, of which only one was published in the nineteenth century. Utopian literature by Asian American, Latinx, or Arab American authors, for example, features even more sparsely in this list.14 Pavla Veselá (2011) suggests that this unequal distribution is a result of the racism that figures in many widely regarded representatives of the utopian genre: “racial inequality has been a burning issue since the arrival of European settlers, yet it was not until the mid-twentieth century that the majority of utopias openly engaged the topic. Until then, they had prioritized class and gender tensions within the white race, describing white, or white supremacist, societies devoid of racial tensions and conflicts” (270). Thus, maybe, the genre was less attractive for those commonly written out of these visions. Indeed, in many widely read utopian novels authored by White writers, the color line, that is to say, racism, constitutes one of the limits to the utopian imagination. In this way, the genre reflects an ideology of White supremacy. For example, the developmentalism of Bellamy’s utopias “flattens out cultural difference and … its utilitarian calculus figures racial purification as an aspect of progress” (Ahmad 2009, 6). While there are no Black people in the future Boston of Looking Backward (1888), Bellamy argues in its sequel, Equality (1897), 14  These numbers only serve to indicate a trend. For one, the extensive bibliography does not claim completeness. Second, it cannot factor out the racial bias of the publishing industry and archives. Third, while nationalities, as well as ethnic minorities, are listed as categories, there is no category for White, or any comparable denomination, implying White to be synonymous with US American. This connects to point number four: the author (or the ethnicity of the author) of some of the works included may be unknown and so she/he would be listed as US American. Nonetheless, the extreme disparity indicates that utopia is a genre dominated by White people, especially when considering that Lyman Tower Sargent deliberately applies a rather broad definition of utopia for this bibliography. Corroborating these findings, Kenneth Roemer describes a similar trend at the end of the nineteenth century: looking at a sample of roughly two hundred utopian texts, he observes that the authors, “with few exceptions … were Protestant, native American, white, male, and middle-aged (about fifty-years old in 1894)” (1976, 9).

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“that blacks should have economic equality, but ‘the new system involved no more commingling of races than the old one’” (Roemer 1976, 70). However, while prominently known examples reproduced or obfuscated racism, and the history of utopianism is closely entwined with European colonialism (to be discussed below), the genre was also employed to reconsider the conception of race itself (Shelby and Gilroy 2008, 119). Recently, scholars have begun to acknowledge more and more works by non-White authors, particularly in the context of Afrofuturisms: Sutton E. Griggs’s literary oeuvre, Of One Blood by Pauline Hopkins (1903), and Samuel R. Delany’s famous Trouble on Triton: An Ambiguous Heterotopia (1976), to name just a few prolific African American engagements with the utopian genre. Others, such as Edward A. Johnson’s Light Ahead for the Negro (1904) and Robert Sherman Tracy’s The White Man’s Burden: A Satirical Forecast (published 1915 under the pseudonym T.  Shirby Hodge; the author was, to my knowledge, White, yet the work is set in Africa and takes an anti-racist stand) still await wider academic attention. Utopias constructed from Black experiences are therefore an important addition to the de-colonialization of utopian space, to the investigation of racial biases and to tracing its relation to the utopian imagination. The novels by Griggs and Du Bois, discussed below, offer further insight into how genre and race intersect. Despite the long (and expandable) list of anti-utopian arguments, in times of utopian enthusiasm there were cases in which utopian fiction and utopian theory were hardly distinguishable, and seemingly fantastic narratives inspired attempts to realize their visions: Charles Fourier’s elaborations of an absurdly paradisiac world, including new species and interplanetary harmony, inspired a whole wave of Fourierist communities, so-called Phalansteries/Phalanxes, in the middle of the nineteenth century; while the Icarians adhered to Étienne Cabet’s Travels in Icaria (1840); A Traveler from Altruria, 1892–1893, by William Dean Howells, lies at the basis of the founding of Altruria, California (1894–1896); toward the end of the nineteenth century, people joined in Bellamite societies after having read Bellamy’s Looking Backward (1888); and Skinner’s Walden Two (1948) inspired the foundation of multiple communities, for example, the Twin Oaks Community (1967–present). All these instances of utopian practice (and there are many more) illustrate the attraction of immediately realizing utopian visions, and the (ongoing) belief that the United States offered the ideal conditions to do so.

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‘In the Beginning, All the World Was America’: European Origins of US American Utopianism The United States are, of course, no ideal place, nor does rampant capitalism, wealth inequality, and the resulting oligarchy represent what most nineteenth-century utopists had in mind when they used the term ‘utopia.’ Instead, their ideas revolved either around creating a community that enabled its members to lead a ‘godly’ life, and/or around a more equitable distribution of wealth, better living conditions, and uplift of the working class. To that end, they sought to use resources and labor communally— hence the moniker “utopian socialism” that Friedrich Engels (1877) bestowed upon this group—running the gamut from joint stock companies to co-ops to the abolishment of private property. However, utopianism has far-reaching connections with the modern nation-state in general, and the United States in particular. For one, utopia’s closure mirrors the imaginary coherence of the modern nation, the “geographical secession specified as a racial uniqueness” (Jameson 2005, 19). Similar discourses on closure “have been key in utopian visions of national sovereignty” (Roberts and Stephens 2013, 4). Indeed, multiple scholars hold that More’s Utopia, “an insula, a world apart, an enclosed and bordered social, political, and cultural totality, forms the basis of both a Utopian and an emerging English social and cultural identity” (Wegner 2002, 55; see also Knapp 1994). The emergence of the utopian genre marked the “changing relationship between space and community during the ‘long revolution’ of Western modernity” (Wegner 2002, xv), helping to construct “a sort of homogeneous space within which a cognizable communitarian identity is inscribed, thus forming a sort of imagined totality and, with it, a nation-state” (Tally 2013, 3). This recalls Benedict Anderson’s definition of the nation as an imagined community, “imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign” (1983, 6). In the mid-twentieth century, prominent scholars of American studies were very much occupied with investigating what constituted this ‘imagined community’ of the US American nation, attempting to trace the history of “a unified and compelling vision of the total American experience” (Slotkin 1973, 19). Proposing that certain narratives have been favored and repeated in order to form this vision, they sought to outline a “special and identifying ‘myth’” (Lewis 1955, 3) of the United States, well aware that these myths are gross generalizations woven into a national narrative.

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Remarkably, many of these influential academics equated utopia with the United States as if it were self-evident. The works of, for instance, Jean Baudrillard (1989), Sacvan Bercovitch (1975), R.W.B. Lewis (1955), Leo Marx (1964), Richard Slotkin (1973), and Henry Nash Smith (1950), among others, showcase that within narratives of a ‘total American experience’ reverberates the conviction that the United States are exceptional because they are utopian—both, already radically different as well as capable of realizing even more utopian visions, a conviction that this book aims to unpack. For example, Jean Baudrillard claims that sects make “the move towards an achieved utopia” (1989, 90), and then goes on to argue that “the important point is that the whole of America is preoccupied with [sects, for their] immediate demand for beatification, [and] its material efficacity [sic]” (Baudrillard 1989, 90–91). Apparently deeply convinced of United States’ exceptionalism, he sees utopia in the United States as characterized by the attempt to realize utopia (whereas the Europeans only think utopian). “America, by contrast, draws the logical, pragmatic consequences from everything that can possibly be thought. … it gets on with turning things into material realities” (Baudrillard 1989, 97–98). The United States are then “the culture which dared to forge right ahead and, by a theatrical masterstroke, turn those values into reality, [the] society which, thanks to the geographical and mental break effected by emigration, allowed itself to imagine it could create an ideal world from nothing” (Baudrillard 1989, 77). In this, a total utopian and national grand narrative completely erases dystopian realities of displacement and genocide. Baudrillard’s detailing of the utopianism of the United States epitomizes the common denominator of studies from the twentieth century that claim that the United States, inspired by the break with Europe, envision themselves as the place where utopias can be put into practice, in which an ‘ideal world’ can be formed ‘from nothing.’ According to this narrative, the United States offer space to realize utopian visions, and as a nation continuously come closer to becoming a good place. These depictions of the United States as utopian construct a historical narrative that favors a normative, Eurocentric, and White perspective, focusing on White European settlers and their descendants. The utopian history of the United States is comprised of material suitable for this purpose, while all topics unfit—such as genocide, slavery, Civil War, and capitalistic exploitation— are discarded in favor of a utopian, US American telos (Paul 2014, 12).

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Consequently, this book offers a short overview of the utopian undercurrents of these popular national myths and their historical cornerstones that must precede the discussion on how the different novels on utopian practice accepted, modified, challenged, utilized, and shaped these myths. Even before the United States were founded, even before colonial settlers arrived in any significant numbers in North America, the European colonial imagination had prepared the ground for the United States’ utopianism. The history of utopianism is closely linked to the Age of Discovery, and to European overseas colonialism. More wrote his Utopia shortly after Europeans found out about the ‘New World.’ In England, utopian imagery in literature helped to incite interest for the expansion of the British Empire in the New World (Knapp 1994). Indeed, the “birth of Utopian fiction in the early modern era is an event not only ‘contemporary with,’ but also ‘inseparable from,’ the beginnings of overseas colonization” (Balasopoulos 2004, 3). On the supposedly ‘untouched’ canvas of lands hitherto unknown in Europe, the prospective colonizers projected their utopian longings: Thus, the “New World was ‘invented’ by Europeans rather than ‘discovered’ by them. … Whatever version of the Utopian dream Europeans embraced … these ideas were imposed on the New World landscape, and upon its aboriginal population, with little regard for stubborn facts” (Guarneri 1994, 73). The Americas were imagined to be outside of history, and to provide the chance to start over. Famously, “in the beginning, all the world was America” (Locke 1764, 237). America, secluded from Europe geographically, and presumably devoid of its own history (and corruption), offered ideal utopian conditions. Such discursive impositions appear, for example, in More’s Utopia (1516), Edmund Spencer’s The Faerie Queene (1590–1596), William Shakespeare’s The Tempest (1611), and Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis (1627) (Knapp 1994).15 Depictions of imaginary good places idealized the lands to be explored and colonized, toyed with the attraction of a new start for the colonizers, and exercised arguments for modern-day colonialism. For instance, More’s Utopia was conquered by Utopos, who then 15  On the subject of such projections, I recommend Jeffrey Knapp’s An Empire Nowhere: England, America, and Literature from Utopia to The Tempest (1994) and Antonis Balasopoulos’s “Unworldly Worldliness: America and the Trajectories of Utopian Expansionism” (2004), as well as Dejal Kadir’s Columbus and the Ends of the Earth (1992). For an insightful discussion of later English utopian visions (from the eighteenth and early nineteenth century) and how they influence the stylization of the United States consult Wil Verhoeven’s Americomania and the French Revolution Debate in Britain, 1789–1802 (2013).

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enforces his vision on the native population, and, when the island is overpopulated, utopians are by (their own) law allowed to overtake lands “where the inhabitants have much waste and unoccupied ground” (More 1516, 109), imposing their order on them so “that the ground which before was neither good nor profitable for the one nor for the other is now sufficient and fruitful enough for them both” (More 1516, 110). If the native population does not want the Utopian system imposed on them, the Utopians “drive them out of those bounds which they have limited and appointed out for themselves” (ibid.). Of course, this idea of a vacuum domicilium or terra nullius recalls the discourses of British as well as US American expansionism: “the expropriation of native American land [appealed] to a logic that is Utopian both in its visualization of desirable territory as a legally uninhabited non-place and in its direct evocation of Utopia’s ideal colonialism” (Balasopoulos 2004, 6; see also Knapp 1994, 21). Early modern literary utopias thus conceive of a system that is simultaneously homogeneous, closed, and expandable (without having to compromise its internal systemic totality)—a modern nation-state and empire. Some early reports on North America employed comparable utopian strategies. Motivated by financial interests, texts by English travelers, such as Arthur Barlowe (1584), Thomas Hariot (1588), and Thomas Morton (1637) described American lands as positively prelapsarian (see also the selection of texts in Bercovitch 1975, 137–138). The paradisiac imagery is, however, ultimately earthbound, as these reports urged trade and settlement, that is, the establishment of worldly institutions and social structures. Underlining the utopian potential of the continent, these accounts gave favorable descriptions of the civilizations which they encountered while stressing their fundamental difference to European society. In their otherworldliness, the Indigenous populations are presented as utopian, as an example of the benefits of American lands. Thus, for the colonizers, the North American continent was the space enabling “a renewal of physical and sexual vigor, of the power of the heart and of sentiment, achieved through a return to a more ‘natural,’ less civilizedly ‘corrupt’ mode of life” (Slotkin 1973, 29). At the same time, Native Americans were depicted as soon-to-be vanished or, following the terra nullius argument as exercised by More’s utopians, as not adequately cultivating the land. The Indigenous population was either said to be small and dwindling (Morton 1637, 133–134), or as easily missionized and colonized, or, as in the Massachusetts Bay Colony seal, as even begging for help. Either way, these

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representations demarcated North American Indigenous populations as little obstacle to European colonial settlement. From the seventeenth century onward, the Americas gained popularity in England as an “actual and imaginary space in which to create both practicing and literary experiments” (Moylan 1986, 3). As Moylan summarizes utopianism in colonial North America: “For social experimenters such as the Puritans, for entrepreneurs such as fur trappers and slavers and merchants, and for writers of travel narratives and utopian novels, the Americas especially offered space in which the imagination could work out alternatives that broke the bounds of the historical status quo” (1986, 3–4). Not only, then, has utopianism shaped the discourse on America since colonial times; attempts to realize utopian visions “have mushroomed in the fertile ground of America” (Balasopoulos 2004, 3). Hence, “communal living is a venerable part of the America past, a patchwork fabric … that has been continuously present in one venue or another since the seventeenth century” (Miller 2002b, 327). The New World attracted religious settlements that followed their utopian vision of a human-made, ideal place “in which the spiritual and the mundane were inseparably joined” (Engler et al. 2002, 1). While their aim was the millennium—they believed that their practice would help to bring about/prepare for the second coming of Christ and the transformation of the entire world—their plans nonetheless qualify as utopian because they outlined a man-made systematic structure, abandoning Europe in order to set up and realize a potential “Promised Land in this world, not the next: The Promised Land could be realized—in the near future, and in America” (Paul 2014, 159). The most famous of these settlements is without a doubt the Puritan Massachusetts Bay Colony. The Puritan settlements are frequently argued to be the inspiration for later US utopianism (regardless of historical contradictions, such as the considerable non-separatist strand of New England Puritanism), with John Winthrop’s famous sermon, known as “A Modell of Christian Charity” (1630), and its image of a city upon a hill—the failure/success of which may determine the fate of the Christian world—a case in point (see, e.g., Castilho 2006, 111; Hogan 1985, 47; Moylan 1986, 3–4; Sargent 2010, 56; Yale 2000). Merry Mount, John Eliot’s Praying Towns, the Mennonite Commonwealth, and The Society of Friends (aka Quakers) provide further examples for utopian practice in colonial America, often spurred by fear of religious persecution and the desire to live as their faith dictated. This notion of Exodus, and hence of

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being a chosen people, inspires early notions of exceptionalism that may have carried over into the US American national narrative. Much scholarship foregrounds the Puritans because they appear to have been most influential; their “demographic success, out of all proportion to their original migration numbers, gave a peculiar cast to the northern British colonies” (Shammas 2008, 39; see also Bercovitch 1975; Landsman 2008, 87; Paul 2014, 159), which in turn explains their ubiquity in much US historiography and in arguments in favor of the nation’s utopian past. Secular groups of the time also sought to put to practice their visions of a better world. Bercovitch argues that the more ‘worldly’ settlers, especially in the South, lacked the Puritan emphasis on providence and the fulfillment of scripture prophecy and were therefore even more decidedly utopian: “The Southern myth was essentially utopian … it mingled the euphoria of Renaissance exploration with the secular aspirations of classical and medieval Europe. Like More’s Utopia, it offered a probable basis for natural and rational progress, emphatically outside the realm of revelation” (1975, 137). Thus, while some North American settler colonies were engaged in millennialism that results in utopian practice, others could be viewed as standing at the beginning of a secular, and economically inspired, tradition of utopianism. The Mid-Atlantic region in particular attracted a diverse range of settlers in the late seventeenth century with economic prospects (Landsman 2008, 87–88); for them, the opportunities offered by cheap land and social mobility—not necessarily communalism or religious life—constituted a good place, possibly even radically different from their countries of origin. America was therefore a promising destination and became for some the ‘probable basis’ for a good place to be realized, or at least approximated. The various colonial settlements are often taken as the origin of the alleged utopianism of the United States. In fact, they were claimed as ancestors in spirit by dominant political camps in the United States as soon as the 1790s (Kelleter 2002, 620). They stylized these settlements as an example of the ‘glorious contrast’ between North America and Europe. America in this way was imagined as the utopian pendant to Europe, and the founding of the United States the logical result of this relationship. The budding nation then had a history as a good place long in the making, and the colonies were “a concrete embodiment of what had been in Europe but a utopian dream” (Smith 1950, 130). Refashioned European utopian fantasies of America, combined with arguments for separation and

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a new start, also inform the discourse of the American Revolution, as the next chapter illustrates in more detail. From the late eighteenth century onwards, a host of texts—speeches, political treatises, historical tracts, geographical accounts, magazine articles, novels—on the United States declared in some way or another the utopian-ness of the United States. The colonial period as well as the American Enlightenment, John Winthrop’s city upon a hill, Thomas Jefferson’s agrarian vision, “the evangelicals’ ‘redeemer nation,’ expansionists’ ‘manifest destiny,’ and immigrants’ ‘promised land’ all referred to the same place” (Guarneri 1994, 73; a similar list in Roemer 1981). All of these are linked in a discourse of the ‘Utopian States of America,’ in the assertion that the United States is defined by an “American dream of a better world, now” (Yale 2000). As the proceeding chapters will demonstrate, this utopian national narrative crucially informs and circumscribes utopian production in the United States. Revolutions and civil wars draw attention to the fragility of empires and nations, in particular if the uprising was successful. Thus, American Independence brought with it a peculiar problem: how to contain attempts at secession that the American Revolution, religious separatists, pioneers, and economic adventurers may inspire. Strengthening the imaginary community by defining what makes an ‘American’ was an urgent task and has produced countless studies since. The building blocks of this national identity are likely familiar to most. In his Letters from an American Farmer (1782), J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur (1735–1813) asked “What is an American” a question that was belabored by many twentieth-century critics and placed “at the starting point of a uniquely ‘American’ Literary tradition, using the famous question … and the utopian impulse that prompts it to codify that tradition” (Goddu 1997, 26). The resulting US American exceptionalism, expressed in national narratives or national ‘myths,’ links itself closely to utopianism. The following chapters will detail how utopianism surfaces in multifaceted ways in various discourses of the nation during its first century, and gesture to one way in which the US American national narrative in the nineteenth and the twentieth century contained dissent. Colonial utopists, the American Revolution, pioneers, and the romanticized imagery typically associated with the frontier and so-called virgin land, all stand in for new beginnings that will eventually become part of the United States. These narratives thus plot a national trajectory. That is, the road to a radical good place in these paradigms

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always leads to the United States, the utopian imagination having a national telos. Historical and sociological studies on US communalism have been conducted at least since 1870, when John Humphrey Noyes, founder of the Oneida16 community, published the records of A.J. Macdonald, who had “took upon himself the task of making a book that should give future generations the benefit of the lessons taught by these attempts and failures” (Noyes 1870, 2). Over recent decades, scholars have examined the historical entanglements of the United States and utopianism more critically (Ahmad 2009; Guarneri 1991, 1994; Wegner 2002) and pointed out how the discourse of the United States as exceptional and utopian serves to maintain the nation’s integrality, in spite of internal diversity and dissent. As will become evident at multiple points throughout this book, the bridge between utopia and the United States is built of dubious, but powerful, ideas of exceptionalism, strengthening the imagined national community and justifying its imperialist expansion. Specifically, the connection between the national narrative and utopian practice within the United States still necessitates theorization. As Sargent acknowledged, “It is more difficult to connect intentional communities to national identity than utopian literature” (2007, 100). On the one hand, the formation of intentional communities appears to be a symptom of dissent, the failure of the ‘mainstream’ culture of the United States “to fulfil its promise of satisfaction and gratification” (Hutchinson 2008, 36). On the other hand, the communalists themselves and/or authors or scholars framed this symptom as an expression of the general national narrative, “Utopias as alternative, ‘true’ versions of the American dream, contrary in 16  Oneida (1848–1881) was a religious utopian community in New York, famous for practicing a system of regimented polygamy called ‘Complex Marriage’ and a eugenic breeding program (stirpiculture) which scandalized outsiders. As accounts of members illustrate, John Humphrey Noyes was a manipulative leader, his teachings were a gateway for sexual exploitation, and members were subject to various powerplays by him and other leading members: see, for example, Victor Hawley’s (1843–1893) dairy, or Tirzah Miller’s (1843–1902) memoir, both published and discussed by Robert S. Fogarty under the titles Special Love/Special Sex (1994), and Desire and Duty at Oneida (2000), respectively. On the other hand, Oneida granted all members the right to refuse sexual advances, had men and women participate in its communal industry, propagated birth control via male continence, organized childcare communally and emphasized adult education. I recommend the useful compilation of primary materials Free Love in Utopia: John Humphrey Noyes and the Origin of the Oneida Community (2001) by George Noyes and Lawrence Foster. Of course, interested readers should also consider John Humphrey Noyes’s own writings.

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some fundamental ways to dominant social norms yet also faithful in essence to national ideals” (Guarneri 1994, 73): “all reflected the American dream of a better world, now,” “from the first Puritan settlements to the communes of the 1960s” (Yale 2000). The common denominator that utopian communities and the United States allegedly have is drawn directly from popular constructions of the exceptionality of the United States, as the separatism of such groups is seen as part of the general utopianism of the United States: “Of all the freedoms for which America stood, none was more significant for history than the freedom to experiment with new practices and new institutions” (Bestor 1950, 1), leading to the impression that “the history of the United States is in some respects the chronicle of a contest of overlapping, competing perfectionist experiments. … Virtually all have claimed a unique ability to realize, reform, criticize, or supplant the one big Utopia: America itself” (Guarneri 1994, 73–74). Thus, referrals to exceptionalism occur in various studies of utopian communities in the United States. Along this line of thinking, utopian visions and attempts at their realization are not in conflict with a dominant cultural and societal order. On the contrary, utopian practice and dissent are in this way aligned and consolidated into a national US American narrative. Regarding intentional communities, this exceptionalism can be seen as inspiring such attempts to realize utopia, as a motivation to venture to set up the good place in a distinctly national space, while it at the same time regulates the utopian imagination. This alignment of intentional communities with the nation, effectively reinforcing the idea of a national trajectory of utopian practice, understates and obscures the intentions of many utopists in the United States. Their plans, and their dissent, were often much grander: the utopian socialists, for example, set out to change the social, economic, political, and cultural system of the nation, and even eventually the world. In his studies on Fourierism in the United States, Carl J.  Guarneri points out that the potential inclusion of utopian communities, especially once dissolved, into a homogenized national narrative, renders them “‘minor tributaries’ in the course of American social development” (1994, 72). This project is hardly the place to evaluate whether this is the cause for the struggles of utopian communities, struggles certainly not unique to utopian practice in the United States. However, by downplaying the extent of their dissent, the national narrative of the United States as exceptional and utopian is reinforced. Many communities, especially prominent examples from the nineteenth century, meant to inspire radical change by serving as

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models for others. To them, utopian practice was no mode of individualistic escapism but an attempt to shape the society in their close proximity, the nation, and eventually the world. This intention to function as an internally coherent entity that leads by example relates the communities back to the nation and even hints at an expansionist logic. Utopian fantasy mechanisms and national framework thus were in sync and at odds. Researching this relationship is “not to reproduce the equation of America and utopia, and even the nationalistic organization of American Studies” (Ahmad 2009, 10), but to make visible the makings of the link between utopia and the United States.

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Sayers, Daniel O. 2014. A Desolate Place for a Defiant People. The Archaeology of Maroons, Indigenous Americans, and Enslaved Laborers in the Great Dismal Swamp. Gainesville: University Press of Florida; Society for Historical Archaeology. Scott, Sarah. [1762] 1995. A Description of Millennium Hall. Edited by Gary Kelly. Peterborough: Broadview. Shakespeare, William. [1611] 2011. The Tempest. Edited by Virginia Mason Vaughan and Alden T. Vaughan. London: Arden. Shammas, Carole. 2008. The Origins of Transatlantic Colonization. In A Companion to Colonial America, ed. Daniel Vickers, 25–43. Hoboken: Wiley-Blackwell. Shelby, Tommie, and Paul Gilroy. 2008. Cosmopolitanism, Blackness, and Utopia. Transition 98: 116–135. Skinner, B.F. [1948] 2005. Walden Two. Indianapolis: Hackett. Slotkin, Richard. [1973] 1996. Regeneration through Violence. The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600–1860. New York: Harper Perennial. Smith, Henry Nash. [1950] 1971. Virgin Land. The American West as Symbol and Myth. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Soja, Edward W. 1996. Thirdspace. Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-And-­ Imagined Places. Oxford: Blackwell. Spencer, Edmund. [1590–1596] 1987. The Faerie Queene. Edited by Thomas P. Roche. London: Penguin. Spencer, Robyn C. 2012. Communalism and the Black Panther Party in Oakland, California. In West of Eden: Communes and Utopia in Northern California, ed. Iain A. Boal, 92–121. Oakland: PM. Stone, Janferie. 2012. Occupied Alcatraz: Native American Community and Activism. In West of Eden: Communes and Utopia in Northern California, ed. Iain A. Boal, 81–91. Oakland: PM. Tally, Robert T., Jr. 2013. Utopia in the Age of Globalization. Space, Representation, and the World-System. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Turner, Fred. 2013. The Politics of the Whole circa 1968—and Now. In The Whole Earth: California and the Disappearance of the Outside, ed. Haus der Kulturen der Welt, 43–48. Berlin: Sternberg Press. Van Bueren, Thad M., and Sarah A. Tarlow. 2006. The Interpretive Potential of Utopian Settlements. Historical Archaeology 40 (1): 1–5. Vannini, Philipp, et  al. 2009. Recontinentalizing Canada: Arctic Ice’s Liquid Modernity and the Imagining of a Canadian Archipelago. Island Studies Journal 4 (2): 121–138. Verhoeven, Will. 2013. Americomania and the French Revolution Debate in Britain, 1789–1802. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Veselá, Pavla. 2011. Neither Black Nor White: The Critical Utopias of Sutton E. Griggs and George S. Schuyler. Science Fiction Studies 38 (2): 270–287.

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Vieira, Fátima. 2010. The Concept of Utopia. In The Cambridge Companion to Utopian Literature, ed. Gregory Claeys, 3–27. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Waugh, Patricia. 2003. Metafiction. The Theory and Practice of Self-Conscious Fiction. London: Routledge. Wegner, Phillip E. 2002. Imaginary Communities. Utopia, the Nation, and the Spatial Histories of Modernity. Berkeley: University of California Press. Wells, H.G. [1905] 1967. A Modern Utopia. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Williams, Raymond. [1980] 2005. Culture and Materialism. Selected Essays. London and New York: Verso. Winthrop, John. [1630] 1838. A Modell of Christian Charity: Written on Board of the Arabella, On the Atlantic Ocean. Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society 3 (7): 31–48. Yale University Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. 2000. America and the Utopian Dream. http://brbl-archive.library.yale.edu/exhibitions/utopia/ index.html. Accessed 28 June 2020.

CHAPTER 3

‘Idle Speculation’ and Utopian Practice: Gilbert Imlay’s The Emigrants (1793)

Here you may appropriate your talents for the benefit of mankind, and not waste them in idle speculation—here you will find a new creation bursting from the shades of wildness into a populous state;—and here is the country were the foundation must be laid for the renovation of those privileges, which have decayed under the influence of the most capricious and violent despotism. (Imlay 1793, 1:102)

If utopia and nation are as closely related as observed in the previous chapters, the question of the subversive potential of utopianism arises. With utopian discourse informing arguments for the American Revolution and for the nation’s expansion west across the North American continent, could the call to start the world anew provoke new beginnings in conflict with the new nation? In other words, is there a destabilizing risk included in the US American entanglement of national and utopian discourse? Gilbert Imlay’s The Emigrants—published in 1793, four years after the ratification of the US constitution—illustrates that there indeed is a peril inherent in the discursive link between utopia and the United States, already detectable while the nation was still in the process of formation. Imlay’s The Emigrants revolves around the future members of a utopian community. In seventy-three letters, the novel relates the story of an

© The Author(s) 2020 V. Adamik, In Search of the Utopian States of America, Palgrave Studies in Utopianism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-60279-6_3

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English family, the T—ns, who in the years 1783–17851 move to the Ohio River Valley (close to the Ohio River Falls in what would become Kentucky in 1792)2 to flee the repercussions of bankruptcy in Britain. Central to the narrative is a love story between Caroline T—n and a veteran of the American Revolutionary War, Captain James Arl—ton. They fall in love when her family sets out to cross the Allegheny Mountains, but a series of misunderstandings threatens the budding romance between the American captain and the young English woman. Eventually, Arl—ton saves a half-­ naked Caroline from Native American captivity and they confess their tender feelings for one another. By the end of the novel they are married and living in Bellefont, a town which Arl—ton and other military men have set up according to their political ideals.3 This community adds another layer to the novel’s title: Caroline’s family are not the only emigrants of the story. Bellefont is set up in a way that suggests that the community has no intention to become part of the United States, making all its members emigrants from the United States. Gilbert Imlay’s (1754–1828) work and life have only recently started to draw academic interest, chiefly thanks to the detailed biographical work conducted by the transatlantic scholar Wil Verhoeven, in which he elaborates how Imlay served “as an interface between figures of much greater historical significance [whose] diverse and often mutually exclusive ideas and ambitions, dreams and schemes he frequently borrowed and then disseminated across continents and across the Atlantic” (2008, 1). Indeed, Imlay rubbed shoulders with renowned persons in the North American 1  Dates according to Verhoeven and Gilroy (1998, 299). Descriptions in the novel are not always quite accurate. For example, Imlay understates the duration it would take settlers to venture to the west (Verhoeven and Gilroy 1998, 267), downplays the risk of Native American attacks (Verhoeven and Gilroy 1998, 269), and is overly optimistic regarding the price and availability of land (Verhoeven and Gilroy 1998, 282). He also omits that some of the back-settlements that the emigrants pass through (e.g., Louisville) were far from developed at the time that the novel plays (Verhoeven and Gilroy 1998, 288–289) and he never hints that Kentucky, by the time that the novel was published, had become a state of the United States. Other references to contemporary political events, institutions, or personae in the United States and Great Britain are likewise strikingly absent. 2  Formerly a county of Virginia, Kentucky was divided into three Virginian counties at the time that The Emigrants takes place; Imlay, however, omits any references to the era being an already more or less organized part of the United States. 3  The federal government lacked sufficient funds to repay those who had served in the French and Indian War (1754–1763) and the Revolutionary War (1775–1783) and granted officers land at the western frontier as remuneration.

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colonies and the infant United States such as pioneer Daniel Boone (1734–1820), patriot and politician Colonel Henry ‘Light-Horse Harry’ Lee III (1756–1818), and American diplomat, spy, and delegate to the Continental Congress Arthur Lee (1740–1792). He was a close associate of a certain General James Wilkinson (1757–1825), who was involved in various schemes for the independence of Kentucky/the western territories—an idea that echoes throughout The Emigrants. After Imlay left the United States around 1788, he resurfaced as the author of the, in Europe, fairly successful A Topographical Description of the Western Territory of North America (1792). Again, Imlay moved in illustrious company. He was part of the circle of English radicals commonly referred to as Jacobins. As a representative of the United States to France he conversed with a range of famous contemporaries, among them Jacques Pierre Brissot (1754–1793), J. Hector St. John Crèvecoeur (1735–1813), and Thomas Paine (1737–1809). While Imlay encountered a range of historical personae, he angered a sufficient amount of them and was frequently the target of lawsuits because of unpaid debts. This image hardly improves when one considers Imlay’s involvement in fraudulent land schemes as well as the transatlantic slave trade (Verhoeven 2006). Of all his encounters, Imlay is however most infamously known as the lover of the feminist writer Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–1797). She had a child by him, and he abandoned her and his daughter—conduct that rendered him “one of literary history’s most notoriously nasty footnotes” (Verhoeven and Gilroy 1998, xxx). Of his life after 1796—the last time Wollstonecraft met him— little is known. Imlay seems to have remained in London, and at one point moved to the Isle of Jersey, where he died in 1828. While on the topic of Wollstonecraft, a note on the authorship debate surrounding the novel: The Emigrants has been published under Imlay’s name, yet there are some scholars, such as John R. Cole, who would rather attribute it to Wollstonecraft. The case for her authorship rests on speculations about Imlay’s and Wollstonecraft’s respective grasps on orthography and geography (Cole 2001, 291; 294–295) and is encouraged by ellipses and censored comments in Wollstonecraft’s letters as well as the biography written by her husband, political philosopher and novelist William Godwin (1756–1836), after her death in 1797. Imlay’s name would then have served to lend a stronger claim of authenticity to the promised ideal conditions in the Ohio River Valley, and Wollstonecraft could have secretly propagated the rights of women. The argument, however, that a man— especially a man who treats his lover and his daughter as shamefully as

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Imlay did—could not have written anything to promote a woman’s right to divorce renders the relationship between author and work extremely trivial. Moreover, it does not take into consideration that the novel was likely written to deliberately target an audience of a progressive mindset, such as the circle of political dissidents around Wollstonecraft. Given what is known of Imlay, this seems plausible; at least, he was familiar with these debates, the English Jacobin circles, and their literary productions. Furthermore, the conviction that only Wollstonecraft would have been able to write such fiction implies that Wollstonecraft’s ideas could not have been influential beyond her own writings or could not have been deliberately included to attract a certain readership. The argument that speaks most pertinently against a ghost-authorship by Wollstonecraft is that the novel falls short of Wollstonecraft’s calls for a thorough change of the situation of women, an issue that will be discussed in more detail below (see also Davidson 1986). Imlay’s two books, A Topographical Description of the Western Territory of North America and The Emigrants, engaged contemporary British interest in America and the newly independent United States. Specifically, these works contributed to British debates regarding the “imperial crisis” (Verhoeven 2013, 7) over the lost American Revolutionary War, and to discussions about emigration to the United States. Imlay’s writings played into what Verhoeven calls the ‘Americomania’ of the time: The full title of the first edition reads The Emigrants, or the history of an expatriated family; being a delineation of English manners, drawn from real characters, written in America, by G. Imlay, Esq., author of the topographical description of its Western territory. The intended readership (English) and geopolitical message (emigration to America) are already implied. The accounts of the land border on an advertisement promoting settlement, especially considering that they downplay various problems that settlers might encounter (Seelye 1987, 206; Smith 1950, 124–132). But while A Topographical Description enjoyed huge popularity, The Emigrants was not a great commercial success, as it was viewed with the rapidly evolving mistrust regarding anything that appeared revolutionary—especially after the Reign of Terror in France—and thus anything that was not complying with what were perceived to be ‘British’ conservative values (Piep 2004, 1; Verhoeven 2008, 125). Indeed, contemporary reviewers seem to dislike the notion that divorces should be more easily attainable (Critical Review 1793; Monthly Review 1793) and are also suspicious of the author’s agenda regarding international politics. One of them notes that “this work has

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two objects professedly in view, the one to recommend the government and manners of America … the other to recommend divorces” (155), rejects both of these agendas, bashes the style of the novel, and finally quips: “For the faults of orthography, which are likewise frequent in these Letters, we presume the printer is to be responsible, as we imagine the Americans do not push their love of independence so far as to reject the legislative authority of Dr. Johnson, though a Tory, in this department” (Critical Review 1793, 158; emphasis in original). Broadly speaking, The Emigrants has been largely forgotten and has only recently made its way back into critical discussions. After it sank into near oblivion in the nineteenth century, it briefly resurfaced as one of the contesters for the title of ‘First American Novel’ (Piep 2004) in the early twentieth century, only to be then neglected again. It rarely finds more than short—if any—mention in academic publications on British eighteenth-­century epistolary fiction, Jacobin writings, or on literature regarding the Early Republic, US expansionism, utopianism, and the frontier, even though it could justifiably be included into all of these canons. As it interfaces these different discourses, The Emigrants offers a productive start for investigating renditions of American lands and the United States as utopian. Regarding its motives and literary relatives, The Emigrants is situated on two continents. On the one hand, it incorporates elements that characterize US American literature throughout the nineteenth century. The novel intersects romance, captivity, travel and adventure and thus The Emigrants is an ancestor of popular US American frontier romances, such as James Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales (starting with The Prairie, 1827, and ending with Deerslayer, or First War-Path, 1841) or Jack London’s Klondike novels (e.g., The Call of the Wild, 1903). On the other hand, it discusses British marital law exhaustively and depicts failed relationships and the plight of women at the hands of brutish men at length—every character in the novel is in some way either having severe marital problems or corresponding with someone who has them. Thus, The Emigrants echoes epistolary sentimental novels like Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa (1748), which commented on sexual power imbalances as well as class struggles (Eagleton 1982). In this, the influence of the British Jacobins becomes apparent, as they had adapted the motifs of such sentimental works to “champion ideas and principles associated with revolutionary debates about personal and legal rights, heredity and property rights, more broadly representative governance, and sometimes the

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possibility of ‘revolution’ as a rational response to monarchical misrule” (Wallace 2012).4 As I will show in the course of this chapter, the novel also exhibits a ‘unity of design,’ a relationship between form and content that “was central to the technique of the major English Jacobin novelists” (Kelly 1976, 12). In this respect, Imlay’s novel is closely linked to a British canon and to European political discourse. Taking these multiple facets of The Emigrants into account, this chapter draws two insights regarding the link between United States and utopia. First, in accordance with colonial and revolutionary imageries, the novel maintains that utopia is supposed to be established, or is certain to be established, somewhere in America. Various characters in The Emigrants emphasize the importance of action, and that putting plans into reality is an ‘American’ trait, while it is ‘European’ to discuss and draw up complex regulations without much avail. This rejection of excessive governmental control links the novel to the discourse of the American Revolution, the French Revolution, and the British Jacobins. The Emigrants also reflects these convictions via its form: it makes the case for practice instead of ‘idle speculation’ by skillfully employing metafictional commentary, through which the novel suggests written words to be useless, and even deceitful, when it is time to act. Thus, North America is utopia literally, not literary. Second, however, while the freshly seceded United States provide the inspiration for further secession and for utopian practice, The Emigrants also reflects that the Declaration of Independence posed a risk for the stability of nationhood as such. Inspired by US American Independence, the community in the back-settlements of the Ohio River Valley is not clearly part of any nation or empire, be it the British Empire or the United States. Notably, the societies in both nations are depicted as corrupted, and both must be abandoned henceforth. The Emigrants states this openly and reiterates it by metaphorically relating marriage and divorce to national belonging and secession. While the utopianism of the novel may seem to foreshadow the US American frontier discourse of the nineteenth century, a closer reading reveals that it lacks its national trajectory. The Emigrants therefore disrupts ideas of a seemingly naturalized alignment of utopia and United States, since the prospect of realizing utopia challenges the Union of States. 4  Examples would be Elizabeth Inchbald’s A Simple Story (1791), Thomas Holcroft’s Anna St. Ives (1792), and Things as They Are: or, The Adventures of Caleb Williams (1794) by William Godwin (see also Verhoeven and Gilroy 1998, xv).

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‘Antipathy to Control’: Challenges to Nationhood and the Early Republic In the course of the American Revolution, political and philosophical arguments for secession and the founding of a new nation were assembled. How, then, to keep people from using the same logic to argue for seceding from the United States? American Independence did, after all, opt for the establishment of a new nation, not for anarchy or ever-multiplying secessions. Thus, for Thomas “Jefferson’s contemporaries, the Revolution posed a comparable dilemma: how to dissolve their connections to a … government without, in the words of an 18th century English critic, at the same time putting ‘the axe to the root of all government’” (Basch 28).5 Shays’ Rebellion (1786–1787) in Massachusetts and Vermont’s insistence on independence (1777–1791) speak to the widespread revolutionary impulses of the time. In other words, the Declaration of Independence may inspire others to demand their rights and even to declare themselves independent from the recently independent nation, grabbing their own opportunity “to begin the world over again,” to quote the iconic words of Thomas Paine (1776, 40). This idea of starting over also shapes the discourse of the frontier—in The Emigrants, Arl—ton promotes the Ohio River Valley with the words “the government in this district is not organized” (3:129).6 Thus, the nation’s expansion posed a challenge to its totality and stability, so that utopian might threaten United. As historian Staughton Lynd, seizing at the national-utopian potential, once succinctly put it: “One cannot entrust men with a collective right to revolution unless one is prepared for them to revolutionize their lives from day to day” (1968, 13). Therein lies the paradox in making the right to revolution a part of the national ideology, even more so when the individual’s conscience is foregrounded, that is, when the right to revolution is no longer only with a dissenting majority. While the Declaration of 5  Expressed also, for example, by George Washington in a letter to Benjamin Harrison on October 10, 1784 (Kelleter 2002, 519), and by J. Hector St. John Crèvecoeur in a letter to the Comte de la Luzerne on May 16, 1788 (Kelleter 2002, 547). On these grounds, Frank Kelleter observes that “regarding the West, the natural right to political independence thus became a ‘boogeyman’” (in the original German: “Im Hinblick auf den Westen wird das naturrechtliche Konzept politischer Unabhängigkeit somit zum Schreckgespenst”; Kelleter 2002, 519). 6  Arl—ton’s description of the government in the area as “not organized” (3:129) is somewhat misleading, as it was part of Virginia at the time.

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Independence repeatedly holds that it speaks for a people, and that governmental allegiance “should not be changed for light and transient causes,” influential contributors to the discourse of the American Revolution, such as Paine, or Joseph Priestly (1733–1804), stressed the individual’s right to follow his conscience. Dissent then may result in either the overhaul of an elected government by ‘the people,’ or the non-­ participation of individuals in this or that institution (examples from US American history to this day include the school system and health measures), or, ultimately, the separation from the nation. One could also (mis) interpret the following words by Jefferson (1743–1826) from A Summary View of the Rights of British America (1774) to this effect: “a right which nature has given to all men, of departing from the country in which chance, not choice, has placed them, of going in quest of new habitations, and of there establishing new societies, under such laws and regulations as to them shall seem most likely to promote public happiness” (7)—note that in this case, not revolution inside of a nation, but emigration and settlement are seen as a ‘natural right.’ One reoccurring proposition to resolve this conflict between national cohesion and individual rights was a “vision of a surprisingly consistent Utopia, a decentralized communal society” (Lynd 1968, 160), a much decentralized republic built on agriculture, as, for example, proposed by Jefferson or, described more ambivalently, by J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur (1782). Its advocates believed that the individual’s voice and choice would have a strong impact in such a loose confederacy, and that an agrarian lifestyle would be a vaccine against capitalist corruption and rivalry, as well as aristocratic tyranny. This agrarian utopianism is intricately connected to the westward expansion of US American territory, as Jefferson’s quote exemplifies: The West was to provide the lands necessary for such a society. Furthermore, the argument for expansion in the early republic takes up and extends the spatial reasoning of the American Revolution. Geographic distance from European nations served as ‘proof’ that the United States are predestined to come into existence—in Paine’s words, “Even the distance at which the Almighty has placed England and America is a strong and natural proof that the authority of the one over the other was never the design of Heaven” (1776, 19). The need to maintain this closure then was used to justify seizing and settling lands on the entire continent. In this way, an ‘insular’ space (of colossal proportions) was to be established. Territorial enlargement therefore allows for the nation’s exceptionality: “Jefferson declares in his ‘Third Annual Message’ [to the Senate and House of

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Representatives on October 17, 1803] that the achievement of establishing a practice of natural reason in the USA—‘bringing collisions of interest to the umpirage of reason rather than of force’—is chiefly due to America’s lack of neighbors, that is, the, singular blessings of the position in which nature has placed us, the opportunity she has endowed us with of pursuing, at a distance from foreign contentions, the paths of industry, peace, and happiness.’ It seems as if America wants to view itself not only as a new world, but also as an isolated one” (Kelleter 2002, 5217). Expansion then eventually provides closure, and this argument parallels early modern conceptions of national spatiality as expressed in utopian literature. Just like More’s Utopia, the nation is supposed to be closed-off and isolated. Geographical closure initially suggests a pre-willed condition of seclusion. Ergo, secession is the consequence of existing geographical distance. This reasoning can then in turn be used to justify expansion: in order to maintain this independent space, the nation has to occupy a large section of the continent (from sea to shining sea), so that no other nations may interfere. The logic behind expansionism mirrors the basis of utopia’s internal coherence: the need for closure. A century later, the historian Frederick Jackson Turner would claim in his seminal speech and essay “The Significance of the Frontier in American History” (1893) that expansion was the decisive factor in “the formation of composite nationality for the American people” (Turner 1893, 22; emphasis added). This proposition that uniformly progressing waves of settlers were “continually beginning over again” (Turner 1893, 2) in a “perennial rebirth” (Turner 1893, 2) remains an iconic motif within the discourses of the United States, even though Turner’s frontier thesis has been refuted in its generalizing assumptions, its blatant imperialism, and its deliberate downplaying and justification of genocide of the Indigenous peoples. Turner echoed the interplay between isolation and expansion that nation and utopia both draw on. The frontier, as Turner describes it, is a space outside of the constrictions of European and Anglo-American society. It functions as a chronotope—a space in which time passes differently 7  In the original German: “In seiner ‘Third Annual Message’ (1803) erklärt Jefferson, die Durchsetzung einer naturrechtlichen Vernunftpraxis in den USA – ‘bringing collisions of interest to the umpirage of reason rather than of force – verdanke sich vor allem Amerikas Nachbarlosigkeit, d.h. den, singular blessings of the position in which nature has placed us, the opportunity she has endowed us with of pursuing, at a distance from foreign contentions, the paths of industry, peace, and happiness.’ Es ist, als wolle Amerika sich nicht nur als neue, sondern auch als isolierte Welt betrachten” (Kelleter 2002, 521).

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than in the rest of the world. At the frontier, “the history of society” (Turner 1893, 11), the development that led to civilization (in a Eurocentric sense), is replayed. The frontier, in this conception, constantly makes available new spaces for utopian practice, “a new field of opportunity, a gate of escape from the bondage of the past” (Turner 1893, 38). Yet, this escape, this ‘continually beginning over again,’ does apparently not challenge the nation, does not bring forth a plethora of enclaves that host incompatibly different societies. Instead, Turner’s thesis postulates that these spaces ultimately have an ‘Americanizing’ influence: “In the crucible of the frontier the immigrants were Americanized, liberated, and fused into a mixed race, English in neither nationality nor characteristics” (Turner 1893, 23) as the frontier forces collaboration against day-to-day hardships and to withstand Native American attacks. Furthermore, “the most important effect of the frontier has been in the promotion of democracy here and in Europe. As has been indicated, the frontier is productive of individualism. … It produces antipathy to control, and particularly to any direct control” (Turner 1893, 30). The landmass is therefore responsible for the democratic system that its new settlers demand and that the United States offers: Both, social dreaming and its national trajectory are geographically determined. This idea of the frontier features most prominently in linking utopianism to the United States (see Balasopoulos 2004, 20; Cronon 1995, 76; Goddu 1997, 16–17; Hogan 1985, 35; Hutchinson 2008, 85; Slotkin 1973, 5; Tuan 2001, 99). Of course, it was not the actual frontier, but the way in which it was imagined, that had the ‘Americanizing’ effect. As Henry Nash Smith observed in his study Virgin Land (1950), a seminal work of American studies, the idea of an ‘open space’ played a pivotal part in the US American national myth in the course of the nineteenth century. Belying the existence of, and the conflicts with, the Indigenous population, the land west of the Allegheny Mountains was rendered ‘virgin’ (when the more appropriate nuptial analogy would be of a land raped and/or widowed), “an agricultural paradise …, embodying group memories of an earlier, a simpler and, it was believed, a happier state of society. So powerful and vivid … that down to the very end of the nineteenth century it continued to seem a representation, in Whitman’s words, of the core of the nation, ‘the real genuine America’” (Smith 1950, 125). Smith’s various examples (among them Turner’s frontier thesis) speak to the important role that the idea of unlimited space has played in this national narrative, including romantic notions of communities enjoying “fecundity, growth, increase, and blissful

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labor in the earth” (Smith 1950, 124). The territorial enlargement toward the West then connects the United States to utopianism (in the tradition of previous European discourses) by casting the land to be occupied and settled as utopian. This imagery in turn encouraged attempts to realize “what had been in Europe but a utopian dream” (Smith 1950, 130) of an ideal agrarian society—as enacted by the emigrants in Imlay’s novel. Pastoral idealizations of agricultural life are of course no prerogative of the United States, and Smith does not argue this. Instead, it is the idea of new beginnings, again and again, that he takes to be specifically US American. Other influential scholars of American Studies, such as R.W.B. Lewis in The American Adam: Innocence, Tragedy, and Tradition in the Nineteenth Century (1955), or Richard Slotkin, particularly in Regeneration through Violence (1973), concur. In other words, the new nation is narrated as having access to, and as making accessible, a place for a new start—under what one could call utopian conditions. However, these glorifications of new beginnings masked, among many other conflicts, the threat to communal/national cohesion that territorial expansion—and the utopian language that promotes it—poses (Hogan 1985). Even though the frontier thesis purports that the imagined community was strengthened by the frontier, some of Turner’s words suggest potential risks: The frontier “produces antipathy to control, and particularly to any direct control” (Turner 1893, 30)—by which he means that it serves as an insurance for democratic ideals and thus against tyranny. Yet, ‘antipathy to control’ can be problematic for the nation, especially since the United States struggled to exert control where they claimed their territory. The United States faced the same problems as, for example, the British Empire had regarding its colonies.8 For one, conflicts arose over claims to the land, whether with the Indigenous population or with colonial settlers from other nations. Also, those willing to move to a frontier are not naturally inclined to submit themselves to a distant government, as already showcased in the geographical arguments brought forth in the course of the American Revolution. The issue of so-called squatters along the western frontier 8  This, of course, can also be observed in North America’s early colonial settlements: The issue of discontented inhabitants leaving established settlements dates all the way back to the Puritans, as William Bradford suggests in Of Plimoth Plantation (ca. 1650). See also Richard Hogan’s considerations regarding perimeter settlements in “The Frontier as Social Control” (1985).

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illustrates this lack of governmental control over perimeter settlements. In the eighteenth century, European settlers had moved onto the land west of the Alleghenies although England decreed in the Proclamation of 1763 that English colonists could not live there, as this land was assigned to Indigenous tribes. Squatting in what was formerly the Ohio Country— and would become the Northwest Territory in 1787—continued after the American Revolution. Similar disorder marked the settlements south of the Ohio River (where The Emigrants takes place): In the late eighteenth century, a range of lawsuits (some of them featuring Imlay) revolving around speculation, contesting claims, and outright land fraud testify the short reach of the law in these regions. This led to policies that treated squatters much like Native Americans: “while the relationship between squatters and the Indigenous population in these regions was hostile, for the central government, they posed a similar problem. They were too far removed for laws to be enforced upon them, their claims of ownership contested and contradicted those of the nation-state, and they formed isolated, impermeable communities” (Kelleter 2002, 643).9 Attempts to severe trans-Appalachian territory from the young republic provide another example for the instability of the United States during the nation’s gradual expansion. In the final decades of the eighteenth century, the aforementioned General James Wilkinson, close associate of Imlay, conspired multiple times to split western territory and states from the union.10 This he staged in American spirit: in order to lay the ground for Kentucky’s independence, Wilkinson drew on the discourse of the American Revolution, borrowing geographic arguments for his secessionist cause. As Verhoeven points out, Wilkinson presented to the Kentucky November convention a petition which makes “mischievous reference to Jefferson’s Declaration” (Verhoeven 2008, 105) and the discourse of natural rights and the geopolitical rhetoric of the American Revolution: He asked “can the GOD OF WISDOM AND NATURE have created that vast country in vain? … Did he not provide those great streams which 9  In the original German: “Obgleich sich die angloamerikanischen und die indianischen Bewohner der frontier also als erbitterte Feinde gegenüberstehen, stellen sie aus Sicht der Zentralregierung identische Gefahren dar, nämlich die Gefahren der Gesetzesfeme, der außerstaatlichen Eigentumsansprüche und der isolierten, undurchdringlichen Gemeinschaftlichkeit” (Kelleter 2002, 643). 10  For an introductory overview of General James Wilkinson’s involvement in the Spanish Conspiracy (1778–1788), the Spanish Intrigue (1794–1795), and the Burr Conspiracy (1804–1806), see Verhoeven (2008, 105–115, 204–205).

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enter into the Mississippi, and by it communicate with the Atlantic, that other nations might enjoy with us the blessings of our prolific soil?” (qtd. in Verhoeven 2008, 105).11 The expansion of the territory of the United States across the North American continent created conflict not solely with American Indigenous and European nations, but also stirred up secessionist impulses in European settlers and their descendants. To recapitulate, the ‘radical’ discourse of the American Revolution and the imagery of the West as a so-called virgin land evoke utopianism, and both constitute building blocks of the national narrative throughout the centuries. Nonetheless, both also harbor a potential threat to the unity of the nation. The United States’ utopianism appears to consist of an ever-­ repeating act of beginning, which then progresses toward integration into the national community. That is, the road to utopia in these paradigms always leads to the United States. The utopian imagination has a national telos. To anticipate the findings provided in subsequent chapters: as coherent and compelling as these historiographic assessments may appear, other texts throughout the long nineteenth century contest this national trajectory of utopianism in the United States.

‘Societies of This Kind Established Throughout a Great Community’: The Emigrants’s Separatism Imlay’s The Emigrants is an excellent example for utopianism that relates to the United States but does not align with them. Initially, the emigrants appear to follow the Anglo-American republican tradition, establishing a small agrarian community á la Jefferson’s proposal (Shields 2012, 42). Political representation in the community runs fairly direct, with a few hundred men to be settled on the land “who shall be eligible to a seat in a house of representatives consisting of twenty members, who are to assemble every Sunday in the year …. Every male being of the age of twenty-­ one, and sound in his reason, is intitled to vote in the nomination of a member to represent them” (3:130). Daily life in the community consists of agrarian labor “so necessary to invigorate the constitution” (3:167), some organizational and political employment, and spontaneous festivities in the sugar groves. However, the newly founded Bellefont views itself as removed from the United States and England, which are described as urban societies  The entire petition was also given, verbatim, in Imlay’s A Topographical Description (1792).

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dominated by corrupt elites. One of many rants about the world from which the emigrants have removed themselves contrasts “the dignity of man” and “love, and harmony” (3:131) in the newly founded Bellefont with the “false wit” (3:138) of the “fashionable life” and its “depravity” (3:139), “every species of luxury” (3:137), and “debauchery” (3:138) in Europe. Through different plotlines and narrators, The Emigrants implies that the society of the United States already comes too close to that of the Old World. This is illustrated by the example of Laura R, a young woman from Philadelphia. To safeguard her indebted father from his creditors, she marries a reprehensible conman. Ultimately, she is freed from the confines of that marriage when her husband drinks himself to death. She then joins Bellefont. In her letters, she describes at length the “fashionable parties of our metropolis” (1:70), the trivialities, the financial dependency, and the deceit that dominates her life in New England. Laura’s account illustrates that the problems of British society have migrated from the ‘Old World’ to the United States; decadence, unworthy men preying on honorable women, and debt—which in the novel seems to be one of the core motivations to move across the Atlantic, and then to lands further west—have already festered in the cities of the United States. To then set up a community in which the societal and legal faults of the Old World are abolished, the members of Bellefont remove themselves from US American institutions. Even though Arl—ton speaks of “country” (3:129) and being “a good, if not a very useful citizen” (3:129), the community appears to have no governmental connection to the United States: “The subversive, anti-ecclesiastical Sunday meeting as well as the structure of its government confirm that Arl—ton’s community is to be an atheistic, secessionist state, independent of the government of the United States” (Verhoeven 2004, 160). Though never stated openly, The Emigrants prepares for independence in various letters, reiterating that secession is necessary, as reform is nigh impossible. The elderly P. P., an esquire from England turned American farmer, and avuncular advisor to Caroline, argues that the “tyranny of custom” (2:28) is hard to overthrow. With his help, Caroline comes to the conclusion that “the inconvenience society will experience from such a perversion, cannot be easily removed: and thus I fear many virtuous characters, will yet suffer under the influence of [this] system” (2:145). Correspondingly, none of the emigrants ever references the nation-in-the-making beyond talking of the American Revolution, nor do they formulate a vision for the United States. In

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accordance with Paine’s allegations that the British governmental system is so complex that it will be extremely difficult to fix (1776, 7), the novel favors the utopian creation of an entirely new society, closed off from Europe and the United States. The title of The Emigrants therefore applies not only to the T—ns in their exodus from Europe, but also to the Americans who join them, as they emigrate from the infant United States. Pertinently, the utopian community comprises emigrants from two nations, and belongs to neither. By not providing extensive details about law, taxation, education, and so on, the novel gives formal expression to a belief in experimentation and small governmental units with as little legislation as possible. Government plays only a minor role because the “community in North America [is] organized around the practice of natural sociability rather than artificial institutions” (Cayton 2013, 82). Apart from an outline of the small-scale system of representation and the agrarianism that the community practices, institutions, laws, and regulations are not described. More to the point, such structures do not (yet) exist in Bellefont since it is organized following convictions reminiscent of the British Jacobins and the radical dissenters that influenced the American Revolution: a belief in sociability, “in human perfectibility” (Andrews 1997, 35–36) or rather in humans being “susceptible of perpetual improvements” (Godwin 1793, 109; qtd. in Marshall 2017, 24), that the “human character is malleable” (Marshall 2017, 24) and that humans “are rational beings” (Marshall 2017, 24), which cumulates in critiques of excessively complex and severe systems of punishment and law, and of centralized political power. The male protagonists (in the letters, women do not participate in the political debates, with Caroline being the only exception) advocate for minimal government and “absolute rights … which are not only paramount, but which are immutable, and cannot be revoked or abridged by any tribunal upon earth, farther than is absolutely necessary that they should be surrendered for the order and benefit of society” (2:23–24). In other words, ‘that government is best that governs least.’ Thus, Bellefont is largely regulated by sociability based on virtue; the provenance of its sociable subjects will be discussed shortly. By contrast, a strict enforcement of law is stressed by the European letter-writers, who argue that “The perverseness of some men, have made it absolutely necessary that government should restrain their licentious habits, and the executive part of a constitution must have efficiency, otherwise the expected coercions of laws will lose their effect” (3:179).

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The central protagonists in The Emigrants refute this view that the solution to human vices lies in regulations and argue against further outlines and pamphlets. In what appears to be a subtle attack against contemporary political thinkers—such as fellow Jacobin and future husband of Wollstonecraft, Godwin,12 who “as a philosopher, … wanted to treat universal principles, not practical details” (Marshall 2017, 12)—the emigrants emphasize putting theories to the test and realizing plans for a better society. They insist that the epistemic utopian production should cease in favor of the ontological creation of good places, that is, they advocate utopian practice. Although various letters voice political arguments, the novel ultimately “puts a premium on decisive action” (Cayton 2013, 86). At multiple points, characters make statements to that effect: “[On education] there has been so much said upon by men of first rate talents; but unfortunately for the world, they have either been too fond of perfecting their theoretical systems, or of displaying their ingenuity—The subject yet requires to be simplified, and perhaps a few years [sic] experience, with the aid of books already written upon the subject, will do more good than would the most elaborate production”(2:25). Writing has gone as far as it can; what is needed now is practical experience and simplicity. Caroline agrees: “To be virtuous it is not sufficient to talk of it, or to define in what it consists.—It is practicing those precepts … which constitutes the man of honor” (2:35). She and P.  P. stress that “a conduct of a more exalted nature than a mere profession of words” (2:44) is in order. Arl—ton also concurs, telling his friend G.  Il—ray: “appropriate your talents for the benefit of mankind, and not waste them in idle speculation” (1:102). In this way, The Emigrants supports the myth that “American democracy was born of no theorist’s dream” (Smith 1950, 253), and that America is the place for practice. While there is merit attested to writing (writing, after all, makes up the narrative, and all the main characters are evidently educated), various letters forcefully reason for the importance to act, instead of theorizing any further. America then provides the geographical location for embarking on the road to utopia. Consequently, instead of placing 12  While William Godwin and Gilbert Imlay were both in London in the early 1790s, moved in the same circles, and while there are parallels in their thought and in their writing (Andrews 1997; Verhoeven 2008, 117, 124), there is to my knowledge no record of them having had any direct contact. Imlay is never once mentioned in Godwin’s dairies. The closest feasible connection thus seems to be Godwin’s treatment of Imlay in his Memoirs of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1798), which solely focuses on the relationship of Mary Wollstonecraft and Imlay.

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trust in some linear progressive course of history that will eventually lead to a better place, Arl—ton proudly writes: “The plan I am determined shall not be merely theoretical, for it is in great part already carried into execution” (3:133). Noticeably, the novel implies that Bellefont’s location in the Ohio River Valley makes this possible without a violent revolution. Bellefont is an escapist project, realistically speaking. A closer look at the community’s members reveals that the community is very exclusive. Bellefont is void of conflicts based on class or race because its population is homogenous and keeps out of conflicts that plague its non-utopian environment. For one, slavery is completely absent in Bellefont. It is briefly condemned in a sentimental manner (typical for the time), when a minor character compares his lot favorably to that of “the unfortunate African who is torn from his home—from his family—and from that independence when he labored for himself, and when he enjoyed the fruits of his toil, which he kindly shared with a smiling progeny, whose infant faces, when lisping to their sire, taught him to feel that unbounded bliss flowing from the affectionate soul” (1:136). This statement implies that the bliss of subsistence agriculture should be available to all humans, and that being a slave means “suffering under the most tyrannic and inhuman sacrilege” (1:136). At any rate, the gentry that constitutes Bellefont has no use for slaves and is innocent of this crime, because the land does not require extensive physical labor. Even the servants mentioned have ample free time and are educated in “appropriate knowledge” (3:168). Thus, the issue of slavery in the United States, and in the Ohio River Valley, can be avoided or excluded without actually being resolved. The community never has to deal with other cultures or races, constructing a utopian “zone of social totality” (to use Fredric Jameson’s terminology; 2005, 16). With such messy complications removed, the space becomes perfectly orderable. Bellefont is outside of non-utopian realities and is marked by uniformity. As mentioned in the introductory chapters, this is a recurring issue of utopias and of intentional communities throughout the ages. Since the community presumes to take no part in the imperial atrocities and entanglements of the United States and the British Empire, it offers the chance to ‘begin the world over again.’ Nonetheless, the United States have contributed to the founding of Bellefont in ideological terms. American Independence in part enables the formation of the community, as most of its members are former American soldiers. In the American Revolutionary War they have already proven that they are able to consummate secession. In this way, they are

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prototypical for the ‘American Adam’: inspired by American Independence they act on “the prevailing impulse to escape from every existing mode of organizing and explaining experience, in order to confront life in entirely original terms” (Lewis 1955, 14). Various letters emphasize the value of men who fought in the War of Independence. This valor is also illustrated by General W—’s lauding comments about the community, and is epitomized by the protagonist Arl—ton.13 In this sense, American Independence informs Bellefont, even if the new settlement is not part of the imagined community of the United States. While the United States are no utopia, a good place has come into reach through the American Revolution. Bellefont is thus indicative of the beginning of an alternative union and a loosely connected confederation. Arl—ton envisions “small societies of this kind established throughout a great community” (3:135), a loose federation which does not appear to relate to the United States. Furthermore, the very idea of many coexisting communities allows readers to picture themselves as part of an altogether new embryonic community. In short, the novel gives form and concrete shape to dormant transatlantic desires for a better future elsewhere.

‘All the Comforts of Living in the Most Superfluous Abundance’: Geographical Determinism The location of Bellefont is key for this better future, not only because the ideal men—American soldiers—already roam the continent. The foundation of the utopian community depends crucially on the land providing an enclave. The Emigrants evokes an idealized West in which “a rebirth, a regeneration, a rejuvenation of man and society” (Smith 1950, 253) are possible. More to the point, the novel suggests that this change is bound to occur and is predetermined by the geographic conditions. At first glance descriptions of the lands therefore convey ideas central to the frontier myth, which are frequently reiterated in dominant renditions of the narrative of the United States. However, this rebirth has to happen away from already established societies. The emigrants do not join the nation, and their settlement at the frontier does not expand the reach of the United States. Quite the opposite, expansion opens up geopolitical space that allows for an emancipation from the United States. 13  Nonetheless, James Arl—ton explicitly condemns warfare as an “indelible grace” (3:128).

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The way in which Imlay treats the land west of the Alleghenies fits the virgin land paradigm as described by Smith. In fact, Smith himself lists Imlay’s Topographical Description as a case in point for his observations, that is, as one of the texts that have promoted the image of a North American ‘Garden of the World’ (Seelye 1987, 206; see Smith 1950, 124–132). The Emigrants shares the optimistic utopian outlook of such descriptions: Bellefont’s “infancy affords an opportunity to its citizens of establishing a system conformable to reason and humanity” (3:128). The agrarian lifestyle in the community does not result in deprivation because the land allows for pioneers to produce “all the comforts of living in the most superfluous abundance” (2:185). Evidently, agrarian life in the Ohio River Valley is far from strenuous: the aging P. P. willingly joins in the erection of a new settlement, and Arl—ton’s labor on his own farm only occupies him part-time. These romantic ideas of agrarian life suggest that the Ohio River Valley provides a blissful idyll. Likewise romantic is the path to this utopia across the Allegheny Mountains, at least for Caroline and her husband-to-be, who travel the western regions of North America with relative ease (Verhoeven 2008, 127). They do not conquer or subdue the landscape, and their explorations “take[s] a distinctly erotic coloration, a prelude … to marriage and Utopian community” (Seelye 1987, 210). Furthermore, the easy travels suggest that even European newcomers will find the (literal) road to utopia an easy one. Any ‘nativism,’ that is, any exceptional relationship to the land claimed by American Revolutionaries (Kelleter 2002, 439), is disavowed, suggesting that being born on the land or having fought on it is no prerequisite for seeking a better place in the West. Thus, the English Caroline plays a pivotal role in unlocking the utopian potential of the landscape. As John Seelye has argued, Caroline “becomes a central and organizing feature of the countryside” (1987, 210). Establishing a traditional analogy between female appearance and terrain in a settler discourse, she is repeatedly described in scenic terms (Seelye 1987, 209–210), providing the analogical pendant to the attractive landscape. She also actively unlocks the aesthetic of the American landscape, alerting other characters to the sublime, “most captivating beauty” (1:118) she perceives. Especially for her future husband Arl—ton, the encounter with Caroline is an eye-­ opening experience. Without her, his accounts of the landscape are factual, providing mostly geographic details. Meeting her, the sun literarily and figuratively rises: “just after the sun had risen, and was gilding those immense plains … I first caught sight of Caroline … her eyes … were

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glimmering like the rays of the sun through the most of an April shower” (1:25). Talking to her, he encounters the limits of his perceptive and descriptive abilities: “for such was my astonishment at the fertility of her imagination, that I heard her with amazement” (1:50). Even though Arl—ton must have seen most of US American territory, it is through her that he experiences its aesthetic pleasures. The romantic portrayal of the Ohio River Valley, especially of Bellefont as a “delightful spot [which] has a combination of charms, that renders it altogether enchanting” (3:162), suggests a landscape that is available for settlement. The severity of conflicts between Indigenous population and invading settlers in the late eighteenth century is grossly understated (Verhoeven and Gilroy 1998, 269). While Native American violent resistance against colonial settlers contributes crucially to the plot, it is nonetheless suggested to soon become a problem of the past. Instead, the novel portrays the area as depopulated and spacious, with “room for millions” (1:92). In this way, The Emigrants employs an imperial/utopian strategy of declaring land as a vacuum domicilium, akin to that which was used to justify the European theft and occupation of land (Andrews 1997, 165). However, the novel does not erase the genocide conducted by the British, and instead notes that Indigenous people had lived on the lands onto which the ‘millions’ are supposed to move: “When the ruthless hand of barbarous war has in many places desolated the fairest country upon the face of the globe, … Who can help feeling an indignation against such gothic practices? When I recollect the once smiling meads of the gentle Pacaic,14 which are now untilled—when I reflect upon the plenty that prolific region once produced, which is now a waste; and then figure to my mind the innocent wiles of a growing progeny that used to gladden the fields with the rude songs of the uncultivated bard, which the horrors of sanguinary warfare have turned into gloom and heaps of ruins, how can I help reprobating a system pregnant with evils the most monstrous?” (3:127). With this displacement of the Indigenous population into the past, the novel perpetuates what is commonly referred to as the myth of the ‘Vanishing Indian.’ This also allows Imlay to absolve all new settlers 14  Wil Verhoeven and Amanda Gilroy note that “Imlay is presumably referring to a once thriving Indian tribe; however, no tribe of this name has been identified” (1998: 299). Maybe Pacaic is a variation of Passaic, and thus refers to the Passaic River (in today’s New Jersey) and the Lenape people of these lands. The Lenape were forced off their lands in the 1750s.

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from any blame for ‘the horrors of sanguinary warfare,’ denouncing the British Empire as ‘pregnant with evils the most monstrous.’ The emigrants can then claim the land without any moral qualms and without having to resort to ‘gothic practices.’ Their relationship to the land remains untainted. The Native Americans whom the emigrants encounter appear remarkably different from those who ravaged the pioneer homestead of P. P. years before. The group who abducts Caroline treats her with “the most distant respect, and scrupulous delicacy” (3:50), making the resistance of Native Americans seem more harmless while underlining Caroline’s special connection to the land. Other Native Americans she meets on her way west converse with her and express their intentions of “burying the hatchet” (1:106). This is not the only way in which Imlay’s novel ‘vacates’ the land: historically speaking, the region was not ‘outside’ of the United States, with the area part of Virginia at the time that the novel is set, and officially gaining statehood in 1792—shortly before the novel was first published. Conflicts about land ownership among speculators, settlers, and the US government (which Imlay himself was very familiar with) are also left unmentioned to maintain the image of a terra nullius. Thus, The Emigrants erases Indigenous populations and all other territorial claims and stylizes the land west of the Alleghenies as essentially free for the taking, and for utopian practice. Historical fact aside, what would become Kentucky is in The Emigrants still ‘virgin’ and securely isolated from the United States. Contradicting any notion that the young United States are significantly different from the society of the ‘Old World,’ the narrative stresses European, specifically British, influences on the people east of the Allegheny Mountains. Seelye summarizes: “the division between urban vice and rural virtue remains constant, identified with the corrupt, Europeanized regions east of the mountains and the innocent, Utopian zone to the west” (1987, 208), which begs the question of how this ‘innocent zone’ in the west can be maintained. In the novel, this is done by the land itself, as it serves as a selective boundary that leaves only suitably utopian inhabitants. The Emigrants juxtaposes positive romanticized notions of an almost Edenic garden with descriptions that suggest the discomfort and even dangers of the wilderness. In order to prevent the corrupting influence from Europe, those not fit for the utopian scheme are deterred by the land’s appearance as ‘wilderness,’ even though they are physically able to enter. While Caroline saunters most of the way to Louisville, the track is

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referred to as almost “perpendicular” (1:27, 82). Arl—ton supposes that Caroline “must have encountered many difficulties” (1:26) on her way; Il—ray describes the Alleghenies as “the wilds of a desart [sic]” (1:6), and the trail as “the roughest road for a carriage perhaps on the whole world” (1:59). Given that most Americans express astonishment at Caroline roaming the mountains on foot, the Allegheny Mountains must pose a considerable obstacle for other settlers. The form of the narrative itself strengthens this impression that the land that the emigrants seek out is shut off. The order of the letters implies that communication across the Alleghenies does not run smoothly. The most striking example for such disruption is provided in a letter by Eliza, Caroline’s sister who traveled back to England, in which she bemoans that no answers of Caroline “have yet come to hand” (2:122), while precisely those answering letters are included much earlier in the novel (1:110). Other correspondences also note that letters take a long time to arrive (e.g., 1:36, 1:42). Thus, the epistolary form underlines Bellefont’s utopian situation, with the Alleghenies providing a boundary from Europe and the United States. Bellefont is effectively closed off, allowing it to evolve into a utopia. The conflicting depictions of the landscape suggest that the hardship has a selecting effect, hindering those not fit for life outside of European society, and thus creating a “sequestration” (1:69) from the corrupting influences of the eastern United States and Europe. For example, Caroline’s siblings, George and Mary, cannot bear the inconveniences of travel and are barely able to leave the coach (1:28, 1:30). This marks them symbolically as unsuited for the utopia toward which they are moving. As the plot progresses, George squanders the fortune of his family and Mary contrives the major complication hindering James and Caroline’s romantic union. Thus, the land aids the utopian endeavors by forming a selectively permeable barrier that keeps the utopian West apart from the non-utopian world (how and why the mountain range should be more effective than the entire Atlantic remains an inexplicable enigma). Yet, according to The Emigrants, the ‘New World’ lies past the Alleghenies. Luckily for those non-utopian subjects, the land also harbors transformative powers. One example would be George, who starts off as lazy and wasteful, and in the end is described as being “distinguished by manly form” (3:189), “robust” (3:190), and having “the appearance of an Ancient Briton” (ibid.). The presumably ideal space therefore not only attracts and selects a certain kind of person, it also aids their

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self-­improvement: “the emphasis of the novel is … on the influence of the western landscape on eastern mores” (Seelye 1987, 205; see also Schmitt von Mühlenfels 1986, 19). Evidently, this particular landscape on the Ohio River shapes its inhabitants appropriately, making arriving there part of the process to becoming a utopian subject. Similar convictions that life in the backcountry restores an ‘original’ ideal (Anglo-Saxon) human being from what Europe has corrupted are of course also to be found in European depictions of ‘new’ worlds and reappear in British romanticism as well as in the myth of the American frontier. Ultimately, the landscape will bring about the utopian transformations. Change happens not by legal recourse, but through the arrangement of the new agrarian communities: “Small societies of this kind [such as Bellefont] established throughout a great community would help to soften the manners of the vulgar, correct their idle and vicious habits—extend their knowledge—ameliorate their judgement—and afford an opportunity to every genius or man of sense of becoming useful to this country” (3:135–136). The threat of the ‘vulgar,’ that is, the potential mob, is defused. Pastoral idyll and radical reform are united, turning, as Seelye aptly put it, “the pastoral asylum into an agent of change” (1987, 208), without any revolts necessary. The ever-evolving characters emphasize a complex reciprocal relationship between land, society, and subject, contrasting the “Godwinian mixture of bad environment, unjust laws, faulty education, and flawed character” (Seelye 1987, 208) in the old world. The Alleghenies provide a ‘moral watershed’ and ensure the utopian integralite; putting utopia into reality is geographically determined. The mountain range and the labor that the new life requires serve to keep the ‘garden’ free from a sudden influx of vulgar masses and exclude the corrupting influence of Europe and the United States. This utopian community in North America, then, is not a continuation of the United States, as it functions on the premise of “an ideological dichotomy between two distinct Americas: between the eastern states, … as an outpost of an earlier, Puritan exodus, whose original energy petered out and had become permeated with the social evils of the Old World, and the ‘true,’ trans-Alleghenian America in the West, which was radically discontinuous with the earlier, European colonization of North America” (Verhoeven 2001, 133). This rift between the ‘old’ American settlements and the ‘new’ West is enhanced by the geographic conditions that hinder non-utopian subjects from entering the Western regions. It is this break that marks the subversive potential of incorporating utopianism into a

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national narrative. It also allows The Emigrants to circumvent US American national claims to utopianism. The good place Bellefont is in many ways the result of the utopian landscape, not of the utopian telos of the United States. The Alleghenies establish a selectively permeable border, or, using Michel Foucault’s words, “a system of opening and closing that both isolates [the other space] and makes [it] penetrable” (1967, 26). The Emigrants adheres to romantic notions of rural life as in itself beneficial. In accordance with many depictions of the West, the land enables “an even more perfect realization of the agrarian ideal on a scale so vast that it dwarfed all previous conceptions of possible transformations in human society” (Smith 1950, 130). However, while the erection of a good place in the Ohio River Valley is geographically determined, this utopia will not be part of the United States.

‘Most Dangerous to the Safety of Society’: Romantic Relationships and Utopia in The Emigrants All in all, rather than elaborating structural governmental or economic matters, The Emigrants devotes the considerably largest number of letters to marriage law and marriage as an institution. These issues will be discussed at length throughout this section because they stand metonymically for a society and at the same time crucially constitute it. As befits the totality of utopianism, domestic and political are entwined. Romance in The Emigrants is therefore about more than just the “complicated paths to marriage” (Cayton 2013, 26) which a cursory glance at the narrative may suggest. The main plot and many of the subplots delineate that the way to utopia is through a romantic relationship resulting in a happy marriage— an institution which is strongly criticized in various letters, but, with surprising myopia, in the end hardly reformed and far from abolished in Bellefont. The key to romantic, and therefore socioeconomic, bliss ultimately seems to lie in America, where better men make for better husbands. The preface justifies writing a romance because it allows to convey “moral instruction; for when vices and follies of the world are held up to us, so connectedly with incidents which are interesting, it is most likely they will leave a more lasting impression than when given in a dull narrative” (1:i). “Believing that it would prove more acceptable to the reader” (1:i), a love story is produced. The rest of the preface stresses that it is not

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sufficient to look at a country’s ministry and government being “salutary,” as they depend on the “arts and manufactures, the progress of agricultures, and the accumulations of capitals employed in trade” (1:viii). This holistic statement of course prepares the utopianism of the emigrants. The main focus lies decidedly on the personal, “the miseries of individuals” (ibid.), and occurrences that “daily happen in domestic life” (1:ix). What happens in ‘domestic life’—that is, romantic relationships and the general role of women—and in the public spheres of government and economics ties together, and all of these spheres need to be reformed on the way to utopia. As Beranger has observed, “right from the start, each character has a symbolic function” (Beranger 1986, 23).15 The couples they form in the course of the plot are likewise symbolically charged; almost every character belongs to, was formerly part of, or will become part of, a married couple, with the relationships representing different social groups. Common for the late eighteenth century, private and governmental structures are not understood as separate spheres (see Kelleter 2002, 718–726; Breinig and Opfermann 2010, 38). The instances of women with deceiving and abusive husbands are representative of, and a result of, the society in which they occur. Furthermore, the deficiencies in the institution of marriage figure in themselves a reason for the depravity of that social system, and for the necessity of a new start, symbolized by new partnerships. Generally, the marital issues are caused by the wrongful treatment that women suffer at the hands of their husbands, and the difficulty or impossibility for married women to obtain a divorce. The novel has therefore been read as “a reformist tract in fictional form, focusing on the harshness of British marriage law” (Cole 2001, 274) for women. While some of the letters make short mention of women ruining their husbands financially, a considerably larger portion is dedicated to the detailing of men mistreating their wives. In this way, The Emigrants describes life in British and US American society as unbearable for women, with the marriage laws and social conventions of both nations enclosing them firmly in their domestic misery. These drastic descriptions, so the next paragraphs illustrate, provide an argument for the necessity of not only piecemeal legal reform, but for a wholesale change of society, recalling the institutional entirety and the transformation of everyday life that utopia aims for. 15  In the original French: « Dès le début chaque personnage a une fonction symbolique » (Beranger 1986, 23).

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The scandalous conduct of the English husbands toward their wives suggests the depravity of three different social groups: the English aristocracy (the ancient regime), the English upper middle class, and its offshoot in the United States. The British Lord B— is infertile, symbolically suggesting the lack of virility of the English nobility, and the inevitable dead end of the aristocratic system. The American continent, by contrast, is marked by fertility: after Lady Juliana B— leaves Lord B—, she will bear three children in her marriage with P.P. In England, a generation later and a social class ‘below,’ no improvements are made. Eliza, Caroline’s sister, marries the English Mr. F., who recklessly spends money, and is incapable of consummating the marriage physically. Mr. F.’s impotence is contrasted by the insatiable sexual appetite of the nobility: where Lord B was described as a sexual predator (sterile or not), Mr. F. cannot partake in “domestic pleasures” (3:141). Instead, he tries to pimp out his wife to “a nobleman in power” (3:142). The English bourgeoisie is portrayed as weak, which is further underlined by Mr. F.’s suicide, coming “to a resolution to die as cowardly as he had lived” (3:176). The bourgeois English husbands imitate the behavior of the nobility, are subservient, impuissant, and economically unreasonable, and have no regard for the well-being of their wives. This implies that domestic abuse is a tradition of English society that even a middle-class revolution (which is highly unlikely, given the behavior of Mr. F.) would not fix, for women’s rights are abused by either social strata. Thus, this subplot contributes to the impression that improvement within the British system is impossible. The situation in the United States is portrayed as rather similar,16 which facilitates the rise of people like Mr. S., a professional swindler from Europe, who tricks Laura into marriage. Evidently, the “newly independent nation state … has already reverted back to ‘barbarism’ of the ‘Old World’” (Piep 2004, 5). To emphasize the parallels, Mr. S. in Boston and Mr. F. in London are rather alike: both are wasteful, both drink excessively, and both part from this world by their own doing, one by suicide, the other by drinking himself to death (3:56–57). The different social strata in the United States and in England are depicted as harboring wasteful, untrustworthy, abusive, lecherous, impotent, or infertile men, while their wives “resemble the heroines of seduction narratives in that they are 16  Divorce was a little more easily available in the United States (Basch 1999, 20–21, 24). The legal situation for women in general had improved with American Independence in some states, but not drastically (Shields 2012, 37; Verhoeven 2008, 136–137).

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exploited sexually, economically, and emotionally” (Shields 2012, 36). Furthermore, the law encourages the disdainful treatment of women, while “a friend sufficiently rational, and with spirit enough to protect them” (3:155–156) is strikingly absent—unless an American military man comes to their aid. By depicting three different social strata in a negative light, the novel suggests that society is beyond repair, and that emigration is the only solution to escape its total depravity. Men in England and in the eastern United States are untrustworthy, wasteful, and scurrilous. Their mistreatment of women is supported by the law and sanctioned by society, which emphasizes the need for radical practice. Laying the foundations for a new society is necessary because marital problems are not restrictedly domestic and individual cases, but systematic as legal institutions are in league with abusive husbands. In the novel, the situation of married women becomes the pivotal issue that underlies all social structures. Confirming this view, Caroline initially remarks that challenges to the institution of marriage are “the most dangerous to the safety of society” (2:37–38). Expressing the same conviction, the villainous Lord B— pronounces raping his wife to be his prerogative, and the marker for civilization as he knows (and likes) it: “which if we surrender, we should become the most abject and contemptible animals in the creation. … the tranquility of society depended upon the tyranny which should be continually exercised over them, otherwise a female empire would destroy every thing that was beautiful and which the talents of ages had accumulated” (1:203–204; emphasis in original). Marital or romantic relationships, and the treatment of women, are in this way directly connected to social order, and repeatedly encourage the reader “to make the link between individual and institutional oppression” (Verhoeven 2008, 131). Romantic couples form the smallest unit that determines the just or unjust distribution of power within a society. The many plots revolving around marital conduct which all come together on the way to Bellefont suggest that the ‘root of all evil’ of British and US American society intricately connects to ‘romantic’ couples. Ending matrimonial relationships may be seemingly contradictory to the ideal romance. In The Emigrants, divorce has symbolic value (rather than any implications de jure) since it mirrors the argument for the necessity of governmental overthrow. Such a discursive equation was frequently used by British Anti-Jacobins and Jacobins alike. As Nicola J.  Watson explains, quoting the English author Laetitia Matilda Hawkins (1759–1835): “‘She who … will easily be persuaded to consider her

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husband as an unauthorized tyrant’ is likely to be one ‘who has early imbibed an aversion towards the kingly character’” (1994, 2; omissions by Watson). Ergo, The Emigrants draws on an established “synecdochical [sic] relationship between the dynamics of the domestic sphere of household and family and the larger political sphere of the nation’s relation to its king” (Wallace 2012). As Cayton puts it: “The problems of Imlay’s couples parallel imperial problems” (2013, 83), failed marriages in The Emigrants being discussed by employing political terms. For example, Arl—ton compares his brother-in-law to “the most contemptible despot that ever tyrannized over a nation” (3:156), Caroline calls the treatment of wives “tyranny” (3:169), and P. P. narrates his love story interspersed with political terms like “tyranny,” “oppressed,” and “govern” (2:47–50). This pars pro toto is not exclusively British, as divorce is likewise a popular trope in the young Republic: “Revolution was the handmaid of divorce, [and] the transformations of family and polity were closely connected” (Basch 15; see also Verhoeven 2008, 133). In the United States, marriage and divorce feature prominently when disputing the new nation. Vice versa, “American discussions of divorce employed a revolutionary vocabulary of tyranny and misrule, liberty and equality” (Shields 2012, 36). A letter by Abigail Adams (1744–1818) provides a famous historical example for this discursive linkage. In 1776, she urged her husband, founding father John Adams (1735–1826), and the Continental Congress to “remember the ladies”—that is, to grant them more legal protection— with the words: “all Men would be tyrants if they could” (854). Echoing arguments for independence from the British Crown, divorce was debated for its own means and simultaneously in a metaphorical manner: US American independence was rendered as a “collective divorce from Great Britain” (Basch 1999, 4; see also Blakemore 2012, 15–21). For example, Jefferson’s “notes supporting divorce anticipated the rationale he employed to justify independence: ‘No partnership,’ he declared, ‘can oblige continuance in contradiction to its end and design’” (Basch 1999, 22–23). Therefore, “in letting the ‘Facts’ be submitted to a candid world, the Declaration of Independence at once explained, decreed, and sanctified a divorce from the bonds of empire; and from the bonds of empire to the bonds of matrimony, it was but a short conceptual step” (Basch 1999, 26). The new partnerships in the novel intentionally evoke the language of a ‘more perfect union’ (in the words of the Preamble of the Declaration of Independence) and promote starting over.

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Thus, in the novel “the arguments for both marital divorce and separatist communalism are derived from the revolutionary language of the Declaration of Independence” (Piep 2004, 5). Divorce is compared to secession from a tyrant; vice versa, secession from a society is symbolically argued for through the discussion of divorce. Clearly echoing the Declaration of Independence, P. P. argues that in the case of his late wife’s first husband there had been enough chances for “the brutish tyrant” (2:46) to change his behavior: “When every indulgence and opportunity has been given to a depraved man to reform” (2:47) dissolving the relationship is the right course. “Just as American colonists had seceded from an abusive British Empire, so, too, wives ought to be able to leave abusive husbands” (Cayton 2013, 86), and, so should any other nation be seceded from (even if it is from the secessionist United States itself). Hence, divorcing a tyrannical nation is like leaving a tyrannical husband. The establishment of a new society is advocated because it will free women from unhappy relationships, and people in general from despotic elites. The key issue of the right to divorce becomes the means to debate the right to revolution, and to national divorce, that is, to ‘digging the trench’ around the American utopia. On the other hand, governmental tyranny is used as a metaphor for domestic violence. Drawing on this connection, The Emigrants entangles English marriage law and American Independence and argues for secession from the United States by replicating the US American arguments for independence from the British Empire. However, legal improvements, so The Emigrants suggests, can only go so far: more importantly, better husbands are needed. While P. P. stresses the importance of legal measures to improve the situation of women, Caroline answers bluntly that marital problems are “the fault of men” (2:38), of individuals, and not a systemic issue. Her uncle will, however, convince her otherwise. Yet, given the apparent corrupted state of the English society, divorce is only part of the solution for the women there, as no desirable husbands exist in England, and corrupted English specimen are already showing up in the United States. By contrast, as Cayton summarizes the general pattern, “American men are empathetic; therefore, British women should leave British men for American men” (2013, 84), preferably for former soldiers. This reiterates a point already discussed: the American Revolution provides the male utopian subjects necessary for the establishment of the good place. To underscore the utopian conditions in the West, the relationship between Arl—ton and Caroline is based on mutual attraction and passion,

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contrasting the seduction plots other women in the novel are subjected to. Caroline appears as close to perfect as romantic heroine can be. She is praised in various letters “as the most interesting creature that ever decorated our terrestrial orb” (1:37), and everyone appreciates her appearance and her behavior. She is complemented by her American husband-to-be: Captain James Arl—ton is introduced as “a soldier, which is a sufficient warranty … for the practice of delicacy which ever distinguishes the gentleman, and real generosity from an ostentatious benevolence” (1:7). Mostly characterized by taking “decisive action” (Cayton 2013, 86), he takes on various journeys and quests. Also, “valorizing American masculinity at the expense of British” (Cayton 2013, 86), Arl—ton has evident sexual desires, as his descriptions of Caroline openly express, yet at the same time does not enforce their satisfaction: “American men do not have to force women to have sex with them because women desire sex with them” (Cayton 2013, 86). Their relationship is “a natural, egalitarian, and volitional bond founded in the complementary sentiments of chivalry and gratitude” (Shields 2012, 34). Accordingly, from the very beginning, Caroline finds him “too interesting” (1:111) and reciprocates the sexual attraction in phrases that equate sensual pleasure with political liberation: “my whole soul appeared to be rebelling against the despotism of restraint” (2:214); and her “high beating heart … almost burst from its confines” (3:84). Obviously, the two commence their relationship because they want to, a desire that parallels their passion for political liberty. Thus, the couple serves as the paragon of marriage in “a society in which people choose each other because of sympathy and self-interest and learn that autonomy and mutuality are complementary” (Cayton 2013, 82). It is noteworthy that, despite the ‘sensual’ aspects of Enlightenment thought (see Kelleter 2002, 40), happy romantic relationships at the time were imagined to be rather desexualized. “Unbridled passion in the sentimental novel is always pernicious; the natural emotion needs the restraint that comes from reason” (Breinig and Opfermann 2010, 56).17 The Emigrants, on the other hand, emphasizes an intense mutual physical attraction, providing a strikingly different ideal. To all appearances, better men await in 17  In the original German: “Im sentimentalen Roman ist ungezügelte Leidenschaft immer verderblich; das natürliche Gefühl bedarf der Zurückhaltung durch die Vernunft” (Breinig and Opfermann 2010, 56). See also Kelleter 2002, 717; Wollstonecraft’s advice on the matter in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792); and William Godwin’s condemnation of sexual pleasure in An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793).

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the American West, constituting the safe basis for a romantic, passionate utopia. This also links back to the virgin land: In the end, thanks to farm work and Bellefont, even George is hailed as a good catch (3:191). Overall, the novel establishes a triad of land, romance, and sociopolitical system. Utopian subjects are created by the landscape, and husbandry creates attentive husbands: “Nature has its bounds, and vigour is the concomitant of temperance, and exercise, and the charms of fine women can only be relished by men who have not been enervated by luxury” (3:138). Even the rejection of writing is applied to the (utopian) romance. Letters, so it seems, only lead to confusion. Despite the prominence of the love story between Caroline and Arl—ton, The Emigrants does not contain a single letter that is exchanged between the two of them. This appears to be a missed opportunity, as “the letter form seems tailored for the love plot, with its emphasis on separation and reunion” (Altman 1982, 14). Quite to the contrary, letters in The Emigrants only harm the formation of happy romantic unions, as exemplified by the forged letters that Caroline’s sister Mary passes on to Arl—ton, and the deceiving note that tricks Laura into marrying the swindler Mr. S. Letters in The Emigrants narrate, but do not produce, romantic resolutions, and at times even hinder them. In this way, writing produces a “slippery doubleness and amenability to misreading [which] threatens to destroy an appropriately transparent correspondence between lovers” (Watson 1994, 87). The happy union between Arl—ton and Caroline is recounted in retrospect, as his pursuit of her captors and her liberation is a matter of doing, not of writing. The narrative complicates its own form, in this way supporting Arl—ton’s call for action. In accordance with the many parallels drawn between socioeconomic order and romance, the written word is cast as irrelevant, and even as inhibiting the realization of happy relationships and good places. Due to the important role that relationships play in the novel and for the utopian community, the lack of seduction in the main love story is another important symbol regarding the route to utopia. Imlay’s subplots employ a common motif, as by the late eighteenth century, “the fiction of sentimental seduction [was understood] as at once fomenting revolution and perfectly figuring its logic—seducing its readers into infidelity on all levels” (Watson 1994, 2). However, in contrast to the false pretense, deceits and class-conflict of other sentimental novels, The Emigrants’s main plot emphasizes consent and mutual initial attraction. Contrary to convention, desire does not end fatally for the main female protagonist

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Caroline, but in a happy marriage (Breinig and Opfermann 2010, 56). Instead of “excess of feeling and correspondent lack of rationality” (Watson 1994, 7–8) of lovers—which came to stand in for revolutions and unruly mobs—utopia is founded on reciprocal desire. In the American West, no vile seduction, and therefore no excessive revolutionary unrest, is necessary. Weirdly enough, the establishment of a good place goes hand in hand with a radical improvement of romantic relationships but seems not to ultimately depend on a reform of marriage law. Despite all the palaver, the legal rights of women are by no means the central concern of the community, reflecting the above-discussed lack of details on utopian structures: the sociability of American men must suffice as a guarantee for women’s rights. In fact, divorce is not once mentioned as a constitutional issue in the description of the community, and the outline of the community “remains silent about the rights of women” (Beranger 1986, 32)18 and about the, apparently inconceivable, matter of women’s suffrage. Instead, the presumably better men in the new community do not require any prescriptions that secure these rights, as they all agree in the letters exchanged that women need to be protected, and divorce be made attainable. Shields speculates that since there are ideal marriages to be had in America, divorce becomes de facto unnecessary (2012, 37)—utopian marriages, so to speak, are as static as utopian societies. Based on the idea of natural sociability, the community has women’s rights rely on what looks suspiciously like a gentlemen’s agreement. Caroline promises her sister: “you will be protected by the same generous hand” (3:169). This implies that women depend on magnanimous gestures instead of protection in front of the law. The novel’s “emancipatory trajectory is oddly compromised … with a good dose of chivalry” (Verhoeven 2008, 135) and women remain encoded as “possession” (Verhoeven 2008, 136). The general social change seems to eradicate the problem altogether, which “sublimate[s] the questions about the oppression of women that have preoccupied the novel” (Verhoeven 2008, 136). The radical notion of 18  In the original French: « Cette esquisse – muette sur les droits politiques des femmes » (Beranger 1986, 32). As Piep (2004, 3) points out, it is also evasive on vindicating female education, and occupation. P. P. merely at one point argues, after having disputed guidelines for the education of young men: “I will say nothing of the education of girls, for the amendment of the one, would naturally lead to the amelioration of the other” (2:28). This vagueness on an issue dear to Mary Wollstonecraft provides another argument against her secret authorship.

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changing the very institution of marriage is not pursued further, since apparently, utopian, that is, American, men need not to be divorced. The marriages, just like the new utopian society, are stable. No more new beginnings are necessary.

‘Decisive Action’: Establishing Utopia in The Emigrants The Emigrants has served as the opening example for this investigation of utopian communities in fiction. At first glance, the novel is part of the US American utopian discourse, as it promotes the idea of America being constantly “poised at the start of a new history” (Lewis 1955, 1). Thus, former soldiers from the Revolutionary War become the male members for the future utopian community, where they can practice what could be understood as ‘American’ (in this case, radically Antifederalist) values of an agrarian and democratic life. Yet, the emigrants do not intend to have their community serve as an extension of the newly founded United States. Instead, the narrative points out that nationhood has been crucially destabilized by the American Revolution and by the western frontier. While the American Revolution serves as a stepping-stone on the way to an improved society, the United States are abandoned since they have already failed in their utopian promise and have ultimately reproduced European decadence. “Indeed, underlying Imlay’s dream of America is a fervent plea for a secessionist utopia across the Alleghenies” (Verhoeven 2000, 194), and so the novel’s protagonists eventually set up their own community which will form a loose federation with other, similar settlements. Bellefont is therefore not a transient project at the frontier (despite the fact that the US American frontier had already moved further west by the time The Emigrants was published). The desire for radical social change, so it seems, is not contained by the United States. While the case of the United States seems already hopeless, Bellefont is more promising. The pastoral community is off to a good start, as it is founded not on an extensive regulatory system but on the sociability of reasonable people, and on the nuclear unit of romantic couples. Taking advantage of the option to move out West, the emigrants establish, in a relatively easy manner, the basis for what appears to be a new society. The Emigrants therefore provides an example of utopian practice disrupting

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the nation—the novel delineates a risk that the frontier myth would then discursively mitigate by making ‘antipathy to control, and particularly to any direct control’ a national character trait. As the following chapters will detail, this conflict between utopian enclaves and United States will be revisited and negotiated by fiction concerned with utopian practice all through the long nineteenth century. The Emigrants thus neatly outlines how the ideological construction of American space as utopian engenders secessionist language and logic from colonial times onward. Bellefont is exemplary for the struggle of the young republic against secessionist schemes. The combination of European utopian projections, Euro-American territorial expansion, and American Independence inspires a very peculiar utopian production: With nationhood being such an unstable construct (as the unfolding events in revolutionary France also illustrate) utopianism appears to be better applicable to smaller, territorially closed, and, in this way, homogeneous communities. Utopian production becomes highly localized, geographically determined, and is marked by an insistence on immediacy. According to this reading, Verhoeven’s assessment that “Imlay’s physiocratic millennium does not have its origin … in the ideological energy released by the American Revolution” (2000, 194) therefore only partially applies. In Imlay’s frontier land, ‘American’ rationality and decisiveness, not European upheaval, realize the utopian vision of the new society. After all, America is the place for action, not ‘idle speculation.’

References Altman, Janet Gurkin. 1982. Epistolarity. Approaches to a Form. Columbus: Ohio State University Press. Andrews, Stuart. 1997. Fellow Pantisocrats: Brissot, Cooper, and Imlay. Symbiosis: A Journal of Anglo-American Literary Relations 1 (1): 35–47. Balasopoulos, Antonis. 2004. Unworldly Worldliness: America and the Trajectories of Utopian Expansionism. Utopian Studies 15 (2): 3–35. Basch, Norma. 1999. Framing American Divorce. From the Revolutionary Generation to the Victorians. Berkeley: University of California Press. Beranger, Jean. 1986. Emigration et commune utopique dans The Emigrants de Gilbert Imlay (?). Annales du Centre de recherches sur l’Amérique Anglophone 11: 21–35. Blakemore, Steven. 2012. Literature, Intertextuality, and the American Revolution. From Common Sense to “Rip Van Winkle”. Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press.

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Bradford, William. [1650] 1908. Of Plimoth Plantation, 1606–1646. Edited by William T. Davis. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. Breinig, Helmbrecht, and Susanne Opfermann. 2010. Die Literatur der frühen Republik. In Amerikanische Literaturgeschichte, ed. Hubert Zapf and Helmbrecht Breinig, 3rd ed. Stuttgart: Metzler. Cayton, Andrew. 2013. Love in the Time of Revolution. Transatlantic Literary Radicalism and Historical Change, 1793–1818. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Cole, John R. 2001. Imlay’s Ghost: Wollstonecraft’s Authorship of The Emigrants. In Eighteenth-Century Women: Studies in Their Lives, Work and Culture, ed. Linda V. Troost, 263–298. New York: AMS Press. Cooper, James Fenimore. 1827. The Prairie. Philadelphia: Carey, Lea & Carey. ———. 1841. The Deerslayer, or First War-Path. Philadelphia: Lea & Blanchard. Crèvecoeur, Michel Guillaume Jean de [John Hector St. John de]. [1782] 1981. Letters from an American Farmer. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. Critical Review, or, Annals of Literature. 1793. Review of Gilbert Imlay’s The Emigrants. October. Cronon, William. 1995. The Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature. In Uncommon Ground: Toward Reinventing Nature, ed. William Cronon, 69–90. New York: Norton. Davidson, Cathy. 1986. Revolution and the Word: The Rise of the Novel in America. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Eagleton, Terry. 1982. The Rape of Clarissa. Writing, Sexuality, and Class Struggle in Samuel Richardson. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Foucault, Michel. [1967] 1986. Of Other Spaces (trans. Jay Miskowiec). Diacritics 16 (1): 22–27. Goddu, Teresa A. 1997. Gothic America. Narrative, History, and Nation. New York: Columbia University Press. Godwin, William. 1793. Enquiry Concerning Political Justice and its Influence on Morals and Happiness. London: G.G.J. & J. Robinson. ———. 1794. Things as They Are, or, The Adventures of Caleb Williams. London: B. Crosby. Hogan, Richard. 1985. The Frontier as Social Control. Theory and Society 14 (1): 35–51. Holcroft, Thomas. 1792. Anna St. Ives. London: Shepperson and Reynolds. Hutchinson, Colin. 2008. Cult Fiction: “Good” and “Bad” Communities in the Contemporary American Novel. Journal of American Studies 24 (1): 35–50. Imlay, Gilbert. 1792. A Topographical Description of the Western Territory of North America. Debrett. ———. 1793. The Emigrants, or the History of an Expatriated Family. 3 vols. London: A. Hamilton. Inchbald, Elizabeth. 1791. A Simple Story. London: G.G.J. & J. Robinson.

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Jameson, Fredric. 2005. Archaeologies of the Future. The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions. New York: Verso. Jefferson, Thomas. 1774. A Summary View of the Rights of British America. Williamsburg: Clementina Rind. Kelleter, Frank. 2002. Amerikanische Aufklärung. Sprachen der Rationalität im Zeitalter der Revolution. Paderborn: Schöningh. Kelly, Gary. 1976. The English Jacobin Novel. 1780–1805. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Lewis, R.W.B. 1955. The American Adam. Innocence, Tragedy and Tradition in the Nineteenth Century. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. London, Jack. 1903. The Call of the Wild. New York: Macmillan. Lynd, Staughton. [1968] 2009. Intellectual Origins of American Radicalism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Marshall, Peter, ed. 2017. Romantic Rationalist. A William Godwin Reader. Oakland: PM Press. Monthly Review. 1793. Review of Gilbert Imlay’s The Emigrants. 1 August. Paine, Thomas. 1776. Common Sense. Providence: John Carter. Piep, Karsten H. 2004. Separatist Nationalism in Gilbert Imlay’s The Emigrants. CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 6 (4): 1–9. Richardson, Samuel. 1748. Clarissa. or, The History of a Young Lady. London. Schmitt von Mühlenfels, Astrid. 1986. Geographie und Literatur: Der Nachrevolutionäre Westen Nordamerikas bei Gilbert Imlay. In Beiträge zur Räumlichen Prozessforschung in den USA, ed. Hans-Wilhelm Windhorst and William H. Berentsen, 15–22. Vechta: Vechtaer Druckerei und Verlag. Seelye, John. 1987. The Jacobin Mode in Early American Fiction: Gilbert Imlay’s ‘The Emigrants’. Early American Literature 22 (2): 204–212. Shields, Juliet. 2012. Genuine Sentiments and Gendered Liberties: Migration and Marriage in Gilbert Imlay’s The Emigrants. In Atlantic Worlds in the Long Eighteenth Century: Seduction and Sentiment, ed. Toni Bowers and Tita Chico, 33–49. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Slotkin, Richard. [1973] 1996. Regeneration through Violence. The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600–1860. New York: Harper Perennial. Smith, Henry Nash. [1950] 1971. Virgin Land. The American West as Symbol and Myth. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Tuan, Yi-Fu. 2001. Space and Place. The Perspective of Experience. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Turner, Frederick Jackson. [1893] 1996. The Frontier in American History. New York: Dover. Verhoeven, Wil. 2000. Land-jobbing in the Western Territories: Radicalism, Transatlantic Emigration, and the 1790s American Travel Narrative. In Romantic Geographies: Discourses of Travel, 1775–1844, ed. Amanda Gilroy, 185–203. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

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———. 2001. ‘New Philosophers’ in the Backwoods: Romantic Primitivism in the 1790’s Novel. The Wordsworth Circle 32 (3): 130–133. ———. 2004. ‘Some Corner of a Foreign Field that is Forever England’: The Transatlantic Construction of the Anglo-American Landscape. In Green and Pleasant Land: English Culture and the Romantic Countryside, ed. Amanda Gilroy, 155–171. Leuven: Peeters. ———. 2006. Gilbert Imlay and the Triangular Trade. The William and Mary Quarterly 63 (4): 827–842. ———. 2008. Gilbert Imlay. Citizen of the World. London: Pickering & Chatto. ———. 2013. Americomania and the French Revolution Debate in Britain, 1789–1802. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Verhoeven, Wil, and Amanda Gilroy, eds. 1998. Gilbert Imlay: The Emigrants. London: Penguin. Wallace, Miriam L. 2012. Jacobin and Anti-Jacobin Novels. In The Encyclopedia of Romantic Literature, ed. Frederick Burwick. Blackwell Reference Online. Oxford: Blackwell. Watson, Nicola J. 1994. Revolution and the Form of the British Novel 1790–1825. Intercepted Letters, Interrupted Seductions. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Wollstonecraft, Mary. [1792] 2009. A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. An Authoritative Text, Backgrounds, and Contexts Criticism. New York: Norton.

CHAPTER 4

‘Between Fiction and Reality’: The Utopian Past in The Blithedale Romance (1852)

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. … With the idea of partially obviating this difficulty, (the sense of which has always pressed very heavily upon him,) the Author has ventured to make free with his old, and affectionately remembered home, at BROOK FARM, as being, certainly, the most romantic episode of his own life—essentially a day-dream, and yet a fact—and thus offering an available foothold between fiction and reality. (iv–v)

One of the most canonical writers of US American fiction, Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–1864) seems to have shared the utopian vigor of Gilbert Imlay’s emigrants. At least, Hawthorne did not stop at ‘idle speculation’ and tried the utopian lifestyle for himself, joining the utopian community of Brook Farm (1841–1847) for six months. However, given his financial situation, Hawthorne’s motivation for living at Brook Farm in 1841 may not have been solely ideological: much points to him trying to save some money by living communally. Unable to make his living as a writer, Hawthorne frequently had to take up various engagements—one well-known result being the caricature of his former workplace, the Salem © The Author(s) 2020 V. Adamik, In Search of the Utopian States of America, Palgrave Studies in Utopianism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-60279-6_4

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custom house, in the preface to The Scarlet Letter (1850). Whatever his initial incentives to move to Brook Farm, Hawthorne did not enjoy his short sojourn into utopian practice very much. He soon came to the conclusion that communal life and farm work did not agree with him, to say the least. At one point, he wrote to his fiancé Sophia Peabody (1809–1871) that “a man’s soul may be buried and perish under a dung heap or in a furrow of the field, just as well as under a pile of money” (in Myerson 2002, 87). Despite its short lifespan, the community in Brook Farm is widely known because of its illustrious members and associates. It is intricately linked to US American transcendentalism as its founder George Ripley also co-founded and housed the Transcendental Club in Boston. Famous transcendentalists like Margarete Fuller (1810–1850), Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882), and Amos Bronson Alcott (1799–1888) frequented the community. Broadly speaking, the basic idea behind Brook Farm was to balance manual labor, higher education, and artistic creation. Collaborative work was supposed to allow each member maximum time for self-culture, that is, for developing the mind through intellectual and artistic activities. Women and men were to choose their line of work at leisure and to be equally paid for it. The community published a journal, The Harbinger, and ran a highly renowned boarding school. While the farm comprised mostly of intellectuals, the commune attracted members and students from diverse and international backgrounds. In 1843, New York reformer Albert Brisbane (1809–1890) began visiting the community and convinced Ripley and others to structure the community according to a Fourierist layout.1 In 1844, Brook Farm officially, but not unanimously, converted to Fourierism. This meant, among other things, a more rigid work-schedule and constructing a so-called Phalanstery, a building in which members would live, work, and recreate collectively. When the communal building was destroyed in a fire, bankruptcy added to the internal struggles of the community, and it dissolved. By that point, Hawthorne himself was already long gone. Utopian practice was only a short phase in his life, and he is neither held to be a utopian writer, nor a fervent reformer. His oeuvre participating in a national historiography, it was largely concerned with the past, not the 1  The novel discussed in the next chapter, Marie Howland’s Papa’s Own Girl (1874), is strongly influenced by Fourierism. I recommend Carl J. Guarneri’s The Utopian Alternative: Fourierism in Nineteenth-Century America (1991) as an introduction to the topic.

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future. Hawthorne is instead widely credited with having influenced the way US Americans perceive the history and the literature of their nation. The Scarlet Letter (1850) and his short stories, especially those set in Puritan settlements, are a ‘perennial’ (Coale 2013, 9) of various school, college, and university syllabi. Hawthorne was also well connected to many of his contemporaries who would go on to shape the intellectual and literary landscape of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Among them was the transcendentalist crowd as well as other writers, perhaps most famously Herman Melville (1819–1891), who dedicated Moby Dick (1851) to Hawthorne. Later in his life, Hawthorne turned his back on America, physically and literary, and spent seven years in Europe. He returned to the United States in 1860 and died in 1864.

‘Numberless Projects of Social Reform’: The Communal Wave of the Nineteenth Century Given Hawthorne’s prominence as a national author—which does not mean that he was uncritical or patriotic—his comment on utopian practice is an important contribution to my investigation into the relationship between utopia and United States. Even though Hawthorne lived in a utopian community, The Blithedale Romance is not a thinly veiled autobiographical account, no roman-à-clef, of his time at Brook Farm. As many critics have argued, the romance is more complexly layered. In contrast to the optimism expressed in Imlay’s The Emigrants, half a century later Hawthorne draws a bleak picture of utopian practice. The pessimistic commentary of The Blithedale Romance marks a pivotal moment for utopianism in the United States. The nation, its foundation stylized as the birth of a new world, had in its first sixty years rapidly industrialized, especially in the East, and had continued to expand its territory, murdering and relocating tens of thousands of Indigenous people in the process, engaged in wars with other nations, and faced its first severe economic depression while the issue of slavery divided the nation and would eventually lead to the outbreak of the Civil War. At the same time, the ‘virgin’ land and the idea of establishing a new systemic order continued to attract settlers as well as to inspire utopian communities. The first half of the nineteenth century experienced a surge of utopian practice. Famously, Emerson exclaimed in 1840 in a letter to the Scotsman Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881): “We are all a little wild here with numberless projects of

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social reform. Not a reading man but has a draft of a new community in his waistcoat pocket” (qtd. e.g., in Holloway 1966, 19). More than a hundred intentional communities were founded in the United States between 1825 and 1860, most of them in the 1840s (Bestor 1950, 277–285). In fact, some scholars argue that the territorial expansion and industrialization of the United States and the communal wave are related, with “the distance the United States had traveled from the agrarian republic of the Founders … compelling Americans to reexamine inherited social ideals” (Guarneri 1991, 6). This reexamination of ‘inherited social ideals’ did not result in plans marked by escapism and nostalgia. Instead, the communal wave was inspired largely by ‘socialist’2 thinkers who sought to tackle the problems that increasing industrialization posed (see Claeys 2011). They advocated holistic changes to the system, resulting in what is referred to as utopian socialism—as opposed to scientific socialism, a distinction that would be drawn by Friedrich Engels in Herrn Eugen Dühring’s Umwälzung der Wissenschaft (1877).3 Exercised in utopian communities with hundreds, or even thousands of members, the new socioeconomic order was to be promoted by example. The two most notable and influential thinkers behind utopian socialism in the United States were Robert Owen (1801–1877) and Charles Fourier (1772–1837), but there were others, such as Étienne Cabet (1788–1856), Adin Ballou (1803–1890), whose community ‘Hopedale’ clearly inspired the name ‘Blithedale,’ and John Humphrey Noyes (1811–1886). And while we may, with the beauty of hindsight, dismiss these communities as futile endeavors, historians engaged in communal studies repeatedly point out that these visions seemed not implausible at the time. To quote historian Carl J. Guarneri, we have to discard “the notion that historical change is inexorable or inherently progressive” and view our present as the only logical outcome of the past, so as to shed “doctrinaire assumptions about ‘reality’” (1991, 5). The first of these thinkers to set up a socialistic community in the United States was Robert Owen, a Welsh industrialist who had already experimented with large-scale reform in New Lanark, a factory-village in 2  I am using the term socialism loosely here, referring to a variety of ideas to distribute labor and capital more evenly within a community. 3  Commonly referred to as Anti-Dühring, this is a longer version of the more commonly known Die Entwicklung des Sozialismus von der Utopie zur Wissenschaft/Socialism: Utopian and Scientific (1870).

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Scotland that he managed and co-owned. Convinced “that the character of man is formed FOR—not BY himself” (qtd. in Pitzer 1997, 100), Owen conducted a variety of social experiments in his lifetime: in New Lanark, he restructured the village in order to improve the conditions of the working class by offering better housing and salaries, conditional welfare and exceptional education for children and adults, in turn enforcing strict rules regarding hygiene, extramarital relationships, and the consumption of alcohol. Initially, the cooperative village did well, and had a positive reputation. However, Owen’s intrusive rules, his crusade against organized religion, organizational issues, and squabbles among investors began to complicate matters. Eventually, Owen turned his attention across the Atlantic, and set out for an even larger scheme. He purchased a town in Indiana called ‘Harmony.’ It was sold by Johann George Rapp (1757–1847), the founder and leader of the Harmony Society, also known as the ‘Rappites.’ The Rappites, a religious group of German origin, had built this town in order to live the communal, religious lifestyle as prescribed by their founder and had now decided to move the entire community to erect yet another settlement. The formerly Rappite Harmony, renamed ‘New Harmony,’ became the flagship for Owen’s utopian vision. Inspired by Owen’s teachings, at least nineteen other Owenite utopian communities were set up in the United States. All the same, New Harmony’s Owenite phase only lasted from 1825 to 1827. Owen’s philosophy appears to have nicely fit in with some discourses dominant in the United States: “His appeal to familiar Enlightenment themes placed him in the American tradition of Benjamin Franklin [1706–1790], John Adams [1735–1826], Thomas Jefferson [1743–1826], Thomas Paine [1736–1809], Joel Barlow [1754–1812], and Elihu Palmer [1764–1806]. This helped attract a few leading persons to New Harmony, such as William Maclure [1763–1840], teacher Paul Brown,4 and feminist Frances Wright [1795–1852], who already adhered to natural rights, environmental determinism, deism, and the rights of women” (Pitzer 1997, 108). However, just as in New Lanark, Owen believed that egalitarianism was for the future, and did not practice it in the present. Historians argue that his “aggressive paternalism” (Pitzer 1997, 95), paired with his frequent 4  There is, as far as I can tell, little research on Paul Brown, although his critical Twelve Months in New Harmony (1827) is an important source on the community. Eventually, he left the community because it did not live up to its egalitarian promises. He authored multiple radical works (see Bestor 1950, 187; Oved 1987, 120–121).

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absences from New Harmony, led to dissidence. Furthermore, Owen’s adamant atheist agenda was in stark conflict with the emphasis on personal religious experience as promoted by the many preachers that swept the land: “Owen’s appeal to Enlightenment thought proved to be a liability when attempting to attract independent Jeffersonian farmers. They had shelved deism and adopted the revivalism and evangelicalism that flowed from the powerful emotions of the camp meeting of the Second Great Awakening” (Pitzer 1997, 108). Moreover, commitment was ever in flux, as members were accepted regardless of whether they subscribed to Owen’s vision or not. Nonetheless, New Harmony’s achievements are impressive: It became a hub for outstanding education, from infant schools to scientific research. Some steps toward women’s rights were taken, such as communal childcare, obtainability of divorce, and the design of a more liberating ‘costume.’ In the footsteps of Owenism followed Fourierism. Owen and Fourier were near contemporaries and developed their ideas simultaneously and independently from each other, but it took until the 1840s for Fourierism to attract a larger fellowship in the United States. Charles Fourier was a French philosopher, who theorized on his convictions at length and was oddly specific in his utopian outline; much unlike Owen, who was decidedly more hands-on and experimentally inclined, so that ‘Owenism’ covers a range of ideas (Claeys 1991). In fact, Fourier’s extensive oeuvre is often more fantastic than practical. His ‘utopian’ visions are rather otherworldly, including new species of animals, fruitfulness beyond measure, fairies, and oceans that turn into lemonade. Those in favor of Fourier claimed that such statements were not meant to be taken literally. On the other hand, there is no indication to the contrary. Furthermore, his outlines of the new world order were rather specific, supplying oddly precise numbers and classifications. Infamously, he argued that there are twelve common ‘passions’ to be found within the human psyche, and from their combinations, 810 distinct personality types can be deduced. A community should therefore be composed of two people of each type; 1620 people would then live together happily. One of Fourier’s core convictions is that any type of work can be agreeable—so agreeable that it borders on sexual pleasure—if executed by the matching type of personality. Individual pleasure and collective good are in this way united. To reorganize labor, communities were to be set up in so-called phalansteries, or phalanxes. Fourier’s teachings and plans would probably not have attracted a large fellowship in the United States had not Brisbane adapted Fourier’s

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writings to promote Fourierism to a US American audience. Brisbane, before publishing his translation of Fourier’s doctrine, censored the sections on sexuality, replaced some of Fourier’s neologisms for more common parlance, focused on more practical aspects of Fourier’s teachings, and downsized the advised number of people to live in a phalanstery. Overall, Fourierism in practice had to be much more flexible than Fourier himself, who waited all his life for someone with enough capital to realize his plans exactly. Brisbane clearly struck a nerve. Within the first two years of his campaign, near twenty phalanxes, albeit of different size and success, were founded. Thus, Fourierism became “the classic case of the nineteenth-­ century ideology that Marx and Engels derisively called ‘utopian socialism’” (Guarneri 1997, 161). To counter a common prejudice: some of them, such as the North American Phallanx and the Wisconsin Phallanx, were quite successful and prosperous at one point in their existence. Nonetheless, most of these projects, and, certainly connected to their failure, the general interest in Fourierism, subsided toward the end of the 1850s. Yet, such generalizations are to be taken with a grain of salt. As mentioned above, Owenism and Fourierism were merely the most prominent strands of utopian socialism at the time, and those two labels only apply loosely to communities that differ widely in their size, in the members they attracted, and in their longevity (see Noyes 1870). Furthermore, there were other utopian communities that followed neither of those two thinkers—such as the Icarians, the Oneidans, and the Hopedalers. Others avoided the spotlight and have therefore vanished from historical memory. Finally, while the 1840s may have been the heyday of communalism, utopian practice did not disappear from the US American landscape: the subsequent chapter will discuss an example for the revival—or, rather for the survival—of Fourier’s theories after the Civil War. Founders of such communities held the United States to be an ideal petri dish for utopian socialism. Owen declared that “The United States, but particularly the States west of the Allegheny Mountains have been prepared in the most remarkable manner for the New System. … In fact the whole of this country is ready to commence a new empire” (qtd. in Pitzer 1997, 113). Albert Brisbane argued that “the American Revolution would remain incomplete if it was not extended to a social revolution” (qtd. in Fluck 2009, 294). In a preface to the first comprehensive work on the communal waves of the nineteenth century, John Humphrey Noyes wrote: “This country has been from the beginning, and especially for the

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last forty years, a laboratory in which Socialisms of all kinds have been experimenting” (Noyes 1870, xix). From a twenty-first-century perspective, this connection between the dominant national narrative and utopian practice (in particular utopian socialism) within the United States may appear somewhat paradoxical. The formation of intentional communities appears to be a clear symptom of dissent. For example, Imlay’s emigrants, as discussed in the previous chapter, are setting up their community because no nation provides the structures which they deem agreeable, or even good enough to provide the basis for a reform. However, utopianism, and utopian practice in particular, bespeak a belief that one can radically transform one’s environment, that is, it testifies to a utopian conviction. These convictions are encouraged by the zeitgeist and are thus rooted in the sociocultural context of the era, particularly if they are shared by many individuals. The preceding chapters have demonstrated that similar convictions were often articulated in the context of a US American narrative, and the utopianists in the nineteenth century frequently referred to precisely this aspect: “The Brook Farmers, Oneidans, and other communitarian groups drew their ideals, energy, and inspiration from popular notions of the mission and promise of America. These groups proposed their Utopias as alternative, ‘true’ versions of the American dream, contrary in some fundamental ways to dominant social norms yet also faithful in essence to national ideals” (Guarneri 1994, 73). Thus, they had all come to think of the United States as a suitable place for their communities, even though the groups had visions that diverged dramatically from the country’s status quo.

No ‘Conclusion Favorable or Otherwise’: Blithedale’s Utopianism The Blithedale Romance reflects on this tension while evading the finer details of Brook Farm’s utopian practice, most likely because Hawthorne himself had mixed feelings about the project and the underlying tenets. Even though the narrative is authored by a former communard and set within an intentional community full of aspiring reformers, Blithedale does not fully concern itself with the merits and faults of communal living, private/collective property, women’s rights, or any of the other points of the various agendas of utopian projects in the nineteenth century. However, in its satirical—albeit melodramatic—style, the romance

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comments extensively and mordantly on the futility of utopian practice in the United States. Like Gilbert Imlay’s The Emigrants (1793), The Blithedale Romance highlights the romantic interests of prominent individuals in its community. The narrator, Miles Coverdale, reminisces about his time at Blithedale. Looking backward, he focuses decidedly on personal, not social and political, matters. One literary critic comments fittingly: “For a participant in a reform association that aspires to regenerate society, Miles Coverdale … spends very little time actually doing the work of social reform” (Levine 2004, 384). Another calls the novel “so painfully interpersonal as to be, in some fundamental sense, pre-political” (Colacurcio 2008, 1). Indeed, Coverdale mostly fantasizes not about a utopian social order, but about a love-triangle between the community’s founder and benefactor, Zenobia (the pseudonym of an allegedly well-known author and reformer),5 the reformer Hollingsworth (no first name), and the destitute and enigmatic Priscilla (no last name used), who shows up with Hollingsworth at the newly founded Blithedale community. Aside from Priscilla, Zenobia, Hollingsworth, the farmer Silas Foster, his wife, and the narrator Coverdale, members are not mentioned by name or otherwise distinguished, and there is no telling how big the community is. Were it not for the occasional passage in which a number of anonymous members are present (e.g., in the chapters “The Supper Table,” “Zenobia’s Legend,” and “The Masqueraders”), Blithedale may well be populated only by these six characters (Brook Farm, by comparison, counted more than one hundred members at one point). Complications and narrative turns arise with a visit from the stage-wizard Westervelt, ex-lover of Zenobia. ‘Professor’ Westervelt has come to Blithedale to retrieve Priscilla, whom he had held, presumably against her will, as his spiritual medium. In the end, Zenobia commits suicide, probably over her father having transferred his inheritance to his other daughter—who turns out to be Priscilla—and Hollingsworth transferring his romantic interests to no other than Priscilla. The main romantic plot and the sidelined communal project both come to an end with Zenobia’s death. At first glance it appears as if the love plot could well be situated anywhere, and the utopian community at Blithedale 5  Critics agree that Zenobia is loosely modelled on Margarete Fuller (Millington 2011b). Fuller is also the only historical person associated with Brook Farm that The Blithedale Romance mentions by name: Coverdale informs Priscilla that she resembles Fuller. This is of course another Hawthornian jape, as Priscilla is Zenobia’s sister.

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seems to have no greater relevance for the complications of the romance and its ending. The preface of The Blithedale Romance supports such assessments of the work as apolitical. There, the author announces that he does not “put forward the slightest pretensions to illustrate a theory, or elicit a conclusion favorable or otherwise to Socialism” (iiv). With this, Hawthorne’s fourth romance disappointed the expectations of many nineteenth-­century readers, as contemporary reviews illustrate. Reactions to Blithedale wavered, critics “either finding it too cynical because of Miles Coverdale’s narration or too suddenly disrupted by Zenobia’s suicide” (Coale 2013, 28), yet the most common complaint revolves around the lack of commentary on communalism. For example, an overall appreciative article in the American Whig Review (1852) proclaims: “We believe that if Mr. Hawthorne had intended to give a faithful portrait of Brook Farm and its inmates, he would have signally failed” (417). Another commentary,6 from the Westminster Review, judges more harshly: “‘Blithedale,’ whatever may be its relation to Brook Farm, is itself a socialistic settlement, with its corresponding phases of life, and therefore involves points both of moral and material interest, the practical operation of which should have been exhibited so as to bring out the good and evil of the system. But this task Hawthorne declines … He confines himself to the delineation of its picturesque phases, as a ‘thing of beauty,’ and either has no particular convictions respecting its deeper relations, or hesitates to express them” (1852, 597). Whether disappointed expectations are to blame or not, the novel’s sales numbers, whilst initially promising, dropped below those of Hawthorne’s other works after only a year. Hawthorne’s non-account on communal life was not a great commercial success. Due to its lack of detail on aspects of communal life, The Blithedale Romance is, regarding content and form, a rather un-utopian narrative. It refrains from giving the ‘utopian tour’ in which the underlying social theory and the transformed daily life would be explained, even though Coverdale narrates the romance in hindsight and from this position could have included all kinds of insights. This omission can be understood as a political statement in itself, speaking to Blithedale’s ongoing, if somewhat covert, critique of utopian practice in the United States.

6  Possibly, this review was authored by the English writer George Eliot (1819–1880) (see footnote in Millington 2011b, 264).

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For one, Coverdale cannot discuss Blithedale’s intention because the community lacks a common cause. If anything, the community’s utopian vision is defined by mutual discontent. The members “agreed as to the inexpediency of lumbering along with the old system any farther. As to what should be substituted, there was much less unanimity” (76): their “bond … was not affirmative, but negative” (ibid.). For example, Hollingsworth plans to use the grounds and the communal institutions to reform prisoners but these plans are not supported by the other members. Despite this absence of a unified utopian vision, the community understands itself as utopian. For one, the members view themselves as singled out, as “estranged from the rest of mankind in pretty fair proportion with the strictness of our mutual bond among ourselves” (28), having “sequestered themselves from the crowd” (108), and striving for “separation from the greedy, struggling, self-seeking world” (27). Like many nineteenthcentury communards, they take themselves to be exceptional, a city upon a hill, which will provide an “example of a life governed by other than the false and cruel principles on which human society has all along been based” (26). This means that the community eventually wants to expand their utopian system (even though it will never get to that point). In a sense, Blithedale is a utopian community without a utopian vision. Toward the end, Coverdale notes: “The experiment, so far as its original projectors were concerned, proved long ago a failure, first lapsing into Fourierism, and dying, as it well deserved, for this infidelity to its own higher spirit” (286). The narrative, however, leaves the precise nature of this ‘higher spirit’ untold. One could, of course, draw on the historical model of Brook Farm for further details, but the reading developed here hinges on the observation that the narrative deliberately evades factuality. Hawthorne’s novel also avoids giving any commentary on contemporary politics. The community appears to have no non-White members, and despite the many abolitionists Hawthorne associated with, and the slow dawn of the Civil War at the novel’s publication, the question of slavery is not addressed. Blithedale also does not feature a school, whereas Brook Farmers held education to be an important part of their agenda and provided an education to children and adults of both sexes. Coverdale and his fellow communards in general do not do much in terms of social reform and rather dream up “splendid castles (phalansteries perhaps they might be more fitly called), and pictured beautiful scenes” (26–27). He mentions “theories of equal brotherhood and sisterhood” (31), and bringing about “the millennium of love” (ibid.) by living and working in an

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agrarian community, but this appears to be about as much philosophical thought as goes into the ‘intention’ behind the commune. On closer investigation, Hawthorne made a peculiar choice with Coverdale as narrator for the utopian community, as Coverdale is politically disinterested and blatantly uninformed. For example, he takes excerpts from Fourier’s writings more literal than his contemporaries (under the guidance of Brisbane) would, which reveals his lack of understanding of his reading matter. This may be Hawthornian self-criticism, or a general wry commentary on the ideological ignorance of members of utopian communities in general and Fourierists in particular. Scholars have picked up on this and highlight in their observations the subtle and sardonic humor of the novel: “The result appears to be a novel about a man writing a novel about things he does not sufficiently understand” (Colacurcio 2008, 4). Coverdale could not possibly provide any details on the theories that inform Blithedale’s utopian practice because he either does not care or he does not understand them or both. Therefore, even though the romance and the community share a name, the romance is not about the daily life in a utopian community per se. This is one of the many paradoxes of The Blithedale Romance. The various contradictions and the layered, almost ciphered, symbolism of Hawthorne’s work are reflected in the struggle of critics to offer an interpretation that unites all aspects of the romance under one paradigm. Most academic readings, however, have in common that they do not read it as a historical, autobiographic source on Hawthorne and Brook Farm. Instead, they focus on intertextual and metafictional statements throughout the narrative and relish its self-conscious irony. Thus, Lauren Berlant has investigated how the insistence on romance “breaks down under the pressure of its application” (1989, 54). Robert S. Levine argues that the “exaggerations, which regularly depict Coverdale as an uncomprehending prig” (2004, 402) work to alienate the reader from the narrator in order to criticize the conflation of sentimentalism and reform. Elizabeth Dill has likewise read Blithedale as a challenge to sentimental conceptions of utopian practice (2011). Other critics have located commentaries on melodrama (Pusch 2013) and the Gothic (Goddu 1997) within it. Feminist approaches, inspired by Nina Baym’s pivotal work on Hawthorne (1976a), contributed further fruitful readings, and underlie investigations of the symbol of female virginity and virgin land (Berlant 1989), class issues, and the market (Castronovo 2011; Goddu 1997). Due to the self-contradictory and unreliable narrator, readings come to various conclusions as to what the

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romance is trying to convey. One critic even proposes that Coverdale himself is the murderer of Zenobia (Colacurcio 2008); an interpretation that centers on Coverdale’s awkward stylization of Zenobia’s suicide and that has in part inspired my take on the novel.

‘Better Air to Breathe’: Blithedale’s Promising Beginnings Coverdale’s unreliability stems in part from him narrating in retrospect. Since his attitude toward the community has changed from when he first joined it, he frequently shifts his tone, fluctuating between the enthusiasm of his younger self and the more supercilious stance of his aged auctorial persona. To complicate matters, it is often unclear which of these two Coverdales is talking. Initially, his younger self is eager to become part of the utopian community but this changes noticeably in the course of the narrative, which divides Blithedale in two sections: in the first half, Coverdale apparently did believe in the transformative powers that American space exerts over subject—quite similar to the conviction that underlies The Emigrants. At the outset of Coverdale’s stay, the communards are busy tilling the earth, yet they appear to not so much change the grounds at Blithedale as Blithedale changes them. The beneficiary effect of this agrarian work connects with the book’s initial hints at the exceptional traits of the region, which enable utopian practice. That is to say, the communards follow the pastoral ideals underlying the virgin land discourse. As the English writer and critic Henry Fothergill Chorley (1808–1872) in the London Athenaeum (1852) commented: “This ‘Blithedale Romance’ is eminently an American book; … Mr. Hawthorne’s America is a vast new country” (741). As far as the beginnings of Blithedale go, this assessment holds. The land at Blithedale farm first proves to be beneficial for the Anglo-American settlers who occupy it; it can be turned into a fruitful garden and it provides them with a chance for a new start. Given that Brook Farm never was quite as rural, Hawthorne here seems to deliberately work the virgin land topos, only to debunk it in the course of the narrative. The rural environment has initially the desired transformative effect on some of the communards, and so the utopian space appears to successfully create utopian subjects. Priscilla is especially prone to change because her lot was the hardest. Working for the ‘Professor’ Westervelt as the ‘Veiled

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Lady,’ she was beneath a ‘magic’ veil, which served to subdue and exploit her (Baym 1976b, 292–293). Blithedale’s open space offers her liberation: “She has never before known what it is to live in the free air, and so it intoxicates her as if she were sipping wine” (71–72). Presumably, Priscilla, who has been held in some “close nook” (44) in the city (or so young Coverdale confabulates), is significantly transformed by her environment. While the city has an oppressing effect, the countryside is liberating. The narrator Coverdale also experiences a similar metamorphosis himself. He enthusiastically announces to have felt the difference the moment he left town: “then, there was better air to breathe. Air, that had not been breathed, once and again! Air, that had not been spoken into words of falsehood, formality, and error, like all the air of the dusky city” (17). Not only is this air ‘better,’ it is also presumably not as ‘used’ as the urban air, but fresh and pristine. Coverdale evidently bought into the idea of virgin space fit to create utopia. The city is marked by “old conventionalism” and leaves their hearts “barely room enough to throb” (16). The farm, on the other hand, appears to offer indefinite range: “The sense of vast, undefined space, pressing from the outside against the black panes of our uncurtained windows” (44). Removed from “narrowing of human limits” (27), Blithedale is offering utopian possibilities. The windows without curtains (curtains being a reoccurring symbol in Blithedale) imply that the protagonists at this point wanted to open themselves up to ‘vast’ utopian opportunity. On arriving at the farm, Coverdale is incapacitated by a fever, which he stylizes as a rite of passage: “an avenue between two existences; the low-­ arched and darksome doorway, through which I crept out of a life of old conventionalisms, … and gained admittance into the freer region that lay beyond” (73). He emerges ready for transformation and is subsequently recreated through physical labor as an uber-fit specimen—just like some of Imlay’s emigrants, he is regenerated as an Adamic ideal of a man. After weeks of American farm-life, Coverdale imagines himself turned into the able-bodied ancestor of future utopian generations (154). Urban life has the opposite effect. Whereas Blithedale invigorates Coverdale, the city is perceived as weakening the male body: “the hot-house warmth of a town residence, and the luxurious life in which I indulged myself, had taken much of the pith out of my physical system” (49). However, neither the weakening nor the vitalizing effects are irreversible. Just as Coverdale’s body is strengthened and broadened in the commune, so the city immediately restores him to his old self when he returns for a short while: “all the

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effeminacy of past days had returned upon me at once” (172). “Old habits, such as were merely external, returned upon me with wonderful promptitude” (228). Yet again, when leaving the city for Blithedale the second time, the reversion is reversed (238). The speed at which he changes is so extreme that his self, that is, the human subject, appears to be almost non-existent outside of its immediate sociocultural milieu, “being utterly reformable” (Millington 2011a, 305). Any human in this way seems to be just a short trip away from becoming the forefather of a utopian posterity, or a sickly city-dweller. In these instances, Blithedale represents the ideal of pastoral, ‘Arcadian’ perfection, counter to the city, to which negative qualities are ascribed. Notions of a supposedly beneficiary agrarian lifestyle seem confirmed in the eyes of the young Coverdale. The optimistic portrayals of these transformations into utopian subjects stand exemplary for a naïve belief in human perfectibility/improvement within a rural setting. Thus, Blithedale alludes to, and by way of hyperbole ridicules, the idea of the supposed benefits of subsistence agriculture.

‘A Cold Arcadia’: Utopian Aspirations Unfulfilled While Blithedale as a community promises to transform its inhabitants, The Blithedale Romance does not assert that the ideal grounds for a utopia are to be found somewhere within the United States. Instead, Hawthorne’s novel perverts the geographical determinism underlying the virgin land theme so that this space seems particularly unsuited for realizing a good place. For one, the book repeatedly draws upon the virgin land motif only to undermine it. Coverdale’s running commentary on his early days in the commune makes clear that the land of the farm is neither a garden that easily supplies plenty nor is it virgin. Blithedale constantly juxtaposes the pastoral ideals, which the narrator’s younger self half expected to have fulfilled, with descriptions of the hardship and dearth of agrarian life. This juxtaposition begins early in the narrative. Immediately after (young) Coverdale praises the freshness of air, his older self retrospectively mocks his own enthusiasm: “‘How pleasant it is!’ remarked I, while the snowflakes flew into my mouth the moment it was opened. ‘How very mild and balmy is this country air!’” (17). The community described in the romance is certainly not set in the fertile paradise of The Emigrants. On the contrary, the narrator arrives on the farm during a snowstorm and exclaims

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disappointedly “How cold an Arcadia was this!” (47). Adverse weather, awkwardness at the dinner table, followed by a reminder that he will have to feed cattle the next day, all inform Coverdale’s suspicions that he has not found a plentiful Eden. No matter how much he wanted to believe otherwise, the land is not a garden that easily provides. On the contrary, the community’s members have to labor so hard that Coverdale fears they are losing sight of their higher intentions and will “cease to be anything else” (79) than farmers. While Coverdale welcomes the changes in his body, he is not transformed into the politically active Captain James Arl—ton of The Emigrants, nor J.  Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur’s eloquent American farmer (1782), nor a Ploughman Poet like the Scottish Romantic poet Robert Burns (1759–1796), failing to be “a poet while a farmer, nor a farmer while a poet” (80). In this way, Coverdale’s account refutes Ripley’s/Brook Farm’s “vision of uniting man-thinking and man-doing” (Michael 2016, 62). Blithedale will not produce a poet, a ‘man-thinking,’ as long as it requires strenuous manual labor, and notions of the educated farmer are debunked. The space seems not so much empty and malleable for utopian endeavors but, in the eyes of Coverdale, dictates an undesirable condition of the subject. Evoking the claim that America serves as the space to bring European imaginations into reality, Coverdale refers repeatedly to European literature: he brings up Fourier, draws on authors Thomas Carlyle (1795–1813) and George Sand/Amantine Lucile Aurore Dupin (1804–1876) (64), Robert Southey’s (1774–1843) and Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s (1772–1834) Pantisocracy (proposed by them in 1794), and Voltaire’s Candide (1759) (77). But members of Blithedale do not come close to the works of the great European authors and are in comparison the unsuccessful ‘hack’ writers of London’s Grub Street, known for producing heaps of ‘inferior’ literature for the masses, if these were to try their hand at agriculture (77). In this way, Blithedale links utopian writing with utopian practice, and points out the disparity between romantic, agrarian visions of highly esteemed European writers and utopian practice on American grounds. The idea of overcoming class divisions is likewise flawed from the beginning (Castronovo 2011, 377) since the communards continue to look down upon the farmer that works with them. Class privilege is in no small part upheld by Zenobia, who treats Priscilla and Silas as her service personnel (48, 200). Despite Blithedale proposing a life based on manual labor, the Blithedalers are unable to accept those who perform such labor

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as their equals. The ideal of farming conflicts with their contempt for farmers. The Blithedale Romance draws attention to these contradictions inherent in utopian endeavors based on Arcadian or pastoral ideals. In this way, the novel exposes bourgeois notions of social equality and the agrarian ideal as myopic and suggests that these conventions might not serve for an ultimate utopian telos. Switching from describing the utopian vision and the disappointing reality at Blithedale, the novel does provide at least one comment regarding utopian practice: the Arcadian idyll cannot be put into practice as geographical conditions and agrarian labor do not comply with the romantic expectations of the communards. This should come as no surprise, as The Blithedale Romance cites plenty of historic precedents that illustrate the impossibility of realizing similar utopian visions on American grounds. Expressing disappointment with the United States, Coverdale distances himself from the more recent national political developments, most remarkably from the constitution itself: “We did not greatly care—at least, I never did—for the written constitution under which our millennium had commenced” (76). Instead of going into further political detail, he strips examples of previous utopian attempts of their aims and thus of any conflict so that they fit together, constructing a history of utopian practice—and failure. The violent end of Blithedale then appears to be grounded in the past of the land which the community inhabits; this land is far from virginal, given its long history of failed utopias. As the Blithedalers ignore the implications of previous utopian projects, Blithedale insinuates that the exceptional tradition within the United States is not to ‘create an ideal world’ but to, quite literally, die trying. The community’s mash-up of historical materials into one utopian US American narrative is symbolized by the commune’s masquerade dance. Their costumes range from Native American Chief to Black minstrel figure (“a negro of the Jim Crow order”) and “a Kentucky woodsman …, a Shaker elder, … Shepherds of Arcadia, … grim Puritans, gay Cavaliers, and Revolutionary officers” (244–245). These characters, connecting European ideals and the colonial and national history of the United States, are united as “their separate incongruities were blended all together, and they became a kind of entanglement that went nigh to turn one’s brain with merely looking at it” (245). The many pasts and conflicts that are already part of the utopian space of Blithedale are symbolically merged in dance, providing “a gloss on the history and politics of missionary/philanthropic activity in America” (Berlant 1989, 42; see also Holland 2016)

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and an allegory for national/mythological historiography that is not interested in historical, legal, or institutional details. Consequently, Blithedale is foreshadowed to soon join this list of bygone projects; the autumn leaves are already descending on the community at the dance and begin to cover them up. Coverdale stresses particularly the influence of the Massachusetts Bay Colony on Blithedale. The Puritans are the topos of famous works of Hawthorne, who stylized them to be the primary ancestors of the United States. In Blithedale, they fulfill exactly this function. Geographically speaking, Blithedalers and Puritans occupy the same ground. The ruins of a pulpit from which John Eliot (ca. 1604–1690), a Puritan missionary to Native Americans, has preached, is close to the community’s premises. More importantly, the connection between Blithedalers and Puritans is in spirit, and Hollingsworth becomes to Coverdale a “Puritan magistrate” (249; Baym 1976b, 290). Here, the parallels to Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter become painfully obvious, especially when recalling the famous comment on utopianism at the very beginning of The Scarlet Letter: “The founders of a new colony, whatever Utopia of human virtue and happiness they might originally project, have invariably recognized it among their earliest practical necessities to allot a portion of the virgin soil as a cemetery, and another portion as the site of a prison” (1850, 36). For one, Hollingsworth wants to use the grounds of Blithedale to establish a community in which prisoners are reformed. Utopia and prison go hand in hand. On the other hand, Coverdale eagerly wants to assign a graveyard to the utopian grounds (155). Even more outright, the narrator describes his community as “colonists” (166) and “the descendants of the Pilgrims” (140), although only a few of the commune’s members engage in religious practices (48, 140). Providence is held responsible for the course of events (67), and the commune is imagined as serving as a beacon for others (32). Hollingsworth’s rhetoric likewise employs Puritan imagery when he talks of building his house on a hill for everyone to see as an example (97), echoing John Winthrop’s sermon “A Modell of Christian Charity” (1630)—the irony being that Hollingsworth takes this image literally and speaks of an actual hill. This is not the only time that The Blithedale Romance references works of Hawthorne. Evidently, Coverdale is an avid reader of his author’s previous writings. He evokes Thomas Morton’s community at Merry Mount/ Mare Mount/Merrymount (ca. 1626–1628 under Morton’s leadership), as depicted in Hawthorne’s short story “The May-Pole of Merry Mount”

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(1832). Blithedalers and Merry Mounters are described almost identically. In the short story on Merry Mount, time does not pass adhering to the change of seasons, as “May, or her mirthful spirit, dwelt all the year round at Merry Mount” (1832, 111). The Blithedalers also do not observe the calendar: May Day “had been declared a movable festival” (42) due to the weather. The festivities at Merry Mount and Blithedale resemble each other, including the May pole, and a masqueraded dance featuring “fauns and nymphs … Gothic monsters, though perhaps of Grecian ancestry” (1832, 111) and other fable-creatures, as well as “an Indian hunter, with feathery crest and wampum belt” (1832, 112). This is remarkable because the community at Merry Mount, both historically and in Hawthorne’s short story, was an outrage to the Puritans. The English colonist Morton, who was not a Puritan, headed a trading post at Merry Mount which eventually became a community in which indentured servants were declared free, and which not only traded with Indigenous neighbors but aimed to find a way to live together with the Algonquian people of the area (eventual Christianization and ‘civilizing’ on the agenda nonetheless). This scandalized the Puritan neighbors, who destroyed Merry Mount and its maypole, exiled Morton twice, leaving him to die the first time around, and imprisoned him upon every return to the area. Back in England, Morton was a fierce critic of the Massachusetts Bay Colony and delivered a scathing account of their methods of colonialism in his publication The New English Canaan (1637). Yet, even though Puritans and Merry Mount were fundamentally opposed, in Blithedale they are ancestors of the same people, part of one utopian tradition. Furthermore, Coverdale’s descriptions recall a Puritan source on Merrymount, Of Plimoth Plantation (completed ca. 1650), in which the Puritan William Bradford gave an account of the May Festivities as a heathen gathering.7 Evoking this condemnation again recalls the Puritan animosity toward the Merrymounters and the paradox in trying to unite them. Coverdale’s narrative creates consensus between past utopian projects, while providing ample hints that this contradicts historical facts. Glossing over yet more conflicts, Coverdale casts Native Americans as another part of the utopian past. He imagines an Indigenous population 7  Of course, Nathaniel Hawthorne could not have read William Bradford’s Of Plimoth Plantation (ca. 1650) in its entirety, as the original text was only rediscovered in 1855. However, before the manuscript was lost sometime around the American Revolution, multiple historians used it as a source, making it a touchstone of early American history.

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idyllically living “an immemorial time ago” on “soil, being of the rudest and most broken surface, … apparently never … brought under tillage” in “an entanglement of softer wildness” (141). This past has, just as the other ‘failed’ utopian ancestors, no significant influence on the setup of the community as such. First of all, the communards reject the Native American name for the lands of their community (45–46). The project of the “venerable Apostle Eliot” (141) in bringing Christianity to the local Natives is regarded uncritically. Native Americans are explicitly described as vanished—“the great-great-great-great grandson of one of Eliot’s Indians (had any such posterity been in existence)” (ibid.)—yet the reasons for the disappearance of those who lived on these lands, the violent means by which this supposedly idyllic place came to an end, are conveniently ignored. The incompatibility of European claims and Native American belonging to the land are another conflict varnished. While previous Native American settlements are integrated as part of the past of these grounds, this has no apparent consequences for those trying to erect their new communities and does not affect their utopian vision. The grounds at Blithedale also bear the marks of agrarian frontier settlements. Again, these reminders are decayed, indicating that this rural America cannot be ‘re-ignited’ again (fire being a prominent symbol in the romance): “a heap of logs and sticks that had been cut for firewood, a great while ago, by some former possessor of the soil, and piled up square … But, being forgotten, they had lain there, perhaps fifty years, and possibly much longer” (247) and are now rotting away: “by the accumulation of moss, and the leaves falling over them and decaying there, from autumn to autumn, a green mound was formed” (ibid.). The overgrown pile of firewood, hardly perceivable as such, suggests that the previous projects cannot be discerned correctly, nor can they be rekindled: “I imagined the long-dead woodman, and his long-dead wife and children, coming out of their chill graves, and essaying to make a fire with this heap of mossy fuel” (ibid.). Taken together, the different reminders of utopian projects, absorbed into the land and into a vague, utopian history, already foreshadow the fate of Blithedale. To maintain their illusion of a utopian new start on virgin lands, the communards at Blithedale ignore the implications of their utopian forbearers, an argument that Berlant has made in detail. This “historical amnesia with respect to the utopian projects that have preceded it” (1989, 31) is strikingly selective and bespeaks an unwillingness to address the conflicts among, and the failure of, past utopian practices. The Blithedalers

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refuse to acknowledge that the tradition that is followed is not to erect utopia, but to fail it. The romance juxtaposes this deliberate ignorance with the implications by Coverdale that “America … is always distinctively post-utopian” (Berlant 1989, 32). Ultimately, all the previous projects taken together, the land on which they labor is far from ‘virgin’ but covered “fathom-deep with the dust of deluded generations on every one of which, as on ourselves, the world had imposed itself as a hitherto unwedded bride” (153). In the end, Blithedale’s corpse is added to this ground— which is already covered with the remains of other utopian attempts—so that eventually “posterity may dig it up, and profit by it” (286). Blithedale becomes another addition to the history its members ignore. In short, The Blithedale Romance delineates a utopian tradition that goes back to early colonial times—in the case of Coverdale’s Blithedale, this tradition is as unpolitical as the romantic relationships he likes to think about. The romance constructs a utopian historical narrative, much in line with the paradigms of frontier theory, virgin land, American Adam, and so on, and denotes a geographically and historically determined impulse to starting over. By playing Indian8/Puritan/Merry Mounters/farmers, the communards appropriate the utopian pasts for their own project. This tradition creates a consensus that renders the utopian ancestors strikingly apolitical, chipping away all details to create the homogenous mass that Coverdale describes at the masquerade dance. However, this history of North America implies that the lands are not at all exceptionally well suited for such endeavors. The contrary is suggested by the failure of previous practice. It is not only this ‘dust of deluded generations’ that harms the supposed new start. In addition to still being grounded in this history of utopian failure, Blithedale cannot create closure from the system it sought to abandon: the capitalist market economy. Even though the members of Blithedale live communally and in a rural setting, they never left this socioeconomic system behind (Baym 1976b; Goddu 1997; Castronovo 2011), as Coverdale’s ambiguous style of narration and the increasing complexity of the spatial setup in the course of the romance suggest. Space in Blithedale is not simply divided into agrarian commune in conflict with the ever-­ encroaching city, into ‘garden’ and ‘machine,’ to cite another popular 8  Here of course alluding to Philip J. Deloria’s famous publication Playing Indian (1998), in which he outlines European American strategies to claim ‘nativity’ to the land via such masquerades.

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interpretation of US American history (retraced by Leo Marx 1964). While the commune insists on this (illusory) binary, the narrative does not comply. The very first evening at Blithedale makes obvious that the commune cannot build its ‘splendid castles’ away from the society they left behind. Instead of living apart from the “swinish multitude” (27), the narrator learns that they still have to adhere to the logic of the marketplace. That is, they have to produce and sell goods: “one of the first questions raised … should relate to the possibility of getting the advantage over the outside barbarians, in their own field of labor” (27–28). As critical readings of the romance have noted, “being subject to the demands and pressures of the market, the utopian community becomes a competitive unit in a competitive society” (Howe 1957, 280). Historically speaking, though, utopian communities do not necessarily insist on strict subsistence economy. Coverdale, however, harbors such notions and is disappointed that Blithedale is no closed microcosm: From the very first evening onward, his romantic illusion of a pastoral utopian enclave is subtly undermined. The noticeable turning point comes when Coverdale encounters ‘Professor’ Westervelt in the woods. The woods surrounding Blithedale, contrary to expected conventional binaries, provide no metaphoric ‘wilderness,’ no antipode to the city. In an arrangement that is typical for Hawthorne9 the city and the countryside are not juxtaposed but are revealed to mirror each other. The woods are just another metaphoric setting in which the ubiquitous status quo plays out. Westervelt appears in these woods as a devil incarnate, or reincarnate, resembling closely Young Goodman Brown’s devil (Hoffman 1994, 207), representing the city, industrialization, and all things that the communards seek to abandon. Coverdale describes him as “worldly” (122) contrasting the lofty utopian aims of the intentional community. Dressed fashionably with “well-­ ordered foppishness” (111), Westervelt is all materialism, symbolized by his supremely white shirt, the gold chain, and the gem he wears, tellingly glimmering “like a living tip of fire” (110). His teeth are made entirely of gold and he has a “metallic laugh” (113). He is constructed out of costly 9  A similar spatial entanglement can be observed, for example, in Hawthorne’s “Young Goodman Brown” (1835). The short story starts out implying that the Puritan settlement is the place of ‘Faith’ and civilization, and the woods the place where witches and the devil rule. In the course of the story, this binary is complicated until the witch-infested woods are the place that reflects and reveals the truth about the settlement (Achilles 2012).

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materials, resembling the mechanical and the modern market. In Coverdale’s words, he is made “for time and its gross objects, and incapable … of so much as a spiritual idea” (280). Yet, Westervelt is not in the least repelled, slowed down, or reformed by the forest but proceeds to meet with Zenobia at leisure. The wilderness that protected Bellefont in The Emigrants from the corrupting influences of urban society fails to enable closure in Blithedale. It is Westervelt’s appearance that commences the exposure of the underlying problems of the idyll by fermenting doubts in young Coverdale’s mind. Westervelt’s laughter and his sardonic (if realistic) take on Hollingsworth, and Blithedale in general, is infectious: “The fantasy of his spectral character so wrought upon me, together with the contagion of his strange mirth on my sympathies, that I soon began to laugh as loudly as himself” (114). Westervelt transmits to Coverdale the worldliness that his name implies: “I recognized, as chiefly due to this man’s influence, the sceptical [sic] and sneering view” (122). ‘Westervelt’ stands for the “worldly society at large, where a cold skepticism smothers what it can of our spiritual aspirations, and makes the rest ridiculous” (ibid.). Once Coverdale begins to doubt the premise of the utopian community, he, and with him the reader, becomes conscious to the “unspoken knowledge” (Millington 2011a, 302), of all that does not fit within the utopian agrarian image. The illusion of harmony and closure is disrupted. Coverdale begins to perceive the ‘reality’ that informs the utopia community in which he participates, taking on Westervelt’s point of view: “And it was through his eyes, more than my own, that I was looking” (ibid.). The plot from this point on unravels, laying bare what it so far only hinted at: the monetary interests and problems of Hollingsworth, Zenobia, and Priscilla, and therefore the ‘real world’ issues that pertain to the fate of Blithedale. The second half of the romance also casually leaves Blithedale and explains that Zenobia, as well as other members of the commune, have never lived at the farm exclusively, but regularly go to visit the city (185). They, and the narrative, break the segregation they initially avowed. The illusion of a coherent and closed utopian community is exposed. Blithedale lays open Blithedale’s ongoing connections to the non-utopian reality. Generally speaking, there appears to be no place to hide, no closed-off ‘island’ in the world of The Blithedale Romance. Ideas of seclusion, of closing-off, of curtains and veils, are an obsession of Coverdale. He is constantly seeking out secluded spaces while at the same time prying into the private rooms and affairs of others. However, spatial differentiations

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are easily overcome wherever Coverdale looks and so he bemoans that he is living in “the epoch of annihilated space” (229). Indeed, the Blithedale community is but one enclave that is not closed. This is illustrated especially in the often-discussed stream of consciousness in Boston, in which Coverdale never leaves his room but perceives fragments of the hectic city life, aware that he could easily travel the world if he so chose (173–174), as well as a window-scene in which he stalks his three protagonists, and his voyeuristic peeping through the ‘windows’ of his tree-top hideout (119). In the constant search for a place that is shut-off, “Hawthorne’s novel reveals the interplay of public sphere and private affair” (Castronovo 2011, 361) and a narrator’s inability to observe any world without entering it— there is no such thing as auctorial aloofness. Everything seems entangled, which makes for a complex and uncontrollable environment in which utopianism, thinking, and acting radically different become near impossible. Even the spiritual world cannot claim closure. Teresa Goddu’s reading of the Gothic elements in The Blithedale Romance elaborates that Westervelt’s stage act symbolizes the ubiquitous influence of ‘the market realm.’ Westervelt peddles publicly what appears private and veiled, making Priscilla at once “private woman and public performer” (Goddu 1997, 98). He demonstrates that even the spiritual world is accessible. Treading “a step or two across the boundaries of the spiritual world” (10), Westervelt purports a totalizing utopian vision, a “new era that was dawning upon the world; an era that would link soul to soul, and the present life to what we call futurity, with a closeness that should finally convert both worlds into one great, mutually conscious brotherhood” (234). The parallels between the lingo of the intentional community and Westervelt are no coincidence, as mesmerism is a “manifestation of the variously directed energy of social and intellectual reconstruction that touched almost all aspects of American culture in the 1840s” (Brodhead 2011, 331), just like communalism. However, Westervelt operates to further ‘annihilate space’ as he transgresses all kinds of boundaries, whereas utopian communities and the young Coverdale rely on the illusion of closure. The romance delineates the pastoral idyll to be an illusion, or an amnesiac delusion, as, to begin with, closure and exemption from the past and from the outside world are impossible. The utopian aspirations are contrasted with Hollingsworth’s intentions to turn the community into a project for social reformation; his courting of any woman who would provide the financial means; Zenobia’s past with Westervelt; and her fiscal reasons for delivering Priscilla back to him. All these “intertwined,

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corrupted, and degrading life histories represent the reality which it is Blithedale’s self-appointed mission to reform. Yet, at Blithedale no one acknowledges their existence” (Hoffman 1994, 208). While pretending to exist in a closed space, Blithedale’s members remain part of a tradition of failed utopian projects and entangled in their contemporary situation within the socioeconomic system of the United States. Therefore, critics conclude that the “failure of the Blithedale community suggests that there exists no safe margin of culture, no ‘outside’ from which to work the needed transformation” (Millington 2011a, 316).

‘Faery’ Instead of ‘Virgin’ Land: The Fate of Utopia in The Blithedale Romance But while the community at Blithedale is dissolved, The Blithedale Romance prevails. Curiously, critics have often overlooked the significance of the narrator being a writer, and that Blithedale’s preface discusses writing and therefore also refers to Coverdale’s mode of narration. Hawthorne is after all writing a romance about someone writing a romance about his experience in a utopian community. Furthermore, Blithedale and Blithedale may share a name but are often at odds. While it is soon obvious that the commune is bound to fail, the narrative profits from this, and constructs itself upon, and from, the wreckage of the community. In the preface to The Blithedale Romance, Hawthorne justifies writing about the commune by pointing to the similarities that utopian communities, such as Brook Farm and Blithedale, and romances share.10 For one, 10  Arguably, The Blithedale Romance is the most widely read of all the works discussed here. Another canonical writer of the nineteenth century has also written a romance/satire of sorts about her time at a utopian community: Louisa May Alcott’s Transcendental Wild Oats: A Chapter From An Unwritten Romance (1873) is likewise vaguely based on an autobiographical experience, namely her living with her family in Fruitlands (1843), an intentional community that her father, Amos Bronson Alcott, had founded. There are many points of contact that confirm the influence of Hawthorne on Alcott, and thus the two works are often compared and contrasted by critics (cf. Cheney 1898; Fluck 2009; Michael 2016). Fruitlands and Brook Farm were part of the same communal wave, and the Hawthornes frequented Alcott’s childhood home. Her personal records confirm that she read Hawthorne’s works. Oats describes the problems intentional communities are likely to undergo when expertise and dedication to physical labor are lacking in most members. The main plot portrays the hard work of the mother of the family, and the development of the paternal figure, who goes from utopian dreaming to thinking practically for his immediate, nuclear family. The utopian community in Oats serves as a liminal space in which he undergoes a personal transformation.

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like a reformer, the writer of romance attempts to refine ‘reality.’ Thus, he chooses to write a romance “in view of the improved effects which he is bound to produce thereby” (iv). Coverdale uses similar words when he lauds Fourier’s plans for “human improvement” (64). Just like the community of Blithedale, a writer is on the lookout for the appropriate (somewhat secluded) space in which to effect these changes. Hawthorne states in the preface, “Brook Farm, as being, certainly, the most romantic episode of his own life” (iv) offers what America is (yet) lacking and “what the American romancer needs” (ibid.): a “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” (ibid.). A utopian community, Hawthorne argues, is suitably removed, and therefore grants the writer the “privilege” and “license” to have “the creatures of his brain play their phantasmagorical antiques” (ibid.). Blithedale provides such a ‘Faery Land’ like that of the “old countries” (ibid.). Since both, reformer and author, need such a space, Hawthorne has community and romance share this “available foothold between fiction and reality” (ibid.). Indeed, Hawthorne had already used the communities of the Puritans and Merry Mount in a very similar manner. Within the narrative itself, the connection between intentional community and romance is addressed when the community discusses what “an appropriate name” (45) for their project might be. One proposal is “the old Indian name of the premises” (ibid.) However, this name proves to be unsuitable: “it chanced to be a harsh, ill-connected, and interminable word” (46). The Native American title is unsuitable, presumably because its pronunciation does not fulfill poetic criteria: it is ‘harsh’—a fault appropriate for a name that should serve as a reminder of the violence and warfare against Native Americans, executed on the ground of the Blithedalers’ new utopia. Of course, the communards at Blithedale must reject such a dissonance in order to protect their historical amnesia and their illusion of an innocent, new beginning. The entire debate about the community’s name reads like they are searching for a title for a literary work. Some of the suggestions are rejected Thus, his utopian practice is not moving toward realizing a utopia but turns him into a father-figure. Just as the father refocuses himself from the universal brotherhood to the family, so does Alcott embed the utopian endeavor as if it were part of a larger romance that is concerned with the private matters of a family. While the rest of the romance remains, as the title suggests, ‘unwritten,’ the utopian section of it is completed. In this interplay of utopianism and romance, Alcott faintly echoes Hawthorne’s approach.

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because they are too fantastical, such as “Oasis” and “Saharah [sic]” (46). Zenobia’s proposal, ‘Sunny Glimpse,’ is dismissed because it is “rather too fine and sentimental a name (a fault inevitable by literary ladies, in such attempts) for sun-burnt men to work under” (ibid.). In other words, its genre comes with the wrong gender implications.11 Coverdale himself offers up another literary title for a perfected world: “I ventured to whisper ‘Utopia,’ which, however, was unanimously scouted down, and the proposer very harshly maltreated, as if he had intended a latent satire” (ibid.); which gestures toward the satire that infuses The Blithedale Romance. Obviously, this discussion is just as much a debate on genre as it is about the name for the intentional community. Even though the literary suggestions are discarded, sentimental novel and utopia influence Blithedale and the respective genres underlie Blithedale, regardless of whether the community wants to acknowledge it or not. In fact, the whole section closely resembles Hawthorne’s own deliberations regarding the title. Shortly before the novel’s publication, Hawthorne wrote to a friend: “I wish, at least, you would help me to choose a name. I have put ‘Hollingsworth,’ on the title-page, but that is not irrevocable … Here are others—‘Blithedale,’—well enough, but with no positive merit or suitability. ‘Miles Coverdale’s Three Friends’; —his title comprehends the book, but rather clumsily. ‘The Veiled Lady’—too melodramatic; and, besides, I do not wish to give prominence to that feature of the Romance. ‘Priscilla’—she is such a shrinking damsel that it seems hardly fair to thrust her into the vanguard and make her the standard-bearer. ‘The Blithedale Romance’—that would do, in lack of a better. ‘The Arcadian Summer’— not a taking title. ‘Zenobia’—Mr. Ware [another author who had recently published a book by that title] has anticipated me in this” (in Millington 2011b, 253; editorial changes are mine). Evidently, naming a community and titling a romance are similar acts and present with similar problems. The communard’s discussion concludes with the same, seemingly drab, compromise: “So, at last, finding it impracticable to hammer out anything better, we resolved that the spot should still be Blithedale, as being of good augury enough” (46)—just as Hawthorne chooses the title “The Blithedale Romance” ‘in lack of a better.’ With this, commune and romance are given their shared name, and are written into one another. 11  In an 1855 letter to his publisher, Nathaniel Hawthorne infamously called the female authors who dominated him in the literary market “a damned mob of scribbling women” (e.g., in Dana 1910, 75).

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The debate about the name reiterates the point that Hawthorne argues in the preface: romance and intentional community share certain attributes. Neither too fictional nor too realistic, the commune becomes Blithedale and Coverdale’s narrative becomes The Blithedale Romance. Despite these striking similarities, romance and intentional community apparently cannot coexist for long. During the first weeks of Coverdale’s stay at Blithedale, the romance struggles with the ‘drabness’ of its subject matter. Life in the commune checks Coverdale’s poetic ambitions with practical necessities. Moonlight, in The Scarlet Letter famously generating romantic visions, reveals only the coldness of the Arcadia, its being a “lifeless copy of the world in marble” (47). As already discussed above, the agrarian lifestyle interferes with Coverdale’s poetic output. The farmer Silas Foster further disrupts any poetic inklings with “his look of shrewd, acrid, Yankee observation” (245), and so the reality of utopianism in practice hinders the creation of a romantic narrative. Instead of uncovering “some aromatic roots of wisdom” (79), the narrator ceases to be a poet and feels himself becoming “mentally sluggish” (ibid.). Accordingly, Blithedale for a short time proceeds with utopian uneventfulness, that is, without the personal and dramatic occurrences that would make for a romance. Yet, Coverdale ends up writing a romance. Instead of relishing the ‘decisive action’ and the joyous agrarian work that Imlay recommends in The Emigrants, Coverdale soon dreads further “loathsomeness that was to be forever in my daily work” (159–160) and quickly loses all interest in the “ponderous realities” (16) that the community has to face for the future realization of their utopian plans. Subsequently, the narrator rather focuses on a potential love-triangle, even though he himself acknowledges that this occupation, and the corresponding genre, conflicts with the habits he tried to adopt: “It is not, I apprehend, a healthy kind of mental occupation, to devote ourselves too exclusively to the study of individual men and women” (83). His motivation to find the plot of a romance gains the upper hand. Communal and utopian thinking is abandoned as the three protagonists “were separated from the rest of the Community, to my imagination, and stood forth as the indices of a problem which it was my business to solve” (83–84). The plot advances, not as a communal utopia or a report on the mechanisms of ‘social reorganization,’ but as The Blithedale Romance. Later in the narrative, Hollingsworth accuses Coverdale of not being wholeheartedly engaged in utopian practice, and of primarily viewing the

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Blithedale community as “a theme for poetry” (156). His assessment proves accurate: just a few paragraphs before, Coverdale had evaluated Blithedale for its literary potential, pondering how “these early days” (154) will figure as a “romantic story for the young people” (ibid.). Again, the narrator does not busy himself with a vision of a radically different, transformed future society. Instead, he mentions a utopian future only to think back on his self a “little more romantic than truth may warrant” (ibid.). He longs for a romantically aged scenery, for “the cottages to be built, that the creeping plants may begin to run over them, and the moss to gather on the walls” (155). At another point, Coverdale asserts that he “would rather look backward ten times, than forward once. For, little as we know of our life to come, we may be very sure, for one thing, that the good we aim at will not be attained” (91). Not only does this statement reveal the pessimism that informs the narrative and that surfaces in small acidic comments throughout, but it marks Coverdale’s preferred narrative situation: hindsight. His interest is in the romantic story looking backward, not the actual community as it was in the present (utopian practice) or would be in the future (utopia, ideally). Hollingsworth repeatedly reprimands Coverdale for his fantasies: “You seem … to be trying how much nonsense you can pour out in one breath” (154). Even though Coverdale defends himself and reiterates that his and the community’s “highest anticipations have a solid footing on commonsense” (156), Hollingsworth insists that he can “find no substance whatever” (158). What Coverdale holds to be a “fair” (157) and “beautiful system” (158), Hollingsworth denounces as “aimless beauty” (159). Hollingsworth does have a point: Coverdale is certainly no realist. After his fever, he becomes “a mesmerical clairvoyant” (57) and seems to view everything through a preternatural lens: Zenobia becomes an “enchantress” (55); Hollingsworth is depicted as haunted by a fictional house (the edifice he intends to erect to reform criminals) (Colacurcio 2008, 89); Priscilla is barely human (60); and even the practical Silas is “vaporous and spectre-like” (25) at one point. In the course of the narrative, Coverdale turns further and further away from the details in the utopian community, to surveil three of his fellow communards in search of the plot for a romance, which is intricately connected to the non-utopian present—the city, financial dearth, class and gender conflicts—yet places these into the past ‘Faery land’ that he has set up in the space of the utopian community. Contrary to the initial

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impression that the space changes him, he takes control, rewriting Blithedale into Blithedale: the utopia practice becomes a romance. Essentially, Hawthorne depicts a contest over who gets to impose their vision onto Blithedale—the utopians or the romancer. The main opponent of Coverdale is the reformer Zenobia, who is—quite literally—the life of the community. Constantly questioning the narrator’s literary intentions, Zenobia “draw[s] our attention to the way, the literary way that Coverdale tries to stereotype her” (Pfister 2011, 326). On the first night in Blithedale she predicts her own death, ridiculing the pathos of her drowning “with a pair of wet slippers” (41). With this begins her rebellion against the license Coverdale’s narrative will take with her, and her community (and the poetic license that Hawthorne takes with the life and death of Margarete Fuller, who tragically drowned in 1850, albeit not in Brook Farm). It is her who repeatedly stresses the narrator’s original occupation, teasing him on the first night: “you had better turn the affair into a ballad” (ibid.), and later, with her death already looming: “it is a genuine tragedy, is it not? … by all means, write this ballad” (260). Such allusions to writing and different forms of fiction ensure that the reader cannot forget that this story is the conscious construction of a narrator, which emphasizes that Blithedale is not a romance about how to establish a utopian society, but about writing and the space “the American romancer needs” (iv). Coverdale tries to fit Zenobia into various roles: an empowered ‘enchantress,’ equipped with a symbolic flower and associated with fire; a tragic Ophelia rejected by her lover; and a witch condemned to death by a Puritan reincarnate (Hollingsworth). Her name also symbolizes that Coverdale wants her to be a literary figurine. He only ever refers to her by ‘Zenobia,’ her pen name. ‘Zenobia,’ a queen of the Palmyrene Empire, was the subject of the aforementioned historical novel Zenobia, or, the Fall of Palmyra (1838) by William Ware (1797–1852). Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849), too, used the name. In the satirical short story “The Scythe of Time” (1836a) (later to be re-published as “A Predicament”), he compiled any cliché which, in his eyes, made for bad writing. To ensure that the reader would take his meaning, he supplemented the story with a commentary titled “The Signora Zenobia [How to Write a Blackwood Article]” (1836b). Significantly, Poe in this story also deliberately sends his protagonist into suicide in order to produce a narrative. This reference draws additional attention to the metafictional implications of The Blithedale Romance. But Coverdale’s Zenobia only reluctantly plays her

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part. Even her contorted corpse signifies that “Hawthorne has Zenobia refuse to cooperate” (Pfister 2011, 328), even over her dead body. The unconventional description—“Of all modes of death, methinks it is the ugliest. Her wet garments swathed limbs of terrible inflexibility … Her arms had grown rigid in the act of struggling, and were bent before her with clenched hands” (273)—cannot be turned into an aesthetic experience by Coverdale. Zenobia defies poetic expectations. Again, parallels to Poe’s story are striking, as Poe’s Zenobia dies so grotesquely that it is plain ridiculous. Coverdale admits this “reflection” on the lack of décor of Zenobia’s corpse “will show ludicrously” (275), yet he observes that this body has no resemblance to the “lithe and graceful attitudes” (ibid.) that he supposes dead bodies of heroines ought to possess. Perhaps Poe’s statement that ‘the death of a beautiful woman’ is the most poetic subject of them all (Kopley 2009, 56) was on Coverdale’s mind, but a corpse in rigor mortis is hardly reconcilable with “tender, delicious, only half-­melancholy and almost smiling pathos” (155) that Coverdale envisions for death in Blithedale.12 Upon her death, Zenobia’s story can be turned into a romance. In the preface, Hawthorne claimed that in a romance set in the United States “the beings of imagination are compelled to show themselves in the same category as actually living mortals; a necessity that generally renders the paint and pasteboard of their composition but too painfully discernible” (iv). Killing Zenobia off mitigates this issue and offers a more ‘European’ romance. In a series of awkward interactions with the contorted corpse, Silas Foster comments on her shoe not being “made on a Yankee last” but to be of “French manufacture” (269). Coverdale ultimately keeps this shoe as a token of the romance he is writing, and Zenobia ends, in the moonlight, an uneasy imitation of a romantic heroine ‘of old.’ With her body, another failed utopia is added to the grounds. In his final words on the community, the narrator even invites future generations to “dig up” (286) the utopian projects—a choice of words that too eerily recalls Zenobia’s grave. 12  This is another parallel between reformer and romance writer that Nathaniel Hawthorne included: Like Robert Owen (Pitzer 1997, 98–99), Coverdale envisions death to lose its terror in utopia: “By our sweet, calm way of dying, and the airy elegance out of which we will shape our funeral rites, and the cheerful allegories which we will model into tombstones, the final scene shall lose its terrors; so that, hereafter, it may be happiness to live, and bliss to die … the event shall not be sorrowful, but affect us with a tender, delicious, only half-melancholy, and almost smiling pathos” (155).

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The forecast for utopia in The Blithedale Romance is bleak. With each utopian practice that fails, it becomes more questionable whether the United States offer any space for realizing visions of a good place. Instead, the foundered attempts accumulate to provide a mystical ‘Faery Land.’ Not virgin, the United States slowly acquires a narrative space like that of ‘the old countries.’ The utopian impulse, in Blithedale closely connected to the historical amnesia that allows for the constant claims to start anew, is exposed as a romantic illusion. In 1855, a British review aptly comments: “How thoroughly worn out and blasé must that young world be … We enter this strange existence with a sort of wondering inquiry whether any events ever take place there … we want more than thoughts and fancies—we want things” (qtd. in Coale 2013, 29). In The Blithedale Romance, the ‘young world’ appears rapidly aged. The result of this is a romance merging different pasts into national narrative without touching upon contentious political issues, and devoid of an impulse to start the world over again. Blithedale self-consciously describes how utopianism in the United States constitutes a narrative space in the past, to which no future-bound and realizable pendant (and thus no challenge to the status quo) exists. Hawthorne’s utopian psychology follows a deterministic logic, the “doctrinaire assumptions about ‘reality’” (Guarneri 1991, 5) mentioned at the beginning of this chapter: a better world is not possible because the market economy reaches everywhere; all previous attempts have shown that realizing a holistic social blueprint is not feasible. For Coverdale, the upside to this is that these utopian wreckages supply the writer of romance with a scenery on American grounds, and thus create a national and utopian space—an attractive national tradition, safely situated in the past.

References Achilles, Jochen. 2012. Liminalität und Heterotopie: Grundstrukturierungen amerikanischer Erzählliteratur. In Liminale Anthropologien: Zwischenzeiten, Schwellenphänomene, Zwischenräume in Literatur und Philosophie, ed. Jochen Achilles, Roland Borgards, and Brigitte Burrichter, 145–160. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann. Alcott, Louisa May. [1873] 1981. Transcendental Wild Oats and Excerpts from the Fruitlands Diary. Harvard: Harvard Common Press. American Whig Review. 1852. The Blithedale Romance. 1 November.

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Baym, Nina. 1976a. The Shape of Hawthorne’s Career. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. ———. [1976b] 2011. [Passion and Oppression in The Blithedale Romance]. In Nathaniel Hawthorne. The Blithedale Romance: An Authoritative Text, Contexts, Criticism, ed. Richard H. Millington, 285–297. New York: Norton. Berlant, Lauren. 1989. Fantasies of Utopia in The Blithedale Romance. American Literary History 1 (1): 30–62. Bestor, Arthur. [1950] 1970. Backwoods Utopias. The Sectarian Origins and the Owenite Phase of Communitarian Socialism in America: 1663–1829. 2nd ed. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Bradford, William. [1650] 1908. Of Plimoth Plantation, 1606–1646. Edited by William T. Davis. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. Brodhead, Richard H. 2011. Veiled Ladies: Toward a History of Antebellum Entertainment. In Nathaniel Hawthorne. The Blithedale Romance: An Authoritative Text, Contexts, Criticism, ed. Richard H. Millington, 330–349. New York: Norton. Brown, Paul. [1827] 1972. Twelve Months in New Harmony. Philadelphia: Porcupine Press. Castronovo, Russ. 2011. The Half-Living Corpse: Female Mediums, Seances, and the Occult. In Nathaniel Hawthorne. The Blithedale Romance: An Authoritative Text, Contexts, Criticism, ed. Richard H.  Millington, 359–384. New York: Norton. Cheney, Ednah D. 1898. Louisa May Alcott. Life, Letters, and Journals. Boston: Little, Brown, and Company. Chorley, Henry Fothergill. 1852. Review. The Athenaeum, 10 July. Claeys, Gregory, ed. 1991. Robert Owen: A New View of Society and Other Writings. Harmondsworth: Penguin. ———. 2011. Non-Marxian Socialism 1815–1914. In The Cambridge History of Nineteenth-Century Political Thought, ed. Gareth Stedman Jones and Gregory Claeys, 521–555. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Coale, Samuel Chase. 2013. Mapping the Manse and Resuscitating Rome: Hawthorne’s Themed Spaces and Staging Places. Nathaniel Hawthorne Review 39 (1): 57–72. Colacurcio, Michael J. 2008. Nobody’s Protest Novel: Art and Politics in The Blithedale Romance. Nathaniel Hawthorne Review 34 (1 & 2): 1–39. Crèvecoeur, Michel Guillaume Jean de [John Hector St. John de]. [1782] 1981. Letters from an American Farmer. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. Dana, John Cotton, ed. 1910. Letters of Hawthorne to William D.  Ticknor, 1851–1864. Vol. 1. Newark: The Carteret Book Club. Deloria, Philip Joseph. 1998. Playing Indian. New Haven: Yale University Press.

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Dill, Elizabeth. 2011. Angel of the House, Ghost of the Commune: Zenobia as Sentimental Woman in The Blithedale Romance. Nathaniel Hawthorne Review 37 (1): 62–87. Engels, Friedrich. [1877] 1948. Herrn Eugen Dühring’s Umwälzung der Wissenschaft. Berlin: Dietz. Fluck, Winfried. 2009. A More Natural Union. In A New Literary History of America, ed. Greil Marcus and Werner Sollors, 292–297. Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Goddu, Teresa A. 1997. Gothic America. Narrative, History, and Nation. New York: Columbia University Press. Guarneri, Carl J. 1991. The Utopian Alternative. Fourierism in Nineteenth-­ Century America. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. ———. 1994. The Americanization of Utopia: Fourierism and the Dilemma of Utopian Dissent in the United States. Utopian Studies 5 (1): 72–88. ———. 1997. Brook Farm and the Fourierist Phalanxes: Immediatism, Gradualism, and American Utopian Socialism. In America’s Communal Utopias, ed. Donald E. Pitzer, 159–180. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Hawthorne, Nathaniel. [1832] 2013. The May-Pole of Merry Mount. In Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Tales: Authoritative Texts, Backgrounds, Criticism, ed. James McIntosh, 2nd ed., 110–120. New York: Norton. ———. [1835] 2013. Young Goodman Brown. In Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Tales: Authoritative Texts, Backgrounds, Criticism, ed. James McIntosh, 2nd ed., 84–95. New York: Norton. ———. [1850] 2005. The Scarlet Letter, and Other Writings. New York: Norton. ———. 1852. The Blithedale Romance. Boston: Ticknor, Reed, and Fields. Hoffman, Daniel. 1994. Form and Fable in American Fiction. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia. Holland, Owen. 2016. Spectatorship and Entanglement in Thoreau, Hawthorne, Morris, and Wells. Utopian Studies 27 (1): 28. Holloway, Mark. 1966. Heavens on Earth. Utopian Communities in America 1680–1880. 2nd ed. New York: Dover Publications. Howe, Irving. [1957]. 2011. [Coverdale’s Politics]. In Nathaniel Hawthorne. The Blithedale Romance: An Authoritative Text, Contexts, Criticism, ed. Richard H. Millington, 279–281. New York: Norton. Howland, Marie. 1874. Papa’s Own Girl. New York: Jewett. Imlay, Gilbert. 1793. The Emigrants, or the History of an Expatriated Family. 3 vols. London: A. Hamilton. Kopley, Richard. 2009. Poe at Blithedale. The Edgar Allen Poe Review 10 (3): 53–59. Levine, Robert S. [2004] 2011. Sympathy and Reform in The Blithedale Romance. In Nathaniel Hawthorne. The Blithedale Romance: An Authoritative Text, Contexts, Criticism, ed. Richard H. Millington, 384–406. New York: Norton.

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Marx, Leo. [1964] 2000. The Machine in the Garden. Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Melville, Herman. 1851. Moby Dick, or, The Whale. New York: Harper & Brothers. Michael, Shellie Melnick. 2016. ‘How Cold an Arcadia Was This’: Transcendentalist Communes in The Blithedale Romance and Transcendental Wild Oats. Dissertation, Middle Tennessee State University, Murfreesboro. Millington, Richard H. 2011a. American Anxiousness: Selfhood and Culture in The Blithedale Romance. In Nathaniel Hawthorne. The Blithedale Romance: An Authoritative Text, Contexts, Criticism, ed. Richard H.  Millington, 298–316. New York: Norton. ———., ed. 2011b. Nathaniel Hawthorne. The Blithedale Romance. An Authoritative Text, Contexts, Criticism. New York: Norton. Morton, Thomas. [1637] 1883. The New English Canaan. Boston: Prince Society. Myerson, Joel, ed. 2002. Selected Letters of Nathaniel Hawthorne. Columbus: Norton. Noyes, John Humphrey. [1870] 1966. Strange Cults and Utopias of 19th Century America. Original title: History of American Socialisms. New  York, Dover Publications. Oved, Yaacov. 1987. Two Hundred Years of American Communes. New Brunswick: Transaction. Pfister, Joel. 2011. From: Plotting Womanhood: Feminine Evolution and Narrative Feminization in Blithedale. In Nathaniel Hawthorne. The Blithedale Romance: An Authoritative Text, Contexts, Criticism, ed. Richard H.  Millington, 317–330. New York: Norton. Pitzer, Donald E. 1997. The New Moral World of Robert Owen and New Harmony. In America’s Communal Utopias, ed. Donald E.  Pitzer, 88–134. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Poe, Edgar Allan [1836a] 1840. The Scythe of Time [A Predicament]. In Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque, vol. 1, 229–243. Philadelphia: Lea & Blanchard. ——— [1836b] 1840. The Signora Zenobia [How to Write a Blackwood Article]. In Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque, vol. 1, 213–227. Philadelphia: Lea & Blanchard. Pusch, Jeffrey. 2013. ‘Showing like an Illusion’: The Failure of Sympathy in The Blithedale Romance. Nathaniel Hawthorne Review 39 (1): 73–93. Voltaire. [1759] 2001. Candide. London: Penguin. Ware, William. 1838. Zenobia, or, The Fall of Palmyra. New York: C.S. Francis. Westminster Review. 1852. Contemporary Literature of America. October: 592–598. Winthrop, John. [1630] 1838. A Modell of Christian Charity: Written on Board of the Arabella, On the Atlantic Ocean. Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society 3 (7): 31–48.

CHAPTER 5

‘A Great Republic of Equals’: Postbellum Utopia in Marie Howland’s Papa’s Own Girl (1874) As things go, sensible, educated, and self-poised women are better single than married, even to the best class of men. About every man is conscious that he’s a tyrant; but slaves make tyrants. If there were no slaves there would be no tyrants, but a great republic of equals. (40)

After considering Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Blithedale Romance (1852) it may appear that utopia had become a construct of the past by the 1850s. Even though studies show that the communal movement continued past the heyday of communalism in the 1840s,1 the number of utopian communities that we know of subsided somewhat in the 1850s and remained low during, and after, the Civil War. Scholarship has speculated on the reasons for this decline: Firstly, numerous reports on the many secular communities that had dissolved, leaving former members in the red financially, may have deterred people from joining yet another utopian project (Bestor 1950, 227, 260). Secondly, some reformers shifted the focus of their efforts from utopian living to political activism for the abolition of slavery. The divisive issue of abolition may have also disrupted the national utopian discourse as debates about slavery became more frequent and more prominent, and, as will be illustrated shortly, the constant reminders of the heinous crimes condoned by the institution of slavery divided utopianists. Thirdly, the nation was no longer ‘infant’ which for 1  Robert S. Fogarty’s historical research (1990) has delivered a fundamental contribution to refuting the misconception of communalism ‘ending’ with the 1850s.

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some scholars suggests that the utopian possibilities offered via communalism were drawing to a close (Bestor 1950, 251; Jennings 2016, 377). In addition, some scholars have hypothesized that the decreased interest in utopian production indicates that the experience of the Civil War, viewed as a caesura in the historical narrative of the United States, interfered with the utopian imagination itself: “The communitarian movements of the early and middle nineteenth century had been fueled by a widely held belief in the imminence of a new golden age. That faith could not survive forty-nine months of wholesale butchery in familiar cow pastures. The thrum of millenarian optimism that had set so many Americans on the road to utopia went quiet” (Jennings 2016, 377). At closer investigation, such assessments must be mitigated. Many communities at the time did not receive or seek much public attention, which impedes historical research (Fogarty 1990, 2–3). True, there were no widespread movements and “no [new] major theorist, like Owen or Fourier, [that] had seized the imagination of any wide segment of the reform or religious population” (Fogarty 1990, 154) until the final decade of the century, when the interest for utopian social theory, most notably Marxism and other strands of socialism, as well as various schools on health, diet, temperance, and sexual abstinence channeled fervor to improve the world into various reformist movements (recalling Ernst Bloch’s idea of the ‘utopian impulse’). However, there also exists evidence for a continued ‘millenarian optimism’ in the years after the Civil War. For one, some communities from the antebellum period endured (e.g., Oneida 1848–1881). In addition, the period saw the first comprehensive work of US American communal studies, John Humphrey Noyes’s History of American Socialism (1870), which cheerfully announced that utopian experiments would ensue. Indeed, new communities were founded: well around thirty in the two decades following the Civil War, at least fifteen in the 1880s, and more than thirty in the 1890s (Fogarty 1990). These figures indicate that some people did continue to believe in the immediate advent of the good place. The novel to be discussed in this chapter, Papa’s Own Girl (1874) by Marie Howland (1836–1921), was pivotal in promoting one of these experiments: Pacific Colony, in Topolobampo, Mexico (1886–1894). Hundreds of members ventured to this new community in a sparsely settled Mexican bay at the Gulf of California. For these hopeful settlers, most of whom were US Americans, utopia continued to be immediately realizable. Such postbellum utopian practice merits further investigation: “the fact that some groups of idealistic people in the North were indifferent to

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the most devastating war in U.S. history is … of significance” (Cobb 2015, 855). Yet, the postbellum utopian imagination is still underexplored, with examples of utopianism from that era surprisingly underrepresented in academic scholarship. As Howland’s example will show, these instances of utopianism have a transitional function in maintaining utopian production and linking the reunited States (back) to a utopian discourse of “a great republic of equals” (40), and thus foreshadowed and influenced the surge of the utopian genre in the progressive era—for better and for worse, as this chapter shall illustrate.

‘A Story of American Life’: Utopianism, Women’s Rights, and Marie Howland Generally speaking, reform efforts after the Civil War focused on education, the penal system, temperance, and, most notably, women’s rights. It is a fairly common assumption that women’s rights were not observed in utopian communities and that utopian practice broadly results in the exploitation of female labor. Deeply ingrained patterns of patriarchy often endured in intentional communities of the nineteenth century, as touched upon in the previous chapters: domestic chores were left to female members, who often also partook in other forms of communal work. At the same time, women were often not involved in any of the decision-making processes. One famous illustration of this is given in Mary Louisa Alcott’s Transcendental Wild Oats (1873), in which the mother of the family, Sister Hope, works in the fields, cleans, and is asked to cook for the ‘free-­ thinking’ men according to whatever fad they are following. Yet, not every woman experienced communal life as negatively as Sister Hope, alias Abigail May Alcott (1840–1879), Mary Louisa Alcott’s mother. Many nineteenth-century utopian communities actively worked to improve women’s economic situation, to challenge the cult of domesticity and the institution of marriage. However, despite good intentions, male visionaries sidelined and excluded women’s voices and concerns, resulting in an awkward motley of contradictory claims and practices. For example, the Owenite New Harmony proclaimed itself to be a ‘Community of Equality.’ In practice, women continued to perform household duties next to their communal occupations, which were likewise distributed according to conventional gender roles. Education was provided for girls and boys but when it came to the teaching of practical skills and trades, gender divisions were upheld. Women were rarely included in democratic procedures. Nonetheless, New Harmony offered

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communal childcare, opted for a more practical dress code, and promoted the right to divorce. Robert Dale Owen, Owen’s son, composed an alternative wedding vow in which he acknowledged women’s property rights and disavowed any notion of ‘owning’ his spouse. Donald E. Pitzer concludes that life in New Harmony may have relieved working-class women of some of their obligations and provided them with additional rights and amenities. For more privileged female members, life in New Harmony meant more physical and domestic labor while they had to give up their more comfortable lifestyle and their privileged position, through which they had previously exerted some power (1997, 134). Carol A. Kolmerten, who has published extensively on the subject, fittingly summarized women’s roles in Owenite communities under the heading “Egalitarian Promises and Inegalitarian Practices” (1981; see also Kolmerten 1990). Another such contradictory setup was Oneida. On the one hand, complex marriage, regulated by John Humphrey Noyes and community elders (male and female but in different roles), resulted in arrangements that look suspiciously like sexual exploitation of young, attractive women, and totalitarian control over sexual behavior. Especially those who formed what looked like monogamous couples were reprimanded and frequently pressured to end their relationship. Attractive women were encouraged to sleep, and procreate, with the community’s ‘elders’ (Noyes in particular) to facilitate the women’s spiritual advance. On the other hand, Oneida’s take on female sexuality and reproductive rights was surprisingly progressive. One of Noyes’s concerns was to shield women from unplanned or unwanted pregnancies. For this, he promoted a form of birth control called ‘male continence,’ that is, men were not to ejaculate (which would also aid their spiritual development). Furthermore, the community acknowledged the existence of female sexual pleasure, and members of Oneida could change partners without repercussions. While women oversaw most domestic duties, chores were shared among them communally and were acknowledged as a form of labor. Women also worked in crafts and sales, and enjoyed the benefits of communal childcare, excellent education, and wearing a type of bloomers. Compared to many of their contemporaries in the United States, Oneida’s women had an unusual amount of liberties and rights, yet they were also subject to Noyes’s manipulative strategies.2 Feminist author Marie Howland certainly saw more chances for female emancipation in utopian socialism than outside of it. In the course of her life, she firsthand experienced life in four different utopian communities: 2

 See Chap. 2, footnote 16.

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the Unitary Household in New  York City, the Familistère de Guise in France, the aforementioned Pacific Colony in Mexico, and the single tax community Fairhope in Alabama. Her novel Papa’s Own Girl (1874; later republished as The Familistère), emphatically advocates utopian practice and its power to alleviate social inequalities based on class and gender. Undeterred by the Civil War (for reasons to be expounded below), she imagined that Familistères would solve the social problems that the United States faced. However, Howland’s utopianism as laid out in Papa’s Own Girl is far from unproblematic: for one, she struggles to unite romance and women’s independence. Furthermore, notions of racial superiority underlie her utopian planning, resulting in a White, middle-class good place. Howland has certainly not received due academic attention, even though her life was that of an unusually radical and influential woman. Born as Hannah Maria Stevens, she grew up in a poor family in Lebanon, New Hampshire. After her father died, she joined the industrial workforce and eventually became a Lowell mill girl, providing for herself and supporting her younger twin sisters. Taking advantage of education programs offered to factory workers, Howland studied and managed to work her way up the social ladder. She moved to Boston and then to New York, where she took a teaching position in the infamous Five Points district, one of the most notorious slums of the industrial world at the time. Meanwhile, she became part of the radical scene of New York, which comprised of various reformers, among them the leading promoter of Fourierism in the United States, Albert Brisbane (1809–1890). In these circles, she made many lifelong friends (e.g., the ‘queen of Bohemia’ Ada Clare, 1834–1874), and met her first husband, the lawyer Lyman W. Case (1827–1892). Together, they joined the Unitary Household (1858–1860), a cooperative household in New York. One aspect hotly discussed among Howland and her fellow reformers was free love, a term that encompasses a range of convictions: some understood it to mean polyamory (the ‘varietists’), while others still believed in what we would call monogamous marriage but emphasized the importance of love. This may sound trivial but would have far-reaching social, political, and economic consequences: men and women should be allowed to dissolve their bonds if they became emotionally detached (i.e. divorce must be easily attainable for both sexes), and women should have the right to refuse physical intimacy as they please. For this to be effected, women would have to be free from male domination and financial and political dependence (Gaston 1984, 28). Marie

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Stevens Case (as she called herself then) sided with the latter group (the so-called exclusivists).3 Eventually, she and Case would follow through on their convictions regarding the importance of mutual, deeply felt emotions. The very same night that she had met Edward Howland (1832–1890), her husband insisted: “You have met the man of all men whom you need” (Gaston 1984, 32). He would remain a close friend to the Howlands. With her new partner, Howland traveled to France, and spent roughly a year at the Familistère, a cooperative community set up by Jean-Baptiste André Godin (1817–1888). Howland was enthused, and understandably so: like Howland, Godin was an epigone of Fourierism, and his model community did immensely well—the cooperative lasted until the 1960s. Her time in Godin’s Familistère had left such a lasting impression that, back in the States, she wrote Papa’s Own Girl. Howland eventually moved to the countryside where she and her husband started farming (which was, however, never their only source of income). All the while she was involved in different reform movements: Howland was a part of the Grange (dedicated to agricultural issues and the situation of farmers) and the International Workingman’s Association, where she continuously advocated for women’s rights to not be sidelined. To further promote Godin’s ideas in the United States, she translated Godin’s Social Solutions (originally entitled: Solutions Sociales, 1871; her translation 1886). When it came to women’s rights, Howland sided with the National Woman Suffrage Association, who criticized the Fifteenth Amendment as it granted the right to vote to men regardless of race but did not grant female suffrage. The National Woman Suffrage Association thus came to represent nativist and racist voices within the women’s rights movement in the United States. Howland’s support of the National  Woman  Suffrage  Association reflects her own prejudice. Her strive for reform was decidedly nativist and racially biased, so that Black people profiting from her plans would at best be a side effect. As her biographer Holly Jacklyn Blake summarizes: her “inability to question her white privilege or popular notions about racial hierarchy narrowed her approach to social change, and speaks to the shortcomings of many white reformers in U.S. history” (Blake 2015, 892). Accordingly, the utopian communities in which she lived were exclusively White (Blake 2015, 1116). Overall, Howland could best be 3  Rumors about free love (in the sense of polyamory) in the Unitary Household scandalized New York, as a heated debate in the New York Times (1860a, b) illustrates.

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described as benevolently condescending toward Black people. She entertained notions of biological determinism to the end of her days, unable to change her mind even when she saw evidence to the contrary (Blake 2015, 1156). The consequences of her racist convictions for her utopianism will be detailed in the upcoming analysis of the novel. In the 1880s, Howland thought she had found the capitalist of her dreams who would realize an endeavor akin to Godin’s Familistère: Albert Kimsey Owen (1847–1916; no relation to Robert Owen). Owen planned a lucrative settlement called Pacific Colony in Topolobampo, Mexico (settlement started in 1886; the community began dissolving around 1894; see Katscher 1906),4 where he intended to establish a utopian community, the final stop of a new railroad line, and a wharf for a new harbor in the Gulf of Mexico. Eager for this chance at utopian practice, Howland set up a newspaper, the Credit Foncier of Sinaloa, to advertise the endeavor and to further a sense of community among shareholders. Howland then wrote for and edited the Credit Foncier and managed colony matters from the United States until she and her husband moved to Topolobampo in 1888. Howland enjoyed (the by no means easy) life in Mexico. However, Owen had misjudged multiple factors: fertile land and potable water were not as easily available as he had imagined; water in the bay was too shallow for large ships; communalists who were able-bodied, skilled workers, were few; infrastructure and customs of the area did not aid his plans; the local government and landowners would not collaborate; financiers were not as patient as he had wagered; and so on. The settlers—some of whom arrived as early as 1886, even though Owen and Howland warned them that it was too soon—had to endure considerable dearth. Furthermore, ideological disagreements arose. Particularly Howland’s insistence on female equality and her progressive ways irked conservative members. For instance, her going swimming in the presence of men and the amount of clothing she had or had not worn on these occasions became a bone of contention (Blake 2015, 1136). To make matters worse, Edward’s physical and mental health had been deteriorating for some time, and he died in 1890. Moreover, Howland was repeatedly accused of having an affair with a (married) fellow communalist. Owen ultimately did not back the advocates of female rights in the community, judging the issues raised 4  There exists a surprisingly small number of academic works on the Pacific Colony (Ortega Noriega 2003; Reynolds 1972; Robertson 1947; Sánchez-Hidalgo 2012).

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(which type of clothing was deemed appropriate, whether women had to ride sidesaddle, etc.) to be secondary to the economic problems they were facing. Howland nonetheless persisted in her position as the only female member on the board of directors. She did not give up on the community until 1893, when another rift between Owen and influential community members (including her alleged lover) proved to be the final straw. Dispirited, Howland left, initially only to take a vacation and to promote the community. She never returned. After moving around and visiting friends, Howland joined the Fairhope Single Tax Colony (founded in 1894 and still going) in Alabama. She had apparently finally found a community to her liking that welcomed progressive women, granted them their rights, and in which members were willing to work cooperatively. She stayed with the community for the rest of her life and died in 1921. Evidently, Howland was deeply invested in reform and utopian practice. One of the few working-class women of her time to publish a novel, to travel back and forth across the Atlantic, and to become part of influential philosophical and political circles, Howland’s move up the social ladder is certainly remarkable. Her enduring commitment to the uplift of the working class and women’s emancipation is just as impressive. Howland published pamphlets and papers, organized meetings and events for the public, and managed to rally many people to join in the Pacific Colony. Papa’s Own Girl offers details of a utopia in the making that, so academic readings agree, reappear decades later in the famous works of Edward Bellamy and Charlotte Perkins Gilman (Foster 1997, 32; Trahair 1999, 192; Blake 2015, 1126). Specifically, they all describe a similar reorganization of labor: in order to give women economic independence, domestic chores and care work are distributed communally and made visible as a type of labor (Blake 2015, 879). Furthermore, the same developmentalist notions that inform Howland’s ideas on the good place are expressed in Bellamy and Gilman, essentially erasing Black people and thus resolving the strain that the Civil War and conflicts over the rights of African Americans had put on the utopian imagination of these White authors. Papa’s Own Girl also features certain characters that would appear prominently in later utopian fiction, such as the utopian doctor, and the young utopian woman, educated, well-tempered, and attractive, who explain the new order. Nonetheless, Howland has not been subject to a huge amount of academic attention. Fortunately for all those interested in Howland’s life, Blake recently compiled the first detailed biography on Howland, in which she convincingly argues that Howland exerted a still largely

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unacknowledged influence on reformist thought and serves as an important piece of the puzzle that is the tableau of utopianism in the United States. Susan Lynch Foster observes in her discussion of Papa’s Own Girl that the novel received a “deeply ambivalent reception” (1997, 32). Indeed, a reviewer in The New York Herald did not even finish the book, declaring it to be “the crudest attempt at a novel that we remember in years” (1874, 4). Mostly, however, when the novel was rejected it was not on the grounds of lacking literary merit but for its call to ‘free love’ and its explicit depiction of sexuality. The author boasts in the preface to the second edition that the Boston Public library held it under lock and key, due to its “corrupting” (qtd. in Foster 1997, 32) content. A London publication, The Academy, aptly illustrates the shock that some must have felt at a novel that starts as a relatively boring ‘domestic tale’ and a ‘housewife’s guide’ to then treat “delicate subjects in a manner bordering on license” (Macleane 1874, 687). All the more surprising then that some middle-­ class conservative magazines recommended the novel. Godey’s Lady’s Book writes: “This is a book that we can cheerfully recommend to all readers. It is a story of American life, with characters naturally drawn, and with a high tone. Its literary merits are quite up to the average” (1874, 190). The “eminently respectable” (Foster 1997, 31) Harper’s New Monthly Magazine (1874) likewise praised the novel and described the passages on the “glorious forecast of the future” (443) as worthy of Alfred Tennyson (1809–1892), Poet Laureate of Great Britain and Ireland at the time. Those less conservatively inclined also applauded the novel. Papa’s Own Girl was issued by John P. Jewett, a publishing house known for taking risks with controversial, and potentially subversive, material, especially since it had put out the bestseller that had rallied, and further divided, the antebellum nation: Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852). Indeed, Woodhull and Claflin’s Weekly (1874) claimed that Howland’s novel would be just as popular. San Francisco’s The Morning Call also recommends the novel (1894), evidently impressed because some thought it worth banning. Of course, utopian socialism is not for every dissenter: the anarchist J. William Lloyd (1857–1940) lauded the novel’s style, but criticized Howland’s vision as too totalitarian, and the utopian community as a scheme to exploit working people (1887). The novel was moderately successful, with three editions published during Howland’s lifetime, and a fourth in 1975. Even though it did not sell in staggering numbers, never coming close to the success of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Papa’s Own Girl appears to have resonated with a certain

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readership. “Several correspondents personify the book as an evangelical missionary” (Foster 1997, 35) and appear to have fervently circulated Howland’s social critique as well as her way out of the dilemma, looking for the ‘glorious future’ promised via a ‘story of American life.’

‘Papa Is a Radical, They Say; So Are We’: Gender and Collaboration Howland’s novel clearly centers on two issues: female emancipation and the uplift of the working class. However, contrary to what a contemporary feminist reader might want to find, men in the novel appear to be main instigators of this glorious future and play a crucial role in creating the Social Palace, the utopian community that marks the happy ending of the novel. As the title implies, Clara Forest, main protagonist of the novel, is ‘Papa’s own girl’ through and through, drawing her ideological convictions from her father, Doctor Forest. Throughout the novel, the doctor supplies moral guidance. Clara echoes his unconventional views on the necessity of women’s economic independence and his critical stance against middle-class prejudices and ideas surrounding respectability. At one point she explains to her best friend, Susie Dykes, that “Papa is a radical, they say; so are we” (129). The other pivotal male is Clara’s second husband: Count Paul von Fraunstein, a European aristocrat, who founds and funds the Social Palace, a utopian community modeled on Godin’s Familistère. Fraunstein is German for ‘women’s stone/rock’ and fittingly, as the novel explains, women could build their church “upon such a rock” (358). It thus seems as if men are responsible for the advancement of women’s rights; a dependency that undermines female agency. However, this critique can be mitigated to a certain extent, as the key word for the entire novel and utopian scheme is collaboration. Howland’s writing underlies the Fourierist ideal of communally conjoined efforts in which all profit when everyone’s individual ‘passions’ are met, capitalists fund the uplift of their workers, and men clear the way for women. It is harmonious change, not conflict, which Howland promotes in the postbellum United States, just as Fourier sought to avoid another French Revolution. In the few cases that Papa’s Own Girl did attract academic interest, critics expressed their frustration with the role that men play in the resolution of the otherwise feminist novel. Indeed, in the final chapter the protagonist Clara finds herself in the Social Palace, yet also in a very domestic

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setting: married and with her newborn in her arms (even though her first husband convinced her that she was barren to guilt her into obedience). Concluding her short overview of the plot, Carol Farley Kessler (1989) notes with disappointment that “Accurate though Howland’s suffrage prediction is, she focuses less upon women’s political equality in the novel than upon the relations between women and men. … The typical suitable marriage concludes the novel, the woman in the traditional role of wifemother” (119) but at least “with the requirement that man and woman find the marriage equally desirable” (119; emphasis in original). Barbara C.  Quissell in her reading of feminist utopias similarly remarks that Howland “leaves unanswered any problems regarding the Count’s paternalistic leadership or the heroine’s adjustments to motherhood and the nuclear family” (1981, 163). On the same grounds, Darby Lewes criticizes the “strict moral orthodoxy” (1989, 93) that underlies the narrative and points out that “Clara gradually fades from the narrative” (1989, 94) once her charismatic second husband enters the scene. A similar return to conventional gender roles within marriage can be found in other nineteenth-­century novels dedicated to promoting free love as well—as Holly Jackson observes in her essay on this “puzzling pattern” (2015, 681). Foster on the other hand suggests that adhering to these conventions is (at least in part) strategic, sugaring the radical pill the novel wants its readers to swallow (1997). In addition, for the Fourierist Howland, romantic happiness and maternal bliss are crucial components of a good place. After all, the ‘attractive passions’ are an important part of Fourier’s worldview. Similar to Imlay’s The Emigrants, romance is not contradictory to the utopian narrative, but part of it. The happy ending with the perfect, aristocratic feminist hunk of a husband that has turned into a hopelessly devoted romantic suggests that women in a utopian society can have their cake and eat it too. Paradoxically, the reward for no longer chasing marital bliss is marital bliss. Also, marriage itself has been transformed: while the novel resolves the romantic plot in a generic way, it nonetheless ends with a completely unconventional arrangement. The divorcee Clara is a newlywed with a child that she will happily trust into the communal childcare of the Social Palace, and her husband has adopted Susie’s daughter. They form a happy, non-nuclear, and unorthodox family within a utopian community. Despite the role that Fraunstein plays to bring about the happy ending, the plot takes some feminist turns. It starts with the childhood and Bildung of Clara and her initiation into the realities of the world (of class and of

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marriage) but then deviates from the conventional mold: Clara leaves her first husband because she feels no longer loved; her best friend, Susie, chooses to have her baby out of wedlock even though the biological father, Clara’s brother Dan, would be reluctantly willing to marry her; Susie and Clara successfully run their own business; Susie, born into poverty and a now a scandalously single mother, becomes the world-traveling business partner of the Count; together with another woman, Clara and Susie raise Susie’s daughter even before the utopian community is established (Howland here draws on her own experience, as she helped to raise children of her unmarried/separated friends); and Clara actively interferes in politics. That is, Clara’s and Susie’s radicalization begins their journey to utopia before Fraunstein shows up. Concordant with Howland’s conviction that the key to women’s equality depends on economic independence, the Social Palace provides childcare and economic security, yet Clara and Susie already achieved this goal before joining the community. Social Palace or not, Clara can choose to be with her husband instead of being dependent on him. Importantly, the romantic plot commences and ends happily after socioeconomic change ensures that it cannot end too unhappily. Papa’s Own Girl is infused with the teachings of Fourier, even though his name is not mentioned once. All credit goes to Godin: Fraunstein and Susie visit the Familistère in France, Fraunstein has read and translated Godin’s Social Solutions, and Godin’s model shapes the setup of the Social Palace. The community is exemplary in its harmony, offering a solution that will ultimately profit the working class as well as the capitalist investing in it. Private property is not abolished, but everyone will live more comfortably, so that class-war becomes unnecessary (499). Fourierism also underlies the convictions of the doctor, who has been identified as the ideological “mouthpiece” (Kessler 1989, 119) of the novel. He frequently imparts utopian wisdoms that recall Fourier’s convictions, such as: “Life, as we know it now, is but a miserable travesty of the real destiny of our race when we become integrally developed, and have brought the planet thoroughly under our united control” (44), or, “the inculcation of this sentiment of unity is so important, that we cannot overestimate it, for it will lead to grand association schemes for the amelioration of mankind” (67). His eccentric ideas of the golden age to come are also worthy of Fourier: for example, he believes “that the coming man’s head is going to be as smooth as an ostrich egg” (474). Doctor Forest fully subscribes to Fourier’s idea that the need for physical intimacy and sexual pleasure is

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integral for a person’s, and therefore society’s, well-being. He treats his patients accordingly. At one point, the doctor prescribes a good-night kiss to a middle-aged female patient, which he then immediately gives her, in order to cure her loneliness, and explains: “You are thoroughly womanly in your nature, and you really need the magnetism of affection. You suffer more from your secluded life than most people would” (34). To mitigate the scandalous implications of this scene, the narrator comments that this act speaks of “his kindness and his deep sympathy with her” (34). Doctor Forest is essentially already a Fourierist subject in a non-utopian world. He contributes to the development toward a good place actively and becomes a source for female empowerment by ensuring that his daughter receives an education, which she will in turn pass on to Susie. Just as Fourier’s plans and Godin’s model cooperation relied on conscientious capitalists, so does the advancement of women’s rights rely on conscientious patriarchs. In both cases, excessive conflict is not necessary, and everyone profits. Yet, Howland does not imply that women should solely place their hopes in “heroic sacrifice” (48) by a “grand, noble creature” (52), that is, in utopian men. As I outlined in Chap. 2, in Gilbert Imlay’s The Emigrants (1793), ideal husbands spring up on American grounds and thus the need for legally securing women’s rights evaporates. Indeed, Howland likewise claims that “American gentlemen are among the most refined in their sentiments toward women” (481). Nonetheless, while men of the Doctor’s kind are needed, Howland’s vision does not rely on a magic transformation of character or the apparition of utopian subjects shaped solely by the American land. Primarily, she argues, the system needs to change. To this end, Howland’s novel gestures to the trope of women being saved by a noble man and refutes it. Adolescent Clara is fascinated with the protagonist of Jacques (1833), a novel by George Sand/Amantine Lucile Aurore Dupin (1804–1876). In Sand’s novel, a married couple falls out of love. This pains both partners, but when Jacques realizes that his wife would be happier with another, he takes off into the woods, never to return. This intertextual reference serves to foreshadow Clara’s disappointment when her first husband, Albert Delano, does not behave nobly at all. Even though Clara and Albert had been in love when they wed (just like the protagonists in Sand’s novel), Albert’s feelings toward Clara change. This hurts her greatly, but it is almost as painful to her that he does not admit that he has stopped loving her. He also denies that he publicly chases after another woman, adding insult to injury—such deception being precisely

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the behavior that Sand’s protagonist condemns. Whereas Sand’s Jacques disappears, presumably to die, so that his wife can embark on a new relationship and a happier life, Albert does not take off, nor does he really fight for Clara, but out of spite refuses divorce. Subsequently, she is ostracized by her social peers. Here, the novel subtly moves from the individual focus of romance to systemic critique: Clara’s personal heartache over losing Albert’s affections and her disappointment in the emotional immaturity of her un-Jacque-like husband is exacerbated by the legal hindrance to divorce and the social repercussions. That is, the un-utopian circumstances must be changed to mitigate the damage caused by subjects that simply refuse to behave in a utopian manner. The novel reiterates this point in various subplots. The first part of Papa’s Own Girl, which describes the sentimental tribulations of Clara’s first marriage, and those of her friends, illustrates how confining women to the domestic sphere in private households oppresses them and makes them vulnerable. Domestic chores, especially childcare, are described as a burden. Three women (Clara, her mother, and the servant Dinah) are positively exhausted with raising Clara’s twin sisters. For Clara, “they weighed upon her young life like the world upon the shoulders of Atlas” (27), and Dinah is likewise “long-suffering” (20). Clara’s mother, Mrs. Forest, argues that women cannot be happy because “household cares so drag us down, and the care of children … is too much for any one” (31). She is reluctant to let her eldest daughter leave for college because she depends on her help and company in the house, illustrating how the economic dependency of women perpetuates itself. Childcare is an especially exhausting and exploitative type of labor: Dinah’s “condition was little better than slavery after the advent of those imps of twins” (12)—this comparison to slavery will be addressed shortly. Yet, there are women who relish watching after children. When Susie becomes a businesswoman, her daughter (born and raised out of wedlock) is left in the daycare of the childless Mrs. Buzzell and everyone is happy. The many cutesy descriptions of young children, replete with baby talk, render childcare, not children, the main burden. The nuclear family is taken to be “natural” (107) yet harmful, “a nursery of crooked, abnormal motives” (29) where individual shortcomings bring about serious character flaws in the youngsters. Mrs. Forest is frequently admonished for not being able to love anything that is “not distinctly her own” (108). Her motherly loyalty to her feckless son is not glorified but depicted as part of the problem because it enables him to mistreat Susie. Invested mothers like Mrs. Foster therefore bear

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responsibility for the existence of misanthropic men. One crucial point of the novel is that the cult of domesticity must be overcome to allow for communally organized childcare and household chores, so that women can become economically independent. That way, the community also ensures that children are adequately raised, a task for which the nuclear family and even the exemplary Dr. Forest is ill-equipped: after all, his son Dan and the twin girls venture far from Clara’s shining example and need extensive reformation. Men play an important role in ending women’s confinement, as those in possession of capital and economic know-how (e.g., Susie interns with a helpful florist). However, Clara’s formal education, her and Susie’s savviness, and female solidarity regarding chores and childcare contribute to their success just as much. Connected to this challenge of the private, domestic sphere is the attack upon respectability and the sanctification of female chastity. This is illustrated by two subplots: the first revolves around Susie. When Susie will not sleep with Dan, he rapes her, and she becomes pregnant. Dan first wants to abandon her, and then to marry her (for her sake), while doubting that she is “innocent” (92). Dan, of course, is himself anything but a virgin. Dr. Forest fumes at his son’s behavior: “Brute force and ignorance have oppressed woman in all history … Of course this has cramped woman’s free growth in every way, and the man who takes advantage of her weakness, as you have done with Susie Dykes, deserves the execration of all honorable men” (93). A second subplot yet again condemns sexual double standards: a young girl by the name of Annie tries to kill herself after her sweetheart encounters her in a brothel and accuses her (falsely) of prostituting herself. Stressing that it would not matter even if Annie had sold her body, Dr. Forest reprimands the young man: “Now what were you there for? Were you ignorant of the nature of the house also?” (331–332). The doctor’s words move the young man, who repents and becomes a “champion of woman’s rights” (333). For Howland to effectively pave the way to utopia, including repentant men like this is extremely important, as it “demonstrates how men can change and become women’s rights advocates. Indeed, it shows that men must be transformed if heterosexual love is to thrive and society is to progress” (Blake 2015, 1076). Just as men and women can be feminist, either can be misogynistic. For most of the novel, Clara’s mother is the personification of toxic femininity, exerting as much pressure as she can to maintain the status quo in which women are evaluated by their domestic virtues. From the beginning, she is overly concerned with upholding class distinctions, hoping to marry her

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daughters with men who will raise the family’s social standing further. To protect her family’s reputation, Mrs. Forest kicks out the pregnant Susie and refuses to acknowledge that the child is her grandchild, doing considerable harm to Susie’s already precarious social standing. She denies that she is in part to blame for the situation: treating Susie, who worked as a servant in the Forest’s home, with derision while glorifying her son, Mrs. Forest has made Susie emotionally vulnerable and Dan cocksure of his immunity. It takes until the end of the novel for her to change her views. Women thus also function as ideological gatekeepers. Through the figure of Mrs. Forest, the novel attacks “respectable modes of resistance” (Blake 2015, 952) for middle-class women in the nineteenth century, who tried to extend their reach into the public sphere either by being in charge of the social standing of their family as ‘fashionable women’ or by a form of ‘domestic feminism’ that held that women had a moral duty to the world and therefore an obligation to engage in public issues related to domestic cares (think temperance, sanitation, charity, healthcare). Mrs. Forest represents both of these ‘respectable’ modes and ultimately helps to keep women submissive and dependent on men. For women to break free from the conventions at the time, the novel suggests a radical path. Men have to abandon their insistence on female respectability, but women have to become less respectable. The doctor muses: “the first condition for the development of broad sympathies for humanity in a woman’s heart is the loss of respectability as defined by hypocrites and prudes” (67). Papa’s Own Girl illustrates this regarding Susie and Clara, who both have caused scandals and are exemplary in their female solidarity, taking in Annie and making her a business partner. Lewes points out that these plotlines are not quite as shocking as the author might have intended, as all of these women have remained “genteel feminine” (94); they may have fallen from social grace but that is because they love too much, care too much, are too principled and too naïve. Ultimately, the conflicts all revolve around their virtues, as none of them has actually engaged in extramarital sex (Jackson 2015). Yet, as Mrs. Forest’s reactions indicate, the mere disregard for social respectability was considered radical enough at the time. Maybe more progressive is the decidedly utopian focus on systemic change, as opposed to individual reformation of vices. The stories of Clara, Susie, and Annie all make clear that men tend to fail women. Thus, the system has to amend the situation by providing education and a proper workplace. To cure Susie’s lovesickness, Clara prescribes books. She is convinced that education would be a vaccine against unhealthy infatuation

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with men in the first place: “‘If I had only been here,’ she said to herself, ‘I would have helped her to study and be interested in something in the universe besides Dan, and this would never have happened’” (124). Despite all her education, Clara will later face her heartache with little more grace, yet a proper occupation, offered by the newly entrepreneurial Susie, marks her way out. They set up shop together, which helps Clara get over Albert and financially enables her to remain separated. Romantic relationships and socioeconomic situation are thus interlinked. Blake interprets this to mean “the healthiness of private relationships is the true bedrock of civilization, since those relationships shape the character of citizens” (2015, 1051). This would imply a similar relationship between political and economic system and romantic relationship as in Imlay’s The Emigrants, in which good husbands constitute a good place. However, I contend that in the case of Papa’s Own Girl it is the other way around: changing the economic, political, and social circumstances will bring about improved relationships, while, so far, flawed relationships have developed for the worse because the system was flawed. It is one thing that Albert (for whatever reason) stops loving Clara, but Albert’s shortcomings are worsened by laws and by social convention, allowing him to cling stubbornly to the concept of marriage even as he cheats on his wife. Dan can take advantage of Susie because she has such a low standing in society that his attentions awe her, while he knows that there will be no greater repercussions for him when he mistreats her. Annie flees from an abusive home and depends on her sweetheart for refuge, which he is simply too embarrassed to provide, as she looks impoverished and destitute. These predicaments could not have occurred were the girls financially independent and educated. In summary, Howland connects personal tragedy to social issues without relegating these problems solely to individual shortcomings. Instead, happier relationships but, more importantly, less devastating heartache will result from a utopian order in which women are no longer confined to the domestic sphere and enjoy economic independence. In such a world, it is safe for Clara to marry and become a mother, as this role will not define, or confine, her. Certainly, Howland, sticking with genre conventions, cuts her narrative off at an unfortunate point. Yet, Clara’s future is very likely not as orthodox as that of other nineteenth-century heroines.

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‘Love is Not All that There is to Life’: Romance and the Utopian Narrator Indeed, the narrator reveals that the world has been changed through the Social Palace. Told from the not-so-distant future, Papa’s Own Girl looks at the events of the novel from a utopian perspective. Typical for the utopian genre, the account reflects on the improvements that the non-­utopian system needed to make. Convinced of feminism and Fourierism, the narrator relates the romantic tribulations of Clara and Susie, the setup of the Social Palace, and Fraunstein’s and the Doctor’s philosophical exclamations. As the forthcoming examples demonstrate, content and Howland’s formal choices make the novel a romance of utopian practice. The narrator is very likely Susie (Foster 1997, 48). In the first chapter, she states that she is “one of the characters, but it does not matter which one” (8). However, there is only one character upon whom the description of a poor childhood friend of Clara fits. Furthermore, the narrator delivers some slight punches against the people who have wronged Susie: while never directly attacking Mrs. Forest and Dan, those two are explicitly served “poetic justice” and “poetic retribution” (251; 430). The introductory anecdote, the floral symbolisms, and the frequent use of French words (Susie is an accomplished florist and has been to France by the time she writes the novel) also mark the voice as Susie’s. In choosing a girl with a farming background who has risen in the world, Howland draws on her own experiences and highlights her own achievements. The first chapters in particular illustrate that uplift is indeed possible: the narrator describes her young self as poor and uneducated, and, by contrast, draws on erudite vocabulary to tell her story. The formerly destitute Susie, who at one point says of herself “I know so little of books; … I am a dreadful poor speller” (125) has become a skilled writer. Papa’s Own Girl also features working-class people who are not as well-­ versed as the narrator is. The novel then takes lengths to illustrate the general potential, and, better yet, the ardent desire, of working men to follow middle-class etiquette. When Fraunstein provides ‘his’ construction workers with tables, tablecloths, dishes, and cutlery for their lunch-breaks, they would “perish rather than forget and put their knives in their mouths … for there is nothing on which people, who have been deprived of refined breeding, are so sensitive as this very subject of manners” (418). The narrator, who is not an astonished bystander but relates these observations in an instructive, matter-of-fact way, ridicules the townspeople’s

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disbelief in these sudden transformations: from her utopian vantage-point, it is clear that a more ‘refined’ habitus is merely a good role-model and a table-cloth away. Etiquette and class hierarchies are not under attack but the ideal for all to aspire to. The narrator and other working-class characters willingly adhere to this order: “workingmen knew perfectly well they were far below the educated gentleman in refinement, in manners, in culture—in everything, perhaps, but heart … no men had more heart than workingmen, and workingmen knew their true friends just as quickly as they knew the true gentleman from the sham” (421). Enthused by their prospect of uplift, they ‘know’ Fraunstein to be a ‘true gentleman’ and react with excitement to Fraunstein’s proposals, immediately volunteering to work overtime (410–414). The absurdity of this scene has not escaped (all) contemporary readers. Lloyd, critically examining the novel from an anarchist’s point of view, calls Fraunstein the “only miscarriage of the novel” (1887) exposing Fraunstein’s aristocratic privilege. The first speech that Fraunstein gives is “just such a condescending, awkward, sure-to-be-­ applauded-as-eloquent speech as such a man might be expected to make” (ibid.). For Lloyd, these parts of the novel are all too conservative. The narrator of Papa’s Own Girl, however, praises that middle-class sensibilities will triumph in the good place. While this marks the middle-class values entrenched in the newly established good place, the narrator’s stance toward other topics is more unusual for its time. Scandalous behavior, such as a doctor kissing his female patients, a woman leaving her husband for lack of romantic affection, or three single women raising a child born out of wedlock, does apparently not strike the emerging utopian subject as much out of the ordinary. Especially the explicit style with which the narrator discusses sex contributes to the impression that she is no longer confined by notions of respectability. She describes female sexual desire, and sexuality in general, with unusual frankness. Men are unabashedly scrutinized and judged for their outward attractiveness: “As a specimen of a fine animal, Dan was certainly handsome; and this is hardly doing him justice, for it must be admitted that very good women—aye, and very superior women—have adored just such fine animals” (76). Sexual desires, “usually so heavily encrypted in sentimental discourse” (Foster 1997, 39), are disclosed openly. Mrs. Forest poses “in the doctor’s room in a ravishing night toilet that had been packed away in lavender since the days of their honeymoon” (143) to seduce him; at another point, the doctor toys with her earlobe

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while they are discussing their sleeping arrangements (105–106); Albert proposes that he and Clara should have sex for old time’s sake, as “there was no reason why they should deny themselves the pleasure of being together, simply because they were not so ineffably sentimental as they had been” (395); and Fraunstein is “accustomed to the caresses of women” (455) and “was not a perfect saint” (506). It were probably these passages that shocked the British reviewer mentioned above into remarking that the novel treats “delicate subjects in a manner bordering on license” (Academy 1874, 686). Indeed, “Papa’s Own Girl refers to sex with an explicitness perfectly sufficient to communicate free love views” (Foster 1997, 39). Since such openness has become the new norm in the near utopian future, the narrator can talk about men visiting brothels and women judging the attractiveness of different mustaches (of course, Fraunstein’s mustache is superior). Fourier’s theories are fundamental to the novel and surface not only in Dr. Forest’s monologues on the human condition and the coming ‘Golden Age.’ The Social Palace is modeled on Godin’s Familistère and is therefore structured by Fourier’s ideas for economic reorganization, and so quotes by Fourier, surrounded by French and US American flags, grace the halls. Just as Godin, Fraunstein does not adhere to Fourierism dogmatically: for example, the Social Palace is built for 2000, not 1620, people. There is no talk of constant work-rotation, no absurd specifications as to who will pick which kind of apple, nor an intricately organized motley of sexual pleasures. Nonetheless, the Social Palace is utopian, also because it is planned and described in detail, down to air vents, children’s beds, cleaning routine, and mushroom cultivation and harvest. Fittingly, Susie provides the tour through the Social Palace at the end of the novel, demonstrating the advantages of Godin’s Fourierist utopian practice. Moreover, Fourier’s psychology (for want of a better word) influences how the plot develops, and how the narrator explains the motifs of the characters. Passion, attraction, magnetism, instincts, and certain ‘types’ of personality account for many decisions. These personality types are neither the result of pedigree nor of upbringing: Clara responds positively to her father’s pedagogy, but his lax methods fail utterly with her siblings, and each child has a completely different set of character traits. The Fourierist laws of attraction underlying the novel are exemplified in the exceptional relationship between ‘papa’ and his ‘own girl,’ a bond that today’s reader probably finds rather too close for comfort and that all academic readings comment on. To anyone born after the “pre-Freudian

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age” (Foster 1997, 42) in which this novel was written, their relationship borders on the incestuous, while contemporary reviewers do not seem to have noted anything awry. Clara is not only ideologically modeled to Dr. Forest’s liking, but the pair is constantly touching, and praise one another to the point of “making love” (90), that is, flirting. They have a closer bond than any other two characters in the novel, be that Dr. Forest and Mrs. Forest, Dr. Forest and his other children, Clara and her mother, or Clara and Susie (Foster 1997, 41). Fraunstein’s appearance does not interfere with that relationship when he marries Clara. Instead, he joins the two of them (whereas Clara’s first husband was jealous of his father-in-law). The two men already professed their love for each other before Fraunstein and Clara ever meet: “‘Doctor, have you ever been in love?’—‘With a woman-no; with a man, yes.’—‘I understand. You have met a man who responded to all the needs a man could respond to, but never a woman to respond to what you need there” (373). The narrator freely describes their relationship: “To say they loved each other like brothers would by no means express the sentiment existing between these two men, so unlike in many respects, yet so closely in sympathy that thought answered to thought like the voice of one’s own soul” (372). This language mirrors the words that are used to describe the soon-to-be newlyweds: when Clara and Fraunstein kiss, it is “soul meeting and mingling with soul” (483) and thus the physical expression of a connection that she, Fraunstein, and her father have. On the night that she and Fraunstein openly confess their love for each other, Clara even wears “a beautiful cameo of her father’s head in profile” (481) hovering over her cleavage. While the doctor declares that women should choose their own partners, and that he as a father is not in the position to grant anyone permission to court his daughter, the match is very much to his liking. Drawn to Clara’s home as if by an “atmosphere” (487) at the night of their engagement, he officiates the “gloriously radical marriage ceremony, after our wicked latitudinarian hearts” (489). Of course, a father giving his daughter to her husband is not radical. However, in this ceremony Fraunstein finds the opportunity to declare his love to the father of the woman he is about to marry: “As any one may perform the ceremony, I should choose you from all the world” (489). It is hard not to view Clara as the female substitute for the union between her father and Fraunstein, although reading these passages with Fourierism (instead of Freudian psychoanalysis) in mind contextualizes such impressions of homoeroticism and incest somewhat. Since Dr. Forest and Clara have essentially the same character

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‘type,’ they both, by law of magnetic attraction, fall in love with Fraunstein. The same goes for Susie, by the way: ideologically, she is very much Dr. Forest’s girl (Foster 1997, 48), and she is not only present at Clara’s engagement but Clara and Fraunstein fantasize about getting married to Susie as well (as Fraunstein clarifies, in a strictly non-sexual manner). In a sense, they already did, as Fraunstein has adopted Susie’s daughter, who is of course the niece of Clara and the granddaughter of Dr. Forest. The narrator evidently tries to provide sentimental aspects as well as a mitigating, more levelheaded perspective—she aims to address and unite different ‘passions’ and construct a narrative that reflects the Social Palace’s ideological foundation. For example, Susie is initially a poor girl, diligent and decent. Dan, the wastrel son of a doctor, and her fall in love. One evening “a thought blacker than mortal night entered his heart” (81) and he rapes her, leaving her pregnant and disgraced. Thus far, Susie’s plot line contains all the ingredients of a sentimental story. She herself has internalized this narrative convention: “half dazed with the knowledge of Dan’s disaffection, and the fate worse than death that hung over her, [she] went about the house, pale, silent, brooding over the thought of death as the only possible escape for such as she” (88). As Susie hopes to die and pines for the affection of her rapist, the narrator interjects a commentary on this type of romantic narrative: “Sentimental or emotional people never count themselves happy except when floundering in some sea of passionate madness … Be it wise or foolish, it is the fate of many people to love in just this mad way; though it excites the contempt of those who can regulate the play of their emotions as easily as we do the movement of a clock by raising or lowering the pendulum” (86). In true Fourierist fashion, the narrator repeatedly acknowledges the existence of different types, and comments on their challenges when it comes to romance and sentimental literature. However, Susie will not end up as a tragic victim of the patriarchy, as she will be instigator and beneficiary of the systemic changes under way. The novel refuses outright to follow the conventions of sentimental plotlines and tries to draw up new ones that correspond with the improved socioeconomic order. When Clara consoles the lovesick Susie, she realizes that ‘romance’ novels advertise a disturbing emotional state: “This was the first time she had ever been brought face to face with real anguish, and she found it more terrible than any romance had ever pictured it” (122). Indeed, both Susie and Clara are so desperate to regain the affection of their respective partners that they become trusting to a fault. Clara

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deliberately ignores that Albert pines after another, and Susie wants to believe in Dan so badly that she allows him to enter her bedroom, even though she is afraid that he will take advantage of the situation. The solution against such romantic folly is female empowerment. Clara advises Susie: “You are not going to sink down under this misfortune like a common-­spirited girl … You can win him back if you will; … I tell you there is nothing so sure to win the love of men as to force them to admire our strength and independence” (123). This prediction, made by a Clara that is still happily in love with Albert, holds true in the novel. Clara will also grovel for her husband’s affection to no avail. Only when Clara and Susie are self-assured businesswomen, do Albert and Dan come to regret their behavior. Ironically, neither Susie nor Clara wants them back by that point. The novel insists on the paradox that independent women, not intent on romance, will be rewarded with romantic bliss. Again, the radical content in the novel—the call to education, economic independence, leaving the domestic sphere, and free love—is coated by the conventional promise of a happy and prosperous romantic union. Yet the script that women must follow in Papa’s Own Girl to be rewarded differs from the advice that many other sentimental novels dish out. The narrator thus undermines romantic stereotypes while still maintaining the premise that women desire happy romantic unions. Doctor Forest summarizes: “Love is not all there is of life; and as you depend less on its intoxication for your happiness, the more smoothly will work the machinery of destiny, just as the circulation of the blood is effected more normally when we trust to Nature, instead of trying to aid her by counting the beating of our hearts” (257). The narrative complies and provides discussions of botany, of politics, of currency and banking, of communal organization, of pedagogy, as well as a tedious subplot that expounds the relationship between Fraunstein and his adoptive daughter, before it returns to romance: Fraunstein and Clara then exemplify how the ‘machinery of destiny’ can work ‘more smoothly.’ This new kind of partnership also needs to be narrated in a new way. Of course, a country doctor like Albert is no match for a rich, sophisticated, and good-looking European count. The second time around, as a reward for her exemplary independence, Clara scores the man that all the other women chase. But Fraunstein is not only a desirable husband: theirs is to be a happy union that does not oppress the bride nor pluck her away from where she belongs. In fact, she does not even go ‘home’ with her new

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husband on their wedding night. The happiness of their union is also symbolized by the orange blossoms: at her wedding with Albert, the bride-tobe finds the smell of the flower arrangements oppressive (199). The ­ chapter titled ‘Clara’s Wedding’ mostly talks of Clara’s doubts regarding marriage, while the ceremony itself is merely granted a paragraph (207). Her spontaneous betrothal to the count, on the other hand, is detailed more extensively, including descriptions of the decorations and the food. This time, blossoms remain in the trees, and Clara does not complain of any nauseating smells. To absolutely ensure that the reader notes the symbolism, the chapter is titled ‘Under the Orange Blossoms.’ Clara’s relationship with Albert and Susie’s relationship with Dan both take up a lot of narrative space. The ups-and-downs are traced through conversations, descriptions of encounters, and letters. In this, these plotlines reflect the ‘intoxication’ with love that the novel reproves. The suffering of the two heroines and their way to economic independence then make up the next large section of the novel, which “disrupts the usual closure provided by marriage in the domestic narrative. Far from putting an end to the heroine’s story, marriage is the catalyst that accelerates Clara’s development into a practicing as well as a theoretical radical” (Foster 1997, 38). The relationship to Fraunstein then does not offer much drama: Fraunstein and Clara are aware that they are drawn to each other and confess their feelings to one another by and by, with Clara cautious and Fraunstein waiting for more encouragement. Once Clara dares to talk about the clause in the divorce papers that forbids her to marry again, Fraunstein dismisses this complication, and they kiss and get married straight away. Even this plot twist  is systemic: if Clara had known more about the legal procedures of divorce, Clara and the Count would have commenced their relationship much sooner. As such knowledge is not passed on to women (unless they read educative literature such as Papa’s Own Girl), they depend on liberal men to help them out of their predicaments. Thus, the novel attempts to write a new kind of romance that illustrates all the advantages of cooperative practice à la Godin without withholding the ultimate romantic reward. This is not to say that Howland is entirely successful in this endeavor. Nonetheless, it must be acknowledged that under the cover of romance, she managed to smuggle more or less socialist ideas and calls for women’s right to divorce, financial independence, and suffrage all the way into the tabloids of conservative magazines.

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‘Never a Possible Question of Equality’: Utopia Surviving the Civil War The general optimism of Papa’s Own Girl and its treatment of the Civil War suggest that the violent conflict had not caused lasting damage to the utopian imagination of Howland and her circle. Systemic anti-Black discrimination and violence had exacerbated as Southern Whites organized resistance against the federal government while the endurance of the North to support Black Civil Rights began to weaken. This so-called Southern Redemption gained momentum in the 1870s—at the time the novel was written. Considering the novel’s treatment of African Americans and the ongoing North-South divide reveals the coping mechanism that in part enabled Howland’s ongoing belief in a realizable good place in the United States. Papa’s Own Girl glosses over the conflicts between North and South, trivializes slavery, and reiterates claims of White supremacy. This oblivion facilitates the utopian vision of the Social Palace (much like the amnesia of Hawthorne’s Blithedalers). Consequently, the dystopian history and present of the country no longer disrupt the utopian telos of the nation, which is marked by Whiteness. In line with the racist ideologies that often underlie the utopian genre, this strategy effectively erases Black people and any solutions for their plight from the utopian future. This observation links to Afropessimist theories; Black utopian imaginations are the topic of the novels discussed in the proceeding chapters. Generally speaking, Fourierist tenets were used for both abolitionist and pro-slavery arguments. Many Fourierist utopian communities, such as the North American Phalanx in New Jersey (1843–1856), as well as the (postbellum) Pacific Colony in Topolobampo, deliberately excluded Black people. Antebellum, others considered providing an ‘economical’ solution to slavery and included slaves into their plans, albeit, as far as I know, no such plan has ever been realized. In these schemes, enslaved Black people would work for and in the communities while receiving an education and learning trades, and by their labor earn their freedom (similar to the Owenist Nashoba; 1825–1827). After they would have worked and learned enough, they were usually not to be permitted to become part of the community but should, ideally, move on and found their own collaborative. Such projects are obviously not based on a belief in racial equality; ultimately, they envision a segregated society, while their economic rationale legitimizes the exploitative logic of slavery instead of disowning those

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who profit from slave labor (Blake 2015, 998; Guarneri 1991, 263–264).5 On the other hand, there are Fourierists and utopianists who were fervent and politically active abolitionists, such as Henry Clapp Jr. (1814–1875) and Horace Greeley (1811–1872). The Northampton Association of Education and Industry, also known as Ross Farm (1841–1845), had been an interracial utopian community and served as a station of the Underground Railroad (see also Sargent 2020). However, Howland and her close associates rejected the abolitionist movement on multiple grounds (Blake 2015, 1006–1007). For one, they condemned the party politics that were fought on the field of abolitionism, accusing politicians of co-opting abolitionist discourse to garner votes. They further argued that, if there was no greater systemic change, slavery would simply be replaced by an exacerbated exploitation of all working people. Fourierism lent itself to conflating chattel slavery and poor working conditions/wage slavery, ultimately viewing any ‘servitude’ as a dehumanizing evil. Fourierists like Howland were staunch believers in reform via utopian socialism—that is, they were convinced that if ideal phalansteries were up and running, they would by example quickly also convert slave holders and thus end slavery. Finally, Howland was among those who were affronted by the 15th Amendment, feeling that (White) women had just as much (if not more) right to, and urgency for, suffrage than Black men. These arguments implicitly promoted the (albeit finite) continuation of slavery and are based on racist assumptions that justify postponing the emancipation of Black slaves. Howland was opposed to slavery but, like many of her White contemporaries, did not believe that people of African descent were equal to Anglo-Saxon/Northern Europeans.6 Accordingly, Papa’s Own Girl offers racist comments on the developmental stages of different civilizations. The doctor explains “You and I have the same faculties that in the Apache express themselves in pow-wow-ing and scalping, yet we neither pow-wow nor scalp: we have outgrown that kind of gratification for the passion” (158). This is, incidentally, the only time that 5  This is one of many examples illustrating that abolitionists were not free from prejudice. Many White people who opposed slavery did not hold Black people to be their equals and rather viewed them as in need of charity, and ultimately opted for a segregated society, or removing them by setting up settler colonies in Africa. 6  In her biographical account of Howland, Holly Jacklyn Blake traces Howland’s convictions in detail, outlining that she subscribed to racist and nativist theories and pseudoscientific arguments from phrenology and developmentalism.

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Native Americans are mentioned, illustrating a convention of the utopian genre throughout the century: “Most authors could not imagine any place for a race that was supposed to vanish before utopia was realized” (Roemer 1976, 73). Apparently, White utopian production runs smoother when the utopian people are of one race and of one cultural background, and few White nineteenth-century authors sought to address this fault in their imagination. Howland’s utopianism was circumscribed by her adherence to scientific racism. She was particularly prejudiced against people of African descent even though, or maybe because, she had little personal interaction with Black people (Blake 2015, 891–892). She believed that the Black working class would benefit from education and grand systemic change but that overcoming alleged differences between the races and thus to solve the problem of the color line had to include genetic assimilation: “For this ‘scientific’ plan to work, she stated that first ‘the blood is to be mixed and refined in the lower strata of society.’ In other words, she thought people of mixed race would be more responsive to education and uplift than African Americans without white ancestry. But it would take additional miscegenation before someone with African ancestry would be capable of bettering him or herself enough to be on equal terms with middle-class whites. As Howland put it, only the ‘cultivated quarto and octo [are] worthy of intermarriage with our cultivated, or our best people’” (Blake 2015, 1000–1001). This ‘plan’ reeks of eugenics. Yet, Blake points out that, “although hard to believe today, this was actually a relatively enlightened idea that countered the country’s move from de facto to de jure racial segregation” (2015, 1001), which included the ban of interracial marriages. Howland also acknowledged that there were people, ‘very few,’ who did not confirm her racist prejudices, writing that she would not object to Frederick Douglass “as a family relation” (Blake 2015, 1000). Throughout her life, she continued to look down on Black people while “expressing both surprise and approval” (Blake 2015, 1156) when a Black person proved her prejudice to be false. Notably, Howland understood slavery first as a class issue, citing Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin as having sparked her interest in socialism (Blake 2015, 1005) while being completely oblivious to the racism that served to justify the exploitation of Black people and that informed her own thinking. The role of African Americans in Howland’s utopian future is illustrated by the novel’s only Black character, the family servant Dinah. In the South, Dinah “had formerly been a slave” (18). She came with the Forests

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when they moved North. The novel does not clarify whether the Forests, the move to Massachusetts, or the Emancipation Proclamation ended Dinah’s de jure state as an enslaved woman. This omission also circumvents any discussions regarding abolition from a slave’s perspective. Indeed, Dinah’s character mostly provides an unthreatening example of racial collaboration and harmony—based on blunt, racist depictions of Black submissiveness. Dinah is a stock character, and appears to be literally ‘borrowed’ from Uncle Tom’s Cabin, as Stowe’s novel also features a Dinah; a good-natured, slightly messy ‘black mammy’ with a thick accent and a painfully docile attachment to the people she works for (Blake 2015, 1169). Blake speculates that, “since Howland had limited personal experience with African Americans … she would have needed to rely on literature for a character to fill this role” (Blake 2015, 1169). It is darkly ironic that Woodhull and Claflin’s Weekly (1874) hailed the novel as equal to Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852). What the reviewer meant was that Papa’s Own Girl, much like Stowe’s novel, would become a bestseller and incite reformist support. Yet, both novels are alike in their racist stereotypes, particularly of Black intellectual inferiority and joyous servitude. By contrast, the Chinese man that becomes the community’s chef, named ‘Too Soon,’ fares a lot better. He is defined as being a diligent laborer from the moment he is introduced, “devoted as a slave, and ready to do whatever was required of him” (417). Like Dinah, Too Soon is a stock character. His industrious nature and his occupation correspond to a stereotype of Chinese people prevalent in the United States before the end of the Gold Rush and economic crises would turn public opinion as  White US Americans created the scapegoat of the ‘Yellow Peril.’ In Howland’s essentialist worldview, Chinese people are assiduous and capable of high development (see Blake 2015, 1118) and Too Soon can thus fully enter the utopian scheme. His labor is integral for the community, his skill as a chef is praised (419; 446) and his work in the kitchen and in the laundry, while stereotypical, is valued. Even Doctor Forest would work as a chef if that was where he could be “most useful” (416). The boys of the town are delighted to help Soon, and together they even provide an example par excellence for Fourierist claims that labor does not have to be drudgery: “Too Soon was now a hero, … They would do anything so that he could get his work done. Sometimes they actually crowded him away from his washtub, and rubbed out the napkins and table-cloths

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themselves” (447). Dinah, on the other hand, is never granted such communal inclusion nor joy of labor and delights in her servitude to one family. For all their radical ideas, the Forests do not treat Dinah as an equal. Blake correctly observes that Dinah “is the one character to whom charity and kindness suffice. She is never encouraged to read or to ‘better herself.’ … She is treated as uneducable—as not capable of enlightenment. As an African American living in a benevolent household, she has already achieved her highest potential—her paid servitude is what is best for her— and for society” (2015, 1078). When Clara is kissed and hugged by Dinah (note that it is not the reverse), a visitor “looked a little surprised at this familiarity with a negro servant, until she recalled the fact that the doctor’s family had lived many years in the South, where, there being never a possible question of equality before the late civil war, the negro was often petted even like much-loved brutes” (85). Dr. Forest relishes shocking his polite guests by pouring Dinah a glass of wine in their presence (162) but she is not asked to join the party, nor the ensuing conversation about slavery. Evidently, even though the Civil War is over, the ‘question of equality’ demands too much of the otherwise more radical imagination of the author. Foster concludes that “the Utopian phalanstery absorbs ethnic difference into the colorful decor of the residence without abandoning racial stereotypes” (Foster 1997, 44) but this is giving Howland too much credit. In fact, Dinah may be living in the Social Palace but she is not ‘absorbed,’ and does not become a part of the community. There is no indication that she profits from its many opportunities for educational uplift and entertainment. Only her workload has lightened (Blake 2015, 1080). Furthermore, she takes no part in the work of the community, and still just serves the Forests, who do not really need a servant, for the Social Palace provides all amenities. That is, Dinah is completely superfluous in the new social order and thus Black people could just as well vanish from the good place.7 Interestingly, the novel includes one small instance in which Dinah crosses racial lines. Susie and Dinah bond when Dinah takes care of the pregnant girl. In her loneliness, Susie feels gracious enough to forget about Dinah’s race: “It was the first woman who had come to her in her sorrow, and she did not think of Dinah’s black skin, but silently thanked God for this blessing” (99). This scene could be read as an indication that 7  Dinah also appears to have no children of her own—as the stereotypical ‘mammy,’ her maternal energies are reserved for the White children of the family she serves.

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Howland does not object to interracial personal relationships and that gender provides a common ground for such a friendship, that is, that there are times when gender might “transcend” (Blake 2015, 1080) race. Even so, this relationship is highly intimate only as long as Susie’s pregnancy remains a secret. Dinah, in line with her role, is exuberant because she is the confidant of “the wise and great Dr. Forest” (99). Furthermore, this secret briefly gives her someone to talk to on a level plane, and so she ceases, for a moment, to be a two-dimensional stereotype of docile simplicity. Suddenly, Dinah adds controversy to the narrative and nonchalantly admits to knowing how to perform an abortion: “Why didn’t ye tell old Dinah long fore dis time? Dinah could a helped ye, mebbe. Not now. Massa’d kill me, now you done gone told him” (99). Truly, this “association of race with abortion in Howland’s mind raises questions” (Blake 2015, 1081) beyond viewing it as another stock-character trait (the ‘Voodoo’ Black woman knowing how to perform abortions). For one, Dinah knows that Doctor Forest would kill her if he found out, and the doctor is the guiding moral voice of the novel. This implies that Dinah is unable to differentiate right from wrong but needs a White paternalistic figure to keep her in check morally. On the other hand, given that Howland equated maternal childcare with slavery, it follows that a woman who had been enslaved would need to know how to avoid burdening herself with even more work. Later in the novel there is a small reference to enslaved women being the victims of rape—a topic that Uncle Tom’s Cabin also addresses and that Howland would have been aware of—when Clara locks her door “with the instinct of a slave” (388), afraid that her husband Albert would force his way into the boudoir. The conversation about abortion between Dinah and Susie serves to illustrate the extremes to which women might be pushed if they become pregnant without social support: they may have to resort to drastic measures, just like women under chattel slavery. However, the doctor protects Susie from this fate by his authoritative hold over Dinah and by finding Susie a new, respectable home and a more appropriate (read: educated and White) friend: Clara. The short interlude of permeable racial boundaries ultimately serves to illustrate how low the “very nice girl” (31) Susie could have fallen—to the level of a Black (formerly enslaved) woman. This is one of the many instances in which the novel aligns slavery and the oppression of women. This parallel is not meant to trivialize the plight of enslaved people but to drastically mark the severity of woman’s condition, even though it is hard to grapple with the idea that taking care of

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twins should be “little better than slavery” (12). Doctor Forest discusses matrimony as corrupting because “slaves make tyrants” (40). Thus, he reiterates a common objection to slavery (recalling similar statements made in Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia; 1781, 174): owning another person corrupts the one in power and therefore the enslaved/wife will end up being mistreated. A similar parallel is drawn when it comes to the harm that slavery/patriarchy does to an enslaved person’s/a woman’s character: “But like many of the slaves, as the doctor called married women, she made up in perversity what she lacked in independence” (365). Implausible as it may seem, Howland drew these comparisons and apparently yet maintained her prejudices against African Americans. The constant alignment of women and slaves gestures to the former alliance of those who campaigned for female suffrage and those who prioritized African American—male—suffrage in the American Equal Rights Association. One conversation in the novel in particular illustrates this. The once-conservative now-suffragist Mrs. Burnham is asked by her husband how she would decide on complex political issues. She replies: “How does the plantation hand decide that … and the ignorant foreigner? I should not dare to vote as carelessly as they do. For my part, I think it a great responsibility. … I should certainly study up the subject, and if I had not time for that, I would go to the wisest and most upright man I knew, and ask him to instruct me” (451). Mr. Burnham then ponders on his wife’s engagement in politics: “Any person who could take that trouble to do the best thing for the interests of the country, might, he thought, have as good a right to political freedom as the newly-enfranchised slaves!” (451). While this section does not directly argue against the right to vote for ‘foreigners,’ ‘plantation hands’ and ‘newly enfranchised slaves,’ it points to the disappointment of women’s rights activists like Howland when their demands were not deemed as important as Black male suffrage, and their intellectual achievements were slighted. Subsequently, the novel points out that discrimination cannot be in the spirit of the republican United States and once again takes up abolitionist rhetoric to make its point. Only if there were no masters and no slaves, and that includes women not being dependent on male benevolence, the United States would be “a great republic of equals” (40). Slavery serves as a parallel to all aspects of women’s life. For example, on the advent of Clara’s first marriage, her father defines slavery not as marked by economic dependence or lack of legal protection but as emotional ownership: “That slaves have no rights which their masters are bound to

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respect, is a logical deduction from the doctrine that slavery is right. … They are not permitted, legally or morally, to dispose of their affections according to their tastes” (200). In another rant, he declares that respectability is “a very bugbear to frighten slaves” (364), that is women; in another those women are made “slave to petty cares” (93). These analogies are obviously ill-chosen, as married free  women, especially of the White middle class, had a safer life, not to mention access to more amenities, and had more rights than people forced into chattel slavery. Howland’s approach to women’s rights analyzes in-depth how power exerts itself not only via brute force but by systemic discrimination and discursive violence, forcing the subjects to behave in the way that is expected of them, even to the point of internalizing derogatory prejudice—an important observation that informs feminist and anti-imperial theory to this day. However, Howland does not draw the logical consequence of her analogies, never transferring her insights to reconsider her own racist attitudes. It comes as no surprise that Doctor Forest is siding with those Fourierists that opposed the abolition movement and the Civil War. Dr. Forest, “of the good old New England, witch-burning stock” (162), his Southern wife, his daughter, and her future father-in-law Mr. Delano, discuss these issues over dinner. Mr. Delano freely admits that “‘I never identified myself with the abolition movement,’ … not mentioning the fact that, as a cotton-­broker, his policy did not lie in that direction ‘but slavery is a relic of barbarism, and therefore out of place in the nineteenth century’” (163). Dr. Forest also objects to slavery, not in the least because it corrupts the White population: “The slavery system is a fearful drag upon the growth of the higher faculties … Slavery made white men despise labor” (159), and thus he finds that “the abolition of slavery was a grand result” (163) of the Civil War. Later, Fraunstein will argue that abolishing slavery put people in the right mindset to value labor: “With the abolition of slavery, we are just beginning to learn that man is not to be adapted to labor, but that labor, through machinery and scientific organization, is to be adapted to man” (534). However, Dr. Forest holds that “even that was purchased too dearly” (163), as the division of the nation remains. Mr. Delano, who is portrayed as a reasonable businessman, predicts “confusion worse confounded in our future political relations with the South” (163). Nonetheless, the conflict between North and South is no longer an explosive topic, and counts as polite dinner conversation: Mrs. Forest, ever concerned about the family’s respectability, “inwardly thanked God that the conversation had been providentially prevented from drifting into religion

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or woman’s rights” (164). Not even a decade past the Civil War, the North-South divide and slavery are no longer contentious topics; Papa’s Own Girl here illustrates that historical amnesia (or rather, convenient oblivion) can be a useful feature for the utopian imagination. Instead of turning into a heated discussion in which people side with the Union or the Confederacy, the conversation takes a strikingly absurd turn; Doctor Forest proposes that the Union Army should not have fought but instead have drained the Dismal Swamp so that it can be used for agriculture. Clara gleefully joins in and imagines how those camps would be fun for everyone as shifts could be circulated, women would come along, and everyone would enjoy pleasant campsite parties. Ultimately, even Doctor Forest must admit that this is wishful thinking. The Confederate Army would not have put the war aside in order to join in these labors and parties: “If they had respected labor, they would have met us right fraternally; but then, if they had understood the dignity of labor, slavery would have never been, and consequently our civil war would have been avoided; so our speculation is useless” (159). Once he stops fantasizing, however, he sides with the South. Secession would have been the best course of action, and women, less war-crazed than men, would have voted for secession had they been able to. In any case, “The moral sense of the civilized world has a natural right to forbid anything so imbecile as an appeal to arms” (163). Dr. Forest would rather allow to continue ‘the fearful drag’ of slavery. For the rest of the plot, Papa’s Own Girl avoids dealing with the aftermath of the Civil War. The solution implicitly offered is utopian practice, as the system of the Social Palace already begins to convince those who behold it, such as the two businessmen and politicians Kendrick and Burnham. Furthermore, Fraunstein is confident that labor organizations will replicate the experiments until the entire world looks like a ‘fair garden’ (414). Harmony is imminent: symbolically, Clara represents a merging of North and South in utopia, being the daughter of a Southern woman and a Northern man. Such marriages were a popular trope to signify successful reunion (Keely 1998; Lee 1999, 391; the upcoming chapter on W.E.B.  Du Bois’s The Quest of the Silver Fleece discusses an example of such marriages failing utterly, by which Du Bois symbolized the unsuccessful reconciliation of North and South). Mrs. Forest’s slow conversion to more liberal ideas once the Social Palace is in place likewise suggests that utopianism is capable of uniting the country—she even ends up serving on the community’s council.

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Howland’s harmonious unions mend the rift in the United States also by realigning it with Europe, marrying the ‘true’ aristocrat from the old world with the middle class of the United States. Fraunstein’s happy relationship with Clara reinforces “traditional aristocratic meanings of marriage, reproduction, and lineal inheritance, even in the context of a socialist phalanx” (Jackson 2015, 687) in the anti-aristocratic United States. Europe serves as a locus of identity for the harmonious social order as the United States again become the place in which utopian visions from the continent (France and Germany, in this case) flourish: French flags and the motto ‘Liberty, Equality, Fraternity’ decorate the halls, an enduring reminder of the French roots of the social theories upon which the Palace is built (even though Fourier, along with other utopian socialists, rejected the motto). Nonetheless, the Social Palace remains US American. For example, Fraunstein plants a palm tree “of historical fame” (476) that once belonged to Founding Father Gouverneur Morris (1752–1816), penman of the preamble of the Constitution. Taken together, this awkward mosaic speaks to Howland evoking Eurocentrism to reinvigorate utopian production, her pride in her ascension to the middle class, her aspiration of distinguishing herself in even more exclusive circles, and the resulting belief in equity rather than equality. This also exposes the multiple ruptures in the United States that have yet to be sutured and the extent to which histories and peoples have to be erased in order to create the smooth road to utopia that Howland imagines. To retain, or revive, the national utopian narrative, similar discursive maneuvers would be employed by other authors in the literary utopias popular around the fin de siècle. I want to end this chapter by contextualizing Howland’s fictionalization of a utopian community as a precursor to these popular utopian novels. Around the time that Howland moved to Topolobampo, utopian fiction rose to enormous popularity in the United States. Following the success of Bellamy’s Looking Backward: 2000–1888 (1888) the number of publications and sales of the utopian genre peaked (Roemer 1976, 2–3). Utopian novels were published before and after, yet the period between 1889 and 1900 is the absolute pinnacle of the genre. This literary trend in the Progressive Era has received extensive coverage by various scholars (with Kenneth Roemer’s work still offering the best entry to this subject) and will therefore not be discussed in too much detail but must be noted for its reinforcement of the link between the United States and utopia.

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Toward the end of the nineteenth century, utopianism became marked by an intense developmentalism, “a new evolutionary outlook that disparages any form of primitivism and sees little of value in the past” (Ahmad 2009, 12). Instead of venturing into geographically removed space, the good place was situated in the future, rendering the reader’s present a non-utopian past, as is the case in Bellamy’s novel, and Jack London’s The Iron Heel (1908). Instead of an ocean or a mountain range, time separates the utopians from contemporary society. The good place often does not result from a radical break with society at large but from progression latent in the developments of the nineteenth century, which would, eventually, evolve into an improved system—ideas also to be found in Papa’s Own Girl. Furthermore, a considerable portion of late nineteenth-century utopian novels situate utopia on US American grounds (Roemer 1976, 40–42): “The basis for Bellamy’s forecast, and for the ‘New Nation’ fervor it inspired … becomes locatable, and reachable, in the future of the USA” (Bercovitch 1975, 147). In texts such as Arthur Bird’s Looking Forward (1899) or Warren S. Rehm’s Practical City (1898), the “enthusiasts before and after Bellamy make the connection between utopia and ‘United States’ still clearer” (Bercovitch 1975, 147). These literary utopias thus draw on the national narrative of the United States as utopian, and from this premise argue that the future United States can become the realized good place (Roemer 1976, 15–34). In this way, utopianism unites a nation that is still divided along the Mason-Dixon line. The color line, however, is turned into a trench: many utopian novels of the time finalize the racial segregation already discernible in the Social Palace of Papa’s Own Girl. Among 160 late-nineteenth century utopian novels, Roemer counts only five “militant Anglo-Saxonists” (1976, 71) but adds that “many authors implied this longing [for a homogenous Anglo-Saxon population] by sprinkling praises to the ‘Caucasians,’ ‘Anglo-­ Saxons,’ and ‘Aryans’ throughout their works” (ibid.). For example, Bellamy’s utopias as well as Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland (1915) use “racially purified utopia to heal the wounds that the Civil War and Reconstruction had inflicted on white America” (Ahmad 2009, 175) and “predicated the success of their utopian societies on homogeneity and, more specifically still, ‘Aryan stock’” (Ahmad 2009, 6).8 The good place, as thought of by White US Americans, was more often than not marked 8  Similar patterns can be observed in the titles listed in Darby Lewes’s bibliographical “Gynotyopia: A Checklist of Nineteenth Century Utopias by American Women” (1989).

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by racial segregation and ‘purity.’ “If blacks were permitted to enter utopia at all, they came, at best, on an equal but definitely separate basis” (Roemer 1976, 73). Jewish people as well as people of Irish, Italian, or Asian descent were often likewise either cast as villains or written out of the good place, and Native Americans received almost no mention. Reminders of genocide, land theft, and slavery would likely disturb the narrative of a humanist ideal place, at least if this ideal place was somehow built on the grounds of such atrocities. In other words, people who are not White represent intrusions of a history that severely disrupts the ‘goodness’ and homogeneity of the US American no place—a challenge to imagining utopia that someone who subscribes to White supremacy will likely not undertake. Instead, White utopian authors either resolved this cognitive dissonance by erasing racial minorities altogether, or by asserting the supremacy of White people. As scholars like Roemer and Ahmad have shown, this defect of the White US American utopian imagination clearly manifests at the dawn of the twentieth century. Papa’s Own Girl is a signpost to these works in which Black stock characters devised by White authors become irreconcilable with ideal utopian subjects. For this, and for her role in various reform movements and contribution to sustaining radical socialist and feminist discourses via her activism, practice, and many publications, Howland’s writing merits investigation. Authors following in Howland’s wake also envisioned that a pre-utopian population (usually homogeneously White) would find consensus to restructure the state into a more social construct without another civil war. This lies at the heart of the privilege paradigm of utopian production: imagining such an easy road to utopia is possible for those ignoring or denying the horrors of slavery, the dawning Jim Crow era, and White supremacy in general, as will be discussed in the following chapters.

References Ahmad, Dohra. 2009. Landscapes of Hope. Anti-Colonial Utopianism in America. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Alcott, Louisa May. [1873] 1981. Transcendental Wild Oats and Excerpts from the Fruitlands Diary. Harvard: Harvard Common Press. Bellamy, Edward. [1888] 2009. Looking Backward, 2000–1887. New  York: Signet Classics. Bercovitch, Sacvan. 1975. The Puritan Origins of the American Self. New Haven: Yale University Press.

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Bestor, Arthur. [1950] 1970. Backwoods Utopias. The Sectarian Origins and the Owenite Phase of Communitarian Socialism in America: 1663–1829. 2nd ed. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Bird, Arthur. [1899] 1971. Looking Forward. A Dream of the United States of the Americas in 1999. New York: Arno Press. Blake, Holly Jacklyn. 2015. Marie Howland: 19th-Century Leader for Women’s Economic Independence. American Journal of Economics and Sociology 74 (4): 878–1190. Cobb, Clifford. 2015. Editor’s Introduction to Marie Howland: 19th-Century Leader for Women’s Economic Independence. American Journal of Economics and Sociology 74 (5): 853–877. Fogarty, Robert S. 1990. All Things New. American Communes and Utopian Movements 1865–1914. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Foster, Susan Lynch. 1997. Romancing the Cause: Fourierism, Feminism, and Free Love in Papa’s Own Girl. Utopian Studies 8 (1): 31–54. Gaston, Paul M. 1984. Women of Fair Hope. Athens: University of Georgia Press. Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. 1915. Herland. The Forerunner 6. Godey’s Lady’s Book and Magazine. 1874. Literary Notices. August. Godin, Jean-Baptiste André. [1871] 1886. Social Solutions. Translated by M. Howland. New York: John W. Lovell. Guarneri, Carl J. 1991. The Utopian Alternative. Fourierism in Nineteenth-­ Century America. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Harper’s New Monthly Magazine. 1874. Editor’s Literary Record. August. Hawthorne, Nathaniel. 1852. The Blithedale Romance. Boston: Ticknor, Reed, and Fields. Howland, Marie. 1874. Papa’s Own Girl. New York: Jewett. Imlay, Gilbert. 1793. The Emigrants, or the History of an Expatriated Family. 3 vols. London: A. Hamilton. Jackson, Holly. 2015. The Marriage Trap in the Free-Love Novel and Queer Critique. American Literature: A Journal of Literary History, Criticism, and Bibliography 87 (4): 681–708. Jefferson, Thomas. [1781] 1853. Notes on the State of Virginia. Richmond: J. W. Randolph. Jennings, Chris. 2016. Paradise Now. The Story of American Utopianism. New York: Random House. Katscher, Leopold. 1906. Owen’s Topolobampo Colony, Mexico. American Journal of Sociology 12 (2): 145–175. Keely, Karen. 1998. Marriage Plots and National Reunion: The Trope of Romantic Reconciliation in Postbellum Literature. The Mississippi Quarterly 51 (4): 621–648. Kessler, Carol Farley. 1989. Women Daring to Speak: United States Women’s Feminist Utopias. Utopian Studies 2: 118–123.

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Kolmerten, Carola A. 1981. Egalitarian Promises and Inegalitarian Practices: Women’s Roles in the American Owenite Communities, 1824–1828. Journal of General Education 33 (1): 31–44. ———. 1990. Women in Utopia. The Ideology of Gender in the American Owenite Communities. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Lee, Maurice. 1999. Du Bois the Novelist: White Influence, Black Spirit, and The Quest of the Silver Fleece. African American Review 33 (3): 389–400. Lewes, Darby. 1989. Gynotopia: A Checklist of Nineteenth-Century Utopias by American Women. Legacy 6 (2): 29–41. Lloyd, J.  William. 1887. Papa’s Own Girl in Topolobampo. Liberty. Not the Daughter, but the Mother of Order. readliberty.org/liberty/4/23. Accessed 3 July 2020. London, Jack. [1908] 2006. The Iron Heel. London: Penguin. Macleane, Walter. 1874. New Novels. Academy 110 (5): 686–688. Morning Call. 1894. Recent Publications, 2 December. New York Herald. 1874. The Development of American Fiction: A Batch of Novels, Very Good, Good and Bad. 13 June. New York Times. 1860a. Free Love: Expose of the Affairs of the Late “Unitary Household”. Progress and Prospects of the Free-Lovers. 21 September. ———. 1860b. The Unitary Household. 26 September. Noyes, John Humphrey. [1870] 1966. Strange Cults and Utopias of 19th Century America. Original title: History of American Socialisms. New  York: Dover Publications. Ortega Noriega, Sergio. 2003. El Edén Subvertido. La Colonización de Topolobampo: 1886–1896. Madrid: Siglo XXI. Pitzer, Donald E. 1997. The New Moral World of Robert Owen and New Harmony. In America’s Communal Utopias, ed. Donald E.  Pitzer, 88–134. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Quissell, Barbara C. 1981. The New World that Eve Made: Feminist Utopias Written by Nineteenth Century Women. In America as Utopia, ed. Kenneth M. Roemer, 148–174. New York: B. Franklin. Rehm, Warren S. [Omen Nemo]. 1898. The Practical City. A Future City Romance, or, a Study in Environment. Lancaster: Lancaster County Magazine. Reynolds, Ray. [1972] 1996. Cat’s Paw Utopia. Albert K. Owen, the Adventurer of Topolobampo Bay and the Last Great Utopian Scheme. 2nd ed. San Bernardino: Borgo Press. Robertson, Thomas A. 1947. A Southwestern Utopia. Los Angeles: Ward Ritchie Press. Roemer, Kenneth M. 1976. The Obsolete Necessity. America in Utopian Writings, 1888–1900. Kent: Kent State University Press.

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Sánchez-Hidalgo, Verónica Velasquez. 2012. Lugar de Maravillas. Arqueología en Pacific City: Sedimentos y Vestigios de un Sueño Utópico del Siglo XIX en el Norte de Sinaloa. México, D.F.: Axial; Colofón. Sand, George [Amantine Dupin]. [1833] 1846. Jacques. Translated by A. Blackwell. New York: J.S. Redfield. Sargent, Lyman Tower. 2020. African Americans and Utopia: Visions of a Better Life. Utopian Studies 31 (1): 23–96. Stowe, Harriet Beecher. 1852. Uncle Tom’s Cabin or, Life Among the Lowly. Boston: John P. Jewett and Co. Trahair, Richard. [1999] 2013. Utopias and Utopians. A Historical Dictionary. New York: Routledge. Woodhull and Claflin’s Weekly. 1874. Book Review. 31 October.

CHAPTER 6

‘Shrouded in an American Flag’: Sutton E. Griggs’s Imperium in Imperio (1899)

“Tell posterity,” said Belton, in firm ringing tones that startled the birds into silence, “that I loved the race to which I belonged and the flag that floated over me; and, being unable to see these objects of my love engage in mortal combat, I went to my God, and now look down upon both from my home in the skies to bless them with my spirit.” Bernard gave the word of command to fire, and Belton fell forward, a corpse. On the knoll where he fell he was buried, shrouded in an American flag. (261)

As outlined in the preceding chapter, most literary utopias published at the dawn of the twentieth century focused on systemic solutions to the class-related challenges of industrialization while whitewashing the violence against Black people, Indigenous people, and People of Color.1 1  A note on terminology: Using historically correct terms without reproducing discursive violence in these contexts is challenging because categories were often redefined as the White majority and people in power clung to nativist and supremacist agendas and turned against different ethnic and racial groups, employing several pseudoscientific theories on race and nation—one example would be the different legal definitions of Blackness under Jim Crow laws, which could differ from state to state, and sometimes include Native Americans; another example for such pliable categories are the arguments against US American citizenship for colonized people such as Puerto Ricans and Filipinos; another the developing discourse on the ‘Yellow Peril’ once the Gold Rush was over. Griggs uses the terms Negro and Black interchangeably. The former I tried to repeat as little as possible, only citing it for accuracy or historical references in the hope that I made sensible choices. Since this chapter will engage with the implications of race and nation as elaborated within the novel, I am

© The Author(s) 2020 V. Adamik, In Search of the Utopian States of America, Palgrave Studies in Utopianism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-60279-6_6

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Within this context, Imperium in Imperio (1899) by the African American Baptist minister, writer, publisher, and political activist Sutton E. Griggs (1872–1933) provides an insightful commentary on the utopian psychology of those commonly excluded from the genre’s bestsellers at the time and serves as a signpost to the exclusionary mechanisms of White utopianism in the United States. Griggs’s work is one of the few examples of African American engagement with utopian discourse at the turn of the century; others include Pauline Hopkins’s Of One Blood from 1903, Edward A. Johnson’s Light Ahead for the Negro from 1904, and W.E.B. Du Bois’s The Quest of the Silver Fleece (1911)—the latter will be discussed extensively in the next chapter. In the 1920s, during the Harlem Renaissance, George Schuyler (1895–1977) would capitalize on the satirical potential of utopian fiction. Apart from Johnson, none of these writers exactly reproduced the conventions of the genre. Instead, they reworked and played with them, offering layered and complex observations on utopian themes and strategies that are indispensable for any scholar that discusses the genre. However, these works were often excluded from the utopian canon, perpetuating the assumption that underlies the privilege paradigm: namely, that utopian production is inherently White. Thus, the visions of White (male) writers are foregrounded, even though “anti-colonial politics participates in both categories of utopianism, the practical and the ideological” (Ahmad 2009, 5). In contrast to the utopian novels of White utopian authors of the time, the works by African American authors mentioned here do not move forward to an easier future, nor do they gloss over the systemic violence and discrimination that African Americans faced at the end of the nineteenth century. Some of these works focused on utopian practice in order to place utopianism in juxtaposition to contemporary realities. A fitting example of this is Griggs’s Imperium in Imperio, which describes a conflict between different political courses of action to gain civil rights for African Americans. These are presented to the congress of a secret organization, a shadow government of African Americans for the Black population of the United States: the Imperium in Imperio. employing the term Black where the novel refers to race or skin color; when it unambiguously denotes US American citizens of African descent, I am using the term African American. In accordance with Griggs’s terminology, I am using the term Anglo-Saxon to refer to the ideological foundations of the United States as he allocates them and to refer to White Anglophone people in the United States.

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‘A Contest of Two Ideologies’: Conflicting Solutions in Imperium in Imperio For most of the twentieth century, Imperium, along with Griggs’s other fiction and nonfiction, had been largely ignored. One reason might be its lack of aesthetic merit, “stylistic flaws—weak or implausible plot structure, stilted language, and remarkably condescending didacticism,” “hyper-­ romantic twists and turns of fate and implausible coincidences [and not one] fully realized character” (Coleman 2007, 34). However, the general scholarly neglect may also be the result of the radical note it strikes, as its “extreme and even contradictory answers to questions of race are problematic for modern-day readers” (Winter 2007, 114). The relative obscurity of Griggs’s ‘science of collective efficiency,’2 “a system of conservative strategies built upon progressive self-help doctrine and increased but reserved cooperation between the races” (Coleman 2007, 74), further complicates access to his writing. Even though Sutton E. Griggs is not particularly well-known today, he appears to have been an influential figure in his time. Griggs’s father, Alan Ralph Griggs, a Baptist minister, established the Baptist Journal (1877), the first Black newspaper in Texas, served as an editor for several others, founded the first high school for Black students in the state, and was responsible for the erection of multiple churches. These achievements are all the more impressive since Alan Ralph Griggs was born into slavery and freed only in 1865. Born in 1872, Sutton E. Griggs followed in the footsteps of his father, became a Baptist minister and held positions in the Baptist National Convention, was—on invitation of Du Bois—one of the civil rights activists that comprised the Niagara movement (1905–1907) and conversed with the African American political elite. He spent most of his life in the southern States, primarily in Texas. Griggs wrote extensively and indiscriminately, from fiction to religious and political treatises, and in part self-published his writings with the two publishing companies he founded. He authored multiple novels, among them The Hindered Hand: or, Reign of the Repressionists (1905), which was commissioned by the National Baptist Convention in 1903 as a response to the White Supremacist The Leopard’s Spots; A Romance of the White Man’s Burden 2  For more information on Sutton E. Griggs’s ‘science of collective efficiency,’ see “‘The Power of Combinations’: Sutton Griggs’ Imperium in Imperio and the Science of Collective Efficiency” by Eric Curry (2010).

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(1865–1900) (1902) by Thomas Dixon, Jr. Commercially, Griggs’s novels were never a big success (Coleman 2007, 19–23). Yet, African American periodicals, such as The Colored American (1902), Charles Alexander in The Alexander Magazine (1906), The Nashville Globe (1908), and The Washington Bee (1908), among others, make favorable mentions of Griggs’s works. This suggests that his books were bought, read, and discussed within African American communities. Being a man of “oratorical powers” (Chakkalakal and Warren 2013, 3) on and off the pulpit who also distributed his written works (fiction and non-fiction) to his audience personally, Griggs may have reached a larger portion of the Black readership (in particular in the South) than contemporaries who are more prominently remembered, such as Charles W. Chestnut (1858–1932) and Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872–1906) (Katz 1971). As the forthcoming analysis will demonstrate, Griggs’s fiction is complexly ambiguous, so much so that his last novel Pointing the Way (1908) was commercially “more successful than his earlier ventures [because] White leaders of the South rather than their Black counterparts touted the book as a reasonable and responsible novel, and White readers responded by purchasing the text” (Coleman 2007, 24). In his later years, Griggs came under attack by other African Americans, due to personal disputes as well as his political views, then regarded as too subservient to White domination (Coleman 2007, 25–27). He died in 1933.3 Imperium in Imperio provides an example of how Griggs’s fiction results in a multitude of interpretations. The novel is short, but its incoherent and melodramatic plotlines and the somewhat unfathomable decisions of its characters challenge readers and critics alike and spawned a variety of interpretations.4 The story mostly revolves around the 3  For an overview of Griggs’s life and work, consult, for example, the introduction to Jim Crow, Literature, and the Legacy of Sutton E.  Griggs by Tess Chakkalakal and Kenneth W.  Warren (2013), or Finnie D.  Coleman’s biographical work Sutton E.  Griggs and the Struggle Against White Supremacy (2007), which also offers an account of the family history of Griggs. 4  In addition to interpretations that draw their conclusions relatively independently from the actual text, such as essays by Jack M. Beckham (2005) and Lynn R. Johnson (2010), some seem to have rewritten the content of the novel in the course of their interpretation, accounting for additional confusion. For example, Amy Kaplan calls Bernard the ‘founder’ and Belton the ‘president’ of the organization (2005, 124). In some cases, similar factual blunders actually influence the resulting interpretations: Hannah Wallinger changes the final outcome of the narrative, arguing that Bernard “is the radical speaker who will eventually convince the masses” (1997, 200), when actually, he is no match for Belton’s rhetorical skill.

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biographies of two African American men, Belton Piedmont and Bernard Belgrave. In their youth, they attend the same school in Virginia. Their paths cross again in adulthood: Bernard defends Belton in court, and Belton introduces Bernard to the Imperium. Ultimately, they end up as fierce antagonists when they emerge as the two leading figures of the secret African American government that is the Imperium in Imperio. Thus, the novel ponders the role of a small Black elite, relating to the idea of the ‘Talented Tenth,’ the Black intellectuals that should organize and champion the general uplift of African Americans, as argued for by Du Bois in 1903 (see Du Bois 1903b). It debates as to who should have the access to the power that such a privileged position would entail. However, the novel’s final stance regarding this issue eludes critics to this day. There is still no consensus on which of the two protagonists is the ‘hero,’ and who is the ‘villain,’ and this uncertainty has inspired “more than divergent readings” (Coleman 2007, 36). Two polar strategies for gaining and securing civil rights for the Black population in the United States come to a climactic collision in the final plot twists. In its last chapters, Imperium suddenly reveals to its readers that the Imperium in Imperio has united a range of secret African American societies; that it had been operating in the background for some time; and He has to resort to backdoor politics to gain backing for his proposal for secession, a telling instance that this chapter will revisit at a later point. Peter Schmidt asserts that Bernard and Belton are both teachers (2008, 75) in support of his assertion that the novel is about institutionalized education, but Bernard never teaches; Schmidt and Stephen Knadler both make arguments based on racial purity, and have Viola Martin, Bernard’s fiancé, pegged as “already a mixture of races” (Knadler 2007, 692; see also Schmidt 2008, 72), yet the novel describes her as “dark brown” (40) and does not denote her as a ‘mulatto’ or ‘fair-skinned’ (while it uses such terms generously to describe other characters). Knadler, casting Belton as a docile ‘Citizen Tom,’ misremembers further details: Belton and Bernard do not both graduate from “Stowe University” (2007, 682, 683); the speech at Belton’s graduation does not talk of Black people waiting passively for the Anglo-Saxon race to evacuate any posts (2007, 683), but for Black leaders to bring about that evacuation. The end of the speech reads: “The present status of affairs cannot possibly remain. The Anglo-Saxon race must surrender some of its outposts, and [Black people] will occupy these. To bring about this evacuation on the part of the Anglo-Saxon, and the forward march of the [Black race], will be your task” (27). I mention these instances (there are more) here to justify why I am giving detailed accounts during this chapter and to call for caution regarding research on Griggs. Multiple existing interpretations of the novel must in part be challenged or refuted on the basis of such fallacies. Imperium and its author have apparently not enjoyed enough academic recognition to prevent such mistakes, which, so my impression, becomes especially evident whenever the novel contradicts preconceived notions of African American literature.

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that Belton has been a member since college. It has now formed governmental structures and unanimously elected its first president. Triggered by the outbreak of the Spanish-American War and the lynching of an African American postmaster (a clear reference to the real-life murder of Frazier Baker and one of his children in 1898 by a White mob in South Carolina), the congress of the Imperium calls for more drastic strategies in order to protect African American citizens. They debate to seize the state of Texas and turn it into a stronghold for Black people. Belton and Bernard, representing the “contest of two ideologies” (Coleman 2007, 56) in African American communities at the dawn of the twentieth century, disagree on when, how, and to what ends they should go ahead with this plan. Both “are valid if not plausible responses” (Coleman 2007, 57) and Griggs elaborates the arguments for each proposition carefully. Instead of coming to a mutual agreement or a compromise, the ideological conflict between Belton and Bernard has fatal consequences for Belton, and it will shatter the Imperium (which likely will result in Bernard being executed as a traitor under US American law). Politically, Belton is more moderate than Bernard. Due to a small number of biographical and physiological parallels, some critics5 have argued that Belton is modeled on Booker T. Washington (1856–1915), who was the most influential political figure of the African American community of the period. Like Washington, Belton has dark skin, comes from a poor background, and proposes a comparatively temperate course in order to secure African American rights. Belton urges the Imperium to first make an effort to “change the conception which the Anglo-Saxon has formed” (244) by exposing the Imperium; the organization is supposed to serve as a testimony for the governmental skills of African Americans. By the virtue of this new image, they should then demand full civil and political rights for African Americans. Only if that should fail, Belton plans to seize Texas and prepare to defend Black civil rights by any means necessary: “Emigrate in a body to the State of Texas …. Having an unquestioned majority of votes we shall secure possession of the State government … every man, die in his shoes before we shall allow vicious frauds or unlawful force to pursue us there and rob us of our acknowledged right … working out our destiny as a separate and distinct race in the United States of America” (245). For 5  Critics who stress the parallels between Booker T. Washington and Bernard Belgrave are, for example, John Gruesser (2013), Maria Karafilis (2006), Stephen Knadler (2007), and Hannah Wallinger (1997).

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critics who align Belton with Washington, this proposal recalls Washington’s politics of racial accommodation as laid bare in the so-called Atlanta Compromise (1895). Washington proposed that, if the most basic rights (life, security of person and property, access to basic education, and a chance to compete on the labor market) of African Americans were protected, they would supply a compliant work force for “agriculture, mechanics, in commerce, in domestic service, and in the professions” (Washington 1901, 901) and not challenge White political rule, cease striving for political offices, accept segregation, and even forgo the right to vote.6 Indeed, Belton at times is scandalously meek, for example, when he suggests that African Americans bear some blame for the violence directed against them. This is particularly puzzling as he is brutalized at the hands of White people all his life. In fact, Belton’s entire biography can be mapped through such instances: he grows up in a very poor household and thus experiences firsthand the economic reverberations of slavery; he is bullied by his school master and his intellectual prowess is intentionally ignored by a White elite on the grounds of his dark skin; even at Stowe University,7 the Black college Belton attends, he is mistaken for a chicken 6  Booker T. Washington is most famously remembered for his speech before the Cotton States and International Exposition in Atlanta (1895) in which he proposed what would later be referred to as ‘The Atlanta Compromise,’ an agreement that he, among others, struck with White capitalists. The compromise meant to secure White donations for African American education, ameliorate the situation for African Americans especially in the South, and halt the import of an immigrant work force that added to the economic pressures on the African American working class. Washington’s agreement and his speech, its developmentalist notions, and its general image of Black people’s virtuous loyalty and humility were soon heavily criticized by other African Americans as it stinted the Black middle class and social mobility of African Americans severely. However, Washington operated and negotiated under extreme pressure, with Black people in the South in mind, who received little to no education, who were legally discriminated against and who went unprotected from extralegal violence since the end of Reconstruction, and who now struggled for living wages and employment as White Southern capitalists began to hire White immigrant workers. Washington mostly appeased White people in power and thus gained funds for his school and access even to the White House. Secretly, he transferred funds to some more radical campaigns than his own. 7  Griggs’s evocation of Harriet Beecher Stowe is symbolic for White benevolence undercut with notions of White supremacy, as the White teaching staff continues to be prejudiced. The university functions nonetheless as a steppingstone for Black emancipation, and created useful structures, providing education and spaces where African Americans can assemble for further activism (Karafilis 2006, 126).

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thief; he struggles to find employment outside of the education sector and is fired after campaigning for Black rights; cross-dressing to work as a nurse, Belton is preyed upon by White men who try to rape him; presumably, his wife has cheated on him with a White man (a misunderstanding that is cleared up toward the end of the novel); Belton is thrown out of a moving train for sitting in the ‘White’ compartment—a plot segment that of course hints at the case Plessy vs. Fergusson 1896; he is hanged and shot by a lynch mob; he is nearly dissected by a White supremacist physician8 and then convicted to death for defending himself. However, no abuse of the White supremacist system can kill Belton nor his dedication to the United States and even to the South. Instead, his life ends at the hands of the Black Imperium when he objects to immediate war with the United States. In light of his personal experience, Belton’s loyalty remains a conundrum: some critics have read Belton’s proclamation that he “shall never prove false to the flag” (253) and his deference to the Anglo-Saxon race as satire of Black submissiveness as epitomized by the eponymous character of Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) (Knadler 2007, 688). Others deem him “the novel’s moral center” (Ahmad 2009, 142) and an “unflawed utopian exemplar of the new Negro man” (Tamplin 2020, 100). In light of Griggs’s entire oeuvre, Finnie D. Coleman suggests in his biography on Griggs (2007) that the author was more radical than this protagonist, something that I find to be reflected in the many ambiguous instances in Belton’s story. Regarding the comparisons to Washington, it is especially important to note that Belton’s magnanimity has its limits. Multiple critics have pointed out (Gruesser 2013; Hebard 2015; Levander 2010) that Belton is conservative but does not propose accommodation (Washington’s approach) but rather the immediate recognition of African Americans as equal citizens of 8  This instance, as well as the near-rape of the crossdressing Belton, suggests that Griggs views White supremacism to be somehow rooted in misplaced interracial sexual desires of White men who want to possess Black male bodies: “Belton was a fine specimen of physical manhood. His limbs were well formed, well proportioned and seemed as strong as oak. His manly appearance always excited interest wherever he was seen. The doctor’s eyes followed him cadaverously. He went up to the postmaster, a short man with a large head. The postmaster was president of the band of ‘N—Rulers’ of that section. The doctor said to the postmaster: ‘I’ll be durned if that ain’t the finest lookin’ darkey I ever put my eye on. If I could get his body to dissect, I’d give one of the finest kegs of whiskey in my cellar.’ The postmaster looked at Belton and said: … ‘you are right. He is a fine looking chap, and he looks a little tony’” (145; my omissions).

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the United States. By contrast, three years prior to the publication of Imperium in Imperio, Washington had explicitly declared that African Americans were not ‘ready’ for social and political equality. Belton puts forth multiple strategies to gain equal rights: first, convince White US Americans to secure African American rights at the federal level, which would require a stronger federal government. If that should fail, seize political control of Texas9 and from there defend its Black population, a strategy that emphasizes states’ rights, mirroring confederate plans of the South. Ergo, Belton purports two versions of US sovereignty, fixing what he describes as “a flaw or defect in the Constitution of the United States … The vague, unsettled state of the relationship” (181) between the federal government and states. The makeup of the United States then hinges on the situation of African Americans (Hebard 2015). In Belton’s own words, his plan is “primarily pacific; … yet it does not shirk war, if war is forced” (245–246). The scope of Belton’s proposal and his willingness to eventually wage war refute the alleged analogies between Belton and Washington: taking over a state government and preparing for military confrontation is neither accommodationist nor does Belton’s insistence on equal civil rights align with strategies that Washington publicly endorsed. The second protagonist, Bernard, is introduced to the Imperium late in his life and under rather extraordinary circumstances. Because the Imperium doubts his “loyalty to the race” (197), he was kept under close surveillance for years and had not been inaugurated into the secret society. Nonetheless, the Imperium’s congress unanimously elects him to be their very first president. That is, Bernard, an outsider, becomes the most powerful man in the Imperium before he is even aware of its existence. In this new position, he subtly prepares for war. However, Bernard’s oratory skills are no match for Belton’s eloquence, so much so that the congress does not support his plan. Bernard then shifts his strategy, scheming until he can effect an even more radical proposition: infiltrate and, if necessary, wreck, the US Navy, form alliances with “all of the foreign enemies of the United States” (251) by offering them Louisiana, and seize Texas “as an empire of its own” (252). Compared to Belton, Bernard enjoyed a quite privileged life (Coleman calls him “filthy rich” 2007, 46). Overall, Bernard is the opposite of Belton in many ways, being the son of an African American woman (to be exact, 9  For an influential and insightful discussion of the significance of the history of Texas for Imperium, turn to Caroline Levander’s essay (2010).

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Bernard’s mother is the daughter of a Black ‘servant’ and a White Governor) and her husband, a White senator, who secretly finances his wife and his son but never publicly acknowledges them. Bernard is favored by his teacher and the local White elite, attends Harvard, where he is regarded for his intellect, not his race, and then embarks on a political career, following the imploring words of his father to elevate himself so that his example will change the public image of Black people in the United States. This fuels in Bernard a “burning desire for glory” (94). His ambition to fulfill his father’s wishes is radically overturned when his long-­ pursued fiancé, a Black girl by the name of Viola Martin, takes her own life. In her suicide note, she explains that she chooses death rather than to harm the purity of the Black race by reproducing with Bernard—whom she loves—because he is not racially ‘pure.’ Viola’s dying wish is for him to ensure the prerequisites for genetic racial purity. This becomes Bernard’s new core motivation, resulting in his determination to declare war on the United States. However, as a member of the Imperium exposes the organization, Bernard’s plans are thwarted, and the Imperium is likely destroyed. As with Belton, Bernard has been assigned multiple roles by critics. Some take him to be the “villain” of the novel (Schmidt 2008, 77), and some argue that his demagogic aspirations prove his dead fiancé’s theories on the danger of mixing bloodlines, depicting people of mixed race as emotionally unstable (Kramer 2013, 14; Whitlow 1978, 34). He is cast as an “antirational” (Coleman 2007, 42) “almost hysterical fanatic” (Whitlow 1978, 34), but also as a failed Moses (Kramer 2013), as a Black potential Roosevelt (ibid.), and as a fictional rendition of W.E.B. Du Bois (Gruesser 2013; Knadler 2007; Karafilis 2006; Wallinger 1997) because they both have light skin and attended Harvard. Bernard and Belton would then represent the political opponents Du Bois and Washington. However, neither protagonist resembles Washington or Du Bois too closely, nor do their propositions align with the respective agendas of the two activists. The search for historical role models seems futile and beside the point. Given the general hyperbole of the story, the two antagonists can be more fruitfully understood as representing two vastly different aspects of African American experiences—which explains the vague resemblance with the emerging conflict between Du Bois and Washington—but are nonetheless bound by friendship and loyalty to their race. The narrator Berl Trout is the third male Black character (a triangular construction made obvious by all names starting with a B). He is largely

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invisible throughout the story, even though he is an important actant in the narrative: after all, it is he who betrays the Imperium and thus prevents the impending war. While Belton submits to being executed on the grounds that he can neither agree to go to war nor betray the planned revolution of the Imperium to the US American government, Berl chooses the United States over the Imperium and leaks the plans. The narrative is his death-bed confession. He is about to be executed and then buried as a traitor. Starting his account with the words “I am a traitor” (4), Berl immediately undermines his own trustworthiness. As in the case of the two protagonists, Berl’s role in the novel has been interpreted in various ways: he is seen as a device to palliate any White readers that may get their hands on the novel (Wallinger 1997, 200), or “designed to deflect African Americans—and by extension the country as a whole—from such [revenge] fantasies” (Gruesser 2013, 62), or as a “deus ex machina of utopianism [that] seems to return us all too uncomfortably to the racial friendship of Stowe’s world” (Knadler 2007, 693). Obviously, Berl’s frame narrative does not conclude the political statement of Imperium but continues its ambiguity. The variety of interpretations that scholars have produced essentially mirrors the multiplicity of voices in the novel. Hence, Imperium’s inconsistencies must be understood as intentional and programmatic, acknowledging “the ambitious, complex demands he [Griggs] placed on the form” (Richard Yarborough qtd. in Coleman 2007, 35). Some critics have picked up on this and argue that the unresolved conflicts serve to promote political debate (Karafilis 2006), to endorse heterogeneity (Hebard 2015), “moral quandary” (Tal 2002, 75), and “utopian, albeit imperfect and multiple, alternatives” (Veselá 2011, 273). If that be the case, then any reading that wants to do the novel justice must carefully consider the different arguments without rushing to favor either—Belton or Bernard, African American patriotism or militant Black nationalism—and acknowledge the skepticism that underlies the novel’s dialectics despite its extremely solemn style. Such an approach elicits Imperium’s comment on the limitations of utopianism in the United States. By juxtaposing two protagonists, Imperium sketches out different political strategies and visions and traces the conflicts that hinder the empowerment of the Imperium and therefore the creation of a good place for Black people in North America. As early as the 1960s and 1970s, Imperium found its way into some academic publications and the utopian canon as “perhaps the first

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substantial contribution by an African American to the genre of utopia” (Veselá 2011, 273). Discussed within African American studies by such luminaries as Hugh M. Gloster (1948), it receives mention as a utopian text in Kenneth Roemer’s canonical study (1976) and is praised by Roger Whitlow (1978) as “breaking new ground … on the matter of race revolution by presenting a scheme which looks forward to a form of black nationalism which would not be seriously considered by many until well into the new century” (35).10 Molly Crumpton Winter (2007) even enthusiastically declares Griggs to be “writing black utopian novels that always laid out a plan for a better tomorrow” (117) and asserts that his work offers “a way out of contemporary modes of thinking that had limited the choices available not only to African Americans but to the nation as a whole” (114). Yet this is a misleading assessment of Griggs as a utopist, at least when Imperium in Imperio is concerned. The Imperium differs in crucial points from a utopia. First, “Contrary to the traditional utopia … the novel does not portray an ideal society in which African Americans would live happily and free from oppression” (Veselá 2011, 273). Moreover, it is literally nowhere, as it has no territory. The empire within the empire has developed “a black American shadow government with its own legislature, judiciary, treasury, capitol building near Waco, Texas, and loyal population of 7,250,000” (Ahmad 2009, 142), yet it remains without territory in which to execute its own sovereignty and system over its subjects (Hebard 2015). The organization is even unsure as to whether it wants to claim such totality, and as to its relationship to the United States. Eventually, the Imperium flounders because of the conflicting visions regarding its future. Its utopian imagination is severely hemmed in by the historical situation, especially regarding the concepts of race and nation. The novel tries to imagine African America utopian practice, only to probe whether there is any “way out of contemporary modes of thinking.” Hence, Imperium in Imperio marks the limitations of the theoretical and geographical territory that the imagination can explore. It delineates the obstacles to African American utopianism, not a utopia.

10  In light of more recent findings, this statement must be mitigated. More or less covertly, the idea of Black nationalism and even organized, violent action had been discussed by African Americans throughout the nineteenth century (Coleman 2007, 62; Karafilis 2006, 138).

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‘Make the Separation Physical’: Race and the Lack of Closure Crucially, Imperium stages the conflict between “cultural nationalism and racial separatism” (Coleman 2007, 69). When Belton speaks of nation, Bernard talks about race. Ultimately, the two protagonists debate which criterion, which communal identity, will determine the future of the African American community: nationality or race. In their last dispute, Belton declares his “love of country,” to which Bernard retorts, “I know the Anglo-Saxon race” (252). Bernard clearly views the United States as the locus of White identity, talking of ‘white American citizens’ and “the Anglo-Saxon race of the United States of America” (207), which have “hermetically sealed” (212) opportunities for social uplift for African Americans. Bernard intends to deepen the dividing line between the races in order to set up a good place for Black people, outside and independent of the United States, but the novel offers multiple examples that demonstrate how this insistence on segregation would prove harmful to the Black community. For one, segregationist fantasies are depicted as unfeasible since race in Imperium is unstable and heterogeneous. The novel emphasizes that a community cannot implement racial purity, contrary to what White late nineteenth-century utopian novels imagined. Imperium in this way contradicts pseudoscientific theories on race circulating at the time and suggests that using race as a marker for the formation of a community can only cause harm. “Griggs recognized that the color line was in essence an artificial, unnatural barrier” (Coleman 2007, 40) and Imperium depicts how this political line affects the individual’s sexual and romantic relations. Thus, the novel locates itself in the emerging discourse of “race conservation as a biopolitical problem” (Hebard 2015, 71). Throughout the novel, race is shown to be contextual. From the moment Fairfax Belgrave, Bernard’s mother, enters the schoolhouse and her son is received with courtesy instead of muttered racist slurs, the experience of being Black in the United States is revealed to depend on class, money, and power. In this instance, the school master perceives Fairfax’s money, her husband’s influence, and her beauty before her ‘tinge’ of Blackness. Racism is thus motivated by and entangled with economic and political interests. Furthermore, skin color is a misleading and unreliable marker of identity. This is aptly demonstrated when Belton’s wife gives birth to a

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light-­skinned child. Belton abandons his family because he presumes that he is not the biological father. His wife, Antoinette Nermal, a woman “famed throughout the city for her beauty, intelligence and virtue” (113) is ostracized by the Black community for having committed interracial adultery. She bears her status as an outcast with superhuman grace. When the child gradually turns darker, Belton must acknowledge his mistake and Antionette regains her good reputation and is accepted back into her social circles. Belton’s, and the community’s, fixation on skin color and racial purity has detrimental consequences. Therefore, Coleman’s conclusion that this plot means to denounce Black women sleeping with White men as “the basest form of race treachery” (2007, 52) overlooks that Belton is proven wrong and Griggs’s narrative redeems and idealizes Antoinette. The shade of a person’s skin is shown to be no reliable indicator of belonging or not belonging to a family, let alone a race. The primary advocate for racial purity is Viola, Bernard’s fiancé. Melodramatically, she does not merely reject Bernard’s proposal but decides that she cannot bear to choose between him and her commitment against miscegenation. Apparently, Viola has read White Supremacy and Negro Subordination (1869) and maybe other works by the White supremacist J.  H. Van Evrie (1814–1896) on race relations and miscegenation and internalized the assertion that ‘mixing’ races has harmful effects on the offspring (Coleman 2007, 55–56). Her suicide note expounds: “the fourth generation of the children born of intermarrying mulattoes were invariably sterile or woefully lacking in vital force. … While this intermingling was impairing the vital force of our race and exterminating it, it was having no such effect on the white race for the following reason. Every half-breed, or for that, every person having a tinge of [African] blood, the white people cast off. We receive the cast off with open arms and he comes to us with his devitalizing power. Thus, the white man was slowly exterminating us” (173–174). Viola thinks she has uncovered a covert mechanism of White power, a eugenic conspiracy. In fact, she has fallen prey to White supremacist propaganda, to wit, to a pseudoscientific theory that is employed against the Black community in order to enshrine Whiteness and promote segregation. Her suicide suggests that “an identification with black nationalism, no less than white U.S. nationalism, might lead to self-mutilation: a denial of—but more precisely a fear of—multi-racial and hybrid cultural genealogy that would expose the fiction of racial or national unity” (Knadler 2007, 692). Viola, maybe “the very first ‘unmixed’ dark-­ skinned Black woman in African American fiction to be described as

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absolutely beautiful” (Coleman 2007, 55), is a tragically unstable person, especially considering that her author is a Baptist minister, and as such unlikely to condone suicide. Insisting on racial separation is exposed as leading to individual, and communal, destruction. Furthermore, Viola’s resolution and her efforts to talk Black women out of interracial unions, and women of mixed racial background out of reproducing at all, come too little too late. Her dying wish of a racially pure community leaves uncertain the fate of the growing number of people that do not belong to either, of which the novel features plenty of examples. Winter summarizes that “Griggs points out the fact that the two races are already connected in the most intimate way: by blood” (2007, 104–105). Separation along racial lines should therefore prove impossible, as the races have mixed, and as racial classifications are inconsistent and unreliable. In the end, all that Viola’s obsession with race does is take her, a beautiful Black woman, out of the gene pool, and leave the intellectual prodigy Bernard mentally unhinged. Like his fiancé, Bernard is driven to insanity by the demands of racial purity. In her suicide note, Viola urges her never-to-be husband Bernard to “Erect moral barriers to separate [the races]. If you fail this, make the separation physical” (175). She thus proposes a Black future based on racial, if necessary territorial, exclusivity, and thus closure. Requiring of her ‘mixed’ fiancé to ‘make the separation physical’ is one of the many painful ironies in the novel and creates a paradox that contributes to triggering Bernard becoming a “maniac” (263). Contrary to the assertions of some scholars, Bernard’s final descent into megalomania does not essentialize “the mulatto as an unstable personality type” (Whitlow 1978, 34): Viola is dark-skinned and suicidal, and Antoinette, who is stable and beyond virtuous, has “light brown skin” (113) and gives birth to a light-­ skinned child. If anything, skin color and racial purity are shown to be “overinterpreted and not to be trusted as the gauge of the merit of an individual” (Karafilis 2006, 133). If anything, Bernard’s tragic ‘mulatto’ biography serves as a warning against overemphasizing racial purity. Even though Bernard is mostly of European ancestry, by logic of hypodescent and White supremacy, he will never be accepted into White society: his Black ancestry is seen as the dominant component in his racial makeup. Nonetheless, Bernard had been excluded from the Black Imperium for years. Even Bernard’s oldest friend Belton only sighs at the thought, but never criticizes that “only the coloring of his skin prevented [Bernard] from being enrolled upon the scroll containing the names of the very

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noblest sons of earth” (190). Hitherto unnoticed by critics, this is one of several instances indicating that the conservative Belton disapproves of miscegenation, and that this attitude is shown to harm the Black community. Yet, at the same time, Griggs does not promote the ‘erasure’ of Blackness: programmatic genetic amalgamation is clearly rejected by the Imperium’s congress (224), and the physical appeal of the dark-skinned Viola and Belton is emphasized. Putting the theory of racial purity into practice is impossible and ends in insanity and mayhem, a trope that reoccurs throughout Griggs’s fiction (Winter 2007, 107). Ironically, Viola’s union with Bernard could indeed lead to “exterminating” (173) the race, only in a much different way than Viola’s scientific racism anticipates. After all, it is in Viola’s memory that Bernard intends to embark on an “internecine war” (262) resulting in “destruction, devastation and death all around” (263). As the narrator emphasizes at the end of the novel, Bernard acts “with Viola’s tiny hand protruding from the grave” (262–263). In this way, the novel undermines plans of a closed-off community on the grounds of racial belonging, no matter which race draws the line. Rejecting any plans for a ‘racially purified utopia,’ Imperium in Imperio pits this vision against the complex reality of the interracial entanglement of generations. Griggs’s work mitigates essentialist assumptions about race. Since Griggs employs developmentalist arguments that stress that ‘civilization’ can be transmitted and taught, he reveals that races are communities that emerge over the course of history, and hints that these communities are nonetheless imagined in so far as racial belonging in the United States is regulated arbitrarily.

‘Beneath the American Flag’: Utopian States for African Americans If Bernard’s racial separatism is a dead end, can Belton’s nationalism serve to form a functioning community that secures a future for Black people in the United States? At least, the novel’s utopian practice functions within a frame distinctly US American; the Imperium is an intricate secret society, a form of utopian practice, and at the same time an institution within the United States, in Imperio. It regulates all disputes among African Americans, its constitution “except in a few, but important particulars, … modeled after that of the USA” (195), and the Congress “passes laws relating to the general welfare of our people, and whenever a bill is

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introduced in the Congress of the United States affecting our race it is also introduced and debated here. Every race question submitted to the United States is judiciary, is also submitted to our own” (195). The Imperium is entwined with the United States and in constant (if covert) interaction with it. Dismissing calls for African American emigration from North America, multiple voices in the novel assert the US American citizenship of African Americans. African Americans are “immersed in the spirit of that heroic age” (28), that is, the American Revolution, and therefore hold a right to the nation, and recognition under the ideals it proclaims. Bernard, for example, puts forth this “nativistic” (Veselá 2011, 275) argument: “An Italian, a Frenchman, a German, a Russian, a Chinaman and a Swede come, let us suppose, on a visit to our country. As they draw near our public parks they look up and see placards forbidding somebody to enter these places. They pause to read the signs … Unable to understand our language, they see a [Black] child returning from school and they call the child to read and interpret the placard. It reads thus: ‘Negroes and dogs not allowed in here.’ The little … child, whose father’s sweaty, unrequited toil cleared the spot whereon the park now stands, loiters outside of the wicker gate in company with the dogs of the foreigners and gazes wistfully through the cracks at the children of these strangers sporting on the lawn” (212–213). African American labor ‘cleared’ North American lands, that is, contributed crucially to forming the land and enabling the formation of the nation—Native Americans go, once again, unmentioned. The novel here utilizes, if implicitly, the idea that North America was turned from wilderness to garden and appropriates the imperialist terra nullius argument, as Black people have cultivated the ground and should therefore hold rights to it. Imperium is constantly employing the symbols of the United States in a way that highlights the disparities between the ideals proclaimed and the reality of racial segregation and atrocious abuse. One exemplary symbol for this conflict is the decoration of the Imperium’s ‘Capitol,’ ‘Jefferson College’: under a layer of American flags, the building is in mourning for the lynched Postmaster Cook—the makeup foreshadowing Belton’s corpse. Levander reads this layering as representing “the Imperium’s critique of the US, its mourning for the racial violence the US continues to condone within its borders, and its aspirations to create an independent empire that threatens US hegemony” (Levander 2010, 71). Yet, the flags also figure as a genuine celebration of the beginning of the

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Spanish-­American War. Even Bernard supports that the ‘empire for liberty’ exerts its influence onto Cuba and its large Black population and will “carry the cup of liberty to a people perishing for its healing draught” (206), albeit at the cost of Black US American soldiers. Lynching and declaring a war to liberate Cuba are events that occur back-to-back, pointing out the paradox of an ‘empire of liberty’ that oppresses its own citizens on the grounds of skin color. The Imperium is therefore simultaneously in mourning and patriotic. Eventually though, the destabilizing potential of this doubling resurfaces, as the African American population claims the utopian discourse of the American Revolution. The narrative frequently highlights the impact that the ideological heritage of the United States has on African Americans. Belton repeatedly quotes the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution and, in particular, references Thomas Jefferson. It would go far beyond the scope of this book to take on the various roles of the slaveholding Jefferson, US American Founding Father and author of the Declaration of Independence, in African American literature. As far as Imperium goes, Jefferson having fathered children with Sarah ‘Sally’ Hemings (1773–1835), one of his slaves, may have inspired Bernard’s family tree, whose grandfather and father are prominent White politicians that secretly have children with Black women.11 Hemings’s father and grandfather had likewise been White men, her mother and grandmother slaves. Jefferson’s anti-­federalism also fits in with the scheme for a Black Texas. Even the headquarters of the Imperium are hidden in a ‘Thomas Jefferson College.’ Most importantly though, Jefferson’s writing is evoked to call on the founding ideals as expressed in the Declaration of Independence: for one, that “all men are created equal.” Furthermore, it may once again have become necessary “for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them.” That is, Griggs has his characters draw the same conclusions Gilbert Imlay’s emigrants came to a century earlier: the rhetoric of the American Revolution can be used against the United States.

11  See Annette Gordon-Reed’s The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family (2008) for an insightful and well-written family history of Sarah Hemings. Rumors about Hemings and Thomas Jefferson inspired, for example, William Wells Brown’s Clotel, or, The President’s Daughter (1853).

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While Jefferson recommended that slavery in the United States should eventually be abolished (also for the master’s benefit), he advocated that Black people be relocated to Africa because “difference of … faculty, is a powerful obstacle to the emancipation of these people” (1781, 155). Of course, this plan hinges on the idea that the races did not ‘mix,’ but Jefferson seemed unperturbed by this contradiction of his theory and practice. His disparaging attitude toward Black people makes him an unlikely choice for the constant reverential mentions, unless Imperium aims to demonstrate that his observations regarding the ‘faculties’ of people of African descent do not apply. The protagonists’ intellect and oratory skill refute Jefferson’s essentialist notions, and both use Jefferson’s linking of “speech and oratory with fitness for participation in the US nation” (Karafilis 2006, 132) to make their point for civil rights. With developmentalist condescension popular at the time, Belton concedes that slaves from Africa and their descendants had to undergo a process of ‘edification’ to become fit for democratic procedures, and that Western civilizations provided the model to which they should ‘rise.’ To make this case, Belton echoes Washington’s arguments that “if [civil rights] had all come to us when they first belonged to us, we must frankly admit that we would have been unprepared for them” (234–235). In difference to Washington, however, the novel challenges the notion that African Americans are not already sufficiently ‘edified.’ Berl proudly comments that African Americans are no longer “cringing, fawning, sniffling, cowardly [as] slavery had left [them]” (62) and “left the last relic of barbarism behind” (82). African Americans have thus progressed to meet Jefferson’s standards and are now ‘prepared’ for full integration into the United States. A “new Negro, self-respecting, fearless, and determined in the assertion of his rights was at hand” (62). With the precise definition of the ‘New Negro,’ a term introduced in 1895, very much debated (Gates 1988), the narrator Berl emphasizes intellectual prowess and political determination as the main attributes of these ‘new’ people, suggesting that they have reached the same stage in the ladder of civilizations as their White fellow citizens. Indeed, within this logic of linear developmentalism, African Americans have not merely risen to be the equals of the Anglo-Saxons; they surpassed their presumed teachers. Belton turns into a prodigy, not in spite of, but because of the adversity that he experiences at school, “accustomed to the closest scrutiny” (28). In his rhetorical talents and his moral integrity, he exemplifies Black superiority. Ever optimistic, Belton views exclusion as

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providing unique opportunities: “If there is any one thing, more than another, that will push the Negro forth to build enterprises of his own, it will be this refusal of the whites to employ the higher order of labor” (234). These enterprises can then prosper where White structures falter, since African Americans will be able to evade the “imminent” (234) conflicts of labor and capital that White people are facing. Accordingly, he formulates a vision of Black people in the United States eclipsing the progress of all other races: “Other races which have obtained their freedom erect monuments over bloody spots where they slew their fellow men. May God favor us to obtain our freedom without having to dot our land with these relics of barbaric ages. … It would be the crowning glory of even this marvelous age … if [African Americans], away from the land, can by means of pen, force an acknowledgement of equality from the proud lips of the fierce, all conquering Anglo-Saxon, thus eclipsing the record of all other races of men” (246–247). This vision entails the hope for a utopian future in a united United States, no longer internally segregated by the color line, the Mason-Dixon line, or picket-lines, by virtue of African American ascend and example. In proposing such a future, the Imperium bridges the gap between the past visions of the American Enlightenment and the novel’s postbellum present. Where the previously discussed novel by Marie Howland (1874) excludes Black people from her harmoniously united utopia, Griggs puts them at the center.

‘Our Race as an Empire’: US American Empire in the Imperium If Black people comprise the heart of this utopian future, why is Belton, the advocate for the harmonious solution within the United States, executed at the end? The answer to this question lies in the title of the book, calling out the imperial hold that the Anglo-Saxon United States exerts over its Black population. Significantly, Imperium in Imperio is not called ‘A Nation within a Nation’—a phrase used as early as 1852 by Martin Delany (1812–1885) (Coleman 2007, 19). While references to the Spanish-American War (1898) bear testimony to the international imperialism of the United States (Hebard 2015; Kaplan 2005; Levander 2010), the primary focus of the novel is on the intranational treatment of African Americans as a form of imperialism.

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The “racial inequities and racism in Griggs’s real world encroach upon his fantasy world” (Coleman 2007, 56). White supremacy defines the reach of the imaginary Imperium so that it remains a colonial government in Imperio. It has no power over White US American citizens, is impotent in the face of lynchings and other atrocities, and its subjects are not represented in the US government: “In some states we are deprived of our right to vote by frauds, in others by violence, and in yet others by statutory enactment. But in all cases it is most effectually done” (219). Here, Bernard turns to directly discussing the United States’ imperialism. The Anglo-Saxons continue to rule in a “monarchial” (218) fashion despite the US American constitution (a duplicity the entire book decries). African Americans are not incorporated as citizens but treated as colonial subjects (see also Kaplan 2005, 124). Moreover, the White imperial hold over the African American community is also ideological, so much so that the Imperium’s members struggle to think outside of the national framework. Their options regarding the implementation of a utopian solution are thus severely limited. The influence of the United States’ national narrative is made evident throughout the novel. For example, Belton reminisces: “It was in school that our hearts grew warm as we read of Washington, of Jefferson, of Henry, apostles of human liberty” (236), reflected in his graduation speech on “The Contribution of the Anglo-Saxon to the Cause of Human Liberty” (32). The Imperium thus lacks its own utopian vision. For all its intricacies, the secret government “mirrors the U.S. government in structure and function” (Coleman 2007, 59). As Veselá has observed, the Imperium’s government is curiously passive and susceptible, its congressmen “docile and submissive” (2011, 275), struggling to formulate any plan, and having “no clear vision of the future they desire, no clear conception of themselves as agents” (Veselá 2011, 275), let alone a utopian intention. In the end, the congress is coaxed into agreeing to secession but without any details on what this new nation should look like. The only markers to the Imperium’s vision are its US American constitution, and a racial separation along the color line as drawn by White people in the United States. Theirs would be another ‘imperium,’ just as the United States are as much an empire as the British Empire from which they separated. It takes until one of Bernard’s final speeches to unfold the full implications of the novel’s title: “they have apparently chosen our race as an empire” (218). Once more, the long-standing entanglement of US American utopian rhetoric and imperialism emerges, reaching all the way

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back to the genre’s genesis in the wake of European colonialism. Justifying expansionism and the global predominance, the United States repeatedly drew on utopian discourse, recalling strategies of the British Empire (see Go 2011)—and of Thomas More’s Utopia (1516). ‘Virgin land’ and terra nullius arguments for the genocide and removal of indigenous populations, Jefferson’s ‘empire of liberty,’ manifest destiny, the ‘White Man’s Burden’ in the Philippines: if the United States conceded that they were acting imperially, they argued that their motivations and their means differed fundamentally from that of other territorial empires (Go 2011, 17; Kaplan 1999, 13; Rowe 2000, xi). This exceptionalism is fraught with a rhetoric of responsibilities that the socio-political position of an imperial power allegedly entails (Go 2011, 2–3). Akin to More’s Utopians, they forcefully expand their ‘good place.’ Elucidating examples of how utopianism serves the United States in their imperialism in imperio are President Andrew Jackson’s justifications for the creation of Native American reservations. As Kristina Baudemann astutely observed, the exclusion, forced removal, and domination of Indigenous populations, who by their very existence contest the ideals of a new start on virgin land, were rendered in distinctly utopian terms. President Andrew Jackson’s Fifth Annual Message to Congress on December 3, 1833, “clothed the colonial ideologies of the ‘white man’s burden’ and the ‘Vanishing American’ into the language of utopianism” (Baudemann 2018, 16), arguing that in order to prevent Indigenous people and their cultures from disappearing they have to be helped “by a general removal beyond our boundary and by the reorganization of their political system upon principles adapted to the new relations in which they will be placed” (Jackson qtd. in Baudemann 2018, 16–17). Systemic totality within a closed space is thus enforced in order to create controllable spaces within the nation. Native Americans are removed, the reservations serve to contain them, and as an enclave form “a part of a purer past, a pastoral idyll that according to the logic of Manifest Destiny had to give way to progress and civilization. Its preservation provides American civilization with historical depth … Americans are free to project their dreams of utopia onto them” (Baudemann 2018, 17). Utopianism is forced on the Indigenous populations of North America, and (once more) employed as a rhetoric tool in the service of imperialism. Such discursive employments, as well as Griggs’s novel, illustrate a key difference between More’s Utopia and various ‘utopian’ imperial endeavors of the United States (and the British Empire). More and his Utopians

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thought of territory, which they would settle and eventually fully incorporate into the Utopian empire (with or without its native inhabitants). The United States would vary this strategy in an ‘anarchic’ fashion (in the words of Amy Kaplan 2005). Next to declaring independence and colonial expansion, the United States shifted to an “antispatial” (Balasopoulos 2004, 22) enlargement of more or less covert military, economic, political, and cultural influence, opening up new markets without incorporating or even (openly) occupying the countries over which they exerted their power. All the while, this imperial influence was continuously stylized as the export of a utopian order and thus encompassed ideological dominance as well. Bernard’s words draw attention to what he understands to be internal imperialism, as ‘our race as an empire’ flips the meaning of the novel’s title. When the secret government is introduced, ‘Imperium’ denotes the Black organization and ‘in Imperio’ its situation within the United States. But within this section of Bernard’s speech, ‘Imperium’ comes to refer to the United States and their ubiquity in the ‘empire’ of African Americans. Bernard thus describes ideological and cultural dominance, imposed by the hegemonic White race. His case in point is the Declaration of Independence, and Jefferson, whom he describes as “the man whom the South has taught us to revere as the greatest and noblest American statesman …. They have taught us that he was too wise to err and that his sayings are truth incarnate” (218). The hyperbole, and the repetitive emphasis that the South has imposed these opinions, implies that these convictions are contestable or at least in need of critical reevaluation. Critical reevaluation is also needed, obviously, for Belton’s line of argument, who goes as far as glorifying slavery as a benevolent practice. While Black people were not paid in coin, they “received that from the Anglo Saxons which far outweighs in value all the gold coin on earth … instruction in the arts of civilization, a knowledge of the English language, and a conception of the one true God and his Christ” (231). A White journalist who funds Belton because he hopes that this generosity will ward off a race war argues that “the whites … had brought about these aspirations” and that African Americans demanding their rights are their “legitimate offspring” (45). The African American call for civil rights is then a fundamentally patriotic endeavor. Yet, once again, Imperium refrains from making unequivocal statements and subverts Belton’s assessment. Instructing Black people to claim their civil rights was not intended by the White oppressors: African Americans living “beneath the American flag, known

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as the flag of freedom, studying American history, and listening on the outer edge of great Fourth of July crowds to eloquent orators discourse on freedom, it was only a matter of a few years before [they] would deify liberty as the Anglo-Saxon race had done” (42). Hence, the African American population obtained their teachings by observing it from ‘the outer edge.’ Belton’s lackluster defense of the Anglo-Saxons in the South who “might do less” (236) for African American education and who have at least stopped flogging those “aspiring to learn” (236) merely underlines that knowledge was never ‘traded’ by the White enslavers. By contrast, the novel had just revealed that Black agency was responsible for much of the uplift: The Imperium infiltrated the education system, ensuring that curricula “pay special attention to the history of the United States during the revolutionary period” (193). Importantly, even though Belton does not fully acknowledge this in his speeches, Berl’s narrative reveals that ideology and knowledge were ultimately obtained and disseminated by the African American community itself. Belton is an ardent defender of the United States, and by his example of loyalty and intellect is a case in point for the contributions of African American citizens. At Stowe University, Belton was told to “use no crisis for self-aggrandizement” (67) and religious voices that urge forgiveness seem to abound in his life. Yet, just like Bernard’s vengeance, Belton’s deference is overdone and so he comes close to representing a ‘Citizen Tom.’ An allusion to Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), ‘Citizen Tom’ refers to a discursive construction of African Americans popular in the second half of the nineteenth century that associates African Americans with a “greater racial instinct toward affection, loyalty, self-sacrifice, and submissiveness” and which therefore makes them out to be “more natural American patriots than were naturalized citizens and could be counted on as a ‘storehouse of loyalty’ to support the American troops” (Knadler 2007, 674). Imperium does indeed evoke this stereotype but endows it with some subversive potency: when race and nation are diametrically opposed, this ‘instinct’ for patriotism, loyalty, self-sacrifice, and so on, and the large number of African Americans that have enlisted in the military, may benefit the Black, not the national, community. With such fiercely loyal subjects to infiltrate the US American military and hold the ground, the Imperium is a force to be reckoned with. The ‘affection, loyalty, self-­ sacrifice’ of African Americans is not infinitely ‘submissive,’ and can benefit, or just as easily devastate, the United States.

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But not yet. Members of the Imperium are still unsure as to which community they belong, and so treason becomes one of the core themes of the novel (Brown 2012): Berl’s frame narrative, Belton’s conviction, and Bernard’s resolution to secede from the United States stand emblematic for a conflict of allegiance to either nation or race—a conflict that finds its expression throughout African American literature, its most iconic manifestation of the term “double consciousness” as coined by W.E.B. Du Bois in The Souls of Black Folk (1903a). In Imperium, the term ‘patriot’ bears special significance (Knadler 2007, 673), as it occurs whenever the novel addresses conflicted loyalty. Berl uses it when he declares himself a traitor, and Viola tells of the ‘patriotic’ feelings she had as a child when she heard of African American soldiers in the Civil War. At that point it is unclear whether she is talking about patriotism for the United States or for her race, suggesting that for her, the split between the two had not yet occurred. Later, Viola’s feelings for the latter will be so strong that she commits suicide and directs her beloved into a war between the races. Finally, Belton resolves to die rather than betray race or nation, “being unable to see these objects of my love engage in mortal combat” (261). US American symbolism even pervades Bernard’s call to arms against the United States, culminating in a rapid sequence of metaphors: “our faces are now all turned toward the golden shores of liberty’s lovely land … Some tell us that a sea is in our way … Others tell us that towering, snowcapped mountains enclose the land … If it calls for a Valley Forge, be free” (221). Yet, these references to colonial settlers, frontier pioneers, and the War of Independence are interspersed with gruesome images that illustrate that the United States (and the prospective Black empire) are built on violence, from the middle passage—“Some tell us that a sea is in our way, so deep that we cannot cross. Let us answer back in joyful tones … that our clotted blood, shed in the middle of the sea, will float to the other side”—to the death of pioneers at the frontier—“if we die on the mountain-­ side, we shall be shrouded in sheets of whitest snow, and all generations of men yet to come upon the earth will have to gaze upward” (an analogy that brings to mind the memorial for the Donner Party, finalized in 1901)—to the American Revolution—“If contending for our rights, given unto us by God, causes us to be slain, let us perish on the field of battle, singing as we pass out of the world, ‘Sweet Freedom’s song,’ though every word of this soul-inspiring hymn must come forth wrapped in our hearts’ warm blood” (221–222) and “we are now thoroughly wedded to the doctrine of Patrick Henry: ‘Give me liberty or give me death’” (245). As

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the war-crazed Bernard glorifies the very foundation of the United States and wields the rhetoric of utopian secession against the nation, he reveals its bloody history. Bernard makes it seem as if the United States cannot be regenerated without violence (to draw on Richard Slotkin’s famous 1973 publication). Thus, the novel illustrates the influence that the White United States have on the Black nationalist Bernard, who, as a lawyer and statesman in the Northern States learned to manipulate the political system to his advantage. Griggs repeated this warning in Overshadowed: the wrong role-­ models would “result in Blacks learning the wrong lessons from White America” (Coleman 2007, 116). It is not only the ‘Citizen Tom’ Belton that has been “co-opted” (Coleman 2007, 49), as Bernard reproduces US corruption and polemics, which will exacerbate the racial conflict. The novel further hints that his elite education and upbringing have not provided moral guidance. Bernard even questions “the Bible which the white people gave us” (85). Keeping in mind that Griggs is a Baptist minister and that his audience was likely religious, this short moment of heresy stigmatizes Bernard as mad and immediately defuses his call for war, yet it also highlights the devastating effects of White supremacism, driving Black people to doubt even the Lord’s word. Bernard is motivated by a “tremendous incentive” (94) to pursue individualistic achievements, thoughts planted there by his father, the White senator: “climb high. Scale the high wall of prejudice. Make it possible, for me to own you ere I pass out of life” (93). The symbolic charge of his father’s words is an excellent example for Griggs’s skill in choosing images pregnant with multiple meanings: the imperial White father wants to own the Black son and claim his success but takes no responsibility for him should he fail in a system rigged against him. The other influences shaping Bernard’s character are the racist teachings over which his beloved killed herself—as detailed above, these are likewise a product of White supremacism. Bernard fights “for the freedom of the race” (93) and applies his education to defend the rights of African Americans, but his motivations for provoking a race war are personal, for “eternal glory and honor” (250). One critic argued that Belton is too lenient because “the education system in which Belton becomes a leader … is not overseen by the community and is in fact largely run by outside, which is to say white, interests” (Curry 2010, 34). As these excerpts have underscored, the same, even more so, goes for Bernard’s education. Despite of what all three B’s in the novel claim, various incidents hint that the Imperium is not the improved version of the United States but

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corroded by the influence from the ‘real’ United States. Firstly, it cannot protect its citizens, such as the postmaster Cook. Furthermore, public debates and democratic procedures are overtaken by backroom politics. This recalls an incident from the childhood of the two protagonists: in their very first debating contest, the judges conspire to give the award based on skin color, not on the merit of the speeches. When the Imperium likewise passes over Belton’s rhetoric victory, the novel returns to its beginnings, closing a circle that marks the “ultimate problematizing of the traditional link between mastery of speech and political agency that the novel reinforces at the outset but complicates as the work continues” (Karafilis 2006, 126). Political power in the Imperium operates by the same underhanded tactics as on the outside. Well-versed in the tricks and intrigues of US American politics, Bernard circumvents the public decision-­making process of the Imperium, employing “forms of coercion that parallel the more covert oppression occurring in the official institutions of the nation” (Karafilis 2006, 136) which had already helped him to secure his seat in Congress. Bernard is “endowed with the worst” (Tamplin 2020, 99) of Anglo-Saxon traits that can be acquired in the United States. Belton, standing for the uncorrupted spirit of democracy, fails and so the Imperium fails its utopian promise. Neither the United States nor the Imperium realize the democratic visions of the founding documents. Instead, they are both “the site of a disturbing coercion and violence that seriously compromises the possibility of an alternate vision in which a democratic ethics can be achieved and maintained” (Karafilis 2006, 128). The influence of the United States thus extends deeply into the Imperium, the utopian practice limited and contained by its inspirational, yet non-­ utopian, role model. The ideals that are promoted by the US American national narrative and their corruption work in the Imperium and ultimately render it impotent.

‘Mightier Weapon’: Final Appeals in Imperium in Imperio After carefully tracing the events that led up to Belton’s execution, it appears almost incoherent that critics would hold the novel to be utopian and argue that “Griggs … maintains that the New World still holds promise” (Ahmad 2009, 142). The novel gives plenty of examples as to why placing any hope in systematic political change may appear contradictory

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to the historic experience of Black people in the United States. Imperium in Imperio in many ways seems to harbinger Black Nihilism and Afropessimism. The United States appear to have only one last chance for improvement—which needs to come about immediately and radically. However, one silver lining to this utopian cloud is that Griggs would become more hopeful in his later writings. As an appendix to his second novel Unfettered (1902), Griggs provided a fully realized outline, called Dorlan’s Plan. In it, he promotes coordinated collective practice of churches, schools, and families in order to counter anti-Black policies in the United States. From Imperium to Unfettered, Griggs shifted from juxtaposing extremes and investigating the deadlock of utopian practice to devising plans for political activism. The final sections of the novel also suggest that Imperium in Imperio is Griggs’s attempt to improve the situation of African Americans by writing, since all other options, including large-scale conspiracy, are bound to fail. That is, where utopianism is yet impossible, writing may help to clear the way. The publication of the novel thus becomes a contribution toward Belton’s plan to ‘force an acknowledgement of equality.’ When Belton makes his final grand speech, he suggests that war can yet be avoided if the Imperium strengthens its efforts “to impress the Anglo Saxon that he has a New Negro on his hands and must surrender what belongs to him” (245). Imperium functions, in part, as such an attempt to ‘impress’ possible White readers, who may not have been the primary target audience but nonetheless factor in as a group to be addressed.12 Imperium is thus full of assertions of Black superiority, such as calling Belton’s speech “one of the most remarkable feats of oratory known to history” (227). The Imperium itself serves as another case in point to stress the right to the land and acknowledgement as full citizens, giving testimony to the conceptual grasp of “the genius of … institutions” (242) by its founders and members. The novel attests the African American community with superhuman governing skills in setting up the large yet secret Imperium, possibly nodding to slave-era means of secretive organization via codes, songs, messages sewn in quilts, and so on, as in the cases of the Underground Railroad and Black espionage during the Civil War. Belton further argues that the African American community “has been a marvelous success since 12  Finnie D. Coleman (2007), John Gruesser (2013), and Hannah Wallinger (1997) agree that Griggs expected to reach a White audience; they differ, however, on the effect Griggs intended.

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the war, as a builder of secret societies. One member of [the Imperium] conceived the idea of making use of all of these secret orders already formed” (194). More-or-less secret organizations and lodges had also been part of the mainstream political landscape of the nineteenth century (e.g., the Freemasons, and the nativists ‘Know Nothings’ of The Order of the Star Spangled Banner) and so Griggs asserts that African Americans are well capable of using similar strategies. Thus, when Belton proclaims writing to be a “mightier weapon” (246) than the sword and the ballot, he refers to Imperium in Imperio itself. Berl’s concluding words make the same case. After he has betrayed the Imperium, he passes the story to Griggs in the hope that his voice will be heard: “I only ask as a return that all mankind will join hands and help my poor down-trodden people to secure those right for which they organized the Imperium” (264–265). The narrative therefore aims to stand in for the empire, generating the change that the Imperium could not. For this to work, though, the literary convention that Belton represents must be executed. The narrator concludes that Belton must have been “the last of that peculiar type of Negro heroes that could so fondly kiss the smiting hand” (262). Clearly this is “a warning—work with the Piedmonts or create and later face the Belgraves” (Gruesser 2013, 62; see also Coleman 2007, 57). Since the murders and war mentioned in the novel have already taken place in reality, all other events are likewise in the past, and therefore the ‘Belton Piedmonts’ (and the ‘Berl Trouts’ as well) either have already deceased or are about to be extinct. Belton’s death symbolizes the end of African Americans that even remotely resemble the ‘Citizen Tom’ and wholeheartedly and naively believe in the benevolence of the White United States. Now, the United States has to appease a ‘new’ Black population that resembles the much more belligerent Bernard, as Black voices loyal to the nation are dying out. Threatening war if the ‘Anglo Saxon race’ should prove unimpressed and not hold true to its founding ideals, the novel effects a synthesis of the two protagonists. In Imperium, the United States’ failure to realize the good place—despite utopian promises of liberty— poses a serious threat to the nation. Imperium in Imperio aims to support the struggle for civil rights, proving the capability of African Americans to participate as full citizens in the republic, and to be included in the national narrative. The novel not only “looks forward to black nationalism” (Whitlow 1978, 35) as it would emerge more prominently in the

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twentieth century, but is in its description of demagogy,13 separatist movements, and extreme nationalism also suggestive of the general discourse of dystopian practice as it emerged with the rise of fascism and terrorism in the twentieth century. Imperium does not endorse any of the political strategies that its protagonists propose and has “begun to redefine and undermine the tradition by describing uncertain, inconclusive, and ambiguous visions of better worlds” (Veselá 2011, 285), a so-called critical utopia (Moylan 1986). In its commentary on the intersection of race, utopia, and the United States it illustrates and challenges how the United States have colonized the utopian psyche of the African American community. The relationship between race and nation affects African American utopianism, and so the novel raises the question in how far (and whether at all) African Americans can leave the United States behind—territorially, genetically, and ideologically—and if so, to what avail. By suggesting that the answer to these limitations may be war among the races, Imperium in Imperio employs what would become a popular trope in African American sf, as observed by Kalí Tal: “a distinguishable, though submerged, pattern of kill-the-white-folks futurist fiction in the African American literary tradition” (Tal 2002). Tal illustrates this by drawing on, for example, Griggs’s Imperium, George Schuyler’s Black Empire (1936–1938), and John A.  Williams’s Sons of Darkness, Sons of Light (1969). Pavla Veselá also discusses this motif briefly and refers to Mark Bould’s “exhaustive study of Black Power science fiction, [in which he points out that] the period of the 1960s and 1970s also witnessed the emergence of a number of works by black sf writers, including Julian Moreau’s The Black Commandos (1967), John A.  Williams’s Captain Blackman (1972), and John Edgar Wideman’s The Lynchers (1973). Even though several of these texts imagine a black revolution, they cannot be classified as utopias since they do not go beyond resisting white supremacy” (2011, 284). As Imperium delineates, thinking beyond a violent conflict is hard as long as the Black population is still in imperio. War may (eventually) be the only functioning mechanism to utopian production available.

13  Kenneth Roemer (1976, 68–70) gives a short overview of contemporaries of Griggs who also provided small “glimpses of Hitlers, Stalins, and even a Nixon-like modern leader” (70) in their utopian fiction.

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Griggs’s novel thus draws attention to ‘antispatial’ imperialism and remains at best mildly hopeful regarding its fragility. A brief section on the novel in Kaplan’s seminal The Anarchy of Empire in the Making of US Culture (2005) argues that, in Imperium, the Spanish War fends off another civil war (along race lines) and that “African Americans serve as the medium of exchange to pay the cost of national reunion … by their paralyzing and unresolvable double allegiance” (124). This assessment holds for most of the plot but does not take into account the ending; the ‘paralyzed’ Belton and Berl are dead. The novel illustrates that the utopian national narrative struggles to contain those who are facing a dystopian reality in the United States, and that Jim Crow and the nadir of American race relations (to use Rayford W. Logan’s famous term) have the potential to react explosively with the utopian/national/imperial discourse. The threat of a race war suggests the danger resulting from the extreme disparity between national utopian telos and non-utopian reality. Resolving this paradox harmonically is becoming nigh impossible. Utopianism is thus stylized as national yet has retained its potential to challenge the nation: deeply tied to the national narrative, it may wreak havoc on the United States.

References Ahmad, Dohra. 2009. Landscapes of Hope. Anti-Colonial Utopianism in America. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Alexander, Charles. 1906. The Hindered Hand. Alexander’s Magazine 2 (4): 31–34. Balasopoulos, Antonis. 2004. Unworldly Worldliness: America and the Trajectories of Utopian Expansionism. Utopian Studies 15 (2): 3–35. Baudemann, Kristina. 2018. Removed to the Signifier: Utopia in Stephen Graham Jones’s The Bird is Gone: A Manifesto (2003). Open Library of Humanities 4 (1): 16. Beckham, Jack M. 2005. Griggs’s Imperium in Imperio. The Explicator 63 (2): 85–87. Brown, Christopher Michael. 2012. Seditious Prose: Patriots and Traitors in the African American Literary Tradition. Law and Literature 24 (2): 174–212. Brown, William Wells. 1853. Clotel, or, The President’s Daughter. London: Partridge and Oakey. Chakkalakal, Tess, and Kenneth W.  Warren. 2013. Introduction. In Jim Crow, Literature, and the Legacy of Sutton E. Griggs, ed. Tess Chakkalakal and Kenneth W. Warren, 1–20. Athens: University of Georgia Press.

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Coleman, Finnie D. 2007. Sutton E.  Griggs and the Struggle against White Supremacy. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press. Curry, Eric. 2010. The Power of Combinations: Sutton Griggs’ Imperium in Imperio and the Science of Collective Efficiency. American Literary Realism 43 (1): 23–40. Dixon, Thomas. 1902. The Leopard’s Spots. A Romance of the White Man’s Burden, 1865–1900. Doubleday Page & Co. Du Bois, William Edward Burghardt. [1903a] 2007. The Souls of Black Folk. Edited by Brent Hayes Edwards. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 1903b. The Talented Tenth. In The Negro Problem, ed. Booker T. Washington, 31–77. New York: James Pott & Company. ———. 1911. The Quest of the Silver Fleece. Chicago: A. C. McClurg & Co. Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. 1988. The Trope of a New Negro and the Reconstruction of the Image of the Black. Representations 24: 129–155. Gloster, Hugh Morris. 1948. Negro Voices in American Fiction. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Go, Julian. 2011. Patterns of Empire. The British and American Empires, 1688 to the Present. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gordon-Reed, Annette. 2008. The Hemingses of Monticello. An American Family. New York: Norton. Griggs, Sutton E. 1899. Imperium in Imperio. A Study of the Negro Race Problem. Cincinnati: The Editor Publishing Company. ———. 1902. Unfettered. Nashville: The Orion Publishing Company. ———. 1905. The Hindered Hand. Or, The Reign of the Repressionist. Nashville: The Orion Publishing Company. ———. 1908. Pointing the Way. The Orion Publishing Company. Gruesser, John. 2013. Empires at Home and Abroad in Sutton E.  Griggs’s Imperium in Imperio. In Jim Crow, Literature, and the Legacy of Sutton E.  Griggs, ed. Tess Chakkalakal and Kenneth W.  Warren, 49–68. Athens: University of Georgia Press. Hebard, Andrew. 2015. Race Conservation and Imperial Sovereignty in Sutton Griggs’s Imperium in Imperio. Arizona Quarterly: A Journal of American Literature, Culture, and Theory 71 (3): 59–83. Hopkins, Pauline E. [1903] 2009. Of One Blood or, The Hidden Self. Edited By Deborah E. McDowell. New York: Washington Square Press. Howland, Marie. 1874. Papa’s Own Girl. New York: Jewett. Jefferson, Thomas. [1781] 1853. Notes on the State of Virginia. Richmond: J. W. Randolph. Johnson, Edward A. 1904. Light Ahead for the Negro. New York: The Grafton Press. Johnson, Lynn R. 2010. A Return to the Black (W)hole: Mitigating the Trauma of Homelessness in Sutton E.  Griggs’s Imperium in Imperio. The Southern Literary Journal 42 (2): 12–33.

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Kaplan, Amy. 1999. ‘Left Alone with America’: The Absence of Empire in the Study of American Culture. In Cultures of United States Imperialism, ed. Amy Kaplan, 3–21. Durham: Duke University Press. ———. 2005. The Anarchy of Empire in the Making of U.S. Culture. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Karafilis, Maria. 2006. Oratory, Embodiment, and US Citizenship in Sutton E. Griggs’s Imperium in Imperio. African American Review 40 (1): 125–143. Katz, William Loren. 1971. Review: Imperium in Imperio by Sutton E. Griggs. Journal of Black Studies 1 (4): 494–498. Knadler, Stephen. 2007. Sensationalizing Patriotism: Sutton Griggs and the Sentimental Nationalism of Citizen Tom. American Literature 79 (4): 673–699. Kramer, David. 2013. Imperium in Imperio: Sutton Griggs’s Imagined War of 1898. War, Literature, and the Arts 25: 1–21. Levander, Caroline. 2010. Sutton Griggs and the Borderlands of Empire. American Literary History 22 (1): 57–84. More, Thomas. [1516] 1912. The Utopia. Translated by R. Robinson. New York: Macmillan Company. Moreau, Julia [Joseph Denis Jackson]. 1967. The Black Commandos. Cultural Institute Press. Moylan, Tom. [1986] 2014. Demand the Impossible. Science Fiction and the Utopian Imagination. Bern: Peter Lang. Nashville Globe. 1908. Literary Notes. 10 July. Roemer, Kenneth M. 1976. The Obsolete Necessity. America in Utopian Writings, 1888–1900. Kent: Kent State University Press. Rowe, John Carlos. 2000. Literary Culture and U.S.  Imperialism. From the Revolution to World War II. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Schmidt, Peter. 2008. Sitting in Darkness. New South Fiction, Education, and the Rise of Jim Crow Colonialism, 1865–1920. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Slotkin, Richard. [1973] 1996. Regeneration through Violence. The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600–1860. New York: Harper Perennial. Stowe, Harriet Beecher. 1852. Uncle Tom’s Cabin or, Life among the Lowly. Boston: John P. Jewett and Co. Tal, Kalí. 2002. That Just Kills Me: Black Militant Near-Future Fiction. Social Text 20 (2): 65–91. Tamplin, William. 2020. The Anglo-Saxon New Negro: Sutton E. Griggs’s Anglo-­ Saxonism and the Quest for Cultural Paternity in Imperium in Imperio (1899). Utopian Studies 31 (1): 97–117. The Colored American. 1902. Review of Unfettered. 13 December. The Washington Bee. 1908. Literary Notes. 11 July. p. 4. van Evrie, J.H. 1869. White Supremacy and Negro Subordination. New York: Van Evrie, Horton & Co.

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Veselá, Pavla. 2011. Neither Black nor White: The Critical Utopias of Sutton E. Griggs and George S. Schuyler. Science Fiction Studies 38 (2): 270–287. Wallinger, Hannah. 1997. Secret Societies and Dark Empires: Sutton E. Griggs’s Imperium in Imperio and W.E.B. Du Bois’s Dark Princess. SPELL: Swiss Papers in English Language and Literature 10: 197–210. Washington, Booker T. [1901] 2014. Extract from Up from Slavery: The Atlanta Exposition Address. In The Wiley Blackwell Anthology of African American Literature, ed. Gene Andrew Jarrett, 901–908. Hoboken: Wiley Blackwell. Whitlow, Roger. 1978. The Revolutionary Black Novels of Martin R. Delany and Sutton Griggs. MELUS 5 (3): 26–36. Wideman, John Edgar. 1973. The Lynchers. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. Williams, John A. 1969. Sons of Darkness, Sons of Light. A Novel of Some Probability. Boston: Little, Brown, and Company. ———. [1972] 2000. Captain Blackman. Minneapolis: Coffee House Press. Winter, Molly Crumpton. 2007. American Narratives. Multiethnic Writing in the Age of Realism. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press.

CHAPTER 7

‘A Bold Regeneration’: W.E.B. Du Bois’s The Quest of the Silver Fleece (1911)

Now this attitude was being revolutionized. She was proposing to him a plan of wide scope—a bold regeneration of the land. It was a plan carefully studied out, long thought of and read about. (399–400)

Similar to Sutton E. Griggs’s Imperium in Imperio (1899), W.E.B. Du Bois’s The Quest of the Silver Fleece (1911) considers what effect the national-utopian entanglement has on the African American community. However, the plot of Du Bois’s debut novel ends on a more utopian note and suggests that this link may be worked to the advantage of Black people in the United States. In the final chapters of The Quest the female protagonist Zora establishes a utopian community. This community will provide education, fair working conditions, and protection from extra-legal violence and systemic discrimination for African Americans. The novel itself calls for a multidimensional change in a much more utopian manner than Griggs’s Imperium, as the community is clearly invested in the uplift and education of the working class, regardless of race, and a profound change of how the United States are organized, by means of utopian socialism. The Quest of the Silver Fleece blends different aspects of the US American/utopian relationship as it developed in the nineteenth century. In fact, the novel does this so comprehensively that the forthcoming reading can neatly tie together different utopian threads that have emerged in previous chapters. The Quest evokes the frontier imagery that is so prominent in Gilbert Imlay’s The Emigrants (1793), as well as key components

© The Author(s) 2020 V. Adamik, In Search of the Utopian States of America, Palgrave Studies in Utopianism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-60279-6_7

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of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s (1852) construction of a utopian past. Like Imlay, Hawthorne, and Marie Howland (1874), Du Bois ponders the interconnections between narrative conventions, romantic relationships, and utopianism. The Bildung of Zora is reminiscent of Howland’s Papa’s Own Girl, from the importance of education to the belittlement of notions of respectability. Just as in Imperium in Imperio, the ideological reach of White supremacy in the United States creates a central obstacle for the protagonist’s personal happiness. The novel brings together all these different discourses and forms a narrative that symbolically resolves the conflicts that Griggs outlined. The Quest of the Silver Fleece is a “determined attempt to portray the ‘race problem’ as a national issue demanding a national fictional canvas on which to portray it and a reorientation of national consciousness and priorities in order to resolve it” (Andrews 2007, xxvii). This chapter will trace Du Bois’s composition of a US national narrative that foregrounds African American history and through this assigns the US Black population an exceptional role in reaching the national/utopian telos. That is, the novel views the ‘narrative’ of the Utopian States of America to be pervasive and therefore reorganizes it so as to have African Americans play a crucial part in the fulfillment of a utopian, decidedly socialist, United States.

‘Of the Whole Nation’: Systemic Complexities and Far-Reaching Solutions Despite its multifaceted critique of the socioeconomic and legal situation in the United States and the light it sheds on the interrelations between race, class, gender, literary conventions, and utopianism, The Quest of the Silver Fleece has not received due academic attention. Du Bois, arguably one of the best-known and most cited intellectuals of his time, is still mostly remembered for his non-fiction writing, in particular for The Souls of Black Folk (1903). Especially the passages on ‘double consciousness’ and on ‘the color line’ are seminal reading for African American studies and made him a “central figure in the postcolonial discourse” (Zamir 2008, 1). A lot of his oeuvre, including his five novels, remains “overshadowed” (Terry 2008, 48) by this relatively early work, though Du Bois was highly productive throughout his entire life. Born in 1862, William Edward Burghardt Du Bois grew up as the son of two middle-class African Americans (his father left the family when Du

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Bois was young) in Great Barrington, a small town in Massachusetts. In this community, the color line was not as patent as elsewhere in the United States (Rampersad 1976, 1–2), so that Du Bois had easier access to quality education than many of his African American contemporaries. He began writing and editing while still in high school, and then embarked on an outstanding academic career. From Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee, he went on to study in Harvard. He was enrolled in the Friedrich Wilhelm III University in Berlin (now Humboldt Universität) for two years. Due to bureaucratic and monetary issues, he did not receive his doctorate in Germany, despite a finished thesis in economics. Returning to the United States, Du Bois taught classics and modern languages at Wilberforce University in Ohio and in 1895 received his PhD from Harvard with a thesis in history. Subsequently, Du Bois held the chair for sociology at Atlanta University. He has contributed to the foundations of sociology with his seminal work The Philadelphia Negro (1899), attended various Pan-African meetings, was part of the group that founded the African American civil rights organization known as the Niagara Movement, and was a founding member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1909, for which he served as the only Black board member at the time, and as the editor of its journal The Crisis. He was also the editor of the first magazine for African American children, The Brownies’ Book (1920–1921). However, Du Bois does not ‘end’ in the early twentieth century, even though focus commonly lies on this section of his life and work, thus reducing him to a more convenient—read: more nationalist and less socialist and anti-imperial (Melamed 2006; Rasberry 2016, 183–185)—historic figure. Even though he was initially intrigued by nationalism (in his college years, he was fascinated with Otto von Bismarck’s unification of Germany), Du Bois became more interested in socialism, eventually adopted Marxism, and even Stalinism. Du Bois left the NAACP twice; was dismissed from Atlanta University; in the McCarthy era, he faced persecution and suspicion by US institutions on account of his communist convictions, and as a consequence was not permitted to leave the United States for years in the 1950s. Toward the end of his life, in 1961, he left for Ghana where he spent the rest of his life. He died in 1963. The early days of the NAACP, race riots, Jim Crow laws and debates about the appropriate course of action to achieve racial uplift inform the setting of his debut novel The Quest of the Silver Fleece. As Du Bois grew older, he came to think more internationally and along Marxist lines. Du

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Bois’s later writings, such as his next novel, Dark Princess (1928), would provide quite different approaches to nationhood, the United States, race, liberalism, and communism. The Quest, on the other hand, illustrates the beliefs of a ‘younger’ Du Bois: it stresses the importance of high, classical (and thus Eurocentric) education and showcases the nationalist notions he still harbored, alongside nascent socialist convictions. It also contains a clear systemic critique that highlights the intersections of capitalism and racism. The story of the two protagonists, Zora and Blessed Alwyn, usually referred to as ‘Bles’ in the novel, illustrates that individual diligence, virtue, hard work, and even capital only go so far in the individual advancement of Black people in the United States, let alone bring about a solution to “the problem of the color-line” (Du Bois 1903, 3). Underlying The Quest of the Silver Fleece is the conviction that the end of violence against African Americans will not be effectuated within a socioeconomic system based on capitalism and alleged meritocracy. The long-term solution must aim at a larger societal and economic transformation, since racism is so deeply ingrained in the system that only overhauling the socioeconomic basis can result in improvements for the situation of African Americans. Thus, Black socialist utopianism is the proposed solution. Du Bois does not mention any Black utopian experiments that might have inspired his rendition of the community, and neither could I find one in the historical accounts I consulted. Historic precedents may be scarce because, as William H. Pease and Jane Pease point out in Black Utopia, intentional communities by African Americans in the nineteenth century were more likely dedicated to “the philosophy of the American Middle Class” (1963, 18) and to providing their members with the means to successfully participate in the US American economy.1 However, such and other African American communal efforts—the erection of schools and churches in particular—are predecessors to the utopian socialism of The Quest. At the beginning of the novel, Bles enrolls as a student in a school for African American children, situated adjacent to a cotton plantation in Alabama. Despite the best intentions of the school’s mistress, Sarah Smith, 1  In these cases, the intentional communities were a means to an end other than communalism (see Pitzer 2013, 35; Sargent 2013, 59). However, historical sources on African American utopian communities are scarce, and academic research on the topic is patchy; it is possible that a community that resembles Zora’s project more closely has existed but that I have not learned of it yet. See Chap. 2,  footnote 11, for further reading suggestions on African American utopian practice.

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educational doctrines of self-improvement are shown to have their limits as the African American population is systematically exploited by the plantation owners, an openly White supremacist family by the name of Cresswell. This exploitation manifests itself throughout the life of the protagonists. Exemplifying the ongoing sexual abuse of Black women by White men, Zora grows up and is pimped out in a brothel run by her mother and swamp-witch Elspeth. Until Bles comes along, no one thinks to encourage Zora to attend school to get even the most basic education. Bles and Zora fall in love, but he leaves Zora once he learns that she had already been sexually active, even though, by virtue of her upbringing, Zora had not known that submitting to the sexual desires of (White) men transgressed norms of ‘purity.’ This plot twist illustrates how societal standards of ‘respectability’ imposed on assaulted Black women further wreck their chances at personal happiness. Sharecropping on the plantation is another apparatus in this exploitation of Black people. The Cresswells control the price of cotton, the general store, and own the lands, thus keeping African American workers in permanent debt, their lives little improved from those they led under chattel slavery (including physical violence). Colonel Cresswell also immediately takes possession of the eponymous silver fleece—supernaturally high-quality cotton that Bles and Zora secretly planted and harvested in the swamp. This act demonstrates the limits to Black emancipation within a White supremacist capitalist economy. In the South, plantation owners profit from Black labor through a rigged sharecropping system and by controlling legal and educational institutions. In the North, members of the White northern elite only support African American equality in theory, from a distance and, ultimately, under the conditions that the Atlanta compromise2 suggested. White capitalists in the North and the South cooperate economically and politically to pit Black and White workers against each other, frustrating solidarity efforts and uprisings among the working classes. Within this system, chances for equal rights are slim to non-existent. The Quest of the Silver Fleece thus offers a “critique both of an unreflective assimilationist ideology of the early NAACP … just as it surely serves as a critique of Booker T.  Washington’s apparently radical notion that economic development for the newly freed slaves could very well ensure political equality in a manner both irresistible and inevitable” (Gates 2007, xvii). Instead of ‘just’ weighing assimilation against 2

 See Chap. 6 footnote 6.

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accommodation against Black nationalism, The Quest argues that the entire system must be replaced by a radically different one. In The Quest of the Silver Fleece, US American meritocracy in which Black people can eventually reach equality within the capitalist system is shown to be a deceptive illusion. Education and even democratic representation will not bring about the end of anti-Black discrimination and are bound to fail African Americans. Zora and Bles both learn that even the educated Black political elite is disillusioned and self-serving, having become but a pawn in White politics. Access to a classical education and white-collar employment for some Black men and women—the Talented Tenth, a term which Du Bois himself had coined at the turn of the century to rally for the creation of a Black elite that would work to emancipate African Americans—thus can only go so far to improve the situation of the majority of African Americans. The African American population of the rural South continues to be oppressed by racist and capitalist institutions (such as the general store, the courts, cotton vendors, even the churches, and the schoolboard). It follows that the Black elite (to which Zora and Bles will come to belong) must initiate socialist collaboration that targets the Black working class and will change the mode of production itself. One subplot that deftly illustrates the futility of staying with and rising in the sociopolitical system is the story of Caroline Wynn, a Black woman who is moving in the political circles of Washington, D.C., and who tries to evoke change from ‘within.’ Submitting to the enduring humiliations that this strategy entails, she tells Bles (and herself): “I use the world; I did not make it” (265). By contrast, Zora challenges the system holistically and eventually makes her ‘world’ by engaging in utopianism. From early on, Zora rejects both, white supremacy and private property (Ahmad 2009, 148; Rampersad 1976, 121–122; van Wienen and Kraft 2007, 70). As a young girl, she explains to her teacher Mary Taylor that “folks ain’t got no right to things they don’t need” (79) and that they did not make. At a very young age, Zora thus formulates core socialist convictions. By having Zora come to such radical conclusions regarding ownership “socialist ideas are promulgated as basic human truths, as commonplaces of the untutored but honest mind” (Rampersad 1976, 130). Eventually, she passes this mindset on to the more conservative Bles: “Zora’s guiding philosophy is a radical anti-materialism. … Tutored by Zora, Bles … acquires the ability to see the world not as it is but as it should be: in short, as a utopian” (Ahmad 2009, 148).

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To the multiple evils of the system, Zora finds, or rather, founds, one solution: her community, implementing a new economic system based on “working land on shares” (405) and communal ownership, female leadership, uplift through education, and union among Black and White workers. Eventually, the community plans to expand into a whole town: “We want all sorts of industries; we want a little hospital with a resident physician and two or three nurses; we want a cooperative store for buying supplies; we want a cotton-gin and sawmill, and in the future other things” (404). Even though Du Bois would eventually join the Communist Party and become an adamant supporter of Stalinism, the plot of The Quest of the Silver Fleece cumulates in utopian socialism as practiced in the United States of the nineteenth century. As in some of the other novels discussed, in The Quest systemic change also pertains to romantic relationships, and so, at the very end of the novel, Zora proposes to Bles. The novel stresses that the newly found community will have to face animosity, yet the novel’s conclusion has been described as “a happy, indeed Utopian ending” (Hack 2013, 760)—an assessment that I will mitigate in the course of the upcoming reading. With this utopian community, The Quest (cautiously) purports that utopianism in the United States is available beyond the racial divide and may even be utilized to overcome it but only if Black people are given chances to engage with utopianism. Consequently, the plot does not end with a utopian society, but with a tentative first step toward the realization of a utopian vision for the United States. Confronted with a similar historical context as Imperium in Imperio, The Quest of the Silver Fleece engages with the same issues and employs in part similar strategies by noting the failure of accommodationist strategies and meritocratic promises, and by describing the atrocities that a White supremacist society commits and condones. Yet, Maurice Lee notes “little commerce between Griggs and Du Bois in The Quest of the Silver Fleece” (1999, 393). It is unclear whether Du Bois had actually read any of Griggs’s novels. The two definitely knew of each other, as both were prominent Black political figures who tried to see the ‘problem of the color line’, as well as the ‘solution’ in its totality, and its complexity. Du Bois had invited Griggs to join the Niagara movement “because of [Griggs’s] reputation as one of the few active Black novelists in the country” (Coleman 2007, 2). Yet, there appears to be no record of exchange between the two (Coleman 2007, 18, 140; Lee 1999, 393). Similarities between Imperium and The Quest appear coincidental, and the big, underground Imperium hardly resembles the agrarian communal project of

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Zora (apart from both relating to utopianism). This is not to say that Griggs’s novel does not inform The Quest, even if it is not referenced as obviously as other texts. Whether Du Bois directly quotes Griggs or not, he certainly comments on similar internal conflicts within the African American community. The scenes set in the ‘inner circle’ in Washington, D.C., delineate a community in which skin-color does not determine identity because every person present is Black, at least by ‘one drop’: “they were used to asking one’s color as one asks of height and weight; it was simply an extra dimension in their world” (257). However, this educated elite schemes toward personal advancement, while Bles is unwilling to compromise his integrity and his cause for personal gain. Furthermore, they have no contact with the Black rural population of the South and therefore no concept of their plight, which marks a divide in the African American community that runs along class and the Mason-Dixon Line (esp. evident in the chapter entitled “The Education of Alwyn”). The Quest of the Silver Fleece therefore proposes another approach altogether: experimental utopian socialism in the tradition of the nineteenth century. The new communal wave is to be set off by an exemplary community, with an empowered Black female as its creator, changing modes of production, class relations, race relations, and gender roles. Because of this multidimensional approach, Zora’s community, while not preparing Bernard Belgrave’s civil war, is perhaps more radical, and more utopian, than the Imperium. Still relegated to the margins of utopian studies and literary criticism in general, the fictional rendition of African American utopian practice offers a proposal for the future of the United States that would change more than removing the color line—the ‘root of all evil’ being a complex tangle of capitalism and racism. While the novel quickly ran through multiple editions (McClurg 1912, 468), its impact seems to have been minimal. Contemporary reviews are positive, but scarce. The writer William Stanley Braithwaite (1878–1962) remarks in The Crisis (the editor of which was at the time no other than Du Bois himself): “In reading Dr. Du Bois’ [sic] novel you realize for the first time the vital note which the art of American fiction has lacked. In the absorbing and compelling hold that it takes upon your imagination and sympathies, you are convinced of what American fiction has gained in this story” (Braithwaite 1911, 77). The Kindergarten Primary Magazine praises the novel for supplying “an illuminating glimpse into the racial problem” (1912, 59) from a Black perspective—the journal evidently targeting an audience composed of White teachers, as the review refers to

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African Americans in the third person, while identifying with Sara Smith, the White principal of the school—and that when “viewed as a story alone it holds one to the end” (1912, 59). African American author Benjamin Brawley (1882–1939) was less enthused by the novel’s artistic value, remarking that “the author is a sociologist and essayist rather than a novelist” (1916, 450). However, all the critics arrive more or less at the same conclusion regarding the merit of the novel, namely, that it manages to embed the situation of African Americans in the South into a larger framework. It is ‘American,’ as it considers the role the North plays in the continued oppression of Black people (which the Kindergarten Primary Magazine finds particularly humbling) and the general effect that the cotton market has on the entire United States. Braithwaite praises its holistic approach: “for the first time … the great problem has been handled with such sheer visional grasp of life purpose and not race purpose” (1911, 40), that is, it provides a vision “more important” (1911, 78), since it attempts to review the total system that creates and sustains racism. In the range of its dissent and its plans, The Quest of the Silver Fleece is utopian. Many critics have since found The Quest of the Silver Fleece’s wealth of characters, symbols, plots, and settings rather excessive and confusing. However, as is the case with Imperium in Imperio, the novel’s form and symbolism are highly charged, adding layers to the content conveyed in the plot. Its abundance reflects the complexity of the issues it tackles, and which its protagonists seek to change. Thus, The Quest offers plenty material for a diachronic utopian psychology of the United States in general, and of an African American perspective in particular. The relative lack of interest in The Quest of the Silver Fleece appears, as in the case of Imperium in Imperio, to be rooted in a general agreement over the lack of aesthetic merit of the novel. Du Bois’s debut as a novelist (in fact, his entire novelistic oeuvre) “is largely regarded as a failure. The novel … ‘suffers’ generic confusion. Its ‘contradictory’ musings are intellectually lax. Its politics are finally ‘problematic,’ though Du Bois’s progressive intentions are clear” (Lee 1999, 389; essays quoted Rampersad 1976; Kostelanetz 1985; Byerman 1992). Maurice Lee’s summary of the issues on which critics focus still holds: they either read the novel in order to relate the political notions expressed to Du Bois’s overall oeuvre (e.g., Doku 2014; Warren 2014; Rampersad 1976; Rossetti 2013) or discuss the novel’s treatment of genre conventions (e.g., Andrews 2007; Byerman 1992; Hack 2013; Lee 1999; Oliver 2005; Rossetti 2013).

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However, the utopian implications of The Quest of the Silver Fleece often go unexamined (exceptions are Ahmad 2009; Byerman 1992; Doku 2014), even though most critics acknowledge their existence in passing. Of course, the in-between status of the fictional utopian community does not simplify the novel’s entanglement of form and content. One cannot cast the novel as a literary utopia, as the solution proposed is very much in its infancy, and the community still far too unstable to constitute a utopia. Viewing the novel within the paradigm of this book—namely, within a tradition of utopian practice—highlights that Du Bois uses this as one of many links to the US American national narrative. In this way, he tries to resolve class struggles and unite the nation by virtue of African American utopian socialism. In its style and its literary references, The Quest of the Silver Fleece is in many ways looking backward (late-nineteenth-century utopian pun intended). In this, the novel corroborates a popular critical assessment of Du Bois’s aesthetics as being firmly grounded in the nineteenth century: “indeed, it is a commonplace to describe him as in some sense ‘Victorian’, with that term used with varying degrees of precision—and derision” (Hack 2013, 756). However, Du Bois does not deploy this aesthetic naively, but strategically. In light of his 1926 insistence that “all Art is propaganda and ever must be” (26), critics have come to understand The Quest’s mixture of genre and its accumulation of intertextual references as the conscious application of literary traditions (e.g., Elder 1973; Lee 1999; Oliver 2005; Rampersad 1976; Terry 2008; van Wienen and Kraft 2007). The publication of The Quest precedes this proclamation by more than a decade, and yet, the novel’s formal complexity bears the marks of ‘propaganda,’ of ideological content consciously included. Du Bois employs a range of literary techniques, plot elements, and generic conventions to one end: to construct the aesthetics of a narrative that can end with the first steps toward the establishment of a US American good place that hinges on the African American presence and experience—instead of ignoring and erasing it, as White utopian practice and utopian fiction throughout the nineteenth century were wont to do. The novel is so heavily intertextual that spotting and sorting the various references amount to solving an intricate word puzzle, yet an intense literary analysis is well worth it. The upcoming sections therefore undertake this work, bringing together multiple critical readings to illustrate how Du Bois’s debut novel strives for an aesthetic intervention on the available literary conventions so as to enable Black utopian production within the United States.

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‘Field of Dreams’ and ‘Toil beyond Exhilaration’: Geographic Symbolism In order to interrupt dominant discourses that portray African Americans negatively, The Quest of the Silver Fleece employs a range of geographical metaphors. For one, intricate symbolism makes the case of African American rights to the fruits of their labor and the land that they have been cultivating for generations. Furthermore, the relationship to the land is metonymic for Zora’s community and even for the way that the novel deals with the various narrative conventions that it engages with. As in The Emigrants and The Blithedale Romance, once again a mythical American landscape is assigned a pivotal role in outlining a path to utopia. Mystic metaphors underline the connection of the workers to the land. During cotton harvest, workers become the magic attendants of the earth, assisting her labor: “All that dark earth heaved in mighty travail with the bursting bolls of the cotton while black attendant earth spirits swarmed above, sweating and crooning to its birth pains” (54). In this praise, the novel’s tone is quite different from that of Miles Coverdale’s accounts of field work in The Blithedale Romance. Unlike Hawthorne, Du Bois never makes derogatory statements about shoveling manure or tending to pigs, as Du Bois revives parts of the frontier discourse and merges it with socialist aesthetics in which hard labor in the fields is valued as a form of art: “the poetry of Toil was in the souls of the laborers” (54). This romantic imagery denotes cotton to be “basically the labor of the people who produce it” (Rampersad 1976, 120), not those who oversee the labor and own the grounds. At the same time, these descriptions vaguely recall Utopia’s claim to any ground that Utopians would efficiently cultivate, an impression strengthened by the complete absence of Indigenous people in the United States of The Quest of the Silver Fleece. Contrary to the garden of plenty that Imlay’s pioneering emigrants found, the land requires hard, sweaty work; clearing the land makes Zora’s hands bleed. This idea of work represents a crucial conviction of the novel, as this particular terrain, the swamp, is the central symbolic space of The Quest of the Silver Fleece. The historic significance of swamp land in the United States for Black slaves and their descendants specifically can be illustrated by the example of the Great Dismal Swamp (as already mentioned in Chap. 2). As Daniel O.  Sayers’s research and archaeological excavations illustrate, the Great Dismal Swamp in its relative inaccessibility was “a blemish on the regional landscape that by the eighteenth century

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was otherwise generally to reflect colonial political economy and ideologies of modern spatiality” (2014, 82). Difficult to enter and to control by the colonizers, the swamp “emerged in the first half of the 1600s as a cultural landscape for resistant indigenous, African, and European Diasporas, laborers and criminalized individuals who sought to take control of their lives, labors, families, and communities and recognized that the principle means of doing so was self-removal from that world that sought to define time in such ways” (Sayers 2014, 87). Sayers argues that for centuries, the swamp offered a certain amount of closure from the outside world: “Those people who chose to permanently settle the interior region … did so … to absolutely minimize, maybe eliminate, connections with the world outside the swamp, including access to its market commodities, its people, its landscapes and built environment, its exploitative labor regimes, and its racist and racialized societies” (2014, 105). In the nineteenth century, the swamp received increasing “national awareness and politicization … among abolitionist and antislavery writers” (Sayers 2014, 104), with Frederick Douglass in The Heroic Slave (1852), Harriet Beecher Stowe in Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp (1856), and Martin Delany in Blake, or the Huts of America (1859, 1861–1862) offering imageries of Black people forming maroon communities in the swamp that certainly inspired Du Bois’s depictions in The Quest of the Silver Fleece. Prominently featuring this place, the novel routes the national imagery of virgin lands, plentiful gardens, and wilderness—discourses tied to European and European American settler colonialism and utopianism— through an ‘other’ space, here distinctly Black. Through the swamp, African American experience is added to the utopian national narrative. It therefore seems only fit for me to likewise approach the novel ‘via the swamp.’ The Quest of the Silver Fleece evokes and then rejects the idea of virgin land and places the community not in pastoral green fields but on the recently cleared grounds of a swamp. The swamp becomes a complex symbolic space, and in many ways illustrates the problems that Black people face in the United States, as well as the work necessary to realize utopia in the United States. Like the fields, the swamp is also connected to the Black population through a metaphysical bond. It is the space of “African roots and a future black community” (Lee 1999, 397). In it live the sorceress Elspeth and the enigmatic preacher and conjurer Old Pappy, who is a sort of deus ex machina for black solidarity. These characters represent a form of African mysticism that established spiritual connections between people

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of African ancestry and the land onto which they have been violently placed. The swamp also contains knowledge of the traumata of displacement and slavery (Lee 1999, 397). When Zora plants her numinous cotton seed, “sowed wid [sic] the three spells of Obi in the old land ten thousand moons ago” (75) she implants African heritage into Alabama soil. Zora and Bles’s silver fleece that grows from these seeds likewise weds them not only to each other (Zora’s wedding dress is made from this cotton) but to the land. In this way, the strong connection between land and people assigns the Black community a territory in which to establish its utopia. Pairing historical, nativist, and socialist reasoning with magic ritual, The Quest claims American space for people of African descent, without overwriting their cultural and historical heritage. The swamp in the novel is exemplary for a space that is ‘other,’ and yet is not entirely subversive, as it exists within the socioeconomic system that exploits Black Southern workers. Its ambiguity has befuddled readers: Arlene A. Elder opens her discussion of the swamp and the plantation in The Quest of the Silver Fleece by asserting that the “Swamp represents all that is free, wild, joyful, and loving, the Plantation, all that is self-serving and exploitative” (1973, 358). Indeed, it is a beautiful terrain: “The golden sun was pouring floods of glory through the slim black trees, and the mystic sombre pools caught and tossed back the glow in darker, duller crimson” (76). Zora often hides in the swamp, and it is there on “A Field of Dreams” (89) that she and Bles plant the ‘silver fleece,’ the cotton of superb quality. Yet, “dark and haunting” (92), the swamp offers a safe space also because the “gray and death-like wilderness” (77) deters many from entering. The Quest alludes to maroons living there, who would have sought the swamp for protection from persecution. Yet, that means risking other dangers. Thus, Harry Cresswell (junior) warns of “Wandering Negroes, and even wild beasts, in the forest depths—and malaria” (206). This does not sound ‘free, wild, joyful, and loving.’ Furthermore, Black people did not select the swamp as an option among many. In the novel the Cresswells delegated this space to the descendants of enslaved people, and White power extends far into it: after all, it is in the swamp that Elspeth pimps out Black girls to White men. Hence, this landscape was also read in a completely different way. Arnold Rampersad’s interpretation, for example, directly contradicts that of Elder, arguing that the “swamp symbolizes all that the author finds distressing about black life; the cotton, once it has been wrested away from the exploiters, stands for black effort and achievement. The swamp stands for ignorance, sloth, superstition,

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paganism, and moral delinquency” (1976, 120). Such a reading in turn fails to consider that the school and the community are built on the swamp, and that it repeatedly offers refuge to Zora and Bles. Ultimately, the swamp “resists easy reduction to univocal symbolic structures” (Lee 1999, 396–397), containing within it a range of African American history and experiences in the South, fantasies and realities. Encompassing Zora’s dream space, a fertile field, perilous wilderness, and Elspeth’s brothel, the swamp stands in contrast to the neatly ordered farm of the Cresswells. The novel describes swamp and Black people often with the colors red and black; the realm of the Cresswells, on the other hand, is green, blue, purple, and white. The Quest does not assign any of these colors unambiguous value as threatening or negative. Zora wears her white wedding dress, made from the silver fleece, when she and Bles finally elope. The swamp, Zora, and Bles are also ‘dark,’ Zora is initially associated with the color red, and the soil of the Black Belt is often described with emphasis on its color, symbolizing its unique fertility and economic potential, and the intricate connection between the grounds and Black labor. Yet the suffering of the African American population is also encoded in these colors, for example, in the black and red corpses of the victims of a lynch mob. This Gothic and convoluted aesthetic appeal is juxtaposed to the type of orderly and colonial scenery that the newly arrived White teacher Mary oversees (in the double sense of the word) from the Cresswells’s veranda: “a smooth green lawn, beds of flowers, a vista of brown fields, and the dark line of wood beyond” (107). To her naïve and privileged gaze (more on Mary’s significant naivety in a moment), this view is picturesque and depopulated. The Black people, that is, the labor sustaining this panorama, are invisible. This contrast illuminates the programmatic complexity of the swamp. It contains an intricate set of symbols that cannot easily be viewed and decoded within an imperial, European American framework. The swamp through this ambiguity resists the ordered modern spatiality in which the White plantation system situates it as Black space. Within the swamp, Zora has found a spot of uncultivated but potentially fertile land, twenty acres of “paradise” (78), an island with soil “virgin and black” (78) on which the magic cotton will grow. This island and the many scenic descriptions of cotton give a romantic image of the Southern landscape and the agrarian lifestyle. While the earth is not easily malleable and tillable—it is not the paradise the European settlers, such as Imlay’s emigrants, thought to find—it has the potential to be turned into

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a good place. Even though the novel toys with a by now familiar trope of utopia in a pastoral environment, the land is not outside of history, neither is it fruitful without demanding hard work. “The toil was beyond exhilaration—it was sickening weariness and panting despair” (90). Elspeth’s presence makes itself negatively known, as she frequently shows up out of nowhere, and so Zora’s field-to-be must first be assiduously cleared from her influence: “She saw the long gnarled fingers of the tough little trees and they looked like the fingers of Elspeth” (90). Reworked, however, the swamp contains the potential for utopia, offering the counter-space and the land workable and malleable for Zora’s utopian plans. This even links to the issue of Zora’s sexual ‘purity’—once Bles fully sees how deep the ‘roots’ of the exploitative system reach, he understands that Zora was innocently caught in this system, and is without fault (recalling the not-­ virgin-­yet-morally-superior heroines of Howland’s novel). The two protagonists symbolically remove the past of displacement, slavery, and continuing exploitation to which Elspeth is an accessory. They do not suffer from historic amnesia, completely aware of the ‘dust’ of the past that Hawthorne’s Blithedalers remained oblivious to, and the swamp is no land to start over, but a chronotope, a space in which to rework history. The ambiguous swamp is thus the key to the novel’s symbolism and formal choices, as well as to Du Bois’s utopian psychology. The upcoming discussion will reiterate that Zora and Bles’s relationship to the swamp mirrors the novel’s strategic employment of nineteenth-century literature and hegemonic national discourses. The Quest of the Silver Fleece reworks the discursive ‘grounds’ that it is given, belaboring various tropes and conventions so that they nourish the beginnings of a Black utopian endeavor. Whereas Imperium in Imperio had ultimately depicted utopian space to be imperially occupied by the United States, The Quest cautiously offers a solution to this problem that does not involve another civil war. Ergo, Du Bois’s novel is utopian also because it subscribes to the idea of malleable space. And, while the United States still provide the framework, the nation will be crucially transformed for and by the utopianism it harbors. While mostly focusing on these national motifs, the novel briefly foreshadows Du Bois’s interest in transnational spatiality (Doku 2014, 48). The opening of Chapter VI, entitled “Cotton,” gestures toward the developing global market: “The cry of the naked was sweeping the world. From the peasant toiling in Russia, the lady lolling in London, the chieftain burning in Africa, and the Esquimaux [sic] freezing in Alaska; from long

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lines of hungry men, from patient sad-eyed women, from old folk and creeping children went up the cry, ‘Clothes, clothes!’ … when the cry of the naked was loudest in the mouths of men, a sudden cloud of workers swarmed between the Cotton and the Naked, spinning and weaving and sewing and carrying the Fleece and mining and minting and bringing the Silver till the Song of Service filled the world” (54). This passage highlights an exceptional role for African American labor in the global economy, and attempts to refashion the association of the international cotton trade and slavery into a positive imagery of crucial and valuable labor. Apart from these lines, though, The Quest of the Silver Fleece’s utopianism operates (symbolically and geographically) well within the United States. Important for the socialist message and the intricate symbolism of the novel, the fleece is special due to “the extent to which its initial planting lies outside of the Cresswell’s [sic] tenant farm system” (Rossetti 2013, 44). Although the Cresswells easily seize the fleece once it is harvested, and, while they are at it, charge Zora rent for living in a treehouse and in this way force her into the sharecropping system, the fleece is infused with Zora and Bles’s momentary belief in their un-estranged, reconciled labor, through which “earth came very near to heaven” (123). The Quest of the Silver Fleece here combines Protestant work ethic, appraisal of individual strive in the American wilderness, and socialist aesthetics that hail manual labor, a combination also employed by other US American authors with socialist proclivities, such as Owen Wister (1860–1938) and Jack London (1876–1916) (Rampersad 1976, 117). Thus, The Quest echoes various motifs of US American exceptionalism, such as the agrarian nation, the frontier, and the self-made man, for the purpose of a socialist and anti-­ colonial utopia. As the story progresses, it becomes clear that turning the swamp from a space of slavery and oppression into benevolent grounds requires hard physical labor, legal and political work, use of organized religion, spiritual fervor, and capital, because it needs to be freed from and fortified against the racism and capitalism that created and so far contained it. In this way, the swamp represents the quest for utopia overall, “not to transcend the American present, but to deploy an alternative, liminal voice” (Lee 1999, 398). Zora’s community is built on grounds infused with the history of African diaspora, abduction, and slavery in America. While The Blithedale Romance, and to a certain extent Imperium in Imperio, find that the historical past limits them, Zora manages to prepare the territory for utopia, the hard (physical and, as will be discussed shortly,

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intellectual) toil fortifying her claim on the land. By tying all the aspects discussed here into a new geographic imagery, Du Bois’s path to utopia challenges Eurocentrism and White supremacy.

‘The Real and Mighty World’ and the ‘Old and Shaken Dream’: Combining Literary Traditions As outlined, the swamp symbolizes that The Quest of the Silver Fleece does not intend to search for presumably empty space, nor to naively swagger into a harmonious future. The narrative follows Zora and Bles’s example: it reworks the grounds at its disposal. In other words, the novel rearranges a host of elements it draws from the cultural archive of the White United States but does not assimilate African American experiences to the point of erasing Black history—an aesthetic intervention that Imperium, signaling the imperial hold of the United States on the very utopian imagination of its Black subjects, denotes as necessary, but does not attempt. Like Zora and Bles, who work the grounds (literally and figuratively) of the non-utopian world, the novel does not have any ‘empty’ space available, and instead belabors the literary materials at hand. The Quest of the Silver Fleece itself acknowledges the dangers of engaging with a canon dominated by White people and supremacist, racist convictions. It mocks “those who ‘know beauty by convention only’ (124), and when Bles presses Zora about her literacy, she naively asks with devastating irony, ‘Don’t white folks make books?’ (46). Du Bois knows that literature is no neutral system; he knows the limits of white patronage” (Lee 1999, 396). Literary references are evoked throughout the novel, but ever aware that ‘white folks make books,’ the novel re-contextualizes these materials so that they serve to reflect Black experiences in the United States. This agenda of refashioning literary traditions is repeatedly symbolized in the new White teacher at Sarah’s school, Mary. In her character, various novelistic conventions are employed to then be ridiculed. Because her head is full of White literature (her college education was dedicated to literary studies) Mary suffers from a dire lack of insight. A “pretty young woman of twenty-three, fair and rather daintily moulded [sic]” (27) scholars have identified her as the “primary target of satire” (Byerman 1992, 63). Upon her introduction, she is immediately singled out as a literary character that is out of place: “In favorable surroundings, she would have been an aristocrat and an epicure. Here she was teaching dirty children,

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and the smell of confused odors and bodily perspiration was to her at times unbearable” (27). The Quest of the Silver Fleece places her in the ‘unfavorable’ South, where she is directly confronted with the color line and poverty. Mary would have been a genteel heroine, of the type featured in “the new books and periodicals and talk of great philanthropies and reforms” (28) which she herself enjoys, and which do not portray the reality of the treatment of Black people as a problem “sordid and small at close range” (28) as she experiences it in Alabama. She sighs at this unpoetic scenery for her own character: “most of this place was such desperate prose” (29). Evidently, Mary does not like the setting nor the role that The Quest ascribes her. Nor can she make sense of what she sees, as she cannot find a fitting comparison for the situation in the South, despite all the poetic imagery at her disposal: “There seemed no analogy that she knew. Here was a unique thing” (32). Her education fails her in deciphering the beauty of the land, the ins and outs of agrarian work, the situation of African Americans in the South, her initial repulsion for Black skin as well as her obvious attraction to Bles (Rampersad 1976, 131). Subsequently, sections which focalize through Mary tend to provide false predictions and misinterpretations of the plot that correspond to popular literary conventions: White women being courted and saved by chivalrous White men; African American men in general favoring White women; wives exerting power by educating their husbands into better human beings and politicians; light-skinned women ending up in the role of the romantic heroine; condescending White benevolence being met with Black eager gratefulness; married people developing into a ridiculously harmonious unit, and so on. Mary’s constant misinterpretations of her environment point to the inadequacy of canonical plotlines for the story that The Quest aims to convey. While her obliviousness is at times amusing—to the delight of her students, she thinks that cotton is harvested by cutting its stalks and that peanuts grow aboveground on branches—her story is also that of a tragic failed marriage with a rich brute, Harry Cresswell (junior). In this, Du Bois takes up a reoccurring US American motif of the time: the marriage of North and South (also briefly touched upon in the chapter on Howland’s Papa’s Own Girl). “North-South marriages came to stand for national reunion, while nuptial vows between pairs of siblings avoided the awkward gendering of sections” (Lee 1999, 391), with maybe the most infamous example to be found in Thomas Dixon, Jr.’s The Clansman (1905). Uniting Northern entrepreneurship with Southern aristocracy, Mary

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Taylor marries Harry Cresswell; Mary’s brother marries Harry’s sister. “Du Bois depicts his cross-sectional marriages as flawed, oppressive unions” (Lee 1999, 391), which literally bring forth death: Mary gives birth to a stillborn baby (Oliver 2005, 36). Uniting White North and White South in marriage and business through the Taylor-Cresswell nuptials and deals reinforces the exploitation of Black and White labor, adding White aristocratic privilege to Northern capitalist calculation. In this union, the North loses the moral standards of the former abolitionist generation and the South drops its genteel pretense. By way of poetic justice, these marriages hurt all the parties involved. “By speaking against a national double-marriage, he fights reconciliation at the expense of black rights” (Lee 1999, 392). Thus, the novel refashions a common romantic trope in a “deconstructive nature” (Byerman 1992, 65) to undermine what would like to appear a happy union of the United States. As mentioned above, readings of The Quest of the Silver Fleece discuss what Rampersad has titled the novel’s ‘generic confusion’ (1976). Such approaches find the novel to be a cornucopia of various significant literary references and metafictional commentaries. In light of this abundance, critics have advocated to redeem the novel: William L. Andrews proclaims “Du Bois was fearless in the face of genre” (2007, xi), and Lee likewise praises “Du Bois the novelist as an expert subverter of genre and text” (1999, 396). Indeed, the novel does juxtapose different genres, narrating parts of the story realistically with extensive fiscal and political details, and others in the manner of a romance, featuring strong sentimental emotions, and preternatural occurrences, “lovers speak[ing] in poetic diction or burst[ing] into operatic song … [and a] Gothic aspect … in the acceptance of supernatural forces at work among the black folk” (Rampersad 1976, 128). Even though this accumulation may strike today’s audience as odd, such a patchwork is not uncommon for the time: “narratives in … romances [around the turn of the century] unfold through an alternation between romantic and realist modes, an alternation between seemingly extraordinary and ordinary worldviews” (Hebard 2015, 77). It is therefore highly productive to consider how these formal aspects substantiate, and contain, content: that is, to ponder possible intentions behind the generic choices and combinations. Critics all find that form and content correspond, as the realistic sections deal with the ‘real’ world, with pragmatism, education, personal ambition, the political elite in Washington, D.C., and a capitalist system dominated by a rich White elite. Significantly, when the White Northern capitalist John Taylor is trying his

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hand in the cotton trade, he is advised “to bring back facts, not dreams” (110). The romance then constitutes a counter-aesthetic of magic, irrationality, love, and Black resistance. Following Lee, readings favoring one of the genres over the other end up missing how The Quest of the Silver Fleece “explores an autonomous space, not to transcend the American present, but to deploy an alternative, liminal voice … The Quest of the Silver Fleece makes a strong political and literary case, for it is cognizant of, but not co-opted by, over-determined structures of language” (1999, 398). That is, the opposition of different perspectives is programmatic, as generic ‘confusion’ constitutes the dialectic of the novel. A reading that focusses on the novel’s intertextuality, as given below, illustrates that combining ‘reality’ and ‘romance’ becomes a mechanism toward utopian production, for the community and for the novel. The novel’s title already indicates that the reworking of the Eurocentric canon extends all the way back to ancient Greece, which the conversation between Bles and Mary about “The Quest of the Golden Fleece” underlines forcibly. As with the other literary works reworked, “The Quest of the Golden Fleece” is not applied par on par: “Du Bois does not simply recast the Greek myth into the modern American South” (Andrews 2007, xxvi). While Elspeth stands in for Medea, and the fleece stands in for cotton,3 the novel rejects the key male heroism of the Greek myth. Bles, in the novel sometimes compared to Jason, might come back from an odyssey, but it is Zora that is obsessed with the fleece and it is she who finds the mythical ‘Way.’ Moreover, stealing the Fleece is no heroic deed, but understood as an act of White capitalist exploitation: [Bles] pointed with one sweep of his long arm to the quivering mass of green-gold foliage that swept from swamp to horizon. “All yon golden fleece is Jason’s now,” he repeated. “I thought it was Cresswell’s,” [Mary] said. “That’s what I mean.”… “I am glad to hear you say that,” she said methodically, “for Jason was a brave adventurer—” “I thought he was a thief.” “Oh, well-those were other times.” “The Cresswells are thieves now.” (35–36) 3  Du Bois had already drawn this analogy between cotton and the Golden Fleece in The Souls of Black Folk (1903). The chapter that offers a sociological study of the situation of Black rural workers in the South is entitled “Of the Quest of the Golden Fleece.”

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In fact, the Cresswells continue to be thieves and even take possession of the silver fleece. The Quest of the Silver Fleece may use the myth’s basic symbolism, but it does more than lend “the appeal of quasi-universal Greco-European myth to a problem novel that probed scientific socioeconomic injustices of the segregated South” (Andrews 2007, xxvi) and is “perhaps better identified as a proto-postcolonial appropriation and revision that remakes the traditional hero as oppressor” (Terry 2008, 54). The novel crucially destabilizes the imperial imagery of odysseys, continuing a literary tradition while reorganizing it. This also becomes evident in the appropriation of Victorian texts, probing, as Daniel Hack points out, “the Victorian novel’s elasticity” (2013, 756). Zora “inspired comparison to the heroines of Victorian fiction from the moment Quest was published” (Hack 2013, 759). Her foremothers hail from Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847), William Makepeace Thackeray’s Vanity Fair (1847–1848), Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter (1850), George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss (1860), and Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1891), all together representing a popular type of tragic heroine in Victorian novels (Braithwaite 1911, 77; Hack 2013, 759). Furthermore, the novel’s plot roughly follows the conventions of the Bildungsroman: “The narrative is linear, the narrative voice impersonal, authoritative, and telepathic. The novel tracks a process of maturation for its main character … with maturation consisting in the acquisition (for lower-class protagonists) of middle-class linguistic competence and cultural knowledge, the chastening of youthful ambitions, and the discovery of a proper vocation and spouse” (Hack 2013, 757–758). Drawing on these particular conventions, The Quest of the Silver Fleece emulates the didactic authority and moral high ground that Victorian novels often assumed (Byerman 1992, 63). Zora does of course not simply follow the script of a tragic Victorian heroine. Her emancipation is more radical than that of the other pre-­ utopian female characters discussed in this book. Thanks to her physical strength and her quick thinking, she saves Bles from a misunderstanding (brought about by, who else, Mary) that would have likely resulted in him being lynched (see the chapter entitled “The Return of Alwyn”). Zora is clearly the heroine of the novel, coming to the aid of her beloved. Part of the novel’s agenda is to rework gender roles. Zora is not only a utopian subject, but a utopian visionary and instigator, and as such resists being cast as an object for mere adoration from the start. Flirting happily, she corrects Bles’s repeated attempts to elevate her for adoration, or to belittle her by diminutives:

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“You are tall and bend like grasses on the swamp,” he said. “And yet look up to you,” she murmured. … “Your little hands are much too frail for work.” “They must grow larger, then, and soon.” … “Your lips—your full and purple lips—were made alone for kissing, not for words.” “They’ll do for both.” (165–166)

Zora defies each of these stylizations, underscoring that for the quest toward a good place, and The Quest of the Silver Fleece, the heroine cannot be a passive, fragile woman from a Victorian novel, and her partner cannot be “judging and weighing her from on high, looking down upon her with thoughts of uplift and development” (399). Zora’s Bildung therefore cumulates in her emancipation from a romantic typecast. She ceases to scheme through and for a man, which is what many other women in the novel attempt to do, manages her own finances, founds the community, represents her own case in court, and employs her former intended to work for the community. Bles must eventually rethink his condescending attitude toward Zora, along with his notions of female purity. Zora was, as she makes clear, not aware that her sexual conduct was against societal norms; when Bles explains that being good and ‘pure’ means “just as good as a woman knows how” (98), Zora concludes that she is ‘pure.’ Moreover, given that the abuse takes place before the plot sets in, she was shockingly young when Cresswell junior assaulted her. Nonetheless, Bles pronounces the conventional conviction for a female protagonist that has been raped: “You should have died!” (170; emphasis in original; see also Lee 1999, 391; Rossetti 2013, 44). In the end, Zora does not seek Bles’s forgiveness: “they will share the ‘comradeship’ of ‘co-­ workers’ on a reform effort in which Alwyn would have to accept, at least at the outset, the role of ‘follower’” (Andrews 2007, xxvii). It is therefore Bles, not Zora, who must atone and repent. She even refuses Bles’s marriage proposal because she first wants “comradeship on the basis of the new friendship” (400) and so Bles has to learn to see her as an equal and ends up accepting her as the superior in the community’s organization. Because she puts her community first, and her desire for her beloved second, Zora’s actions imply that there can be no happy romance in the dystopian reality of the White supremacist South. “Out of a nebulous cloudland she seemed to step; a land where all things floated in strange confusion, but where one thing stood steadfast, and that was love. When

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love was shaken all things moved, but now, at last, for the first time she seemed to know the real and mighty world that stood behind that old and shaken dream” (355). ‘Love’ appears to have clouded her rational assessment of the grander sociopolitical situation. Furthermore, the ‘real and mighty world’ stands behind the ‘dream’ and thus informs everything, including how utopian plans and romantic relationships pan out. Therefore, this part of her life can only be attended to once the community finds its feet. The plot follows suit and waits until after the community is set up to turn to Bles and Zora’s engagement. Here, the link between utopian politics, gender roles, romance, and literary conventions, which had been prominently discussed in the novels from the nineteenth century, resurfaces. In Jim Crow United States, romantic bliss and personal happiness (for Black and White people) are only feasible once the grounds for a radically better place are cleared—private romantic bliss does not constitute the solution for racial violence. Ever aware that “white folks make books” (46) The Quest of the Silver Fleece attempts to challenge the aesthetic standards of the Anglophone nineteenth-century canon and to emphasize that “Black folks is wonderful” (46). Du Bois “incorporates aesthetic reform into his utopian practice, using a preexisting discourse of Oriental romance to assert a nonwhite physical ideal” (Ahmad 2009, 150). By contrast, two light-skinned women, Mary and Emma (who is the illegitimate offspring of a light-­ skinned African American prostitute and a Cresswell), are denied roles as heroines: “By refusing to privilege light skin and passivity, [Du Bois] argues instead for black unity and activism” (Lee 1999, 392). The silver fleece grows of African and American components; an implicit comment on racial ‘purity’ versus ‘synthesis,’ and geographical belonging. The novel and the commune include characters from a mixed racial background, such as Emma, who, like Zora, grows up with Elspeth. Yet, Emma is far from being a ‘tragic’ stereotype. She is “a born nurse” (419) and a valuable member of the community. Zora also does not seem to have any intentions of creating a racially purified, or segregated, community and lets the White working class likewise profit from the community’s institutions. However, The Quest of the Silver Fleece focuses on advertising distinctly Black aesthetics, centering on a Black woman and praising her dark skin, dark eyes, closely curled hair, and purple lips. Zora’s beauty is positively magical, inspiring mystical memories of “the dusky magnificence of some bejewelled [sic] barbarian queen” (223) in the bitter and racist Mrs. Vanderpool. Zora’s inherent royalty thus contributes to forming “a

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resistant counternarrative” (Ahmad 2009, 146) to the Victorian novels that revolve around White women moving up and down a social ladder. While resembling a set of Victorian heroines in terms of her beauty and her mise-­en-­scène, she is a Black woman who improves her social standing, to then work to disassemble the social ladder altogether. As the plot moves through different generic modes, Zora’s experiences in these different literary settings allow her to become the agent of change, and the visionary of the utopian project. Within the more mystic sections, the imperialism and capitalism of the United States are contested and rejected. Zora is “of more fantastic origin” (Rampersad 1976, 118) than Bles, and precisely this fantastic element, her dreaming, enables her utopian production. Eventually, Zora and Bles return from cities in the North to the magical swamp, to the ‘other’ space from whence part of Zora’s utopian imagination comes. However, previous readings that hail Zora’s unconventionality have overlooked that she needs to acquire the legal training and the economic expertise to carve out the space for the community through her Bildung (the exception to this being Arnold Rampersad’s 1976 analysis). Only after Zora is confronted with an overview of the systemic oppression, and only when her romance with Bles seems forever out of reach, she begins to think systematically and thus utopian. The realist section serves to instill knowledge while going beyond the pattern of the Bildungsroman according to which the protagonist would at best improve her social standing as she is initiated into middle-­ class propriety. Critics have noted the influence of American muckraking novels on Du Bois’s debut novel (see, e.g., Byerman 1992; Oliver 2005; Terry 2008; van Wienen and Kraft 2007). Muckraking conventions—weaving novelistic storylines with factual depictions of injustices, corruption, and so on— are employed to provide Zora, Bles, and the reader with the necessary systemic understanding. The realism of the novel has been compared to Frank Norris’s The Octopus (1901)/The Pit (1903) (Braithwaite 1911, 77; Oliver 2005, 32; Rampersad 1976, 117), famous muckraking novels that laid bare the multiple socioeconomic layers to the exploitation brought about by the wheat industry, and Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle (1906) (van Wienen and Kraft 2007, 69), which exposed the horrid working conditions in the meat-packing industry. Similar to The Quest of the Silver Fleece, both novels use realistic and sentimental elements to depict complex economic and political interrelations and their impact on individual lives (Rampersad 1976, 127; Andrews 2007, xxxv). They also adopt a more

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factual tone for those parts of the plot that relate to the market and to the political apparatus. “But unlike these white writers, [Du Bois] dramatizes the racism and intransigent color line that made a mockery of the word ‘progress’ for most blacks” (Oliver 2005, 39). Various instances in the novel are thinly, if at all, concealed attacks on real institutions, people, and practices (Oliver 2005, 35–41), especially when it comes to the White power elite, their hypocrisy, and their hand in the cotton market (Byerman 1992, 61). For example, the novel includes depictions of the Southern Education Board (SEB), which argued that Black people were best suited to menial labor; discussions surrounding the Education Bill of 1900; the drawbacks of Booker T.  Washington’s politics of accommodation  (see Washington 2014); and the disillusionment of African Americans with the Republican Party (Oliver 2005, 40). In the tradition of muckraking, the novel also shifts the focus from individual villainy (as often preferred by Victorian novels and plantation romances) and does not end on “individualized solutions that rescue key characters while leaving the larger problems untouched, or envisioning merely a kinder, gentler version of the status quo” (Hack 2013, 762)—generic conventions that the previous chapters on Imlay, Hawthorne, and Howland likewise addressed. Muckraking conventions are therefore a useful tool to underline the urgency for social change of utopian proportions, and to depict the multiple layers of the conflicts among class, and, in The Quest, race. In these realistic sections, Zora is thoroughly disillusioned from her assumption that “right always triumphs” (328). Painfully, she has to quit her magical devils and dreams to understand the complex mechanisms of oppression, and the implications of this non-utopian reality for her utopianism. Realism confronts her (and the reader) with the ‘world,’ exposing the socioeconomic system that any utopia must take into account. On her return to the South, she has obtained “wider clearer vision” (355) and has come “out of a nebulous cloudland” (355). With “new eyes” (355), seeing realities instead of the “shadows” (355) of her childhood, Zora sets out to realize her utopian intentions. Applying her new knowledge, she no longer engages in fantastic escapisms that allowed for her ‘difference’ in the first place. This denotes the necessity of not solely relying on primitivism and mysticism, which are “insufficient to advance a people in an industrial economy” (Elder 1973, 358); as is the problematic focus on the individual that arises with romance and Gothic aesthetics. Zora’s transformation and her subsequent political efficiency demonstrate that White supremacy’s hold on education represses the Black population in the

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South. Only the protagonists’ exposure to high education, economics, and politics supplies them with the insight, the tools, and the capital for their utopian endeavor. This exposure is necessary, as putting Zora’s ‘dreams’ into practice requires various skills, a political mindset, and knowledge of different institutions. Thus, Zora has to expand her horizons beyond her local enclave in the South, the United States, and her time. Education allows her to travel “on worlds, and worlds of worlds” (252), immersing herself in reading. She becomes cosmopolitan in her room, as space, time, race, and gender cannot contain her: “She gossiped with old Herodotus across the earth to the black and blameless Ethiopians; she saw the sculptured glories of Phidias marbled amid the splendor of the swamp; she listened to Demosthenes and walked the Appian Way with Cornelia—while all New York streamed beneath her window. She saw the drunken Goths reel upon Rome and heard the careless Negroes yodle as they galloped to Toomsville … the Paris of Clovis, and St. Louis; of Louis the Great, and Napoleon III; of Balzac, and her own Dumas. She tasted the mud and comfort of thick old London, and the while wept with Jeremiah and sang with Deborah, Semiramis, and Atala. Mary of Scotland and Joan of Arc held her dark hands in theirs, and Kings lifted up their sceptres [sic]” (251–252). Evoking this multitude of literary traditions, The Quest of the Silver Fleece refuses to glorify intellectual seclusion and emphasizes the necessity of classical education to reorder the present. Another such bibliography is given when the grown-up Zora shows Bles her collection of books: fittingly, she has “Plato’s Republic, Gorky’s ‘Comrades,’ a Cyclopedia of Agriculture, Balzac’s novels, Spencer’s ‘First Principles,’ Tennyson’s Poems” (399) on the shelves in her office. What appears to be ‘generic confusion’ is therefore and intentional arrangement charged with meaning. Instead of opting for the one or the other, The Quest of the Silver Fleece places realism and romance in a dialectic exchange. As its preface states, the novel attempts to tell the “truth” “well” and “beautifully” (11), to criticize the status quo and to take a step toward envisioning how to arrive at a utopian future. In this way, the various modes discussed reflect on political ideologies. In the end, Zora understands the political games played and can, with her extensive knowledge, conceive of a solution to halt the exploitative schemes of the Northern capitalists and the Southern aristocracy. Her return to the swamp nonetheless emphasizes that she never gives up her origins, which inform her activism: by contrast, the Black and the White political elite of

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the nation provide “a negative object lesson—the emptiness of a life without a mission” (Andrews 2007, xxvii). The Quest’s “cultural cross-fertilization and cultural pluralism” (Rampersad 1976, 6) and its host of literary references and nods toward literary conventions must therefore, as outlined, not be understood as an alignment within these traditions. Instead, Du Bois belabors them to construct out of them a signpost to a radically better place. If fin-de-siècle utopian novels as well as North-South romances written by White authors attempted to heal the wounds of the Civil War, then so does The Quest. Du Bois’s solution does not rely on the literary erasure of African Americans but rests on overcoming racial boundaries in a utopia that originates with the Black population of the United States.

‘A New National Errand’: Appropriating the National Tradition In order to effectively utilize the national utopian tradition, The Quest of the Silver Fleece needs to navigate around the pitfalls that Imperium in Imperio and The Blithedale Romance both grappled with: repeating a history of failed utopian attempts and forsaken ideals. For this, Du Bois refashions the national utopian tradition—drawing on no other than Hawthorne—for African American characters so that they can initiate radical change in the United States. In this way, The Quest provides the critical counterpoint to the embrace of utopia as a narrative past, employs the link of utopia and United States for present and future practice, and disrupts the restrictions that a national White framework has placed on the utopian fantasy mechanisms of African Americans. The radical novelty of Zora’s community is assigned a White English and US American heritage: “To wake a nation, The Silver Fleece repossesses a powerful tradition of dissent by advocating a new national errand— this time with blacks as the chosen people, this time not as a city on a hill, but on land redeemed from the swamp” (Lee 1999, 396). Focus in The Quest of the Silver Fleece lies decidedly on the situation of African American people. Even though an older Du Bois would express a “utopian desire for an egalitarian social and economic order for the ‘peoples’ of the world” (Doku 2014, 8), for an anti-colonial cosmopolitanism (Ahmad 2009, 150), The Quest only hints at such cosmopolitan possibilities and does not mention Native Americans, nor does it feature other People of Color (but

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for one sentence about India). Instead, it engages much more emphatically with the relationship between utopia and the United States, integrating Black people into this discourse to redirect its trajectory. Fascinated by “the romantic vision of the state, with its stress on the authentic geist, spirit, or soul of the nation” (Rampersad 1976, 45), Du Bois attempts to bring together race and nation, African and American. Neither the concept of nation nor the United States in particular are rejected, even though the United States would be radically reformed if Zora’s community succeeds. Already, Colonel Cresswell fears that the project will inspire others to follow: “Such an example before the tenants of the Black Belt would be fatal” (408). Of course, a similar utopian proliferation was envisioned by many utopian communalists throughout the nineteenth century. The main interaction between community and nation occurs on an intertextual level, via the national narrative. Next to merging virgin land discourse and dreams of an agrarian nation with the history of Black resistance in the swamp discussed above, Zora is stylized as the descendant of various utopians from the Massachusetts Bay Colony. She and her community inherit the traditions of utopian practice, dating all the way back to colonial times. By reworking the land, transforming the aesthetics, and rerouting the trajectory of the national utopian narrative, The Quest of the Silver Fleece prepares for an African American utopia. Especially through the evocation of Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter (1850), the community becomes embedded in the national utopian framework. Despite the community being situated in the Black Belt of the US American South, Zora’s community relates back to colonial New England. Du Bois’s childhood and youth in New England are commonly said to have strongly influenced him. References in The Quest of the Silver Fleece attest to Rampersad’s assertion that “Puritan ethics and aesthetics held him fast” (1976, 23). For one, the school’s director Sarah and the teacher Mary both repeatedly evoke “New England” (28, 29, 34, 58, 71, 86) sentiments. Sarah is an unambiguously good person, “honest, inscrutable, determined, with a conscience … and utterly unselfish” (28). Through the younger, White, Northern Mary the novel “laments the loss of Northern moral vigor” (Rampersad 1976, 126), as she neglects acting according to a moral codex, even though she still can tell when she diverts from it. When she lies to deflect the wrath of her father-in-law and then realizes that this lie fatally endangers Bles, “the full horror of the thing burst upon her. Her own silly misapprehension, the infatuation of Alwyn for Zora, her thoughtless—no, vindictive—betrayal of him to something worse than

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death” (387). And when Mary betrays Sarah’s cause for quality education for Black children, Mary’s “conscience was uncomfortable” (149). Mary’s principles are further corrupted when she comes “to sweet communion” (284) with Cresswell junior, a Southerner. Only after her marriage fails does she begin to regain her integrity. It is African Americans who revive New England ethics: Sarah, the epitome of these ideals, successfully instills her integrity and morality in her Black students, especially in Bles and Zora. Ideologically, the utopian community thus reaches across the North-­ South divide. By alluding to Puritan settlements, The Quest of the Silver Fleece frequently draws on White New England history. For example, Lee identifies “allusions to John Cotton’s work, and … a famous dispute between Cotton and Roger Williams” (1999, 394) in the novel, which relate Zora’s utopianism to seventeenth-century colonists. Echoing the Puritan mission in America as famously outlined in Samuel Danforth’s sermon “Errand into the Wilderness” (1670), Sarah wonders about her student: “What can a half-taught black girl do in the wilderness?” (335). In the same vein, Sarah’s school recalls the way John Winthrop (1630)  had outlined the responsibility of the new settlements when her project is described as “a light [that] had not simply shone in darkness, but had lighted answering beacons” (355). Lee even argues that Zora parallels Anne Hutchinson (1591–1643): “Zora’s schooling is ‘a revelation of grace’ (124); she preaches a visionary sermon; she founds a community of spirited exiles outside the pale of society. [She is the successor in spirit to] a powerful leader who took followers with her into banishment—a female who dared give religious instruction based on her own revelations of grace” (1999, 395). Zora’s utopian practice may be new in  location, the details of its intentions, and its conscious contestation of White supremacist ideology and capitalism; it nonetheless is very much US American. The most obvious evocation of New England heritage are the intertextual references to Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter (1850). The Quest of the Silver Fleece frequently draws on Hawthorne’s depiction of the Puritans and “whatever Utopia of human virtue and happiness they might originally project” (Hawthorne 1850, 36). As Lee ingeniously points out, Zora is both Pearl and Hester Prynne: “Zora is an ‘elf-girl’, Pearl Prynne an ‘elfish child’. Zora’s ‘birdlike laughter’ echoes Pearl’s ‘bird-like voice’. Both girls are mystical daughters of sin; both are pagan, passionate children. Both represent untutored goodness and befuddle their betters with innocent questions” (1999, 395). The first description of Zora, then still

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a girl, in The Quest of the Silver Fleece emulates Hester’s first appearance in The Scarlet Letter. Zora’s first appearance in the novel—“Amid this mighty halo, as on clouds of flame, a girl was dancing” (14); “her dark, round, and broad-browed head and strangely beautiful face were poised almost defiantly, crowned with a misty mass of waveless hair, and lit by the velvet radiance of two wonderful eyes” (15)—echoes the description of Hester at the beginning of the plot of The Scarlet Letter—“her beauty shone out, and made a halo of the misfortune and ignominy in which she was enveloped”; “She had dark and abundant hair, so glossy that it threw off the sunshine with a gleam, and a face which, besides being beautiful from regularity of feature and richness of complexion, had the impressiveness belonging to a marked brow and deep black eyes” (Hawthorne 1850, 40). Both are facing a crowd that lusts to undress them, and both are introduced with focus on their sexuality; not to equate Hester’s making love and the sexual abuse inflicted on Zora but for the ostracism that both women experience as a result. Both confront this crowd tall, glowing, and surrounded by a halo. Pertinently, on Zora’s first day to school, her attire is described: “hanging from shoulder to ankle, in formless, clinging folds, blazed the scarlet gown” (53), and this appearance is, like Hester’s wearing of the Scarlet Letter, regarded as “immodest” (67). In both cases, the scarlet item of cloth marks them as different, as sexual, but also beloved: Zora by Bles, who got her the dress, and Hester by Arthur Dimmesdale. Both do needlework, and for both, this has a special significance. Hester’s finely stitched letter gives her a reputation as a good seamstress, while Zora re-fashions the red dress, and will later alter her clothes to make herself look more respectable, and she works the silver fleece into a magnificent wedding gown. Both overcome their status as an outcast in part through this labor (Lee 1999, 395). On the other hand, The Quest of the Silver Fleece does not clearly cite The Blithedale Romance, and parallels could be coincidental: Zora and Zenobia are both founders of a community, are sexually experienced, and are only referred to by their respective first names, which start with a Z.  Nonetheless, Zora seems to wear not Zenobia’s, but Hester Prynne’s, insignia. However, Zora’s quest goes farther than Hester’s as she strives for more than an individual solution to her situation. “Du Bois’s heroine … is not, like Hester, safely relegated to the margins of dominant culture. … Du Bois suggests that the New England project is now carried forward by

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black dissenters—by a new oppressed people seeking spiritual freedom … Hester nearly convinces Dimmesdale to run ‘into the wilderness’ … Zora does not linger for Bles’s approval. She goes to the swamp; he finally follows; and together they join a ‘free community’ quite unlike the private departure Hester urges on her minister” (Lee 1999, 395–396). Zora’s utopian community channels the utopian heritage, subsequently developing, transforming, and fulfilling the errand in the wilderness. Like Griggs’s Belton Piedmont, Du Bois’s Black protagonist outmatches the developmental stages of White civilization. In this transplantation of utopian New England (read: Northern) history into the South, her utopianism provides an alternative to the reunion of the nation that the collaboration of White Northern capitalist industrialism and Southern planter aristocracy sought to bring about. This chapter has now compiled various popular motifs and figures of the national narrative as they occur in The Quest of the Silver Fleece. Importantly, however, the novel does not simply produce a national narrative out of well-established symbols, and the utopian community founded by African Americans does not intend to assimilate Black people into the existing non-utopian United States. Akin to The Blithedale Romance, The Quest merges historical utopian projects into a tradition. This tradition is then transplanted to blossom in the Southern swamp under the leadership of a Black woman. That is why Andrews can praise The Quest’s “political boldness about sexual, gender, and economic institutions, as well as its determined attempt to portray the ‘race problem’ as a national issue demanding a national fictional canvas on which to portray it and a reorientation of national consciousness and priorities in order to resolve it” (2007, xxvii). Uniting this radical and multidimensional change with colonial and White US American ancestors, African mysticism, and African American history, the utopian quest is still rendered national, while modifying US American capitalistic ideology, gender roles, and racism. Furthermore, it moves the utopian space from a romantic past into a romance of the present. By the appropriations elaborated here, the novel uses national building blocks to conceptualize the aesthetics for a utopia that is firmly grounded on African American experiences, instead of erasing them. The utopian practice and the novel thus bring together the “two unreconciled strivings” (Du Bois 1903, 5) of Black people in the United States.

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‘The Battle Scarcely Even Begun’: Decolonizing Utopian Space Despite the happy ending brought about by these intricate arrangements of symbols and conventions, the novel’s final words threaten war and destruction: “Lend me thine ears, O God the Reader, whose Fathers aforetime sent mine down into the land of Egypt, into this House of Bondage. Lay not these words aside for a moment’s phantasy, but lift up thine eyes upon the Horror in this land; —the maiming and mocking and murdering of my people, and the prisonment [sic] of their souls. Let my people go, O Infinite One, lest the world shudder at The End” (434). This envoi poses a challenge that some critics sidestep, leaving it out of otherwise insightful readings (e.g., Lee 1999; Rampersad 1976; Oliver 2005)—a lamentable oversight, as Du Bois in these concluding lines makes a broader statement regarding utopianism and provides an explanation for the cluster of plot twists toward the end of the novel. In the closing chapters, the fictional utopian community is in constant conflict with its environment. The non-utopian facts of the contemporary world continue to disrupt Zora’s endeavors and vice versa, resulting in a rushed back-and-forth of activism and White reactionary violence. From Cresswell senior’s sudden deathbed conversion—he rues his treatment of the Black workers, acknowledges Emma as his offspring, and bequeaths his money to her—to yet more well-intentioned but potentially harmful meddling by Mary; from budding collaborations between Black and White working class to mob and police violence instigated by the Cresswells, to court justice after the lynching of two black men, the many and sudden plot changes in the final chapters are the climax of the narrative’s oscillation between affirming utopian agency and decrying outrageous injustice. Through these rapid changes, the precarious situation of Zora’s utopia is emphasized. Mary once again misunderstands the story she is a part of: “Well, the battle’s over, isn’t it?” (430). Zora has to explain to her: “Think of the servile black folk, the half awakened restless whites, the fat land waiting for the harvest, the masses panting to know—why, the battle is scarcely even begun” (430). Venturing for an African American utopia is not a quick, nor an easy, endeavor. Nonetheless, the envoi insists that African American—US American and Black—utopianism is the only solution ‘lest the world shutter at the end.’ The novel thus closes with a warning for the White reader, who is sardonically referred to as “God the Reader” and “Infinite One” (434)

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“whose Fathers aforetime send mine down into the land of Egypt” (434). This reader is not to hinder the African American population in their emancipation, in their exodus to a better future (importantly, this is a metaphoric, not a geographical, exodus). “Let my people go … lest the world shudder at The End” (434). Continuing the status quo will have dire consequences. While the narrative’s plots and aesthetic choices lead up to the establishment of a utopian community, the final words stress the urgency of realizing this vision and threaten an impending war. Like Delany’s Blake, or the Huts of America (1859, 1861–1862), Griggs’s Imperium in Imperio (1899), and Of One Blood by Pauline Hopkins (1903),  the envoi of the refashioned ‘Victorian’ romance harbingers a strand of African American futurisms of the twentieth century: “Black Militant Near-Future Fiction” (Tal 2002) (see also Chap. 6). True, Cresswell senior’s sudden change of heart has puzzled critics and raised concerns as to the significance of including such a Dickensian plot-­ twist, especially since the hateful-then-suddenly-benevolent patriarch á la Ebenezer Scrooge had gone out of fashion (Hack 2013, 762). Cresswell’s conversion may be a dated trope, but his money, and that of the rich White Mrs. Vanderpool, who undergoes a similar conversion, is nonetheless needed. Significantly, Mrs. Vanderpool at one point declares: “I am the world” (327)—the world that needs to be changed. The community’s reliance on money from outside, mostly in the form of donations, and Zora’s intentions to continue in the capitalist system through the cotton trade, may strike those unfamiliar with nineteenth-century communal practices as illogical (see Byerman 1992, 70). Yet, many utopian communities were set up and financed by people with capital, such as Robert Owen (1771–1858), Jean-Baptiste André Godin (1817–1888), Albert Kinsey Owen (1847–1916), and Ernest de Boissière (1811–1894), and, of course, Marie Howland’s Count von Fraunstein. The many communes that faltered because of monetary issues illustrate that capital is often necessary to change the course of events. Furthermore, White money financed the foundation of African American utopian communities in the nineteenth century, such as Israel Hill.4 In fact, in The Quest of the Silver Fleece White capital is the condition for the peaceful tactics of utopian practice. White capitalists must contribute to avoiding the horrible end 4  Israel Hill officially began in 1810/11 and, according to the historical marker in Farmville, Virginia, remained “a vigorous black community into the twentieth century” (see Ely 2005; Sargent 2020).

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predicted—the pivotal war that Imperium in Imperium threatens. The old plantation owner does as the envoi advises: “Let Go” of the formerly enslaved population and so avoid a race war. The poem and Vanderpool’s and Cresswell’s conversion do not deny Black agency but stress the necessity of White collaboration for a peaceful transition toward a good world, as opposed to class and race war. The poem at the end of the novel also functions as a final commentary on the dangers of the literary choices made, in this case the happy ending and the utopian vision it hints at. Hitherto unnoticed in literary analysis, the envoi offers a concluding statement on Du Bois’s utopian psychology. The last words and the violent escalation of White hate in the final chapters caution of misunderstanding the intention for its completion, of confusing utopia in fiction with a good place established, and of mistaking utopian striving for utopia realized: “Lay not these words aside for a moment’s phantasy, but lift up thine eyes upon the Horror in this land” (434). The plot’s resolution remains a “moment’s phantasy” (434). Utopian fiction is then a forceful recommendation, not a prognosis: an expression of dissent and of sociopolitical urgency, not of naïve optimism. To underline this point and to forego ambivalences, the novel threatens that the United States are in danger of coming to an end that the world will ‘shudder at’; a dystopian perspective of a race war. The establishment of the utopian community is not meant to obscure or romanticize the reality of Black suffering in the United States but to direct the gaze at “the maiming and mocking and murdering of my people, and the prisonment of their souls” (434), while at the same time providing a challenge to this imprisonment, suggesting new forms of agency against White capitalism. US American utopianism in this way is, again, an obligation to act and is not contained in the past. Drawing on nineteenth-century utopian practice, The Quest of the Silver Fleece fortifies the connection between the nation and utopia and calls for it to result in immediate practice. Even though Du Bois would come to endorse a different type of spatiality, a different variety of socialism, and ultimately a different continent and nation, the novel provides a strikingly nationalist example of utopianism. The Quest of the Silver Fleece, like Imperium in Imperio, places African American people at the center of US American utopianism and of the general survival of the United States’ founding ideals and union. Of course, other works by African American writers—such as Octavia Butler, Samuel E. Delany, Ralph Ellison, Toni Morrison, and Colson Whitehead, to name just a few acclaimed authors that emerged since the

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1950s—evoke more fantastic visions, venture across oceans, into space, into a scientifically advanced future, or draw up alternative histories. In this context of so-called Afrofuturisms,5 it is noteworthy that the two novels discussed here do not move into a closed off space, but denote, and try to rewrite, the frictions between reality and utopia, between enclave and nation, in the United States, and at the same time would accept the nation’s destruction if White people continue to refuse to fulfill the nation’s promise of equality.

References Ahmad, Dohra. 2009. Landscapes of Hope. Anti-Colonial Utopianism in America. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Andrews, William L. 2007. Introduction. In W.E.B.  Du Bois, The Quest of The Silver Fleece, ed. Henry Louis Gates Jr., xxv–xxvii. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Braithwaite, William Stanley. 1911. What to Read. The Crisis 3 (2): 77–78. Brawley, Benjamin. 1916. The Negro in American Fiction. The Dial 60 (718): 445–450. Brontë, Charlotte. [1847] 1994. Jane Eyre. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Byerman, Keith. 1992. Race and Romance: “The Quest of the Silver Fleece” as Utopian Narrative. American Literary Realism, 1870–1910 24 (3): 58–71. Coleman, Finnie D. 2007. Sutton E.  Griggs and the Struggle Against White Supremacy. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press. Danforth, Samuel. [1670] 2006. A Brief Recognition of New England’s Errand into the Wilderness. Transcribed and edited by Paul Royster. Faculty Publications UNL Libraries. Delany, Martin Robison. [1859, 1861–1862] 2017. Blake, or, The Huts of America. Edited by Jerome J. McGann. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Dixon, Thomas. 1905. The Clansman. An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan. Doubleday Page & Co. Doku, Samuel Obed. 2014. World Imagined Community: W.  E. B.  Du Bois, Cosmopolitanism, and the Utopian Desire for an Egalitarian Social Order. Dissertation, Howard University, Washington, DC. http://gradworks.proquest.com/36/89/3689257.html. Accessed 2 March 2017. 5  As introductions to the topic of Afrofuturisms, I am suggesting Kalí Tal, “That Just Kills Me: Black Militant Near-Future Fiction” (2002), Ytasha Womack, Afrofuturism: The World of Black Sci-Fi and Fantasy Culture (2013), Lisa Yaszek “Afrofuturism in American Science Fiction” (2015), and Alex Zamalin Black Utopia: The History of an Idea from Black Nationalism to Afrofuturism (2019).

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Douglass, Fredric. 1852. The Heroic Slave. John P. Jewett and Co. Du Bois, William Edward Burghardt. 1899. The Philadelphia Negro. A Social Study. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. ———. [1903] 2007. The Souls of Black Folk. Edited by Brent Hayes Edwards. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 1911. The Quest of the Silver Fleece. Chicago: A. C. McClurg & Co. ———. 1926. Criteria of Negro Art. Crisis 32: 290–297. ———. [1928] 2007. Dark Princess. A Romance. Edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Elder, Arlene A. 1973. Swamp versus Plantation: Symbolic Structure in W. E. B. Du Bois’ The Quest of the Silver Fleece. Phylon 34 (4): 358–367. Eliot, George. 1860. The Mill on the Floss. Edinburgh: William Blackwood. Ely, Melvin Patrick. 2005. Israel on the Appomattox. A Southern Experiment in Black Freedom from the 1790s through the Civil War. New York: Vintage. Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. 2007. The Black Letters on the Sign: W.E.B. Du Bois and the Canon. In W.E.B. Du Bois, The Quest of The Silver Fleece, ed. Henry Louis Gates Jr., xi–xxvii. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Griggs, Sutton E. 1899. Imperium in Imperio. A Study of the Negro Race Problem. Cincinnati: The Editor Publishing Company. Hack, Daniel. 2013. The Last Victorian Novel: II. The Quest of the Silver Fleece. In The Oxford Handbook of the Victorian Novel, ed. Lisa Rodensky, 755–763. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hardy, Thomas. [1891] 1991. Tess of the d’Urbervilles. New York: Norton. Hawthorne, Nathaniel. [1850] 2005. The Scarlet Letter and Other Writings. New York: Norton. ———. 1852. The Blithedale Romance. Boston: Ticknor, Reed, and Fields. Hebard, Andrew. 2015. Race Conservation and Imperial Sovereignty in Sutton Griggs’s Imperium in Imperio. Arizona Quarterly: A Journal of American Literature, Culture, and Theory 71 (3): 59–83. Hopkins, Pauline E. [1903] 2009. Of One Blood or, The Hidden Self. Edited By Deborah E. McDowell. New York: Washington Square Press. Howland, Marie. 1874. Papa’s Own Girl. New York: Jewett. Imlay, Gilbert. 1793. The Emigrants, or the History of an Expatriated Family. 3 vols. London: A. Hamilton. Kindergarten Primary Magazine. 1912. Book Notes. 25: 59. September. Kostelanetz, Richard. 1985. Fictions for a Negro Politics: The Neglected Novels of W.E.B.  Du Bois. In Critical Essays on W.  E. B.  Du Bois, ed. William L. Andrews, 173–194. Boston: Hall. Lee, Maurice. 1999. Du Bois the Novelist: White Influence, Black Spirit, and The Quest of the Silver Fleece. African American Review 33 (3): 389–400. McClurg, A. 1912. A Classified Catalogue of Selected Standard Books Suitable for a Public Library. 4th ed. Chicago: A. C. McClurg & Co.

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Melamed, Jodi. 2006. W. E. B. Du Bois’s UnAmerican End. African American Review 40 (3): 533–550. Norris, Frank. 1901. The Octopus. A Story of California. New  York: Doubleday Page & Co. ———. 1903. The Pit. A Story of Chicago. New York: Doubleday Page & Co. Oliver, Lawrence J. 2005. W. E. B. Du Bois’ “The Quest of the Silver Fleece” and Contract Realism. American Literary Realism 38 (1): 32–46. Pitzer, Donald E. 2013. Developmental Communalism into the Twenty-First Century. In The Communal Idea in the 21st Century, ed. Eliezer Ben-Rafael, Yaacov Oved, and Menachem Topel, 33–52. Leiden: Brill. Rampersad, Arnold. 1976. The Art and Imagination of W.E.B. Du Bois. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Rasberry, Vaughn. 2016. Race and the Totalitarian Century. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Rossetti, Gina M. 2013. Turning the Corner: Romance as Economic Critique in Norris’s Trilogy of Wheat and Du Bois’s The Quest of the Silver Fleece. Studies in American Naturalism 7 (1): 39. Sargent, Lyman Tower. 2013. Theorizing Intentional Community in the Twenty-­ First Century. In The Communal Idea in the 21st Century, ed. Eliezer Ben-­ Rafael, Yaacov Oved, and Menachem Topel, 53–72. Leiden: Brill. ———. 2020. African Americans and Utopia: Visions of a Better Life. Utopian Studies 31 (1): 23–96. Sayers, Daniel O. 2014. A Desolate Place for a Defiant People. The Archaeology of Maroons, Indigenous Americans, and Enslaved Laborers in the Great Dismal Swamp. Gainesville: University Press of Florida; Society for Historical Archaeology. Sinclair, Upton. [1906] 2015. The Jungle. New York: Signet Classic. Stowe, Harriet Beecher. [1856] 2000. Dred. A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp. Edited by Robert Steven Levine. North Carolina: University of North Carolina Press. Tal, Kalí. 2002. That Just Kills Me: Black Militant Near-Future Fiction. Social Text 20 (2): 65–91. Terry, Jennifer. 2008. The Fiction of W.E.B.  Du Bois. In The Cambridge Companion to W.  E. B.  Du Bois, ed. Shamoon Zamir, 48–63. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Thackeray, William Makepeace. [1847–1848] 1992. Vanity Fair. A Novel Without a Hero. Oxford: Oxford University Press. van Wienen, Mark, and Julie Kraft. 2007. How the Socialism of W. E. B. Du Bois Still Matters: Black Socialism in “The Quest of the Silver Fleece”—And Beyond. African American Review 41 (1): 67–85. Warren, Nagueyalti. 2014. His Deep and Abiding Love: W.E.B. Du Bois, Gender Politics, and Black Studies. Phylon 51 (1): 18–29.

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Washington, Booker T. 2014. Extract from Up from Slavery [1901]: The Atlanta Exposition Address [1895]. In The Wiley Blackwell Anthology of African American Literature, ed. Gene Andrew Jarrett, 901–908. Hoboken: Wiley Blackwell. Winthrop, John. [1630] 1838. A Modell of Christian Charity: Written on Board of the Arabella, On the Atlantic Ocean. Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society 3 (7): 31–48. Womack, Ytasha. 2013. Afrofuturism. The World of Black Sci-Fi and Fantasy Culture. Chicago: Chicago Review Press. Yaszek, Lisa. 2015. Afrofuturism in American Science Fiction. In The Cambridge Companion to American Science Fiction, ed. Eric Carl Link and Gerry Canavan, 58–69. New York: Cambridge University Press. Zamalin, Alex. 2019. Black Utopia. The History of an Idea from Black Nationalism to Afrofuturism. New York: Columbia University Press. Zamir, Shamoon. 2008. Introduction. In The Cambridge Companion to W. E. B. Du Bois, ed. Shamoon Zamir, 1–6. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

CHAPTER 8

‘To Begin the World Over Again’: Conclusion

In order to conclude the discussion presented here, I will first take a brief look backwards. To understand the seemingly direct link between utopianism and the United States, I traced the constituent parts of this relationship throughout a set of literary examples. The narratives delineate the limitations of utopian fantasy mechanisms in connection with the United States as they are engaged with utopianism in various ways. They do so either by evoking a national utopian teleology or by romanticizing a utopian past, or both. In Gilbert Imlay’s The Emigrants (1793), the settlers erect their utopia on land that is closed off, ‘empty,’ and outside of history, untouched but ready to be touched by European civilization. This endeavor to start over appeared practically feasible at the dawn of the nineteenth century. The emphasis on a trench that secures the emigrants’ utopian enclave at the frontier illustrates contemporary beliefs regarding geographical determinism and the “power to begin the world over again” (to recall Thomas Paine’s rallying cry for independence 1776, 40), and the potential of such utopianism to disrupt national coherency and expansion. While Imlay’s novel sincerely promotes agrarian life on American soil, such romantic notions amount to nothing more than a “cherished anachronism” (Paul 2014, 317) in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Blithedale Romance (1852). Hawthorne’s novel quite self-consciously constructs a tradition of failed utopian attempts, and then harvests it for materials for romance on US American ground, resulting in an intentionally awkward

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story  that mocks the national-utopian narrative. And yet, in Marie Howland’s Papa’s Own Girl (1874), the United States hold utopian promise—the nation, internally conflicted by the aftermath of the Civil War, the color line, demands for women’s suffrage, and class conflict, will be harmoniously re-united by utopian socialism, which will also result in the radical improvement of romantic relationships. Papa’s Own Girl also illustrates that utopianism can be both, progressive (moving toward a more socially just economy and women’s economic emancipation) and conservative (maintaining national cohesion, racial segregation, and the institution of marriage). Where Howland’s utopian imagination glosses over conflicts, other authors have highlighted them and seized at the disruptive potential of utopian promises embedded into the nation’s founding history. Sutton E.  Griggs’s Imperium in Imperio (1899) most drastically illustrates the limitations to utopian production. The Imperium, unable to implement any change because of its ideological boundedness, that is, its location within another empire, symbolically remains without geographic territory. As the respective chapter pointed out, Griggs’s rendition of utopian practice strongly emphasizes the hold that the non-utopian, or rather dystopian, reality has over the African American population, and that the resulting dissonance between reality and national narrative is an explosive combination. W.E.B. Du Bois’s The Quest of the Silver Fleece (1911) more optimistically suggests that it might be possible to remove history’s ‘roots,’ and to change the United States. For this purpose, Du Bois’s novel refashions literary conventions from the nineteenth century to construct a story that ends in a utopian socialist community. In the novel, the European American bias of US American utopianism is consciously highlighted, to then argue that, not only should African Americans be included in this tradition, but they are the ones who will bring about utopian United States. (I do not want to make any predictions about the effect that the 2020 national and international outrage at anti-Black police brutality in the United States will have.  Black Lives Matter protests to current events rightfully decry that the United States still have to make true on their foundational declarations of equality. I have repeatedly wondered what the authors of the works discussed here would have to say to these developments.) In this way further developing a historical psychology of utopian production, I hope to have outlined new pathways for utopian studies and, ultimately, to have extended the knowledge of ‘America’ as utopia.

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From this, a short glimpse forward at utopian communities in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries seems appropriate. Communalism in the United States waxed and waned, yet it never completely died out. In fact, the 1930s saw enough intentional communities established so that by 1940, a network to share resources and knowledge among these utopian projects was founded: The Fellowship of Intentional Communities (now the ‘Foundation for Intentional Community’).1 Yet, the utopian communities of the 1960s and 1970s are remembered most prominently; especially rural hippie communes—such as Drop City in Colorado (1965–1970s), Morning Star Ranch in California (1967–1973), Twin Oaks in Virginia (1967–present), The Farm in Tennessee (1971–present), and Black Bear Ranch in California (1968–present)—inform mainstream ideas of what intentional communities may look like, who the members are, and what problems they will face. Indeed, these communities were part of a peak in utopian practice in the United States: “In the mid-1960s communitarian idealism erupted in what was to be by far its largest manifestation ever, when hundreds of thousands, perhaps even a million, of mostly young Americans sought to rebuild from the ground up what they perceived as a rotten, decadent society” (Miller 2002, 327). While ‘hippie communes’ received much of media attention and are widely known examples of utopian practice to this day, closer investigation reveals that “the hip communes were a minority in the overall communal scene. The thousands of religiously committed communes often sharply limited sexual activity and prohibited all drugs, including tobacco, alcohol, and psychedelics. A key to understanding the communes of the Sixties era is that they were enormously, endlessly diverse. … The thousands of intentional communities that embodied the subject at hand included Asian religious ashrams, group marriage experiments, communal rock bands, ‘Jesus freak’ houses, centers of radical politics, and back-to-the-land experiments in agricultural self-sufficiency. The variation was endless, mind-boggling” (Miller 2002, 328–329). Throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, utopian practice in the United States continues to be fascinatingly 1  For an overview over the ‘long’ history of utopian communities, readers may consult, for example, Timothy Miller’s extensive work in The Quest for Utopia in Twentieth-Century America: 1900–1960 (1998), The 60’s Communes: Hippies and Beyond (1999), The Encyclopedic Guide to American Intentional Communities (2015), and Communes in America 1975–2000 (2019); Yaacov Oved’s Two Hundred Years of American Communes (1987); America’s Communal Utopias (1997) edited by Donald E. Pitzer; or Communal Utopias and the American Experience: Secular Communities, 1824–2000 (2004) by Robert P. Sutton.

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multifaceted: some planned entire cities such as Soul City in North Carolina (first plans published in 1969 and still populated, even though it never took off as envisioned), or NewVistas in Vermont (planned by the millionaire David Hall, who was inspired by the urban planning of Joseph Smith Jr., founder of the Mormon faith, but NewVistas never came to fruition despite all of Hall’s money). Others, such as the Friends of Perfection Commune, also known as Kaliflower, in San Francisco, California (1967–continuing under different names in different projects to this day), form communities within cities. Some even run hostels, such as the International Guest House in St. Petersburg, Florida (which was kind enough to host me and some fellow utopian scholars for a short time). Over the last decades, ecovillages such as Dancing Rabbit in Missouri (1997–present) have risen in popularity. Many, such as Dancing Rabbit and the Farm, offer internships, open weekends, and share their knowledge online and in seminars, so that others may follow on the path to a communally organized good place. Urban utopian practice revolving around communal/guerilla gardening is another recent trend. Utopian communities have often networked in one way or another, and the Foundation for Intentional Community and the Whole Earth Catalogue (founded in the 1960s and continuing in spin-offs to the present day) are just two examples for this continuous exchange. Now, the internet offers plenty of resources and means of contact. Prepper/survivalist communities have also become more common over the last decades: in this case, the fear of a catastrophic end of the world as we know it, brought about by a pandemic, or by terrorism, or by climate change, or by a world conspiracy, or by an asteroid, and so on, and the resulting dystopian order inspire something that, weirdly enough, recalls utopian practice—secluded communities dedicated to a previously agreed-upon social structure. Their ‘social dreaming’ is a reaction to a fearful nightmare and, I would reason, usually revolves around survival more than the creation of a good place. However, they are certainly intentional, and maybe the illusion of preparedness and control constitutes radical improvement for them. Utopian/intentional/independent communities of the past hundred years or so are often associated with the horrors that psychological dependence on a charismatic leader can bring about. Unforgotten are the murders committed by the Manson Family (1969), the mass-suicide of the People’s Temple in Jonestown (1978), and the crimes planned and committed in association with the Osho community Rajneeshpuram (1984/1985). Various historical and psychological factors appear to make

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those seeking to live in a radically improved manner particularly prone to radicalism, as well as vulnerable to exploitation and manipulation (see Kaplan and Lööw 2002). Examples of dystopian communities have created a widespread prejudice regarding utopian communities in general (Boal 2012, 135–150; Melton 2002, 272; Sargent 2013, 71). Attempts to immediately realize visions of a better place continue to fascinate, and so utopian communities repeatedly find their way into literature. For example, Caroline Dale Snedeker, Robert Owen’s great-­ granddaughter, wrote a romance set in Owen’s New Harmony: Seth Way (1917). Snedeker’s novel is, just as The Blithedale Romance had foretold, a distinctly US American romance set in the nation’s utopian past; so is Marguerite Young’s Angel in the Forest: A Fairy Tale of Two Utopias (1945) which also plays in New Harmony (in its Rappite and in its Owenite phase). Since the 1960s, hippie communities dominate in literature. Tom Wolfe’s Electric Kool Aid Acid Test (1968) on Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters may be the most famous; another widely read non-fiction account would be Vincent Bugliosi’s true-crime work on the Manson family, Helter Skelter (1974). Around the turn of the millennium, various novels that deal with hippie(ish) back-to-the-land communes have surfaced and sold well, such as Ken Follett’s The Hammer of Eden (1998), T.C. Boyle’s Drop City (2003), and Lauren Groff’s Arcadia (2012). Utopian communities also feature in bestselling sf, as in Octavia Butler’s The Parable of the Sower (1993) and The Parable of the Talents (1998), and in Edan Lepucky’s California (2014), which relate intentional communities to gated communities. All of these novels stylize utopian communities as part of a national tradition, with the 1960s serving as yet another piece of evidence (maybe the most commonly remembered) for the link between utopianism and nation. One famous fictional community—the backpacker resort/commune in Alex Garland’s The Beach (1996)—employs this setting to reflect on US American imperialism. The discussions on Griggs’s and Du Bois’s work exemplified that postcolonial or anti-imperial utopianism2 and its relation to the nation are still deserving of more academic attention. Scholars would do well to keep in mind that utopianism means detailing a social vision in a very particular 2  Further discussions on postcolonial utopianism can be found, for example, in works by Dohra Ahmad (2009), Bill Ashcroft (2012), Antonis  Balasopoulos (2004), Antoine Hatzenberger (2003), Corina Kesler (2012), and Ralph Pordzik (2001); some of them, however, stretch the term way beyond the definition used in this book.

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way and that changes to these conventions—man-made, systemic, wholesale, total, and possibly imperial—are significant. They require rethinking the proposed utopian genealogy and its relation to a powerful discourse that originates with early modern Europe. For example, Nalo Hopkinson’s The Midnight Robber (2000) is in many ways too fantastic, too ambiguous, and too dynamic to fit the utopian mold and in this way offers important pointers regarding the utopian imagination in relation to diaspora and transgenerational trauma. Stephen Graham Jones (2003) in The Bird Is Gone: A Manifesto details through various storylines why White, Eurocentric utopianism, complete with seclusion and so on, provides no viable anti-imperial strategy for Native American cultures. The various literary representations of utopian communities attest to a continued interest in living out the ‘social dreaming’ of utopianism. In addition to novelists, academic researchers and journalists periodically take up the topic and have produced a range of documentaries and articles, in tones alternating between fascination and skepticism. I personally noticed that when I try to explain the objective of my research, many people readily point out all the ways in which social dreamers fail. Most (including, often, me) certainly find it easier to critique and belittle than to imagine the end of capitalism—to recall the famous quote by Fredric Jameson (1994, xii)—and to explain why one does not put one’s social dreaming into action. The very idea of utopian practice invites accusations of failure. Even though reality seldom is as orderable as imaginary utopian space and the utopian people within it, the term utopia suggests that “one of their [utopian communities] primary aims is the creation of an enduring social world” following their “ideal social orders” (Kanter 1973, 502). If utopian practice is held to the requirements of stasis and perfection, then longevity and ‘truthfulness’ to the original layout become a marker for evaluating whether a community has been a failure. Thus, researchers came to use the time span of twenty-five years (one generation) to evaluate the success of any intentional community (see Sargent 2013). Yet, this focus on longevity—which then also shaped the research objectives, which would focus on reasons for success or failure, and on those communities that ‘last’—obscures that communities may be in flux. Members may migrate, form new projects, or the communal structure may dissolve but a movement continue. One example would be the aforementioned Sutter/ Scott Street commune/Kaliflower/Friends of Perfection Commune, which relocated, renamed itself, and disseminated into a variety of

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communal projects (a communal garden, a communal food pantry, various co-ops, etc.). Another example is the Amana Society, a religious settlement established in Iowa in 1856 that abandoned communal life in 1932 but continues as a “living religious movement” (Pitzer 1997, xvii). Consequently, over the last decades, communal scholar Donald E. Pitzer advocated developmental communalism, broadening the definition and the scope of the research objectives of communal studies by viewing “communal living [as] a generic social mechanism available to all peoples, governments, and movements” (Pitzer 2013, 34). In this paradigm, utopian practice is not evaluated by how well it comes to represent a static and closed-off utopian island but in how far it manages to survive in interaction with the non-utopian reality. On the other hand, intentional communities may hold communal living to be the goal, not a means to an end. In those cases, developmental communalism obscures the actual intention of the community (Sargent 2013, 67). Furthermore, the attraction that communalism, but also neatly controllable space exerts can be observed to this day and should not be underestimated: digging a trench appears attractive to those opposing a world in which capitalism runs rampant,3 and to those who are enamored with nationalism and even imperialism. Writing these concluding lines from my home office in times of the COVID-19 pandemic, the idea of small, isolated communities suddenly has taken on completely different relevance. As have national borders and utopian orderability: at this very moment, various nations try to control the habits of their people down to small details, often failing when not taking strict disciplinary measures. The word ‘dystopia’ is tossed about with inflationary frequency; yet it remains to be seen how these fears affect the utopian imagination, and how the Utopian States will fare hereafter. The question that this book turned to was never whether visions of better worlds are viable, but to focus on the attempts to get there. It zeroed in on the fantasy mechanisms of utopian production by looking at how fiction dealt with the first steps toward realizing a utopia. All the books discussed have stressed the importance of how we narrate (community, economics, empire, gender, nation, race, romance, space, time) can pave the way for what we do. Yet, they all related these new narratives to the United States. The authors wrote national histories that correspond to their respective attitudes toward the Utopian States of America, 3  For an engaging discussion of utopianism under globalization, see Utopia in the Age of Globalization: Space, Representation, and the World-System by Robert T. Tally Jr. (2013).

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illustrating that this discourse was regarded with suspicion and at the same time often probed for its subversive potential, its “power to begin the world over again” (Paine 1776, 40). However, these engagements also illustrate the pervasiveness of the grand national narrative in the nineteenth century. Even when asserting that the socioeconomic order of the United States can and needs to be radically changed, these attempts are, much like the corpse of Griggs’s protagonist, “shrouded in an American flag” (1899, 261). In these instances, limitations do not originate with the pessimistic belief that there is ‘no alternative,’ the alleged “practical thinking which everywhere represents a capitulation to the system itself, and which stands as a testimony to the power of that system” (Fitting 1998, “Concept” 8). Instead, the utopian optimism illustrates the hold of the United States over the utopian imagination. If utopianism is “a representational meditation on radical difference, radical otherness, and on the systemic nature of the social totality, to the point where one cannot imagine any fundamental change in our social existence which has not first thrown off Utopian visions like so many sparks from a comet” (Jameson 2005, xii) then the examples discussed in this book traced a different kind of “weakness” of the imagination (to recall Jameson 1994, xii), in which all the ‘sparks’ are the tail of a comet that is the United States. In many ways, most of these works hold that their vision of a good place can be realized and would transform the United States. Yet, in the end, all these envisioned beginnings were America.

References Ahmad, Dohra. 2009. Landscapes of Hope. Anti-Colonial Utopianism in America. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ashcroft, Bill. 2012. Introduction: Spaces of Utopia. Spaces of Utopia: An Electronic Journal 2 (1): 1–17. Balasopoulos, Antonis. 2004. Unworldly Worldliness: America and the Trajectories of Utopian Expansionism. Utopian Studies 15 (2): 3–35. Boal, Iain A., ed. 2012. West of Eden. Communes and Utopia in Northern California. Oakland: PM. Boyle, Tom Coraghessan. [2003] 2004. Drop City. New York: Penguin. Bugliosi, Vincent. [1974] 1994. Helter Skelter. The True Story of the Manson Murders. New York: Norton. Butler, Octavia E. 1993. Parable of the Sower. New York: Four Walls Eight Windows. ———. 1998. Parable of the Talents. New York: Seven Stories Press.

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Du Bois, William Edward Burghardt. 1911. The Quest of the Silver Fleece. Chicago: A.C. McClurg & Co. Fitting, Peter. 1998. The Concept of Utopia in the Work of Fredric Jameson. Utopian Studies 9 (2): 8–17. Follet, Ken. 1998. The Hammer of Eden. London: Pan Macmillan. Garland, Alex. 1996. The Beach. New York: Viking. Griggs, Sutton E. 1899. Imperium in Imperio. A Study of the Negro Race Problem. Cincinnati: The Editor Publishing Company. Groff, Lauren. 2012. Arcadia. New York: Voice/Hyperion. Hatzenberger, Antoine. 2003. Islands and Empire: Beyond the Shores of Utopia. Angelaki. Journal of the Theoretical Humanities 8 (1): 119–128. Hawthorne, Nathaniel. 1852. The Blithedale Romance. Boston: Ticknor, Reed, and Fields. Hopkinson, Nalo. 2000. Midnight Robber. New York: Warner Books. Howland, Marie. 1874. Papa’s Own Girl. New York: Jewett. Imlay, Gilbert. 1793. The Emigrants, or the History of an Expatriated Family. 3 vols. London: A. Hamilton. Jameson, Fredric. 1994. The Seeds of Time. New York: Columbia University Press. ———. 2005. Archaeologies of the Future. The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions. New York: Verso. Jones, Stephen Graham. 2003. The Bird is Gone. A Manifesto. Salt Lake City: Fiction Collective Two. Kanter, Rosabeth Moss. 1973. Utopian Communities. Sociological Inquiry 43 (3–4): 263–290. Kaplan, Jeffrey, and Heléne Lööw, eds. 2002. The Cultic Milieu. Oppositional Subcultures in an Age of Globalization. Walnut Creek: AltaMira. Kesler, Corina. 2012. Postcolonial Utopias or Imagining ‘Brave New Worlds’: Caliban Speaks Back. Spaces of Utopia: An Electronic Journal 2 (1): 88–107. Lepucki, Edan. 2014. California. New York: Little, Brown, and Company. Melton, J.  Gordon. 2002. The Modern Anti-Cult Movement in Historical Perspective. In The Cultic Milieu: Oppositional Subcultures in an Age of Globalization, ed. Jeffrey Kaplan and Heléne Lööw, 265–289. Walnut Creek: AltaMira. Miller, Timothy. 1998. The Quest for Utopia in Twentieth-Century America. 1900–1960. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press. ———. 1999. The 60s Communes. Hippies and Beyond. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press. ———. 2002. The Sixties Era Communes. In Imagine Nation: The American Counterculture of the 1960s and ’70s, ed. Peter Braunstein and Michael William Doyle, 327–351. New York: Routledge. ———. 2015. The Encyclopedic Guide to American Intentional Communities. 2nd ed. Clinton: Richard W. Couper.

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———. 2019. Communes in America, 1975–2000. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press. Oved, Yaacov. 1987. Two Hundred Years of American Communes. New Brunswick: Transaction. Paine, Thomas. 1776. Common Sense. Providence: John Carter. Paul, Heike. 2014. The Myths That Made America. An Introduction to American Studies. Bielefeld: transcript. Pitzer, Donald E., ed. 1997. America’s Communal Utopias. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. ———. 2013. Developmental Communalism into the Twenty-First Century. In The Communal Idea in the 21st Century, ed. Eliezer Ben-Rafael, Yaacov Oved, and Menachem Topel, 33–52. Leiden: Brill. Pordzik, Ralph. 2001. The Quest for Postcolonial Utopia. A Comparative Introduction to the Utopian Novel in the New English Literatures. Bern: Peter Lang. Sargent, Lyman Tower. 2013. Theorizing Intentional Community in the Twenty-­ First Century. In The Communal Idea in the 21st Century, ed. Eliezer Ben-­ Rafael, Yaacov Oved, and Menachem Topel, 53–72. Leiden: Brill. Snedeker, Caroline Dale. 1917. Seth Way. A Romance of the New Harmony Community. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Sutton, Robert P. 2004. Communal Utopias and the American Experience. Secular Communities, 1824–2000. Westport: Praeger. Tally, Robert T., Jr. 2013. Utopia in the Age of Globalization. Space, Representation, and the World-System. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Wolfe, Tom. [1968] 2008. The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. New York: Picador. Young, Marguerite. [1945] 1994. Angel in the Forest. A Fairy Tale of Two Utopias. Normal: Dalkey Archive.

Index

A Abolitionism, 147–149, 154 Accommodation, 169, 170, 202, 221 African American emigration, 179, 181, 229 African American utopian communities, 28, 200, 229, 238 Afrofuturisms, 31, 229, 231 Afropessimism, 190 Agrarianism, 55–57, 67, 71, 99–103, 106, 108, 207, 211 Alcott, Louisa May, see Transcendental Wild Oats by Louisa May Alcott American Independence, see American Revolution American Revolution, 55–57, 60, 62–65, 74n16, 75–79, 82, 93, 179–180, 187 Assimilation, 149, 201 Atlanta Compromise, see Washington, Booker T.

B Black aesthetics, 178, 219 Black nationalism, 173, 174n10, 202 Blake, or the Huts of America by Martin Delany, 208, 229 C Civil War, 124, 130, 155, 187 Class, 65, 74–75, 102, 127, 133, 140–141, 169, 171, 201, 204, 219, 220, 228 Colonialism, 34–36, 184 Color line, the, 10, 30, 149, 157, 175, 182, 183, 198, 200, 203, 204, 214, 221, 236 Contemporary reception, 52–53, 96, 118, 131–132, 166, 204–205 Crèvecoeur, J. Hector St. John, 38, 51, 55n5, 56, 102

© The Author(s) 2020 V. Adamik, In Search of the Utopian States of America, Palgrave Studies in Utopianism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-60279-6

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INDEX

D Developmentalism, 30, 130, 148, 157, 178, 181, 227 Dixon, Thomas Jr. (works by), 166, 214 Double consciousness, 187, 198, 227 Douglass, Frederick, 149, 208 Du Bois, W.E.B., biographical notes, 199 Dystopia, 16, 26 Dystopian practice, 25–26, 239 E Ecotopia by Ernest Callenbach, 21, 22, 25 Engels, Friedrich, 32, 90 F Fourier, Charles, 90, 92, 156 Fourierism, 88, 92–93, 128, 133–135, 140, 142–144, 147–149 Free love, 127, 133 French Revolution, 51, 52, 54, 82, 156 Frontier thesis, 71, 187 Fuller, Margarete, 88, 95n5, 116 G Genre Afrofuturisms, 192 Bildungsroman, 133, 217, 219–220 dystopian fiction, 2n2, 11, 23, 29 frontier romance, 53 gothic, 110, 117, 210, 215, 221 Jacobin novel, 54, 54n4 muckracking novels, 221 North-South romances, 214

realism, 145 romance, 98, 111–112, 114, 117, 140, 215 satire, 18, 111n10, 113, 115, 164, 213 sentimental literature, 53, 65, 75, 79, 80, 98, 113, 136, 141, 144–146, 215, 218 sf and fantasy, 18, 192 utopian fiction, 2, 5, 18, 20–23, 30–32, 114, 130, 156–158, 206 utopian fiction by African American authors, 30–31, 164, 190 Victorian novel, 217 Globalization, 25n8, 184, 211 Godin, Jean-Baptiste André, 128, 142 Godwin, William, 51, 54n4, 64, 64n12, 71, 78n17 Great Dismal Swamp, 28, 207, 208 Griggs, Sutton E., biographical notes, 165–166 H Hawthorne, Nathaniel, biographical notes, 88, 89 Herland by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, 29, 130, 157 Heterotopia, 17n2 Howland, Marie, biographical notes, 126–131 Hutchinson, Anne, 26, 225 I Icarians, 22n4, 31, 93 Imlay, Gilbert, biographical notes, 50–53, 64n12

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J Jacobins, 52, 54, 63, 64, 75 Jefferson, Thomas, 56, 76, 153, 180–181, 180n11, 183, 185 Jim Crow, 168, 170, 183, 186, 199

Niagara Movement, 199 North-South divide, 154, 155, 182, 204, 225 Noyes, John Humphrey, 39, 39n16, 90, 93, 124, 126

L Light Ahead for the Negro by Edward A. Johnson, 31, 164 Looking Backward by Edward Bellamy, 21, 22, 25, 30, 31, 130, 156, 157

O Of One Blood by Pauline Hopkins, 31, 229 Oneida, 39n16 Owen, Albert Kimsey, 129 Owen, Robert, 90, 117n12 Owenism, 90–92

M Marriage (legal institution), 52, 73–79, 92, 127–128, 134, 136, 154 Meritocracy, 200, 202 Middle passage, 187 Midnight Robber by Nalo Hopkinson, 22, 25 More, Thomas, see Utopia by Thomas More Morton, Thomas, 26, 35, 104–105 N National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), 199 National narrative, USA, 32–34, 36, 39–41, 55–61, 94, 107, 184, 193, 212 National Woman Suffrage Association, 128 Native Americans, discursive erasure of, 68–69, 103, 106, 112, 149, 184, 207, 223 terra nullius, 35 Native American utopianism, tentative notes on, 29n12, 30, 240

P Paine, Thomas, 51, 56, 63, 235 Postbellum USA, 151, 155, 157, 223 Privilege paradigm, 158, 164 Psychology of utopian production, 16–17, 32–33, 39–41, 124, 158, 192, 206 Puritans, 36–37, 104–105, 224–227 R Race and utopia, 65, 97–98, 130, 148, 150–151 Race war, 168, 171, 182, 186, 187, 191, 193, 228 Romantic relationships, 75, 80–81, 127–128, 133–135, 143, 145–147, 175, 218, 219 S Scientific racism, 149, 172, 175, 176, 178 Sensuality, 67–68, 77–79, 131, 141–142

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INDEX

Slavery, 65, 97, 151, 153–155, 209, 211, 212 Spanish-American War, 168, 180 T Talented Tenth, 167, 202 Terra nullius, see Native Americans, discursive erasure of Topolobampo, see Utopian communities, further historical examples, Pacific Colony Totalitarianism, see Dystopian practice Transcendentalism, 88 Transcendental Wild Oats by Louisa May Alcott, 6, 112n10 U Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe, 131, 149, 150, 152, 169n7, 170, 186 Utopia by Thomas More, 1–2, 2n1, 18–23, 26, 32, 34, 35, 184 Utopian communities, further historical examples, 4, 26, 29n13, 31, 36, 90, 91, 93, 102, 111n10, 127, 148, 229, 237–238, 241 Brook Farm, 87–88, 95, 99, 102 Familistère, 128, 129, 132, 134 Jonestown, 26 Manson family, 26, 238 Massachusetts Bay Colony (see Puritans) Merrymount, 104–105 New Harmony, 91, 92, 125–126 Oneida, 126

Pacific Colony, 124, 129–130, 147 Peoples Temple of the Disciples of Christ (see Utopian communities, further historical examples, Jonestown) Utopian communities in fiction, further examples, 5–7, 6n6, 239–240 Utopian formalism, see Psychology of utopian production Utopian socialism, 32, 90–94, 148, 197, 203, 204 V Virgin land, 58–59, 67–72, 79, 99–103, 106–107, 112, 184, 207–209, 211 W Walden Two by B.F. Skinner, 21, 22, 25, 31 Washington, Booker T., 168, 169n6, 171, 172, 181, 183, 201, 221 Western frontier, 55n5, 56–57, 59–61 The White Man’s Burden by Shirby T. Hodge, 31 White privilege, 175 White supremacist utopias, 17, 17n1 White supremacy, 30–31, 128, 150, 157–158, 181, 183, 222 Wollstonecraft, Mary, 50–53, 64, 64n12, 78n17, 80n18 Women’s rights, 52, 74, 75, 80, 92, 125–128, 132, 134–140, 148, 152–154, 201, 236