CHAPTER
1
INTRODUCTION
André
Breton did not discover Fourier until 1940, when he was marooned in
When
the socialist Charles Fourier died in 1837, one might have supposed that his
utopian dream would have perished with him.
In fact, however, his French disciples successfully promoted Fourierism
by stressing its critique of social structures that unjustly empowered a small
class, its belief in the goodness of human passions, and its faith in
Association, a new method of social organization that would give free rein to
the passions and make work enjoyable. By
implementing this reform, they hoped to create "Harmony," a
perfectly-organized society.[1] One such disciple was the American Albert
Brisbane, a former student of Fourier's who introduced the movement to
In
the early 1840s, several key American Fourierist, or Associationist, leaders,
including Brisbane, Horace Greeley, and Parke Godwin, made the acquaintance of
members Transcendentalist circle.[3] In doing so, the Associationists were
partially motivated by the desire to get free publicity. (Orestes Brownson edited his Boston Quarterly Review until 1842, then
wrote for the Democratic Review, as
did Nathaniel Hawthorne. The Dial, of course, was edited by Margaret
Fuller, then Ralph Waldo Emerson. Henry
James, Sr., wrote for, and underwrote, The
Harbinger. All four magazines
published articles by Brisbane.) Yet
Brisbane also believed that the Transcendentalists' interest in reform,
typified by Ripley's Brook Farm experiment, made them potential recruits;
indeed, Ripley, Charles A. Dana, John Sullivan Dwight, and William H. Channing
led Brook Farm to Fourierism in 1844.
Other candidates were not so eager: Brownson, Fuller, James, and Emerson
were all exposed to the Fourierist blueprint for utopia, sometimes at great
length and against their will.[4]
Despite
their initial lack of enthusiasm, all these writers belonged to the select
group of Fourier's American readers. In
an 1844 letter, Fuller told Brownson that Brisbane had offered to lend her a
volume of Fourier in Brownson's possession; she asked him to leave it for her
at Elizabeth Palmer Peabody's (LMF
3:174). In September of the same year,
Fuller read Nouveau monde industriel
(LMF 3:175n). Emerson had dipped into Fourier's books in
the early 1840s, then read several volumes in early 1845 and discussed them at
length with Caroline Sturgis. In the
spring of 1845, Sophia Hawthorne and her husband read Fourier's "fourth
volume" in the original French; she found it "abominable, immoral,
irreligious, and void of all delicate sentiment," adding that Nathaniel
was "thoroughly disgusted" (J. Hawthorne 1:268-269). In August 1851, while The Blithedale Romance was still in its incubation period,
Hawthorne borrowed "two or three volumes of Fourier's works" (American Notebooks 446). Six days later, his reading of Quatre Mouvements prompted a well-known
journal entry, later incorporated into a conversation between Coverdale and
Hollingsworth: "Fourier states that, in the progress of the world, the
ocean is to lose its saltiness, and acquire the taste of a particularly
flavored lemonade—limonade à cedré."[5]
Carl
J. Guarneri's The Utopian Alternative:
Fourierism in Nineteenth-Century America (1991), already acknowledged as
the standard work on American Fourierism, suggests compelling reasons for
studying the responses of the Transcendentalists. While it is true that the short-lived
communitarian experiments of the Fourierists had little economic effect on
American society, Guarneri argues that they made several major contributions to
the antebellum reform debate. The
Fourierists furnished a ground-breaking critique of American society from a
sociological perspective; they proposed to "harness" the innovations
of the Industrial Revolution "for group benefit rather than individual
exploitation," rather than rejecting these innovations and championing a
nostalgic neo-feudal agrarianism; and they offered a vision of universal reform
that was millenarian yet secular (6). One
of my goals is to test Guarneri's claim that the Fourierists were
"important participant[s]" in the struggle that led to the formation
of an American industrial capitalist ideology, that they "played a key
part in the dialectic out of which the national creed emerged, though they
utterly failed to control the outcome of that dialectic" (6, 8-9).
In
doing so, however, I will shift attention to the other side of the dialectic,
the anti-Fourierists. These opponents
included several members of the Transcendentalist circle, who, despite their
expressions of sympathy for social reform and their friendships with the Brook
Farmers, often attacked Fourierism.
Fuller made fun of the Fourierists in her correspondence; Emerson and
Hawthorne all eventually rejected the movement in harsher terms. Brownson, who became the nation's most
vitriolic critic of world reform in any guise, even described Fourierism as
Satan's handiwork.
But
synthesis requires change from both sides of the dialectic. Therefore, it should not be surprising that
the attempt to draw a boundary between Fourier's admirers and his detractors
becomes problematic. Over the years,
many opponents of Fourierism in the Transcendentalist circle were at least
partially seduced by the doctrine; others expressed initial enthusiasm before
becoming disenchanted. Henry James's
writings in the late 1840s were emphatically Fourierist; this label could
arguably be stretched to include Fuller's post-1843 writings. After his conversion to Catholicism, Brownson
claimed that his earlier, erroneous socialist writings had "seized all the
great principles of the practical part of Fourierism".[6] Emerson, one of the harshest critics of the
Fourierists, nevertheless praised Fourier in his journals for having "the
immense merit of originality & hope" (JMN 9:104). Emerson was even
married to a fellow-traveler. Lidian
Jackson Emerson, in an 1848 letter to Waldo, wrote: "I shall feel bound to
do all to promote the success of this blessed movement that my husband will
sanction" (Carpenter 155). Many in
the Transcendentalist circle evaluated Fourier dynamically, continually
revising their earlier opinions.
This
study examines American authors' responses to the writings of Fourier and the
American Fourierists, paying particular attention to the responses of four
members of the Transcendentalist circle: Brownson, Emerson, Henry James, Sr.,
and Fuller, and to the effect of
The
posthumous reception of American Fourierism raises yet another set of questions
which I do not attempt to answer fully, but which the reader may wish to keep
in mind. While the complex
interrelationship between the Transcendentalists and the Fourierists has not
yet received the comprehensive treatment it deserves, it has certainly been
discussed many times before.[7] A influential characterization of the
connections between the two movements is found in the introduction to F. O.
Matthiessen's masterwork of canon-formation, American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and
Whitman (1941). Matthiessen defines
his literary history by exclusion: it is neither an "intellectual history
. . . of the breakdown of Puritan orthodoxy into Unitarianism,
and of the quickening of the cool Unitarian strain into the spiritual and
emotional fervor of transcendentalism," nor is it a critical history of
the "interpretation our great authors gave of the economic and social
forces of the time." While
Matthiessen noted that these intellectual and social histories would
necessarily be closely interrelated, he also insisted upon the distinctions
between them:
The two books
envisaged [above] might well be called The
Age of Swedenborg and The Age of
Fourier. Emerson said in 1854, 'The
age is Swedenborg's,' by which he meant that it had embraced the subjective
philosophy that 'the soul makes its own world.'
That extreme development of idealism was what Emerson had found
adumbrated in Channing's 'one sublime idea': the potential divinity of
man. That religious assumption could
also be social when it claimed the inalienable worth of the individual and his
right to participate in whatever the community might produce. Thus the transition from transcendentalism to
Fourierism was made by many at the time, as by Henry James, Sr., and George
Ripley and his loyal followers at Brook Farm.
The Age of Fourier could by
license be extended to take up a wider subject than utopian socialism; it could
treat all the radical movements of the period; it would stress the fact that
1852 witnessed not only the appearance of Pierre
but also Uncle Tom's Cabin; it would
stress also what had been largely ignored until recently, the anticipation by
Orestes Brownson of some of the Marxist analysis of the class controls of
action.
But the age was also
that of Emerson and Melville. (vii-ix)
Paradoxically, in labeling the antebellum years
"The Age of Fourier," Matthiessen effectively excludes Fourierism
from the narrative of American literary history. True, he admits that his aesthetic narrative
is not comprehensive, yet it is incomparably finer than the two narratives that
remain untold. One, "The Age of
Swedenborg," would provide the intellectual (perhaps "visionary"
or "mystical" would be more appropriate terms) background for the
foregrounded American Renaissance, Channing's illuministic revelation. The other, "The Age of Fourier,"
would relate the comparatively straightforward attempt to make this revelation
a material reality. Thus, for
Matthiessen, the Age of Fourier was not the age of ideal form, but of pragmatic
reform in the material world.
This
compartmentalization of the two "Ages" has significance for American
literary historiography. From
Matthiessen's perspective, a major function of "The Age of Fourier"
narrative is to provide the background for the aesthetically inferior novels of
popular culture.[8] Thus, it is precisely his valorization of the
Age of Swedenborg over the Age of Fourier that enables him to valorize
permanent literature over transient literature, Pierre over Uncle Tom's Cabin,
the decision that would eventually make him one of the New Historicists'
favorite whipping-boys.[9] Even Vernon Parrington's The Romantic Revolution in America (1927)—which established a
criterion of "historical significance" rather than
"aesthetic[s]" (i), and which argued that the "naturalization of
French revolutionary theory," specifically including Fourierism, was the
first stage of American romanticism (vi-vii)—fell into a similar
reduction. Discussing the "Fourier
Phalanx" at Brook Farm, Parrington observed that
Fluid, individualistic
Transcendentalism trumps prosaic, mechanical Fourierism. Some version of this formula had been
propounded by the three major Transcendentalists—Emerson, Fuller, and
Thoreau. But Emerson and Fuller came to
revise their earlier verdict, and rightly so.
The Fourierism of Fourier was not a dry materialism, but rather, like
Swedenborgianism and like New England Transcendentalism itself, strongly
influenced by the illuministic tradition.
In other words, no "transition from transcendentalism to
Fourierism" was necessary, for the Fourierist ideology of perfectionism
was intrinsically transcendental. Yet
this dubious "Fourierism equals materialism" equation—a convenient
one for the Cold War ideologue, Donald Pease might argue—has frequently been
repeated by literary critics and cultural historians.[10]
In
his classic The Age of Jackson
(1945), Arthur M. Schlesinger brutally dismissed American Fourierism as
"the hobbyhorse of a decade."
He characterized the movement as "a posture of romantic despair,
assumed in terror before a few economic complexities, self-exposed at every
crisis," and even argued for its "irrelevance" to history.[11] Schlesinger's tirade against "the
emotions of Utopia" is itself uncharacteristically overwrought—perhaps he
saw an analogy between the Fourierists and his generation's Stalinist
fellow-travelers. But irrational social
movements are not necessarily inconsequential, a fact that is as obvious today
as it should have been in 1945. Indeed,
the recent studies by Guarneri and Sacvan Bercovitch have independently
challenged Schlesinger's claim, arguing that the Fourierists played an
important role in the formation of the American capitalist ideology. Bercovitch argues that Emerson's
anti-socialist journal entries, which include frequent references to
Fourierism, suggest that the nascent ideology of American individualism (or at
least Emerson's substantial contribution to that ideology) was forged from
"the confrontation between socialist and liberal ideologies in Jacksonian
America" ("Emerson, Individualism, and Liberal Dissent," Rites of Assent 308).
When
I first began to examine American Fourierism, I too felt that cultural
historians had underestimated the movement's importance. The more I read, however, the more I became
convinced that Schlesinger's caricature of the movement was not wholly
incorrect. To put it bluntly, many
American Fourierists were crackpots.
This claim has a long and distinguished pedigree and is hardly news to
the revisionists. Most of them, however,
have contended that the Associationists largely succeeded in purging the
wackiest of Fourier's tenets from their movement. This argument was first made by the
influential communitarian scholar Arthur E. Bestor, Jr., in his essay,
"Albert Brisbane—Propagandist for Socialism in the 1840's" (1947). Bestor held that Fourier's American disciple
cull[ing] from the confused mass of
Fourier's writings a simple, straight-forward, practicable plan of social
action, divorced from all extravagancies and possible immoralities, yet
sufficiently linked with Fourier's world-view so that the specific proposals
would appear to follow logically (as Fourier and Brisbane believed they did)
from a genuinely scientific analysis of the nature of man and society. (147-48)
Guarneri's study, which carefully traces the American
movement's French roots, supports Bestor's interpretation (94); the absence of
indexed references to Fourier in the final two-thirds of The Utopian Alternative suggests that, in many respects, Fourier's
writings had become irrelevant to the Associationists. Paradoxically, according to the
Bestor/Guarneri interpretation, Fourier's relative obscurity facilitated
Brisbane's task, for his selective presentation of Fourier's theory largely
controlled the American response.
Chapter 2, however, presents evidence that some Americans were attracted
to certain "insane" doctrines from the beginning of their interest in
Fourierism. In Chapter 3, I suggest that
these Americans found Fourierism attractive because of its
insanity.
The
reader may be curious to know how I came to adopt this psychoanalytic
approach. The route was not a direct
one. Originally, I had conceived of this
project as a literary-historical hybrid.
The subsequent publication of Guarneri's study was timely—or rather, I
came to that view after a traumatic six weeks—for it relieved me of the burden
of historical exposition, while leaving sufficient room for a study of
Fourierism in American literature. And
even though The Utopian Alternative
is a remarkably comprehensive synthesis, some ground was left relatively
uncovered. While Guarneri scrupulously
documents the unconventional beliefs of many Fourierists during the 1840s, his
emphasis is upon the links between Fourierist theory and communitarian
practice. Thus, he understandably gives
less attention to the impracticable elements of Fourier's doctrine. Indeed, a study with the express goal of
"giv[ing] the Fourierists the serious hearing they deserve" can only
mention the "copulation of planets" so many times before subverting
its own intentions (6, 19). And yet,
these doctrines had provoked a wide range of responses within the
Transcendentalist circle, from suspicion and revulsion to sympathy and even
ecstasy. For these authors, as for other
Americans of the 1840s, Fourierism served as a sort of Rorschach test. Granted, many people have strange
beliefs. But why would so many of the
New England and New York intelligentsia, accomplished and successful men and
women, subscribe to the same set of strange beliefs? Ultimately, the data convinced me that a
psychoanalytic approach is necessary.
When I discovered Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel's work, I was impressed by
its ability to account for the Transcendentalist circle's responses.
Chapter
4 examines Orestes Brownson's prolonged anti-Fourierist crusade. In the early 1840s, Brownson had voiced
friendly criticism of the American Fourierist movement, openly sympathizing
with many of its goals. In 1842,
however, at about the same time that Brownson began to lose faith in reform,
his criticism grew more strident. By
1844, the year of his conversion to Catholicism, he had become Fourierism's
fiercest opponent in America. In the
four years between the publication of "The Laboring Classes" and his
conversion, Brownson wrote eight essays on Fourierism. Brownson's writings suggest that his
conversion to Catholicism was not simply the cause, but also in part the
consequence, of his rejection of Fourierism.
Chapter
5 examines two of Sacvan Bercovitch's recent claims: that Emerson's
"confrontation with the theory and practice of socialism" circa 1842
catalyzed the shift from his early radicalism to his later conservatism; and
that Emerson's unideological ideology of individuality was developed out of his
engagement with the "crazy" European socialists. In other words, Bercovitch argues that
Emerson's "individuality" was the dialectical negation of European
socialist ideology, and perhaps Fourierism in particular. But a closer examination shows that Emerson's
reaction was far more complex. At
roughly the same time that Brownson was learning to despise Fourier, Emerson
was learning to admire the utopian.
After reading several volumes of Fourier in early 1845, Emerson came to
distinguish Fourier's original theory from adulterated American
Associationism. While the mockery continued,
it was now juxtaposed with profound, occasionally extravagant appreciations of
Fourier's views on diverse topics: social reform, sexual liberation, economics,
antislavery, human nature itself.
Emerson's complex dialogue with Fourierism suggests that Emerson, in
coming to distinguish Fourier from the Associationists, found more merit in the
Frenchman's "crazy" thought than in the watered-down socialism of his
American interpreters.
Chapter
6 pushes the application of the ego ideal theory to its limits, arguing that
the elder Henry James's interest in Fourierism's most bizarre doctrines was the
indirect result of his earlier psychic crisis.
Yet the interest in Fourierism should not be reduced to a mere index of
Transcendentalist insanity: Chapter 7 shows that Margaret Fuller's attitude
towards Fourierist socialism followed a radically different trajectory, one
that is difficult to explain within the psychoanalytic framework. Chapter 8 temporarily abandons Chasseguet-Smirgel
in order to read The Blithedale Romance
through the lens of another ghost story, Jacques Derrida's Specters of Marx. Rereading
Chapter 9 some years after I first wrote it, I’m not sure whether it’s the
deconstruction of my project, a pretentious Dennis Miller rant, the O. Henry
twist, or merely something to be cleaned up by the Little Hordes….
[1]Throughout this study, a general
acquaintance with Fourier's theory and the history of the Fourierist movement
is assumed. In English, the two best
introductions to Fourier are
[2]The republication history of Fourier's
books is complex; see SF 14 for a
useful schematic representation. Two
other books by Fourier, Pièges et
Charlatanisme des deux sectes Saint-Simon et Owen (1831) and La Fausse Industrie (1835-36), were not
republished by the French Fourierists; note that the Anthropos edition of the Oeuvres complètes de Charles Fourier
(1966-68; 12 vols.) does not include Pièges
et Charlatanisme.
[3]Throughout this study, I use
"Transcendentalist circle" in a sociological sense (roughly
equivalent to "Emerson's circle").
[4]Emerson strongly suspected that
[5]American Notebooks 310; for the original, see OC
1:45n. Fourier actually wrote "aigre
'de cèdre.'"
[7]The most comprehensive treatment to date
is Guarneri 44-59; the most ambitious attempt to reconcile the two movements is
Francis, "The Ideology of Brook Farm" (for other studies, see
Guarneri 430n31, 432n58-59).
[8]Cf. Matthiessen ix-xi. For another example. see Spiller et al., the
narrative of their Literary History of
the United States (1948) only mentions Fourierism in passing; the only
substantive remarks are found in a bibliographical essay (3:349-350). The very organization of LHUS invites this foreground / background distinction.
[9]Jane Tompkins's Sensational Designs (1985) is exemplary. While I am sympathetic to the critique of an
American canon that "embodies the views of a very small, socially,
culturally, geographically, and racially restricted elite" (Tompkins 200),
the gay socialist suicide has been more than sufficiently castigated for his
political incorrectness. In suggesting
that Matthiessen's presentation of Fourierism is misleading, I do not intend to
mount yet another frontal assault upon his work, nor do I intend to imply that
he was simply unaware of Fourierism's mystical tendencies.
[10]Here, it might be appropriate to concede
one of the inherent limitations of my approach.
I focus upon a group of writers that scholars have placed at or near the
heart of the American canon. (Brownson
is a central figure in American intellectual history, and James is patriarch of
Nevertheless,
I chose to limit my scope for two very practical reasons. First, even after the long-touted
"rediscovery" of historical approaches, there is a relative paucity
of criticism on the noncanonical American writers influenced by Fourier. A more comprehensive treatment of
Fourierism's literary influence, one that ventured outside the
Transcendentalist circle, would have made this study much longer. Second, Blithedale
aside, the extent of Fourierism's influence upon antebellum American literature
is still relatively obscure. Though my
subjects are familiar, most of their writings on Fourier are not.