Brook Farm
Brook Farm, a transcendentalist utopian experiment, was put into practice by transcendentalist former Unitarian minister George Ripley at a farm in West Roxbury, Massachusetts, at that time nine miles from Boston. The community, in operation from 1841 to 1847, was inspired by socialist concepts of Charles Fourier. It was based (as many later utopias would be) on the concept of self-reliance, which powers much of the utopian movement. The actual farm they lived on was influential to many writers like Thoreau as they rejected civilization and its injustices and desired to be secluded. The Brook Farm utopia was intended to rely on agriculture, whereas the moderately more successful utopia of the Oneidas was based on consumer goods like furniture.
Agriculture was never very successful at Brook Farm, which in fact was sited on land not very suitable for agriculture. Brook Farm also was an educational enterprise, and ran schools at all levels from primary to college preparatory. These, in fact, were the financially profitable part of Brook Farm's operations.
Nathaniel Hawthorne spent time at Brook Farm and presented a fictionalized portrait of it in his novel, The Blithedale Romance. (He acknowledged the resemblance in his introduction, saying "in the 'Blithedale' of this volume, many readers will probably suspect a faint and not very faithful shadowing of Brook Farm, in Roxbury, which (now a little more than ten years ago) was occupied and cultivated by a company of socialists.") Some have seen a resemblance between Margaret Fuller and Hawthorne's fictional character "Zenobia." In the novel, a visitor—a writer like Hawthorne—finds that hard farm labor is not conducive to intellectual creativity:
- We had pleased ourselves with delectable visions of the spiritualization of labor.... [but] the clods of earth, which we so constantly belabored and turned over and over, were never etherealized into thought. Our thoughts, on the contrary, were fast becoming cloddish. Our labor symbolized nothing, and left us mentally sluggish in the dusk of the evening. Intellectual activity is incompatible with any large amount of bodily exercise. The yeoman and the scholar—the yeoman and the man of finest moral culture, though not the man of sturdiest sense and integrity—are two distinct individuals, and can never be melted or welded into one substance.
During its later years, the Brook Farm community became more and more committed to Fourierist theories, and committed itself to building an ambitious communal building known as the "Phylanstery." When this building caught fire and burned to the ground in 1846, the community's hopes perished with it.
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