Somewhat on the Community System

Representations of Fourierism in the Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne

Andrew Loman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9781138868663
• eBook ISBN:
  9781135494117
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Hawthorne wrote much of his major fiction in the decade that the theories of Charles Marie François Fourier crossed the Atlantic and contributed to a wave of communitarian experimentation in the American North. Famously, Hawthorne briefly lived and worked at Brook Farm, a Transcendentalist commune that formally converted to Fourierism when he had left and was embroiled in litigation to recover money he had invested in the community. In his fiction, Hawthorne responded directly to Fourierism and its critique of capitalism. He used his experiences at Brook Farm as the inspiration for The Blithedale Romance, and in The House of the SevenGables cast one of the principal characters as a recovering Fourierist. In The Scarlet Letter he engaged with Fourierist debates on marriage and the regulation of desire. Somewhat on the Community-System examines these interventions, and argues that Hawthorne's fiction both seeks to contain Fourierism and responds to its allure. Moreover, in formulating alternative, morally acceptable utopias (ones that are predicated on middle-class marriage), Hawthorne's fiction appropriates key aspects of Fourierist theory

Chapter One

Introduction

I.

Nathaniel Hawthorne read several of the works of the pre-Marxian socialist Marie François Charles Fourier (1772–1837), and was familiar or intimate with a number of the preëminent American Fourierists¹ of the 1840s. A founding participant in George Ripley's communitarian experiment at Brook Farm, he was aware of its later conversion to Fourierism; he may, in fact, have lost $500 because of this conversion, at a time when his personal finances were in crisis. Representations of Fourier are crucial to the logic of two of the American romances, The House of the Seven Gables (1851) and The Blithedale Romance (1852), and I will argue that Hawthorne implicitly challenges Fourierist theory in The Scarlet Letter (1850).

These facts notwithstanding, no critic has written a study that attends sufficiently to the function of Fourier in Hawthorne's work. Many have made note of Fourier's presence in The Blithedale Romance, and some have built powerful arguments about it which acknowledge and incorporate Hawthorne's representations of Fourier.² But Fourier's function in The House of the Seven Gables has been almost entirely ignored, even though he is as often invoked in that romance as in The Blithedale Romance.³ Critics have treated The Scarlet Letter's critique of reform only in general terms, for the novel makes no direct mention of Fourier. Nevertheless, Fourierist discourses influence The Scarlet Letter in its treatment of its major theme, adultery. A study is long overdue which makes Hawthorne's engagement with Fourierism its focus. Given the recent distinguished work attending to communitarianism⁴ in general and to American Fourierism in particular, preëminent among which is Carl Guarneri's The Utopian Alternative: Fourierism in Nineteenth-Century America, such a study is also now possible.⁵

A Fourierist focus promises to enrich our understanding of the aesthetic complexities and historical situation of Hawthorne's fiction, and hence to clarify what Jane Tompkins calls their “cultural work.” By this term, Tompkins refers to authors' “designs upon their audiences” and their efforts “to make people think and act in a particular way” (Tompkins xi); she argues that literary works participate actively in the mêlée of politics. The representations of Fourier in Hawthorne's romances are ineluctably political. When Hawthorne was writing his romances, the Fourierist experiments of the 1840s, and such distant communitarian cousins as the Alcotts' Fruitlands, were mostly over, typically having ended in bankruptcy. This might suggest that in The Blithedale Romance Hawthorne was writing a satiric elegy for an already discredited reform movement. Nevertheless, Fourierist phalanxes were not wholly a thing of the past in 1852. When the Oneida Circular, the journal of John Humphrey Noyes's Perfectionist community, reviewed The Blithedale Romance, it also ran an article on the Fourierist North American Phalanx, testimony to the persistence of Fourierism. And the existence of colonies such as Oneida and the free-love community Modern Times, which in different ways evinced Fourierist influence, suggests that Fourierism continued to exert an influence on American society well into the 1850s. To take one further example, Hawthorne's preoccupation with mesmerism in both The House of the Seven Gables and The Blithedale Romance, and his direct correlation of it with Fourierism, does not derive from his memories of Brook Farm. Rather, it responds to allegiances made between Fourierists and spiritualists in the late 1840s and early 1850s.⁶ One can say, therefore, that Hawthorne's representation of Blithedale as safely interred in the past is not just an aesthetic representation of social reality, but also a political strategy, couched in the form of fiction, in an as-yet-unresolved contest.⁷

Understanding the cultural work of Hawthorne's fictions depends upon having a subtle sense of their historical situations. By historical situation I mean not only the context in which Hawthorne produced his work, but also the ways in which his work negotiated with other discourses to participate in that context. Historicist readings of literary texts are no longer new; literary criticism no longer needs to be told that one must “[a]lways his-toricize” (Jameson 9), or that without understanding the historical circumstances in which works are produced one cannot understand the works themselves. Still, much of this historicizing remains to be done. We have been able to perceive, for instance, that Hawthorne's works criticize Fourierism. But we have not understood well how they do so, or how even in the midst of their critique they covertly appropriate elements of Fourierist theory. The benefit of situating the works in their historical moment extends in two directions: we emerge with an enriched understanding not only of the texts, but also of the historical moment. Carl Guarneri's magisterial The Utopian Alternative has subtilized our understanding of American Fourierism.⁸ But Guarneri approaches the issue as an historian, not as a literary scholar, and so his study's forays into literary analysis are limited. Studying the ways in which literature portrays Fourierism gives additional insight into the period. Hawthorne's works provide an appropriate starting point in such an enterprise because they are by far the best known works in English to engage with Fourierism.⁹ Hawthorne is, however, only one of many authors representing Fourier.¹⁰

Hawthorne's representations of Fourier and Fourierism are not neutral signs indicating that he wrote at a time when there were such things as Fourierists. Hawthorne was conscious of the political effects of his works, and his representations of Fourier aim to persuade his reader of the merits of his own position—one largely hostile to Fourierism. This rhetorical enterprise is subtle, and so one must approach the texts with interpretive care as great as that of the most ardent formalist (as, indeed, all of the best politically oriented literary critics do). Such care not only discloses the nuances of Hawthorne's political enterprise, however. It has the additional virtue of subtilizing our understanding of the texts themselves: attending to the function of Fourier in Hawthorne's romances can disclose textual complexities heretofore unregistered.

The challenges such an enterprise faces, however, are various. One fundamental error would be to read the romances as Fourierist allegories. Such is the strategy of Gerard Nawrocki in a recent article on The Blithedale Romance. For Nawrocki, Fourierist theory makes the relations of the romances characters intelligible: Fourier's complex equations for the ideal interaction of individuals within his social system inform the romance's deployment of its characters; Fourier's psychological theory explicates the romance's characters. As we shall see, Hawthorne's documented reading of Fourier's texts justifies Nawrocki s assumption that Hawthorne engaged with the intricacies of Fourierist theory. But Nawrocki s claims depend upon his own arbitrary schematizing of the romance. He writes, for instance, that “the group structure of The Blithedale Romance fits the basic group structure of Fourier's theory nearly perfectly” (Nawrocki 201); he can support this claim only by arranging the characters himself:

there are seven characters with names: Zenobia, Hollingsworth, Priscilla, Coverdale, Mr. Moodie, Professor Westervelt, and Silas Foster. They are all united in the common interest of the Blithedale experiment or in affinity to Zenobia and her money. These seven characters form three sub-groups: the center which consists of Zenobia, Hollingsworth and Priscilla; the wing from Blithedale related to Zenobia's present is made up of Coverdale and Silas Foster; and the wing from urban society related to Zenobias past is made up of Mr. Moodie and Professor Westervelt. (Nawrocki 201)

But Westervelt and Moodie never meet in the action of the romance, except, perhaps, at Zenobias funeral, and thus their conscription in a sub-group is not of their own volition, defying Fourierist group theory. And Coverdale cannot so neatly be conscripted into the “wing from Blithedale” given his ambivalence about communitarianism and his own provenance in the city.

Nawrocki not only makes too rigid an application of Fourierist theory to the romance's design, but also attributes to Hawthorne an implausible familiarity with details of Fourier s career. He draws unwarranted parallels between Blithedale and the only Fourierist community with which Fourier was personally involved, Condé-sur-Vesgre (near Paris), trying to read as significant certain perceived similarities between Hollingsworth and that community's architect, Colomb Gengembre. It is remotely possible that Hawthorne read Charles Pellarin's 1849 biography of Fourier which reprinted Fourier's private letters complaining about Gengembre.¹¹ But differences between Hollingsworth and Gengembre far outweigh similarities; ultimately, reading Gengembre as a source for Hollingsworth is not particularly fruitful. Nawrocki's best point is that group dynamics in The Blithedale Romance are more destructive than Fourier imagined, and this might have led to more productive insights—that Hawthorne and Fourier have fundamentally opposed conceptions of innate virtue or depravity, for instance. As we shall see, Fourier followed Rousseau in supposing that society was corruptive. By contrast, for Hawthorne, as one of the characters in “Earths Holocaust” puts it, schemes for reform will always collapse until reformers “hit upon some method of purifying that foul cavern” (CE 10:403), the “human heart.” As Herman Melville put it in his review of Mosses from an Old Manse, Hawthorne had a “great power of blackness in him [which] derives its force from its appeals to that Calvinistic sense of Innate Depravity and Original Sin” (CR 107).

Nawrocki's allegorization of The Blithedale Romance is inadequate, but it is just as problematic, and just as easy, to make the opposite mistake: because Fourier's system is so grand in scope, a study of its relation to Hawthorne's fiction can easily become too diffuse in focus. Carl Guarneri has shown that the Fourierists represented their own cultural critique as totalizing, subsuming all varieties of reforms within their own. F. O. Matthiessen suggested long ago that a study “concentrat[ing] on how discerning an interpretation our great authors gave of the economic and social forces of the time” might be called “ The Age of Fourier” Such a study

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 of 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. (Matthiessen viii–ix)

Crediting Fourier with “all the radical movements of the period” would accord with the Fourierists' own view of their role in mid-century reform.¹² But the Fourierists' claims on behalf of their theory and the realities of mid-century reform plainly differ: Brownson, for instance, has been called “Fourierism's fiercest opponent in America” (Hill 92). Nor should one assume, just because Hawthorne used Fourierism as a metonym for what he took to be immoral reform, that he considered it coextensive with all reform. To understand the function of Fourier in Hawthorne one must distinguish between his references to Fourierism and his references to various other programs of reform, rather than assent to the Fourierists' own claims to subsume all reform. One might justly read Zenobias commitment (however ambivalent) to both communitarianism and feminism as reflective of the appeal that Fourier held for a number of antebellum American feminists (a variety of whom, most notably the Grimké sisters, lived for stretches of time in Fourierist communities), but one can assume neither that Fourierism and feminism were entirely comfortable partners nor that the ideals of Zenobia and those of the Fourierist Blithedale are coextensive. Similarly, although Fourierists and Hawthorne both use the rhetoric of slavery to describe the condition both of women and wage laborers, it would be misguided to assume that this implies a Fourierist influence on Hawthorne. The danger, in short, is to simplify the relation and to obscure the differences between the varieties of reform represented in Hawthorne's work.

A further difficulty arises in distinguishing between possible Fouriers. Fourierist discourse in the United States in the 1840s did not derive exclusively from Fourier. In 1840, when Albert Brisbane transported Fourierism across the Atlantic, Fourier himself had been dead for three years. Although Brisbane had studied theory with Fourier, French Fourierism had already changed considerably by 1840. At that time, the leader of the Fourierist movement in France, Victor Considérant, was committed to creating a mass movement, which necessarily implied jettisoning the philosophical, libidinal, and cosmogonical extravagances of Fourierist theory (this had been happening, in fact, from the moment that Fourier began to acquire adherents, but with Fourier's death the disciples had one significant impediment fewer to making Fourierism widely palatable).¹³ It is a commonplace of pro-Fourierist propaganda of all stripes to disclaim affiliation with some element of Fourier's speculations. Brisbane's own version of Fourierism—which he published in 1840 as The Social Destiny of Man and in a weekly column in Horace Greeley's New York Tribune—reflects, sustains, and carries further the efforts of French Fourierists: relative to Fourier's own writing, The Social Destiny of Man is a pallid document advocating little more than communitarianism. And as Brisbane's Americanized Fourierism started to become a mass movement, there arose yet another version of Fourierism, that constructed in the conservative press. Thus Hawthorne, who read newspapers avidly and on two occasions read Fourier in the original, had a multiplicity of Fourierisms from which to assemble his own portrait.

II.

Hawthorne often bases his own representations of Fourierism on contemporary portraits hostile to Fourier. But he would have encountered at least four distinct strains of Fourierism. The first is Fourier's own. Second is the Fourierism that developed out of Brisbane's efforts at establishing a movement in America, which had close ties with Hugh Doherty s abortive efforts in England and with the Fourierism of Victor Considérant....

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Notes on Abbreviations
• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• Chapter One Introduction
• Chapter Two Dreamers' Utopias: Communitarianism and Fourierism in Hawthorne's Works Prior to the American Romances
• Chapter Three The Unpardonable Sin: Egotism as Ideology in The House of the Seven Gables and The Blithedale Romance
• Chapter Four Free Love and its Specters in the American Romances
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index