Transcendental Anti-Lions: Radical Hope in the Age of Fourier
Holly Jackson
University of Massachusetts, Boston
Holly Jackson is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, and the author of American Blood: The Ends of the Family in American Literature (Oxford UP, 2014). Her work has appeared in PMLA, New England Quarterly, ESQ, and American Literature, among other venues, and has received the Nineteenth-Century Studies Article Prize and the Norman Foerster Prize. She is at work on a crossover cultural history provisionally titled American Radicals: How 19th-Century Counterculture Shaped the Nation. This book is under contract with Crown, an imprint of Penguin Random House. She is represented by the Regal Hoffman Agency.
Abstract
In May of 1837, a bank panic kicked off a disastrous period of deflation and unemployment, the country’s first major economic depression. Starvation was widespread, as was suicide. Emerson wrote in his journal, “the world... [ view full abstract ]
In May of 1837, a bank panic kicked off a disastrous period of deflation and unemployment, the country’s first major economic depression. Starvation was widespread, as was suicide. Emerson wrote in his journal, “the world has failed,” and “young men have no hope.”[i] And yet from these circumstances a socialist movement emerged that gave as many as 100,000 Americans a surprising kind of hope. My paper explores the impact of the French philosopher Charles Fourier on the American 1840s. His vision for a society based on pleasure and cooperation promised reform so total that it would transform the Earth’s climates and perfect the human body. Fourier is a flamboyant exemplar of the relationship between social critique and utopian imagining, both forms of radical hope that another and better world is possible.
My treatment of the national Associationist movement delves into its role in the emergence of organized labor in New England and also in the overlapping countercultures of the region, including the activist wing of Transcendentalism. I revisit Brook Farm’s conversion to a Fourierist Phalanx in 1844 to argue that this commune was more than a pastoral summer camp for the Brahmin gifted and talented. Disillusioned with American society, they channeled religious fervor into radical social theory, worshipping Fourier explicitly as the second coming of Christ, sent to abolish capitalist inequality. The Brook Farmers illuminate the value and limits of prefigurative politics, of the utopianism that is crucial to social justice work but can also eclipse it.
[i] 332-4. Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson Volume V. 1835-1838. Harvard UP 1965
Authors
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Holly Jackson
(University of Massachusetts, Boston)
Topic Area
Expanding Forms: a Writing Workshop
Session
S4b » Seminar 4.b Expanding Forms: a Writing Workshop II (10:15 - Saturday, 24th March, Boardroom North)
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