Canada and the United States
Hallock provides us with insights on how to read
texts as variable in content and intent as Thomas
Jefferson's Notes on the State of Virginia (1787), William Bartram's Travels (1791), the Nicholas Biddle
edition of History of the Expedition under the Command
of Captains Lewis and Clark (1814), and Cooper's The
Pioneers. In doing so, he provides a basis for the
transition between regional or geographical literature
(for example, Jefferson's Notes) as the justification for
the benevolent progress model of American westering
and the more aggressive and dispossessive attitudes
(see Philip Freneau's works on "the unsocial Indian")
expressed in the literature emerging after the initial
settling of the old Northwest Territory but before the
great migrations to the farther west that represented
the culmination of the theme of Manifest Destiny. The
organization of the author's critical evaluation of
regional literature is chronological. He begins with
analysis of the writings from the imagined and contested trans-Appalachian West of Evans's Pennsylvania and John Filson's Kentucky before the American
Revolution and moves to the opening of the region as
symbolized in Jefferson's extended views of Virginia.
From thence it is a small geographic leap (albeit a
great philosophical one) to the settlement of the
cis-Mississippi frontier and its redefinition as borderland to the broader trans-Mississippi West as represented by the journals of Lewis and Clark and the
travel accounts of Bartram. And, finally, Hallock concludes by drawing loose parallels between the travels
of Timothy Dwight and Cooper's Pioneers and the
settlement (or "civilizing") of the Old Northwest.
But if the organization of the literary analysis moves
along chronological lines, the analysis itself does not.
There are consistent themes that run unchanged
throughout the literature from Evans to Cooper: the
relationship between the environmental change of a
new economic order and the social conflict between
American and American Indian; the shaping of the
mythical and unsubstantiated noble savage (Shepard
Krech's "ecological Indian") as a part of the landscape;
the continuing definition and redefinition of wilderness. Hallock has much to teach us, despite the
persistent obscurity of some of his ideas, not the least
of which is that American writing about place maintains some consistency across space and time and that
consistency is the presence of the Other in the landscape. For Evans, drawing his maps of Pennsylvania in
the 1750s, the "Other" may have been American
Indian. For Washington Irving, writing about the
farther West in the 1830s, the "Other" may just as
easily have been the "white savages" of the midlands
frontier. This book is not an easy or comfortable or
comforting read. But it is an important one.
JOHN L. ALLEN
University of Wyoming
STERLING F. DELANO. Brook Farm: The Dark Side of
Utopia. Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. 2004. Pp. xvii, 428. $29.95.
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW
477
Why no comprehensive, scholarly history of the most
celebrated American utopian community has appeared
until now is a puzzle. Because Brook Farm was linked
to the circle of New England Transcendentalists that
gathered around Ralph Waldo Emerson and Margaret
Fuller, some account of it appears in most histories of
the antebellum era. Sources for a full-scale study have
long sat in archives, and in recent decades various
editions of Brook Farmers' letters and memoirs have
been published by Joel Myerson and others. Lindsay
Swift's elegant portrait in Brook Farm: Its Members,
Scholars and Visitors (1900) may have cowed later
writers. More likely, Brook Farm fell victim to a divide
between literary and historical scholars. Literary
chroniclers of the" American Renaissance" share Emerson, Fuller, and Nathaniel Hawthorne's bemused
attitude toward Brook Farm but like them lose interest
once the community adopts the French utopian
Charles Fourier's theories. Historians, on the other
hand, tend to submerge Brook Farm's Transcendentalist identity in the broader communitarian movement
of the 1840s. What one of Brook Farm's patrons called
an "unnatural union" of Transcendentalists and utopian socialists produced scholarly commentators who
split into disciplinary camps partial to one or the other.
This divide has finally been bridged by an English
professor, not a "new historicist" leaning heavily on
theory but one who successfully adapts the traditional
methods of literary biography to communal history.
Sterling F. Delano has produced a detailed group
biography of the Brook Farmers that blends careful
historical scholarship with Swift's humanistic approach. Delano's focus is on Brook Farm's leaders,
especially its admirable founder George Ripley and a
handful of his associates who persevered through
Brook Farm's brief but important life. The author
follows these ministers, reformers, and artisans-alas,
almost none were farmers-from the community's
founding in 1841 as an informal experiment in Christian equality to its decision to join the Fourierist
movement two years later and its collapse and dispersal in 1847. Speaking mainly through the Brook
Farmers' own words, Delano brings alive their hopes,
trials, and frustrations as they converged on an idyllic
site along the Charles River and began to confront the
realities of group living and the market economy.
Although Delano favors individual stories over intensive analysis of social and cultural issues, this is the
first study to nail down the slippery details of who
joined Brook Farm, how it was run, and what members
produced. Thus we learn that the community's ninety
residents accommodated perhaps a thousand visitors a
year, that most members rotated work tasks (one of
Fourier's requirements), and that despite purchasing a
dairy farm the community had to buy milk from
outsiders during its first two years.
On Transcendentalism and Fourierism, the two
poles of Brook Farm's magnetic field, Delano also
adds pertinent information. By the time Brook Farm
was established, the battle against religious orthodoxy
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478
Reviews of Books and Films
that had linked Transcendentalists in common cause
was superseded by disputes over what should replace
it. Delano suggests that Ripley's vision of a model
community of equals joining manual and intellectual
labor owed more to his Unitarian mentor William
Ellery Channing and to Fourierist ideas than to Transcendentalist debates. In contrast to Swift and Perry
Miller, Delano seconds the claims of Charles Crowe
and myself that Brook Farm's conversion to Fourierism was not an abrupt change of course but the logical
result of compatible objectives and growing ambition.
As Delano shows in convincing detail, with Brook
Farm's economy in disarray and a communitarian
craze sweeping the nation, Ripley, Charles Dana, and
most Brook Farm leaders became willing to trade
some of their experiment's spontaneity, middle-class
atmosphere, and New England provincialism for the
greater social inclusiveness, organizational rigor, and
national publicity promised by the Fourierist alliance.
That this bargain did not work was due partly to
Fourierism's cumbersome work arrangements and distracting lecture tours. An outbreak of smallpox and a
fire in 1846 that consumed Brook Farm's nearly finished communal residence sealed the community's
fate. But the real cause of Brook Farm's collapse,
according to Delano, was the community's inability to
find profitable lines of work, hampered by infertile
land and an inconvenient location but especially by
Ripley's impractical leadership. Chronic financial
woes, not the entry of Fourierist serpent Albert Brisbane into the garden (as Swift would have it) or
members' betrayal of their own ideals (as Hawthorne's
Blithedale Romance [1852] implied) constituted the
"dark side of utopia." In fact, while Delano cautions
against taking members' gauzily nostalgic memoirs at
face value, he praises their devotion to communal
ideals, their abolition of domestic service, and the
festive atmosphere they maintained even after the
conversion to Fourierism. This book is less melodramatic and more balanced than its title.
Focused on individuals and governed by a traditional narrative, Delano's study may not satisfy historians looking for fresh interpretation of Transcendentalism or Fourierism, theoretical contributions to the
literature on utopian communities, or extended analyses of Brook Farmers' ties to abolitionism, feminism,
or the labor movement. Delano is reluctant to generalize, and his controversies with scholars are mainly
factual and relegated to end notes. Strict chronological
organization creates some repetition and divides up
the book's coverage of key topics.
These, however, are minor weaknesses, flip sides of
the book's strength as an absorbing group biography.
Delano's study fills a gaping hole in the literature on
Transcendentalism and American utopian ism with
solid research, tempered judgment, and narrative flair.
It should become the standard reference on Brook
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW
Farm and the required starting point for more specialized studies of that ever-fascinating community.
CARL J. GUARNERI
Saint Mary's College of California
PETER KAFER. Charles Brockden Brown's Revolution
and the Birth of American Gothic. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. 2004. Pp. xxi, 249.
$39.95.
This book is an inventive, often entertaining, and richly
interdisciplinary investigation of how Charles Brockden Brown came to write gothic literature in an
American context that, on the surface, would seem
resistant to such strains. Peter Kafer interweaves biography, history, and literary readings to show that
Brown's pioneering forays into gothicism stemmed
from his informed sense that the nation's birth was
attended by injustices and horrors, that the past could
not easily be shaken off, and that the age of reason and
enlightenment was haunted by irrationality in myriad
forms. The first part of the book lays out historical and
cultural contexts running from the 1650s to 1798including the American Revolution, Quaker history,
and transatlantic literary and philosophical trendssituating each with reference to Brown, his family, or
his immediate communities. The second part builds on
these backgrounds to explicate Brown's major works:
Wieland, "Carwin," Arthur Mervyn, Ormond, and Edgar
Huntly, all written or published in a fury of productivity
between 1798 and 1800.
The book's main contribution lies in the degree to
which it digs beneath theoretical or historical generalizations to substantively locate the "ground zero" (p.
129) of American gothicism: its commitment to embedding Brown's fictions in local, familial, and personal facts. Kafer shows, for instance, how details of
Wieland (spontaneous combustion, mysterious voices)
echo Quaker imagery found in the writings of Brown's
ancestors. Most centrally, Kafer uncovers how thoroughly Brown's novels draw from his traumatic experiences in revolutionary Philadelphia, particularly the
persecution of his Quaker neighbors and the arrest of
his father. To say the book is grounded in specificity,
however, is not to say that it is limited. Indeed, as
Kafer shows, Brown's life story intersects at peculiar
angles with major historical events, movements, and
figures. The book thus also presents a well textured
study of Brown's moment, including lively, often irreverent glimpses at early national luminaries.
Kafer's ability to meaningfully trace out the labyrinths of connection and experience beneath Brown's
stories is supported by a wide-ranging grasp of religious, political, cultural, and intellectual history, and,
most importantly, by a prodigious amount of primary,
archival research, ingeniously analyzed and deployed.
Kafer carves his argument out of what is (and what is
not) found in letters, diaries, family histories, pamphlets, tax records, and maps, as well as literary texts.
The degree of original groundwork here is epitomized
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