"Thoreau, Brook Farm, and Work in the 1840s"
Hey there.
It's Professor Bernstein and in this video, which is the second of a two-part series,
I'm sharing with you some more details about the model or utopian or alternative communities
that were springing up in America during the 1840s because they'll help you cultivate a
richer cultural context for understanding Thoreau's own experiment at Walden and to
eventually draw some connections between these communities and the 21st-century lifestyle
design movement, which we'll soon be exploring.
In the first video, I talked about the utopian communities and movements that explored alternative
ways of thinking about love, sex, and relationships.
Another one of the most well known utopian communities was Brook Farm, which came into
being in 1841 and went bankrupt in 1847, was located in West Roxbury, an area very close
to Boston in Massachusetts.
George Ripley, the founder of Brook Farm, said that the goals of Brook Farm
"`are to secure a more natural union between intellectual and manual labor than now exists;
to combine the thinker and the worker, as far as possible, in the same individual; to
guarantee the highest mental freedom, by providing all with labor adapted to their tastes and
talents'" (101).
Ripley's point about "union" is really important.
Transcendentalists and romantics were very committed to fostering a union between the
internal the external.
So in the case of Brook Farm, the emphasis was on cultivating a more healthy balance
between intellectual and hands-on work.
If you're in my Thoreau class, you're probably starting to sense some connections between
Brook Farm and Thoreau.
Jot them down!
As I mentioned in the videos on American romanticism and transcendentalism, the individuals associated
with these movements were very sensitive to how work can distort our being—our sense
of self-- by dominating our lives and cutting us off from other parts of ourselves.
Let's take a minute to listen to what Emerson had to say about this issue in his 1837 talk
"The American Scholar."
"Man is not a farmer, or a professor, or an engineer, but he is all.
Man is priest, and scholar, and statesman, and producer, and soldier.
In the divided or social state, these functions are parcelled out to individuals, each of
whom aims to do his stint of the joint work, whilst each other performs his. . . .the individual,
to possess himself, must sometimes return from his own labor to embrace all the other
laborers.
But unfortunately, this original unit, this fountain of power, has been so distributed
to multitudes, has been so minutely subdivided and peddled out, that it is spilled into drops,
and cannot be gathered.
The state of society is one in which the members have suffered amputation from the trunk, and
strut about so many walking monsters, — a good finger, a neck, a stomach, an elbow,
but never a man.
Man is thus metamorphosed into a thing, into many things.
The planter, who is Man sent out into the field to gather food, is seldom cheered by
any idea of the true dignity of his ministry.
He sees his bushel and his cart, and nothing beyond, and sinks into the farmer, instead
of Man on the farm.
The tradesman scarcely ever gives an ideal worth to his work, but is ridden by the routine
of his craft, and the soul is subject to dollars.
The priest becomes a form; the attorney, a statute-book; the mechanic, a machine; the
sailor, a rope of a ship."
Brook Farm aimed to alleviate the drudgery of work and the way it splintered our beings.
The work you did at Brook Farm was based on your affinity for it.
That is, if you liked to do something, you were encouraged to pursue that interest.
And there was also an emphasis on switching things up—engaging in variety of types of
work—so that you didn't fall into a rut or get swallowed up by your profession.
A Unitarian minister points out a good example of the balance between intellectual and manual
work is how they attached reading stands to the ironing boards so that people could read
as they ironed.
Here's one of the problems, though.
Many of the transcendentalists and romantics—at least the ones we study in school--were coming
from a highly intellectual, learned background and often had no real experience with manual
labor.
And though they saw something of true value in the "humble, rustic" life, they also idealized
this way of living without having their own first-hand experience of it.
Idealizing is not necessarily a bad thing, but when it came time to actually committing
to a life of balancing the intellect with manual labor.
. .Well, things got a lot more real.
Let me share with you the example of Nathaniel Hawthorne—the 19th-century American author
who wrote The Scarlet Letter—lived at Brook Farm for a time and later wrote a novel The
Blithedale Romance loosely based on his experiences there.
At first, he was really into milking the cows, but as one person points out, the "phase of
`idealistic tourism'" quickly passed and Hawthorne is reported to have said that he "never suspected
that farming was so hard," and wanted to leave before his soul was "utterly buried in a dungheap."
And he left.
Achieving and sustaining this balance—this union—is harder and more complex than we
think.
Even though Thoreau never lived at Brook Farm, he was concerned
with many of the same issues about work and its effect on our
beings as well as what Ripley described as the "union between intellectual and manual
labor."
So when you're reading Walden, I want you to think about how he addresses these issues.