"Thoreau, Sex, and Love in the 1840s"
Hey there.
It's Professor Bernstein and in this video, which is the first 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.
So as you discovered from your reading of Robert Richardson's biography of Thoreau,
the 1840s was marked by a period of tumult.
He points out there was the English war with China and "the American war with the Indians
in Florida" as well as economic hard times, the less-than-desirable condition of "the
laboring classes" and struggles for women's rights and the abolishment of slavery.
Thee founders and members of these alternative communities believed that there were other
ways to live and that "society could be reconstructed along better lines" (100).
Richardson focuses mainly on Brook Farm, which I'll discuss in the next video, but since
I'm making this video for those of you in my Thoreau class at Le Moyne College, here
in Syracuse, NY, let's start with an alternative community—the Oneida Community in NY—which
was located just about an hour away from us.
David Reynolds, who was one of my mentors in graduate school, wrote an award-winning
cultural biography of Walt Whitman—a 19th-century American poet who is probably best known as
the author of Leaves of Grass.
In his biography, Reynolds talks about how "Antebellum America"-that is pre-Civil War
America—"was an extremely fertile breeding ground for various religious and secular groups
who practiced alternative lifestyles in an effort to put sexual relations on entirely
new basis" (222).
This was one of the goals of the Oneida community founded by John Humphrey Noyes in 1848.
He was a perfectionist who believed that "God could not expect the impossible from his subjects,
and that the perfection he demanded was. . .attainable."
Noyes also believed that we could "attain the kingdom of heaven on earth" by "duplicat[ing]
Heaven."
http://xroads.virginia.edu/~hyper/hns/cities/oneida.html.
Right now, I'm quoting from the University of Virginia's American Studies website, which
is a great, trustworthy resource for all sorts of information about American culture and
grants you free access to many full-text works.
The members of the Oneida community practiced "complex marriage," which involved
allowing both men and women the ability to have sex with multiple partners.
This idea of complex marriage was "based on Christ's teaching that there would be no marriage
in Heaven."
As such, "Noyes believed that on earth all men were married to all women."
As the author of the piece on the Oneida perfectionists points out, Noyes felt that complex marriage
"moved the community beyond the traditionally divisive commitments to one partner or the
family, and raised this love and loyalty inherent in those commitments to the level of the community,
just as he envisioned it in Heaven."
The Oneida community, like all of the utopian communities, didn't last forever, but it does
live in one way.
The members supported themselves by making traps and chains as well as traveling bags.
. .but mostly memorably...they made silver knives and forks and spoons. . .and that work
formed the beginning of what is now the Oneida silverware company.
Another movement in the pre-Civil War period was
the Free Love movement.
Reynolds describes how the free lovers "called for the abolishment of marriage and the reestablishment
of relationships on the basis of `passional attraction."
(222).
Now a lot of times when we hear "free love," we think immediately of promiscuity and the
hippies of the 1960s, but really this movement began in the 19th century and as Reynolds
observes, it was "a direct response to what was seen as the enslaving marriage institution"
(224).
"Free lovers did not emphasize promiscuity.
Free love for them did not mean indiscriminate love but love freely given, freely shared.
The precondition for sexual relations should be love, not marriage" (225).
"The basic assumption was that capitalism had poisoned heterosexual relationships, making
marriage an institution of entrapment.
The `free' in `free love' meant freedom to regulate sex according to true feeling rather
than exterior social codes, so that every individual heeded the inner call of his or
her sexual voice" (227).
So what does all this have to do with Thoreau?
Thoreau did not belong to any of these communities.
In fact, Thoreau, Emerson, Whitman and a number of other important writers and thinkers were
skeptical of all these institutionalized reform movements.
Thoreau believed that we had to start with ourselves, not with a community.
He also had issues with the idea of institutions and their effect
on us.
So keep these issues in mind when you're reading him.
Sometimes when we're first studying something we only see what's there—we're so focused
on getting a grasp of what's happening—that we don't notice what's not there.
And sometimes what's not there—what's not being said—is just as important as what's
happening and what's being said.
One thing you'll discover as you're reading Thoreau's work is that the issues of love
between men and women, romance, marriage—are conspicuously absent for the most part.
He never married, though he proposed to one woman and was at another time proposed to
by a woman.
But when you're reading, I want you to think about what types of intimacy, attraction,
and relationships does seem to matter to Thoreau and why.
Okay, that's it for this video.
Head over to the next one, where I'm talking a bit more about Brook Farm.