Brook Farm (Bowdoin, )

History 12 Reading Guide

Reading:

J.B. Wilson, “The Antecedents of Brook Farm,” New England Quarterly 15.2 (1942), 320-331. JSTOR

Documents:

Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Historic Notes of Life and Letters in New England,” in Emerson, Lectures and Biographical Sketches (1904; notes written in 1867, first published 1883), 325-370. American Transcendentalism Web, Virginia Commonwealth University. LINK [Note: focus on the section on Brook Farm at the end of the Notes, pp.359-370 in the 1904 edition.]

Note: read one or more of the following:

Nathaniel Hawthorne, Passages from the American Note-books of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Vol. II (1868), [April 13—October 17, 1841], 1-49. Online Books Page, University of Pennsylvania Library, at Eldritch Press. LINK [Note: Scroll down until you find the link for Passages from the American Notebooks. Focus on the entries from April 13-September 3, 1841].
Joel Myerson, “Memoranda and Documents: James Burrill Curtis and Brook Farm [1842-43],” New England Quarterly 51.3 (1978), 396-423. JSTOR
Joel Myerson, ed., “Rebecca Codman Butterfield’s Reminiscences of Brook Farm [1843-47; written c. 1890s],” New England Quarterly 65.4 (1992), 603-630. JSTOR
Ora Gannett Sedgwick, “A Girl of 16 at Brook Farm [1841-42],” The Atlantic Monthly 85.509 (March 1900), 395-404. Making of America: Cornell University Library. LINK. Printable .pdf

Further reading (a fictional, semi-autobiographical account of Fruitlands)

Amelia Wilson, “Home Life of the Brook Farm Association,” The Atlantic Monthly 42.252-253 (Oct.—Nov. 1878), Part I, 458-466, Part II, 556-563. Printable .pdf
Louisa May Alcott, “Transcendental Wild Oats” (from Silver Pitchers, 1876), American Transcendentalism Web, Virginia Commonwealth University. LINK

Questions:

Note: Individualism (one of the tenets of Transcendentalism, which sought to free individuals from the restraints of institutions) nourishes an anti-institutional impulse, so there is an inherent tension between individual freedom and centralized authority. How did the communal experiments based on Transcendentalism (Brook Farm and Fruitlands) try to overcome this tension? How well did they succeed?

According to J.B. Wilson, why did nineteenth-century observers characterize Brook Farm as “either something more or something less than just another experiment in communism”? What were the cultural, educational, and associative antecendents of Brook Farm? How, according to Wilson, did those theoretical influences shape the practice at Brook Farm?

How did Ralph Waldo Emerson’s formulation (that individualism leads to criticism which leads to reform) contrast with Robert Owen’s anti-individualism? Why didn’t Emerson join the Transcendentalist communal experiment that he, at least initially, praised? How did Emerson, in hindsight, assess the Association?

What was Nathaniel Hawthorne seeking, from Brook Farm and from the Shaker communities he later visited? What were his hopes for Brook Farm as a community? What did he hope to gain there? How did he envision his contribution? How quickly did he lose patience with manual labor? How did his description of his experience change when he returned to Brook Farm as a boarder? Did he offer any perspective on why the community worked (or didn’t work)? Did Brook Farm expect its members to focus on the good of the whole? Was the disjunction for Hawthorne between ideal and reality similar to the ambiguity between Robert Owen’s vision and the reality of New Harmony?

How did Burrill Curtis first describe Brook Farm in his correspondence with his father? How did both the content and the focus of his descriptions change over the course of his correspondence? In the early months, he expressed confidence that he was better off at Brook Farm than he could be anywhere else. How did he articulate what he hoped to learn or gain from the experience, and how did his goals change over time? Much of his correspondence with his father (a banker) focused on financial matters—questions about his expenses and rent (which were determined by status: member, laboring boarder, or boarder); a decision about whether to purchase shares in Brookfarm Stock, etc. What does his correspondence reveal about Brook Farm as an economic endeavor (and corporation)?

What “inquiries repeated again and again” inspired Rebecca Codman Butterfield’s memoirs of Brook Farm, and how did those influence what she chose to describe (and perhaps to omit)? Note: do not let Myerson’s assessments of her account as “uncritical and sentimentalized” limit your reading of her memoirs. What characteristics of the community, its principles, and its membership did she emphasize—and why? Even though the tone of her account was almost consistently positive, she did describe some of the difficulties that the community faced during the years that her family lived there? What were the problems, and how did they deal with them? At the end of her account, what “principle points of difference between our life and Brook Farm and that of ordinary society” did she present? What kind of parting message did she hope to leave?