Brook Farm (1843)

AUTHOR: Lane, Charles

PUBLICATION: The Dial. Vol. IV, no. 3 (January 1843): 351-357.
https://archive.org/details/dial03riplgoog/page/350/mode/2up

In this short text, Lane refers only vaguely and in passing to his principles of ethical veganism ( which he calls the “purer diet”) in the context of his discussion of communal life, emphasizing the intersections of labor, women's rights, and education.

KEYWORDS: food, women's rights, labor, education, Brook Farm, Association

SUMMARY (Ridvan Askin, edited Deborah Madsen):

This article describes Lane's visit to Brook Farm, the Transcendentalist community established by George and Sophia Ripley in April 184,. shortly before Lane and Bronson Alcott set up their own utopian experiment at Fruitlands. He finds that the inhabitants can be divided roughly into three groups: adherents of the idea of free association; those for whom Brook Farm serves as a refuge “from some portion of worldly strife”; and those who join with a view to self-improvement and education (351). Communal life, better living and working conditions, and superior education are indeed the community's three most outstanding features, Lane says. With respect to the organization of labor, he insists: “In order to economize labor, and dignify the laborer, it is absolutely necessary that men should cease to work in the present isolate competitive mode, and adopt that of cooperative union or association” (352). With respect to education, Lane particularly values how Brook Farm fosters “mental freedom” based on “the power of love” (352; 353). He also lauds Brook Farm's  non-profit oriented economy: “The just and happy mean between riches and poverty is, indeed, more likely to be attained when, as in this instance, all thought of acquiring great wealth in a brief time, is necessarily abandoned, as a condition of membership” (353).

In a more critical vein, however, Lane decries the lack of idealism, which he thinks is necessary for a proper community and association. Brook Farm, he writes, “is not a community: it is not truly an association: it is merely an aggregation of persons, and lacks that oneness of spirit, which is probably needful to make it of deep and lasting value to mankind” (354). Still, for Lane, while Brook Farm will not contribute to “progress” it at least constitutes “improvement” (354), particularly with respect to education and work. The introduction of a “purer diet” is another aspect Lane is happy about (354).

A problem Lane identifies – he even calls it “the grand problem” – pertains to the contradiction between the nuclear family (“marital family” in Lane's words) and what he terms the “universal family” of real community (355). Mothers, Lane believes, are particularly attached to the former. “That the affections can be divided or bent with equal ardor on two objects, so opposed as universal and individual love” seems unlikely, Lane maintains, since obviously “there is somewhat in the marriage bond which is found to counteract the universal nature of the affections” (356). Since for Lane it is “the determination to do what parents consider the best for themselves and their families, which renders the o'er populous world such a wilderness of selfhood,” he simply advocates to “[d]estroy this feeling” so as to promote “the universal good” and to preclude “all possibility of an individual family” (356-357). This holds not only of places like Brook Farm, but even more so of the more radical, Fourier-inspired communities. These might well be “acute and eloquent in deploring Woman's oppressed and degraded position in past and present times, but are almost silent as to the future” (357), Lane laments. Regardless of his criticisms, Lane found Brook Farm to be a “highly important and praisworthy” enterprise (357).

 

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