The Threefold Tie historical note

I have finished a draft of the historical note for The Threefold Tie! Which at 1500 words is, perhaps, longer than a historical note ought to be, and that’s after I cut the list of My Favorite Would-Be Utopian Communes of 19th Century America, and also at least half the Howells’ books I wanted to talk about. I really mourn the loss of The Coast of Bohemia, but one has to draw the line somewhere.

Possibly it ought to be drawn somewhere before I recount the entire adultery-in-his-HEART plotline of A Modern Instance. Perhaps, actually, I should just stick with the Oneida Community infodump and leave the Howells books out of it?

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In my rough drafts of this book, the Oneida Community infodump was much longer, and it still didn’t include everything I wanted to share because quite a lot of it happened after the book is set. This is of course the sort of situation that historical notes were made for, so here are all the Oneida Community facts that didn’t fit in the book.

The Oneida Community, founded in 1848, was a Christian perfectionist commune - perfectionist in the sense of "We can achieve sinless grace on earth!", not its modern meaning. They practiced:

1. Bible communism. Everyone in the community holds all goods in common; the community takes care of everyone and everyone does work for the community. All kinds of work are held to be holy.

2. Complex marriage. All the men and women in the community are heterosexually married to each other. People at the time often figured that there was a constant orgy going on in the mansion, but in fact sexual contact had to be carefully negotiated, usually through an intermediary, and anyone had the right to say no. (As Sarah Vowell recounts in Assassination Vacation, Charles Guiteau, who later assassinated President Garfield, lived in the Oneida Community for five years and could not get laid.) You'd think women would be getting pregnant all the time, except the community also practiced

3. Male sexual continence. Men were not to ejaculate during sex. This apparently worked really well as a birth control method - there were only forty pregnancies in the group's first twenty years of existence - possibly because incorrect ejaculation would come up during

4. Mutual Criticism. During Mutual Criticism, the whole community would gather, one person was put on the hot seat, and everyone else was allowed - nay, encouraged! - to tell you all your faults (for instance: “You ejaculate during sex”) so you could try to correct them and thus approach nearer to spiritual perfection. This sounds excruciating, but Pierrepont Noyes, in his memoir My Father’s House: An Oneida Childhood, comments that “because members had the opportunity to criticize each other openly, Community life was singularly free from backbiting and scandalmongering,” so perhaps it's a case of ripping off the bandaid all in one go rather than taking it up millimeter by excruciating millimeter.

Everyone except John Humphrey Noyes, the community’s charismatic founder, underwent Mutual Criticism, so any impulse toward harshness must have been tempered by the knowledge that the criticizer might soon be the criticized.

The Oneida Community lasted until 1881. As Noyes grew older, he suffered from a disease that destroyed the beautiful voice so central to his charisma, and a faction of malcontents began to mutter about deposing him.

Then Professor Mears from Hamilton College launched a moral crusade against Oneida. Noyes fled to Canada to avoid prosecution for adultery, and in exile in Niagara he suggested that community members should marry so as to avoid prosecution as well. So they did, and that was the end of Bible Communism: once people had their own families to take care of, they wanted their own stuff.

And then Oneida became a joint stock company and eventually transformed into a silverware manufacturing giant.

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Those prospective adultery prosecutions are a reminder that most nineteenth century Americans viewed marriage as the line between moral and immoral sex. For a man to fall in love with another man’s wife was a moral disaster, as evidenced in William Dean Howells’ A Modern Instance. The book, published in 1882, was one of the earliest American novels to sympathetically portray a divorce, which was considered a daring and outre subject for a novel at that time.

Soon after their marriage, Marcia and Bartley Hubbard move to Boston, where they run into an old friend of Bartley’s, Ben Halleck. Ben Halleck falls in love with Marcia, and he is so horrified by this sinful love that he flees to South America to escape it. Indeed, he finds his own love for a married woman so shameful that he can’t even bring himself to tell his family why he’s fleeing the country.

Years later, Ben returns to Boston. Marcia and Bartley do divorce, whereupon Bartley jocularly suggests to Ben that he should marry Marcia, which sends Ben into a tailspin of self-loathing, because he’s a nineteenth-century Bostonian and that’s just what they do. How dare he covet a married woman? Sometimes he wished that Bartley would die so he could marry Marcia, and doesn’t that make him a murderer in his heart? Doesn’t his passion for Marcia undermine the sanctity of all marriages everywhere in its refusal to respect the inviolability of the marriage bond?

A few years pass, and Bartley dies, freeing Marcia from her marital bonds. But didn’t the divorce do that, you say? Well, kind of sort of not really. The divorce meant that she and Bartley didn’t have to live together anymore, but apparently to a nineteenth century Bostonian, it didn’t actually leave her free to marry anyone else. But now Marcia’s a widow and can definitely remarry!

But Ben is afraid that his earlier illicit passion has disqualified him as Marcia’s potential husband. Does the fact that he fell in love with Marcia while she was still married to another man means that his love is forever soiled and he can never marry her and should just continue pining hopelessly from afar?

He puts this question to his friend Atherton in a letter, and Atherton reads the letter aloud to his wife who thinks the whole thing is nonsense and Ben should ask for Marcia’s hand, while Atherton is like, no no, Ben is right! His love is SOILED FOREVER. And there the book ends, Ben’s letter unanswered, because clearly Howells knows that Mrs. Atherton is right and it IS too cruel to tell Ben to pine till he dies, but he also knows that ending the book with a divorcee marrying a man who fell in love with her while her husband yet lived (and thus committed adultery in his heart) would be just a bridge too far for the average reader of 1882.

Another Howells book I found invaluable was My Year in a Log Cabin, a short memoir about a year in Howells’ boyhood in the 1850s when his family lived in a log cabin in southern Ohio. By the 1850s, log cabins were no longer common in Ohio, and Howells recalls having the delicious sense of having moved into one of his father’s stories about his own childhood. Poor Mrs. Howells perhaps found it less delicious, as she was reduced to cooking on a crane over an open fire rather than using a stove - a detail I borrowed for Jonathan’s old-fashioned aunt and uncle.

One more Howells book. My Literary Passions has no real relevance to The Threefold Tie, but I have to mention it simply because I so enjoyed reading Howells’ exuberant reminiscences about his favorite books and musings about books still left unread. “Perhaps I shall be able to whisper to readers behind my hand that I have never yet read the Aeneid of Virgil; the Georgics, yes; but the Aeneid, no,” he confides. “Some time, however, I expect to read it and to like it immensely. That is often the case with things that I have held aloof from indefinitely.”