Utopia!

[osprey_archer]

I've finished my American Carnival syllabus! One final project down, two to go.

A couple of you expressed interest in reading the syllabus when it was done, so if you still want that, PM me your email address.

***

Having finished my syllabus, I at once had a splendid idea for another possible course, tentatively titled "American Eden: Utopia in American Thought and Practice."

It would be awesome! It would begin, of course, with late 16th century English conceptions of an America as a new Eden, a pure, natural, untouched garden of plenty (and the mostly terrible effects this misconception had on the native inhabitants) - maybe with excerpts from The Tempest?

And then we would go on to the two founding regional utopian conceptions of American politics and society: the southern vision of a gentry utopia, with a few mannered gentlemen living in ease and splendor while the slaves (stand-ins for the irritatingly absent peasants) toil, and the New England conception of America as the "city on the hill" - we would read Winthrop's famous speech.

The southern vision didn't particularly lend itself to replication, but the New England ideal of America as a place to set up a new, better religious/political order spawned swarms of children: other religious orders who came to America, or used America, in order to enact their own vision of utopian order.

The Amish. The Mormons, on pilgrimage to the west to found Deseret. (Speaking of the west: my dad thinks I should include a section about the Homestead Act, its vision of an American paradise of independent yeoman farmers, and the fact that this seemed to European immigrants at the time to almost literally fulfill promises of streets paved in gold.)

Back to religion! I'd love to do a section on the Shakers, because you can't go wrong with celibate dancing furniture-makers. Also Hasidic Jews, particularly in New York. (I'd have to pick a particular sect to focus on, perhaps?) The Hutterites, who are like the Amish, but believe strictly in the community of goods: no private property, everyone in the group - groups are limited to about 200 members; if they get bigger they split off into daughter communities - owns everything in common. The Amana - of air conditioner fame - were similar, though they ultimately fell away from their religious grounds.

One of the subthemes of the class: why do some attempts at utopia succeed, for the value of succeed that means "continue to exist and follow their utopian standards" rather than "create heaven on earth," while so many others fail?

Secular utopias don't seem to do as well: think of Bronson Alcott's quickly collapsing commune Fruitlands, or the hippies' Haight-Ashbury. I think perhaps it's hard to give up all one needs to give up to live a communitarian life without the religious appeal. The free-love Oneida community (I must include it. Presidential assassin Charles Guiteau lived there for a while. Even in the free-love commune, he couldn't get laid) lasted forty years, but it did have religious underpinnings.

Artists' colonies! Do you think those count? It's an attempt to reorder society to make it easier to create art, to surround oneself with other artists. Also, artists' colonies are awesome. I haven't picked quite which ones to focus on...does Greenwich Village count as an artists' colony? I feel that it needs to go in this course somewhere, as the standard of radical utopia.

I'd also have a few days devoted to utopian literature - really, there's probably enough of it that I could have a whole course about it, but I will restrain myself. Excerpts from Edward Bellamy's Looking Back, in which pneumatic tubes and socialism create utopia, and perhaps Charlotte Perkins Gillman's Herland, although that wasn't as popular or influential as Bellamy's. There were whole Bellamy societies. He was invited to speak at the Chicago World's Fair of 1893, he was so popular. (Indeed, he was mad he didn't get his own conference at the Fair.)

Should I make them read something dystopian, too? Since the 1920s or so the dystopian seems to have definitively defeated the utopian in American literature.

And, of course, we'd wrap up the section on utopian literature with Star Trek - the original series; the recent movie has no utopian goals. Which episode most clearly shows the utopian qualities of the Federation, do you think?

Man, this course sounds amazing. I want to take it now.

Comments

[anait.livejournal.com]

This is very interesting stuff. It has me thinking about Canada now, because a fair bit of it applies: the Amish (and Mennonites) and Hutterites. The European immigrants given land. The Scottish escaping persecution by the English and the Irish escaping the Potato Famine. The Chinese building the Railway and bringing over their families to stay.

But also the flow between Canada and the States. Into Canada, the Loyalists, and much later the draft dodgers during the Vietnam War. And into the States, the Acadiens.

People looking for Utopia, or escaping terrible situations; sometimes finding opportunity and a place and building a good home, sometimes not being so lucky.

Yeah... There's a lot there.

[osprey-archer.livejournal.com]

Yes, I think any class about American utopia would have to devote a class period or two the image of all the Americas as, in a way, a utopia: an escape from whatever difficulties dogged people in the old world.