Hawthorne at the Farmer’s Market

from Propeller

By early spring of 1841, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s employment with the Boston Custom House had come to an end. Then in his late 30s, Hawthorne had just published his first collection of short stories, Twice-Told Tales, to little acclaim, and he was occupationally free to explore lifestyle options for himself and his bride-to-be, Sophia Peabody. So in April, though scholars are not wholly in agreement as to why, he packed up a few possessions and headed off into the forest to learn how to grow food, tend the land, and raise animals at Brook Farm, a transcendentalist experiment in communal living among the woods of eastern Massachusetts.

The Hawthorne that readers most often encounter in the 21st century—almost exclusively by way of high school drudgery—is the Hawthorne who surveys the landscape of Puritanical guilt and repentance via the likes of The Scarlet Letter and “The Minister’s Black Veil.” Lesser known, but perhaps more fascinating, is the Hawthorne who was as deeply interested—at least for a time—as Emerson and Thoreau in the ideals of transcendentalist protest; the Hawthorne who for a summer was “transformed,” as he writes in a letter, “into a complete farmer” in an environment he regarded “one of the most beautiful places” he ever saw; the Hawthorne who by the end of that very same summer, though, was ready to swear off, once and for all, the eco-minded and cooperative living he had found there.

Enter The Blithedale Romance, a novel not widely considered one of Hawthorne’s best, but a tale based on the writer’s farm-filled summer that he published in 1852, some ten years after his stint at Brook Farm. In it, dandy poet narrator Miles Coverdale decides to escape bustling city life to take up residence at an idyllic and secluded community, where he makes friends with a bewitchingly intelligent and lovely feminist named Zenobia, a workhorse philanthropist named Hollingsworth, and a waifish young orphan girl named Priscilla. What transpires between them is mostly dry highfalutin debates sustained over hours of hoeing and cooking, with one or two curious and furtive forest meetings—that is, until the narrator poet goes back to the city, having tired of the whole experience. “I was beginning,” Coverdale thinks to himself, “to lose the sense of what kind of a world it was, among innumerable schemes of what it might or ought to be.” As its characters lose their physical way and their moral bearings, each attempting to discern the most responsible means of existing together, and as the rural union itself begins to crumble, the novel becomes one in which a disillusioned Hawthorne indirectly criticizes the reasons people seek to leave society.

While The Blithedale Romance can hardly be used to exemplify Hawthorne’s literary prowess, it nonetheless remains a convincing testament to the dangers inherent in communal living. Furthermore, the book goes a great distance in reminding current-day eco-praising locavores that the desire to have chickens in the backyard and vegetables in planter boxes is not as revolutionary, sustainable, or utopian as we all might think.

Whereas globalism was the bent of the 1990s—if not the whole of the 20th century itself—Brook Farm’s brand of rural Romanticism seems to be enjoying a vigorous and renewed popularity in the form of contemporary anti-Industrialism. Lawns everywhere are being uprooted, and expansive vegetable gardens put down in their place. Major newspapers routinely run articles about how live chickens and goats are the new decorative yard gnomes, and how small communities across the country are dedicating themselves to growing, buying, and eating locally, with reference to the calendar. Michael Pollan’s books on food and food systems are by now mainstream commodities, and even my mother calls to tell me she saw Oprah and Martha talking about ways to live more organically. With all this environmental “green” commotion—eating what’s in season, minding our carbon footprint, supporting farmers, and compost, compost, compost—it’s fair to wonder if we’ve haven’t wandered into some Neo-Neo-Romantic era.

The romantic (Romantic?) envy of many neighborhoods is now the yard from which not a drop of rainwater escapes unused, and the excited talk of the housing blogosphere is intimate square footage rather than baroque and unwieldy vastness. It has even become fashionable to consider getting off “the grid” entirely, and then to invite friends to live at self-made sustainable communes. And as we all know, “green-ness” itself has already been co-opted and marketed back to us by makers of automobiles and bottled water—the very products environmentalists most often speak out against. Think of Honda’s new speedometer that, when you drive carefully, goes green, or Ford’s SmartGauge that lights up with little green leaves when you slow down.

Instead of passing each other impersonally in the fluorescent aisles of the supermarket where everything is flown in from—gasp—South America, we convene at the farmers market and buy up each other’s merchandise, while wholesome bluegrass music reminds us of our humble organic origins. The modern day run at revolutionizing our world is one in which we’re trying to have fewer cars clog our streets so that we can hear the hum of bicycle tires. Earth and soil and health and community—why haven’t we thought of this before?

We have, of course. Steward Brand, publisher of The Whole Earth Catalog back in the 1960s and 70s, would have us remember the “first-wave” environmental movement of those decades. But that wasn’t actually the first wave. Or, at the very least, the steps Brand and his clan took thirty years ago beg comparison to an earlier era still—the 1840s—during which more than fifty different agrarian-centric communal experiments sprouted up across the country. And Hawthorne joined one because he was like us: he wanted to find another way.

In a letter to his sister Louisa that Hawthorne penned shortly after arriving at Brook Farm, he earnestly exclaims, “I have milked a cow!” Hawthorne’s excitement is that of someone learning about natural cycles and truly experiencing Earth systems for the first time. Admittedly, who hasn’t grinned widely when picking fruit off the vine, or when convening with nature in some way that one doesn’t often experience in a city park? The Bowdoin graduate had begun to rise early every morning to tend to the chores of a full-on small-scale farm, hoping to then spend the afternoons writing. “We found,” Hawthorne writes to his fiancée later on in his stay, “white and purple grapes, in great abundance, ripe, and gushing with rich juice when the hand pressed their clusters.” His sincere response to the affect of the countryside is the very core of Romanticism. The life he was living at Brook Farm, as well as the life he depicts at Blithedale, were undergone, as Coverdale says, “in quest of a better life.”

The dichotomous relationship between the urban and rural lifestyle that Coverdale uses when saying, “Air, that had not be been breathed…Air, that had not been spoken into words of falsehood, formality, and error, like all the air of the dusky city!” is really just a 19th century version of the same oppostions we still banter around today in discussing conventional/organic, sprawl/sustainable, or local/not, whereby the city is vilified, and the rustic triumphs as emotional and moral victor. Like Hawthorne, Coverdale is overcome with how great it is to be in the openness of the country.

Unfortunately, it wears off. He is not long in residence at Blithedale before he cries out, “Pigs! Good heavens, had we come out from among the swinish multitude, for this?” Reality sets in. It doesn’t take Coverdale much time to believe that “in reference to some discussion about raising early vegetables for the market—We shall never make any hand at market-gardening.” The life of the farmer is hard and humble, and therein lies one of the most contemporarily-relevant aspects of the novel: it questions our own swooning infatuation with the pastoral, and the way many of us have brought that lifestyle into vogue—and onto our property—without fully understanding what it means or what it takes. In other words: If rural farm life was that great and that sustainable, why did we collectively give it up?

Meandering through the pages of Blithedale, it’s difficult not to see the similarities between its growing number of us in the 21st century who are taking up an Earth-friendly rhetoric more energetically every day. There are many cries to raze our food, transportation, or health systems and replace them entirely, and they sound similar to the folks at Brook Farm who intended, as Phillip McFarland writes in Hawthorne at Concord, “to save the world by setting a good example.” The self-secluded activists like George Ripley and Margaret Fuller, upon whom Hawthorne drew in writing Blithedale, wanted little more than to live sustainably (veganism, for example, was a documented practice even back in the 1840s), pool their labor, share their knowledge, be collectively self-sufficient, and thereby offer a model solution to the ills of their world. These groups emphatically turned their backs on the unhealthy habits of society, and preached a back-to-the-land movement.

“How difficult a task we had in hand,” Hawthorne writes near the beginning of Blithedale, “for the reformation of the world.” By the middle of the story, Hollingsworth, a character whose utopian designs include building a giant institution for the reformation of criminals, goes on a sort of tirade and yells, “Your fantastic aspirations make me discern, all the more forcibly, what a wretched, unsubstantial scheme is this [farm], on which we have wasted a precious summer of our lives. Do you seriously imagine that any such realities as you, and many others here, have dreamed of, will ever be brought to pass?”

But Coverdale is in the thick of a daydream about one day when the members of Blithedale will be remembered as farmer-hero-saviors of the future world, people who had prescience enough to make a change toward a “simple, natural, and active life”—a change that would, in effect, save the entire world from the clutches of unhealthy urban industrial destruction.

Brook Farm burned down. This was in 1846, though, five years after Hawthorne had shoveled his share of dung there through the hottest months of the year. Though its remaining residents tried to rebuild it, the enthusiasm surrounding the endeavor had evaporated, and people began to leave. They were unable to keep alight the “warm and bright beacon-fire” Hawthorne describes the characters of Blithedale as having in mind, a fire which they “kindled for humanity.”

In the novel, Coverdale states that he and his kin are in “a day of crisis,” and “in the critical vortex.” With a very serious global warming conundrum to be solved, a rising world population, massive food and clean water shortages, a dwindling supply of non-renewable energy, and many clogged transportation systems, it’s hard not to think we are in just such a critical place.

Just as importantly, though—and as Hawthorne would perhaps counsel—we would be wise to make certain that in going green, we aren’t just slumming in want of entertainment. Giving up a fancy lawn for corn and leeks and heirloom varieties of umpteen different tomatoes could prove just another passing fad. “Though we saw fit to drink our tea out of earthen cups tonight,” Hawthorne writes, “and in earthen company, it was at our own option to use pictured porcelain and handle silver forks again, tomorrow.”

One of the lessons of Blithedale is that if and when we fill our yards with chickens and growing food, we might eventually come to feel like Coverdale: “I seriously wished that the reformation of society had been postponed about half-a-century, or at all events, to such a date as should have put my intermeddling with it entirely out of the question. What, in the name of common-sense, had I to do with any better society than I had always lived in!” The reality is that dirt is dirty, animals are animals, and if you’re going to sustain yourself at a remove from society, it’s going to be a lot of work.

The most enlightening revelation of The Blithedale Romance and Hawthorne’s time at Brook Farm is not that the well-known writer couldn’t hack it as a farmer, though. Neither is it that people, even the most forward- and collective-thinking among us, are egotistic and self-serving in the innermost recesses of their being. It’s that when we seek to overhaul a system we believe is failing, there are going to be millions and millions of different opinions on what must be done to fix it. The opinion that survives in the pages of Blithedale, as Hawthorne gripes, via fiction, about the failures of farming and socialism, is that “real life never arranges itself exactly like a romance” and that “honesty and wisdom are such delightful pastimes—at another person’s expense.”

In a letter to David Mack dated May, 1842, in which Hawthorne considers the merits of investing himself back into a communal farm, he writes that the most important question is “how my intellectual and moral condition, and ability to be useful, would be affected by merging myself in a community. I confess to you, my dear Sir, it is my present belief that I can best attain the higher ends of my life by retaining the ordinary relation to society.”

Blithedale poses the question of whether removal from society is praiseworthy at all. Total removal, nowadays, is almost wholly impossible, but people can still distance themselves from participation in what they see as mainstream destruction and unhealthiness. Hawthorne seems to suggest that going a step further—undertaking a revolution of that mainstream system—needs to be done carefully, or the result could be as regrettable as the system it replaced.

“Philanthropy,” Coverdale reflects at the novel’s end, when tragedy of some variety has struck down almost every character associated with the farm, “when adopted as a profession, to be often useful by its energetic impulse to society at large, is perilous to the individual.” Using a metaphor of alcoholic distillation, Hawthorne goes further and posits, through Coverdale, that when we use philanthropy, like local farming, to forcefully reform world systems, it “ruins the heart,” because “the rich juices of which God never meant should be pressed violently out,” will ultimately render life bland.

Is it unwise to think about our individual contributions to the world’s decimation, or how we may be inadvertently polluting or reinforcing awful systems? Of course not—it’s helpful to the health of our bodies and our planet to think about what we consume, where it comes from, and how long it will last. But The Blithedale Romance suggests that the desire to overthrow an entire system—seeing  a utopian alternative on the horizon if we can get everyone to give up their cars, eat organic, and stop consuming so much—is just as dangerous.

The true test, of course, of the lasting power of this third-wave environmentalism—like the two that have preceded it—will be how many seasons its proponents can keep it up. Chickens are noisy birds, and vegetables can be difficult to keep alive. Cows need milking, and other animals run off. Just as some people are naturals at community organizing and others good at running businesses, still others are great at farming. The beauty of a free society is that we all have the possibility to do what we like—or at least not to have to do what we don’t. Socialist-oriented communities—or at least Hawthorne’s experience of them—can require us to give up far more than what we get in return.

It’s also possible that Hawthorne just wasn’t cut out for farming. And maybe he just wanted to vent about how poorly that summer turned out. But the question remains: was it even necessary for him to be self-sufficient in the first place? And maybe Blithedale, like the real-life Brook Farm on which it was based, was not particularly well organized. But that still leaves the central question: must we wholly detach ourselves from society in order to revolutionize it?

For Hawthorne, the answer seems clear. “Is it a praiseworthy matter that I have spent five golden months,” he muses near the end of the summer in another letter to his sister, “in providing food for cows and horses? It is not so.”

Advertisement