(no subject)
Sep. 2nd, 2004 03:04 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
decemberthirtyI'm currently reading a book with the semi-ludicrous title Free Love in Utopia (kinda makes me want to say, "Alright! Sign me up!" whenever I see it). It's actually rather academic, and quite a departure from the kind of stuff I usually read. The book is a history of the Oneida Community, a utopian movement that developed in the 1840s. I had heard of the Oneida Community before, as have most people with ties to western New York, I suspect, but all I knew about it was that it was a strange group of people, somehow vaguely connected with the company that makes Oneida silverware, and something about burned documents...
So, now I am learning more. The Oneida Community was founded by a guy named John Humphrey Noyes, who developed something called Perfectionism (which is apparently not just the thing that's preventing me from finishing my novel, but also a religious doctrine). In order to practice Perfectionism, Noyes founded what basically amounted to full-on hippie commune, complete with communally owned property, hundreds of members, and, yup, free love. Noyes called it "complex marriage" but it was the same idea: every man in the community was married to every woman in the community, and everyone was allowed to sleep together, although not everyone was allowed to procreate with each other. Noyes and his followers disliked traditional marriage and family structure because they felt there was too great a sense of possession in the relationships, and because of the inequality of the sexes.
One of the most interesting things about the book for me is the way the Oneida Community fits in to the larger social context of the times. For some reason, there was a rash of odd religious sects springing up at that time, and, even stranger, in the same place. The fact that the Shakers, the Mormons, and the Oneida Community all originated in upstate New York is probably no more than a weird coincidence; it's more interesting to me that they all developed at roughly the same time. It seems to connect somehow to the spiritual crisis of the Victorians in England, the kind of thing we see in Possession, in Graham Swift's Ever After, even a little bit in some of Pat Barker's work... I don't know enough about that period of time to know what was happening that would cause such a spiritual crisis, but it's interesting, especially the way in manifested itself differently in England and America.
Reading this book is also making me wonder about the drive to create utopias, to drop out of mainstream society the way the Oneidans did. Why don't people do that anymore they way they used to? There are certainly still people who don't fit in with or don't agree with mainstream society, and often people like that figure out their own ways to live and the degree to which they want to 'drop out', but it's not a huge and public movement like it was with the Oneida community. Someone who doesn't fit in with society nowadays may go off and live in the woods and grow organic produce, or they may hitchhike back and forth across the country and work a job just long enough to get enough money to move on, or they may live like the characters in Michelle Tea's Valencia, or whatever, but these are personal decisions, carried out on a personal level. The Oneida Community was a huge social experiment, and it was carried out under a high degree of public scrutiny. I don't believe in marriage so I make the personal decision not to get married, but when John Humphrey Noyes didn't believe in marriage he founded a community to show the whole world the benefit of living without marriage. Is it just a difference in personality between me and Noyes? Or is there some larger difference between contemporary attitudes and the attitudes that existed 150 years ago?
So, now I am learning more. The Oneida Community was founded by a guy named John Humphrey Noyes, who developed something called Perfectionism (which is apparently not just the thing that's preventing me from finishing my novel, but also a religious doctrine). In order to practice Perfectionism, Noyes founded what basically amounted to full-on hippie commune, complete with communally owned property, hundreds of members, and, yup, free love. Noyes called it "complex marriage" but it was the same idea: every man in the community was married to every woman in the community, and everyone was allowed to sleep together, although not everyone was allowed to procreate with each other. Noyes and his followers disliked traditional marriage and family structure because they felt there was too great a sense of possession in the relationships, and because of the inequality of the sexes.
One of the most interesting things about the book for me is the way the Oneida Community fits in to the larger social context of the times. For some reason, there was a rash of odd religious sects springing up at that time, and, even stranger, in the same place. The fact that the Shakers, the Mormons, and the Oneida Community all originated in upstate New York is probably no more than a weird coincidence; it's more interesting to me that they all developed at roughly the same time. It seems to connect somehow to the spiritual crisis of the Victorians in England, the kind of thing we see in Possession, in Graham Swift's Ever After, even a little bit in some of Pat Barker's work... I don't know enough about that period of time to know what was happening that would cause such a spiritual crisis, but it's interesting, especially the way in manifested itself differently in England and America.
Reading this book is also making me wonder about the drive to create utopias, to drop out of mainstream society the way the Oneidans did. Why don't people do that anymore they way they used to? There are certainly still people who don't fit in with or don't agree with mainstream society, and often people like that figure out their own ways to live and the degree to which they want to 'drop out', but it's not a huge and public movement like it was with the Oneida community. Someone who doesn't fit in with society nowadays may go off and live in the woods and grow organic produce, or they may hitchhike back and forth across the country and work a job just long enough to get enough money to move on, or they may live like the characters in Michelle Tea's Valencia, or whatever, but these are personal decisions, carried out on a personal level. The Oneida Community was a huge social experiment, and it was carried out under a high degree of public scrutiny. I don't believe in marriage so I make the personal decision not to get married, but when John Humphrey Noyes didn't believe in marriage he founded a community to show the whole world the benefit of living without marriage. Is it just a difference in personality between me and Noyes? Or is there some larger difference between contemporary attitudes and the attitudes that existed 150 years ago?
no subject
Date: 2004-09-02 04:37 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-09-02 08:05 pm (UTC)Anyhow, if you want to look for it, you might want to know the whole title and the author and stuff like that. It's called Free Love in Utopia: John Humphrey Noyes and the Origin of the Oneida Community, and it's listed as "Compiled by George Wallingford Noyes and edited by Lawrence Foster."