Despite the providential calm and ease of such large-scale transformations, as envisioned in the optimistic writings of both Finney and Emerson, many of the reform movements of the period were actively directed by Protestant elites concerned with maintaining their social hegemony during a time of increasing class and ethnic diversity. For many other reformers, however, the impulse toward reform emerged from a more genuine desire to bring about change in a nation whose idealistic values were believed to be compromised by rampant materialism, class and gender inequities, various abuses of authority, and the intransigent presence of slavery. To be sure, even these reformers sometimes betrayed a meanspirited hostility toward those perceived as marginal or different, but overall the religious revivals, along with the romantic theorizing of Emerson and his circle, played an enormously productive role in the emergence of a number of progressive reforms, such as the temperance, communitarian, antislavery, and women's rights movements. Although Finney and Emerson were themselves somewhat suspicious of group efforts at social reform, many of their auditors and readers, newly convinced of the regenerative potential of the individual and the nation, thought concerted social action the best possible approach to purging America of its accumulated evils and renewing consensual ideals.
Convinced that American society was in need of complete renovation, communitarian reformers, for example, established familial subcommunities based on noncompetitive principles of group association that were intended to serve as models for national reform. Over one hundred such groups, mostly short-lived, came into existence between the Revolution and the Civil War. Notable early groups, whose religious beliefs provided their chief inspiration and modus operandi, included Ann Lee's Shakers, the German pietistic Harmony Society, and the Mormons. Other groups, such as Robert Owen's New Harmony Society in Indiana and Frances Wright's group at Nashoba, Tennessee, were more secularly inclined. Both the socialist ideals of Charles Fourier, as popularized by Albert Brisbane's Social Destiny of Man (1840), and the millennialist ideals of the revivalists and the transcendentalists informed the 1840s communitarian experiment at Brook Farm. During the same period Adam Ballou established the nearby Hopedale Community, with the evangelical aim of promoting world peace. Many of these reform associ-133- ations attempted to implement nonsexist modes of social organization, though none was more committed to this end than John Humphrey Noyes's upstate New York Oneida community. During its relatively long life from 1848 to 1880, the community practiced "complex marriage" — shared marriage partners — and male continence, an arrangement intended both to protect women from the bonds of repeated pregnancies and to protect men from what was believed to be the debilitating expenditure of semen.
Surprisingly, Nathaniel Hawthorne, who in an 1835 notebook entry compared the "modern reformer" to an escaped lunatic, joined the Brook Farm community for seven months of 1841. His retrospective The Blithedale Romance (1852), set at a reform association similar to Brook Farm, reveals his conflicted attitudes toward the reform impulses that he himself briefly embraced. Conceiving of themselves as disinterested reformers in the spirit of the Pilgrims, the participants at Blithedale appear to be self-important and just plain selfish: Hollingsworth secretly pursues his prison-reform project; Coverdale apparently seeks a private refuge and literary material; the feminist reformer Zenobia, modeled partly on Margaret Fuller, seems in search of the limelight and a man. Though the community embraces gender reforms, women continue to do the cooking and men the physical labor, and there is a strong suggestion that Zenobia commits suicide out of her frustrated love for Hollingsworth (whereas Fuller in Woman in the Nineteenth Century [1845] had mocked the idea that women exist only for the love of a man).
Hawthorne's treatment of spiritualism further contributes to his apparently skeptical portrayal of the group's character and intentions. Whereas the Fox sisters' 1848 "spirit-rapping" communications with the dead helped to give rise to spiritualism as a reform movement of sorts, promising to provide access to the invisible and divine, in Blithedale Hawthorne analogizes Westervelt's decadent spiritualistic practices, which link mediums in "one great, mutually conscious brotherhood," to the associative practices at Blithedale, which link reformers in a "general brain" — with the large intention of underscoring both groups' propensities toward revolutionism. This is never so clear as when the novel shifts from Westervelt's lyceum display to the festive masquerade at Blithedale, where the associationists, as Coverdale describes them from his hiding place in the -134- hermitage, whirled "round so swiftly, so madly, and so merrily, in time and tune with the Satanic music, that their separate incongruities were blended all together." In his imaging of associationism and spiritualism as forms of demonic revolutionism, Hawthorne would seem to be in the same reactionary camp as the Roman Catholic convert Orestes Brownson, whose novel The Spirit-Rapper (1854) portrayed spiritualism as Satan's invisible tool for bringing forth the French Revolution, the European revolutions of the 1840s, and the emerging women's rights movement.
Yet Blithedale is more complicated than that, in large part because of Hawthorne's use of the first-person narrator Coverdale to enact both the suspicion of and the desire for reform. As presented in the novel, Coverdale is simultaneously an insider and outsider, a character who, leading an aimlessly drifting life in the anomic city, deeply desires the structure and community offered by Blithedale. He is a character, too, whose sexual anxieties and insecurities, and chronic cynicism, make him an unreliable critic of reform. The novel, to a large extent, is a study in power, desire, and impotence, as the voyeuristic Coverdale, simultaneously attracted to and frightened by Zenobia's sexuality, Hollingsworth's "masculine" fixedness of purpose, and, indeed, the carnivalesque energies of the festive Blithedalers, weaves melodramatic tales of flight and entrapment suggestive of his own wavering desires. Though the satirical elements of the novel would appear to suggest, in the manner of early Emerson, that individuals must first achieve their own private reforms in order for communitarian reforms to succeed, the larger thematic thrust of Hawthorne's skillful creation of the ironic and at times loathsome Coverdale is to suggest the importance of the self having some sort of ground, some sort of context, against which that self-reformation can be initiated. Unwilling to make any social commitment, whether at Blithedale or in the city, and fearful of losing control over his self-regulated imagination and body, Coverdale simply drifts on, unattached, unengaged, unhappy. In this sense he is quite different from the erstwhile reformer Holgrave (Maule) of The House of the Seven Gables (1851), whose ability both to locate himself in history and to honor the integrity of individuals — most dramatically when he resists taking mesmeric control over Phoebe's body — allows him to forge redemptive and potentially transformative bonds with others. -135-
In his use of mesmerism, in House and Blithedale, Hawthorne dramatically brings to focus a large impulse of social reform: the desire to take control of the body — individual and social. Whereas some Americans of the 1840s and 1850s regarded mesmerism — a species of hypnotism — as a reformatory science potentially bringing individuals and nature into perfect harmony, Hawthorne presents it, in his accounts of Matthew Maule's cruel domination of Alice Pyncheon, and of Westervelt's and Hollingsworth's manipulations of Priscilla and Zenobia, as merely the selfish enactment of hyperintrusive patriarchal power. Despite the demonizations of mesmeric control, however, an underlying anxiety of both books is a fear of losing control, an anxiety that in Blithedale finds its most haunting expression in the figure of the decaying inebriate Moodie. Devastated by the ravages of the marketplace, Moodie, like the sherry-loving Coverdale and the Blithedale masqueraders "with portentously red noses," remains in search of "a boozy kind of pleasure in the customary life" even as he wastes away. Coverdale, who does everything he can to deny his likeness to Moodie, remains haunted by a fear that their characters, fates, and resting places — the tavern — might not be so very different after all.