building the american landscape - Univerza v Novi Gorici

Among the 41 Fourier‐type communities founded in the early decades of the
nineteenth century, the case of Brook Farm (1841), West Roxbury, Massachusetts,
is probably the most meaningful for our discussion, precisely for the influence it
exercised on the New England transcendentalists, the first intellectuals capable of
establishing the philosophical foundations of the concept of landscape in America.
Brook Farm was founded by George Ripley, a Unitarian minister. He envisaged a
community working as a kind of stock company, to which people contributed in
proportion of their manual and intellectual work, and they were paid on the basis of
the principles of equality between men and women.
Some of the buildings were identified with names which recalled elements of the
natural world; “the hive” was the hall for social activities and "the nest" was where
school classes were held and where some of the guests of the community were
accommodated.
Nathaniel Hawthorne was among its members for a short period. Disappointed with
the experience, the American writer used his recollections in The Blithedale
Romance (1852), a love story set in an Arcadian world, the failure of which appears
from the very first pages. The inhabitants of this blithe dale reflect Hawthorne’s
gloomy resentment for having adhered to an enterprise which satisfied the spirit
(comforted by the blossoming gardens and by the contact with nature), but which
was of no benefit to the body:
Emerging into the genial sunshine, I half fancied that the labors of the
brotherhood had already realized some of Fourier's predictions. Their
enlightened culture of the soil, and the virtues with which they
sanctified their life, had begun to produce an effect upon the material
world and its climate. In my new enthusiasm, man looked strong and
stately,—and woman, O how beautiful! —and the earth a green garden,
blossoming with many‐colored delights. Thus Nature, whose laws I had
broken in various artificial ways, comported herself towards me as a
strict but loving mother, who uses the rod upon her little boy for his
naughtiness, and then gives him a smile, a kiss, and some pretty
playthings, to console the urchin for her severity. In the interval of my
seclusion, there had been a number of recruits to our little army of
saints and martyrs. They were mostly individuals who had gone through
such an experience as to disgust them with ordinary pursuits, but who
were not yet so old, nor had suffered so deeply, as to lose their faith in
the better time to come […] Arcadians though we were, our costume
bore no resemblance to the be‐ribboned doublets, silk breeches and
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