building the american landscape - Univerza v Novi Gorici

He purchased 90 acres of land, but his enterprise and autonomy soon caused
resentment 120 . The ideas of Fruitlands community life put respect for nature and
animals at the centre of existence in a radical and extremist manner. A harsh life
followed. By listing just some of the rules practiced, we can understand the
conditions: a vegetarian‐vegan diet, linen dresses (cotton was not used to avoid
favouring slavery indirectly), economic autarchy and animals exempted from
agricultural labour.
There were a handful of members, among whom Samuel Bower, an extrovert who
left after few months, during which he was convinced definitively to practice
nudism as an extreme act of freedom, and Joseph Palmer who fought publicly for
the right to wear a thick, unkempt beard 121 . No further comments are needed to
understand the failure of the enterprise. Louise May Alcott (1832‐1888), the
daughter of one of the founders and authoress of the famous novel Little Women
(1868), told many years after of her experience as a child at Fruitlands in
Transcendental Wild Oats (1873) 122 . By using fantasy names for her father (Mr. Abel
Lamb) and Charles Lane (Mr. Timon Lion), she recalls the birth of the community in
these words:
[…] these modern pilgrims journeyed hopefully out of the old world, to
found a new one in the wilderness. The editors of "The Transcendental
Tripod" had received from Messrs. Lion & Lamb (two of the aforesaid
pilgrims) a communication from which the following statement is an
extract: "We have made arrangements with the proprietor of an estate
of about a hundred acres which liberates this tract from human
ownership. Here we shall prose cute our effort to initiate a Family in
harmony with the primitive instincts of man. Ordinary secular farming is
not our object. Fruit, grain, pulse, herbs, flax, and other vegetable
products, receiving assiduous attention, will afford ample manual
occupation, and chaste supplies for the bodily needs. It is intended to
adorn the pastures with orchards and to supersede the labor of cattle by
the spade and the pruning‐knife. Consecrated to human freedom, the
land awaits the sober culture of devoted men. Beginning with small
120 See EDGELL, David P., “Charles Lane at Fruitlands”, The New England Quarterly, Vol. 33, N. 3 (Sep.,
1960), pp. 374‐377
121 See FRANCIS, Richard, Transcendental Utopias, Individual and Community at Brook Farm,
Fruitlands, and Walden, New York, Cornell University Press, 1997
122 See MATTESON, John, Eden’s outcasts: the story of Louisa May Alcott and her Father, New York,
Nortin & Company, 2008; and SEARS, Endicott Clara (ed.), Bronson Alcott’s Fruitlands, Boston,
Houghton Mifflin Company, 1915
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