LITR 5737: Literary & Historical Utopias
Historical Presentation 2007
Oneida - Community to Corporation
John Humphrey Noyes
- Birthplace – Brattleboro, Vermont
- Birth Year – 1811
- Parents – John and Polly Noyes
Life-changing events
- Charles Finney
- feverish cold
History of Movement - “No moral society achieves perfection, and for all its success our culture brings within it inevitable frustrations and disappointments. Religion promises to transport the believer to spiritual perfection, and it is perfectly natural for some participants in high-tension movements to believe they could bring heaven down to earth.”
- Foundations of Perfectionism
Ø Holiness movement – “launched in search of an experience of sanctification that many seekers hoped would free them from anxiety, guilt, and perhaps even from sin; a movement to establish better people: people whose beliefs were strong and infallible.”
Ø Adventism – “members are supposed to follow distinctive norms of behavior, both in religious contexts and their daily lives to bring about a better world’
Ø Schismatic movement (Perfectionism) – adopted beliefs of both the holiness movement and Adventism and paved the way for the establishment of utopian communes as the Oneida Community
- Perfectionism – saw man as reaching a state of perfection or sinlessness at conversion
Objective 3g – What is utopia’s relation to time and history? Does a utopia stop time, as with the millennial rapture or an idea of perfection? Or can utopias change, evolve, and adapt to the changes of history?
- Harriet Holton’s influence
- Publications
Ø “The Perfectionist” – journal dedicated to advancing perfectionist ideals
Ø “The Battle-Axe” – periodical in which Noyes’ submitted articles to be published
Ø “The Witness” – Noyes’ publication that propagated his beliefs
- Putney Association, Putney Corporation, Association of Perfectionists – came into being in 1840 as a “purely religious body.” In 1844, the group formally adopted communism by which to live: shared property and work. The interest of one member became the interest of all – the enlargement of the family. Perfectionists proceeded to substitute for the small unit of home and family and individual possessions, the larger unit of group-family and group-family life.
Oneida Community
· Beliefs
· Location
· Population
· Government
· Teachings and Practices – “Separation from society was needed to encourage conditions under which social and spiritual perfection could be achieved. Since one can’t construct a perfect society out of corrupt building blocks, the aim of the community was at “maintaining a perfect social order, and also at improving the individuals within that order.”
Ø Complex Marriage – “In the kingdom of heaven, the institution of marriage –which assigns the exclusive possession of one woman to one man – does not exist” – Mat. 22:23-30. “Noyes rejected conventional marriage both as a form of legalism from which Christians should be free and as a selfish institution in which men exerted rights of ownership over women.” It was Noyes who actually coined the term “free love.”
Ø Male Continence – type of birth control
Ø Ascending Fellowship – set up to properly introduce virgins into Complex Marriage and worked to prevent the young members from falling in love and from limiting their range of affection to their peers
Ø Mutual Criticism – established to assure the integrity of the community by conformity to Noyes’ morality
Ø Stirpiculture – introduced in 1869 as a selective breeding program to create perfect children; Breed superior children by encouraging the mating of the healthiest, most intelligent males and females.
Ø Other info.
Objective 3f – What social structure, units, or identities does utopia expose or frustrate? What changes result in child-rearing, feeding, marriage, agins, sexuality, etc?
Ø The Berean - Noyes’ theological treatise, embodying his interpretations of and arguments surrounding scripture
- Decline – Outside tension and intra-community tension. John summarizes his communal experiment thus: “We made a raid into unknown country, charted it, and returned without the loss of man, woman or child.”
- Corporation – Oneida Limited
Links:
Oneida Community Mansion House - The group lived together in the Mansion House. It is a 93,000 square foot, three-story brick structure that houses a museum, the Big Hall, 35 apartments, 9 guestrooms, and a dining room. It was constructed in stages between 1861and 1914. It is thought that in the 1870s, the Mansion House had 475 rooms which probably included basement storage rooms. Today, the Oneida Community Mansion House is a nonprofit organization. http://aroundcny.com/features/Mansion_House/index.cfm#multimedia
Objective 3b – Are utopian impulses limited to socialism and communism, or may freemarket capitalism also express itself in utopian terms and visions? Is utopia “progressive/liberal” or “reactionary/conservative?” What relations between “self and other” are modeled?
http://www.nfls.lib.wi.us/one/