Utopia. Why is anyone interested in made-up visions of some perfect community? It’s hard enough living in this imperfect world without comparing it to some ideal, isn’t it? I went to the deCordova Museum a few days ago to see their show “Visionary New England” because they included some of my old friends, the Transcendentalists. I grew up reading Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women, Eight Cousins and Jo’s Boys. The fictional family she created out of her real family felt like my own private utopia. Reading them was a satisfactory escape from my large family where we walked anxiously on tight ropes of high expectations. Little did I know that Louisa May had some very bad experiences with her father’s idea of Utopia. The unpractical Transcendentalist Bronson Alcott packed up Marmie and the four girls to live in his dream of utopia, Fruitlands. Actually, Marmie did the packing and once there struggled to feed them all with scant food while the little girls worked very hard in the fields trying to grow some. The experiment failed when the women went on strike and left. In high school I was required to read some of her father’s friends including Nathaniel Hawthorn and Ralph Waldo Emerson. The book that I wrote my term paper on was a skeptical account of another slightly more successful utopian community Brook Farm – Hawthorne’s The Blithedale Romance. The deCordova show included a painting of Brook Farm with a rainbow over it without mentioning that these attempts at utopias were as ephemeral as a rainbow.
There was one group of pictures in the show that helped me understand the lure of Utopia though, the work of untrained artist Gayleen Aiken, who lived 1934-2005 in Barre, Vermont. She grew up in this rural area near where my mother grew up at about the same time, so I could imagine her life. Aiken was mostly home-schooled and imagined a large family of cousins, making large cardboard puppets for each them, then drawing and writing their joint adventures with paintings, collages, comics, a photographs, well into her adulthood. Like Louisa May Alcott, she created her perfect family.
Reflecting upon the work of both Alcott and Aiken, I wonder if the source of Utopian visions comes from the kinds of questions we all ask at times: What does it mean to be a good person? How do I become one? What values did my family teach me? What values guide my life now? Who are the people near me who share those values? How do we help each other live a good life? I know that reading Alcott as a child expanded my ideal of goodness beyond my family’s teachings. Learning more about her life and the lives of her greater community has helped me dig up, sort through, question, and then compost some and nourish other values that where passed on to me by my New England white settler ancestors. One value they treasured was ‘perfection.’ If Utopia is a perfect community, I have thrown that idea into the compost heap. I do want to nourish a different way to visualizing utopia as a creative practice to explore our values within community.