Fantasies of Utopia in The Blithedale Romance

Abstract From its publication, The Blithedale Romance has been read as a commentary on the project of utopian socialism as executed in George Ripley’s Brook Farm experiment. But Brook Farm/Blithedale is not the only site of utopian theory-and failure-in the novel. A fantasy of communion informs the love plots of Blithedale as fully as it does the story of collective life. The perfect knowledge that will accompany perfect social relations is also sought through the body; the “subject” constructed within collective identity is also defined sexually. Blithedale stages the relationship between collective and subjective desire not simply as a similitude-where love and community become simultaneous ends of utopian practice and projection - but also as a site of tension. Specifically, the novel plays what Jacques Ehrmann has called the tragic and the utopian directions of history against each other; the narrative poses the double articulation of individual and collective identity as a problem in history and for the narratives and persons that operate within its sphere.