[To kick off the
summer of 2016, a series AmericanStudying some famous summer texts and
contexts. Add your responses to these posts or other SummerStudying nominations
for a crowd-sourced post that’ll go down like a glass of iced lemonade!]
How two prior
American utopias can help us understand the famous 60s social experiment.
Throughout the
summer of 1967, between 75,000 and 100,000 people gathered in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury neighborhood
(and in other cities such as New York and London, but Haight-Ashbury was without
doubt the movement’s center) to take part in the
self-proclaimed Summer of Love. Many of the topics about which I wrote in
May’s series on 60s rock played important roles in the Summer of Love, from the
folk music and drug cultures embodied
by Joan Baez and Janis Joplin respectively to the communal and festival atmosphere
of Woodstock. Yet at the same time, the summer differed from the rest of
the decade, inasmuch as it comprised the era’s most overt and self-consciously
utopian experiment, an attempt to put alternative, idealistic lifestyles and
perspectives into individual and communal practice. And as such, it can be
productively contextualized and analyzed not only within its own period, but
also in relationship to other American utopian movements and concepts, each of
which can shed its own light on the Summer of Love.
The 19th
century was full of utopian
communities and social experiments, each of which could offer its own
contexts and lessons for Haight-Ashbury. But perhaps the single most prominent,
in its own era as well as into our own (thanks in significant part to Nathaniel
Hawthorne’s 1852 novel The Blithedale
Romance, derived from his own experiences with the community), was George and
Sophia Ripley’s Brook Farm. Hawthorne focuses much of his novel on the
romantic, sexual, and gendered experiments at Brook Farm, and those elements
represent both a similarity with the Summer of Love more than a century later
and an example of why utopian communities are always complicatedly
connected to and influenced by human psychology and relationships. Yet if
we focus too fully on those elements (as I believe Hawthorne does), we risk
missing the philosophical and spiritual ideas at the heart of utopian
communities, and the Ripleys’
Transcendentalism (with its Eastern influences, its democratic vision of
humanity, its profound optimism) was an idea very similar in many respects to those
that motivated the Summer of Love.
Ever since Thomas
More (if not before, although he is thought to have coined the term “utopia”
in that book), of course, utopian communities have been imagined
in literary works at least as often as they have been put into social
practice. One of the more interesting American literary utopias is that created
by author and reformer Charlotte
Perkins Gilman in her book Herland (1915). Originally
serialized in Gilman’s
magazine The Forerunner, Herland imagines a utopian community
populated entirely by women (who reproduce asexually), a society free of war,
social stratification, and other conflicts. Both her central pacificism
(tellingly produced in the midst of World War I) and the book’s overarching, progressive
ideas about gender, sexuality, and society obviously link Gilman’s utopian
philosophies to those that would drive the Summer of Love a half-century later.
Yet just as important to
Gilman’s book is her vision of the utopia’s effects on outsiders—specifically,
the male protagonist Van Jennings and his two friends, explorers who stumble
upon Herland, are initially held captive there, and become complicated parts of
and converts to its society and ideas. After all, no utopian experiment can
survive if it doesn’t multiply, doesn’t extend beyond its initial community and
influence a larger society. Whether
and how the Summer of Love did so remains an open question, but a vital one
to consider as we analyze this 1960s utopian movement.
Last
SummerStudying tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other summer texts or contexts you’d highlight?
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