When the Messiah Came to America, She Was a Woman | LongreadsYet the tens of thousands of Americans

When the Messiah Came to America, She Was a Woman | Longreads

Yet the tens of thousands of Americans who lived in these communities were not fools. To be sure, in an era thick with cranks and faddists, the utopias sheltered more than their share. But the majority of the communitarians were intelligent, hardworking people. They came from every denomination and every social class. Significantly, unlike the utopian communalists of other eras, they were not primarily young people. They were blacksmiths and farmers, journalists and lawyers, tailors and scientists, teachers and clergymen. A few of them were among the most articulate and prescient reformers of their day. After their respective sojourns in utopia, many went on to illustrious careers elsewhere. They may have been dreamers, but they did their dreaming out loud, with their dollars, their arms, and their time. They tried to manifest their impractical visions with great practical skill.

This one is, true to its parent site, a long one, but it’s one of the most worthwhile pieces I’ve read in a while. It’s the first time that I’ve bought the author’s book before even finishing reading this excerpt. I don’t need to add too much commentary about the piece specifically, because I think it does a wonderful job of speaking for itself, but it did (along with some other factors) get me thinking about the value of transporting yourself historically, as a student of history or merely a consumer of historical artifacts.

I got thinking a little bit about historical empathy when I posted that review of Far From the Madding Crowd, mostly in relation to the convention of marriage. Many pieces of Victorian media are out of fashion or difficult for modern readers/viewers to get caught up in because the conflicts featured simply would not be conflicts any more. Being married to a man with a madwoman in his attic would hardly be an obstacle in an age that has largely destigmatized divorce (and has a slightly more humane view of mental health).

I also saw The Witch last night (SPOILERS AHEAD) with an audience that was clearly expecting a horror movie, and were ready to laugh at anything that didn’t fit that mold. So things like “a woman is breastfeeding” or “the characters are talking in an old timey fancy way” was enough to set my theater giggling. Probably this was mostly due to them being a ramped-up Friday night horror fan audience, but what really got me thinking was the fact that as Thomasin’s father begins to suspect that she may be a witch, commanding her to say she loves the Bible, my theater was awash with giggles. Was it really so hard for them to transport themselves to a time when the Devil was a real and present threat on Earth, when you had to be vigilant at all times for real physical manifestations of his evil in your everyday life?

Part of the wonders of reading fiction, especially old fiction, is that it throws you into a world with a set of values both different from and alike to our own. In addition to absorbing the plot, the writing, the characters, you must also re-orient yourself within a world with a new set of rules. I love Victorian fiction in a similar way to how I love sci-fi, and that is for challenging me on a level that goes above plot, on a level that requires that I re-orient myself to a world that could be similar to or different from my own in a variety of unknown ways.

The aspect of The Witch that I loved the most was its ability to depict the wilds of New England–the woods looked like the woods I grew up loving, but the woods I knew had well-defined and marked paths, old colonial-era stone walls that had since been abandoned, other evidence of previous human lives lived in those places. To imagine a family that are not just a sect of separatists, but themselves separatists from the separatists, carving out a living for themselves in (often literally) dark and uncharted territory alone, that is to understand how they could be overtaken by hysteria to the point that they would cast out their own daughter. That someone could watch the movie and refuse to let themselves feel just how dark and lonely that world would feel baffles my mind.

And that’s what I love about this piece by Chris Jennings; as he himself points out, utopia as a concept is very much out of fashion in contemporary thinking. While cynicism and irony are perceived as intelligence and optimism is perceived as naivete, it’s difficult to convince a reader that a group of people running off into the 19th century American wilderness to start radical communities were not cranks and fools. But Jennings succeeds–he manages to make these people’s aims, their ideals, and their dreams seem perfectly comprehensibly of a time, a time when automated manufacturing increasingly threatened workers’ livelihoods, when the working class was increasingly downtrodden, a time, in other words, not too different from our own. He manages to close the gap that readers have to leap to empathize with a historical period and a group of people rather different from us and our time. He truly loves and feels his subjects’ ideals, and that’s what makes his writing so convincing. To make your readers believe, you have to believe. But both parties, producer and consumer, have to meet halfway.

An absurd amount of ink has been spilled over the value of fiction and why it’s important to have the skill of historical empathy, so I won’t pile on, but I think that for a creator of any media, it’s one of the most difficult and most important things you can incorporate into your work. And as a reader/viewer/listener/etc., it’s a valuable exercise to let the creator take you to that time. Also please don’t laugh at a serious part of a movie unless it’s really really bad, just please don’t.