Director: Francois Ozon

Writers: Juan Mayorga (play), Francois Ozon (screenplay)

Stars: Fabrice Luchini, Ernst Umhauer, Kristin Scott Thomas

Ask yourself.  What’s happening In The House?  That is, who really knows what’s happening In The House?

“If you can think of life, for a moment, as a large house with a nursery, living and dining rooms, bedrooms, study, and so forth, all unfamiliar and bright, the chapters which follow are, in a way, like looking through the windows of this house.  Certain occupants will be glimpsed only briefly.  Visitors come and go.  At some windows, you may wish to stay longer, but alas.  As with any house all within cannot be seen.”

–Preface to James Salter’s memoir, “Burning the Days”

No doubt we have all sat on park benches, looking at a house across the way and wondering about the family who lives there. In the driveway, a man bounces a basketball, his wife waves good-bye to him as she gets in her car and their son hops on his bike, a book bag slung over his shoulder. One could just sit and wonder… or one could figure out a way to enter the house and write a story like Scheherazade warding off death, captivating your audience as if your life depended on it. In the new film by acclaimed French director Francoise Ozon (Swimming Pool, 2003), a sixteen-year old student responds to a writing assignment asking for little more than what he did over the weekend with a cliffhanger story that draws his professor, episode by episode, into an edgy real life drama.

The opening scene of In The House takes place in the austere high-ceiling marble foyer of the prestigious Gustav Flaubert High School, where a professor sits alone – on a different kind of bench – waiting for a meeting. It’s a forbidding, cold atmosphere for a student like Claude (Ernst Umhauer) who doesn’t come from a privileged home. The next scene is of Claude putting on a school uniform that speaks of his enrollment status while masking his troubled emotional background and, unlike clothes of choice, hides personal identity. Claude, a gifted student, embarks on a journey that reveals a talent for entrancing his professor that’s a bit disturbing.

In response to the assignment to describe his weekend, Claude writes about his perceptions of a family — a longed-for “perfect family” of another student in his class, Rapha Artole (Bastien Ughetto). He volunteers to tutor Rapha out of voyeuristic curiosity about his “perfect family”, but as it turns out, Claude’s writing  about Rapha’s home life arouses hope in his teacher, Mr. Germain (Fabrice Luchini), a disgruntled professor known as a dispenser of C’s, D’s and F’s.  Mr. Germain’s demeaning attitude toward his students leads him to treat Claude’s writing with disdain. He often dismisses his depictions of the Artole family and pushes for more detail but, as he does, Claude rises to the challenge. Instead of getting ground down by Mr. Germain’s harsh critiques, he asks appreciatively, “Why are you helping me?”

The special mentoring continues as Mr. Germain gets caught up in the drama of Claude’s story.  Claude takes his professor’s lessons increasingly to heart and begins to incorporate, in real life and in his writing, the scenes Mr. Germain wants. The story itself comes alive – in Rapha’s house, in Claude’s writing and Mr. Germain’s mind. Mr. Germain shares Claude’s writing assignments with his wife, Jeanne (Kristin Scott Thomas), who runs an offbeat art gallery. Claude’s stories spark erotic, slightly comical conversations between the two of them. Together they begin to speculate on what’s truth and what’s sheer imagination. Mrs. Germain believes Claude is reporting real events while her husband sees Claude as an imaginative writer with potential, a young version of himself before he gave up writing to become a professor. Soon husband and wife are caught up in Claude’s story; as the presence of Claude and his story expand into Mr. and Mrs. Germain’s relationship, the film audience is also drawn into the enticing question of what’s real and what’s not.

Claude rapidly evolves from Rapha’s tutor to his best friend, then to a family friend joining extracurricular activities and taking more liberties in order to give Mr. Germain a technically sophisticated story. He discovers x-rays of a spinal column in Rapha Sr.’s desk, spies Rapha’s parents having sex and examines Mrs. Artole’s shoe collection. Mr. Germain’s writing lessons push Claude to go further into his desires for inclusion in the family and relations with Rapha’s mother, Esther.  He pushes beyond the limits of protocol into perilous territory when he develops the particularities of character identity and, at least theoretically, stirs up emotional reactions in the Artole family.

As fabrication brings truth forward, the film pulls the audience in.  We see Mr. Germain appear in the Artole home, enacting his critiques of Claude’s writing as if correcting his work then and there. What’s real and what’s being expanded in Claude’s writing? Is he really kissing his friend’s mother?  Then what’s Mr. Germain doing in the kitchen critiquing him while he does? Is Claude pursuing personal desires or projecting his desires for effect? From what point of view are we seeing? The line gets pushed hard when Rapha fails to show up in class one day and Claude offers an explanation in his writing that scares Mr. Germain out of his wits. The writer’s power, of course, is to write a scene from one point of view and then to rewrite it from another. Claude blurts out that he knows Mr. Germain was not going to like his original version of Rapha’s reaction to seeing him kiss his mother so he writes it another way.

If you know a writer, you should know that, as their friend, you’re going to show up in their stories. For a writer, the line between a friend as a separate person and as fodder for a story is a fine one indeed. The line between the real and the imagined is simply not the writer’s focus. It’s the story that counts. And for a writer looking to develop quality writing, the skill to weave fantasy and reality into a compelling drama is the grand objective. Who didn’t read Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code searching for the bloodline of Christ as if it would be revealed in spite of knowing the story was a complete fabrication? Fantasy is a land we inhabit as surely as it’s a place that doesn’t exist, especially when it enlivens us. And we like writers who draw from their own life experiences, putting tangible skin in the game.

Giving the Persian King his nightly dose of soul medicine extended Scheherazade’s life for 1001 nights – and gave many more nights of pleasure to readers with many more stories than the well-known Aladdin, Ali Baba and Sinbad. Claude manages to get Mr. Germain to extend his private lessons with irresistible, “to be continued” Scheherazade-like endings until the professor, like the King before him, develops an addictive attachment to his student. Voyeurism does not have to be a sexual preoccupation to become an obsession; “I like women,” Germain declares defensively to his wife in bed one night when she speculates that he has erotic yearnings for Claude. No need for the Greek teacher-student notion.  Germain is hooked on Claude’s writing ability to break through his ennui. As movie lovers, we’re arguably diagnosable voyeurs.

As the talented Francois Ozon, charismatic Fabrice Luchini and quicksilver Kristin Scott Thomas lure us into an impatient anticipation of Claude’s next episode of his borderline diabolical portrayal of a family, we don’t know whether to resist or go all in. Voyeurism has its dark side. The more taboo the revelation, the more intriguing the explanation thereof. At times Claude, an unassuming young man who’s invading a friend’s family to satisfy personal desires, seems akin to a scary protagonist in a horror movie. Claude’s collaboration with Mr. Germain takes both of them further into the perils of curiosity than either ever intended. But, for good or bad, Claude revivifies the deadened lives of the Artole and Germain families with his imaginative powers.

How strong is the pull of fantasy in real life? Francois Ozon’s talent is to hover just above the real, reveal just enough to challenge the bounds of ethical reasoning and lead the viewer into temptation to try their own hand at this business of storytelling.

Lies or deep truth? Treachery or revelation? Mockery or comedy? Finality or (To Be Continued…)?

I liked the ending. It begs beginning. Go ahead, sit on a park bench, look into the windows across the way and risk the perils of curious fantasizing.

“ The only form of lying that is absolutely beyond reproach is lying for its own sake. ”

— Oscar Wilde

Article written by Dr. Jane Alexander Stewart

Newtopia staff writer Jane Alexander Stewart, Ph.D. is a clinical psychologist in Los Angeles who writes essays about mythic themes in film, creates “Myth in Film; Myth in Your Life” seminars for self-exploration and travels a lot. Her film reviews have been published in the San Francisco C.G. Jung Library Journal, Spring: A Journal of Archetype and Culture and Los Angeles Journal of Psychological Perspectives.  Jane’s popular essay on “The Feminine Hero in The Silence of the Lambs” appears in the anthology, The Soul of Popular Culture, and in The Presence of the Feminine in Film as one of its authors. She’s also presented myth in film programs at Los Angeles County Museum, University of Alabama and C.G. Jung Institute in Zurich. A collection of her reviews and other writing can be found at www.CinemaShrink.com.

In the next installments of “Tools of Transformation” I will explore what I believe to be the emotional roots of Anxiety and Depression: Shame, Guilt, and Fear. These three powerful energetic and emotional experiences have been identified by some of our leading psychological researchers, as central to the development of our personalities, among them Professors Thomas Scheff, PhD., Professor Emeritus of Sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and Suzanne Retzinger, PhD.,  Adjunct Professor of Sociology at Antioch University, Santa Barbara. Both Scheff and Retzinger find Shame to be the Master Emotion, the emotion most determining our emotional and psychological development. I hope in this article to show the connections between the first of these powerful emotions, Shame, and the etiology of our experiences of Anxiety and Depression. I will also present some ways we can begin to understand and work with shame. I hope that this information and the tools I offer will be helpful to those of you who are suffering from ongoing depression, anxiety, and panic, and those who have friends or family members who face these emotional challenges. However, because hidden feelings of shame are almost universal, some of the ideas that follow may be of help to almost anyone who takes the time to read this.

My concern in writing these next blogs is that only a few people will want to read about the importance of Shame, Guilt, and Fear. These are unsavory experiences to be sure and they are not considered “positive” topics for discussion. Many of my clients who have suffered from Depression for much of their lives tell me that they experienced shame whenever they felt the need to express how poorly they were feeling. Most have experienced critical responses to their expressions of unhappiness, followed by badly timed encouragement to look on the bright side of life. In some ways this is an understandable response, because if you are not depressed yourself, it is hard to understand, let alone empathize with someone who is. The reality is, however, that if a depressed person could easily lift themselves out of depression, they would have done so long ago. The paradox that comes with this emotional territory is that because Depression is seen as something to be ashamed of, when someone becomes aware that they are depressed, they will immediately try to make a case for why their depression is legitimate. This effort can actually deepen their depression, as they try to validate their experience by enumerating everything that is going wrong and everything they believe is working against them.

 (Copyright Toby Landesman 2013)

Like Dr. Danie Beaulieu’s notion that Anxiety is a GPS type signal that we have taken the wrong path or made a wrong turn, Drs. Scheff and Retzinger believe, based on their extensive research, that Shame is a profound warning signal that indicates that we may be in significant danger. The shame signal is communicating that a primary relationship bond is being stretched or weakened to the breaking point. We human beings are the most dependent of all creatures on our caretakers for our survival. If we sense that one of our indispensable relationships is in jeopardy, the ground of our being starts to tremble. A kind of dread comes over us that can cause us to feel very small and extremely vulnerable. When this feeling comes over us we are likely to become apologetic, behave subserviently and perhaps try to hide. Because many of us do not even know the name of this feeling, we are likely to feel embarrassed, squeamish, and even nauseous. We may sense that danger is at hand, but we are most often not aware of what that danger is.

Shame is evoked by the prospect of rejection, abandonment, ridicule or humiliation. The feeling of shame in our bodies is potentially very strong, and it is usually translated either consciously or unconsciously to mean that we are fundamentally defective. There is something essentially wrong with us. It’s not that we have done something wrong. It’s that we are wrong. We feel instinctively that if we reveal how we are really feeling we will be unacceptable and therefore rejected. Shame is the ghost in the machine that brings on our apprehension of certain failure and rejection. It makes us feel insecure, inferior, and defective. The problem is that in our growing up years we develop defenses against feeling shame. When it starts to arise in the body, our defenses transform it into anger, fear, or sadness and these emotions are degraded energetically to irritation, apprehension or feeling down. We are out of sorts. Something feels wrong but we are not sure what it is. We feel bad.

What follows are a few paragraphs from a monograph entitled “Shame as The Master Emotion of Everyday Life,” by Drs. Scheff and Retzinger that elegantly summarizes what I have written above.

“We call shame the master emotion because it has many more social and psychological functions than other emotions.

1. Shame is a key component of conscience, the moral sense, since it signals moral transgression even without thoughts or words. Shame is our moral gyroscope. Since this function is well understood, we will give most of our attention to two others, both less well understood.

2. Shame arises in an elemental situation in which there is a real or imagined threat to our bonds; it signals trouble in a relationship. Since an infant’s life is completely dependent on the bond with the caregivers, this emotion is as primitive and intense as fear. The point that shame is a response to bond threat cannot be emphasized too strongly, since in psychology and psychoanalysis there is a tendency to individualize shame, taking it out of its social matrix. Typically in these disciplines, shame is defined as a product of the individual’s failure to live up to her own ideal. But one’s ideals, for the most part, are usually a reflection of the ideals of one’s society. Mead’s idea of the generalized other captures this notion perfectly. If one feels that her behavior has been inadequate or deviant, not only an internal gap has been created between behavior and ideals, but also a gap between group ideals and one’s self, a threat to the bond. The sociological definition of the source of shame subsumes the psychological one, pointing to the source in shared ideals.

3. Finally, shame plays a central role in regulating the expression, and indeed, the awareness of all of our other emotions. Anger, fear, grief, and love, for example, are not likely to be expressed outwardly to the degree that one is ashamed of them. One can be so ashamed of one’s emotions that they can be repressed almost completely, to the point that only unusual circumstances will allow them to come to awareness. In Western societies, shame is almost completely repressed and hidden, because one would be embarrassed that one was in a state of grief, fear, anger, or even embarrassment.”

Drs. Scheff and Retzinger go on to emphasize that the experience of shame and the knowledge of what is shameful is almost entirely unconscious because of the strong prohibition against emotion in Western society. As we grow up we are systematically learning not to feel. By the time I was a teenager, I experienced two emotions, anger and happiness and only happiness was really OK, unless I felt that my anger was righteous. This state of my emotional being apparently is not at all unusual. In spite of years of psychotherapeutic interest in what people are feeling, emotions remain to a large degree in the not OK category, especially when it comes to expressing them.

So Dr. Danie Beaulieu’s metaphor that we all have a “garbage bag” inside us that we have cinched up very tightly is very apt indeed. Dr. Beaulieu suggests that there are times when our Anxiety is trying to tell us that our bag is very full and that it smells. This reality is something to be embarrassed about for us, and unconsciously we will try to keep it more and more tightly closed. But, as she points out, even someone with surgery for not smelling, can recognize that the odor is getting worse and worse. The bag needs to be opened and emptied very carefully. Embedded here is a You Tube video of Dr. Beaulieu talking to a group of therapists about her use of this “Impact Method” with a young boy whose brother had been killed in an accident that occurred while they were playing together in a dangerous place.

(Copyright Toby Landesman 2013)

This is a brilliant reenactment by Dr. Beaulieu of her work with this young boy. She demonstrates how she uses the “garbage bag” metaphor to overcome the boy’s shame by treating an actual garbage bag full of garbage with tenderness, as a living metaphor for her care of him and his deep feelings of guilt, shame and grief. Together Danie and the boy open the bag and empty it little by little. Her work here mirrors the understanding of Scheff and Retzinger’s work that so much of our emotional experience is hidden from us. We can be deeply troubled and not know just what the trouble is. Instead we feel bad, inadequate, and apprehensive. We need to let something out, but we don’t know how to open up and express what we so desperately need to reveal, both to ourselves and to another caring, empathic person. Dr. Beaulieu’s session is a wonderful example of how we therapists need to approach people who come to us with major shame issues. The rule of thumb is that the more severe the trauma that a person has experienced, the deeper will be the feelings of shame, guilt, and grief. In the You Tube example, the boy felt that somehow it was his fault that his brother died. He should have known the danger. He should have been the one to be killed. If we throw into the mix how little permission we have in our society to grieve any major loss of a loved one, we can begin to see that this young boy being able to express the depth of his feeling on his own was utterly impossible.

Drs. Scheff and Retzinger make another important point. We know so little about our own shame and about other people’s shame, that just to begin talking about it is an important step. I took part in their online shame discussion group for a few years, when I first learned of their work from a dear friend of mine. The discussion was halting and awkward at times as we began to cognitively understand what shame was and how it operated inside us as a moral gyroscope and an indication of threat to our bonds. I began to be able to see shame in my depressed and anxious clients, but I was not yet aware of how pervasive an experience it is in each of us. So all of us must begin to learn more about shame and learn to identify our own shame, because it is much more pervasive an experience than we would ever imagine.

The more shame accumulates inside us, the more likely we are to feel depressed, anxious, and up tight. The fact that this process of getting trapped in shame is so out of our awareness, a good exercise is to begin to think about what we are ashamed of. What experiences most embarrass us? What kinds of events, requirements, and challenges do we shrink from? What emotions are we most uncomfortable with in ourselves and in others?

Here is an example from my childhood. When I was 11 years old, my family would stay for several weeks on a lake in Wisconsin. We had a motor boat that had a powerful enough motor to pull a water-skier, and one weekend two friends of mine came to visit who loved water skiing. I had never tried it and they offered to teach me. Instead of expressing how fearful I was that I wouldn’t be able to do it, I went into a long tirade about what a waste of time I thought it was, and that I had no interest in learning to water ski whatsoever. My friends tried in vain to change my mind, but of course they failed, because my mind wasn’t the problem. I was ashamed of how fearful I was and of how inadequate I would feel if I failed to master water skiing. I was not, unfortunately, in touch with any of these underlying feelings. Fear in boys was not allowed in my family. I was caught in a bind. I couldn’t admit my vulnerability, so I had to righteously defend my choice not to ski.

I give this experience as an example of how we can begin to learn about our own feelings of shame. If we think of the things we have rejected at various times in our lives, these remembered experiences can provide a clue to our feelings of inadequacy, embarrassment, and shame. This signal that an important relationship bond may be in jeopardy often inspires us to reject challenges and areas of interest that we might otherwise explore. In other words, what often causes shame to come to the surface is our hidden apprehension that we will not win the approval of our parents, teachers, siblings, or our closest friends. We do not want to be rejected for being a poor water skier and so we reject water skiing, or whatever the experience may be, in order to save face in the context we are in. The paradox is that our tirades rejecting what we are actually afraid of are often more embarrassing than the admission of our truth. I am afraid of disappointing you and myself. I feel vulnerable because I am afraid, and I am ashamed to express my fear.

(Copyright Toby Landesman 2007)

So what is the remedy for this almost universal situation? The simple answer is awareness, acceptance, and expression. In other words, we must become more aware of our shame and our avoidance of feeling it. We must become more accepting, not only of our experience of our shame, but of how prevalent it is in everyone. Finally, we must learn to express our vulnerability, rather than becoming angry, resentful, and rejecting of it. Take a close look at the Scheff and Retzinger monograph that I have given the link for earlier. In their analysis of a brief phone conversation and its consequences, they give several examples of what it would take for things to have gone differently. These examples, when compared to the awkwardness of the original conversation, reveal both the complexity of our interactions where shame is a factor, and the simplicity of resolution if we will only reveal our vulnerability.

(Copyright Toby Landesman 2006)

Next month I will take up the powerful feelings of guilt and fear that we are so often either out  touch with or simply do not have permission to express. Taken together, hidden shame, guilt and fear create an internal emotional landscape that is ripe for the development of Depression and Anxiety disorders. By exploring what we actually feel inside ourselves, accepting these emotions and situations without judgment or expectation, and giving expression to these feeling experiences in the company of a supportive and empathic guide can liberate us from the emotional traps that keep us from living our lives fully.

My thanks to you dear readers for your participation, to Dr. Danie Beaulieu for her skillful, empathic work and theory, to Drs. Scheff and Retzinger for their brilliant research and analysis,  and to Toby Landesman for her endlessly amazing photographs.

Dr. Beaulieu’s website. She also has several You Tube Videos that can be accessed by putting her full name in the search bar, Dr. Danie Beaulieu.

Toby Landesman’s photos are available on her website.

Google Drs. Tom Scheff and Suzanne Retzinger for access to their extensive and exemplary writings.

Please feel free to comment, critique, and expound !

 Article written by Tom Goforth

Newtopia staff writer THOMAS GOFORTH is a psychotherapist and pastoral counselor working in Chicago, IL. He was ordained to the Episcopal priesthood in 1967 and served as Chaplain to the Cook County Jail and the Chicago House of Correction while working for St. Leonard’s House, one of the first halfway houses in the country.. He did draft counseling and community organizing during the Viet Nam War, and was one of the founding members of the Lincoln Park Therapy Collective, an all volunteer organization which provided free group therapy for people living on the North Side of Chicago from 1968 until the mid 80′s.He helped organize the first crisis phone line in Chicago, and later helped train the staff counselors for Kool Aide Youth Emergency Services and Metro Help. He was an actor in the Free Theater Company and Rapid Transit Guerrilla Communications, two groundbreaking political theater companies performing in Chicago during the late 60′s and early 70′s. In the 80′s he helped found the Milton H. Erickson Institute of Chicago and became its third president and a member of its teaching faculty. At the invitation of Charles Shaw, he became the acting “Pit Boss” of the New Poetry Collective, the poetry arm of Newtopia Magazine in its first incarnation. Follow him at Twitter @thomas_goforth.

Probably the most important source of food that we’ve tried to eliminate is insects. Insects make up at least 90% of all animal biomass on land. They’re the plankton of the terrestrial food chain, but as food we typically see them as beneath our contempt. Eating insects was traditional in many cultures. But recently, most people around the world got the idea, probably from the liberal media, that eating such meat is not respectable for modern man. As townspeople in Sabah state (of Malaysian Borneo) say of their forest-dwelling, insect-eating neighbors, “Eating insects is disgusting, primitive and weird.” At least TV shows like Fear Factor and Australia’s Bush Tucker Man tend to present it as challenging rather than depraved.

Naturally, people who are beset by plagues of locusts or grasshoppers have commonly eaten the insects, at least on occasions when these bugs were suddenly the only food available. The Jewish scriptures endorsed the practice, with certain rather unclear conditions: “The only flying insects with four walking legs you may eat are those with knees extending above their feet, [using these longer legs] to hop on the ground. Among these you may only eat members of the red locust family, the yellow locust family, the spotted gray locust family and the white locust family. All other flying insects with four feet [for walking] must be avoided by you” (Leviticus 11: 21–23) Therefore, there are such things as kosher locusts, and certain groups of Jews in locust-afflicted lands such as Yemen or Tunisia have long enjoyed them. The Midrash in Shemot Rabba suggests that when God sent a plague of locusts upon Egypt, many Egyptians actually greeted the insects with enthusiasm: “Once the locusts came, the Egyptians rejoiced and said ‘Let us gather them and fill our barrels with them.’ God then punished them further by taking even their locusts away: ‘Wicked people, with the plague that I have brought against you, are you going to rejoice?!’ Immediately God brought upon them a western wind … and none were left. What does it mean that none were left? Even those [locusts] that were pickled with salt and sitting in their pots and barrels were blown away …”

In Japan or Indonesia, rice farmers traditionally controlled grasshoppers in their fields by eating them. In southern Mexico, many farmers do the same. They avoid spending money on pesticides while gaining a food source that can be worth around $3,000 per year. Especially in Oaxaca state, people fry the grasshoppers (or chapulinas) with garlic, lime juice, and salt, mixed with an extract of the agave worm. They munch the chapulinas as a snack, or sprinkle them as a topping on tortillas with refried beans. With a similar attitude, the Paiute Natives of the US Southwest managed to stop the USDA Forest Service from spraying insecticides against pandora moth caterpillars, since these insects are a traditional Paiute food. Basically, these traditional farmers feel it’s inefficient to spend money on chemicals to destroy insects that have up to 75% protein, in order to protect crops that contain 14% protein or less.

In the 1970s, Thailand suffered a major plague of patanga locusts, and aerial spraying showed little effect. The government then urged people to eat the locusts, as had been done in the past. A publicity campaign promoted the use of locusts for deep-fried snacks, as a ground-up ingredient in crackers, or as a cooking sauce. The campaign basically worked. Patanga locusts became a popular food, and are no longer considered a major pest by most farmers. More recently, around 20,000 families in Thailand took up commercial cricket raising. These tiny ranches require only a few hundred square feet of yard space. The farmers make cricket hutches out of containers filled with loamy topsoil. They add cricket eggs on top, then cover the containers with grass, bamboo shoots, or egg cartons. Last they drape nylon netting over the hutch. As the crickets grow, they need only a little chick seed, some extra grass or weeds, and a little water. If the weather is warm, they’re ready to harvest in four to six weeks. In two villages of Thailand’s Khon Kaen province, 400 participating families raised 10 metric tons of crickets, and their income varied between $300 and $1,600 (US) each. The crickets sell well in urban markets, mostly as a fried snack that people eat with beer.

This kind of business represents a new micro-ranching of mini-livestock, which is vastly more efficient that traditional ranching of big herbivores. The big herbivores take around ten times more plant nutrients to make a kilo of meat than it takes to grow a kilo of edible bug protein. The insects require vastly less food and water, grow about six times faster than livestock herbivores, and reproduce thousands of times faster. Insect farming could be a much more productive, far less destructive use of land for feeding the world. We presently use about 26% of the planet’s ice-free land surface for herbivore pasture. And the animals’ feedcrop production requires a third of all cropland. In all, livestock ranching takes up 70% of all agricultural land use, and nearly 33% of the earth’s land surface. The costs in water, deforestation, soil erosion, and the contamination of the environment from pesticides, antibiotics, and methane gas are enormous. Maybe we could raise even more food on a relative microchip of that footprint. In that hope, Dr. Aaron T. Dossey founded a company called All Things Bugs, which conducted a research project named “Good Bugs: Sustainable Food for Malnutrition in Children.” In 2012, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation awarded this project its Grand Challenges Explorations prize. As for the space-age future, Japanese entomologist Jun Mitsuhashi (author of Edible Insects of the World) proposes that

“Edible insects may be used as space-travel food in the distant future. For long voyages to other planets, their cell culture will provide animal protein in a spacecraft, within which the area for the production of foodstuffs will be limited. If humans ever live in huge airtight domes on other planets, food production will have to be developed within the confines of the domes. Breeding of large livestock will not be practicable because of space limitations. The alternative will be to use insects to provide a source of animal protein. For such purposes, species such as silkworms, termites and flies have been suggested, taking into account the effective recycling of organic substances.”

For those who insist on redder meat despite having very limited budgets, the good news is there’s always rodents. Governments in central Africa encourage use of “mini-livestock,” such as Gambian giant rats or cane rats, to increase food supplies. The English aid agency Send a Cow has recently helped African families by soliciting Christmas gift donations of small farm animals such as rabbits, chickens, or cane rats. Concerning the popular cane rats, Kirstin Dunhill explained, “They’re much bigger than the rats we know in the UK and we fund them in Cameroon, where they are farmed.” She said that by making the jungle rats into livestock, the villagers find less need to hunt bushmeat in the forest. There’s less damage to forests from traditional slash and burn hunting methods, and less dependence on killing endangered species such as apes for food.

In southern India, the earth banks surrounding rice fields hold large numbers of burrowing mice, which live off the crops. Many high caste Hindus or Muslims wouldn’t think of eating them, but some communities such as Irula tribal people make a specialty of catching and eating such mice. The field owners offer these people contracts to harvest the rodent resource, for a win-win solution. A similar practice has grown popular in rural Thailand. Sala Prompin, a Thai rat seller, says he never deals in rats from cities or towns, but only those caught rice fields: “They are definitely clean.” Besides, Prompin advises, “It’s tastier than other meats—nothing can compare with rat.”

Perhaps this heralds the great commercial rodent farms of the future. However, when British food inspectors found that stores in the Ridley Road market were selling cane rat meat from Africa, Dr. Yunes Teinaz said “It is disgusting and outrageous that the local authorities don’t take action and remove this meat from the human food chain.” The Market’s shop owners were in denial. One of them said, “I don’t sell rats. I never sell rats … I don’t have any rats, why you come to video me?” Meanwhile, the French chef André Simon, in his Guide to Good Food and Wines, advised roasting black rats with a stuffing of breadcrumbs, minced rat livers and hearts, sweet herbs, and a touch of salt and pepper. For people of open minds, it’s just a matter of making the best of what you’ve got.

Based on portions of the upcoming book Animal Wars: Our Battles, Truces, and Alliances with the Beasts, by Brian Griffith, to be published in Spring, 2014, by the Exterminating Angel Press.

Sources:

BBC News (2008) “Thai diners show appetite for rat.” February 6.

BBC Local Bristol News (2006) “Rats and Toilets Make Great Gifts.” January 20.

Beresford-Kroeger, Diana (2010) The Global Forest: Forty Ways Trees Can Save Us. Viking Penguin, London, pp. 96–99

Chung, Arthur Y.C. (2008) “Edible Insects and Entomaphagy in Borneo.” In Forest Insects as Food: Humans Bite Back. FAO (Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nation), Chiang Mai, Thailand, p. 142.

Johnson, Dennis V. (2008) “The Contribution of Edible Forest Insects to Human Nutrition and to Forest Management.” In Forest Insects as Food: Humans Bite Back. FAO (Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations), Chiang Mai, Thailand, p. 12.

Lynn, Guy (2012) “Cane Rat Meat ‘Sold to Public’ in Ridley Road Market.” BBC News, September 17.

Mitsuhashi, Jun (2008) “The Future Use of Insects as Food.” In Forest Insects as Food: Humans Bite Back. FAO (Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations), Chiang Mai, Thailand, p. 115.

Premalatha, M., Abbasi, Tasneem, Abbasi, Tabassum, Abbasi, S.A. (2011) “Energy-efficient Food Production to Reduce Global Warming and Ecodegradation: The Use of Edible Insects.” Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews, 15(9), pp. 4357–4360.

Steinfeld, Henming, Gerber, Pierre, Wassenaar, Tom, Castel, Vincent, Rosales, Mauricio, de Haan, Cees, (2006). “Livestock’s Long Shadow: Environmental Issues and Options.” FAO (Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations), Rome. Available at http://www.fao/org/docrep/010/a0701e00.HTM.

 Article Written by Brian Griffith

Brian Griffith is an independent historian who’s interested in culture wars and cultural creativity. So far he’s written four books. The Gardens of Their Dreams: Desertification and Culture in World History examines how environmental degradation has affected society across the center of the Old World from ancient times forward. Correcting Jesus: 2000 Years of Changing the Story and Different Visions of Love: Partnership and Dominator Cultures in Christian History reflect on the culture wars that have raged within Christianity from the religion’s beginning down to the present. A Galaxy of Immortal Women: The Yin Side of Chinese Civilization explores the alternative traditions and religions of Chinese women, which offer the world a powerful vision for partnership, health, and spirituality. He lives in a multicultural marriage in the multicultural hub of Toronto.

Charlotte

April 27 2011, Kathmandu

I am drinking tea and sitting in a music store I’ve just discovered on my last day in Kathmandu. The owner and his brother play me selections from CDs of modern Nepalese music. A track begins and within 10 to 30 seconds I say “Yes” or “Not so much” or “Can you fast forward to the next track please?” Rarely does a second listen turn into a yes.

The brothers—they’ve shortened their names to Cho and Gho for the tourists—are a little uncomfortable. Foreigners come in the shop, they say, but no one talks to them other than to ask a price. No one has sat down in their shop and asked for their opinion on the best modern Nepalese music. They are uncertain of their English. No problem, I tell them. It is better than my Nepalese.

They try different genres to see what I might like. No, I repeat. What do you listen to? What music do you buy for yourself?  They look at each other and shrug their shoulders. No, nothing. They have music here, they say.

They steer me toward some light modern but traditional chant (nothing as radically altered as modern western chant) and some very light but pleasant melodic jazz. He does not know the word “punk,” so I mime manic rock and roll. He looks at his brother and they both raise their eyebrows and shrug their shoulders. When I mime guitar, they play some light but pleasant jazz—nothing bluesy or really jazzy.

Nepal is decades behind modern Arabic or African or Indian music. The difference between what I’ve heard here and what I’ve heard of modern Mongolian and Tuvan bands is the difference between black and white and color TV. I asked our guide what store the local hip kids go to buy their CDs and he let me out at an electronics store downtown that sold CDs between refrigerators and car tires. I walked quickly through the stalls—there were plenty of CDs—and dipped in here and there. But there was nothing truly great here—it was mostly not very good American and British rock and a depressing amount of bad European heavy metal. When I found a clerk and made myself understood that I was looking for local or a modern Nepalese music, I was steered to the same CDs I see everywhere—traditional chant, knock-off chant, some traditional Nepalese folk ensembles or small orchestras, some light jazz.

Most of Cho’s music sales come from “traditional folk music.” By traditional folk music he means the chanting of mantras. “Om Mane Padma Hum” is playing in every music shop I’ve visited in Nepal, which is rather pleasant in that I find I continue to chant it silently for a minute or two as I continue walking and wonder what it must be like to be in a room with the chant going on all day long. As it is, it’s a nice pick-me-up, but that’s not the kind of music I’m looking for today.

By the time we’re through, there are 24 nos and 8 yesses on the counter. He tells me the CDs are 400 Nepalese rupees each. I am expected to haggle. If something starts at 400 rupees, I’m supposed to offer 275 and settle for 300. And by buying eight at a time, I should bargain down the final price as well, at least by 10-20 percent. But 400 Nepalese rupees is less than $6.00 USD, and these are not bootlegs, these are official releases, so I hand him 3200 rupees and thank him for his help, waving off his attempts to return some of my money. I tell him it’s a small price to pay for their time and expertise.

When I tell him I am leaving tomorrow for the airport, he warns me that there is going to be a strike. This is the “Travel Year” for Nepal—2011—and there was an agreement that the Leftists wouldn’t call for any strikes this year. Tourism is the only thing keeping the country solvent, and any word about possible strikes is guaranteed to hurt tourism.

No one is really certain what will happen tomorrow. In the past, mobs at major intersections have been known to force business-as-usual trucks and taxis and buses to stop, drag the drivers and riders out of their vehicles and beat them to death on the streets, leaving their abandoned vehicles on the road as a warning as well as a barrier to traffic. Stores that refused to shut down have been burned to the ground. But they usually don’t harass vehicles with “Tourist Only” license plates, he assures me. He tells me I should get out of the city as early as possible as the Leftists aren’t early risers—and he and his brother share a laugh at this. But things will get more difficult as the day progresses and they warn me not to go out after dark. I tell them that my flight is in the early afternoon and they look at each other and frown. But the hotel will probably send a policeman with you, they say together, and nod. You will be okay. On the walk back to my hotel, I pass a teenaged mango salesman on a street corner wearing a t-shirt that says “Nazi Punks Fuck Off.”

Laundry, New Delhi Railway Station

There is a notice at the hotel elevators, advising us of the impending strike, and we are urged not to go outside without alerting the doorman, who will keep an eye on us and make sure that we have safe transportation. The hotel will arrange rides to the airport tomorrow running every hour on the hour beginning at 6 a.m. for 100 Nepalese rupees per person (a more than reasonable fee for transportation to the airport from downtown Kathmandu). Most shops won’t be open tomorrow, and any stores that do open will be forcibly shut down by the strikers as the day goes on. The hotel’s cafeterias will be open throughout the day for meals, as well as room service. All national sites will be closed, so there’s really no reason to go out.

If we are flying tomorrow, we are urged to leave for the airport at least four hours before our flight, as there may be checkpoints on the roads. We could be stopped at any time—and even several times on a single trip—and investigated by the police.

In the morning our waiter tells us that there are no reports of any vehicles with “Tourist Only” plates being attacked, but the only road to the airport has been shut down several times.

There is no policeman on board the van that takes us to the airport. There are small crowds at every intersection. “See,” says our guide, “There is at least a military man and a policeman at every roundabout. This is where people gather because this is where traffic slows down, this is where the trouble starts.”

The policemen and military men look into our van as we pass, making sure we are only tourists on our way to the airport. But we never feel in any real danger, and when we arrive at the airport there is absolutely nothing out of the ordinary. We are soon in line, checking our bags, almost five hours early for our flight back to Delhi.

Applying Eyeliner, Khajuraho Temple

Modern Non-Classical Music of Nepal

Arun Thapa: Jati Maya Laye Pani

Arun Thapa was a Nepalese pop singer (1952-1999) who was born in Calcutta, but his family returned to Nepal when Arun was three months old. In college he fell in love with a girl and ran away from Kathmandu. He has claimed that all of his hundreds of songs are written about this relationship. “Jati Maya Laye Pani” is his first big hit, released when he was 19 years old. His song Reetu haruma timi hariyali basant hau (You are the spring amongst the seasons) is number 7 on the list of the World’s Top Ten songs of all time. A statue to him stands near the house where he spent his teenage years. He died of lung and liver ailments in Kathmandu on July 22, 1999.

The Axe Band: Chiya Barima

The Axe Band have a Facebook page, but it’s all in Nepalese, so I don’t know what it’s saying. But there are lots of links to videos and such on their site.

Khmer Fusion Project: Juno Katah

The Khmer Fusion Project is made up of a group of four Californian musicians who moved to Cambodia while still teenagers to learn traditional Khmer instruments and music and record the music of the current masters. This track is a collaboration with Nepalese musicians of a traditional Nepalese folk song.

Mana Raja Nakarmi & Gopal Rasaili: My Compassion

No information on either artist. From “Nepali Folk Songs” compilation.

Narayan Gopal & Kali Prasad: Kehi Mitho Baat Gara

I have no information on Kali Prasad.

Narayan Gopal Guruacharya (October 4, 1939 – December 5, 1990) was born in Kathmandu. His father was a teacher of classical music, who would not allow folk music to be sung in his house, but Narayan would become the most famous composer and singer of Nepalese folk music in his lifetime. He studied music at Maharaja Sayajirao University, but dropped out before completion. At the end of the ‘60s, already known as a popular folk musician, he began listening to records by Bob Dylan and the Beatles while staying in Calcutta, which began to influence his own compositions. He was referred to in Nepal as Swar Samrat (or Emperor of Voice) and the Tragedy King. He died childless of diabetes at the age of 51.

Newa Beatles: Yala Yala

No information on Newa Beatles.

Trikaal: Mana Muskan

Trikaal is a musical ensemble from Nepal who try to incorporate as many instruments and musical styles as they can from around the world.

Timrai Kasam Bho & Pahdindra Dhakuri: Rajan Thakuri

No information on either artist, although there are several videos available by Timrai on YouTube. From “Nepali Folk Songs” compilation.

Sur Sudha: Tamangselo

Sur Sudha was the Goodwill Ambassador for Nepal during their Tourism Year, 2011. They feature the three instruments most popular in Nepal—flute, sitar, and tabla—and play traditional folk songs, as well as original material in traditional modes. They have been the subject of documentaries in France and Germany, and in 1998, theirs was the 2^nd most frequently played international music in the world, and remained in the top ten in the world throughout 1998.

Upendra & Friends: Wind of Naeba

No information available, although I found many CDs available by Upendra (keyboards), both solo and “Upendra & Friends,” which is his touring group while in Nepal.

Ghandi’s Memorial Gravesite, Delhi

Newtopia staff writer RANDY ROARK worked with Allen Ginsberg for the last 17 years of his life, first as an apprentice, then as his teaching assistant, and finally transcribing and editing 28,000 pages of Ginsberg’s poetry lectures, currently available on-line through the Ginsberg trust. Following Ginsberg’s death, he worked with artist Stan Brakhage, producing art events featuring his films until his death. Since 1998 he has worked with Sounds True as a producer, where he has edited artists such as Alex Grey, writers including William Burroughs and Robert Anton Wilson, and a wide variety of spiritual teachers, including Alan Watts, Krishnamurti, Jack Kornfield, Pema Chodron, and Lakota Elder Joseph Marshall.

I believe that all dreamers enter the picture on their knees.
If they are wise it is hard going and toxic
But hardly a reason to engulf one’s self in flames –
After all, gasoline is flammable and can do great harm.

But the possibilities of harm are minimized
Here in the all new effervescent zone
Where the capacity for love is eternal
If you believe in rising up to the stars
With gum shoes and peachy-keen liquor breath.

In the way that kismet naturally happened in those days, I came to find out he had recently collaborated on a book called February 2003 with my aforementioned friends Gildzen and Wascovich with the addition of Thurston Moore from Sonic Youth and we, too, struck up an online acquaintance. It’s been nearly a decade since and Colby’s evolution as a cultural maelstrom has continued to evolve. He’s got four books of poetry under his belt including Tremble & Shine, Riot in the Charm Factory, Cush and Ripsnort (all from Soft Skull Press). He was also the editor of the poetry anthology Heights of the Marvelous: A New York Anthology (St. Martin’s Press). As a visual artist and performer, Colby’s been broadcast nationally on PBS, MTV and NPR for Garrison Keillor’s Writer’s Almanac. He was the lead singer for the critically acclaimed band Drunken Boat. His books and paintings with the artist David Lantow can be seen in the Brooklyn Museum of Art and The Museum of Modern Art special collections libraries. He’s been invited to read at The Poetry Project, Bowery Poetry Club, The Rubin Museum, New York University, The New School for Social Research, Brooklyn Public Library, Cornell University, The Kingston Writers Conference, The Whitney Museum of American Art, PS 122, and more.

Today, he posts new work on his site Glee Farm.

I caught up with him recently about the state of poetry today.

After publishing a steady series of books by Soft Skull Press in the early 2000s where has your road as a poet led you between then and now?

Actually, my first book with Soft Skull Press came out in 1993 when Sander Hicks, the original publisher, was working at Kinkos in the East Village and offered to print Ripsnort up for me for free if he could put the Soft Skull Press logo on it. I have fond memories of those days when it felt like anything was possible and happy accidents (like running into Sander) happened all the time. I even asked my hero, the great artist George Scheeman, to do the cover, which he did, for free!  After that, Cush came it in 1995 and then Riot in The Charm Factory, and Tremble & Shine. Between my first book with Soft Skull Press and now, I’ve been on a trajectory of writing and more writing, without stop. My journey as a writer has been a long and fruitful one, full of digressions into rock and roll, acting and performing, but I always wind up back up at the empty page, with a pen at a desk. It is the one constant through all these years, and certainly all the years to come.

What projects are you currently involved with/working on?

I have a big book of poems I’ve been working on for a few years. Parts of it are in my latest chapbook Flushing Meadows put out by Scary Topiary Press in Los Angeles. Hopefully I’ll find a publisher for the book of poems sooner than later. Now that Soft Skull has sort of dissolved or at least stopped publishing poetry, it has been a bit more difficult to find a good relationship with a publisher that simply asks “whatcha got?” and then publishes it, like Soft Skull did for years. We’ll see. I have an agent at a fancy literary agency now (Carrie Howland at Donadio & Olson), so we’ll see what she comes up with for me as she shops the manuscript around. I’ve also been working on a novel for several years, parts of which have been published here and there. Someday I’ll finish that big old book and live in the southern deserts of Arizona off the advance. Wouldn’t that be nice?

Do you think the Internet has assisted the poet or diffused poetry with its endless stream of instant wordsmiths?

It has helped a lot. The Internet has decentralized the place of publishing and made it a lot easier to get work out there and read. That said “the book” has become an even more central part of my life as a writer. I am always drawn to books, their smell, their feel, and their incredibly intimate vibe that travels through time with me. Every page of a book I love shows the years that have gone by with my reading and rereading. Every stain, thumbprint, all the wear and tear, all the markings, stars and underlining add another dimension to the physical book which I treasure the same way I do every scratch and worn spot and stain on a favorite pair of boots or jeans. But when it has to do with books, it means so much more to me. The soul of the book as an object will never die for me, Internet, or not.

What do you think the poet’s role is in today’s social arena?

The role of the poet in today’s social arena is to simply notice and report what is noticed in the mind as it interacts with the world. That alone should suffice. The grander political act of writing needs no bigger push or big statement than that. Writing poetry in a commoditized culture is about as counter to our prevailing material culture as one can get without dropping off the map entirely. And certainly it isn’t about rejection of anything, but a huge embrace of all that one comes across as a writer. Poetry really has never been in any danger of being gobbled up by the money inherent in other cultural phenomena that actually might contain a monetary reward at the end of that creative rainbow. It just is. Unlike acting or music or certain forms of visual art where the inevitability of any real success necessitates a real consideration of earning a living at it at one point or another. With poetry, one never needs to ever even really consider that as an option (not if you’re sane), which is quite liberating at its core, though no less sad. As a poet, I get to be my own boss, and that, to me, is the greatest, most responsible thing of all.

As a poet, who are the writers you most admire? 

I love Alice Notley, Gertrude Stein, Christine Schutt, Thomas Bernhard, Bernadette Mayer, Bill Knott, Joe Brainard, Larry Fagin, Max Jacob, Ron Padgett, Diane Williams, Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery, Guillaume Apolinaire, and Mina Loy. The list is really so much longer than that. I’m excluding all the philosophers like Ludwig Wittgenstein, Hegel, Heidegger and Kant I adore, and the nonfiction writers like John Jeremiah Sullivan and the psychologists like Jacques Lacan, Adam Phillips and Christopher Bollas whose work I also turn to again and again. There are so many!

Who are your biggest influences?

John Ashbery. I continue to read and reread him for pleasure, comfort and inspiration.

What do you think is the fate of the printed word in today’s e-culture?

It will keep going. There are enormous burps and hiccups we’re going through, but just because the medium is changing doesn’t mean the written word is going away, far from it. Look at music with it’s decentralized focus on record labels that put the ability to make music and get it out there into a lot of able hands. The only difficulty in the current situation is that it makes it difficult to wade through so much to find something that really sticks to the ribs, so to speak.

How has Glee Farm affected you as a poet, being able to get things down and out in such an immediate format?

I think of Glee Farm as a scrapbook of my mind over almost a decade. The immediacy is what I most love about the blogging format. I wish there was some way to turn the last seven years I’ve been at it into a giant book with all the poems, art, photos, music, and other things I post there.

Can you give me a few new poems you’ve written of late and let me know what inspired them? I especially liked “When I Lay My Burden Down” on Glee Farm.

I like all the poems I’ve written and put up there. They all have a certain place in my heart and mind that allow me to revisit them and the millions of things that inspired them. Never does one thing inform a poem that I write, ever. I can look at any one poem and count dozens of points where the impulse (or inspiration) to write it came from. It seems like a herculean task to examine (and expose) all the intentions that went into making it. I like the question though.

 Article written by Kimberly Nichols

Newtopia managing editor KIMBERLY NICHOLS is author of the book of literary short fiction Mad Anatomy, a contributing editor to 3AM Magazine and has exhibited as a conceptual artist throughout California for the past decade. Her non-fiction articles have appeared in magazines and media internationally. She was a founding editor of Newtopia in its former incarnation where she was also a member of the NewPoetry Collective. She is currently at work on her novel King Neptune’s Journey and an art work titled The Fool. She has recently embarked on a journey of study in shamanic and medicine lore and wisdom under a series of respected teachers. Follow her daily beat poetry on Twitter @LITGFOA or her arts and literature blog.

At least once a year I’m asked by a high school or college student or by the people that teach them to reminisce or answer questions about riot grrrl.  But this year is different.  Last year Pussy Riot brought riot grrrl back into the news as hipsters and journalists alike searched for adjectives of historical relevance.  Now the Kathleen Hanna documentary is sparking riot grrrl reunions and conversations.  Spring 2013 has brought abundant blossoms of “riot grrrl” in the Google newsfeed, most often used as an adjective to describe new bands and even six hundred dollar leather jackets.  I recall buying our clothes by the pound at thrift stores.  Team Dresch had the best band merch because they’d buy a tour’s worth of thrift store clothes and silkscreen their name on them creating unique keepsakes instead of interchangeable mass produced logo wear.  I don’t remember any leather jackets.  Cow murder was frowned upon for food or fashion, amongst the riot grrrls I knew.

We’ve had several riot grrrl documentaries so far, and several books, all precious documentation of a movement that deserves to be exhaustively archived as a rare explosion of female art and politics in a genuine subculture.  Because the most popular bands and scenes continue to receive the most attention a riot grrrl stereotype has formed: white, collegiate, and probably gay.

Happily, Angie Young, director of The Coat Hanger Project, and first time director and riot grrrl veteran Vega Darling have been filming interviews for their documentary Riot Grrrl: The Self Told Narrative, which focuses on previously neglected scenes like Los Angeles and Atlanta.  In Los Angeles white girls were the minority.  The best place to see riot grrrl shows was at Macondo Cultural Center in East L.A. Orange County riot grrrl promoted matinee shows at the original Koo’s Cafe in Santa Ana with the local peace punks, Food Not Bombs, and the Black Panthers, no less.  In Atlanta riot grrrl had a thoroughly pagan flavor with witchy pentagrams decorating the fliers of bands like Pagan Holiday.

The Revolution Rising zine collective in Los Angeles were a real revolution in my life.  Their zines, like Meathook and Housewife Turned Assassin, two of my favorite titles, contained writing that was a revelation, and the realization that I wasn’t alone.  A quote surrounded by heart and kitten stickers could shine like a bright spotlight on some dark corner in your life.  Revolution Rising were former members of L.A’s first riot grrrl chapter who had gone off to start a collective that would focus on issues of race, art and writing, and they wanted to include males. They were Equalists, inclusive not exclusive.  I loved their art shows; blank walls filled by anyone who cared to share their creations.

Revolution Rising fundraisers always had the coolest bands: TummyAche, Crown for Athena, Heavens to Betsy. Founding member Tye would sit in a corner reading the tarot for free.  Tye was my Benjamin Franklin.  She taught me to say genderism, instead of sexism, because sexism isn’t sexy.  Because of her I notice whenever I or anybody else addresses a group that includes women as “you guys.”  She’d do it, too, and we’d all end up laughing.  I learned to call myself not a feminist, but an equalist.  Tye’s fellow Revolution Rising founders Sisi, Danielle, and Debbie L. were the most articulate, determined, creative women I had ever met.  I was so thrilled when they asked me to join Revolution Rising, and never felt worthy even when they treated me as an equal.  They stage mothered me into my first show, booking my band to play a fundraiser before we had a name, drummer, or songs.  Soon I was doing my own zines (TVi, Eracism, Light and Shadow) and trading them with zine writers all over the world.  All the ladies at the post office knew me by name.

 The author’s unsuccessful attempt to rejuvenate riot grrrl with a display of suggested hairstyles.

Revolution Rising and riot grrrl changed my life, gave me back my voice, and gave me the courage to express myself (and to glitter sticker everything in my vicinity including my guitar).  Riot grrrl has changed thousands of lives, mostly but not exclusively females.  I would never have written songs, played guitar or bass, started a band, toured, become an editor for an award winning online journal of progressive politics, studied martial arts, or produced documentaries if it hadn’t been for riot grrrl.  Before riot grrrl I didn’t believe in myself or my gender.  I found my self-esteem in being what people wanted me to be.  Family, friends, and schools had all convinced me my nick name was “shut up”.  I had been threatened, attacked, even nearly murdered so by the time I was in high school I didn’t have ambitions; I was working on my survival skills.

The inspiring example of so many women and girls, and supportive males, putting on shows, starting bands, running clubs, and record labels, organizing collectives, raising money and finding supplies for homeless and abuse shelters made us feel like we could do anything.  My band’s third show was opening for riot grrrl icons Bikini Kill.  Almost a thousand kids were there with zero corporate involvement. No mafia clubs. Nothing but fans and bands. Kathleen Hanna herself frisked the ticket buyers as they entered.

At the time I thought these were the first sparks of a prairie fire of cultural evolution that was going to sweep across the world. It seemed like girls were forming bands in every high school and college in America and the UK.  But actually I had arrived late to the party; riot grrrl was already in decline. The media was saying the movement was no more. At least the LA Times had the guts to publish my letter pointing out that we were playing seven riot grrrl conventions the summer after they had pronounced it dead.

The conventions were amazing, transformative events.  At rape survival workshops just seeing hundreds of young women weeping as they told their horrific stories was profoundly healing, as we realized that our battle for civil rights was far from over.  We learned from each other how to play musical instruments, how to sneak free copies at Kinko’s for our zines (scoop straws), we met fellow writers, and distributors, discovered music and art, bands were formed, silk screens bartered and traded.

But the conventions weren’t all revelations and humble thank yous.   Mean spirited gossip and back stabbing between fans, bands and show promoters disillusioned many an idealist.  My own band once experienced a good old-fashioned shunning based on a rumor that turned out to be a lie.  I guess it’s inevitable when you get a bunch of abuse survivors together, and many of them untreated, all hell will break loose as they begin acting out on each other. Whatever happened, it didn’t take long for the whole thing to rip apart. Bands broke up.  Radical zines were replaced by benign blogs. Indie distributors closed up shop.  The all ages scene across the US disappeared. Clubs like Jabberjaw and Impala in L.A. and The Small Intestine in Baltimore from which bands like Fugazi, Rage Against the Machine and Hole had sprung, were all closed down by local city councils and fire departments who accomplished what the nazi punks who used to attack riot grrrl shows in Los Angeles never could.

One of my colleagues, an otherwise relatively enlightened chap, when chagrined by my sportive angry sense of humor and general pushiness with my opinion, informed me that riot grrrl had died twenty years ago.  I was to stop acting like a riot grrrl.  Except that I don’t act like anybody but me, thanks to riot grrrl.  And riot grrrl didn’t really end, it just went seedy and then had another bloom.  OG riot grrrls, OGRG, are now college professors, schoolteachers, published authors, magazine editors, lawyers, filmmakers, professional artists, and yes, many are moms, including gay moms.  Whenever I run into another OGRG I imagine that must be what being in the Hell’s Angels is like.  It takes three hours just to catch up on news.  We all still consider ourselves riot grrrls, even though one of us wrote a thesis about the use of “girl” to minimize women.

New riot grrrls pop up every day.   Today chapters exist in London, Berlin, Los Angeles, Adelaide, Hamburg, Paraguay, Birmingham, Vienna, Paris, NYC, Brazil, San Francisco, Limerick, Bielefeld, Wurzburg, and Windsor, Ontario, to name a few; some cool riot grrrl zines come from Tokyo.  Tumblr has become a zine unto itself for many new grrrls.  Riot grrrl influenced bands are flourishing from Grim Dylan in the U.K, to The Savages, Husbands N Knives, Lisbon’s Anarchicks, and Berlin’s The Jezebels. Check out the long list of bands on Cats Against Catcalling! the new riot grrrl compilation from riot grrrl berlin, their sixth riot grrrl compilation so far. You can download the earlier compilations for free at riot grrrl berlin’s tumblr.  My favorite is #5: Mansplaining on the Dancefloor.

 Grim Dylan

Willie Mae Rock Camp, supported by former riot grrrls, has taught many girls how to play instruments and write songs. Riot grrrl lives on in bands and Ladyfests all around the world. Every continent and many countries have now hosted their own modest riot grrrl or riot grrrl inspired events. That doesn’t surprise me, because the injustices that inspired riot grrrl are still with us.

I usually do interviews for Newtopia and Reality Sandwich.  I have one in progress with Marianne Williamson.  She’s an amazing woman, and very busy.  I haven’t heard from her for a couple days.  Whenever that happens, with Buddy Roemer or any of my interviews, I always wonder: “Oh shit, did they google me?”  That’s part of being a riot grrrl, too.  Yet for such fitful exhibitionists we didn’t document ourselves very well.  Any old neighborhood garage band has more pictures, fliers, and other memorabilia than your average riot grrrl collective.  For all our work on self-awareness we don’t seem to have held our creations in very high esteem.  Perhaps their disposability was part of the attraction, another rejection of patriarchal standards.

Courtney Love once warned me that riot grrrl would chew me up, spit me out and leave me bitter. She was right about the chewing up and spitting out, but she was wrong about the bitter.  I’m proud of what we accomplished.  I’m grateful that I had the chance to change my life, that a whole scene existed that was devoted to liberation, and that I got to see with my own eyes the realization of a culture that I had always been told was impossible.  I think of it as a glimpse at a magnificent future.  Someday I hope we’ll experience a real female renaissance in the arts, the celebration of our gender when we truly achieve liberation, will light up all humanity.  Meanwhile, riot grrrl is here to stay.

If you were a solitary riot grrrl or a member of the collective and you’d like to participate in Riot Grrrl: The Self Told Narrative please contact the directors of the documentary here.

Newtopia staff writer TAMRA SPIVEY is a founding member and primary singer of Lucid Nation, executive producer of the documentaries Rap is War and Exile Nation, and associate producer of The Gits documentary. She was art editor and west coast editor of Newtopia Magazine in its former incarnation, collaborating on in depth interviews with whistle blower Michael Ruppert, ACLU and record business honcho Danny Goldberg, and grassroots political strategist Larry Tramutola. Follow her on twitter @MongrelPatriot.

Stage lights bathed the three hard, athletic and nearly naked bodies in an electric glow as they posed in a bathtub at the center of the dance floor.  Hundreds of flamboyantly costumed guests pushed in close, but not too close, since they didn’t know exactly what was coming next.  Out came a chair, a ladle, and a cauldron of a gooey, thick chocolate brown liquid.  The audience knew that something very tasty was about to happen.

Rub-a-dub-dub, the three bodies in the tub were oh so close. The woman wore only pasties and barely-perceptible skin-tone bottoms, and the two men wore only vintage swim trunks.   Two other Lucent performers got the party going by drizzling the chocolaty syrup all over them.  They began to move in sync with the energy of the crowd and to the rhythm of the music, rubbing the chocolate concoction all over each other.  Hands went everywhere, slowly and sensually bathing each body.  Then came the whipped cream.  It was the biggest, sexiest chocolate Sundae ever.  The crowed buzzed, and everyone wanted to be in that tub.

This was Lucent Dossier at its best; sexy, sticky and surprising.  If you haven’t heard of Lucent Dossier, it is a cutting-edge performance troupe that has gained a reputation for creating envelope-pushing, mind expanding performance experiences for their audiences.  They mix creative dance, original music and the most unique post-apocalyptic, neo-tribal, steampunky costumes and makeup you have ever seen, into a wild night of audience participation theater.  Lucent Dossier came to life in Los Angeles and has taken up residence at an out-of-the-way converted factory where this bathtub and chocolate scene unfolded in early March.

I’m an unabashed fan of Lucent Dossier.  They have a way of making me feel like I’m at home, where I can be my wildest, weirdest self and no one will care because, well, because we’re family.  Being part of the Lucent Dossier family is a little like living in an asylum for the creatively insane where the patients just found the secret stash of magic mushrooms and decided to dress up like circus players wearing costumes pieced together from the remains of a bombed-out department store.  Everything is beyond stylish, perfectly tattered, and no one believes in matching.  Doesn’t that sound like home to you?

“I wanted to create a beautiful lunacy,”   said Dream Rockwell, the creator of Lucent Dossier, during our recent lunch interview in Larchmont Village.   “I think people are way weirder than we think we are, way more unique than we are led to believe.  I thought if I could let people experience that, it would make them happier.”

More than 800 people got to experience some of that unique weirdness in early March during two nights of “private parties” at Lucent’s downtown warehouse space.  It was just the Lucent Dossier family getting together to share some quality time.   In these days of Cirque du Soleil, which can sell out show after show in big rooms, 800 people may not seem like much, but Lucent fans are in fact fanatic.  This is a hard core group who relish each new show and who often spend days, or even weeks, putting together their own costumes and outfits for the occasion.

On this occasion, the warehouse was decorated on the ground floor with comfortably stuffed couches and chairs around a dance floor, while the upstairs was dressed up like a little bordello. There was a little kitchen in one corner where they served fries, popcorn and other snacks, and in another corner was a “cuddle” room with pillows spread about on the floor.  Just outside the cuddle room was an airbrush artist painting faces.  Around every corner is something you didn’t quite expect to see.

One guest seeing Lucent Dossier for the first time called the performers “”tireless” because the show went on until nearly 4 a.m. with a new set starting every 15 or 20 minutes.  You had the dancers, the aerialists, the Bordello Lap Dancers, and of course, the chocolate Sundae.

“It was a surreal experience,” said Michelle Socci, a west LA psychotherapist.  “I felt like I was part voyeur and part participant.  They really bring you into their world, but they never let you forget whose house it is.  I loved it.”

Lucent Dossier was created in 2004 by Rockwell, a Canadian transplant, by way of New York City.  Trained in commedia del’arte, acting, singing dance, improv and anything else she could find in New York back in the late 90’s, she dreamed of creating something that could use all her skills and she thought Los Angeles was the place to do that.

Not long after reaching Los Angeles, Rockwell found her way to Burning Man, the infamous art and culture festival that takes place in the Nevada desert every August.  Two of the “principles” of Burning Man are radical inclusion and participation.  You can plainly see those values at work in Lucent Dossier’s shows.

It was about 10 years ago and Rockwell was wandering about the vast dry lake bed known to Burners as “the playa,” when she met a mysterious man who told her that she needed to focus her talent and energy in one direction if she wanted people to take her seriously.  She took the advice seriously and began to focus all her skill and talent toward the vision that eventually became Lucent Dossier a few years later.

Always fond of the old school circus, Rockwell wanted to use that format but add her own artistic style so she went to work as a production coordinator with a group called the Dream Circus, one of the first groups to bring the feel of Burning Man back to Los Angeles.  She learned how to manage the elements of a circus and in the process she met some of the performers who would be the first members of the Lucent Dossier troupe, Roger Fojas, Erin Maxick and Dayna Riesgo.

The first time I saw Lucent Dossier, they were performing at the Edison, the trendy retro turn of the century powerhouse (literally) turned period lounge in downtown Los Angeles.  It was New Year’s Eve, 2007 and Lucent was paired up with Steampunk ass-kickers Abney Park.  Each group had a retinue of loyal fans, and they all dressed to the nines in period steam punk out fits or wildly creative Lucent ware, as I like to call it.  “It was a surreal evening,” said Abney Park leader Captain Robert when I spoke to him about that night.

Indeed, it was like nothing I had ever seen.  Descending the stairs into the basement lounge that night we saw these wildly dressed people and didn’t realize they were part of the show at first.  They were frolicking among the guests, being playful and cozying up to everyone.  Around one corner, there was a man with a wild mustache and a big hat washing the feet of several blissed-out guests. That was renowned American folk artist Brent “Shrine” Spears. In a side room, long-time Lucent-ess Erin Maxick was holding forth as the Post Mistress of the Post Portal Post Office, an inter-dimensional way station for lost letters.  Her guests sit down and she searches her file of lost letters to find that long lost message they had been waiting for.

One new Lucent fan who I met at the private party is Svjetlana Jaklenec, a writer and director from Canada, who had a friend dancing in the show.  “I’ve never seen anything like this,” she told me half way part way through the evening.  “They really create their own little world and they let you come in and share it.”

As much as the crew and the guests seem to love the private warehouse shows, setting up the shows are problematic because the city of Los Angeles seems to want to make life particularly hard on them.  Getting the permits needed to host these private parties is an arduous, frustrating and very expensive process.   It would be smart for the ruling class at City Hall to find ways to encourage entrepreneurs Dream Rockwell by making the process easier.  The Lucent Dossier crowd couldn’t be much mellower, so requiring armed guards, for example, seems like serious overkill.

Assuming the roadblocks aren’t insurmountable, there seems to be an audience hungry for this kind of entertainment.  “It seems people are looking for a different kind of entertainment,” said Rockwell.  “When we did our show at the Edison we had 750 to 1,000 people show up for our average Wednesday night show.”

Given the demand, Dream is still dreaming big. She has plans for more private parties (The next are May 17 and 18) new collaborations, shows at Coachella, Lightening in a Bottle, Burning Man and other festivals this year.  She also wants to create a new home for Lucent.

“We want to move to the next level,” she said. “We want to dream bigger.”  Part of that dream includes creating an event that will take place inside a dome.  The inside wall of the dome would be used as a cinesphere-style, interactive projection screen and there would be an aerial water element and multiple stages in and around the crow to create an immersive experience.

“We want to create a place that doesn’t exist right now,” Rockwell said.  She has looked around Los Angeles but hasn’t found the kind of “home” for Lucent that she’s looking for.   So it might be the dome concept, or another club like the Edison, or maybe even the warehouse.

For now, Dream Rockwell and her Lucent family will bring their unique version of weirdness with them wherever they perform.  And that is a good thing because LA can certainly use a little more weirdness.

If you want to discover the Lucent Dossier Experience for yourself, click here.

Written by Rick Ruiz

Rick Ruiz is a writer, former journalist and owner of Zenvironment, a Conscious Communications consulting firm.  A native Southern Californian and graduate of Cal State Fullerton, he now lives in Santa Monica.  He has studied and written about martial arts, spirituality, personal growth and the southern California lifestyle.  He can be reached at rick.ruiz@zenviro.net.

The first female in America to address mixed crowds at a public event, Frances Wright was one of the first American feminists, and female abolitionists, a champion of worker’s rights, and a sharp critic of religious institutions.  Frances was the first American to write eloquently of sexual passion as a wonderful pleasure, not a sinful shame.  She fought for birth control, divorce and property rights for women.  Her lectures attracted thousands. Jefferson, Lafayette, Monroe, Madison and Andrew Jackson advised her.  Her audacious attempt to cure slavery with an experimental commune scandalized America. When she matured and compromised, no one noticed.  Her fame remained a caricature of extremism, until she became a curiosity, and then was forgotten in her own lifetime. Estranged from her family, her only friends her lawyer and her carpenter, she died alone.

Walt Whitman saw Frances Wright lecture at the height of her fame, in New York City, where thousands thundered their appreciation of the eloquence with which she presented her radical ideas about freeing slaves and giving women equal rights.  That year a play Frances had originally written only for her friends and family was produced for the second time at the Park Theater on Broadway.  At Thomas Paine celebrations across America her name was the most toasted.  In old age, remembering her, Whitman wrote: “She was a brilliant woman, of beauty and estate, who was never satisfied unless she was busy doing good—public good, private good…we all loved her: fell down before her: her very appearance seemed to enthrall us…the noblest Roman of them all…a woman of the noblest make-up whose orbit was a great deal larger than theirs—too large to be tolerated for long by them: a most maligned, lied about character—one of the best in history though also one of the least understood.”

THE ORPHAN PRODIGY

On the southeast coast of Scotland in 1795, Frances “Fanny” Wright was born.  Her father James Wright Jr. adored his wife and children.  His career as a merchant suffered from his dedication to spending time with his family, practicing liberal politics, and collecting coins, which included advocating for coin designs featuring good honest work like weaving and mail coaches instead of royal profiles and boring coats of arms.  British authorities investigated James in 1794 for printing and distributing Thomas Paine’s The Rights of Man.  His mother’s brother James Mylne was one of the leaders of the Scottish Enlightenment.  James had a reputation as a local hothead who admired the American and French revolutions.

Fanny’s mother Camilla was the niece of Baron Rokeby, vice chancellor of the University of Dublin and Archbishop of Armagh.  Camilla’s godmother the bluestocking Elizabeth Robinson Montagu defended Shakespeare from the witty attacks of Voltaire; Samuel Johnson nicknamed her “Queen of the Blues,” making her undoubtedly the first queen of the blues in English literary history, though she earned the title without having to sing or play guitar.  Not long before Fanny was born the Queen of England and her six daughters breakfasted with Camilla’s godmother.

Frances seemed destined for the comfortable life of a petty aristocrat.  Letters from Camilla to her husband record the depth of love these parents felt for their children.  With a grand uncle like James Mylne, Frances was assured that her life would not be the empty display of manners and conspicuous consumption practiced by so many of her class, but as a female intellectual all she could hope for was to host a salon, while attending to the responsibilities of a wife and mother, with servants and nannies, to be sure.

When Fanny turned two years old Camilla died in the winter of 1798.  Three months later her father died.  Fanny and her older brother and younger sister became orphans.  Her brother they sent to be raised by James Mylne.  Loving foster parents took in her sister.  But her grandfather and teenage aunt raised Fanny.

Major General Duncan Campbell of the Royal Marines had retired into a luxurious life of grand dinner parties with lords and generals at which ten courses of wine were served.  Opulent evenings at the opera interested him more than child rearing.  Once when little Fanny walked with Duncan through the streets of London she saw the plight of hundreds of mothers and children in tattered clothes, obviously starving, begging for any pittance.  Duncan told her they were begging because they were too lazy to work.

Later when Duncan refused a beggar at the door, a man asking to work for a little food, Fanny announced that she wished she had money to give the poor soul.  Duncan told her she was foolish.  So “she asked him why rich people who did not work did not become beggars, he answered that work was shameful.”  He also informed her that “God intended there should be poor, and there should be rich.”

In 1803 Fanny’s uncle William, a military man like his father, was killed in India.  He willed half of his property in Bengal, Behar, Orissa, and Benares to his nieces.  The other half he willed to his sister.  In 1806 Fanny and her little sister Camilla were reunited when their young aunt used her new wealth to buy a house on the coast of Devonshire.  The sisters became very close and for most of the rest of their lives Fanny depended on her sister named after their mother to handle the domestic side of her life.

 Lyme Bay

The twenty-room mansion called The Cottage offered beautiful scenery, including a view of Lyme Bay from the top of a hill.  Fanny could watch the English Channel flow into the Atlantic.  Apricots and peaches ripened in the kitchen garden.  Magnolia trees scented the ocean breeze.  Fanny would read Wordsworth’s poetry of the rapture of nature and experience it herself swimming and riding horses.  Fanny wrote that she was “surrounded at all times by rare and extensive libraries.”  But this idyllic interlude didn’t last long.

In 1809 Fanny’s brother died in a skirmish with the French, then Major General Duncan Campbell died.  By age fourteen Fanny had lost her mother, father, brother and grandfather.

Fanny lived in the world Jane Austen wrote about.  Women of marriageable age must have only one concern, according to local propriety; they must compete to marry the finest man available.  Fanny’s conservative aunt demanded conformity to local standards of behavior.  Tall, thin teenage Fanny had other ideas.  While others politely trotted their horses, she galloped past them.  When at high tea an eligible bachelor praised his hounds she might respond with a recent insight she had regarding a problem of higher mathematics.  When polite society chatted about the latest popular novel she quoted the smoldering poetry of the notorious Lord Byron.

Meanwhile the industrialization of England advanced.  Men of wealth and power began to buy enormous areas of land on which to build their noble estates.  Fanny saw the evictions of families whose ancestors had worked farms on that land before the Norman Conquest.  They would become workers in dangerous factories, beggars on the streets of London, or immigrants to America or Australia.  Lush lawns and gardens, terrain suitable for foxhunting, and opulent mansions replaced the farms.  Going to tea or dinner at one of these castles tested Fanny’s limits.  She could not understand how these men could have treated innocent people so cruelly.

Fanny came to think of her aunt as an enemy, or perhaps an example of “the enemy.”  The domineering woman told the children exactly how much food to eat, how to stand, how to speak.  Boys must wear gloves at all times.  Her fussy reign of terror predicated on what proper society would think went against the grain of Fanny’s every instinct.

FALLING IN LOVE WITH AMERICA

In The Cottage library Fanny found a book that began the most important romance of her life.  In her autobiography she described herself at this key moment: “While still a very young girl, she found by chance among some old books tumbled together in a chest in her aunt’s library, a copy of Botta’s History of the American Revolution…From that moment she awoke, as it were, to a new existence…There existed a country consecrated to freedom, in which man might wake to the full knowledge and full exercise of his powers.  To see that country was, now at the age of sixteen, her fixed but secret determination…She had absolutely devoured the Italian historian and was in the full tide of ecstasy when a sudden apprehension seized her.  Was the whole thing a romance?  What had become of the country and the nation?  She had never heard of either.  A panic terror seized upon her.  She flew to examine every atlas in the library.  The first was not of recent date and showed no trace of the United States.  She opened with trembling hands another and another.  At last she saw ‘United States’ marked along the Atlantic coastline of North America.”

In the preface to her Course of Popular Lectures she wrote: “I may observe, however, that from the age of seventeen, when I first accidently opened the page of America’s national history…from that moment my attention became riveted on this country, as on the theater where man might first awake to the full knowledge and the full exercise of his powers.”  Soon Frances was reading everything she could find on this daring experiment in life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

In 1813 Fanny though still underage forced a move to the household of James Mylne.  Daughters and sons were equal, and equally well educated in the Mylne family.  Mylne’s colleagues impressed by Fanny’s intellect since she was not allowed to study at any college instead borrowed for her any book she asked for, helping her along in her career of learning.

Gathering with a circle of like-minded friends of both genders Fanny began writing Byronic poetry.  She also wrote a play, and a precocious neoclassical examination of Epicurean philosophy eventually published as A Few Days in Athens.  Frances presented it as a translation of a Greek manuscript discovered in Herculaneum.

While her peers got engaged Fanny decided to move with Camilla to London.  Not only would they pursue a lawsuit against their aunt, who was unwilling to let go their purse strings, but Fanny would get a better sense of what might be accomplished to do some good in the world.  Instead she got a good hard look at the devastation of the poor as policies of protectionism and industrialization destroyed local economies that had been self sufficient for generations.  Soaring prices and unemployment caused rioting in the streets.  Fanny decided she must see America for herself, because she had no hope for England.

James Mylne was so alarmed by Fanny’s plan to sail across the Atlantic with Camilla on a trip to see the wondrous republic America he traveled straight to Liverpool hoping to talk her out of it.  But 22-year-old Frances Wright had made up her mind.  She was too much for England, perhaps in a country as free, brash, and modern as herself, she could find a destiny more to her liking.

On the way to America Fanny made a science of adjusting diet to support digestion at sea, sharing her know how with her fellow passengers.  Imagine her delight when she found that unlike illiterate British sailors the American crew could read and write.  They spoke eagerly and knowledgably of the history and laws of the United States.  In her journal Fanny described the voyage as uneventful, but she must have been thrilled with the anticipation of arriving in a republic to her mind like some new Athens, an outpost of a superior civilization.

In fall of 1818 New York was still a small town; Greenwich Village was a landscape of farms.  Though America’s economy was struggling to Fanny it seemed no one was too poor and no one too rich.  The famous New Yorker exuberance was already in evidence.  But a series of hustles and thefts by boarding house keepers and servants quickly taught Fanny that not every American was a sage.

Walking everywhere and taking touristy boat rides Fanny was the original Studs Terkel, interviewing everyone in her path about what was going on in America.  Her favorites seem to have been the gents from the Carolinas, with their polished manners, and the rugged honest men from the western frontier.  Despite her initial experiences with hustlers, Fanny wrote that New York was more honest than other cities.

Seeking citizenship Frances and Camilla were disappointed to find that five years of residency were required.

Wealthy and powerful new friends helped make life more gracious for the newcomers.  A possible romance with an American banker, son of a famous Irish revolutionary, led to an opportunity for Frances to have the play she’d written for her friends back home in Scotland produced at the ritzy Park Theater on the famous street that even then was known simply as Broadway.

Almost 2400 people filled the theater on opening night to see this new British production about Swiss freedom fighters.  Like Fanny’s family most of the lead characters died.  The play was credited to anonymous; a female author was out of the question.  So Frances sat beside Camilla watching the standing ovation.  She had to keep her seat as the audience chanted for the author.  She could not share the rave reviews she read proclaiming her play uniquely suited for the American stage because of its passion for freedom.  She could not correct the critics who were certain a man had written it.

Despite the exciting premier the play didn’t survive a week before closing down.  No secret can last long in New York City.  Word got out that a woman had written the play that got a standing ovation.  Fussy old ladies and conservative gentlemen were shocked from Boston to Glasgow.

Frances searched for a publisher as a new production of the play was prepared for a run in Philadelphia but no one was in a rush to publish a female playwright.

Frances and Camilla returned to their travels, two young women alone voyaging thousands of miles. They went north to Montreal, and west to Pittsburgh.  Frances relished her anecdotal research on Americans.  She met wealthy liberal expatriates from Great Britain and simple backwoods mechanics and merchants.  She found all of them eager to reflect her own enthusiasm about the republic.

But Frances also saw slavery in America for the first time.  To her such brutality and inhumanity, in a country devoted to freedom and composed of wilderness, became especially vivid.

America’s economic depression seemed an easy fix to Frances.  If the wealthy had not developed a taste for fancy European fabrics and other products of decadence, if they would be content with their own homespun, the prosperity of the growing country could be immediately restored.

  1818 map of Pennsylvania

Sick from her travels under difficult conditions, Frances missed the opening night of her play in Philadelphia.  Once again the audience responded with a standing ovation.  But the play closed that very night.  Frances gave away the few copies of her play that she had been able to get printed.  She sent some of the copies to Americans she admired, including founding father Thomas Jefferson.

Before returning home the sisters visited the future site of Washington D.C. where Frances relished the muddy roads and the boarding houses of nailed together fresh lumber.  She knew someday this would be a city of impressive official buildings but she wished it could always retain the innocence of its humble beginning.  She foresaw “a sumptuous metropolis, rich in arts, and bankrupt in virtue.”

FIRST OF A NEW BREED

Frances Wright

The England that Frances returned to had taken a turn for the worse.  While the sisters were touring America unemployment led to a mass march in Manchester, a protest of over a hundred thousand working people.  The swords and guns of their own troops were turned against them.  Blood drenched the field.  New laws were passed allowing soldiers to search any home or person without a warrant.  Political groups were limited to fifty members at any gathering.  There would be no revolution in Merrie Olde England.

Meanwhile a frisky new king, George IV, was busy trying to divorce his wife for allegedly having an affair with a servant.  Frances told anyone who would listen that America was the hope of humanity.  “Truly I am grateful to this nation; the study of their history and institutions, and the consideration of the peace and happiness which they enjoy, has thawed my heart and filled it with hopes which I had not thought it could know again.”  She began to work on a book about her travels.

She had faith in the American political system.  “The wheel of the people, turns noiseless, and unimpeded, watched by all and suspected by none.”

But she also criticized America for not living up to its potential.  The press used its freedom in shameful ways.  Many farmers could only just eke out a living.  Slavery was slowly poisoning America.  Vital young American girls all became withdrawn sullen wives.  Frances blamed exclusion from education and citizenship for the sorry state of America’s mothers.

And yet Frances also wrote: “The prejudices still to be found in Europe, though now indeed somewhat antiquated, which would confine the female library to romances, poetry, and belles-lettres, and female conversation to the last new publication, new bonnet, and parasol are entirely unknown here. The women are assuming their place as thinking beings.”

Then Frances received a letter from Thomas Jefferson praising her play.  In her response she didn’t mention her Broadway triumph.  She mentioned only “chilling disappointments.”

Views of Society and Manners in America; A Series of Letters from that Country to a Friend in England, During the Years 1818, 1819, and 1820 By An Englishwoman was published in London in 1821.  She wrote about natives, mail delivery, the famous pirate Jean Lafitte, Niagara Falls, Benedict Arnold, and the history of the federal administration.

“The Americans are very good talkers,” she wrote, “and admirable listeners; understand perfectly the exchange of knowledge, for which they employ conversation, and employ it solely.  They have a surprising stock of information, but this runs little into the precincts of imagination; facts form the groundwork of their discourse.  They are accustomed to rest opinions on the results of experience, rather than on ingenious theories and abstract reasonings… the world, however, is the book which they consider most attentively, and make a general practice of turning over the page of every man’s mind that comes across them; they do this very quietly and very civilly, and with the understanding that you are at prefect liberty to do the same by theirs…equally free from effrontery and officiousness…the constant exercise of the reasoning powers gives to their character and manners a mildness, plainness, and unchanging suavity, such as is often remarked in Europe in men devoted to the abstract sciences….wonderfully patient and candid in argument, close reasoners, acute observers and original thinkers.”  She says you can learn more from an American in half an hour than you could from an entire evening with the literary and diplomatic elite of Europe.

The great American novelist James Fennimore Cooper dismissed Fanny’s book about America as “nauseous flattery.”

James Fenimore Cooper

As for British critics a prominent front-page review claimed to have proof that the author was a “red-hot American” dismissing the book as “a tissue of impertinence, and injustice, and falsehood.”  The quarterly, which that year had published the review widely credited with having killed the poet Keats, considered Views of Society and Manners in America “impudent” and “ridiculous.”  Only The Scotsman, a Scottish journal, praised the book as morally sublime, “deeply felt, and so eloquently described.”

But the opinions of European critics mattered little to Frances.  The book became popular in America and two heroes of the American Revolution would soon champion her cause.

British philosopher and reformer Jeremy Bentham was an old man when he met Frances.  The story was told that Jeremy at age three had already begun to study Latin, being dissatisfied with the histories he was already reading in English.  His later attempts to codify the laws of England and the United States may have been unsuccessful but he established the trend.  In fact, he coined the verb: “codify.” All his life he fought for absolute equality for women, abolition of slavery, the repeal of the death penalty, a ban on physical punishment for adults and children, freedom of speech, the right to divorce, and the legality of homosexuality.
Jeremy shared Fanny’s sentiments about America, and her book supported his own arguments.  Jeremy believed the ultimate moral rule to be the greatest happiness for the majority.  He didn’t respect hereditary power and certainly didn’t credit it with superior intelligence.  He thought the prisons should be reformed, the ballots blind.  He argued that Paul had ruined the religion of Jesus.  Jeremy became Fanny’s mentor.  He also sent her to visit friends of his in France, to deliver messages that if intercepted by the British government could have caused him serious trouble.  She became acquainted with the elite political intellectuals of France.  Then in autumn of 1821 she met Jeremy’s friend the American Revolutionary War hero the Marquis de Lafayette.

IN THE WAKE OF LAFAYETTE

Lafayette during the American Revolution

George Washington talked with tears in his eyes about the contributions to the American Revolution of the Marquis de Lafayette, a man who had shared the rough life of his soldiers, who paid them out of his own pocket, spending his inheritance to support the army Washington gave him, a shrewd tactician and heroic fighter.

Lafayette, the preeminent hero of the French Revolution, even dreamed up the tri-color flag of France.  The French idolized him.  In July 1789 when the troops surrounded the national assembly as the king prepared to dismiss it, Lafayette presented the assembly with the Declaration of the Rights of Man, approved by his friend Thomas Jefferson, author of the Declaration of Independence.  Four days later the locals elected Lafayette commander of the Paris militia.  He saved many lives from the wrath of the rioters.

 Lafayette’s handwritten draft of the Declaration of the Rights of Men

Lafayette rescued the royal family twice.  Once when rioters broke into Versailles and with pikes and knives killed royal guards, Lafayette saved the Queen of France by taking her to a balcony over the central court and kissing her hand.  The French understood this generous and sentimental gesture.  They shouted long live Lafayette and long live the queen.

But on the next occasion of her rescue by Lafayette, Marie Antoinette sneered at him for being a traitor to his class, and refused to be rescued by him, choosing to die by the guillotine instead.  Yet because of his respect for the royals Lafayette was a constant target of radicals who wanted to send him to the guillotine with the queen.  When the leaders of the revolution issued warrants for his arrest Lafayette fled with 22 fellow officers, but they were caught in Prussia, and so began Lafayette’s five years of prison in Prussia and Austria, an ordeal of deprivation and hunger that damaged his previously robust health.

When Napoleon defeated Austria the French people demanded the release of Lafayette.  Napoleon didn’t relish a rival of Lafayette’s immense popularity so he negotiated his freedom but exiled him from France.  Lafayette snuck in anyway.  He wanted to go home to his castle on a thousand acres La Grange.  When Lafayette promised to stay there and keep out of public life Napoleon relented.

Later Lafayette

By the time Frances met Lafayette his days of swashbuckling freedom fighting were long over.  French realist author Stendhal wrote this unflattering portrait: “He took each day as it came; a man not overburdened with intelligence…dealt with each heroic situation as it arose, and in between times was solely occupied, in spite of his age, in fumbling at pretty girls’ plackets, not occasionally but constantly, and not much caring who saw.”

But Lafayette and Frances always insisted their relationship was platonic.  When they first met they talked long into the night about their greatest passion, America.  According to Fanny’s letter to her mentor Jeremy, Lafayette described an “army of brothers who had all things in common, our pleasure, our pains, our money, and our poverty…the virtues of that army…their fortitude, their disinterested, and sublime patriotism.”

La Grange dazzled Frances, with its park, five towers, moat, menagerie, aviary, and cider presses.  La Grange was the creation of Lafayette’s beloved wife Adrienne, who had died in 1807.  Adrienne had fought the new bureaucracy of Paris to regain what she could of her ancestral lands and wealth.  She had designed La Grange as a tribute and sanctuary for her husband, made it magical with her sense of decoration, she even wrote the music playing in the background.  She was gone but grandchildren, cousins and dinner guests meant setting the dinner table for thirty.  The halls and walls of La Grange were a museum of Lafayette’s accomplishments, including flags of historical importance, and paintings of great Frenchmen and Americans who had been his friends and colleagues.

Frances offered to write Lafayette’s life story.  He had a portrait painted of her that he placed in his study.  From the privileged position Lafayette provided, Frances watched the maneuvering of the French political parties in their legislative sessions.  Back home in London Lafayette’s friends visited Frances, she found herself surrounded by the famous liberal gray heads of the day.

Frances wrote Lafayette fawning, sycophantic letters in which she claimed to love him more than a daughter could her father, but she was merely imitating his own tone towards her.  He was the first to bring up the father and daughter quality of their relationship. While his letters to her seemed to stray into the area of romance, testing her reactions, Frances was careful to stay away from any affection except paternal, she emphasized his importance to her as a mentor and ideal.

Lafayette wrote of her: “—to know, to respect, and to love her, will ever be, in my sense, one and the same thing.”  Their close relationship first caused gossip then suspicion.  Observing the flurries of intellectual conversation Lafayette and Frances enjoyed, the general’s family began to fear that she had too much influence over him.

Frances had a simple suggestion to end all such interference.  Lafayette could adopt her, or marry her, as he saw fit.  Lafayette explained that he had promised his dying wife he would never marry again.   How could he adopt her when he already had such devoted children and grandchildren?

When Frances shared with Lafayette her unfinished work about Epicurus, he insisted it be published.  Finishing it turned out to be a chore for the impatient Frances, but the book was published in 1822.  Jefferson received a copy and gave it a rave review calling it a “treat to me of the highest order.” Excerpts from it filled seven pages of his journal. He wrote that “the matter and manner of the dialogue is strictly ancient … the scenery and portraiture of the interlocutors are of higher finish than anything in that line left us by the ancients… if not ancient, it is equal to the best morsels of antiquity.”

Frances became Lafayette’s agent as he schemed to support the army in Spain who had forced their king to accept shared power with elected officials.  But in 1823 the new Bourbon king of France came to his fellow monarch’s rescue, and the French army helped crush the rebellion, and then stood by watching in horror as the Spanish royalists took their revenge.  Frances dismissed the disaster as the result of supporting a man inadequate to the task.  The man in question’s last request was to have a lock of his hair snipped off and sent to the Marquis de Lafayette.

In 1824 President Monroe invited Lafayette to return again to the United States.  Lafayette considered this his farewell tour.  He wanted Frances to join him and she of course would not go without Camilla.  But the family would not allow them to travel together, by boat or carriage.  Still Lafayette loved to have the sisters accompany him to public events and he enjoyed introducing Frances to his powerful friends as the author of his biography.

Reunited in America, sucked into the celebration of Lafayette with artillery salutes, musical flourishes, cheering crowds and even a visit to the first of many towns named after him, Frances met Thomas Jefferson, Henry Clay, James Madison, James Monroe, and Andrew Jackson.  Congress voted Lafayette a gift of two hundred thousand dollars to help pay back his generous financial support of the American Revolution.

About Frances Lafayette wrote to Jefferson: “you and I are the two men in the world the esteem of whom she values the most. I wish much, my dear friend, to present these two adopted daughters of mine to Mrs. Randolph and to you; they being orphans from their youth, and preferring American principles to British aristocracy, having an independent, though not very large fortune, have passed the three last years in most intimate connection with my children and myself, and have readily yielded to our joint entreaties to make a second visit to the U.S.”

Thomas Jefferson

The beauty of Montebello, and the daring of the University of Virginia, America’s first institution of higher learning without affiliation to any religious body, charmed Frances.  She was moved by the reunion of these heroes of the American Revolution.  She described Thomas Jefferson’s tall upright figure but observing his weakened state she lamented that “the lamp is evidently on the wane nor is it possible to consider the fading of a light so brilliant and pure without a sentiment of deep melancholy.”

One female critic at the Jefferson soiree said of Frances: “to ladies she never spoke.”  Fanny’s future as a lecturer becomes obvious when this critic commented: “the Frenchmen told many instances of her masculine proclivities, on occasion she would harangue men in the public room of a hotel and the like.”

Frances both charmed and alienated Lafayette’s old American friends.  One woman in particular set her sites on Frances, outraged by her impudent demands on Lafayette’s time and reputation.  Mary, or Mindy as she was better known, was George Washington’s stepdaughter.  She soon convinced Lafayette to distance himself from these two young Scottish sisters traveling scandalously without family, despite his own inappropriate claim to be their protector.

Fanny welcomed the opportunity to see the country, becoming the most traveled woman in American history until that time, from the frontier outposts of the Midwest to the drunken steamboat races on the Mississippi River, all the way to mosquito infested New Orleans, Fanny and Camilla had the foolhardiness and courage to travel alone through the great frontier, astonishing and charming everyone they met.  But Fanny’s fond belief that all Americans were well read, and passionate about liberty, required revision.  She had seen some rough types along the way, none rougher than the men who practiced the business of slavery.

Reunited with Lafayette in the south Frances wrote of the dismay she felt watching slaveholders celebrate the Marquis. “The enthusiasm, triumphs and rejoices exhibited here before the countenance of the great and good Lafayette have no longer charms for me. They who so sin against the liberty of their country, against those great principles for which their honored guest poured on their soil his treasure and his blood, are not worthy to rejoice in his presence. My soul sickens in the midst of gaiety, and turns almost with disgust from the fairest faces or the most amiable discourse.”

Was this resolve regarding slavery a reaction to Fanny’s rejection by the slave owning stepdaughter of George Washington?  Or had she been influenced by the fervor of a social experiment? On the way to New Orleans, Fanny had seen the Utopian community of New Harmony, Indiana.

JACOB RAPP AND THE HARMONISTS

New Harmony as envisioned by Robert Owen

Jacob Rapp declared himself a prophet to his thousands of followers in Germany so the Lutheran authorities gave him five days in jail to think it over.  Jacob never doubted his calling, but he did decide to transplant himself and five hundred families to America.  The Harmonists had a business: building towns.  First they built Harmony, Pennsylvania.  Then they built Harmony, Indiana.  After selling Harmony, Indiana made them wealthy they moved back to Pennsylvania to build the town of Economy.

Jacob was deeply influenced by the great German theosopher and mystic Jakob Böhme. Böhme’s extraordinary visions of spiritual dimensions of existence found harmony and geometry throughout the universe seen and unseen.  Jacob Rapp also found inspiration in the works of the great Swedish mystic visionary Emmanuel Swedenborg, who was a curious combination of pioneer scientist and spiritualist author.  Angels and devils are good and bad humans outside the temporary domains of physical bodies. Böhme’s heaven a shining vision of principles and ratios seems somewhat remote when compared with Swedenborg’s talkative angels and for the most part not really all that bad devils.  Swedenborg reassured loving couples that their sex lives in heaven would make the best sex they had ever known mere foreplay.

Since alchemical vessels and bottles have been found in the town of Economy historians speculate that the Harmonists may have practiced alchemy.  Their library included the notorious and spurious magical work Sixth and Seventh Books of Moses and Opus Mago Cabalisticum, but they were more like Christian mystics than hermetic practitioners.

Jacob and the Harmonists expected the apocalypse during their lifetimes.  They prized celibacy; even married couples were encouraged to give up the practices that depend on the Adam and Eve world, instead of the Adam world, when he was pure, before the fall.  Babies were few and far between.  Sundays were for services and singing.  No chewing or smoking tobacco.  Harmonists lived five or six in each small house, not necessarily family members, but devoted to living as Christian brothers and sisters.

In 1814 the Harmonists moved to Indiana Territory.  That first summer and fall malaria felled over a hundred people.  So the Harmonists drained the swamp, then got back to the “hard labor and coarse fare” of building a town in the wilderness.  By 1819 the town boasted vineyards, a distillery, a brewery, a winery, and a steam powered wool carding and spinning factory.  The impeccable craftsmanship of the carpentry and masonry was matched by the beautiful symmetry of the architecture.  Because they worked in harmony with each other and with great pride in their work they outperformed their peers in these professions. By the time the Harmonists sold Harmony, Indiana they had two thousand acres under cultivation.  They manufactured peach brandy, whiskey, wine, beer, tin ware, rope, wagons, carts, plows, flannel, wool, and cotton.  But they didn’t like living so near Kentucky slave towns.  The Harmonists were strictly abolitionist.  They all became rich when Robert Owen paid them 150,000 dollars for Harmony, Indiana.  Robert renamed it New Harmony.

Robert Owen was an industrialist but also a reformer.  A Welshman who ran a model factory in Scotland, he tried to prove that treating worker’s decently, paying them well, and providing for their whole lives, instead of working them to death, produced not only superior workers with far fewer issues like violence and alcoholism, but the factory itself could make more money.  Sadly, no other industrialists seemed to care. British industrialism rolled on through child labor and matchstick girls with glow in the dark jaws eaten away by phosphorous. Owen had decided to think bigger.  He bought this town from the Harmonists so that he could create a model society.  Like Plato’s Republic, this community would prove the principles of its founder.

The vines of New Harmony

It took only ten years for the Harmonists to build the beautiful town of Harmony.  But Owen’s experimental community lasted only two.  Owen invited everyone who wanted to try life in a commune devoted to enlightened living to join him, but along with a few idealists he attracted hustlers and freeloaders.  So the “Constitution of the Preliminary Society” was drawn up.  Members invested not just their money but also their household possessions.  They would own a piece of an enterprise devoted to reform and equality.  Any services they rendered for the community would be paid in points redeemable at the town store, but cash was welcome there, too, for folks disinclined to work.

Soon New Harmony became a cacophony of bickering.  Overcrowded, poorly supervised and unproductive, the town floundered.  Within months the shortage of skilled craftsmen and laborers led to unrepaired breakdowns.  But Owen soon arrived with reinforcements.  He had recruited scientists and educators, and he had raised more funds, so his great experiment was given another opportunity to flourish.

The New Harmony Community of Equality was adopted as the town constitution.  Happiness would be the result of equal rights and equal duties.  All property would be held in common.  The constitution mandated cooperation, freedom of speech, kindness and courtesy, preservation of health and education.  What it would not do was provide rules by which these objectives were to be achieved.
America’s first anarchist, Josiah Warren was a member of the community.  He wrote eloquently of its failure: “It seemed that the difference of opinion, tastes and purposes increased just in proportion to the demand for conformity. Two years were worn out in this way; at the end of which, I believe that not more than three persons had the least hope of success. Most of the experimenters left in despair of all reforms, and conservatism felt itself confirmed. We had tried every conceivable form of organization and government. We had a world in miniature. We had enacted the French revolution over again with despairing hearts instead of corpses as a result. …It appeared that it was nature’s own inherent law of diversity that had conquered us …our ‘united interests’ were directly at war with the individualities of persons and circumstances and the instinct of self-preservation.”

To dissolve his New Harmony enterprise Owen had to spend another 200,000 dollars, at a time when you could buy a cow for twelve.  His fortune never recovered, and his ambitions became less grandiose.

Unhappily for Frances, she arrived in New Harmony in the first flush of its enthusiasm. She had heard Owen address Congress on February 25, 1825. Owen described what he called A New System of Society, a commune where everyone owned an equal share and shared work equally.  This experimental community would prove that cooperation is superior to competition.

Frances arrived in New Harmony before its first constitution, before the second chance of 1826, at a time when none of the participants would have believed their failure would become obvious by 1827.

By then Frances was mired in the failure of her own utopian experiment.  Like New Harmony, Nashoba would fail because of naiveté regarding human motivations and the complexities of communities.  The Harmonists who had flourished in the town they built were all German immigrants who shared a pious belief system that required constant practice.  New Harmony was a melting pot of radicals, crackpots, intellectuals, and opportunists, each with his or her own agenda.

NASHOBA

Frances and Camilla were thrilled when they learned they were eligible to become citizens of the United States of America, despite having spent much of the five eligibility years in Great Britain and France.  When they said goodbye to Lafayette on his 68^th birthday, as he sailed home from New York harbor on a hot day in July, Frances and Camilla were American citizens.

Now Frances combined the inspiration of New Harmony with her dedication to finding a way to solve the problem of slavery in America in a five-year plan.  She would buy or be given slaves, who would earn their freedom in five years.  While they were earning their freedom they would receive educations.  They would be prepared for life after slavery by learning trades and developing a sense of politics and history.  White members of the community, six of them, would supervise and educate.  Slaves and free blacks would do the work.  White and black children would receive the same education.

Frances worked the connections Lafayette had provided to get a chance to pitch her plan to President Andrew Jackson himself.  Jackson liked the idea.  James Monroe approved.  James Madison had serious reservations, however.  He didn’t think a promise of freedom would be enough to motivate a slave.  He pointed out Spain’s policy of offering slaves the opportunity to work for their freedom and how few slaves took it.

Andrew Jackson suggested Frances buy some recently cleared land in Tennessee.  Jackson had forcibly removed the Chickasaw tribe.  Tennessee was the most liberal of the slave states; abolitionist groups were allowed to flourish there.  The land was cheap and the population sparse, making local controversy less likely.

Jefferson offered neither public endorsement nor funds but he did encourage Frances.  “At the age of eighty-two,” he wrote to her, “with one foot in the grave, and the other uplifted to follow it, I do not permit myself to take part in any new enterprises, even for bettering the condition of man, not even in the great one which has been through life that of my greatest anxieties. Every plan should be adopted, every experiment tried, which may do something towards the ultimate object. That which you propose is well worthy of trial.”

Though Jefferson wondered if “moral urgencies” would be enough to motivate the slaves he also wrote: “You are young, dear Madam, and have powers of mind which may do much in exciting others in this arduous task.  I am confident they will be so exerted, and I pray to Heaven for their success, and that you may be rewarded with the blessings which such efforts merit.”

No one wanted to invest in her plan except Lafayette who offered her eight thousand dollars.  She refused to take it, not wanting to cause him further trouble with his family.  In October 1825 Fanny used her own money to buy two thousand acres of trees and swamp near the Wolf River.  She named her raw acreage Nashoba, the Chickasaw word for wolf.  She spent more of her own money to buy supplies and slaves.

Among the founders of Nashoba was Marcus Brutus Winchester, the eldest son of General James Winchester, President Jackson’s business partner, and his wife, a free black woman.  They had eight children, the oldest boy they named Robert Owen, and their second daughter Frances Wright.  His father’s gift of 420 acres in 1824 became downtown Memphis.  Marcus became a land agent, the county Democratic Party leader, postmaster, and when the town incorporated in 1826 he became the first mayor.  He built the jail and the courthouse.  His general store where Native Americans, backwoodsmen and townspeople mingled gave Frances an education in American frontier society.

Frances was 29 when Nashoba broke ground. In its first year about 100 acres were cleared, and primitive log structures provided shelter.

Frontier life at first agreed with Frances.  As Celia Eckhardt wrote in what remains the only biography of Frances Wright Fanny Wright: Rebel in America: “She wrote of forest land still full of bears, wolves, and panthers, and pictured herself galloping her white horse over rough, open country.  She slept in log cabins open on all sides, she said, and even in the woods with a bearskin for a bed and a saddle for her pillow.  She endured extremes of heat and cold and had never felt better or stronger in her life.  She could now ride forty miles a day without fatigue, and she did so often, going between Memphis and Nashoba, greeting the Indians who were her nearest neighbors as they came to sell their furs. She prayed God for a little rain, drank milk from her cow, ate venison from the Indians, and warmed herself at the great fire in her cabin.  She closed by saying…I begin to cherish life.”

The land was hard to work, and often flooded.  Bad weather made the work harder.  Supplies like lime and rocks had to be taken from the earth itself.  Despite the hardship by its first summer Nashoba seemed to be succeeding.  Visitors commented that the slaves worked with such devoted concentration just seeing them was enough to convince any skeptic that they could match or surpass white men.

In abolitionist newspapers Frances pleaded for stonemasons, carpenters, teachers, and investors to help the great experiment, but her pleas went unanswered.

Frances decided in December 1826 that she would write up a new deed for Nashoba.  No longer privately owned it would now be a true commune.  That way if anything happened to her the experiment could continue. New rules were written, as well.  Six thousand dollars was set as the price of freedom, plus 6% interest yearly.  No slave could become a trustee and they would not be involved in making community decisions.  Freed slaves would leave the United States. Slaves who deserved punishment would be punished according to the old slave system, including flogging, though only in extreme cases.

Camilla, and Robert Dale Owens, son of Robert Owens were among the trustees.  So was James Richardson, an enigmatic man who would care for the sisters through their life threatening fevers, but who would later destroy the reputations of Nashoba and Frances Wright.  Another trustee was George Flower, the only member of the community with farming skills; Nashoba had been his idea at first.  Frances and he worked together to realize their dream.  Historian Celia Eckhardt suggests that Flower and Frances had a passionate affair when they were alone together on a long trip through the wilderness, in the early days of planning Nashoba.  Flower was married with young children.  His wife didn’t keep secret her disdain for Nashoba and Frances.  Mrs. Flower devoted her self to nothing more or less than raising her children.  Camilla was eager to see her go.  But when she did go, she took her husband George with her,

In 1827 Frances visited New Harmony again, hoping to renew her optimism.  The dances, the bands, the marches, the organization, all the good intentions had fallen into angry bickering.  When Owen suggested everyone return to their beds to contemplate their animosities and mean thoughts peace reigned only briefly.  Anger ruled the day.  So Owen dissolved New Harmony.  Unwilling to give up the dream, Robert Dale Owen, Owen’s son, left New Harmony to join Frances at Nashoba.

 Robert Dale Owen

Nashoba was a mosquito-infested swamp the natives had used for hunting only, never for habitation. Frances became ill with fever. Just as Frances began to improve Camilla was struck by the fever, re-infecting Frances, who spent three months in bed near death.  James Richardson took responsibility for nursing the sisters back to health, and both credited his care for their survival.  The slaves continued to work devotedly, but supplies of rope and other necessities were running out.  The school had not yet been built.  They still had neither a skilled carpenter nor an expert at farming.

Dale helped Frances make the arduous trip back to Europe.  She suffered in a hammock in the back of a wagon bumping over uneven roads all the way to the port of New Orleans.  Her ship became grounded on a sand bank.  Nevertheless her health began to improve as the ship crossed the Atlantic.  On board a hired Scottish servant fed her a steady supply of oatcakes and porridge.

Mary Shelley noticed Fanny’s arrival: “a woman, young rich and independent, quits the civilization of England for a life of hardship in the forests of America, that by so doing she may contribute to the happiness of her species.”

Meanwhile back in Nashoba James Richardson for some reason decided details of his journal deserved to be published in a leading abolitionist newspaper The Genius of Universal Emancipation.  Two of the excerpts made shocking news.  Richardson described two incidents when he whipped slave women in the approving presence of Camilla.  He also admitted to be living outside wedlock with a free black woman.  Accusations flew that Nashoba was a “brothel.”  Richardson’s efforts to defend his position, which culminated in his declaration of atheism, only inflamed the controversy.

Frances and Robert Dale had enjoyed time with Lafayette and his now gracious family at La Grange.  They toured Paris and the surrounding countryside.  Dale assured his sister back home that his relationship with Frances was platonic.  He found in her his ideal intellectual companion.  But then the news from home arrived; their trip would have to be cut short.  Frances couldn’t return immediately.  The anxiety over the next month began to turn her hair white.  A chronic backache tormented her.

Before returning to Nashoba, Frances reached out to Mary Shelley: “If you possess the opinions of your father and the generous feelings of you mother, I feel that I could travel far to see you.”  The widow of the notorious poet Shelley, Mary’s mother was the English pioneer of feminism Mary Wollstonecraft and of William Godwin, friend to poets, author of Political Justice, he argued for the overthrow of all traditional institutions including government, religion and private property.  Mary had run off with her poet while he was still married to the mother of his children.  She had a child with him before she took his name in marriage.  Frances must have hoped she would find a kindred soul in Mary, one who might join her in Nashoba.

 Mary Shelley

To Mary Frances wrote: “While we endeavor to undermine the slavery of color existing in the North American Republic, we essay equally to destroy the slavery of mind now reigning there as in other countries.”  She described Nashoba as “an establishment where affection shall form the only marriage, kind feeling and kind action the only religion, respect for the feelings and liberties of others the only restraint, and union of interest the bond of peace and security.”

Mary was flattered and wanted to know more, but she wasn’t about to abandon Europe.  Frances wrote to her passionately hoping to convince her: “I have made the hard earth my bed, the saddle of my horse my pillow, and have staked my life and fortune on an experiment having in view moral liberty and human improvement.  Many of course think me mad, and if to be mad mean to be one of a minority, I am so, and very mad indeed, for our minority is very small.  Should that few succeed in mastering the first difficulties, weaker spirits, though often not less amiable, may carry forward the good work.”

Frances traveled south from London.  She spent seven days with Mary.  The author of Frankenstein understood Frances better than most.  She wrote of Frances to Robert Dale: “neither so independent or so fearless as you think.”  Mary’s son Percy said drily that Frances reminded him of “Minerva.”

When Frances returned to Nashoba she restated her mission in a letter shared with her friends and with potential colleagues.  Nashoba’s purpose was “to prepare the two colors for the coming change.  It is to kill prejudices in the white man by raising the black man to his level…not the mere theory, but the practice of equality…a first example of union and brotherhood.”

Mrs. Trollope, a friend of Fanny’s, needed somewhere to hide from her creditors so she joined the endless line of Fanny’s visitors in London eager to learn more about Nashoba, which included Leigh Hunt, who had been a friend of Keats and Shelly.  Despite approaching age fifty, Mrs. Trollope liked what she heard enough to pack up her servants and her children with a plan to spend one or two years in the woods.  The Trollope troop joined Fanny on her voyage home.

Mary Shelley came to see Fanny off.  She asked for a lock of her hair, which she kept near her for the rest of her life. Was tearful Mary reminded of her husband, another tall thin idealist with curly hair and a way with words?  Mary knew that Fanny was sailing into a storm of her own.

As the ship crossed the Atlantic, Fanny wrote a definitive response on Nashoba she wished to have published.  Trollope watched her read portions of the tract to sailors.  “Let us correct our views of right and wrong,” Frances wrote, “correct our moral lessons, and so correct the practice of rising generations.”

On the way to Nashoba, eating beside sailors and working men, Trollope quickly realized that Fanny had presented an idealized America quiet different from the rude reality.  She couldn’t keep her clothes clean in this world of tobacco spit and spilled alcohol.

When they arrived in Nashoba Frances found out that Camilla was now married, and both she and her husband looked alarmingly sickly.  James Richardson had already left; he had no apologies for Frances or Nashoba.  Food was limited to cornbread, pork and rice.  The farm was a failure.  The slaves had given up and were now as ineffective as any passive aggressive plantation slave, and the pestilential climate and atmosphere seemed a direct threat to herself and her children so Trollope borrowed money to make a hasty exit.  She commented that Camille seemed to share her suspicion that the fever may have somewhat deranged Fanny’s mind.

  Trollope

Trollope quickly relocated to Cincinnati.  But Fanny’s example wasn’t entirely lost on her.  In 1832 she published Domestic Manners of the Americans, beginning her career as a novelist.  Trollope’s anti-slavery novel influenced Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin.  Trollope had this to say about America: “How is it that the men of America, who are reckoned good husbands and good fathers, while they themselves enjoy sufficient freedom of spirit to permit their walking forth into the temple of the living God, can leave those they love best on earth, bound in the iron chains of a most tyrannical fanaticism? How can they breathe the balmy air, and not think of the tainted atmosphere so heavily weighing upon breasts still dearer than their own? How can they gaze upon the blossoms of the spring, and not remember the fairer cheeks of their young daughters, waxing pale, as they sit for long sultry hours, immured with hundreds of fellow victims, listening to the roaring vanities of a preacher, canonized by a college of old women? They cannot think it needful to salvation, or they would not withdraw themselves.”  Her sentiments here weren’t far from Fanny’s own.

When Frances published her Explanatory Notes, Respecting the Nature and Objects of the Institution of Nashoba, and of the Principles upon Which It Is Founded.  Addressed to the Friends of Human Improvement, in All Country and of All Nations’ she shocked her contemporaries by writing that sexual passion was “the strongest and the noblest of human passions…the best joys of our existence…the best source of human happiness.”  Virtue is not the province of self sacrifice and bitter discipline, virtue exists in anyone “in proportion as they are happy, and happy in proportion as they are free…ignorant laws, ignorant prejudices, ignorant codes of morals… condemn one portion of the female sex to vicious excess, another to as vicious restraint, and all to defenseless helplessness and slavery, and generally the whole of the male sex to debasing licentiousness, if not to loathsome brutality.”

But praising sexual passion wasn’t the most controversial of her points.  Frances no longer advocated relocation for the slaves.  She thought the races should mingle.  She predicted that once black Americans received equal educations miscegenation would no longer be controversial.  This and her attacks on organized religion only made her all the more notorious.  Old allies like James Madison were alienated by her adoption of views almost universally despised.  Disappointed, Frances hoped that in the future people would look back in disbelief that her thoughts were ever considered radical.

At this time many of her allies deserted her. The failure of Nashoba cost her half her fortune.  The whiff of the scandal haunted her for the rest of her life.

FRANCES WRIGHT: SUPERSTAR

Robert Dale returned to what was left of New Harmony, and Fanny soon followed.  She accepted his invitation to become co-editor of the New Harmony Gazette.  Frances became the first woman to edit an American newspaper since the colonial days.  Her eloquent articles and editorials argued against the death penalty, condemned religious intolerance, demanded rights for women, advocated equality by education, legal rights for married women, simple divorce laws, and access to birth control.

July 4, 1828, Frances as the featured speaker during New Harmony’s Independence Day celebration was probably the first woman in American history to address a large mixed gender crowd at a secular ceremony, or as her critics called it “a promiscuous assembly.”  The New Harmony Gazette became an important source of news neglected by the newspapers who at the time were the mainstream media.  When her first lecture in Cincinnati overflowed with a line wrapped around the block only the Gazette reported the triumph.  Another newspaper rebutted her ideas with the observation that unhappy marriages don’t exist, then reminded the reader of Fanny’s scandalous defense of miscegenation.

Frances was such a success she toured as a lecturer for several months.  She carried notes but seldom consulted them as she spoke.  She proposed the creation in every town of a Hall of Science or Temple of Reason, where citizens could see for themselves the fruits of science and of the republic.  She suggested correspondence committees create boarding schools, what she called Schools of Industry, to be attached to the Halls of Science so citizens could become skilled workers and educated participants in democracy.  Local leaders lined up to meet her.

Reactions to Fanny’s lectures were mixed, and tended to the extremes of admiration and disgust.  According to Trollope in Cincinnati the men cared only about money, and the women only about religion, nevertheless wealthy donors contributed to what they hoped would become the local Cincinnati Temple of Reason, but the chimerical location was never realized.

Then more bad news forced Frances to return to Nashoba.  A taskmaster who deserted the farm had stolen supplies.  Camilla was now six months pregnant.  Did Fanny put aside her ambitions to stay with her sister for several months during this anxious time, Camilla’s first birth, at risk in the primitive place that was Memphis?  Frances left her sister to fend for herself.  She took a risky trip over river and prairie, to lecture to bigger crowds, appearing in St. Louis, Louisville, Baltimore, Cincinnati, Boston, Philadelphia, and New York City.

Fanny’s fame spread during an especially vicious 1828 presidential campaign between Andrew Jackson and John Quincy Adams.  The Great Awakening gave America an evangelical preoccupation with sexual morality.  Mrs. Jackson was attacked in the press as an adulteress, and therefore as a threat to society, although the scandal in question was hardly scandalous and had occurred thirty years earlier.  In turn Mr. and Mrs. Adams were accused of having had premarital sex.  The ladies of the hottest new town on the frontier, Cincinnati, confronted a shopkeeper about his sign depicting a lady with petticoats showing her ankles.  He had to have the ankles painted out.  Women were scandalized if a man used the word corset in their presence.

Into this climate of overheated repression Frances delivered lectures praising erotic passion and advocating sexual liberation.  She not only ignored the current controversies of adultery and premarital sex, she questioned the institution of marriage.

What did Frances think of the evangelical spirit sweeping America, reaching even into New Harmony?  “By the sudden combination of three orthodox sects, a revival, as such scenes of distraction are wont to be styled, was opened in houses, churches, and even on the Ohio river.  The victims of this odious experiment on human credulity and nervous weakness were invariably women.  Helpless age was made a public spectacle, innocent youth driven to raving insanity, mothers and daughters carried lifeless from the presence of the ghostly expounders of damnation; all ranks shared the contagion, until the despair of Calvin’s hell itself seemed to have fallen upon every heart—.”

What Fanny’s admirers called “noble” her detractors called “masculine.”  She carried no notes, only a copy of the Declaration of Independence.  The press and the clergy were united in their opposition to her.  She was labeled the “female monster,” “great Red Harlot of Infidelity,” “Priestess of Beelzebub,” and “the whore of Babylon.” Her supporters organized to provide her protection. She traveled with a bodyguard. Once when a heckler yelled fire and her audience began to stampede Frances stood calmly on stage, soothing the panic like Apollonius silencing the riot.

Another opponent turned off the gas lines that lit the lecture hall lamps.  Frances finished the lecture by candlelight, earning a thunderous ovation she was carried out of the venue by her devoted followers.

In January of 1829 Camilla was suffering a terrible labor in Memphis.  She was bled three times by the incompetent doctor, and nearly died.  She named her newborn son Francis.  Frances didn’t see her nephew.  Instead she commenced a six lecture series at Masonic Hall in New York City, with an audience of perhaps two thousand each night.  The beaten down liberals of New York found in her words a refuge and hope for their cause.  Her lectures there and at the Park Theater brought together what amounted to a political party.  Then William Stone noticed her.

William Stone

Stone edited the New York Commercial Advertiser.  Though he admired Lafayette and was himself an abolitionist as Celia Eckhardt wrote: “Fanny Wright stirred something so deep and powerful in him that he lost his self-control: repeatedly he returned to the attack, with a rage and hatred so little suppressed that it seemed pathological.”

Stone admitted: “the sensation of the ludicrous, naturally suggested by its novelty…was entirely superseded.”  The novelty Stone refers to was perhaps best captured by Samuel Johnson a century earlier: “Sir, a woman’s preaching is like a dog’s walking on his hind legs. It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all.”

Thousands attended Fanny’s third lecture, at a gothic temple, decorated in what supposed to be Epicurean style.  Thousands were turned away.  Stone called Fanny “the Lioness of the day,” but he shuddered at the women who openly attended the spectacle.

At the fifth lecture a protestor set fire to a barrel of turpentine sending suffocating smoke billowing through the venue.  Stone blamed the victim.  “It is time we should have done with Miss Wright, her pestilent doctrines, and her deluded followers, who are as much to be pitied, as their priestess is to be despised.  She comes amongst us in the character of a bold blasphemer, and a voluptuous preacher of licentiousness…Casting off all restraints, she would break down all the barriers to virtue, and reduce the world to one grand theater of vice and sensuality in its most loathsome form.”

Other editors argued that she was no more than a curiosity who attracted big crowds because the tickets were free.  Many newspapers refused to take ads for her lectures, or to print letters or editorials written in her defense.  Famous poets lampooned her in verse; cartoonists had their way with her.

Undaunted, Frances relocated herself and the New Harmony Gazette to New York City.  The newspaper got a more modern name: the Free Enquirer, printed twice a week.  Frances also bought the Ebenezer Baptist Church for seven thousand dollars and rechristened it the Hall of Science. Here Frances had her office, printing facilities and a bookstore.  Lectures and debates were held every Sunday and sometimes during the week, at ten cents a ticket.

Frances asked Camilla to come join her.  Camilla was reluctant, she blamed herself for the failure of Nashoba, and for the scandal that so damaged Fanny’s reputation, but Fanny reassured her things would be different in New York City.  Fanny was planning to start a commune where men and women would live as equals.  Camilla was needed to be the housekeeper.  Camilla, still sickly, and now caring for an infant, hinted that she could use some help getting there.  But Frances told her the world was changing right before their eyes, requests for lectures were pouring in from all over America, she couldn’t abandon this historic moment that might change the fate of the nation.

April 26, 1829 Frances delivered the first lecture at the Hall of Science.  She wondered if it might “mark an era in the moral history of the republic.”  While Fanny’s self aggrandizing seems obvious, in a world where women were seldom heard or seen she had found a way to command a stage before an audience of thousands.  She became convinced that the people were with her.

Trollope wrote Lafayette with her usual dry wit that Fanny: “anticipates confidently the regeneration of the whole human race from her present exertions.”

Camilla traveled from Nashoba over frontier, and often alone with her child, until she reached Fanny’s side.  Camilla, happy to see her sister apparently in complete command of her talents, settled into the role she had always played.  Yet now she was truly a mother, proud of her child’s intelligent eyes.  When her son died of a sudden fever Camilla was devastated.  Poems of grief were popular in those days.  Like many other women of the time Camilla pined away for her lost loved one.  The serene optimism of Frances Wright didn’t have time to deal with Camilla’s grief.  In letters Camilla lamented that she just wasn’t that important to Frances anymore.

The Hall of Science became headquarters for New York’s liberals, and for curiosity seekers.  Across the street at the Bible repository the employees saw with dismay the bookstore window featuring Shelley and Thomas Paine.  Worse still, the bookstore was a modest success.  The Free Enquirer published exposes about the consequences of extreme inequality of wealth, and whistle blower looks at working class exploitation, like the seamstresses of Philadelphia forced to beg, starve, or practice prostitution.

An assembly she inspired in New York City, the National Association for the Protection of Industry, had begun to analyze the conditions of the working class and the poor.  Their first report revealed that twelve thousand children in New York City between the ages of five and fifteen had no access to education.

Trollope wrote after a lecture by Frances: “I knew her extraordinary gift of eloquence, her almost unequaled command of words, and the wonderful power of her rich and thrilling voice…all my expectations fell far short of the splendor, the brilliance, the overwhelming eloquence of this extraordinary orator… Her tall and majestic figure, the deep and almost solemn expression in her eyes, the simple contour of her finely formed head, unadorned, excepting by its own natural ringlets; her garment of plain white muslin, which hung around her in folds that recalled the drapery of a Grecian statue, all contributed to produce an effect, unlike any thing I have ever seen before, or ever expect to see again.”

THE RED HARLOT IN HER OWN WORDS

 Here are some passages from her lectures. Francis usually walked on stage with a phalanx of women who stood with her throughout her lecture.  Imagine a five foot ten inch woman with red curly hair and a Scottish brogue dominating a hall full of astonished listeners, many thrilled by her, and many deeply offended by her unladylike performance and radical ideas. Frances was so eloquent many a bigot admitted to having been inspired by her to reconsider timeworn prejudices.

Frances criticized organized religion as a waste of resources: “Turn your churches into halls of science, and devote your leisure day to the study of your own bodies, the analysis of your own minds, and the examination of the fair material world which extends around you! Examine the expenses of your present religious system. Calculate all that is spent in multiplying churches and salarying their ministers; in clothing and feeding travelling preachers, who fill your streets and highways with trembling fanatics…. I say, that Jesus would recommend you to pass the first day of the week rather otherwise than you pass it now, and to seek some other mode of bettering the morals of the community than by constraining each other to look grave on a Sunday, and to consider yourselves more virtuous in proportion to the idleness in which you pass one day in seven.”

“My friends,” she dared to tell audiences, “I am no Christian, in the sense usually attached to the word. I am neither Jew nor Gentile, Mahomedan nor Theist; I am but a member of the human family, and would accept of truth by whomsoever offered — that truth which we can all find, if we will but seek it — in things, not in words; in nature, not in human imagination; in our own hearts, not in temples made with hands.”

She also said of religion that: “much of our positive misery originates in our idle speculations in matters of faith, and in our blind, our fearful, forgetfulness of facts.”  In all societies priest craft leads to persecutions.

“Your institutions may declare equality of rights, but we shall never possess those rights until you have national schools. Your legislatures may enact prohibitory laws, and laws offensive and defensive, protective or invasive, it matters little which; our liberties will never be secure, for they will never be understood, until you have national schools. Your spiritual teachers may preach damnation and salvation henceforward through all the eternity of existence, and we shall never be wise nor happy, peaceful nor charitable, useful in our generation, nor useful through our descendants, to all generations, until ye open the flood- gates of knowledge, and let her pure waters fertilize all the land.”

She spoke eloquently as the first feminist lecturer in American history.  “However novel it may appear, I shall venture the assertion, that, until women assume the place in society which good sense and good feeling alike, assign to them, human improvement must advance but feebly. It is in vain that we would circumscribe the power of one half of our race, and that half by far the most important and influential. If they exert it not for good, they will for evil; if they advance not knowledge, they will perpetuate ignorance. Let women stand where they may in the scale of improvement, their position decides that of the race. Are they cultivated? – so is society polished and enlightened. Are they ignorant? – so is it gross and insipid. Are they wise? – so is the human condition prosperous. Are they foolish? – so is it unstable and unpromising. Are they free? – so is the human character elevated. Are they enslaved? – so is the whole race degraded.”

When they banned her in Philadelphia, refusing her a venue, she went to the court to protect her right to free speech, but the case never went to trial.

On December 5, 1829, during a lecture at the Hall of Science, Frances had this to say about the plight of working people: “The industrious classes have been called the bone and marrow of the nation; but they are in fact the nation itself. The fruits of their industry are the nation’s wealth; their moral integrity and physical health is the nation’s strength; their ease and independence is the nation’s prosperity; their intellectual intelligence is the nation’s hope. Where the producing laborer and useful artisan eat well, sleep well, live comfortably, think correctly, speak fearlessly, and act uprightly, the nation is happy, free and wise. Has such a nation ever been? No. Can such a nation ever be? Answer, men of industry of the United States! If such can be, it is here. If such is to be, it must be your work.”

A GHOST IN THE WORLD OF BALZAC

Mr. Frances Wright, Dr. D’Arusmon

The Working Men’s Party candidates in the election of 1830 became known as “the Fanny Wright ticket.” Fanny gave lectures to support the party’s principles and candidates, sharing her staff and resources with the party to launch their newspaper.

But her efforts were cut short when she realized Nashoba couldn’t go on anymore.  The president of Haiti had once promised her when they met on his visit to America that he would help her.  Now she would ask him to take the slaves of Nashoba and make certain they were provided for.  She chose a path to Haiti that allowed her to lecture in areas of America she had never visited before.  Some citizens simply waited for her on the road to ask her questions, then invited her to meet their friends. When she was refused a stage by local authorities she gathered listeners in the fields.

Frances had the paperwork drawn up to free the slaves of Nashoba.  She traveled with them to Haiti, where she met with the president who personally arranged homes and jobs for them.   Frances travelled to Haiti with Dr. D’Arusmont.  He claimed to be a doctor though he never practiced.  At first he occupied himself with theories of education, establishing a progressive school.  Then he became a teacher at New Harmony. He had never been an important part of Fanny’s life.  He was a teacher at Nashoba but not a trustee.  He had followed her to New York to run the printing presses for the Free Enquirer.  But Frances took him on the trip because he was familiar with Haiti and the Caribbean.

The president of Haiti was good to his word.  He took in the slaves of Nashoba and gave them some of his own land, along with the help they would need to learn how to survive as free citizens of their new country.  He also wined and dined Frances and D’Arusmont.  He surprised her with a small sack of gold coins to repay her expenses.  Frances must have relished the quiet walks and lavish tropical meals, a vacation from her work in the political trenches back home.  Somewhere in the mood of intoxication she found herself attracted to D’Arusmont and they became lovers.

Upon her return to New York City editor Stone was ready for her.  He wrote a scathing exposé accusing Frances of shady dealing in Haiti, claiming that she pocketed thousands of dollars from what she trumpeted as a moral obligation.

Frances responded calmly point by point but won only a partial retraction from Stone.  Realizing she was doing more harm than good by having become synonymous with the struggle for workers rights Frances left for Europe with D’Arusmont and Camilla.  To the chagrin of her friends there when she arrived she disappeared into an almost complete isolation.  No one was to know of her pregnancy.  She knew a baby out of wedlock was just the sort of scandal her enemies in America were hoping for.  She had her daughter Sylva in secret.

The timing must have frustrated Frances.  Fed up with the renewed monarchy the French Revolution reared its head.  The people of Paris elected Lafayette commander again, effectively making him the leader of France. Incapacitated, Frances was reduced to writing short notes in which she advised Lafayette as best she could in flurries of jagged sentences.

Lafayette ignored her advice.  He believed promises of a new more enlightened monarchy, the younger generation of royals.  He wrapped himself and the new King of France, another member of the Bourbon family, in the tricolor flag, and once again his sentimental gesture moved the masses.  As Frances predicted, the new king betrayed Lafayette; the new boss was the same as the old boss.  Disappointed, Frances decided she would never write Lafayette’s biography, because he had betrayed his lifetime of devotion to freedom with the last act of reaffirming the hereditary monarchy.

When Frances appeared in Paris, making a rare public appearance at Lafayette’s reception, James Fennimore Cooper wrote: “She looked haggard and much changed for the worse.”  The women all shunned her.

A few months later, in Paris, Camille, who seemed to have regained her health, swooned into Fanny’s arms and died.  Frances had depended on Camille all her life.  Fanny’s grief sealed her isolation.  She married D’Arusmont.  Lafayette served as a witness at her wedding ceremony.  Mr. and Mrs. D’Arusmont had a second child, but the infant died.  From then on Frances used her dead child’s birth date as the birth date of Sylva so no would know her daughter was born out of wedlock. Frances lived a lonely life in France.  She avoided her family and her friends.  One of her oldest friends, the story is told, also a friend of Lafayette’s, asked him for her address.  The woman visited unannounced.  She found a shabby old apartment building.  A bleak, comfortless apartment up four flights of stairs revealed the shocked expression of D’Arusmont, sitting with his son by another marriage in the front room.

Asking for Frances the unexpected guest was dismayed to find a disheveled worn woman, tending to her naked daughter.  Frances wanted to know who gave up her address.  No, she responded curtly, she wasn’t interested in writing anymore, and the very idea of her old fame was painful to her.  How Lafayette must have been saddened by this revelation of a transformation no one foresaw.

Husband and wife engaged in lengthy conversations refining each other’s theories, and yet becoming ever more obscure and out of touch.  Frances developed a detailed counter history of the world based on her theories about money and the suppression of women.  She could still work up a passion over Polish freedom fighters but the troubles of the poor all around her she ignored.

When the French feminist movement found the heroines who would inherit the mantle of 18^th century French feminist author Madeleine d’Arsant de Puisieux Frances knew nothing about it.  Though in conversation and letter writing she was still a feminist she never became involved with them, or contributed in any way to their efforts.

 Thomas Carlyle

Her sense of urgent destiny had rusted into a brittle self-importance.  She told the great essayist Thomas Carlyle that he was wrong about his theory that history was made by great men.   No one is greater than another, she argued, and yet she portrayed herself as far more important than she had actually been.

How did Frances feel when she was told that her old partner at arms Robert Dale had fallen in love and married a young citizen of New Harmony: nineteen-year-old Mary Jane.  She showed no reaction to the news.  Mary had seen Frances lecture back home in America, so when she got the chance to travel with her husband to Europe, and to stay for a while with Frances, while Robert took care of family business, she had been excited about meeting her heroine.  But the household she found was not happy, and the help she tried to provide while being a guest was unwelcome.

Mary Jane described a bleak scene.  Seldom was there a day when either Mr. or Mrs. D’Arusmont enjoyed good health.  Often, they were both sick.  He was an arrogant, irritable control freak, over protective of his daughter.  She was a negligent mother unskilled at even the simplest household task.  Lafayette’s daughter in law brought the old grand general over for a visit.  Lafayette had arranged for D’Arusmont to become superintendent of an experimental garden, but D’Arusmont could not read or write because of worsening problems with his eyes, so he lost the job. If not for their cook, said Mary Jane, the D’Arusmonts wouldn’t have seen another living human being.  Mary Jane bravely dared the English Channel off-season to escape into the arms of her loving husband.

Fanny’s years with her aunt had taken place in the world, among the people, that Jane Austen wrote about.  Now she lived her life in France among the very people Balzac captured in his coffee driven stream of books: a new generation of unsentimental people dedicated to the pursuit of money.

When old friend Trollope’s humorous sketch of a much less glamorous America became all the rage in Europe Lafayette asked Frances to come out and fight.  Trollope was being used against him politically.  Frances could at least bear witness that the suddenly moral Trollope had fled to America to escape her debts.  Frances never responded to his request.

In 1832 Jeremy Bentham died.  He gave up his body for a public dissection, inviting his friends, hoping to demonstrate that material things, including one’s body, are unworthy of special concern.  His skeleton was preserved then dressed in his clothes stuffed with straw.  He intended that his mummified head be used to complete his surrogate, but the results of the process were ghastly, so a wax head stuffed with his hair, wearing his hat, completed what Jeremy called his Auto-Icon.  The mummified head sat in the cabinet between Jeremy’s feet.  The Auto-Icon was to be rolled in for any special occasion, on demand.  As the “spiritual founder” of University College London, Jeremy’s Auto-Icon eventually became the property of the school where it became the object of numerous student pranks. In 1975 students of King’s College, London stole the head and held it for ransom.  Another time it was stolen only to turn up in a locker at the train station in Aberdeen, Scotland.  When it was found on the soccer field the head was locked away to keep it safe from further mischief. The Auto-Icon anticipates in certain ways the darkly humorous and starkly realistic assemblages of Edward Kienholz.

FROM INFAMY TO CURIOUSITY

In 1834 Frances returned to London to lecture at Freemason’s Hall.  The radical press turned out to see her, a who’s who of forward thinkers from a radius of two hundred miles.  Attendance after the first night plummeted.  Fanny had never faced empty seats before.   Then the radical papers criticized her for being too obscure and vague.  Where were practical answers to the real problems of the day?  Complaining of sickness she went home to Paris, to the comfort of isolation.

A few weeks later Lafayette died.  She didn’t attend the funeral.  She left no writing about the loss.  She had no friend to bear witness to her reaction or her thoughts at the loss of her first and greatest champion, the man who had called her daughter.

In 1835 at age forty, Frances returned to America.  She claimed to be there on business.  She and her husband had left their daughter with neighbors in Paris to travel to New Orleans and then Cincinnati to check up on the brewery business Frances had bankrolled for her stepson. In fact, Andrew Jackson had inspired her.  The president was fighting the Second United States Bank.  She and the president agreed that the bank was the tool of the rich and powerful and a sharp golden knife at the throat of the republic.  Frances also thought the bank the tool of the Bank of England.  Her conspiracy theory included the Rothschild family.  If the old powers of Britain and Europe were not able to hold on to America by military force, she argued, than they would bleed it economically and put an end to this dangerous experiment in equality.

America had changed.  The president was a violent man, with a history of duels.  The country was violent, too.  Lynching in the south, a slave was slow roasted alive over green wood in the Deep South, the army fired on protestors. A riot by supporters of slavery lasted three days in New York City.  Civil War was only 25 years away.

America had not forgotten about Frances Wright while she was in France.  When the prosecutor of a blasphemy trial against a preacher who thought women should be able to divorce and to keep their own names and property wanted to sway the jury to understand the danger inherent in such ideas he brought up Frances Wright: “What too did Fanny Wright come here for, but to plant the standard of Infidelity, to raise an insurrection against Christianity, to make an open and gross attack upon our religious faith and our domestic happiness; to open a rendezvous to gather volunteers to enter upon a crusade against religion, marriage, chastity, order and decency, and the very foundations of civil society?”

In spring of 1836 Cincinnati suffered riots.  Though asked to give speeches along the way there, even on board the steamboat that took her up river, Frances refused.  But by May she felt moved to speak, at the very courthouse where her professional lecturing commenced a mere seven years earlier.  She believed she could help calm the town, and dispel the extremism.  She didn’t realize that she was the most notorious woman in America.

President van Buren, nicknamed “The Magician” as in political trickster

Most of Fanny’s listeners didn’t notice that she had reversed many of her old positions.  Her two lectures were devoted to supporting Andrew Jackson’s choice as his successor, Martin Van Buren.  Van Buren had a spotty record on free speech, having been involved in a ban on abolitionist literature delivered by mail.  Jackson was one of America’s biggest slave owners and a friend to the South.  Anyway how could the north talk about slavery in the south, Frances argued, when northern industrialists practiced what she called wage slavery?  But Frances believed the fight against the Second Bank of the United States superseded all other priorities.

The papers and the authorities didn’t notice her new platform.  She was banned in Philadelphia again.  So she lectured at a country fair to five thousand listeners who braved the heavy rain.

When she lectured at an abandoned factory near Laurel Hill Cemetery, Fanny and her small phalanx of two women walked onto the rickety stage in the dilapidated building to loud hissing and cheering.  Gentlemen outside urged street brats to hurl stones through the glass windows of the factory.  What an eerie scene it must have been, as the stubborn lecturer and her equally stubborn audience of a thousand sat through the spraying glass and bouncing rocks.  The local newspaper chortled that the audience had to suffer the “two-fold pain” of the stoning and the lecture itself.  Another newspaper warned: “Fears are entertained that she many not escape personal injury if she persists in her degrading career.”

When Frances returned to Cincinnati she found it uneasy after another riot.  Abolitionist printing presses had been dragged down the street and thrown into the river.  One of Cincinnati’s most respectable ladies, Catharine Beecher now set her sites on Fanny, establishing a pattern conservative women have followed ever since.

The good Christian lady wrote: “who can look without disgust and abhorrence upon such an one as Fanny Wright, with her great masculine person, her loud voice, her untasteful attire, going about unprotected, and feeling no need of protection, mingling with men in stormy debate, and standing up with bare-faced impudence, to lecture to a public assembly…There she stands, with brazen front and brawny arms, attacking the safeguards of all that is venerable and sacred in religion, all that is safe and wise in law, all that is pure and lovely in domestic virtue.  Her talents only make her the more conspicuous and offensive…”

But Frances had bigger fish to fry.  The Second Bank of the United States had to be stopped.  Using “promises to pay…they will appropriate American lands, mortgages on American real estate, shares in American internal improvements…the privileged orders of Europe, having drained their own peoples life-blood, may now gorge themselves…with the heart’s blood of America.

By now Frances and her husband had drifted apart.  They had not been sleeping in the same bed.  The fiery public defender of the glorious sexual passions now believed husband and wife sharing a bed unhealthy.  Soon distance settled between them.  Though the entire family had returned to America, D’Arusmont and Sylva were always together, and never for very long in any city where Frances arrived.

D’Arusmont had been bickering with Robert Dale over old loans and mortgages Dale owed his wife.  Frances chose to write publicly about the trouble.  She dismissed her former colleague Dale, even adjusting the facts to aggrandize her own accomplishments, such as describing him as an assistant editor she had hired at the New Harmony Gazette when in fact he had hired her as co-editor.  Dale forgave her in a public letter, hoping she would come to her senses.

Just before the election Fanny returned to New York in support of Van Buren and the Bank War.  The great newspapers of the city ignored her.  The minor papers reported the event with sneering prose.  “This disgusting exhibition of female impudence has no redeeming excuses.  One could very well afford to hear his own opinions of propriety abused by a woman if…from between a pair of pretty lips.”  The other described Fanny as “a great awkward bungle of womanhood, somewhere about six feet in longitude, with a face like a Fury, and her hair cropped like a convict.”  Pity was owed her husband.

 The new King of France

1837 was a rough year for America economically.  A $480 dollar lot in New York was only worth fifty bucks.  Cotton, nineteen cents in December was suddenly nine cents.  Two out of three merchants in New York went bankrupt.  Banks in New York, Baltimore and Philadelphia suspended payments.  Twenty thousand people gathered in Philly’s Independence Square to protest the banking system.  Frances seemed to believe that if she could explain British history to the American electorate they would not make the same mistake.  The banks, she hoped Americans would realize, were nothing more than the new royalty.  The old king of France used to appear daily in his golden carriage wearing jewels and priceless fabrics; the new king strolled in a sober suit like any good banker.  The banks shared with the royals the goal of hording wealth while cheating the workers out of a decent living wage.  If Americans could realize that, Frances believed, the republic would be saved.

In Philadelphia Fanny’s lecture was jeered and heckled until she gave up.  She never spoke in Philadelphia again though she lived there when she wrote and published Manual of American Principles.

But Fanny was more useful to the opposition than to the party she hoped to promote.  Her name was used to discredit any liberal politician or platform.  The Cincinnati Chronicle for example accused her of “diffusing the worst principles of the French revolution through this land of the Puritan fathers…She has set in motion a train of causes, which will never cease to operate, until that day when God shall come to make inquisition for blood, and to destroy the wicked with the breath of his mouth.  Many a happy home has been rendered a moral desert by the trace of her footsteps, many a parent worse than childless, and many a wife more desolate than a widow.”

Some called her ugly now.  Her deeply furrowed forehead and dowdy dresses mortified her former friends.  The monotone of self-importance had crept into her eloquence.  She seemed the living embodiment of the consequences of having sacrificed the liberty she had once so fiercely idealized.

In late September 1838 Frances began a series of five lectures at Masonic Hall.  There she had first addressed the people of New York nine years earlier.  Her first lecture was uneventful except for bad press.  The second erupted when Frances and a phalanx of thirty women appeared on the platform: hissing, shouting, heckling, hooting and pounding hundreds of canes.  A local newspaper described Frances as a witch from Macbeth because she silenced the crowd with her pointed finger.

The third lecture was broken up by the uproar, more pounded canes and this time shouted obscenities.  The papers blamed her again.  “Riot and Revolution is the element she creates and breathes in.”

For the next lecture the mayor stationed police all around the hall, many in plain clothes.  When the tumult began inside police there got the situation under control. After the lecture a bodyguard of fans surrounded her as she walked up Broadway.  Small groups of young men insulted and taunted her as she passed.

The fifth lecture, on October 21^st was the worst.  Five thousand showed up to hear her.  Ten thousand gathered outside.  After the lecture the crowd outside surged towards her, threatening her, barely restrained by a double line of police.  Women leaving the lecture had their bonnets flipped off by bullies who called them whores yelling every obscenity at them.  The flotsam of the mob washed up at Fanny’s own doorstep.  She must have cowered as the boroughs all around her erupted into riots. Frances Wright, it could be argued, was the first riot grrrl.

She was now reduced to renting Clinton Hall.  Though only a few blocks from the Park Theater where twenty years earlier her play had its triumphant opening night, Clinton Hall was in a bad neighborhood.  She hoped to draw a thousand listeners to the decrepit building.  A woman named Elizabeth Oakes Smith left an eyewitness account after ignoring her family’s warnings and convincing her husband to brave the heavy fog.  “We went upstairs and turned into a very dirty, dimly lighted hall, filled with straight wooden benches, and only three persons in them.  The appointed hour had already arrived, and slowly, men, one after another, sauntered in—several women also, some with babes in their arms, and all bring an atrocious odor of tobacco, whisky, and damp clothing.  At length there might have been fifty persons, not more, present, and these began to shuffle and call for the speaker.  It was all so much more gross and noisy than anything I had ever encountered where a woman was concerned, that I grew quite distressed, and the bad atmosphere nearly made me faint.”  As for the lecturer, Elizabeth found her sound, earnest and wholesome.

Opposition and controversy she thrived on, but Frances could not face the boredom of curiosity seekers.  In March 1839 Fanny surrendered.  She announced her retreat to private life.  As her ship left New York a newspaper editorial commented: “Let her go home or go to the Devil, so that she never visits us again.”

PERILS OF ISOLATION AND THE DESCENT INTO OBSCURITY

As Celia Eckhardt wrote, Fanny’s final years “are both a study in loneliness and a lesson in the perils of isolation.”

Her return to Europe began auspiciously.  In England The National appreciated Fanny’s book Course of Popular Lectures: “The work is also invaluable as evidence of the power of a female mind.  We especially recommend it to the unprejudiced consideration of all those males, who yet, on the score of intellect, claim a superiority over their more moral sisters, enforcing such superiority by the argument of brutality—muscular power.

In 1844 Frances inherited valuable property and land from a cousin in Scotland.  She traveled there to inspect her new wealth.  But she seemed to find no relief from this inheritance.  A year later she was bedridden with nervous exhaustion in America again, as she turned fifty years old, without her husband, or her daughter.  They had traveled to Great Britain to try without her knowledge or consent to weasel some of Fanny’s inheritance out of her estranged relatives.

In 1846 Fanny’s papers mysteriously burned but she quickly reconstructed as much as she could from memory.

By 1847 Frances and her husband began a series of legal suits and financial maneuvers by which he tried to seize control of all his wife’s property, though he brought no wealth to their marriage.  D’Arusmont was clever and the laws gave wives few rights when it came to property so Frances found herself living on a stipend so meager she had to borrow money to survive.

Through most of the 1840s Frances had worked on her last book, England the Civilizer (1848) a pioneering, in some ways gender based, unconventional history of Great Britain that some leading intellectuals found admirable but which was utterly overshadowed by the publication soon after of Macauley’s beloved History of England.  In her final book Frances revealed that she no longer considered America the glowing ideal of her youth, like any society America was a “complicated system of errors…the most decidedly anarchic and supremely corrupt of any on the face of the globe.”

Frances had also changed her mind about religion.  She now believed that communities require religion, but she didn’t consider any of the organized religions widely available to be anything but societies for the enrichment of the few.

In 1850 Frances began divorce proceedings and asked the American court to restore her fortune of 150,000 dollars (in today’s money the wealth of a multimillionaire).  Her husband responded by circulating a condescending open letter her enemies shared and published.  Her husband accused her of falling into mental illness, the natural result of alienation so complete she treated her own husband and daughter as mere appendages. He described his attendance at her lectures as self-sacrifice, and claimed to have prevented their daughter from ever hearing her mother speak publicly.

Two winters at Nashoba, where a strong wind could blast open the door of her damp cabin, further damaged her health.  She began to lose her eyesight.  She was preoccupied with the idea that if she could take control of her estate she could win back her daughter.  In 1851 she won an important victory in court when the judge decided her husband had abandoned her.  But when her daughter came to Memphis, she refused to see her mother without her father in the room.  A month later the local sheriff gave Frances a writ informing her that her daughter was trying to take Nashoba from her.

Living at Nashoba, Frances made legal history when a judge granted the petition of the “infirm and aged” complainant to receive $800 from her own property while the court decided.  The judge made this poignant statement: “to review the history of two lives…that are closing in suffering and sorrow…a fearful picture…of ambition, disappointed hope, and lost happiness…what demon turned all this love to hate, and their home into hell?”

Fanny wrote to her daughter again but the five-hour meeting that followed was only an opportunity for Sylva to adamantly refuse any relationship with her mother.

So isolated had Frances become her friends were now her lawyer and the carpenter working on her house.  The carpenter was shocked by her way of life.  Her possessions amounted to a charcoal furnace, a writing desk, and a table with several chairs.  She ate crackers and boiled potato, egg, or beef.  She drank only tea or coffee.  At first the carpenter had worried that she would oversee his work, but she was more interested in talking about worker’s rights.  She always invited him to eat at her table.  He found her to be a walking encyclopedia and wonderful conversationalist.  He said she lamented that her aristocratic upbringing had never taught her the simple skills of housework, which he said, she still had not mastered, being inept at everything from sweeping to cooking.  He remembered her prediction that in fifty years America would be covered with railroads built on the backs of the poor, creating more large cities, and more millionaires, who would control power at every political level.  She was right.

In early 1852 Frances fell on the ice in her front yard in Cincinnati and broke her femur.  She spent two months in agony at the Hotel for Invalids, cared for only by a hired maid.  Her husband and daughter never visited her.  Her lawyer, who brought her the copy of Uncle Tom’s Cabin she requested, thought she was improving and wrote to her friends at Nashoba that she would return to them, though she would be lame in one leg.  She seemed to believe she would recover.  She bought Prescott’s History of Mexico and a year’s subscription to a magazine she liked.  She had a dentist visit her twenty times to make her a new set of teeth; she paid in old gold coins.

The death of the first female abolitionist and feminist in America didn’t make the news. Frances did not follow Jeremy Bentham’s example; she had no Auto-Icon. She became just another grave at Cincinnati Spring Grove Cemetery but she did leave a powerful message carved into her tombstone: “I have wedded the cause of human improvement, staked on it my fortune, my reputation and my life.”

Fanny’s estate was still tangled in the courts but upon her death became the property of her estranged daughter, Sylva, as Frances wished.  When her father died three years later Sylva battled with her half brother over the estate.

As I write this a collection of Fanny’s unpublished letters is up for sale.  Nine letters, 32 pages in all, in quarto and folio, written as her fame began to spread from 1820 to 1823.  Written to a famous Irish exile in New York, the letters praise the free press as “the safety valve of a free Constitution.” She writes about the prison systems of England and America.  She explains why she favors life imprisonment over the death penalty.  She argues for universal education.  She comments on Bolivar and the revolutions in South America.  She observes that America needs more patriotic songs. She shares Thomas Jefferson’s complementary assessment of her play, and moments from her friendship with Lafayette.

The letters reveal young Fanny’s excitement about the political upheavals in Europe.  “Another revolution!” she wrote. “Naples free and all of Italy in insurrection! How wonderful has been the march of the human mind in these last thirty years…so may it be till the last link of the chains of slavery is broken and the banner of freedom waves over the whole earth!” Frances writes of America: “Is not an hereditary nobility inconsistent with liberty? I will ask more, is it not inconsistent with public virtue? Not only does it lodge authority with the unskillful but with those whose interest it is to abuse it. It does more– it degrades the minds of men, it corrupts their hearts and debases their understanding, leading them to attach honor and to yield respect to something else than talent and virtue.”  The collection is offered at 28,000.00.  A bookseller in Memphis is offering a small poem Frances wrote for a child during her first theatrical tour of the United States.  What would she have made of the asking price of 6500 dollars? 

TENUOUS LEGACIES

What is an atheist like Frances Wright doing in a series of blogs about American Metaphysical Religion?  Frances Wright’s religion was science and her mysticism her romance with the ideal of America.  With her confident optimism that science could only bring good things to humanity, she had no presentiment of Fukushima or Monsanto.  Like the intelligencers, and their inspiration, Paracelsus, Frances believed that all human suffering would find its cure in the natural world.  She did not expect science to produce more suffering.  Ignorance dictates the fates of individuals and nations, she believed.  Like any practitioner of American Metaphysical Religion she believed that knowledge cures all ills.

Once she wrote of how she and D’Arusmont had become husband and wife because of their interest in finding the truth of human society and the cure to injustice and unnecessary suffering, which they believed could be found in the analysis of history.  As she discussed this arcane secret she and her partner labored to discover one can easily imagine them, in the tradition of the alchemist and sorer, or mystical sister, together seeking the philosopher’s stone, often in disheveled poverty, chasing the revelation that revolutionizes individual lives and society.

Her science could be mistaken for Daoist alchemy, a theory of Eliphas Levi, or Blavatsky, or one can easily imagine the following passage written by Frances as an excerpt from a yoga book by Chicago’s favorite Yogi Ramacharaka: “We detect then, throughout the whole of things – in the operations of nature, of human society, and in those of our own internal percipient and sentient soul – two master energies.  These – while preserving equal forces and acting in conjunction – keep all existences in life, all bodies in place; impart and preserve to each and all their appropriate sphere of action or of movement; and tend, throughout the world of matter, as of mind – to order, harmony, and beauty.  Acting in disjunction – i.e. singly, or in opposition – these two principles are transformed into agents of disorder and death; producing variously, violence, inertia, confusion, stagnation, convulsion, decomposition, dissolution.”

Sylva became a devout Episcopalian Christian.  In 1874 the daughter of Frances Wright appeared before Congress to argue against giving women the right to vote.  Sylva inherited her mother’s unpublished papers.  She preserved them for her children but in their hands they disappeared.

Sylva sent her sons to get degrees and ordinations at a good American Episcopalian college in Tennessee.  Both became ministers of churches in New York City.  Both carried on crusades like the grandmother they never met, and each had a toned down version of grandma’s Hall of Science.  Kenneth had a Museum of Slavery in his church; he claimed his Neo-Platonist translations could improve the world.

Like his grandmother Frances, elder brother William rubbed shoulders with the famous, from Kahlil Gibran and Martha Graham to Carl Sandburg and Frank Lloyd Wright; he also pioneered the use of Native American and other non-Christian but nevertheless complementary cultural rituals, and of dance and light shows in American churches.  But the grandkids had nothing on grandma.  She would have considered them weak tea, indeed.  Yet this extraordinary grandmother and her far from ordinary grandsons are an important and fascinating though almost forgotten episode in the neglected history of American Metaphysical Religion.

At the age of 83, in 1854, Robert Owen, whose New Harmony community inspired Fanny’s equally spectacular failure Nashoba, became a spiritualist; thanks to several sessions he had with famous American medium Maria Hayden.  Hayden was one of the first mediums to bring to England séances where spirits answered questions with knocks.  Owen claimed to have contacted the spirits of Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin.  After his death the famous English medium Emma Hardinge Britten said she received the spiritualist classic Seven Principles of Spiritualism from Owen himself.

Robert Dale, his son, the long time ally Frances later dismissed in print after bickering about property rights and loan paybacks also became a spiritualist.

Even the feminists she helped inspire had ambivalent feelings about Frances Wright.  Although Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton used her portrait as the frontispiece of History of Woman Suffrage, Frances soon became a less told story.  Nashoba was such a disappointment, and her outspoken atheism was only one of the ways she inflamed opposition rather than furthered the cause they were fighting for.

Was she ahead of her time or left behind?  Her naive enthusiasm for the cure-all of science fit better with the Enlightenment than the new world of industrialization.  Yet she anticipated many important reforms later adopted by societies worldwide.  The United States, and the globalized world community, all too often lack the fairness, liberty and justice Frances Wright so enthusiastically pursued and promoted.

Sources:

“The Utopian Visions of Frances Wright
Best, Randy
Ethicalmanifold.net, 2003

The Power and Danger of Empathy
Abzug, Robert
Reviews in American History Vol. 12 #4 1986

Course of Popular Lectures as Delivered by Frances Wright
Hall of Science, 1829

“Frances Wright”
Women & Radicalism in the Nineteenth Century
Sanders, Mike, ed.
Routledge, 2004

“Revisiting Nashoba: Slavery, Utopia, and Frances Wright in America, 1818–1826,”
Bederman, Gail
American Literary History 17 (2005)

Elliot, Helen
“Frances Wright’s Experiment with Negro Emancipation”
Indiana Magazine of History

Views of Society and Manners in America
Baker, Paul, ed.
Harvard University Press, 1963

“Frances Wright:  The Other Woman of Early American Feminism.”
Travis, Molly Abel.
Women’s Studies 22, 1993

Volume 2: Frances Wright
Women and Radicalism in the Nineteenth Century
Sanders, Mike, ed.
Routledge, 2001

Francis Wright and the Great Experiment
Lane, Margaret
Manchester University Press, 1972

“An important collection of nine autograph letters signed to Dr. William James MacNeven.”
Wright, Frances
Luxury Catalogs
(Stevenson, MD, U.S.A.)

Fanny Wright: Rebel in America
Celia Eckhardt
Harvard University Press, 1983

Newtopia staff writer RONNIE PONTIAC is a founding member and primary guitarist of Lucid Nation, executive producer of the documentaries Rap is War, Exile Nation, and the award winning animated short Cohen on the Bridge.  He associate produced The Gits documentary, and was art editor, then poet in residence for Newtopia Magazine in its former incarnation . He’s a published author of works on obscure topics such as ancient Greek religion and the history of alchemy. Follow him on Twitter @AmerMysteries.

From Akhenaton, that granddaddy of all activist poets, through the ancient Greek legend of the murdered reformer and musician Orpheus, to the secret musical codes of Sufis and troubadours, throughout history poets have helped rally humanity to the cause of personal and social evolution. No wonder Shelley declared poets “the unacknowledged legislators of the world.” But history had never seen such an explosion of poetic/musical activism as swept the world when rock arrived.

Activism in American music certainly existed before Elvis. One need only point to Woody Guthrie, for example, with his guitar displaying the phrase: “this machine kills fascists.” But Elvis was a turning point. Elvis transmitted to whites and other uptight types worldwide that it was okay to like black music; it was okay to enjoy sex and flaunt style. No matter how many gospel songs he sincerely sang, the hammer blow of his arrival cracked open the Puritan-Catholic-Protestant-Fundamentalist dam holding back the flood of American paganism. Elvis was the first bee in our hive to do the bee dance telling us it’s okay to be bees and do what bees do. But he was square compared to what was just around the corner.

The baby boomers produced a cultural renaissance in the romantic tradition the popularity of which was unparalleled in history. The Beatles bee danced an evolution from mop-top hand holders to trans-generational poets. The intentionally racially mixed Sly and the Family Stone tackled racism in hit after hit. Punk prototypes the MC5 with their White Panther affiliation burned flags on stage. Jimi Hendrix’s guitar imitated machine guns and bombs falling in Viet Nam. Steppenwolf performed now forgotten but once potent political epics like “From Here to There Eventually,” “Monster” and “Draft Resister.”

A wave of poets, including John Lennon, Bob Dylan and Jim Morrison, challenged society concerning a host of crucial issues: the war, the draft, civil rights, sexual morality, recreational drug use. They assaulted the work ethic, cleanliness, church-going, the profit motive, corporate conformity, gender stereotypes, political parties, fashion sensibilities, and the cold war–even the sanctity of marriage and the enforcement of heterosexuality.

Although such breakthroughs are made up of individual commitments to activism, so profound was the upheaval we tend to think of it as a great wave of human genetic development, a confluence of such mighty vehicles of change as the portable record player, the birth control pill, LSD, and television. But most of these individuals thought of themselves as activists.

The following decadence was swift and certain, but nonetheless amusing and filled with interesting art. Once upon a time at the Whisky a Go Go three people used to sit together at a table and drink; they exemplified the change about to happen. They were the famous Jim Morrison and the as yet unknown Alice Cooper and Iggy Pop. Morrison may not have been all that different from what Alice and Iggy became: all three provided a mélange of sexual threat, androgyny and theater of cruelty, with glimpses of questionably sincere tenderness, out of control intoxication, and surprising savvy, but comparatively speaking Morrison’s interviews and lyrics were an education in cultural history and evolutionary perceptions.

Like the other progressives of his generation, Morrison’s artistic goals were those of the romantic poets Shelley and Byron, to bring enlightenment and reform to the world. Alice’s goals, hanging by the neck at the Hollywood Bowl, were more about beer and money. Underneath all his sarcastic gender bending nihilism beloved by the little brothers and sisters of hippies who could use it to torture their siblings, Alice was always a nice Christian boy, and today’s golfing Alice with his occasional Vegas revue tour is proud to have more to do with traditional show biz than social activism.

Iggy at the high school hang out burger joint scribbling bits of kids’ conversations, cribbing song ideas from his thirteen year old girlfriend, was a creepy older guy at twenty, after all, and however liberating the birth of punk rock in his effort to capture true teen male angst, he clearly rejected any attempts at social reform, and in many songs enjoyed sounding the death knell of its optimism. His later attempts at writing more positive songs have always sounded hollow in comparison.

Bowie belongs in this group of seminal Seventies artists whose penchant for outrage and flamboyance replaced activism as the cachet of cool, establishing a precedence for today’s lamentable indie underground where fashion cliques often outweigh art in the social hierarchy. With his Berlin cabaret sensibilities and carefully chosen thefts, Bowie nevertheless held on to his hippie ideals longer than most, as the original covers of his earliest albums prove. Lou Reed, who never had any hippie ideals, fits nicely in this group, too. However, you could point to all these artists and say that at least they, and even somewhat old fashioned Elton John, were furthering gay liberation, and that is activism.

Meanwhile, the much more popular seventies bands like Yes with their lyrical obscurities, Led Zeppelin with its blues bombast, Kiss with their rock anthems, Rush with their rock Sci-Fi novellas, The Eagles with their codification of commercial country rock, Bad Company with their bland classics, Jethro Tull with their neo-medieval literary affectations, along with introspective singer songwriters like Jackson Brown, Jim Croce, John Denver, and Paul Simon, plus a host of mostly inane one hit wonders, were all producing wonderful music with very little activism.

The glimmer of immortality seemed to hover around these stars for their young fans, for there weren’t any old rock stars yet. Elvis was still looking good, at least in the publicity photos. A few stars participated in activist ventures to save Walden Pond or other dear causes, usually with fundraiser concerts, but they all rejected what they now considered the arrogance and naiveté of the Sixties. Why? Perhaps it was because in the Seventies the activism sparked by the protest movement against the Vietnam War ended with the war. Jobs and families ambushed the college radicals as they almost always do. Whatever the reason, by the time Reagan took office the “liberal” media was having a field day ridiculing any and all things hippie, a prejudice now shared by most punk and rap loving people.

The split that occurred next was even more extreme, giving birth to a vital stream of activist art. Where did punk rock really begin? Artists like the MC5, The Stooges, Lou Reed’s Velvet Underground, can all claim credit, but what about The Sonics, or Question Mark and the Mysterians, the Rolling Stones, or Gene Vincent? Wasn’t Elvis’s sneer the same sneer that reappears as the definition of punk from Billy Idol to Rancid to Pink? And how about the New York Dolls? Or Patti Smith, even if Johnny Rotten dismissed her as no more than a tambourine-wielding hippie.

Of course, modern punks are most comfortable pointing to The Ramones as the beginning of it all. But it was The Clash who put a political slant on punk and sparked a small but potent rebirth of activism. From the Clash come almost immediately the Dead Kennedys, and later Minor Threat, and Fugazi. And even if the Sex Pistols perpetrated a cynical scam, when American music fans were first confronted with “God Save the Queen” and “Anarchy in the UK” the nihilism seemed not only starkly sincere but activist.

By then conditions in the music business had changed radically. When the boomers’ explosion of romantic art flared up from London to San Francisco it caught the old music business unprepared. Most of the old school executives, hating the hippies and their music, saw no opportunity there. That sadly predictable state of affairs became a gold rush for hustlers, young lawyers, agents and accountants. The Beatles didn’t break up because of Yoko, they broke up because they didn’t own their own songs anymore. Jimi Hendrix, The Rolling Stones, no artist avoided the rip off. Even relatively fair deals turned out to be especially lucrative for the business savvy involved, and a new music industry was built from the resulting cash hordes.

For obvious reasons the new music business had little use for activism, instead they saw The Beatles in The Knack and punk rock was successfully repackaged as supposedly edgy New Wave acts ideal for ushering in the Reagan years. As cocaine covered mirrors everywhere, the clipped space age coifs and dashing costumes of the New Wavers evolved into the drag queen visual splendors of Motley Crue and their later cousins Poison, Warrant and the other hair metal titans who filled stadiums without ever bothering their pretty heads with a political thought. A sight that must have been ironic indeed to the surviving members of the New York Dolls who were less well appreciated when they pioneered the look and the sound with so much more style (it was even possible to imagine a thread of activism when they asked the musical question “with a Vietnamese baby on your mind. now that it’s over, what ya gonna do?”)

Of course, the Reagan years also spawned huge splashy multi-star events like Live Aid that raised millions for causes like world hunger. What could have been a yearly television fundraiser ala Jerry’s Kids is now all but forgotten alongside such charming anachronisms as Hands Across America and the Harmonic Convergence.

The same year as Live Aid, the legendary indie band Mecca Normal first hit the scene, and though they may not be as famous, as an influence on bands, and on how independent bands with activist and artistic intentions share their music, Mecca Normal is far more important than Live Aid. From the bands that were inspired to form at their shows to the bands that perhaps only unconsciously resemble what they initiated, Mecca Normal lent their inspiration to everyone from Bikini Kill through Sleater Kinney to the White Stripes.

Meanwhile, in the hands of fun bands like Van Halen, then brooding bands like Metallica, mainstream rock had become something of a reactionary force. What had been a refuge for freaks, outcasts and adventurers had become a jock party well stocked with models and/or strippers, so no status quos were challenged. Of course, simply advocating sexual exploration and intoxication retains perhaps the most powerful part of the rock activist agenda in its challenge to America’s stifling inheritance of religious guilt and conformity.

Rap broke through with Public Enemy in 1987, a quantum leap of musical activism in the mainstream that would all too quickly be replaced by gangsta rap and pop hip hop. But even in the 80′s there was hope for kids seeking activism in their music beyond U2′s white flag. Punk gave birth to niches of underground experimentation that satisfied diverse communities. Crust had Crass. Straight Edge had Minor Threat. Drunks had Black Flag. Indie had Mecca Normal. Even Aryan supremacists had and have their very own punk bands. In the best of these scenes a kid could sink his or her teeth into some political information, encounter forgotten heroes like Emma Goldman, and realize a commitment to activism against some injustice, perhaps the destruction of Hopi land by illegal mining operations at Big Mountain.

In the nineties worthy activist efforts like Food Not Bombs became popular in the underground. Food Not Bombs showed punks and others how to get food that would otherwise be thrown away by markets and restaurants, how to prepare it vegan, and then offer it to the homeless in city parks. Today Food Not Bombs is international. Co-founder Keith McHenry is conducting a Food Not Bombs tour in 2004 to contribute to the effort to register voters and raise consciousness. Keith has spent over 500 nights in jail for his peaceful protesting. He was framed under the California Three Strikes law. One of the first white people to face a 25 to life sentence, Amnesty International wrote letters and campaigned for Keith’s unconditional release. His case was taken up by the United Nations Human Rights Commission in Geneva, Switzerland. But however wonderful Food Not Bombs might be, and however dear a cause to certain types of punks and jam bands, it’s a stretch to call it musical activism.

So virtuous were the powers distilled in the political punk undergrounds that they exploded into the public arena with bands like Rage Against the Machine and Nirvana. However ironic that Rage Against the Machine would rail against oil companies in stadiums while their touring machine burned enormous quantities of gasoline, they nevertheless brought political awareness to the attention of huge crowds.

The band Nirvana and its corresponding scene in the Pacific Northwest typified the slacker rejection of the status quo. Grunge was hippie informed by punk, and it greatly assisted the rise of Rock for Choice and Rock the Vote. Although the majority of bands associated with grunge in the public imagination were as empty of political content as their hair band predecessors, it didn’t take much scratching at the surface for a Kurt Cobain fan to uncover the indie treasures of Kill Rock Stars and K Records, and especially, the rock revolution that was riot grrrl.

I probably played more riot grrrl conventions than any male on the planet except possibly Billy Karren. I’m deeply grateful that I was allowed to participate in these ceremonies of empowerment. I didn’t get there till 1994, when it was all but over. Even then it seemed like every high school and college was sprouting outspoken girl bands that didn’t let their inexperience stop them from expressing themselves. Wonderful bands appeared like L.A.’s (never recorded) high school band Foxfire, who sounded more like Black Sabbath than Bratmobile; they sometimes used a broiling pan instead of a snare drum. Most of these girls were zine writers, so their bands had brilliant lyrics, representing as they did the real thoughts of a class of Americans who have seldom enjoyed true freedom of expression. Thousands of notebooks had the band name Bikini Kill scrawled across them, and if you saw that written on a girl or boy’s notebook you knew they might actually be semi-intelligent and possibly civilized.

Girls suddenly awakened to their collective power. By the circulation of hand made zines, they began forming their own shows, and their own show circuits. I was lucky enough to get to watch one of these girls at work, Erin McCarley of the band Delta Dart. The founder of the first Orange County riot grrrl chapter, Erin teamed up with local anarchist show promoter Jae Lee for a series of events at Koo’s Café in Santa Ana that brought together communities in a new way. During those Sunday matinees riot grrrl bands would play alongside Black Panther rappers, Mexican deathcore bands, Asian poets, and Food Not Bombs crust bands. The area around Koo’s would become a small bazaar offering slogan patches, t shirts, information about important causes and concerns, and rare punk and hip-hop records you couldn’t buy in a store.

In zines, poetry readings, songs, raps, and in discussion groups people talked about saving Ward Valley before the hazardous dump planned there polluted the Colorado River, about American political duplicity, and about institutionalized racism, sexism, and homophobia. MTV and media in general, along with the cult of celebrity, were meticulously criticized. The ethics of animal testing or meat eating were debated. Mix tapes of new bands from other cities were eagerly circulated

Between bands, kids sat cross legged everywhere, poring over the latest zines, which would usually contain favorite quotes, blurry photos of Bikini Kill, Heavens to Betsy and other riot grrrl associated bands, and personal testimony, as well as links to suggested reading and listening. If you were lucky, there would be a tip on using a certain kind of straw to get free copies at Kinko’s. Popular zine writers had thousands of copies circulating, and many a father’s and mother’s office copy machine and paper supply were commandeered for the cause.

I witnessed riot grrrl transform awkward and inhibited young women silenced by abuse into confident artists, musicians, writers, and public speakers. I saw circles of hundreds weeping in workshops, making lifelong friends, traveling to stay with AOL IM pals in other cities, joining together in bands crammed into vans to tour America playing tiny all age clubs with names like Cell 63 and The Small Intestine, stopping off at Ward Valley along the way to drop off cans from Food Not Bombs for the squatters, returning home with boxes of zines and home made t shirts.

The truly inclusive, such as Los Angeles riot grrrl splinter group Revolution Rising, with their open wall art shows, and zine and music fundraisers with bands like Los Crudos and Spitboy, were striving to reach housewives, secretaries, strippers, and gang truce centers. Even cheerleaders and males were welcome and found themselves encouraged to be creative and ethical, conscious and conscientious. Here it seemed to us, might be the sort of spontaneous birth of community awareness unseen since the glory days of the baby boomers.

It’s always a treat to talk with Jody Bleyle of Team Dresch whose musical encouragement to gay people trapped in hostile environments has certainly saved lives, and achieved what the gender bending marketing of glitter rock only hinted at. My kitchen table overlooks the L.A. basin so conversations here seem to take on a special poignancy. I’ve been lucky to have conversations with Jean Smith of Mecca Normal here, and with Madigan of Bonfire Madigan, one of the earliest of riot grrrls with her duo TattleTale whose recordings still inspire activist musicians today. We all agree, we never would have believed that less than ten years later we’d find ourselves with another President Bush, and another war in Iraq, or that America’s male idols would be macho gangsta imitators and our female role models would be dancing Barbies and Bratz.

So what happened to riot grrrl? One female poet who was important in the scene suggested that when it began to function as a kind of dating pool for dykes, as she called it, any chance it had to reach a wider audience was lost; she was a dyke herself. A singer for a band that played many riot grrrl events once told me she thought riot grrrl disappeared because it was a movement composed mostly of abuse survivors, and ultimately they couldn’t resist abusing each other, a common symptom of post traumatic stress. I read in a zine once a theory that when Bikini Kill called a media black out, and riot grrrl stopped cooperating with the media, the media simply reported it as a thing of the past, and still does, a stigma that makes it hard to start new chapters. I would add that once grrrls began graduating from college and entering jobs and serious relationships their capacity to participate in riot grrrl chapters disappeared. That’s what happened to Revolution Rising.

Advertising and fashion pilfered riot grrrl imagery reducing once powerful symbols to accessories. When Spin magazine ran a glam photo of Marilyn Monroe version 9.0 Gwen Stefani with the headline “Riot Grrlie” it was easy to understand why many riot grrrls suspected a conspiracy against them. Now “riot girl” graces the merchandise of the teen idol band Good Charlotte whose song “Riot Girl” features lyrics like: “My girl’s a hot girl.I know my baby would do anything for me, yeah!” Said riot girl’s taste in music is described by the song but you won’t find Huggy Bear or Bikini Kill mentioned, just the all male bands Minor Threat and Social Distortion.

Consider Christmastime in the early days of rock and roll. If you were one of many whose families didn’t match the American ideal mercilessly trumpeted from every billboard, TV, and pulpit, perhaps your best hope for supportive camaraderie would be a rock show where local freaks and outcasts discovered they were not as alone or hapless as they feared. Back then rock was just about the only show in town for an outsider.

Today’s outsiders are more like insiders. We can choose from a generous array of activities that create feelings of community outside the Christmas/family conformity ideal so beloved by marketers. On cable we can watch South Park where Hitler weeps in hell for lack of his tannenbaum. We can sign on to hang out with others of our kind or argue with “the enemy” in chat rooms on the Internet; or we can go see the Return of the King at the movies. After all, in the sixties and seventies Tolkein belonged to the hippies. “Frodo lives” was as popular a graffiti then as “Chaka” was in the Nineties. Nice people didn’t read The Lord of the Rings, with its comments about the fine weed of the Shire, its ecological sensitivity, and a whole world of pagan details.

Indeed, yesterday’s novelists were as famous and influential as rock stars like the Beatles. Victor Hugo taking on the government, using his art and fame to defend Dreyfus, was the John Lennon of his day. Now it seems tomorrow’s rock stars will be as obscure as today’s novelists. Successes will be counted in tens of thousands of CDs sold instead of millions. In part, rock has dated itself by succeeding, by inspiring new media to serve the same interests. Rock, blaring from car commercials and sports shows, has taken on such reactionary connotations for many kids it has been replaced completely by rap. Might some artist come along and rock with such abandon, with lyrics so insightful, that rock activism will be reborn? Perhaps, but will anyone notice? The satanic spectacle of Marilyn Manson, the misogyny of rap and new metal, the morbidity of screamo and grindcore, are perhaps mistaken for activism. Fans find a wealth of emotional identification and anti-conformist imagery, but as for practical challenge to the status quo, little is to be found.

Post 9-11 fans of rock activism might have expected at least some sort of punk rock reaction, perhaps based on the perpetually popular assumption that the CIA is responsible, but no existing bands have picked up that gauntlet or anything similar, nor have any new bands shown up to restore the activist spirit to rock. The Strokes are touted in Rolling Stone (once the blog of the boomer activist renaissance) as the rebirth of rock but they are as devoid of political content as Journey. We all have post traumatic stress now. It’s hard to blame rock for avoiding activism

Of course, the activist underground continues. Kathleen Hannah, former riot grrrl firebrand of Bikini Kill, practices a more danceable activism with her band Le Tigre. The Butchies are holding the torch for gay liberation. Mecca Normal and Bonfire Madigan tour and record, as does former White Panther manager of the MC5 John Sinclair, long ago the topic of a John Lennon protest song, now a venerable jazz historian poet. The Anarchy Crust scene continues. The adventurous music fan browsing a merchant table can still encounter the likes of Emma Goldman. There’s even an occasional brave neo-riot grrrl, smart enough to understand the power that was shockingly, suddenly swallowed up by the void.

And there are new movements, perhaps most notably The Travelers. They hop trains and panhandle, existing in communities outside state sanctioned society as much as possible. Their bands don’t use electricity, they use acoustic instruments only. As well as playing originals, they cover songs by bands like Bikini Kill, Fugazi, and TattleTale. They have applied the principles of activism to every facet of their lives they can. By dropping out this way have they dodged their responsibility for co-creating our society, or with their spirit reminiscent of Thoreau are they incubating the next great trend of romantic liberalism?

Or are the flash mobs of the internet and of cell phones the future of activism, a future rock will have little to do with? Spontaneous public demonstrations and organizations that make powerful points, small communities huge when joined, ala Bolivia, these are potential gifts of the Internet. Rock itself is deeply compromised. Music downloading is crippling the parasitic music industry. Channels of alternative distribution are clogged with the efforts of amateur bands, most with little to say. TV commercials for the U.S. Army use rock. The Woodstock Generation are grandparents now, worried about Medicare laws. Punk is your father’s Oldsmobile. Of course rock will live on, with ups and downs of popularity, along the lines of, say, country music, both as a corporate sponsored Vegas-like entertainment experience, and as an underground current of mutations exploring every possible nuance including activism. The Internet should make it possible for those two categories to cross breed occasionally with potentially interesting results.

Perhaps the most fascinating development is the way the very means of distributing music now embodies its revolutionary force more than the music itself, slowly but surely shrinking the music industry. Digital music files, thanks to the RIAA, are the new porn: we tell the pollsters we don’t do that anymore or never did, then in the privacy of our rooms or cubicles we feverishly search for crushes to download, enjoying with a guiIty rush the fear that we might get caught doing something wrong. Music hasn’t felt so contraband since NWA’s arrival. Perhaps this technological advancement can’t be described as activism, but it is changing us and our culture almost as dramatically as rock did that eventful year exactly half a century ago when Sputnik, the Fender Stratocaster, Godzilla, Hank Aaron, Playboy, Sports Illustrated, The Lord of the Rings, Chuck Berry, and Elvis Presley stepped onto the world stage for the first time.

Article written by Ronnie Pontiac

Newtopia staff writer RONNIE PONTIAC is a founding member and primary guitarist of Lucid Nation, executive producer of the documentaries Rap is War, Exile Nation, and the award winning animated short Cohen on the Bridge.  He associate produced The Gits documentary, and was art editor, then poet in residence for Newtopia Magazine in its former incarnation . He’s a published author of works on obscure topics such as ancient Greek religion and the history of alchemy. Follow him on Twitter @AmerMysteries.

Blancanieves, 2013

Written and Directed, Pablo Berger

Director of Photography, Kiko de la Rica

Starring Maribel Verdu (Encarna), Daniel Gimenez Cacho (Antonio Villalta), Angela Molia (Dona Concha), Sofia Oria (Carmencita), Macarena Garcia (Carmen)

Once upon a time, in a land faraway called Spain, a girl named Carmenita after her mother, nicknamed Blancanieves by dwarves and branded Snow White by Grimm and Disney was born Pure and destined to be Someone Special in a world of Good and Evil…what girl isn’t?

Because of its powerful appeal, Pablo Berger’s Blancanieves — a confabulated fairy tale of a girl coming of age that primarily references Snow White but also Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty —  should come with a warning label. Like drugs and tobacco, Berger’s gorgeous black and white cinematography induces a euphoric state of mind that can obscure what the film has to say about the harmful effects that accompany women’s success in our modern world.  Blancanieves contains the deadly message that the break women are making with the tradition of passivity in society bodes a bad end of entrapment and exploitation.  Unless this film is taken as a warning itself that malevolent forces lay in wait for successful women, it should come with a warning to be viewed at one’s own risk.

A fairy tale is not a myth.  A fairy tale is not about the deep inner conflicts of the psyche but about the conflicts between a child born and the world into which it’s born.  Snow White is born into a world with a poisonous power attitude (embodied by her wicked stepmother) to be surmounted as she moves from child to young woman.  A fairy tale is concerned with the familiar and universal theme of a search for the happy ending that overcomes the power of evil in human affairs.

Some think of fairy tales as moralistic, but noted Jungian analyst, Marie-Louise Von Franz, asserts there is an ethos in fairy tales that lies beneath the common standards of right and wrong, an ethos that discloses purpose more than moral rightness.  Blancanieves achieves purpose in its cinematography, letting a fascinating interplay of black and white images communicate the powerful transcendence of beauty; yet it fails to lift its heroine from the clutches of public exploitation.

Blancanieves goes like this:

To tell the tale of a girl child born to a beautiful mother who dies in her own blood during her birth and a famous matador father of great prowess, paralyzed after being bloodily gored by a bull, who abandons her when he falls into the clutches of a wicked and hungry second wife…

So that the girl is raised by a beloved grandmother, who dies flamenco dancing just as the girl’s coming of age and is ritually confirmed into the church…

So that the girl ends up in the basement of her rich father’s house performing hard labor tasks under the thumb of a sadistic stepmother with only a rooster to keep her company…

So that the girl – in clandestine meetings away from her evil stepmother’s eye – bonds with her invalid father sufficiently to dream of being a matador herself one day…

So that the girl can be taken in by performing dwarf toreadors after she survives a murderous attempt by her stepmother who’s already killed her father and eaten her beloved rooster…

So that she develops her natural born abilities as a matador…

So that an unscrupulous entertainment agent can catapult her to fame and return her to the very bullring where her father met his sad fate…

So she can inflame the jealousy of her sadistic stepmother by upstaging her on the cover of a national magazine as a female matador sensation…

So that the sadistic stepmother can give her the iconic poisoned apple that symbolically put the fate of Snow White in the heads of girls forever when they wondered why they are hated instead of loved and long for a Prince to come who will jostle their glass coffin and wake them from the boredom of repression.

Blancanieves, contracted for a lifetime performance, ends up in a deathlike sleep that’s gotten confused with another fairy tale, one in which a Prince kisses her and wakes her up to ‘happily ever after’…

From magazine cover girl to freak show centerpiece, Blancanieves doesn’t cough up the poisoned apple that is her true fairy tale destiny but instead remains asleep while men buy tickets to kiss her…

So she lies in a coma, forever tended by a dwarf who loves her…

The sadistic stepmother does meet a well-deserved comeuppance – any child would demand that of a fairy tale.

And Blancanieves does, as she sleeps, shed a tear.

The End of the Fairy Tale.

~~~

The Beginning of Understanding.

With the clear and incisive form of earlier silent films, Pablo Berger’s Blancanieves transforms one of the oldest, well-known fairy tales of a girl coming of age into an epic conflict between eternal and oppositional divine and demonic forces. From the moment of birth, a threat of death drives the action.  No three drops of blood here.  A girl child is born amidst the blood of her father’s near-fatal goring by a bull and her mother’s bloody death in childbirth.  Innocent child, beautiful mother, powerful father, lethal stepmother, loving grandmother, obedient servants, magical helpers, a small prince charming and a rooster to help the child get from place to place all make for a dramatic tale.  And the child bears no anger, accepting threat as part of the way life is.  But should we, as watchers?

Berger’s drama begins in emptiness. The opening shots scan the empty streets of a city eerily assigned an absence of sound.  It reads like a blank slate, waiting for action. A placard with a question steals a trick from past silent movies to hear the unspoken sound of our own voice — “Where is everyone?”  The answer comes via a shot of people’s feet walking on a promenade toward Spain’s famous bullfighting ring in Seville.  Everyone’s attending the fantastic spectacle in which a great man faces a menacing beast with the bodily moves of a dancer and a cape.

The circular arena is packed.  Attention is riveted on Antonio Villalta (Daniel Gimenex Cacho), a famous matador who has been dressed with tender care and  bows in respect to the crowd.  Just before entering the bullring, he kneels before an aloof plaster statue of Madonna, kissing the photo of his beloved wife in a locket and putting their fate in the upturned fingers of her hand.  The photo dissolves into his beautiful, pregnant wife, Carmen (Macarena Garcia), already in the stands.  Villalta is announced by another placard, “Six bulls, one single toreador”.   There follows one triumph after another until the sixth bull.  Villalta lifts and points his sword, facing the bull on the verge of his final kill.  He creates an irresistible photo-op for a news photographer who’s been banned from taking photos.  The photographer sneaks up to the rim of the ring and takes a shot with a blinding florescent flash.  Villalta takes his eye off the bull for a deadly second and the bull, aptly named Lucifer, charges.

And evil never stops charging in this epic conflict between predator and prey.  The weakened, paraplegic Villalta marries his gorgeous but malevolent nurse, Encarna (Maribel Verdu), who eventually kills him.  He abandons his infant, mother-look-alike daughter, Carmenita (Sofia Oria) to her devoted but elderly grandmother, Angela Molia (Dona Concha), who dies.  That’s how Carmenita comes into the hands of her stepmother.  And then, in a cinematic slide of time, Carmenita disappears as girl child and re-emerges as her young woman self, Carmen (Marcarena Garcia), while hanging sheets outdoors (just one of the many tasks of servitude enforced by her domineering stepmother) she steps from punishment into grave danger.

After pushing her invalid husband to his death down a flight of stairs, Encarna sends her footman on a mission to kill Carmen.  Carmen is rescued from near death of drowning by a ragtag band of dwarf toreadors and begins to develop her talent fighting bulls.

In all versions, Snow White incurs her evil stepmother’s murderous wrath when she comes of age, i.e., coming into the empowered sexuality of a young woman that sets her spirit free from parental dominance.  What’s different in Blancanieves is that the girl doesn’t rest on her natural beauty but acquires the skill and charisma of a toreador, drawing upon her father’s legacy.

However, this modern turn of events in Blancanieves exposes Carmen to danger. When Encarna asks the famous question “who’s the fairest of them all?” she searches for her reflection in a modern mirror. The “mirror, mirror” that doesn’t lie no longer hangs on a wall.  It’s not hand held: it’s the press.  In the national glamour magazine, Lecturas (think Vanity Fair), Encarna – in all her finery – is buried in the back pages while Blancanieves graces the cover.  Thinking Carmen dead, Encarna’s incensed to discover Carmen has not only survived but become a national wonder, a female matador.

Beauty represents perfection, the never to be attained but forever to be sought after prize that evil covets.  Carmen, having become a public sensation, returns to the grand bullring in Seville.  Under cover of a veil of black lace, Encarna arrives, hiding in full view and waiting for the right moment to strike.  As Carmen basks in the pleasure of applause after an astounding performance with a treacherous bull, Encarna pulls the poison apple from her purse.

Carmen takes two bites from the fated poisoned apple and falls asleep.

The wicked stepmother goes to a fate worse than death but we don’t see the gory details as we have with everyone else and what we really want to know is how does the girl destined to be Someone Special fare?

To get to the big leagues, Carmen was required to sign a contract with a sleazy agent and now, in her vulnerable state of coma, he exacts his pound of flesh.  As the film ends, Carmen has been stripped of her identity as Snow White. The agent hawks her as Sleeping Beauty in a freak show; Carmen is embalmed for life as a passive woman unable to fend off lecherous kisses sold to the perversely curious.

Our question begs Berger for a placard but what we get instead is a tear.   A single tear sliding down Carmen’s cheek as she lies in her glass coffin behind the curtained freak show is our only clue.

We are left, in the end, as all fairy tales leave their listeners, to decide for ourselves what to make of the course of events.

Is the tear a response to the devotion of the dwarf who reveres her, loves her spirit and tenderly cares for her passive body?

Is the tear symbolic of sadness for the plight of beauty and innocence in the world, an inevitable end for all of us?

Is it the water of life coming deep from within her soul foretelling her return to a fulfilling future?  I like to think it is the last but this is a dark tale with an icky ending desperately in need of the last fifty years of women on the move to a freedom from dependence on – to borrow a phrase from the great Tennessee Williams that’s relevant to a girl with dwarfs as her only friends — the kindness of strangers.

Only if I take Blancanieves as a cracked mirror, a reluctant commentary on a demonic force in society that refuses to free women from a poisonous backlash when they succeed, can I identify a redeeming feature.  Otherwise, the beauty of its cinematography feels like a trick, pleasuring while it steals the soul of the purpose fairy tales propose.

Article written by Dr. Jane Alexander Stewart

Newtopia staff writer Jane Alexander Stewart, Ph.D. is a clinical psychologist in Los Angeles who writes essays about mythic themes in film, creates “Myth in Film; Myth in Your Life” seminars for self-exploration and travels a lot. Her film reviews have been published in the San Francisco C.G. Jung Library Journal, Spring: A Journal of Archetype and Culture and Los Angeles Journal of Psychological Perspectives.  Jane’s popular essay on “The Feminine Hero in The Silence of the Lambs” appears in the anthology, The Soul of Popular Culture, and in The Presence of the Feminine in Film as one of its authors. She’s also presented myth in film programs at Los Angeles County Museum, University of Alabama and C.G. Jung Institute in Zurich. A collection of her reviews and other writing can be found at www.CinemaShrink.com.