The Perfectionists and the Weather: The Oneida Community's Quest for Meteorological Utopia, 1848–1879

Abstract

has always been-and, modern environmentalism notwithstanding, there no doubt remains-much about environment that people would willingly alter if they could. Visions of perfect earthly future have routinely incorporated reconstructed earth. Not least have they described transformation of features so often and so stubbornly unsatisfactory in many ways as weather and climate. Writers in classical antiquity who tried to imagine terrestrial paradise purged its weather of everything dangerous or merely disagreeable, from extreme temperatures and tempestuous winds to overcast skies. Early Christian representations of Garden of Eden gave it same mild and moderate climate as medieval Europeans ascribed to Land of Cockaigne: There is no heat or cold, water or fire, wind or rain, snow or lightning, thunder or hail. Neither are there storms. Rather, there is eternally fine, clear weather ... It is always wonderfully agreeable May. Two geographers who made study of utopian novel found that genre characteristically presents weather as either an equable given or something totally under man's control., But there is second and quite different way in which meteorological utopia can be sought. It does not depend on perfecting of elements by divine or natural favor or by human effort. It tries to make weather unobjectionable without altering it physically. What will be abolished in this kind of paradise is not weather that people think bad, but their reasons for thinking it bad. The causes of complaint lie not in weather itself, it is assumed, but in human beings, their attitudes, and their social and technological arrangements. If those attributes and arrangements are reformed, dissatisfaction with weather would disappear.. An unnamed character in Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Blithedale Romance (1852) expresses this point of view. He and several companions are riding through surprise April snowstorm to join newly founded utopian community outside of Boston. He reproaches narrator, Miles Coverdale, for grumbling about weather. They can never consider themselves regenerated men, he admonishes Coverdale, until they feel as thankful for a February northeaster as they do for the softest breeze of June.2