The Lost Utopia

Zach Gibson revisits cult novelist Marguerite Young’s 1945 study “Angel in the Forest: A Fairy Tale of Two Utopias.”

By Zach GibsonJanuary 12, 2025

• History

Nobody has ever lived without daydreams, but it is a question of knowing them deeper and deeper and in this way keeping them trained unerringly, usefully, on what is right.
—Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope (1954–59)

UTOPIAN LITERATURE, writes Lyman Tower Sargent, is a form of “social dreaming.” According to Sargent, utopian literature—as opposed to concrete, historical experiments in utopian living—expresses “the dreams and nightmares that concern the ways in which groups of people arrange their lives.” Utopian texts “envision a radically different society from the one in which the dreamers live,” and this is far more important than whether these texts depict a society that we can actually achieve—or one where we might want to live.

Novelist, poet, and historian Marguerite Young describes a similar type of social dreaming in her own writing. From her earliest forays into poetry at the age of five and continuing into the biographical study of Eugene V. Debs left incomplete at the time of her death at 87, Young approached her entire body of work as “one book.” Her oeuvre, she explained to Miriam Fuchs and Ellen G. Friedman, is bound together by the pervasive theme of “paradise lost, always the lost cause, the lost leader, the lost utopia.”

Young’s writing is animated both by the memory of lost innocence, which always recedes into the past, and by the expectation of an elusive utopia, whose advent is always deferred. She envisions a world unlike our own by looking in two directions at once. Where her characters are not convinced that the world was better before, they believe that it will be better soon. In the present, however, resolution is beyond reach.

Loss and hope, the two themes that drive Young’s 1965 cult novel Miss MacIntosh, My Darling, as well as her award-winning poetry collection Moderate Fable (1944), are phenomena that she describes as “without site.” Her poetry and fiction give voice to nostalgic longing, on one hand, and to messianic yearning on the other. When Young turns to history, as she does in her 1945 study Angel in the Forest: A Fairy Tale of Two Utopias (recently rereleased by Dalkey Archive), this pattern takes on an entirely different shape.

Etymologically, “utopia” (borrowed from the Greek for “no place”) can only be without site and beyond reach. The philosopher Paul Ricœur writes that, because “no connecting point exists between the ‘here’ of social reality and the ‘elsewhere’ of the Utopia,” utopias “avoid any obligation to come to grips with the real difficulties of a given society.” Young breaks from the tradition established by Thomas More that situates utopia “elsewhere,” a line of thought carried forward by Edward Bellamy and William Morris and later critiqued by Young’s contemporaries Aldous Huxley and George Orwell. She does this by situating not one but two utopias in the very real town of New Harmony, Indiana, in the early 1800s. Young inverts the framework Ricœur describes in utopian fiction, starting from history and working towards an appeal to the imagination to “conceive of a nowhere.” In doing so, she examines both “the paradoxes of Utopia” and the “eccentricity of the Utopian imagination.”

Angel recounts the history of two experiments in communal living in New Harmony that took place between 1814 and 1827. The first was led by George Rapp, a German pietist who established the town of Harmony as a religious commune; the second by Robert Owen, a secular proto-socialist from Wales who hoped to build a rationally managed society from the ground up after purchasing Rapp’s land in 1825. In what Lillian Robinson called “history’s least ‘studious’ study” of the communities, Young plays Rapp’s spiritual devotion against Owen’s faith in material progress—a contrast she likens to the “Cartesian split between body and soul.” Where Rapp “believed his people to be future angels,” Owen “believed all men to be machines.”

In juxtaposing their contrasting projects, Young mines Rapp’s and Owen’s failed experiments for salvageable, concrete traces of the loss and hope that fuel her fiction and poetry. Though the book is ostensibly a work of nonfiction, the “fairy tale” frame Young uses to narrate her histories draws it much closer to Sargent’s poetic “social dreaming” than to a dispassionate study of real-world utopian communities.

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Like both Rapp and Owen, Young briefly lived in New Harmony. The book was an outgrowth of the seven years she spent there after her parents relocated to the early frontier settlement on the Wabash River. In an interview with Charles Ruas, she recounted her mother and stepfather’s invitation to join them: “They said, ‘You’ll love this new town. It is the scene of two lost utopias, and it has in it the footprints of the Angel Gabriel. It has cruciform shapes on the doors, and a maze.”

The footprints, maze, and architectural embellishments that Young’s mother used to pitch the town were, in Young’s words, “visible evidence” of Rapp’s presence at the time of the town’s founding. The cruciform shapes are remnants of the modest architectural embellishments common to Rappite buildings (many also include decorative sundials). Owen, who purchased Rapp’s land, so admired the practical structures that he left many of them intact as he established his own experimental community. The hedge maze, which still stands today (the grounds can be rented for “garden parties and weddings”), was among the original community’s decorative public works projects that Rapp requested as an allegorical tribute to his belief in the exhausting, labyrinthine path one must take through life before reaching redemption. Writing 60 years after both communities’ dissolution, Miner K. Kellogg, a portrait artist who lived in Owen’s community as a child, remembers the maze:

The first Labyrinth I ever saw was at New Harmony. It was grown in an open field near the town and a source of constant amusement to children. Its lines were formed of vines grown upon light fences and about four feet high, converging as they reached the centre. Here the visitor came upon a circular hut made of the ends of rough logs cut to a point externally leaving one window—& a blind door which had to be sought out—& only found by pushing at the walls. I remember well my first visit to this hut, after a long & tedious run back and forth through the labyrinth. On seeking for the door a large snake took a look at me from between the logs, laughing at me with its long red tongue. I got back out of the labyrinth much sooner and easier than I found my way in.

The footprints are those found on “Gabriel’s Rock,” a slab of limestone purchased by Rapp’s son, Frederick, and proudly displayed on the lawn of the Rapp mansion. The stone bore a pair of footprints (petroglyphs carved by Indigenous people from the Missouri region) that New Harmony tradition attributes to Young’s titular angel: Rapp told his followers that the archangel Gabriel left the prints on the stone when he descended from heaven to guide the community through its inception. The prints were, apparently, so well carved that Owen later remarked, “It appears to me much less improbable that some aboriginal artist should have exhibited unlooked-for skill in intagliating a rock, than that man should have been coëval with the crustacea.”

While living in New Harmony in the 1930s and ’40s, Young “gradually” began to write about the town’s history. In the book’s embryonic stage, there “was no artificial research, except for the experience of living there and talking to the beautiful old-timers in that town,” some of whom were still “believers in the party of Father Rapp.” Angel grew out of a side project that took shape as Young wrote from “about six to midnight” after teaching during the day.

Angel in the Forest was, as Young told Ruas, originally intended to be a series of ballads, written in the style of Robert Browning. When she had completed the poems, however, she found the structure lacking. “After I did the ballads,” Young explains,

I could see that while I had depicted the utopian town New Harmony and its personalities, the history was omitted. […] [S]o then I reluctantly decided to put it into prose. […] I kept bringing into the text everything I had written in the two poetic versions. It was the prose variation that took me about three years. I used all those images. I wanted to write a poetic prose. I would never have written anything in plain prose then or at any time since then. It does not interest me.

By “poetic prose,” Young clarified that she had in mind the “imagistic” writing of 17th-century writers such as Thomas Browne and Robert Burton, whom she cited as major influences.

Young’s meticulous method, in which she goes to extreme lengths to infuse prosaic writing with poetic intensity, accounts for her notoriously slow output. Angel was published in 1945. Young died in 1995. In the intervening years, the only work she saw to publication was Miss MacIntosh, My Darling, which she began drafting in 1945. She delivered the 3,449-page manuscript draft to Scribner’s 19 years later. Young’s massive biography of the American labor leader and socialist presidential candidate Eugene V. Debs, which she began during the Vietnam War, remained unpublished at her death.

Young believed that a factual book on Debs would only take “a year or two.” She explained to Ruas, however:

I don’t think that anyone can do a literary and imagistic portrait of the nineteenth-century utopian dreamers and anti-dreamers at speed level and evolve in it the political metaphors, not only of that day, but of previous days, and the political cartoons and the actual labor histories and statistics, as well as the individual personalities.

This was a practice already at play in Angel in the Forest, which is anything but an ordinary historical account.

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Johann Georg Rapp, the first of Young’s paired visionaries, was born in Iptingen, Germany, in 1757. His initial plan to become a journeyman weaver later grew into a religious avocation, and he took to preaching a strain of Christianity influenced by mystics such as Jakob Böhme and Emanuel Swedenborg. Disillusioned by what he believed to be the distant, impersonal formality of the Lutheranism practiced by the state, Rapp made a formal break from the German church in 1785. When challenged by German religious authorities, he defended his ministry by responding, “I am a prophet and I am called to be one.” After a brief stint in prison, followed by a public gag order that prohibited him from preaching outside of Iptingen, Rapp immigrated to the United States, seeking the religious liberties guaranteed by the fledgling democracy.

“Father Rapp chose America first,” as Young has it, “not because he believed that God’s voice would speak out of the marsh more clearly than it had spoken out of the vineyards in Württemberg, but because the land was fierce and cheap.” She writes that life in Württemberg “nurtured many clouded dreamers, […] who aspired, like Faust, for infinite space, infinite power, and oranges in winter.” The sprawling, open space of the American frontier beckoned to Rapp. He first set up shop in Pennsylvania before moving west, where he founded the town of Harmony on the Wabash in Indiana. Rapp’s religious sect, the Harmony Society, was so successful that, in 1823, Indiana’s newly formed treasury petitioned Harmony for a financial loan to keep the seven-year-old state solvent.

The Rappites’ doctrine made two radical breaks from ordinary Christianity. The first of these was the abolition of private property. Under the Rappites’ “Scriptural communism,” the community, Young writes, “pooled their hard-earned funds, the result of sales of their property, the small farms, the wheels broken at old cisterns.” Rapp’s “Articles of Association” stipulated that its signatories submit “jointly and severally […] to the laws and regulations of the congregation” but also that they “deliver up, renounce, and transfer all [their] estate and property consisting of cash, land, cattle, or whatever else it may be, to George Rapp and his Society in Harmony, Butler County, Pennsylvania, as a free gift or donation.”

In exchange, Rapp and the Society guaranteed its members “the privilege to attend all religious meetings” and “receive the necessary instruction in church and school which is needed and requisite for temporal and eternal felicity.” The charter also promised to supply “all the necessities of life, as lodging, meat, drink, and clothing, […] not only during their healthful days, but also when one or several of them should become sick or otherwise unfit for labor.” For the community to survive, as Young puts it, “the individual must be destroyed and his perceptions sink to the level of the general desire.”

Where the first Rappite religious doctrine laid the foundation for Harmony’s success, the second—universal celibacy—sowed the seeds of its destruction. Rapp founded this doctrine on a heterodox interpretation of Adam’s expulsion from Eden, building on Jakob Böhme’s peculiar teaching that people were sexually indistinct before the fall. In the Garden, both men and women lived in one body. In Böhme’s view, sex organs had “no place in the holy trinity in paradise.” In Young’s retelling of Böhme’s doctrine,

Adam, it seems, fell from grace because he desired a helpmate. Adam, before he fell, was possessed of both sexual elements, the male and female conjoined. He was, in that pristine state, himself a horn of plenty, himself a receptacle, who might have reproduced without the adjunct of woman. It was only when he saw the beasts in pairs—ostriches, elephants, all kinds of living creatures—that he envied them and thus forfeited his godhead, which should have sufficed him undiminished throughout eternity.

Rapp so wholly adhered to Böhme’s teaching that he demanded total abstinence from sexual intercourse, a prohibition he extended to include purely procreative sex. Though this wrote collective extinction into Rappite dogma, the Society held to a millenarian faith that did not concern itself with temporal duration. Christ would return soon, and with him, Young writes, would come “a poisonous gas like the dews from Jehovah, a conflagration covering the whole wide earth. No iota would escape destruction.” The future of Harmony was not to be found on earth but in heaven. Rapp saw little reason to fret over the Society’s continuation beyond Christ’s imminent return, and so carried forth a “holy mission, a renunciation of instinct for the sake of the future, where there would be no adversary among the lower elements.”

This drew immediate hostility from the world beyond Harmony. Neighboring Protestants objected to the doctrine as heresy. Rumors spread that Rapp castrated his son after finding out that he had impregnated a woman in the community. The practice even merited a swipe from Lord Byron, who satirized Rapp in Don Juan:

Because he either meant to sneer at Harmony
Or marriage, by divorcing them thus oddly.
But whether reverend Rapp learn’d this in Germany
Or no, ’tis said his sect is rich and godly,
Pious and pure, beyond what I can term any
Of ours, although they propagate more broadly.
My objection’s to his title, not his ritual,
Although I wonder how it grew habitual.

It was the internal rifts the doctrine generated, however, that led to the greatest source of strife, and ultimately helped drive several crises that undermined Rapp’s leadership.

In Young’s version, it is not Christ but Bernard Mueller whose arrival brings the Harmony Society to its decisive end. The cynical German latecomer, whom Young likens to “a traveling salesman,” swept into Rapp’s third settlement in Economy, Pennsylvania. He called himself Count Maximilian de Leon, claimed to possess alchemical secrets, and promised to transmute base metals into gold. He slowly began to preach against Rapp, promising to restore traditional marriage. When he broke from the Society in 1832, he took with him nearly a third of Rapp’s congregation.

Coupled with Rapp’s failed prediction of Christ’s return on September 15, 1829, the schism greatly weakened Rapp’s leadership. He died in 1847, leaving behind a small but devout group of followers. The Society limped forward into the 20th century, formally dissolving in 1906. “Had the Rappites survived as an entity,” writes Young, “they might have rivaled Rockefeller or Henry Ford, it has been said—a model factory, a model community, no labor problems. They perished, presumably, and in that fact lies their chief charm.”

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In 1825, Robert Owen, the second of Young’s paired utopians, purchased Rapp’s land, where he, like Rapp, attempted to raise a society that would relieve human suffering. As a child, he read widely and, at an early age, “had begun to entertain a new view as to the organization of human nature […] ideas which were to change the course of man.” Young recounts Owen’s youth, when, from “the ripe old age of ten,” he left home to seek an apprenticeship, already on his way to becoming “the world’s greatest spokesman of Utopia, a society achievable through the suppression of the irrational, the excessive head.”

Owen believed that human nature was malleable: character, he thought, is shaped far more by environment than by birth. As the manager of a cotton mill in New Lanark, Scotland, where he supervised a staff of about 500 spinners, Owen had conducted experiments in “principles of justice and kindness,” carrying out a series of small-scale labor reforms that improved the working conditions for his employees. A better working environment, Owen believed, would foster better character. To that end, he provided medical care and education, set up a sick fund, and worked toward building public kitchens. To make labor more palatable, he also encouraged cleanliness, kept a curfew in the winter, and enforced hygiene at the mill. He tried unsuccessfully to set a minimum working age of 12, and successfully cut working hours from 14 to 12 in 1816, with the goal eventually of an eight-hour workday.

As Owen grew increasingly radical, he sought to expand the social organization he developed in the workplace to govern society as a whole. His larger project is likely to be one that many readers familiar with the history of labor movements, socialism, or the industrial revolution will recognize. Owen was canonized, alongside Charles Fourier and Henri de Saint-Simon, as one of three key utopian thinkers in Friedrich Engels’s 1880 essay Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, which contrasts their overly idealistic “utopian” experiments with the “scientific” form of socialism he developed with Karl Marx. The utopians, in Engels’s view, were wanting because “they do not claim to emancipate a particular class” but instead “all humanity at once”; such a view, he writes, leaves far too much to “the individual man of genius” and too little to the “chains of historical development.”

Young, who clearly feels a far greater affinity toward Owen than toward Rapp, finds no problem here. In an early introductory passage to the Owen portion of Angel, she writes, “Who fails to love this man fails to love humanity.” Like Rapp, Owen saw a path to liberation in communitarian ideals that would eliminate competition, the accumulation of wealth, the division of labor, and rigid hierarchy. Unlike Rapp, however, Owen sought harmony not in the hereafter but in the here and now. Though Owen echoed Rapp in his desire to lead by example, he did so not to bring humanity closer to paradise but rather to bring paradise closer to humanity.

By the 1820s, Owen had lost faith in large-scale reform by ordinary means. The British social structure, built around private property and the pursuit of profit, was a categorical hindrance to social improvement. By expanding the management principles he had established at the cotton mill to the whole of society, Owen was convinced that he could set up a series of small, self-sustaining villages driven by “mutual and combined interest” that would so improve the quality of their inhabitants’ lives that they would eventually supplant the reigning social system. Each village would take the shape of a quadrangle surrounded by a cluster of public buildings with private apartments for citizens. Owen claimed that he could get each community up and running for £60,000—a sum for which he appealed to both the government and private investors (whom he offered a five percent return).

When he learned that Rapp had offered up his ready-made town for sale, Owen purchased it for $150,000. Owen’s aggressive promotion of his “plan” drew considerable attention. After arriving in the United States, he twice addressed Congress—among the first public speeches on socialism in the US—to an audience that included John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, James Monroe, and John Quincy Adams. He placed newspaper advertisements calling upon the “rational and well-intentioned” to reshape society in New Harmony.

“They were eight hundred people who,” writes Young, “had been drawn together from the four points of the compass, necessarily without much deliberation, or any reference to their professional usefulness.” Owen made no selection for diverse skills and thus found himself faced with “twelve seamstresses and mantua-makers, but not a saddler, and two watchmakers, but not a coppersmith.” The group comprised, Young observes, “a number of professions which would be extraneous in Utopia, and many missing which were needed most badly. There were only thirty-six farmers and field-laborers to feed their large population, still swelling like a tide.” Despite Owen’s best intentions, the community was plagued by “too many idlers in the streets […] too many who did not know what time of day it was. The hands were horny with age but not skilled.”

Faced with “their deficiencies in practical arts,” Young claims that New Harmony’s inhabitants were “haunted by their Rappite predecessors.” In a poetic twist, Owen’s secular project fell short of the worldly success enjoyed by the religious Harmony Society. Where the Rappites “left behind them respectable evidence of their devotion to the branches of industry,” the Owenite experiment left behind little more than a messianic ideal after its collapse in 1827.

In an ironic inversion, the spiritually inclined George Rapp’s religious ideals fell to pieces while his fleeting material success left “evidence of his incorporeal extension” that persists into the present day. By contrast, Owen’s materially driven project left almost no tangible trace, though the ideals of his worldly millenarianism, carried forward by successive utopian dreamers, have enjoyed a long afterlife. “Perhaps,” suggests Young, “the two visions, Rappite and Owenite, supernatural and natural, must merge into one indistinction by and by—like a maze where lovers walk. Perhaps not.”

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Young offers neither an endorsement nor a condemnation of the Owenite and Rappite projects. Nor does she present a rigid documentary chronicle. Angel has no footnotes. It jumps over large blocks of time. Its citations are few and far between, and it offers little in the way of primary documentation. Young freely cuts back and forth between the time of the book’s composition in the mid-20th century and its early 18th-century subject matter. She often falls into internalized flights of fancy from her subjects’ points of view that, even if accurate, remain impossible to verify. Her narration drifts into free indirect discourse that reads far more like Virginia Woolf or Marcel Proust than the work of a professional historian.

In fact, when Angel was published, the enchanted sensibility Young brought to her narration of the past raised historians’ hackles. A 1945 article in The Mississippi Valley Historical Review, for example, included a long list of Young’s factual errors and embellishments; notable among these was the exaggerated size of the footprints that Rapp’s “angel” left on the slab of limestone (Young repeatedly describes them as enormous when, in fact, they are somewhere between a men’s size five and size six). The reviewer concluded, however, by recommending the book nonetheless. A review in the Journal of Bible and Religion also nodded to “the limitations which flow from this fictional method of treating history” but praised Young for “skillfully blend[ing] her own imaginative insights and the data of history.” Mark Van Doren, who also wrote the introduction to the 1966 edition of Angel, defended the book’s flights of fancy in the New York Herald Tribune: a “sober history of New Harmony,” he wrote, “would not be a true history, for New Harmony was not a sober thing.”

Angel in the Forest is wholly in keeping with Young’s comment to Charles Ruas that she did not see a difference between fiction and history because history itself is “stranger than fiction.” The “beautiful thing” about historical research, Young explained, is that “as the research piles up, it begins to assert a life of its own.” When writing nonfiction, Young set out to follow the “thematic relationships” that guided her initial research through “the flood, the ebb, the flow of history. But the river is a dream—imagination.” The tenuous connections that appear throughout Angel in the Forest do not stem from sloppy research or a lack of rigor on Young’s part. Instead, they work to tease out an unconscious current coursing beneath the book’s surface history.

As she explained to Ruas, he figures Young finds herself most attracted to share a “lingua franca which all understood and which was based upon poetry.” In short, “they all spoke in metaphors.” As such, Young believes that her subject matter is best approached indirectly. Rapp’s and Owen’s visionary projects, for Young, are historical dreams. She clarifies her approach in “The Artist as Wanderer,” an unpublished essay penned sometime between 1965 and 1966, in which she writes that “the artist is like every other dreamer except that he is perhaps more conscious of his dreams than most people—since he must weave by almighty will an order through this chaos.”

In Angel, it is the order of history itself that Young-the-dreamer chooses to weave. On the whole, the people, places, and events that appear were, in fact, real. But the narrative shape that Young imposes upon them rises to the level of artifice. This, however, is a fact of all historical narrative. The historiographer Hayden White points out that the “authority of the historical narrative is the authority of reality itself; the historical account endows this reality with form […] by the imposition upon its processes of the formal coherency that only stories possess.” Angel is a unique work of history only in Young’s candid admission that the orderly, fairy-tale form the book’s narrative takes on is her own invention.

This is not to say that Angel wholly gives itself over to fantasy. Where Young takes liberty with the historical record, she does so to render the very real utopian impulse in a mythic, rather than historical, register. The work of myth, she writes in “The Artist as Wanderer,” is that of “elicit[ing] the wonder of our deepest recognition, seeming to express forgotten dreams, dreams long covered over by the dead weight of convention, dreams long buried in every man, yet awakening to sudden life.”

Both the Harmony and New Harmony communities manifest two literary conceptions of society that the critic Northrop Frye believed to be the proper space of myth: the “social contract,” which “presents an account of the origins of society,” and utopia, “which presents an imaginative vision of the telos or end at which social life aims.” As newly formed, future-oriented societies, the utopian enclaves that appeared in the United States throughout the 19th century underscore the interdependence of Frye’s twin mythologies.

As with so much of Young’s other writing, her story of utopia demands that one eye look toward the past as the other looks toward the future. The utopian social contract is founded upon a vision for the future; this utopian vision grows from a social contract that hoped to amend a fallen world. Such is the double articulation that Miriam Fuchs sees in all of Young’s books, which are “utopian in the sense that each one recognizes the universal struggle for ideality and the impossibility of reaching it.”

According to Fredric Jameson, the utopian vocation is, historically, one of failure. Its “epistemological value,” however, lies in how it helps us find the limits of what we can imagine. A work of utopian fiction helps us feel “the mud of the present age in which the winged Utopian shoes stick, imagining that to be the force of gravity itself”—an artificial constraint on the imagination that we wrongly take to be natural.

In Angel, Young adheres to Jameson’s vocation for utopia. Though she sees Owen’s and Rapp’s projects as doomed from the start, she deals with both figures in similar terms to her characters in Miss MacIntosh—who, as she told Fuchs and Friedman, were “more complete in their incompletion than if they had been whole.” The two failed communities, for Young, stand as fleeting fragments in an ongoing, unfinished, and ultimately unfinishable process of utopian dreaming that “lies beyond this shifting world,” and so “must be shifting too.” To reach utopia would be to reach harmony and completion—a goal that Fuchs sees as incompatible with Young’s worldview, which consigns all such efforts to “disharmony and fragmentation.”

For Young, loss can lead to a sense of despair driven by a discouraged nostalgia. This response draws attention away from the present and often makes hope for a better world difficult. Nostalgia and loss, however, take on an entirely different character when viewed through the mythologizing lens that Young turns toward Harmony and New Harmony. Rapp’s and Owen’s complementary visions do not so much stand for a lost utopia as for a larger sense of lost hope. Though utopia rests on a horizon far beyond both Owen’s and Rapp’s reach, Young, who “refuses to settle for anything other than fragmentation,” according to Fuchs, also sees the impulse that spurred them toward it as one worth preserving and carrying forward.