Anarchist Fiction, 1870-1914

ANARCHIST FICTION, 1870–1914. While fiction was a popular medium for many critics of American society, it held particular value for anarchists. For anarchist writers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, fiction was crucial in allowing a conceptualization of their theories—which were frequently criticized for their ethereal quality—in a popularly accessible form and language. Anarchist fiction manifested several popular literary styles. Utilizing the genres of sentimentality, utopian fantasy, and realism, anarchist writers both engaged in and subverted dominant modes of discourse. Anarchist journals, replete with short stories and advertisements for radical novels, were the lifeline of this fiction, often being its sole means of promotion and distribution.

The evolution of anarchist fiction parallels the progression of the anarchist movement in the United States. While many immigrant anarchists brought with them a tradition of radicalism from their native countries, a significant number of American-born anarchists came to anarchism through their participation in various reform efforts, particularly women’s emancipation. The earliest novels advertised in anarchist journals in the 1880s and 1890s were written in the 1870s and 1880s, and highlight the issues of free love and opposition to institutionalized religion and marriage. Although these authors did not yet self-consciously identify themselves as anarchists (but rather as reformers), their works were embraced by anarchist journals well after their initial publication, and in fact many of the authors became active participants in the anarchist movement by the late nineteenth century.

Like such works as the patently sentimental Uncle Tom’s Cabin, novels by Elmina D. Slenker and Lois Waisbrooker were marked by themes of emotionalism, sacrificial experience, and the distinction between the public and private arenas of society. While resembling popular sentimental novels, early anarchist fiction used the form subversively by playing with the familiar formulation of the sentimental genre. In so doing, the anarchist fiction encouraged a dissatisfaction with the status quo, the remedy for which was to be found in personal liberation. Early anarchist fiction in the sentimental genre did not advocate a violent revolution; rather, these novels depicted the positive results of individual emancipation from the cultural constraints of religion and marriage. Through individual changes in consciousness and lifestyle, anarchist sentimental authors hoped, a larger cultural transformation would occur.

Domesticity in terms of marriage and motherhood and religion were key themes addressed in anarchist sentimental fiction, in which the Victorian angel in the house was replaced by a decidedly sexual heroine who rejected marriage and institutionalized religion. Slenker’s The Darwins (1879), John’s Way (1884), and Mary Jones (1885) portrayed atheists in a complex and sympathetic manner. Waisbrooker, a well-known advocate of free love, spiritualism, and women’s rights, and an active participant in the anarchist community at Home, Washington, published five major novels: Alice Vale (1869), Helen Harlow’s Vow (1870), Mayweed Blossoms (1871), Nothing Like It (1875), and Perfect Motherhood (1890). Each of Waisbrooker’s plots revolved around the struggles faced by unwed mothers, and exposed the hypocrisy of the double standard. Waisbrooker’s works opposed marriage as the manifestation of hierarchical relations between the sexes, and she presented single parenting as an opportunity for women to gain greater autonomy within their own lives. Similar topics were explored in two serialized novels that were less sentimental in style, Lizzie M. Holmes’s Hagar Lyndon; or, A Woman’s Rebellion (1893) and Nellie M. Jerauld’s Chains (1900-1901). While Jerauld’s novel was fulsome in its championing of free love, Holmes’s work was more cautious in tone, and attempted to address the complicated reality of single motherhood in late nineteenth-century America.

In anarchist circles as in the larger society, the sentimental novel gradually gave way to the more fantastic form of the utopia by the end of the nineteenth century. Following the phenomenal success of Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward (1888), anarchists produced their own fictional accounts of the model society. While sentimental fiction located change within the individual, the genre of utopian fantasy allowed the exploration of what individual changes would entail for society, and delineated the forms that society could take. Like their popular utopian counterparts, anarchist utopian fictions emphasized social planning and collectivity; however, they differed sharply from their mainstream contemporaries in their emphasis on extreme individualism.

Through this literary genre, anarchists focused on their ideal construction of society. J. William Lloyd’s The Natural Man: A Romance of the Golden Age (1902) is the account of Forrest Westwood’s efforts to resurrect a symbolic past and create “a perfect American Eden.” Some anarchist utopias presented themselves as scientific analyses through which a futuristic progressive age was to be realized. Henry Olerich in A Cityless and Countryless World (1893) sought to formulate an “Outline of Practical Co-Operative Individualism.” Other utopias, particularly William Windsor’s Loma, a Citizen of Venus (1897), Florence Huntley’s The Dream Child (1892), and Rosa Graul’s Hilda’s Home (1899), equated the emancipation of women with progress and highlighted the maternal roles of women in the establishment of an ideal society.

Produced at the outset of the twentieth century, anarchist utopian fiction reflected and proselytized anarchists’ dreams for the new century. With the fading popularity of the utopian genre in the first decade of the twentieth century, anarchist journals stopped promoting novels as consistently and turned to allegorical short stories. Lillian Browne, Sol Davis, Sadakichi Hartmann, Gertrude Nafe, and Grace Potter, among others, popularized these stories in Mother Earth. In euphemistic language, these allegorical stories provided veiled social commentary on favorite themes of the anarchists: revolution, freedom, and sexuality.

In the 1900s and 1910s realism rivaled allegories as the predominant mode of fiction in anarchist publications. Realism avoided the fantastic and extravagant styles characteristic of late nineteenth-century popular fiction, attempting instead to depict real life in a manner that was true to life. While these works detailed at length the everyday lives of people, the underlying message was usually one of class consciousness and struggle. Labor, industrialization, immigration, and the growth of corporations were common themes in these socioeconomic stories in Mother Earth by Max Baginski, Adeline Chapney, Voltairine de Cleyre, Margaret Grant, Henry May, John Franklyn Phillips, and Margaret Hunter Scott. This literature increasingly expressed themes of futility and fragmentation, and death, individuality, and loneliness filled the pages of these stories. Turning inward, this fiction reflected anarchists’ disillusionment with anarchism and their isolation within the larger society.

Fiction, which had constituted a standard feature of anarchist publications, virtually disappeared after 1914 for some time. Although the figure of the anarchist would frequently appear in fiction, it was in works about anarchists, not by anarchists.

Koenig, Brigitte. “American Anarchism: The Politics of Gender, Culture, and Community from Haymarket to the First World War.” Ph.D. diss., University of California, Berkeley, 2000.

McKinley, Blaine. “Free Love and Domesticity: Lizzie M. Holmes, Hagar Lyndon (1893), and the Anarchist-Feminist Imagination.” Journal of American Culture 13 (Summer 1990).