Come Life, Shaker Life
Early Shaker Spirituals, directed by Kate Valk. The Wooster Group, New York, December 7–17, 2017.
CHARLES DICKENS visited the Shaker community at New Lebanon in 1842, near the end of the U.S. tour that occasioned his American Notes for General Circulation. It appalled him. Variations on the word “grim” recur nine times across three paragraphs of his scornful account of the few Shakers he encountered. They refused to let him see them worship, he reported, because previous tourists had recently made “certain unseemly interruptions” during the fervid “laboring” dances that formed the center of their Sabbath service. He settled for making “some trifling purchases” at the local store, “where,” he wrote, “the stock was presided over by something alive in a russet case, which the elder said was a woman; and which I suppose was a woman, though I should not have suspected it.”
Something about this town had gotten under Dickens’s skin. It could have been that the woman he met at the store did not behave like most women he would have come across elsewhere in America. She might well have had a prominent place in the Shaker leadership; nothing, at any rate, would have kept her from one. In Shaker villages, brothers and sisters—as they were known to one another—both held leadership positions, contributed to the town’s communal economy, gathered in large worship services (where the congregants were, as elsewhere in Shaker life, grouped by gender), and maintained the strict celibacy for which the sect had been known and mocked since it arrived in America in 1774. By the time of Dickens’s visit, a thriving tourist trade had developed around these places where property was held in common and sex had been renounced. Both counts were sources of ridicule. As late as 1903, a reporter for The Connecticut Magazine took the decline of the Shakers in that state as proof that “communism has always been an ultimate failure.”
Male and female visitors both took special pleasure in hating Shaker women for their refusal of traditional femininity. To the English actress Fanny Kemble, “they looked like the nuns in , condemned, for their sins in
