Oneida: From Free Love Utopia to the Well-Set Table by Ellen Wayland-Smith (review)

John Humphrey Noyes and the Oneida Community (OC) he founded in mid-nineteenth-century Central New York have attracted perennial scrutiny from historians, sociologists, psychologists, journalists, and, as in the case of Ellen Wayland-Smith (who is also a scholar of comparative literature), descendants of original OC members. Oneida's unique sexual and other social practices—complex marriage, male continence, stirpiculture, mutual criticism, communal childrearing, (relative) gender egalitarianism—intrigue and excite. Despite existing as a communal experiment for only thirty-three years (1848–1881), the OC has been investigated and interpreted from multiple angles since the publication of Oneida Community: An Autobiography, 1851–1876 (Syracuse University Press, 1970) by another descendant, Constance Noyes Robertson. Oneida: From Free-Love Utopia to the Well-Set Table offers one more attempt to penetrate the inner workings of J. H. Noyes' mind, the community, and its later incarnation as the kitchen and dining ware manufacturing firm Oneida, Ltd.; it reads as both a deeply personal investigation into the author's ancestry and a well-researched and well-documented history.

The book tracks the same story as the many previous attempts to grasp the character and motivations of Noyes and the people who followed him into communal and eventually corporate life and to make sense of the unusual practices they adopted for a time and then rejected. It is well-established, familiar territory: most of the history and much of the analysis have been done before. But Wayland-Smith gives them a twenty-first century perspective, in terms of both events, such as Oneida, Ltd.'s bankruptcy in 2006, and interpretations, such as her analysis of "the Burning" in 1947, when an unnamed group of Oneida officials destroyed thousands of pages of community documents (diaries, letters, and other papers). The Burning seems to be a pivotal event for Wayland-Smith—she discusses it within the first few pages of the book and returns to it in the final chapter, where she speculates about why it occurred: it was a "ritual destruction of the utterly wicked," an "exorcism," a "primitive, magic vanishing act," a reflection of the larger witch-hunting fear of communists and homosexuals at the time, a demonstration of descendants' "visceral commitment to family privacy," and more (259–60). To tell this story and others throughout the book, Wayland-Smith offers anecdotal evidence from her own experiences and memories, family stories she heard as a child, and interviews with living relatives.

One aspect of this book that truly stands out is that it is very well written: lively, engaging, and in many places like reading a novel. The author deftly weaves together thorough research, including archival work, with personal insights to articulate the absorbing story she wants to tell, only occasionally becoming a bit heavy handed in her speculative interpretations, such as an explicitly Freudian psychoanalysis of the "narcissistic" Noyes, with his "psychological quirks and self-contradictions" (34–35). She is transparent about her familial connections to leading figures in the community and the company they formed when the OC was disbanded in 1881; throughout the book she regularly refers to characters as "my great-grandfather" or "my great-great-grandmother." This highlights the very personal nature of the book (perhaps there was a desire to exorcise some of her own ancestral demons). But it also draws the reader into the story, making Oneida: From Free Love Utopia to the Well-Set Table appropriate for a general readership and the undergraduate classroom. While those very familiar with Oneida's story will not find a lot of new information in the book, it is nevertheless a fun read.