ABSTRACT
Chapter 4 considers Nellie Shaw’s early feminist account of the formation and transformation of a utopian, Tolstoyan anarchist colony in the Cotswold countryside, which was influential on Miller’s political, philosophical and spiritual development. In 1898, the early colonists turned their backs on urban, industrialised society, built their own houses, tried to establish solidarity through collective action; they challenged gender roles, conventions and institutions, such as marriage, paid labour and the use of money. Their ideal was a negative freedom from the oppression imposed upon them by the hierarchical, patriarchal “Organic State.” As a young man, Miller visited the colony many times. Many years later, he bought a house and lived there from 1965 to 1979. Miller shared the early colonists’ commitment to personal, spiritual freedom but disagreed with their methods. Chapter 4 examines the intersection between narratives of collective and individualistic freedom in the practical setting of Whiteway Colony as a basis for understanding Miller’s complex personal and translatorial responses to Hegel’s dialectical engagement with divergent conceptions freedom. Naming his address on the colony in his Translator’s Forewords is taken as a performative enactment of these complex, identity-forming commitments.
