Background
Margaret Fuller, author of Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845),
was an integral part of the Concord, Massachusetts, writing community that
was comprised of Waldo Emerson, Henry Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Bronson
Alcott, Ellery Channing, and Henry Hedge, among others.
Fuller was born in 1810 at
Cambridgeport, Massachusetts, and during her youth, she was the companion
and confidante of William Henry Channing, James Freeman Clarke, and Frederick
Henry Hedge of the Harvard Class of 1829 and the Divinity School Class of
1833.
Fuller’s lifelong friendship
with Waldo Emerson began in 1836, and during the next two years, Fuller taught
in Bronson Alcott's Temple School.
From 1839-1844, Fuller was
known for her Boston Conversations for women, which she conducted as a series
of questions and answers. She was editor, during some of these same years,
of The Dial, a transcendentalist magazine founded by the Concord writers.
By 1842, Fuller was anxious to move from editing other people’s works
to producing her own original writing.
Fuller also promoted the
theory of androgyny, and she was instrumental in reform work for women and
the mentally ill during her New York City years (1844-1847) when she worked
as literary critic for Greeley’s New York Daily-Tribune. In 1847,
she left New York for Rome where she was foreign correspondent for Greeley’s
paper and a political activist. She gave birth to a son, in 1848, fathered
by Giovanni Angelo Ossoli, another activist.
In 1850, Fuller, Ossoli,
and their son died by shipwreck off of Fire Island on a visit to the United
States.
Beginnings
“Creative people…do not turn away from non-being. They knock on
silence for an answering music; they pursue meaninglessness until they can
force it to mean.”
For years, in the silence
of her irregular diaries, Margaret Fuller gathered ideas, made observations
on her writing style, and listed topic suggestions for possible future writings,
“for bringing something new into being.”
The inscription in Margaret
Fuller’s brief 1836 gold-and-green diary reads: “Memoranda of interviews,
conversations, and public discourse which may seem to me worthy of being recalled
some fair, contemplative summer day.”
In 1840, Fuller inscribed
her red-and-orange diary as follows: “I propose to keep a record…if
ever to get through this life…something may come of it.”
She goes on to state what
she wishes to write: a better formed book of fragments (sketches and short
stories); a series of essays on the fine arts in the United States; a discourse
on Petrarch’s love letters. She mentions “it’s proposed I should
conduct a magazine,” and feels her position of writing an introduction
for the magazine (The Dial) will allow her to define the role of the
critic. She also observes that her sketchy diary remarks may well serve as
conversations for her West Street gatherings of women and continue to earn
her an income
“A woman of tact and
brilliancy like me has an undue advantage in conversation with men,”
Margaret Fuller observes in another of her irregularly kept 1840 diaries.
However, these men, who are charmed by her conversation, are surprised she
doesn’t write better. “That’s because I’ve had a lonely
apprenticeship,” she says, but she is determined she will write well,
“though never as well as I talk. Yet I won’t be discouraged, for
what men say is not gospel.”
In her 1840 green-and-orange
paisley book, Fuller writes, “I will keep this book,” and observes
she must learn to be alive to “sensuous as well as to intellectual stimulus,
for language is growth.”
But on August 10, 1842, Fuller
writes Waldo Emerson a letter and says,
I am tired to death of dissipation. I do not enjoy it nor find any repose in mere observation now I long to employ myself steadily. I have no inspiration now, but hope it might come, if I were once fixed in some congenial situation. Should you like (,) it should be with you, that I should come and really live in your house a month, instead of making a visit … I shall bring my papers, etc.
Emerson responds,
Well, now please to come, for this I have always desired that you will make my house in some way useful to your occasions and not a mere hotel for a sleighing or summering party.
Was Fuller’s request
of Emerson an affirmation of her willingness, finally, to become a creative
writer, to learn how to write, to submit to his guidance, and to acquire the
sense of purpose and fresh thought that she sought? Instead of essays and
criticism on other people’s writings, instead of observing and recording,
was Fuller ready to learn how to write “a thought so passionate and alive,
that, like the spirit of a plant or an animal, it has an architecture of its
own”?
There is much, much in all
of us … No one ever calls it out of us, unless we are lucky enough to
know very intelligent, imaginative, sympathetic people who love us and have
the magnanimity to encourage us, to believe in us, by listening, by praise,
by appreciation, by laughing.
When Fuller’s stay with
Emerson was over, Fuller produced “The Great Lawsuit: Man versus Men;
Woman versus Women,” Summer on the Lakes, and Woman in the
Nineteenth Century. Her writing brought her fame in the United States
and abroad. Was Margaret Fuller’s 1842 stay with the Emersons the climactic
release in her creative journey?
The Creative Mind
The artist, like every human being, has a life comprised of eight stages:
infancy, early childhood, play age, school age, adolescence, young adulthood,
adulthood, and old age. For the artist, however, young adulthood and adulthood
are the most crucial steps and are to be interpreted as psychological ones
and not ones of physical maturation. In the creative (psychological) life
cycle, young adulthood is a time of sublimation, of redirecting libidinal
forces into psycho-social contexts.
It is a time of intimacy
with the self. The artist recognizes his inner, but mostly unexpressed creativity—and
as it is a time of isolation, the artist fears remaining separate because
being separate means being unrecognized and unproductive. In the creative
(psychological) life cycle, adulthood consists of creativity and production
versus self-absorption and decay.
The artist must transcend
his separation and meet with other artists, discuss ideas, share thoughts.
The artist cannot survive in a vacuum. He requires a household or community
of like-minded individuals in order to conceive, develop, and give birth to
his distinctiveness. Through the influence of his peers, through his rejection
of some of their ideas and through his reforming of their thoughts by mixing
them with the freshness of his own mind, the artist finds a voice and subject
matter of his own.
Therefore, Margaret Fuller’s
initial years of writing (1836-1841), years of producing essays and criticism,
years of editorship, and years of recognizing her desire in the chaos and
confusion of her irregular diaries, can be compared to early adulthood, while
her request for a five-week stay with the Emersons and their artistic guests
served as her initiation into adulthood.
If, as Henry Adams said,
chaos is the law of nature and order the dream of man, and if the imposition
of order on a corner of chaos is the function—or the illusion—of
art, Margaret Fuller, in Concord, would begin imposing discipline on herself
to find order and a voice of her own.
The artist requires creative
courage. Creative courage is the capacity to move ahead in spite of despair,
the capacity to listen to the self and to listen to the self speak to others.
It is the capacity to mix with like-minded individuals.
But more importantly than
possessing creative courage, the artist must have an encounter: he must open
himself to influence. Without influence, he will have no creation. To be influenced,
the artist must pay attention with his five senses, undergo active listening,
must have waited for the fertilization and growth process (entrance to adulthood)
to have begun to move in its own organic time
The artist must be caught
up in, totally involved with, completely absorbed by his adulthood’s
environment and its inhabitants. The duration of the influence may be long
or short, but it must be intense, and it is the center of the new creative
work. The artist will then “use everything at hand,” will take possession
of whatever he needs in his surroundings and will reconstruct and reshape
it to fit his new creation.
Margaret Fuller, in Concord
in 1842, met all the requirements of artistic preparation. She was ready for
an encounter, ready to be influenced. She had the desire to balance her ‘lonely
apprenticeship,’ her isolation, by mixing with a community of like-minded
individuals for an extended period of time. She was eager to listen to and
talk with her major choice of influence, Waldo Emerson, and perhaps she had
the courage to face the changes which would develop from their exchanges.
Influences
For centuries, the word ‘influence’ has had a root meaning of inflow,
and the prime meaning of ‘to be influenced’ means “to receive
an ethereal fluid flowing in upon one from the stars and affecting one’s
character and destiny.”
Ben Jonson preferred the
word ‘imitation’ over ‘influence’ and says ‘imitation’
means “to make a choice of one excellent man above the rest, and so to
follow him till he grow … so like him as the copy may be mistaken for
the original.”
One of Margaret Fuller’s first influences was Mary Wollstonecraft and
her work, A Vindication of the Rights of Women. Fuller’s father
had read Wollstonecraft while at Harvard and sought to educate his daughter
broadly. Although Fuller, in Woman in the Nineteenth Century, would
emphasize education for women as Wollstonecraft did in Vindication,
the tone of Fuller’s work is literary, hopeful, expectant, and expressive
of transcendentalism (every person must make his own world), while Wollstonecraft’s
is angry, indignant, “a rational yet heated defense of Women’s Rights
and stamped with Locke’s theory that man was a product of his environment.”
Charles Fourier was another
of Fuller’s influences; she subscribed to his ideas of androgyny, of
diverse and equal employment for both sexes, and to his central psychological
concept: “a person who is thwarted grows sullen and mischievous, an outward
expression of the internal war of the frustrated self.”
Also, she was influenced
by Goethe’s preoccupation with the individual. Madame de Stael’s
presentation of a new image of woman in her novel, Corinne, as well
as her critical studies of the influence of German literature, and literature
as a product of a social environment, influenced Fuller. So, too, was Fuller
influenced by George Sand’s personal lifestyle and her tales of the individual
woman in her struggle against social constraints, and especially the constraint
of marriage.
But the influence separating
Woman from other feminist works, and the influence separating Fuller
from other writers is transcendentalism, and “of all of the figures associated
with the transcendental movement, no one else affected Margaret Fuller’s
thinking as much as Waldo Emerson did.” With Emerson, Fuller shared a
search for insight, intellectual and social independence, as well as an optimistic
prophecy of a new age. Too, they shared a confident belief in moral change,
intuitive knowledge, and emphasized each man’s individualism, uniqueness,
potential, and faith in the self. As Emerson’s disciple, Fuller used
all of the arguments Emerson “promulgated about the individual and applied
them to women.”
Fuller arrived in Concord
seeking community, the next phase of her psychosocial development as an artist.
She was a leader of Boston’s West Street Conversations, she had been
editor of The Dial, had written criticisms of other people’s writings,
had translated the letters of two German girls, and in one night, earlier
in 1842, she had written her own Credo about good and evil. But Fuller was
a woman who wanted to write. She wanted to write something original. However,
she lacked clarity about subject matter, and she lacked confidence.
Either in her bedroom downstairs
in the Emerson house or in Waldo Emerson’s study, Fuller wrote a paper
on Rhenish and Romaic ballads for a future issue of The Dial. She also
did a piece on Tennyson. She read Emerson’s journals and letters at his
insistence; she read Ellery Channing’s poems as well as those of Louisa
M. Weston of Maine.
Fuller was determined to
write something new, and by telling the truth about writing in her Concord
diary, she demonstrated the courage needed to create. “Waldo brought
me the inkhorn and pen … I began at once to write for him, but not with
much success” (August 17) “I kept at my writing almost all day,
but with small success. I cannot get hold of my subject in a way to suit me”
(August 19). “What a happy day … I cannot write about it” (August
21). “There is too much intercourse to write it down … my writing
thrives but ill, though I spend the appointed time at it” (August 24).
“I have thoughts but no room or time to write them” (August 28).
“This week has been much rain and by my little fire in the red room,
I have written to some purpose. Yet today I feel chill about what I am doing”
(September 8). “I could not go on with my own work” (September 9).
All of some days were spent
walking in the woods; all of other days were spent writing. Evenings were
spent walking with Waldo to Walden, and there was much excellent discourse
and exhaustive analysis. Margaret Fuller felt she wanted to write something
big, something bigger than she had ever written. She also wanted to remember
this experience in Concord.
Some afternoons were spent
walking with the other guests at the Emerson household. Fuller observed Ellery
Channing as he walked through nature as though searching for clues to himself,
while Thoreau, with notebook in hand, seemed to be searching for clues to
the universe. One afternoon was spent reading Kant in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery
and talking with Hawthorne of nature and Brook Farm. Some hours were spent
in Lidian’s room where Lidian Emerson and Fuller spoke of young Waldo’s
death. But beneath this faŤade of passing the days so idyllically, Fuller
was beginning, through discourse, to acquire subject matter and confidence.
Ellery Channing
Concord was a center of the American Renaissance, and Ellery Channing was
an “integral part of the Concord group. His influence ranged from minor
to major, from oblique to direct. He gave hours of freedom to Hawthorne, community
to Alcott, inspiration to Fuller, and genuine friendship to Thoreau and Emerson.”
A guest in the Emerson household
for most of 1842, Ellery Channing had been a careful, intelligent reader of
Fuller’s writings for some time. “I was struck with the length of
the article about Bettine. I am glad it is so long. Your writings are most
valuable in my eyes … your writings are as much above the mass of written
appearances, as the sun is above choice …” Channing wrote in a February
18, 1842 letter to Fuller. As Fuller did initially, Channing, too, created
a mask behind which to write. He perceived that Fuller needed to rid herself
of her mask (to his own artistic downfall, he did not see he needed to rid
himself of his own sentimental one). “Goethe and Bettine are well enough.
I want to see Margaret Fuller herself—not Gunderode—not others.
But not always these, not forever German people and things. Why not American,
why not what is here under our noses,” wrote Channing in his March 20,
1842 letter to Fuller.
Fuller viewed Channing as
a fellow transcendentalist in need of a community of like-minded individuals.
“Cambridge and its people seemed very strange this evening after the
ideal, the true community life at Concord … with Waldo and Ellery [I
am] in community,” wrote Fuller in her diary on September 17, 1842, upon
her return to Concord after an afternoon visit in Cambridge. “For human
beings are not so constituted that they can live without expansion. If they
do not get it one way, they must another, or perish,” Fuller later wrote
in Woman.
Channing’s conversations
released creativity in others for he had intelligence and perspective, and
he was verbally astute. “In walking with Ellery,” Emerson said,
“you shall always see what was never before shown to the eye of man.”
On August 18, 1842, Fuller wrote in her diary, “This evening Ellery called
me out to the/east/clover slip, from which there is a wide view over the meadows.
The moon was nearly at full … He got excited, as in painting a picture.”
Through his poetry’s portrayal of harmonic colors and shapes in nature,
Channing sought to affirm man’s possibilities of intellectual growth.
“Ellery’s dell … is a sweet place, the path through most luxuriant
ferns, the landmarks tall asters, and the natural seat just long enough,”
wrote Fuller on September 8 when she sought a restful, safe place to recompose
and develop her thoughts and to talk with Elizabeth Hoar. “Every relation,
every gradation of nature, is incalculably precious, but only to the soul
which is poised upon itself … for it is in harmony with the central soul,”
Fuller wrote in “Lawsuit.”
“…The gain of creation
consists always in the growth of individual minds, which live and aspire,
as flowers bloom and birds sing,” Fuller wrote in Woman about
the development of thought in the individual. Thus Fuller learned to see society
ideally as a reproduction of man’s definition of harmony. “Harmony
exists in difference, no less than in likeness, if only the same key-note
govern both parts.”
“When we found a snake
in the path, Ellery said (on August 28) that it was the criticism in the universe
… handsome and adroit in its motion, but it made you cold.” “When
the same community of life and consciousness of mind begins among men, humanity
will have, positively and finally, subjugated its brute elements and …
criticism will have perished … all will have entered the harmony of common
growth.” Channing realized “that only he who had command of his
own powers can make an impression of the world around him,” can transform
his potential into experience. “… He began by railing at me as artificial,”
wrote Fuller of Channing on August 28. Fuller later reinterpreted Channing’s
theory of self-command in Woman: “The highest ideal man can form of his
own powers, is that which he is destined to attain. Whatever the soul knows
how to seek, it cannot fail to obtain.” Yet, also on August 28, Channing
ridiculed Fuller’s constant idealism. But as an artist beginning to have
confidence in herself, Fuller decided, “I cannot but see, that what they
say of my or other obscure lives is true of every prophetic, of every tragic
character … I must not let them disturb me.”
Channing lamented over the
spiritual and intellectual waste of most men’s lives. Fuller saw for
woman the type of ideal life Channing prescribed—a chance to grow and
think and unfold: “What woman needs is not as a woman to act or rule,
but as a nature to grow, as an intellect to discern, as soul to live freely
and unimpeded, to unfold such powers as were given her when we left our common
home.
Channing, as a poet, was
not a direct competitor to Fuller. As he was not an essayist or a critic or
an orator, Fuller could respond to him without defensiveness, and could absorb
some of his freshness. “[Waldo] does not read E’s poems … well
… [Waldo] neutralizes[s] … what is so delicate, so subtle in its
nature.” This journal entry of August 25 also hints of Fourier’s
theory of androgyny by suggesting the feminine delicate part of Channing’s
mind as displayed though his work. “I wish I could retain Ellery’s
talk last night: it was wonderful…absurd as was what he said on one side,
it was the finest poetic inspiration on the other.” Fuller’s mind
moved from Channing’s words to fresh speculation on duality and androgyny.
Instead of composing rebuttals as she did with Emerson and Hedge, Fuller thought,
tested her ideas, and clarified her thoughts. Later, in Woman, Fuller
wrote, “Male and female represent the two sides of the great radical
dualism. But, in fact, they are perpetually passing into one another. There
is no wholly masculine man, no purely feminine woman.”
Channing and Fuller saw literature
as expressive of life containing both good and evil, life worth living. On
September 19, Fuller wrote in her diary, “[Ellery] said Mr. E. is quite
wrong about books: He wants them all good, now I want many bad … Literature
is not memely [sic.] a collection of gems, but a great system of interpretation.”
The androgynous qualities
of Channing’s poetry along with his theory that every man had the potential
for intellectual and spiritual growth were applied directly by Fuller to her
subject of woman in the nineteenth century. Fuller’s “Lawsuit”
and Woman themselves are systems of interpretation. As a result of
Channing’s influence, Fuller learned to look past life’s immediacy
and surfaces to the less obvious realities of woman’s predicament in
the nineteenth century. She went beyond Channing’s advice to write about
things American and instead wrote about all women in all ages as a way of
interpreting the mostly stifled American woman in the nineteenth century.
In Appendix D of Woman, Fuller included Channing’s poem, “Reverence,”
for its wisdom and beauty and description of woman as man’s companion.
By observing Channing, Fuller found the determination to voice her truest
concerns about women, literature, and reform; she found the same freeing determination
that had prompted Channing to seek new values in rural America in Concord.
Henry Hedge
Henry Hedge, a Unitarian minister in West Cambridge, and then in Bangor,
Maine, from 1829 to 1850, was an established figure among the Concord transcendentalist
group. It was Hedge, along with Fuller, who had initiated, through conversation,
the Transcendentalist Club in 1836. In 1840, Hedge had been considered for
the role of editor of The Dial, the club’s literary magazine.
In 1842, Henry Hedge was a frequent visitor in the Emerson household
Hedge possessed a love of
intellectual discourse. On September 17, 1842, Fuller noted in her Concord
diary that Hedge’s conversation with Samuel Ward and Waldo Emerson is
“glassy and elaborate in manner,” but when he is alone with her,
his talk changes, becomes “full of soul, the tones of his voice entirely
different. We had an excellent talk on all the great themes before men at
this present.”
The development of the mind
and the role of the scholar in society were Hedge’s special interests.
One of Hedge’s major theories … that the difference between the
learned man and the unlearned man consisted in different arrangement of knowledge
to both, would be reinterpreted by Fuller in “Lawsuit” and then
in Woman to demonstrate that all people had the inclination and potential
to change. (Here, too, is a suggestion of Channing’s theory that he who
has command of his own powers can turn potential into experience.) “No
doubt, a new manifestation is at hand, a new hour in the day of man. We cannot
expect to see him a completed being, when the mass of men lie so entangled
in the sod…yet something new shall presently be shown after life of man,
for hearts crave it now, if minds do not know how to ask it.” “It
should be acknowledged that [women] have intellect which needs developing,
that they should not be considered complete otherwise.”
Hedge was concerned with
the dualities of the scholar: the scholar found his knowledge in private (the
writer/artist finds his need to write in private), then sounded out his findings
in society (the writer/artist temporarily joins community to find confidence
and further subject matter).
By 1842, Hedge’s emphasis
on the reclusiveness of the scholar had changed to the importance of the scholar’s
growth and influence being determined by community. He felt the scholar would
be stifled if shut off from similar blood, eradicated if shut off from time
with the self. “If any individual live too much in relation, so that
he becomes a stranger to the resources of his own nature, he falls after a
while into a distraction, or imbecility … with a society it is the same
… minds … must find help in self-impulse or perish,” wrote
Fuller in “Lawsuit.” Hedge also believed that religion forms man’s
mind, whether or not man accepts the religion he was born into. “H. emphasized
the Church and the Race,” wrote Fuller in her diary on September 17.
In “Lawsuit,” she wrote, “There is but one law for all souls,
and, if there is to be an interpreter of it, he comes not as man, or son of
man, but as son of God.” “It…is the birthright of every being
capable to receive it, … the intelligent freedom of the universe, to
use its means, to learn its secret … with God alone for their guide and
their judge.” “The intellect … is to be cultivated … because
the Power who gave a power, by its mere existence, signifies that it must
be brought out towards perfection,” Fuller wrote in Woman.
At the same time, on
September 17, Fuller, a writer and thinker now gaining confidence, decided
religion was in her own heart. “What is done here at home in my heart
is my religion … I belong nowhere. I have pledged myself to nothing …
I have my church where I am by turns priest and layman.” In Woman, she
wrote “Religion (I mean the thirst for truth and good, not the love of
sect and dogma)…”
On September 18, Fuller listened
to Hedge’s sermon given in Brookline and found it wonderful to hear a
student of German literature and philosophy speak, “wonderful for a disciple
of Hegel to preach, and to encourage the good in oneself.” Thus, Fuller
felt reassured to use Goethe as examples in her own writings. “Those
who know him [Goethe], see, daily, his thought fulfilled more and more, and
they must speak of it …” In Woman, Fuller wrote, “Germany did
not need to learn a high view of woman; it was inborn in that race,”
and Goethe, Fuller felt, wrote deeply and truthfully of woman.
In 1842, Hedge was concerned
with the benefits of reform, and saw a true reformer as one who accepted the
soul’s eternal process and worked cooperatively with it. Beginning on
page 329 in Woman, Fuller gives sympathetic understanding in her concern
for the reform of prisoners, prostitutes, and the mentally ill. Hedge felt
guidance from past thinkers strengthened modern man’s attempts to highlight
reform’s needs. Fuller, in Woman, included examples of women’s
circumstances in history to spotlight the needs of women in the nineteenth
century.
Hedge believed in cultivating
the self first in order to produce a better society. In Woman, Fuller
wrote “Could you clear away all the bad forms of society, it is vain,
unless the individual begins to be ready for better. There must be a parallel
movement in these two branches of life.” By cultivating the self, Hedge
felt, man could apply his beliefs equally to penal reform, education, woman’s
suffrage, and the anti-slavery movement. Fuller wrote in “Lawsuit,”
“As the friend of the Negro assumes that one man cannot, by right, hold
another in bondage, so should the friend of woman assume that man cannot,
by right, lay even well-meant restrictions on women.” When man has educated
himself, cultivated his inner self as prescribed by Hedge, Fuller felt “we
would have every arbitrary barrier thrown down; … We would have every
path laid open to woman as freely as to man.”
Hedge’s belief in self-cultivation
and his belief in the individual’s potential to change and thus understand
women’s need for freedom influenced Fuller most in her new creative works,
“Lawsuit” and Woman. Hedge’s theory of the scholar’s
need to balance a lifestyle comprised of isolation and community influenced
Fuller’s new confident approach to the writing life.
Lidian Emerson
In her Concord diary of 1842, Fuller depicted Lidian Emerson as a woman close
to hysteria most of the time. She viewed her as an example of Fourier’s
concept that the thwarted person grows mischievous and sullen and so outwardly
expresses his inner misery and frustration. Fuller endeavored to separate
Lidian’s opium-induced fits from her true fits of jealousy. Lidian’s
son, Waldo, died in January of 1842; in August, Lidian was still in mourning,
of course. And in August, Lidian was also enduring a swollen face as a result
of dental operations and so was taking opium for her nerves and her pain.
Fuller was sympathetic with Lidian, and on August 17, she wrote that when
Lidian came in to see her “and wept for the lost child … I felt
for her … and she liked to have me.” However, Fuller was harshly
critical of the Lidian who was jealous of her husband’s friends and who
did not try to rise above her feelings of isolation in her marriage. She was
critical, too, of Lidian because she did not try to understand her husband's
need of only friends who loved discourse and so inspired him. “Women
can't bear to be left out of the question. And they don't see the whole truth
about one like me,” wrote Fuller in her diary about her friendship with
Waldo.
Fuller’s critical tone
toward Lidian can be felt in Fuller’s published writing. Fuller thought
Lidian should be like other women, who “are considering within themselves
what they need that they have not, and what they can have, if they find they
need it.” In Woman, Fuller irately hopes for the time “when
inward and outward freedom for woman as much as for man shall be acknowledged
as a right, not yielded as a concession.” Fuller wishes for all self-pitying
and inwardly miserable women the same opportunity she wished for Lidian: “Grant
her, then for a while, the armor and the javelin.” She admonishes, then
reminds “the time is come when Eurydice is to call for an Orpheus, rather
than Orpheus for Eurydice: … woman needs now to take her turn [to lead].”
On September 2, Lidian asked
Fuller about her evenings spent with Waldo. “I said I was with Ellery
or Henry [Thoreau] both of the evenings and that W. was writing in his study,”
wrote Fuller in her diary. Were women “free, were they wise fully to
develop the strength and beauty of women … [they would] not complain,”
Fuller suggests in another reply in “Lawsuit.” Fuller saw Lidian
as unhappy, but dutifully accepting her husband's ways. “She is too amiable
to wish what would make me unhappy, and too judicious to wish to step beyond
the sphere of her sex,” the trader says of his Lidian-like wife in Woman.
Fuller saw Lidian as a self-made
victim, as a woman who did not try to change and therefore she deserved no
sympathy or respect. Yet in “Lawsuit,” Fuller contritely says of
her harsh criticism of some women, “it is love that has caused this [her
criticism], love for … souls, that might be freed could the idea of religious
self-dependence be established in them, could the weakening habit of dependence
on others be broken up.”
On September 19, Fuller wrote
that “nothing makes me so anti-Christian and so anti-marriage as these
talks with L. She lays such undue stress on the office of Jesus and the demands
of the heart.” “The lot of woman is sad,” wrote Fuller in Woman.
“She is constituted to expect and need a happiness that cannot exist
on earth … She will be very lonely while living with her husband.”
On page 298 of Woman, Fuller suggests that women, Lidian-like women
who are good mothers and dutiful wives, should be allowed to be their husbands’
intellectual companions. “I would have her [woman] free from compromise,
from complaisance, from helplessness, because I would have her good enough
and strong enough to love one and all beings, from the fullness, not the poverty
of being.”
Lidian Emerson and Margaret
Fuller also knew some moments of closeness. They spent the evening of September
9 together waiting for Ellery Channing to return from Naushon where he was
visiting his former love, Caroline Sturgis, and both Lidian Emerson and Fuller
seemed to understand Ellery's need to visit Caroline even though his wife,
Ellen, was due at the Emerson household at any hour. On September 25, Fuller
and Lidian Emerson “had a thorough talk” and Fuller said, “I
shall never trouble myself anymore—it is not just to her. But I will
do more attending to her, for I see I could be of real use.” Later in
Woman, Fuller wrote “I believe that, at present, women are the best helpers
of one another.”
Lidian Emerson clarified
for Fuller the role of the self-pitying woman in the nineteenth century. Such
a woman was too meek to disobey her husband and endeavor to become his intellectual
companion. Yet it is through Lidian that Fuller realized only other women
and truly educated men such as Henry Hedge could help all women.
Emerson as an Ingredient
Fuller sought Emerson as her mentor during her first Concord stay of three
weeks in 1836. During the next five years as her critical writing abilities
developed, she became his discerning audience and also stimulated his reading.
During Fuller’s five-week stay in 1842, her choice of Emerson as her
primary influence turned their relationship into one of creative equals. Fuller
and Emerson had been friends for several years. True friendship produces self-reliance,
Emerson believed.
“Then the influence
of anyone with him [Emerson] would be just in proportion to independence of
him,” wrote Fuller on September 2. By observing others, man understands
and trusts himself; by observing others, man is influenced, felt Emerson.
But conversation was the core of genuine friendship, said Emerson: “The
office of conversation is to give me self-possession … A safe and gentle
spirit … spreads out in order before me his own life and aims…Straightway
… I regain, one by one, my faculties, my organs.” For Emerson, conversations
became journal entries, and these in turn became essays. Written at the top
of Margaret Fuller's 1842 Concord diary, in pencil, is: “Will Mr. E mark
the parts he intends to use. After Mr. E has used this, I would like it again.”
Portions of Fuller's Concord journal were later used by Emerson in his sections
of The Memoirs of Margaret Fuller.
Emerson's influential concept
of self-reliance especially was reiterated and broadened by Fuller in Woman.
Based on Harold Bloom's theory of influence, I suggest Margaret Fuller adapted
Waldo Emerson's concept of self-reliance and made it her own as follows: First,
Fuller misreads Emerson’s concept of self-reliance. Misreading means
not understanding completely or misinterpreting passages, and so Fuller takes
a swerve on Emerson’s words and makes them into her own. Man’s self-reliance
becomes woman’s self-reliance in “Lawsuit” and Woman
… and Fuller applies the term so richly to women and their need to break
with constraints that her adaptation of the concept sounds better. Because
her adaptation sounds better, she makes it appear that Emerson had not developed
his concept enough. However, in order to handle her adaptation, Fuller has
to empty herself of her adulation for her influence. Fuller then opens herself
to the power of self-reliance as though it is not Emerson’s concept but
is a truth which was always just beyond Emerson and accessible to anyone capable
of perceiving it. Fuller’s use of self-reliance obliterates the uniqueness
of the concept in Emerson’s work. Next Fuller attains a state of solitude,
psychological and creative, separates herself from others by returning to
Cambridge on September 25, and thus truncates her precursor’s endowment.
Lastly, Fuller confidently holds her concept of self-reliance open now to
her precursor’s, uses it in her own “Lawsuit” and Woman, and
it seems as though Emerson has not influenced Fuller’s theory of self-reliance,
but that Fuller herself developed the concept for her specific use. For a
somewhat different take on the topic, see W.J. Bate’s The Burden of
the Past and the English Poet.
Emerson, Fuller & The Courage to Create
Art, for Emerson, is speaking and writing. Action or life itself is the raw
material of the intellect, said Emerson, and language is the medium which
converts thought or raw material into utterance. Utterance is speaking or
writing. Utterance is literature or art. Literature serves mankind by making
them think and reveals for them what they haven’t seen.
Emerson and Fuller both enjoyed
rhetorical conversation, which is a presentation and critical judgment of
individual interpretation for revising and extending shared knowledge. It
is the art of the effective and persuasive use of language. On September 21,
Fuller wrote in her diary: “My time to go to him [Emerson] is late in
the evening. Then I go knock at the library door, and we have our long word
talk through the growths of things with glimmers of light from the causes
of things.” Their rhetorical conversations, as well as their letters,
were used for generating lectures and texts. Fuller and Emerson searched each
other for the best thoughts as resources for writing: in their conversations,
they would discuss, utilize each other, sound and teach each other, but never
merely enjoy. “A writer must look for the best thought and use it wherever
it’s to be found. On September 1, Fuller wrote in her diary, “There
seems to be no end to these conversations … we [Emerson and Fuller] enjoy
them, for we often get a good expression.”
Emerson, through conversation,
taught Fuller how to refine her thought and writing. “But he stops me
from doing anything and makes me think.” When she knew how to think—how
to convert raw material into utterance—Fuller also knew how to write
and about what to write
The coldness of the Emerson
household from August 17 to September 25, 1842, was due, in part, to the death
of the Emersons’ firstborn which helped to cause some of the isolation
of Waldo Emerson from his wife. Each of them had chosen a different form of
bereavement. Due to this isolation, Emerson placed emphasis on the friendships
of that summer and so in Channing’s words, got “on agreeably with
everybody, [but could] not establish a personal relationship with anyone.”
Fuller attributes Emerson's coldness to his god, which was truth, while her
god was love. On September 1, after Emerson read verses to Fuller, Fuller
named Emerson’s life “Dichtung und Wahrheit,” (poetry and truth)
because Emerson cared only for the immortal essence which can be distilled
from facts. Thus Fuller seemed to attribute Emerson's coldness to his idealism
during his bereavement, “[Emerson believes he] will meet him [young Waldo]
again … to me he [young Waldo] seems lost … that is [my] weakness.
“Pure love, inspired by a worthy object, must ennoble and bless, …
the love of truth, the love of excellence will have power to save you,”
Fuller wrote later in Woman to assure timid women that independence
would not necessarily lead them into prostitution.
The subject of marriage was
discussed most by Fuller and Emerson as Emerson was working on an essay on
marriage. “Ask any woman whether her aim in [marriage] is to further
the genius of her husband, and she will say yes, but her conduct will always
be to claim a devotion that will be injurious to him if he yields,” said
W. Emerson on September 1. In a true union of equals, however, a wife and
a husband would further each other’s calling and well-being. “Such
a woman is the sister and friend of all beings, as the worthy man is their
brother and helper,” Fuller wrote in Woman. Yet if a woman wished to
live alone,” her thought may turn to the centre, and she may … [enter]
into the secret of truth and love, use it for the use of all men, instead
of a chosen few.”
Lidian hoped that Waldo's
character would alter, that he would be capable of intimacy, but on September
2, Fuller wrote that “it will never be more perfect between them.”
And so it is from the qualities lacking in the Emersons’ marriage that
Fuller built her four-point union of equals theory in Woman. At the
initial level in such a union, the man and the woman have a “relation
of mutual esteem, mutual dependence.” The man might be called a good
provider, the woman might be called a good housekeeper. They care for each
other’s needs. At the next level is “mutual idolatry” or physical
attraction. At the third level is intellectual companionship which “has
become more and more frequent” wrote Fuller in Woman. “Men
engaged in public life, literary men, and artists …” “In our
country, women are, in many respects, better situated than men. Good books
are allowed, with more time to read them.” “Not unfrequently, [women]
share the same employment [as men]” as the intellectual development of
women has grown. “The fourth and highest grade of marriage union, is
the religious, which may be expressed as pilgrimage toward a common shrine.
This includes the other [three].”
On September 9, Waldo talked
with Fuller of his latest thoughts on marriage. That “marriage should
be a covenant to secure to either party the sweetness and the handsomeness
of being a calming, continuing, inevitable benefactor to the other,”
seems to summarize Fuller’s four-point union of equals theory. On August
24 and September 18, Waldo Emerson and Fuller talked much about Emerson’s
new poem, “Saadi.” Emerson admired Persia's poet, Sa’di, because
of his preference for practical wisdom. Also, both men loved solitude. Both
men appreciated society but sought to dwell alone as individuals, or in isolation,
in society.
On August 24, after discussing
“Saadi” with Fuller, Emerson said “he will no more plague himself
with the mysteries of another sphere from his.” This may be interpreted
as Emerson's self-permission to enjoy isolationism, and not to feel guilty
about his own marriage, about his preference for writing and thinking. “Saadi,”
for Emerson, “is one acceptance throughout,” said Fuller in her
diary on August 24. She equated Emerson’s tone of acceptance to one of
his journal-keeping habits: “Whenever in his journal he speaks of his
peculiar character and limitations he has written in the margin, ‘Accept.’”
On September 18, Fuller cried over the new lines Emerson added to “Saadi”
… “As Saadi, the joygiver, can also walk in grief,” said Fuller
in her diary. At this time, Fuller, by borrowing Emerson’s theory of
acceptance, likewise may have granted herself permission to love solitude
and individualism, writing and thinking. By recognizing the artist’s
joy and grief inherent to isolationism and community, Fuller gained confidence
as a thinker and a writer. She acquired the courage to believe she would “not
be pitied as a madwoman, not shrunk from as unnatural.” For “women
of genius, even more than men, are likely to be enslaved by an impassioned
sensibility. The world repels them more rudely, and they are of weaker bodily
frame.”
Thus, Fuller had finally
found the courage to create.
Fuller's borrowing of Emerson's
concept of self-reliance, the evolution of her four-point union of equals
theory, and her learning how to think (through conversation) were Fuller’s
primary gains from Emerson’s influence.
The Sum of These Parts
Ellery Channing, Henry Hedge, Lidian Emerson, and Waldo Emerson are to be
credited most for providing Fuller with conversation and dialogue on philosophical
concepts and contemporary social conditions. After five weeks of such exposure
to her peers in Concord, Fuller was freed, through her friendships. “For
Emerson, friendship becomes a process whose end is freedom.”
She returned to Cambridge
to rest, to assess her subject matter. She left Concord because the sense
of community there made her confident that she thought as well as her peers,
that she had her own perspective. She felt confident that she had advanced
beyond Emerson’s studied love of nature and his inability to go forth
and learn of the world.
She had advanced beyond Channing’s
capriciousness and artistic flaws beneath his conversational stance, advanced
beyond Hedge’s controlled transcendentalism and thoughts on reform. She
had interpreted Lidian Emerson’s shortcomings as representative of so
many women.
I suggest that the Concord
setting fulfilled its mission as household during Fuller’s initiation
into adulthood and that Fuller completed the creative cycle. Fuller had an
encounter by opening herself to influences, and she fed her encounter with
discourses and analyses and rhetorical dialogues. She found her subject matter
and so gained confidence in her ability as a writer. She then claimed her
own vision, as separate from her major influences. She rejected the community
setting, and acknowledging “my own path,” left the setting to return
to Cambridge for rest (rest serves to release the artist from intense efforts
and inhibitions, so the creative impulse can now fully and easily express
itself). In Cambridge she readied herself for the early draft of her artwork
("Lawsuit" which would become Woman).
Woman in the Nineteenth Century
Orestes Brownson, in his quarterly review in April, 1845, said that Woman
in the Nineteenth Century has “neither beginning, middle, nor end
and may be read backwards as well as forwards.” However, “Woman's
basic structure is that of a sermon which is appropriate, because its message
is hortatory.” Its ostensible formlessness and exhaustiveness are due
to its dual nature. Within the sermon framework or form (probably influenced
by the sermons of Hedge, the orations of Emerson), Woman includes the spiraling
and optimistic transcendentalist literary form (probably influenced by the
essays of Emerson and the poetry of Channing). Woman developed from
“Lawsuit,” but forty-nine pages of new material were added.
Woman's structural
framework reflects mostly the sermon or oration. Within the framework, Fuller
positions her ideas on liberating women … and men. Fuller begins her
work with the classic exordium. Using German and Latin quotations, and preliminary
conciliation, her proposition is not introduced until the tenth page …
woman needs her turn, improvement in woman's lot can aid in reformation of
men. Her sermon topic is announced: “Be ye perfect.” Having established
her thesis, she continues with partitio and presents her analysis in a debate
style: she raises men's popular arguments about women’s rights and then
rebuts them. To accentuate points, she employs her conversational questions-and-answers
approach.
In a digresio, Fuller presents
all that is known of woman and her story through myth, folklore, the Bible,
literature, history, and the social circumstances and environment of her own
time. She concedes that women have some power, but want freedom from men to
learn about the universe themselves. In the form of a reprehension she admonishes
men who refuse to grant women freedom, men who call strong women ‘manly,’
and women who misuse what power they have.
Woman next takes the
form of an applicatio in a departure from the main argument. She admonishes
women to save themselves in the present time, explore themselves, become self-reliant.
“In a peroration, Fuller outlines the major points of her argument and
of her vision of the harmonious world that an ideal man/woman relationship
would bring.” She addresses a prayer to God, prophesies a day of glory,
and admonishes to cherish hope and act. She closes with Biblical poetry, and
envisions (so shalt thou see what few have seen). When recognized and appreciated
as a sermon form, her work has thematic and structural soundness.
The transcendental influence
on Woman's form is detectable through the movement of her treatise
which is not parallel, but is soaring and circular. It is an unfolding from
the subconscious, “a form of spiraling” thought patterns. Another
of its transcendental qualities is the concept of the individual as the center
of the world and seeking enlargement in the universe. Fuller uses her own
experience and observations as representative of the experience of all women.
“And she begins her text with ‘we’ changes to ‘I’
after fifteen pages, and later reverts back and forth between ‘we’
and ‘I’.” This is a transcendentalist point-of-view technique.
Woman's tone is conversational.
The text questions and answers (like Emerson and Fuller, like Channing and
Fuller). It is sometimes dramatic with breathless phrases as though someone
is talking. “Her writing sounds as if she is talking to a small group
and studying the reaction of her audience.”
From her Concord influences,
Fuller received not only the seeds of the messages and ideas she set forth
in Woman, but also the seeds of the form her writing style took.
Analysis
Would Margaret Fuller’s writing have had the same impact had she not been led through the creative process by Emerson during her five-week stay in Concord in 1842? Margaret Fuller offers answers herself in her letters. In an August 25, 1842 letter, she writes to William Channing,
What did you mean by saying I had imbibed much of his [Emerson’s] way of thought? I do indeed feel his life stealing gradually into mine, and I sometimes think my work would have been more simple, my unfolding to a temporal activity more rapid and easy, if we had never met. But when I look forward to eternal growth, I am always aware that I am far larger and deeper for him ...
Emerson and Fuller often exchanged letters, room-to-room, to assist with their writing, during Fuller's Concord stays. In a September 1842 letter, she writes Emerson,
Yet I deeply wish to keep some record of these days; for if well done, though not as beautiful and grand, yet they would be as significant of the highest New England life in this era, as Plato's marvelous Dialogues were of the life of Attica, in his time.... Nor are ours inferior in quality to that. But, alas, I cannot reproduce this life, while I am in it...
From Cambridge, on October 16, 1842, Fuller writes Emerson:
I can hardly believe that it is a month this day since I passed a true Sabbath in reading your journals and Ellery's book, and talking with you in the study. I have not felt separated from you yet... I understand the leadings of your thoughts better and better, and I feel a conviction that I shall be worthy of this friendship.
I suggest that Margaret
Fuller’s 1842 stay with the Emersons was the climactic release in her
creative journey. In Concord, she adapted influence, learned that art is produced
through a balance of isolation and community, gained confidence as a writer,
acquired subject matter and writing style, and consummated the creative cycle
from encounter to breakthrough or first draft. Through her completion of these
five processes and through her subsequent fame for “Lawsuit”/Woman,
Fuller emerged as a commanding writer and as a representative intellectual
of the nineteenth century.
Margaret Fuller had freed
the artist within.
———————————
References
Principal Sources:
Fuller, Margaret. bMS Am 1086 Boxes 1-3, Miscellaneous: Fuller Papers, Book of Extracts, S.M.F. Ossoli. Cambridge: Houghton Library.
Fuller, Margaret. The Letters of Margaret Fuller. Ed. Robert N. Hudspeth. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1984.
Fuller, Margaret. Woman in the Nineteenth Century The Essential Margaret Fuller. Ed. Jeffrey Steele. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1992.
Dedmond, Francis B. "The Selected Letters of William Ellery Channing the Younger (Part One)." Studies in the American Renaissance (1989): 115-218.
Emerson, Waldo. Letters of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Ed. Ralph L. Rusk. New York: Columbia University Press, 1939.
May, Rollo. The Courage To Create. New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1975.
Other References:
Bloom, Harold. The Anxiety of Influence. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973.
Erikson, Erik H. The Life Cycle Completed. New York: W.W. Norton and Company, Inc., 1982.
Kalinevitch, Karen. "Emerson on Friendship: An Unpublished
Manuscript." Studies in
the American Renaissance (1988):253-270.
Litton, Alfred G. "The Development of the Mind and the Role of the Scholar in the Early Works of Frederic Henry Hedge." Studies in the American Renaissance (1989): 95-114.
Mc Kee, Kathryn B. "'A Fearful Price I Have Had To Pay for Loving Him': Ellery Channing's Troubled Relationship with Ralph Waldo Emerson." Studies in the American Renaissance (1994): 251-270.
Sealts, Merton M., Jr. "Mulberry Leaves and Satin: Emerson's Theory of the Creative Process." Studies in the American Renaissance (1985): 79-94.
Sebouhian, George. "A Dialogue with Death: An Examination of Emerson's 'Friendship.'" Studies in the American Renaissance (1989): 219-240.
Ueland, Brenda., If You Want to Write. Saint Paul: Graywolf Press, 1987.
Urbanski, Marie M.O. Margaret Fuller's "Woman in the Nineteenth Century." Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. 1980.
[Editor's Note: A fully annotated
version of this article is availabe in the PDF
edition of Critique.]
Allegra Wong has a BA in English Literature from Wheaton College (Norton), and has done extensive graduate work in English and American literature and language at Harvard University. Her poetry and prose have been published in numerous journals including The Montserrat Review, 3rd Bed, Modern Haiku, Brevity, The Paumanok Review, Writer Online, and Oyster Boy Review. She teaches at Writers On The Net, is creative writing moderator at SayStuff.com, lives in Boston, and has one son.
