From: The Woman and The Myth: Margaret Fuller’s Life & Writings (1994)
Author: Bell Gale Chevigny, Margaret Fuller
Published: Northeastern University Press 1976; 1994 Boston
FOREWORD TO THE REVISED EDITION
Surveying the work done on Margaret Fuller in the nearly twenty years since the first edition of The Woman and the Myth, I find that Fuller has acted as a catalyst for many of the new ways we are coming to think about both feminist issues and nineteenth-century American literature. Critics and scholars are reading Fuller in the light of a swiftly evolving body of theory about women’s writing, cultures, ideological formations, and subjectivities. Others find that her role in American intellectual history is reshaping our understanding of that history. She cuts a larger figure in studies of the Transcendentalists, who in tum are being read differently in her enlarged presence. We soon will have six volumes of her letters, with annotations that flesh out her world in meticulous detail. Fuller’s most important published work and many of her private journals have been made available in carefully annotated editions, and Fuller bibliographies emerge with increasing frequency.
Is this, then, the recognition Margaret Fuller craved? Is that fierce appetite, so alarming to many, sated at last? And can her revolutionary force—idiosyncratic, eclectic, mercurial—withstand respectability and the demands of a minor academic industry? What will become of her subversive energy? Fuller has come of age, and I fancy myself a friend of her youth. Fuller weighs more—and differently. So, it has been observed, does feminism. No one now imagines that one can read all the new work in feminist studies, but we could in the early 1970s. Hence it might be worthwhile to begin by tracing my evolving sense of Fuller from the time when she, I, and the body of feminist thought were all young. Then, to sketch the unfolding of recent work by others may suggest the vicissitudes of theory and of our perceptions of Fuller as well as the relations between the two. The selections of work by Fuller and her contemporaries in the Supplement to this edition represent my response to both the recovery of material and the new perspectives on Fuller.
In effect, I backed into Margaret Fuller. I encountered her first in the prehistory of my generation’s feminism—by preparing a student lecture on Hawthorne’s Blithedale Romance for Charles Feidelson’s graduate seminar at Yale in 1958. The novel’s conservative vision of utopian experiment, social reform, and feminism so meshed with the temper of the time that it was invisible to most of us, certainly to me. Typically for the time, I talked about the generic tension between romance and realism, the ambivalence of the unreliable narrator, and the ambiguous imagery. I introduced the novel’s female figures, Zenobia and Priscilla, only as they served these themes and mentioned that a slightly ridiculous Transcendentalist bluestocking named Margaret Fuller in some way influenced Hawthorne’s creation of these characters. The lecture was an unqualified success. As my failure to raise questions about Hawthorne’s conservatism or his women shows, I was so happily and unconsciously wed to the canon that I could not have engaged a debate about it had I heard one. But my experience of the civil rights movement began to change that, and by 1970 I was trying to stretch the nineteenth-century canon to include writing by blacks (all men) when someone asked, What about women? Some memory of Fuller drove me to read Joseph Jay Deiss’s The Roman Years of Margaret Fuller,1 which exposed me to a courageous, inquiring, sensual activist entirely unlike the caricature I’d read about.
Deiss’s book made me want to read everything I could about Fuller, and his quotation of unpublished letters drove me to the archives to examine her manuscripts—a mode of work I had imagined to be dry as dust. I cannot now conceive any other research that would have made me see as swiftly so many reasons why we needed feminism and what it might do for us. Everything drew and challenged me. Her enigmatic character: why was it so distorted and why were her papers so suppressed, so rashly revised, in the Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli by her great friends Emerson, Clarke, and Channing? Her thirst for knowledge and experience, her frustration with the confines of “masculine” and “feminine”: did they not challenge notions of gender identity then and even now? In Hawthorne’s Blithedale and in his Italian notebook (see VI:8 in this volume) I now saw fascinated attraction, fear, and hatred for Fuller: why? and what had made me so oblivious? Her passage from genre to genre-might this signal not dilettantism but curiosity and restlessness with available formal means? Most of all, her manuscript letters and journals in the archives of the Boston Public Library and the Houghton Library at Harvard propelled my interest to a new level.
The particularly shocking condition of her papers at the Boston Public Library—passages canceled with crayon, cut up with scissors—made me dream of making sense of them or matching them up with bits in other libraries. Many snippets there hinted at a crisis in 1840 in which failed love, grief, spiritual isolation, and anxiety about her vocation were mingled with residues of childish longing. One sign of crisis was her quarrel with Emerson over the meaning of friendship. Her desire to make that relationship carry more weight than it could bear seemed to me her first intimation, imperfectly interpreted by both, that she had to move out of his field of influence if she was to develop her unique gifts. She engaged her despair and emerged with independence enough for a striking series of moves—from the Conversations to exploration of the West, New York, and revolutionary Europe, which she wrote about with growing critical awareness. Her powers of self-invention and self-transformation were what most held me, and they still do.
I wrote an essay about this empowering crisis: “Growing Out of New England.” (See the Selected Bibliography for data on all texts cited.) In retrospect, my initial preoccupation with Fuller’s move beyond Emerson and the culture of Massachusetts seems part of my related need to work through my own uncritical privileging of the canon of male writers. In a 1973 journal of my own I find that the sight of Emerson’s name in the library’s mosaic vault after a day’s work on her ravaged papers made me so angry that I felt I had to wait two weeks to cool off before permitting myself to write. Probably I held back because I knew Fuller would have wanted no revenge; her regard for Emerson was lifelong, and he figured as interlocutor in her writing long after his influence had waned. In delaying I was also, I think now, imitating Fuller, who, pursuing just estimates, honored the work of time. In the end, my essay developed an insight of Emerson’s: “this athletic soul craved an atmosphere larger than it found.”
While writing the essay, I longed to make more of Fuller’s writing available. The newly launched Feminist Press encouraged me to select texts and manuscripts for an anthology. Setting to work, I felt the materials I wanted to present demanded a special format. Fuller’s writing was unusually bound up with her other activities, each driving the other—the Conversations led to Woman in the Nineteenth Century, for instance; Summer on the Lakes, in 1843 inspired more travel. Poe remarked shrewdly: “Her acts are bookish, and her books are less thoughts than acts” (III:3b). Lacking social and literary precedents, Fuller conducted both life and work as experiments in pursuit of forms not yet articulated. To live deliberately, to invent one’s biography-these were, of course, Transcendentalist aspirations, but no one else carried them, literally and figuratively, so far as she. Her remarkable self-consciousness, her passion to analyze and learn from setbacks often in vividly feminist terms, the cumulative use she made of her experience, and her participation in shaping her fate all seemed in the historical moment of incipient feminism stunning and invaluable finds. Besides, in the early 1970s, essays like Tillie Olsen’s on Rebecca Harding Davis2 taught us to attend to the life stories of women writers and to interpret frustration and failure as well as accomplishment.
To write about Fuller’s life and work was enough for a feast. But there was more, and Fuller’s famous appetite for more of everything was contagious. By the middle of the nineteenth century, she was probably the most written-about woman in the United States. Fuller’s originality stimulated, challenged, or threatened those who knew her to produce lively, various writing. Their texts make incomparably vivid her social and ideological context and exhibit the attitudes with which she had to contend. How to incorporate this irresistible material? The book I felt she needed seemed to defy linear presentation until I hit upon a form dictated by her unique career: identifying her experimental self-definitions and addressing each in tum with three kinds of writing: her own, her contemporaries’ response, and my reading of the unfolding life and text. In a later era, the book might have been subtitled Life, Writings, and Reception.
To convey something of the atmosphere and objectives of feminist study in those days, I like to recall the euphoric day when Liana Borghi, a scholar just arrived from Italy, approached me in the nearly empty Houghton Library at Harvard to ask when I’d be done with volume 9 of Fuller’s letters. Soon we were feasting, lunchless, on scraps of her writing, straining to identify a person named or decipher the “cross-writing” by which she continued communicating after she had run out of paper. When I told Borghi I had found in an 1845 Tribune piece (see p. 294) what might be the earliest mention in the United States of Marx and Engels, she wondered if there had been further contact in Europe and offered to research the matter when she returned. At that time, many of us were eager to find feminism consonant with the pursuit of social-especially racial-justice, anti-imperialism, and socialism. Some of us formed Marxist-feminist groups in which we worried what we called “the problem of the hyphen” (the elusive relation between the two).3 Most of us were less concerned to ensure that feminism met Marxist standards than to find ways feminism might supply the deficiencies of Marxism. Although Borghi and I found no evidence that Fuller knew more of Marx or Engels, the uncovering of her eclectic socialism, critical of family and sexual as well as economic relations, was provocative.
While much has been gained since 1976 by the growth of women’s studies, the academic embrace of feminism, and cumulative theoretical developments, our initial conception of feminism as linking research and fresh analysis with activism often seems to have been diluted. The second wave of feminism began with a commitment to action that Fuller seemed to have shared. My excitement about Fuller—a female intellectual in quest of an active and ever more comprehensive life—and her leaps in social consciousness reflect our desire for such achievements at that time and our belief in their possibility. My account of her problem of identity and vocation and of her experimental resolutions remains useful, I believe, especially as the book’s open form and its display of conflicting views encourage, perhaps require, the reader to construct her own sense of Fuller. Rereading the same material myself, I am sometimes now struck by what is lost in Fuller’s progress and by Fuller’s resistance, until her exhausting final years, to any kind of closure, and by the way her writings selected here so anticipate the social construction of gender theory and poststructuralist feminist criticism developing after 1976 that she seems more contemporary every year.
Reacting against Fuller’s reputation for freakishness and moved by women’s discoveries of common ground in the early days of the movement, I granted in 1976 that her accomplishments were extraordinary, but wondered whether her restlessness, ambitions, and frustrations were not paradigmatic for educated U.S. women of her class. The flourishing study since then of nineteenth-century women can help us to address that question and also to identify more sharply the crosscurrents and cultural pressures on Fuller that made her expression seem at times contradictory. In part IV I sketchily located Fuller between Catharine Beecher and the Grimke sisters. With ongoing analyses of the literature of domesticity and the culture of sentiment and with emerging close studies of female activists, we can now position her various achievements in finer detail.4
After completing my book, I addressed the issue of censorship that had originally galvanized me. In an essay for Signs I examined the paradox of protection enacted as damage and distortion. Her death’s closing of the scandalous final chapter of her life obliged Fuller’s family and friends to find a way to mourn and honor, even if they had to invent, her. I analyzed the omissions and even additions to her papers made by men she most trusted, cavalier in all senses of the word: gallant, offhand, disdainful. Even recent biographies that celebrate her emancipated sexual attitudes and behavior in Europe turned away from patent evidence of her energetic interest in another man after meeting Ossoli (VI:11). My own shock when I uncovered the evidence helped me understand the temptations of editors.
In the next few years, something like a paradigm shift occurred in our understanding of gender. Nancy Chodorow’s Reproduction of Mothering, published in 1978, provided a feminist reading of the mother-child bond in the pre-oedipal period. Chodorow’s analysis of women’s ensuing experience of relatively greater ease in relatedness and difficulty with autonomy freed us to think more analytically about the relations between women, their psychological roots, and sociocultural effects.5
In the same years I was haunted by two problems that I thought unrelated. One was a contradictory version of the author’s postpartum malaise. I feared that, in my passion to rescue Fuller from past distortions and despite my commitment to letting her speak for herself, I might have done her new damage by bringing her back to satisfy needs of my own, as some of her friends had so disturbingly done. Might not feminist biographers produce fresh distortion by projecting our actual, latent, or ideal experience onto our subjects? The other problem was my enduring perplexity over Fuller’s manuscript fiction (I:6), in which she casts herself as a boy and describes a fictional, early death of her mother. I did not believe that my sociopsychological reading of it (21-22) exhausted its meaning. Chodorow’s work made me wonder about Fuller’s bond with her mother, Margarett, by whose name nine-year-old Fuller chose to be called (I:7). Returning to the manuscript collections, I found that as a child Fuller longed to be closer to her mother; their bond grew stronger after Timothy’s death and more intense after Fuller disclosed that she too was a mother.
Among Chodorow’s sources, Melanie Klein’s theory of reparation and D. W. Winnicott’s notion of maternal mirroring helped me see that my two riddles—authorial anxiety and Fuller’s fiction—were interlinked, each holding the key to the other. Thus, in “Daughters Writing: Toward a Theory of Women’s Biography” I argued that Fuller’s manuscript fiction bespoke both her thwarted desire for a maternal presence to sanction the anomalous person she was becoming and a reparative fantasy in which she saved her mother and made her a freer woman. Likewise, we writing daughters of mothers who did not articulate aspirations for autonomy might be tempted to similar reparative ventures, by writing of a foremother to create our own mirroring sanctions and precedents. More broadly, I speculated that women writing about women are likely to be drawn to a subject who symbolically reflects their internalized relations with their mothers and offers them an opportunity to re-create those relations.6 The feminist biographer, I concluded, need not fear distortion in using her intuitive understanding of her subject if she sought also to historicize the differences between her situation and her subject’s; as much as possible, she should seek to come to terms with her own biographical stake in her task. My stake, I realized, drew me more to the writerly and activist Fuller than to the woman who in some periods withdrew to seek mystical unity.
The reparative urgency of Fuller’s manuscript fiction shed new light, I argued in the same essay, on Fuller’s feminism. It informed her effort in the Conversations “to shape women who would understand and share her goals and consequently make them less idiosyncratic. In this reciprocal process, her own ‘shape’ was more securely defined at the same time as the meaning of nurturing roles—mother and mentor—was defined as subtly mutual.” When in Woman in the Nineteenth Century she asserts that “there is no wholly masculine man, no purely feminine woman,” I suggested, she was imagining into being “persons not denied half their nature as she thought her parents were.” Further, she drew attention to the ways gender roles were reversed in her relation with Ossoli, and each recovered a lost maternal tenderness in the other. At the same time, her eagerness to ensure both his freedom and her own sketched a repaired notion of relations between women and men. In “Daughters Writing” I also noted Fuller’s passion for autobiographical rewriting, a theme worth exploiting.7
Still later, new theories about ideology led me to examine her development from another angle. In “To the Edges of Ideology: Margaret Fuller’s Centrifugal Evolution” I read the difference between two radically different texts of Fuller’s-on the Dorr rebellion (V:6) and on the assassination of Rossi (VI:34)-as marking her ideological move to the border of the system in which she was formed. In the period of her youth, American women lived at the crossroads of two ideological constructs. One, founded in faith in individualism and the nation’s unique destiny, posited the classlessness of American society; the other posited the distinct nature of women, which permitted their subjugation. The ideology of gender concealed its basis in social inequality and contradicted the ideology of class even as it was used to support it. For only by insisting on their essential differences in gender could men pursue supposedly universal values of economic freedom and individual development. I argued that we may read Fuller’s actual texts (private and published), her consciousness (what she calls “the text of my inward life”), and the “text” offered by the shape of her life as progressively contributing to the deconstruction of these ideological systems. Further, I showed how these systems were variously reinscribed after her death in the Memoirs, Hawthorne’s Blithedale Romance and Marble Faun, and James’s Portrait of a Lady and The Bostonians, texts that draw on and contribute to the “myth” of Fuller. Finally, knowing the “text” of Fuller’s life enables us more sharply to reread these rewritings and generally to interrogate the canon of American studies. I was at last prepared to give a lecture on The Blithedale Romance that reflected my reeducation by Margaret Fuller.
Since the first publication of The Woman and the Myth, in 1976, bibliographical, biographical, and critical work on Fuller has proliferated, facilitated and deepened by the ongoing recovery of the Fuller canon and the publication of reliable editions. In what follows, I describe aspects of the new work that I find most useful or stimulating. The Selected Bibliography provides full data on all texts cited.
The Fuller Canon. Robert Hudspeth’s labor of finding, deciphering, mending, ordering, and annotating the dismembered and scattered body of Fuller’s correspondence is heroic. While the landscape of Fuller’s own life had been mapped long since, Hudspeth’s six volumes of richly annotated letters have in effect laid down the roads and postal routes and populated cities and hamlets with Fuller’s friends and acquaintance, conferring on each a capsule history. We can appreciate as never before Fuller’s extraordinary range of relationships and epistolary styles. Also important is Joel Myerson’s work in compiling Fuller bibliographies and bringing into print authoritative editions of important works. Further works identified and published with annotations or commentary are three important journals by Hudspeth, Robert Habich, and Alice Perry with Martha Berg, Tribune dispatches from Europe by Larry Reynolds and Susan Belasco Smith, a story and a significant body of verse by Jeffrey Steele, and two early talks by Tess Hoffman. More, including editions by Perry and Berg of the Fruitlands fragments of the 1844 journal and by Robert Hudspeth of the recently found story “Lost and Won,” are in progress.
Biographical. The first edition of The Woman and the Myth was not alone in turning the energies and outlooks of 1970s feminism to Fuller. Published in the next three years, three independently written works participated in the excitement of recognizing Fuller through our fresh consciousness of gender. Ann Douglas’s thesis that “Fuller’s life can be viewed as an effort to find what she called her ‘sovereign self by disavowing fiction for history, the realm of ‘feminine’ fantasy for ‘masculine’ reality” (262), provides a forceful early articulation of the relation between genre and gender, so fruitful for feminist literary theory. And the title of Paula Blanchard’s 1978 biography, which became the standard, speaks for her related perspective: Margaret Fuller: From Transcendentalism to Revolution. Margaret Allen’s study situates Fuller in intellectual history, showing how her humanism balanced the diverse influences of Emerson and Goethe, and examines her eclectic literary criticism and commentary on the arts, her social thought, and her feminism. The 1980s produced Elizabeth Hardwick’s biographical essay and David Watson’s short biography, which assesses the new feminist readings of Fuller.
In 1992 Charles Capper’s publication of the first of two volumes of Margaret Fuller: An American Romantic Life eclipsed all previous Fuller biographies in comprehensiveness and depth. Volume 1, The Private Years, closes with publication of the first issue of The Dial, a turning point in what Capper sees as “the great moral drama of her life,” her sudden movement to the life of the “public” personage of “America’s female intellectual prophet” in the mode of Carlyle and Emerson. Capper’s attention to the interconnections of gender, intellectual culture, and the avant-garde is backed by meticulous examination of every aspect of her milieu. His immersion in the classical, republican, romantic, and transcendental thought that influenced hers enables him to do full justice to the nuances of her evolving aesthetic commitments and her religious, philosophical, and political thought. Availing himself of Hudspeth’s work and many more primary sources, Capper uses the language of Fuller and her peers to weave a contextual web around the thorniest of emotional issues and to render complex judgment. He provides persuasive assessments of Fuller’s problematic relations to her parents and to her intimate friends and discovers persistent patterns. Thanks to Hudspeth and Capper, we have broader access to Fuller’s universe and can better measure her historical significance, and the work of future scholars is incalculably enhanced.
To pursue Fuller during the heyday of Transcendentalism (1839-44) we can read Myerson on her work with The Dial and on Carolyn Dall’s recollections of her, Anne Rose on religious and feminist aspects of the movement, David Robinson on how Woman represents an outgrowth rather than a rejection of Bostonian self-culture, and Capper’s essay on Fuller’s Conversations. Fuller’s deliberate experiments in pedagogy are examined in studies by Judith Albert, Laraine Fergenson, and Frank Shuffleton. In Literary Democracy Larzer Ziff places Fuller at the center of his Tocquevillean analysis of women’s discontent. Sparked by Henry James, Albert Von Frank views her ambition and energy as a function of provinciality and the frontier mentality. Madeleine Stem traces her relation to the “phrenologist publishers” from Providence to New York.
Influences and Significant Relationships. The extent of Fuller’s influence keeps unfolding, partly through the efforts of Myerson, who has created secondary bibliographies on Fuller and a habitat for new work on her and her contemporaries in his annual (since 1977) Studies in the American Renaissance. Some influences are indirect: Christina Zwarg argues that Edith Wharton’s story “The Touchstone” flowed from the scandal surrounding the publication of Fuller’s love letters to James Nathan, and Barton Levi St. Armand demonstrates in “Veiled Ladies” that Fuller’s translation of Bettina Brentano von Arnim’s Die Günderode was used as the basis of a “code” between Emily Dickinson and her beloved sister-in-law Susan.8 Blanchard’s essay linking Fuller to de Stael, Nancy Theriot’s comparison of her to Wollstonecraft, and David Reynolds’s assessment of her relation to Catherine Maria Sedgwick and writers in The Una begin to address the need to situate Fuller among contemporary women writers and thinkers. Leaping beyond Fuller’s era, Elaine Showalter, in Sister’s Choice, observes that Fuller’s Miranda has been as useful to American women writers—such as Stowe, Alcott, Porter, Plath, and Naylor—as Caliban to Third World male intellectuals. She hints at a Dark Lady legacy passing from Fuller through Mary McCarthy to Susan Sontag, and Sontag has borne her out by putting Fuller in a play.
George Dimock has written on Fuller’s gifted lifelong friend Caroline Sturgis, and Francis Dedmond has published and annotated her letters to Fuller. Fuller’s relation to Hawthorne continues to generate critical heat. Discussing Fuller’s 1844 stay in Concord, Edwin Miller’s Salem Is My Dwelling Place: A Life of Nathaniel Hawthorne improvises on the evidence in the manner of the late Hawthorne: “Her greed, as Carlyle noted, was insatiable, but she trifled with three married men.”9 Hawthorne scholars like Walter Herbert and Joel Pfister, who employ feminist research to examine the psychic turmoil concealed in the domestic ideal, meet better the critical challenge Fuller posed their subject. In a forthcoming essay Thomas Mitchell argues that in 1884 Julian Hawthorne’s publication and defense of his father’s 1858 attack on Fuller (VI:8) effectively drove Fuller out of print and out of the canon. The more interesting of critics concerned with Hawthorne’s fictionalizations of Fuller are Pfister and John Paul Eakin (who looks at James’s fiction too).
But Fuller’s most written-about relationship is with Emerson. Margaret Allen’s balanced account remains valuable. Eleanor Tilton seeks to expose the illusions of both about their importance to Sam Ward and Anna Barker and to right the record on the latter pair. Dorothy Berkson, adding Caroline Sturgis to these figures, discusses a “five-way erotic relationship” and the gendering of their debate on friendship. Some critics use Fuller’s work to illuminate Emerson. John McAleer finds her 1842 journal on the month she lived as a member of the Emerson family (II:27, 28) “a minor miracle,” taking us “ deeper into his psyche than anyone else ever was able to penetrate” (407-08). George Sebouhian asserts that her letters offer our best evidence of Emerson’s large emotional range. Judith Bean details Fuller’s impact on Emerson in three stages: protégée, equal and teacher in the art of friendship, and cowriter and editor of The Dial. The most arresting account is Christina Zwarg’s forthcoming Feminist Conversations: Fuller, Emerson, and the Task of Reading. Charles Fourier’s thought is seen as the chief conversation piece between them and a key, along with Fuller’s influence, to what is most subversive and experimental in Emerson’s work. In Zwarg’s refreshing version of Fuller’s and Emerson’s tension, he, not she, took too personally their philosophical discussions about Fourier and marriage. Zwarg’s assertions that Emerson’s letters to Fuller are among his most interesting documents and that Fuller’s presence is palpable in his major essays persuade this reader more than her claims for Emerson’s feminist disposition.
Criticism and Theory. To speak of the literary genius of figures like Fuller, critics have had to mount a range of questions unimaginable under the sway of the New Criticism. As more forces than can be summarized here played a role, I will simply point to critical and theoretical trends that Fuller has fed and that have brought us closer to her.
In the 1970s the feminist exploration of noncanonical genres to uncover women’s forgotten history coincided with the need of scholars of Transcendentalism to move past narrowly defined generic studies to define the forms peculiar to midcentury writers. Lawrence Buell, attending to the role of sermon and Transcendentalist conversation in the art of the period, signals Fuller’s leadership in the latter.10 Drawing on features of the sermon and conversation, Marie Olesen Urbanski also details Fuller’s use of aphorism, allusion, and catalog in a thorough formal analysis of Woman in the Nineteenth Century.
In the 1980s deconstructionist appropriations of theorists like Mikhail Bakhtin pointed the way to new conceptions of genre and voice, and reader-response theory suggested ways of dealing with more eclectic form. Thus Stephen Adams shows how the fragmentary structure of Summer on the Lakes calls forth the reader’s creative collaboration, while William Stowe delineates in this text a nonhierarchical polyvocal discourse.
Adapting the new historicist project of placing canonical works in a broad historical context, Larry Reynolds, in his important book European Revolutions and the American Literary Renaissance, scrutinizes the response of major writers to the European revolutions of 1848. His discovery of conservatism in all the major writers, Fuller dramatically excepted, establishes more richly the value of Fuller’s New-York Tribune writings. With Susan Smith, Reynolds has brought out These Sad But Glorious Days, an annotated edition of all her European dispatches as they appeared in the Tribune, including several omitted in Arthur Fuller’s edition, which Reynolds and Myerson tracked down. In a valuable introduction Smith and Reynolds call the dispatches Fuller’s “finest achievement.” They clarify her relation with the Tribune, trace transcendental and democratic ideas in her dispatches, examine their form and art, and assess her historical judgments. Drawing on Hayden White, they map Fuller’s literary mode of historical emplotment as it advances from romance to historical tragedy. In a recent essay Smith locates Summer on the Lakes in the “paper war” over national superiority fought between British and American writers in the first half of the century. She shows Fuller negotiating a position between the British materialist view and the Transcendentalist idealist one.
Among feminist studies, Annette Kolodny’s influential account of pioneering women’s experience of the land includes an interesting reading of Summer on the Lakes. She argues that Fuller’s exhilaration on the western prairies reflects the consolation she experienced in her mother’s garden in Cambridge; when Fuller observed that women were effectively closed out of this new Elysium, her feminist insights were sharpened. Susan Rosowski reads this text as engendered travel writing, but finds Fuller more hopeful about women in the West. Charlene Avallone reads Fuller’s discussion of Native Americans against those of Anna Jameson and Lydia Maria Child and, drawing on Paula Gunn Allen’s work, argues that Native American culture influenced her feminist thought, especially its freedom from gender essentialism and racial hierarchy. Turning to Tribune pieces written in New York, Paula Kopacz exhibits Fuller’s feminism in style, work circumstances, subjects addressed, and uses of indirection.
Jeffrey Steele’s archetypal, at times almost Jungian, approach to Fuller marks a fresh departure. His extensive and original work on Fuller begins with his contention in The Representation of the Self in the American Renaissance that her spiritual crisis of 1840 taught Fuller to look for a feminine God within. She freed herself from patriarchal assumptions by developing a mythology centering on female figures who, in virginal retreat from heterosexual society, are reborn as self-sufficient beings. Building on Robert Richardson’s study of Fuller and myth, Steele shows how she reinterpreted Diana, Isis, Ceres, and Persephone. In a later essay, Steele analyzes her mourning as a dual process of distancing herself from grief for her father and coming to lament “for the Mother within herself” (286). Finally, Steele’s valuable study of Fuller’s poetry, the best of it in manuscript and until now neglected by critics, climaxes with the thirty-eight poems of 1844, which he sees as documenting her progress through a series of mythic and psychological encounters. Introducing his 1992 anthology, Steele argues that throughout her life grief liberated Fuller’s insight and generated a mystical, mythological, and maternal language, presaging the theory of Helene Cixous and Julia Kristeva.
The difference between Steele’s approach—situating Fuller in a gynocentric culture—and that of most of us writing on Fuller in the 1970s hints at the abundance of resources in Fuller for current feminist inquiry. Broadly speaking, we were “political” feminists, more committed to equality than difference, while Steele develops Fuller from the contrasting perspective of “cultural” feminists. Of course, no reader of Fuller on Muse and Minerva can miss her embrace of the claims of equality and difference (see 264 within). Moreover, as Nancy Cott has shown, the dialogue between these claims resounds throughout the history of the women’s movement. Even before attending Fuller’s Conversations, at thirteen and fifteen years of age, Ednah Dow Cheney and Caroline Healey Dall debated the question, and Fuller’s influence deepened the commitment of each to her different view.11
Critics read Fuller’s straddling of this and other issues either as evidence of her contradiction or as a stimulus to advance theory. In “Miranda and Cassandra,” an essay that opens with Florence Nightingale’s dislike of Fuller in 1847, Showalter does both; she finds the feminist tracts of the two women divided between “internalization of patriarchal rhetorical forms” and the “need to articulate a feminist subjectivity” (320). Other writers—Zwarg, Julie Ellison, and Mary Wood—find Fuller generating theoretical initiatives that address feminists’ current debates with poststructuralism.
Unlike Steele, who locates Fuller in a female culture, Zwarg suggests that Fuller, who never accepted her position outside the canon, demands a different account from those who did. Identifying critique as Fuller’s favored literary mode, Zwarg finds that Fuller’s “radical theory of reading” foreshadows Gayatri Spivak’s and Alice Jardine’s call for feminists to engage the theoretical challenges of deconstruction. Advancing the notion that the subject of an ideological moment may become provisionally the agent of it, Zwarg illuminates the workings of apparently divergent positions in Woman and in Tribune pieces written in New York. Fuller’s focus on gender disrupts ideological assumptions, making reading a transformative social experience. In a ground-breaking chapter on translation, Zwarg makes a case for its emancipatory potential and shows Fuller using it to discover and deploy ideas essential to her work. Thus, in her translations of Goethe’s Torquato Tasso and Bettina Brentano’s epistolary novel Die Günderode, Fuller highlights conversational models of community marked by suspension of control and mastery by participants.
In “Margaret Fuller and Lesbianism in Nineteenth-Century American Literature,” Wood challenges Foucault’s claim that lesbian identity (as contrasted to lesbian behavior) emerged only with sexologists’ definitions in the 1880s and 1890s. She proposes that texts like Fuller’s be located on a “continuum along which notions of deviant behavior and identity changed shape” (3). Wood finds Fuller vacillating in her letters to Sturgis, her writings on Sand, and Woman between questioning and reinscribing the gender difference at the core of heterosexual ideology. If heterosexual male desire controls narrative in Western literature, as Teresa de Lauretis maintains, Wood finds Fuller deconstructing gendered narrativity by mixing male with female writing and exposing voices as constructed and interchangeable positions.
In Delicate Subjects: Romanticism, Gender, and the Ethics of Understanding, Julie Ellison looks at the function of gender in the ethical, interpretive discourse of Coleridge, Schleiermacher, and Fuller. German romanticism offered Fuller “a potential vocation or identity-as the career of ‘Critic’” (xii), Ellison argues. She stresses the continuity of Fuller’s work within a rich and self-critical romantic tradition.12 Moreover, she finds Fuller’s lifelong sense of the “revisionary critical and social possibilities” of the romantic subject is consistent with contemporary feminists’ concern with the “theoretical relationship between ideology and subjectivity” (225). In the Conversations the women’s communication is perfected when idealism is made equivalent to subjectivity and visionary insight is prompted in each by the need of the other.
Especially stimulating is Ellison’s discussion of Fuller’s theatrical, performative dimension, so vivid a feature of her work. Ellison shows how Fuller’s letter to Almira Barlow (II:8), parodying sentimental literature, dramatizes Fuller’s resistance to conventional gender roles. “Mariana” (II:7) demonstrates that female genius, without recourse to “argument or intellectual aggression,” operates desperately “through the codes of behavior” (232). And in the Conversations Fuller verifies “the mind’s own voice” (238) and transforms herself into “a ‘figure,’ a metaphor,” interpreting for the women aspects of themselves (241). Ellison also offers a fresh and compelling reading of Woman.
We may have only begun to tap the uses of Fuller’s writing for feminist and literary inquiry. Wherever our questioning takes us, Fuller, desiring so much thought and experience, venturing so daringly, linking up so many realms of feeling and discourse, confronting her failures and starting afresh, will be already there, living it out.
Necessarily, some of Fuller’s subversive edge is lost with her gain of academic respectability. But she has won her place on our shelves because the library itself, the reasons we enter it, and what we do there have all been altered, partly through her insistent agency. Reading the strong new work on her has been powerfully moving, each extensive reading bringing her to independent life and verifying the myriad ways she belongs to our moment. Of course, the woman who said “I need to be recognized” would have welcomed our attention—especially, I like to believe, when it partakes of her own restless spirit in wishing to pass “every 7 days from one region to the other . . . weary of packing her trunk,” yet blessing the circumstance.13
Ellison’s attention to Fuller’s theatricality, Steele’s to her mysticism, Zwarg’s to her Günderode, Wood’s to her unsettling of gender assumptions, and Perry and Berg’s to her friendships in the 1844 journal may be combined to suggest new perspectives on Fuller worth pursuing. For Fuller theatricality was not only a resource for resistant female expression and communion with other women, but heuristic, a means of finding out who she was or might be. Her exaggerated behavior and diction are not so much affected or unnatural as they are performative, experimental rehearsals of the authentic. When Ellery Channing challenges her for being “artificial,” he notes that she is “disciplined” and “too ideal”; that is, Fuller’s “unnaturalness” is deliberate behavior in aid of her idealism. She asks herself, “Was thy wish sincere? If so thou canst not stray from nature, nor be so perverted but she will make thee true again” (II:13).
“Nature” here is what one must “act out,” in Fuller’s wonderful phrase-though few have the courage to do so. Fuller judged that George Sand did; she “needs no defence . . . for she has bravely acted out her nature” (V:23). Of herself, in relation to Ossoli, she wrote, “for bad or for good, I acted out my character” (VI:48). “Acting out” is a release from repression and a deliberate creative act. Nature and character are both given and made through desiring and defiant performances. Fuller’s performances of her “problem” of gender identification were endeavors to resolve her problem, to escape it, or to throw it in the face of the public—or perhaps all at once. In short, Fuller often made her own kind of “gender trouble”—in Judith Butler’s arresting phrase—to disrupt the social notion and expose the construction of gender by performing gender “badly,” through exaggeration and contradiction.14 While Fuller never questions the reality of the soul, she seems to believe there is enough fluidity and play in gender attributes for choice to be exercised significantly. Thus in Woman, although she believes receptive Muse is “more native” to women, she “calls” them to the intellectually active “Minerva side.” It is stunningly appropriate that in a Tribune piece, “Items of Foreign Gossip,” she reported on three successful performances of cross-dressing, culled from her reading.15 Her powerful recognition, face to face, of George Sand—a woman whom Flaubert hailed, “Oh you, of the third sex,” who shared theatricality and social defiance with Fuller—underscores my point; Sand became the only woman Fuller acknowledged, belatedly, indirectly, but tellingly, as a model.
If Fuller performed gender, so might she be said to perform friendship and to “perform mysticism,” as Ellison put it.16 Fuller’s approach to occult knowledge was experimental or interrogative; as with gender, she pressed the limits. She was uncommonly open to the untested, game to enter the theaters of animal magnetism, séances, and phrenology. While some of her mystical experiences were solitary (III:6), others were shared with friends in the moment or through letters, and Fuller’s language often becomes erotically charged, or histrionic, or both. Again, the fervor may be seen as heuristic. If Fuller’s love for Anna Barker was “a key” that unlocked “many a treasure” and the carbuncle “which cast light into many of the darkest caverns of human nature” (II:16), might she not have courted passion, in herself and others, as a conduit to revelation? How to read Fuller’s passionate utterances to and about women remains a question. While it is impossible to know conclusively the nature of her intimacies, we can ask what her words may have meant. In this volume I have suggested that German romanticism and the cult of true womanhood together influenced “ an elaborate system of permitted passion” (71) for Fuller and her friends. In her ampler “psychosocial” inquiry into the history of feeling through study of women’s passionate correspondence in the middle nineteenth century, Carroll Smith-Rosenberg concludes that the period was a “cultural environment” that permitted women “freedom in moving across [the] spectrum” between “committed heterosexuality” and “uncompromising homosexuality.”17 Yet Fuller’s language to Barker and Sturgis limns intensities relatively absent in Smith-Rosenberg’s display of homosocial sentiment and rarely sounded even in Lillian Faderman’s extensive account of romantic friendships.18
We might fruitfully locate Fuller’s singular performances of gender, mysticism, female friendship and eroticism in a social and political context; her search for utopian community and for power and influence in it crested in her last New England years, 1839-44, rarely to emerge afterward. In her brief but striking account, Anne Rose reads Fuller’s need to command Sturgis’s friendship and to secure her circle of friends as bound up with establishing her base in the Transcendentalist movement. For Rose, Fuller’s 1840 “conversion” helped her to link sisterhood to feminism. I would add that the friendships Fuller cultivated link up her mystical, social, and literary experiments. Her essay on Günderode shows how this strain of German romanticism vindicated her aspirations for female friendship. In Günderode’s relation to Bettina, Fuller read an ideal mentorship that reconciled exclusive understanding with autonomous growth and intense feeling with intellectual dispute.19 Fuller suggests that relations between men and women cannot be expected to reach these heights. In the segment of Brentano’s Die Günderode that she translated, each woman’s frank confession of jealousy, openly confronted, deepened their powers of understanding. Taken seriously and cultivated, then, female friendship could literally become the staging ground of philosophical inquiry, of religious experience, prophecy, and even utopian community.
All but the last of my selections in “Fuller’s Writings” in the Supplement are designed to illuminate these questions. As most of them might have appeared interchangeably under the heads of “The Friend,” “The Transcendentalist,” or “The Feminist,” they suggest linkages between those states of being—and to mysticism and eroticism as well. “Lillo” (VII:9) sketches a project of autobiographical cross-dressing. As “A Woman of Genius” (VII: 10) she translates what she loses as a woman into gain. Transgressive female intellectuality produces a nightmare that only a dream of female rescue can relieve (VII:11). Yet actually dreaming in bed with Anna could produce visions of treachery and isolation (VII:15). The need to secure Caroline’s intimacy both for its intrinsic solace and for shared visionary adventures emerges in letters (VII: 12, 13) and journals (VII:16). The exemplary communion of Günderode and Bettina and their desire to use writing to foster Muse (VII: 14) stand as the original into which Fuller seeks to translate her relationships, with some men as well as women. Thus the 1844 journals (VII: 16) chart a host of friendships that feed understanding,20 mystical experiences shared with Sturgis, and Fuller’s struggle to master painful feelings by turning “all to Muse.” That is to say, she seeks to dominate the power of the past over the present through efforts of will, mystical experiment, and the discipline and release of writing—ultimately to find emotional, imaginative strength to move to a new scene. The first portion of these journals has never before been published.
The Supplement’s “Contemporaries on Fuller” section emphasizes the diverse assessments of Fuller by her female peers Catherine Maria Sedgwick, Lydia Maria Child, Caroline Healey Dall, and George Eliot. Brownson’s, Poe’s, and Whitman’s responses to her myriad provocation enlarge our sense of her dynamic reception.
The final entry (VII:17), from Fuller’s recovered last Tribune dispatches, brings the political dimension of Fuller I was developing in the 1976 edition to more dazzling closure. The spiritual longings and the personal discipline of converting loss into gain that we saw in her New England writing are here transformed into fervent political prophecy.
Notes
1. New York: Crowell, 1969.
2. Rebecca Harding Davis, Life in the Iron Mills, ed. Tillie Olsen (New York: Feminist Press, 1972).
3. See Rosalind Petchesky, “Dissolving the Hyphen: A Report on Marxist-Feminist Groups 1-5,” in Zillah Eisenstein, Capitalist Patriarchy and the Case for Socialist Feminism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1979).
4. Among recent treatments of literary domesticity, outstanding are Mary Kelley, Private Woman, Public Stage: Literary Domesticity in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984); Lora Romero, “Domesticity and Fiction,” in The Columbia History of the American Novel, ed. Emory Elliott (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991); and Shirley Samuels, ed., The Culture of Sentiment: Race, Gender, and Sentimentality (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992). Recent materials on women activists include Ellen DuBois, ed., Elizabeth Cady Stanton–Susan B. Anthony Reader (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1992); Lois Banner, Elizabeth Cady-Stanton: A Radical for Woman’s Rights (New Brunswick, NJ.: Rutgers University Press, 1987); Kathleen Barry, Susan B. Anthony: A Biography of a Singular Feminist (New York: New York University Press, 1988); Celia Morris Eckhardt, Fanny Wright: A Rebel in America (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984); Dorothy Sterling, Ahead of Her Time: Abby Kelley and the Politics of Antislavery (New York: Norton, 1991); and Larry Ceplair, ed., In the Public Years of Sarah and Angelina Grimké: Selected Writings, 1835-39 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989).
5. Nancy Chodorow, The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1978).
6. Confirming my hypothesis, a number of biographers whose engagements with their subjects vary greatly in nature have since informed me that their engagements are critically bound up with their feelings about their mothers.
7. In Writing a Woman’s Life (New York: Norton, 1988), Carolyn Heilbrun discusses the ways in which a woman may write her own biography. Fuller’s uncommon self-consciousness about her “story,” her retellings of her life, her deployment of heroic, sentimental, pathetic, and tragic discourses, her sensitivity to its many stages, turning points, and anniversaries, and her alternating repudiation and appropriation of existing narratives for women—all these suggest that her complex relation to her biography might provide an unusually fruitful field of study.
8. Studies in the American Renaissance 1987, p. 11; Bettina’s relation to Goethe is shown to provide a myth that suffused Higginson’s view of Dickinson, and hers of Higginson, “Master,” several other men, and herself (11-18). Fuller’s influence can be traced more directly through generations of the extended Lowell family. Amy Lowell revised James Russell Lowell’s satire on Fuller in “A Fable for Critics” (III:4) in her “Critical Fable” (1922); encountering the ghost of James Russell Lowell, the poet argues for Fuller and female authorship. And in 1973 Robert Lowell honored Fuller in a sonnet in “History.”
9. p. 234. Miller’s trifled-with trio are Hawthorne, Emerson, and Ellery Channing; Miller apparently takes literally Fuller’s “I want them all” in the July 27 passage of the 1844 journal (VII:16b) and assumes “William” refers to William Ellery Channing (the younger) although Fuller and her friends consistently refer to him as Ellery.
10. Literary Transcendentalism (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1973).
11. Nancy F. Cott, “Feminist Theory and Feminist Movements: The Past before Us,” in What Is Feminism?, ed. Juliet Mitchell and Ann Oakley (New York: Pantheon, 1986), pp. 49-62; Margaret McFadden, “Boston Teenagers Debate the Woman Question, 1837-1838,” Signs 15 (Summer 1990): 832-47. Fanny Fem later appropriated and expanded Fuller’s neologism, femality, to define woman’s difference; see Lauren Berlant, “The Female Woman: Fanny Fem and the Form of Sentiment,” in Samuels, Culture of Sentiment, p. 299.
12. Such a large and flexible notion of romanticism may indeed embrace Fuller’s career; this seems to me a useful way to situate her in a comparative context. My own interest in her growing criticism of her native culture led me to distinguish her mature thought from an aspect of Transcendentalism which was more narrowly spiritual and averse to political conflict and action—a very different matter from Ellison’s romanticism.
13. See VII:16, July 27, 1844.
14. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990).
15. Appearing in the New-York Daily Tribune on September 24, 1845, this short piece offers without comment “three accounts of exchange of parts between the two sexes”: a Frenchman who as “the handsome Catherine” had many admirers until exposed by the police; a Parisian male transvestite whose “mildness of disposition” kept his secret until his death; and a female soldier at Ghent whose great courage won her the cross of the Legion of Honor from Napoleon, even though her identity was known. This series demonstrates literally (or theatrically), and in an increasingly positive way, her argument in Woman that the “two sides of the great radical dualism,” male and female, “are perpetually passing into one another.”
16. Commenting on Steele’s work, Ellison writes suggestively that Fuller’s mysticism must be taken into account, but “it cannot be understood without grasping also the fact that, like most literary romantics, she performs mysticism with a conviction of its meaningfulness but without belief” (243n).
17. “The Female World of Love and Ritual,” in Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian America (New York: Knopf, 1985), p. 76.
18. Surpassing the Love of Men: Romantic Friendship and Love between Women from the Renaissance to the Present (New York: Morrow, 1981).
19. In Günderode, Bettina writes to her friend: “Man is nothing but the desire to feel himself in another. Before I saw thee I knew nothing; I had often heard and read of friends, yet never knew what a life it would be” (Günderode [Boston: E. P. Peabody, 1842], p. 79). Again she writes: “I cannot speak to any other as to thee, I feel not the desire and glow to express myself unless with thee, then whatever I say, or however it comes out, I perceive that somewhat stirs within me as if my soul were growing, and, if I myself do not understand it, I win assurances from thy wise calm eyes, that look on me waiting as if they understood me and knew what must come yet” (76).
20. In May 1844 Fuller wrote in her journal of Sarah Shaw, “We had a long & deep conversation happy in its candor. Truth truth, thou art the great preservative. Let free air into the mind and the pestilence cannot lurk in any comer.” Emerson recorded this passage in his notebook on Fuller (Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. W. H. Gilman et al., XI, 486).
All Sub-Works of The Woman and The Myth: Margaret Fuller’s Life & Writings (1994):
PDF Sub-Works open in a new tab. Close the tab when done viewing to return here.
