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
CONTEMPORARIES ON FULLER
1. Her teaching in Providence, Anna Gale, 1838
These entries in Anna Gale’s journal at the Greene Street School offer portraits of Miss Fuller serious and Miss Fuller jolly, in both cases helping the girls to discard the feelings convention imposed on them and to find their own.
a . . . . We were led to speak of the various idols which people have, such as Money, Fame and Power. Beauty was mentioned, but Miss Fuller thought we could not love Beauty too well if we looked up through Nature to Nature’s God. The possession of it could not injure us, if we were contented with simply being beautiful. Speaking of gratitude to God Miss F. asked us if we thought it was a natural impulse of our nature. If she had asked me in particular I should unhesitatingly have answered that it was. She then asked us if we could think of any particular instance in our lives—if ever anything had occurred so particularly agreeable and pleasant that our first thought was to fall upon our knees and thank God; or whether we should do thus only because we have been taught to do so. She then referred us to little children. If you give them anything new they do not stop and thank you, but you must tell them to do it over and over again. This I have seen done too often to doubt its truth, and I concluded that my opinion was going to be proved entirely wrong, though for once I did not like to give it up. But Miss Fuller said that she had never been taught to feel this gratitude, and there had been instances in her life when she thought this feeling sprung up spontaneously. She thought we naturally possessed such a feeling, but it was destroyed by being drilled into us when children. Children think they are born to be happy,—that everybody is to contribute to their happiness—and it is hard for them to think it otherwise; but it is a lesson that they learn the first time they are shut up in a closet. Miss Fuller said that we are apt to make a wrong estimate of happiness. We see those who are young, rich and beautiful, and we think they must be the happiest; but it is not so. The balance of happiness is more equal than we imagine. We cannot judge of the happiness of others.
b . . . . Miss Landon was a poetess who caused us some amusement. Her poetry is not very valuable. It is very sentimental, being mostly about broken hearts, forlorn lovers, and those who have been disappointed in their love. One of the young ladies asked if Miss Landon’s heart had been broken. Miss F. said she did not know; that if it had it was probably mended. Some broken hearts get mended again, fastened together by putty or something, whilst others always remain broken. Miss F. said if we read her poetry we must sigh over it, or we should be much behindhand; for many ladies read it, and wept over it. It would introduce us to many ladies with swanlike necks; more ladies with swanlike necks than were in this school. Miss Landon is now about twenty-eight. [E. A. Hoyt and L. S. Brigham, “Glimpses of Margaret Fuller: The Greene Street School and Florence,” New England Quarterly, 29 (1956) 93-94]
2. An afternoon with Fuller, Nathaniel Hawthorne, August 22, 1842
During her Concord visits, Fuller became friendly enough with Hawthorne to write in 1844 that she felt “more like a sister to H., or rather more that he might be a brother to me, than ever with any man before” (Mason Wade, Margaret Fuller: Whetstone of Genius, p. 113). Hawthorne, who remained on the critical fringe of Transcendentalism and was much later one of Fuller’s most famous and vehement detractors, (VI:7) left a record in his notebooks of a typically spontaneous Transcendental afternoon with her. (He and Sophia Peabody had been married only a month earlier.)
. . . After leaving the book at Mr. Emerson’s, I returned through the woods, and entering Sleepy Hollow, I perceived a lady reclining near the path which bends along its verge. It was Margaret herself. She had been there the whole afternoon, meditating or reading; for she had a book in her hand, with some strange title, which I did not understand, and have forgotten. She said that nobody had broken her solitude, and was just giving utterance to a theory that no inhabitant of Concord ever visited Sleepy Hollow, when we saw a whole group of people entering the sacred precincts. Most of them followed a path that led them remote from us; but an old man passed near us, and smiled to see Margaret lying on the ground, and me sitting by her side. He made some remark about the beauty of the afternoon, and withdrew himself into the shadow of the wood. Then we talked about Autumn—and about the pleasures of getting lost in the woods—and about the crows, whose voices Margaret had heard—and about the experiences of early childhood, whose influence remains upon the character after the collection of them has passed away—and about the sight of mountains from a distance, and the view from their summits—and about other matters of high and low philosophy. In the midst of our talk we heard footsteps above us, on the high bank; and while the intruder was still hidden among the trees, he called to Margaret, of whom he had gotten a glimpse. Then he emerged from the green shade; and, behold, it was Mr. Emerson, who, in spite of his clerical consecration, had found no better way of spending the Sabbath than to ramble among the woods. He appeared to have had a pleasant time; for he said that there were Muses in the woods to-day, and whispers to be heard in the breezes. It being now nearly six o’clock, we separated, Mr. Emerson and Margaret towards his house, and I towards mine, where my little wife was very busy getting tea . . . . [Hawthorne, American Notebooks, ed. Claude M. Simpson (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1972), pp. 342-43]
3. Her writing and talk, Edgar Allan Poe, August 1846
For the Broadway Journal, Poe wrote an essay essentially in praise of Fuller’s writing. Meeting her in literary circles in New York, he seems to have been agreeably impressed, as witness his description of her reading here, and only later became antagonistic (III:13). The first passage below follows a criticism of her diction for “vulgarity” and “barbarism.”
a . . . In spite of these things, however, and of her frequent unjustifiable Carlyleisms (such as that of writing sentences which are no sentences, since, to be parsed, reference must be had to sentences preceding), the style of Miss Fuller is one of the very best with which I am acquainted. In general effect, I know no style which surpasses it. It is singularly piquant, vivid, terse, bold, luminous; leaving details out of sight, it is everything that a style need be . . . .
b . . . . What poet, in especial, but must feel at least the better portion of himself more fairly represented in even his commonest sonnet (earnestly written) than in his most elaborate or most intimate personalities?
I put all this as a general proposition, to which Miss Fuller affords a marked exception—to this extent, that her personal character and her printed book are merely one and the same thing. We get access to her soul as directly from the one as from the other—no more readily from this than from that—easily from either. Her acts are bookish, and her books are less thoughts than acts. Her literary and her conversational manner are identical. Here is a passage from her Summer on the Lakes:
The rapids enchanted me far beyond what I expected; they are so swift that these cease to seem so—you can think only of their beauty. The fountain beyond the Moss islands I discovered for myself, and thought it for some time an accidental beauty which it would not do to leave, lest I might never see it again. After I found it permanent, I returned many times to watch the play of its crest. In the little waterfall beyond, Nature seems, as she often does, to have made a study for some larger design. She delights in this—a sketch within a sketch—a dream within a dream. Wherever we see it, the lines of the great buttress in the fragment of stone, the hues of the waterfall, copied in the flowers that star its bordering mosses, we are delighted; for all the lineaments become fluent, and we mold the scene in congenial thought with its genius.
Now all this is precisely as Miss Fuller would speak it. She is perpetually saying just such things in just such words. To get the conversational woman in the mind’s eye, all that is needed is to imagine her reciting the paragraph just quoted; but first let us have the personal woman. She is of the medium height; nothing remarkable about the figure; a profusion of lustrous light hair; eyes a bluish gray, full of fire; capacious forehead; the mouth when in repose indicates profound sensibility, capacity for affection, for love—when moved by a slight smile, it becomes even beautiful in the intensity of this expression; but the upper lip, as if impelled by the action of involuntary muscles, habitually uplifts itself, conveying the impression of a sneer. Imagine, now, a person of this description looking you at one moment earnestly in the face, at the next seeming to look only within her own spirit or at the wall; moving nervously every now and then in her chair; speaking in a high key, but musically, deliberately (not hurriedly or loudly), with a delicious distinctness of enunciation—speaking, I say, the paragraph in question, and emphasizing the words which I have italicized, not by impulsion of the breath (as is usual) but by drawing them out as long as possible, nearly closing her eyes the while—imagine all this, and we have both the woman and the authoress before us. [Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1902), IX, 13-14, 17-19]
4. A satirical portrait, James Russell Lowell, 1848
In “A Fable for Critics,” James Russell Lowell snipes at a number of American authors, including himself, and more than once at Fuller, who disparaged his verse in her essay on American literature. “Let murderers be shut, to grow wiser and cooler,/ At hard labor for life on the works of Miss —,” he urges; later he alludes to her as the “Pythoness.” But his fullest attack, in which she bears the name of an autobiographical character in her Woman in the Nineteenth Century, exhibits well what Higginson (p. 216) called the “tomahawk theory” of criticism: “men revenged literary slights by personal abuse.”
She has such a penchant for bothering me too!
She always keeps asking if I don’t observe a
Particular likeness ‘twixt her and Minerva;
She tells me my efforts in verse are quite clever;—
She’s been travelling now, and will be worse than ever;
One would think, though, a sharp-sighted noter she’d be
Of all that’s worth mentioning over the sea,
For a woman must surely see well, if she try,
The whole of whose being’s a capital I:
She will take an old notion, and make it her own,
By saying it o’er in her Sibylline tone,
Or persuade you ‘tis something tremendously deep,
By repeating it so as to put you to sleep;
And she well may defy any mortal to see through it,
When once she has mixed up her infinite me through it,
There is one thing she owns in her own single right,
It is native and genuine—namely, her spite;
Though, when acting as censor, she privately blows
A censer of vanity ‘neath her own nose.”
Here Miranda came up, and said,” Phoebus! you know
That the Infinite Soul has its infinite woe,
As I ought to know, having lived cheek-by-jowl,
Since the day I was born, with the Infinite Soul;
I myself introduced, I myself, I alone,
To my Land’s better life authors solely my own,
Who the sad heart of earth on their shoulders have taken,
Whose works sound a depth by Life’s quiet unshaken,
Such as Shakespeare, for instance, the Bible, and Bacon,
Not to mention my own works; Time’s nadir is fleet,
And, as for myself, I’m quite out of conceit—”
“Quite out of conceit! I’m enchanted to hear it,”
Cried Apollo aside. “Who’d have thought she was near it?
To be sure, one is apt to exhaust those commodities
One uses too fast, yet in this case as odd it is
As if Neptune should say to his turbots and whitings,
‘I’m as much out of salt as Miranda’s own writings’
(Which, as she in her own happy manner has said,
Sound a depth, for ‘tis one of the functions of lead).
She often has asked me if I could not find
A place somewhere near me that suited her mind;
I know but a single one vacant, which she,
With her rare talent that way, would fit to a T.
And it would not imply any pause or cessation
In the work she esteems her peculiar vocation,—
She may enter on duty today, if she chooses,
And remain Tiring-woman for life to the Muses.”
Miranda meanwhile has succeeded in driving
Up into a comer, in spite of their striving,
A small flock of terrified victims, and there,
With an I-turn-the-crank-of-the-Universe air
And a tone which, at least to my fancy, appears
Not so much to be entering as boxing your ears,
Is unfolding a tale (of herself, I surmise,
For ‘tis dotted as thick as a peacock’s with I’s) . . . .
[Poetical works of James Russell Lowell (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1904), IV, 62-64]
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