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
PART III
The Transcendentalist
Teacher, Editor, Literary Critic
The Transcendentalist: Teacher, Editor, Literary Critic In many ways, the Transcendentalist movement, which preoccupied Margaret Fuller during her last eight years in New England, seemed richly designed to meet her needs. As a new cultural presence, as a spiritual revolt, and, in its ambivalent way, as a social force, the movement did much to mitigate her isolation, to strengthen her self-esteem, and, as she came to identify her differences from its members, chiefly Emerson, to sharpen her sense of direction. As we shall see, the direction she ultimately took presents symbolically a powerful critique of the movement.
Her cultural appetites made Margaret Fuller a freak in her own land. “Fitted by genius and culture to mingle as an equal in the most refined circles of Europe,” according to Channing, she was stuck with “the very decent, yet drudging, descendants of the prim Puritans.”1 Through Transcendentalism, some aspects of the Europe she could not visit—the Europe of literary romanticism and German philosophical idealism—and even the exotic India of Hindu thought approached Massachusetts. For a loose enclave of high-minded readers, like an educated elite in an underdeveloped country, passed around their copies of Carlyle and Coleridge, de Stael and Goethe, Kant, Schelling, Fichte, and the Bhagavadgita, and, half digesting them, half recreated them in their own image. Fuller’s participation in this exchange should not be confused with assimilation; when she left America, Emerson characterized her still as “an exotic in New England, a foreigner from some more sultry and expansive climate” (V:4). But for a long while, the group was stimulating and intellectually gratifying to her.
As a spiritual revolt, the Transcendentalist movement served a more profound need. Transcendentalism was the culmination of a long process in which the divine authority of New England’s original Calvinism was internalized. The liberal Unitarian Dr. William Ellery Channing had hastened the process by replacing Calvinist determinism with individual responsibility, and by replacing the subjection of man to a wrathful God with the intuitive discovery of a benevolent God in the human soul. But by the 1830s Dr. Channing was still an exception. More than internalizing divinity, Unitarianism had secularized it, more than encouraging the intuitive authority of the private individual, it had sanctioned the “rational” authority of public institutions and the marketplace. It had become, as Emerson stigmatized it, “the corpse-cold Unitarianism of Harvard College and Brattle Street.” While Dr. Channing thought Christianity, generously interpreted, could house the most rebellious spirit, Emerson felt cramped by all molds, religious and secular. In quitting the ministry in 1832, Emerson was repudiating external authority; and in retiring to Concord, he dramatized his belief that authority could lie only in intuition and feeling, in a self that was not merely godlike but was god itself. Abandoning his reliance on historical Christianity and, as nearly as possible, on the history of his time as well, he sought through creative perception to realize moments of divine harmony between the self and the universe; then he published this enlarged selfhood to the world. It is small wonder that fires of outrage reanimated the Unitarian corpse and that gentle Dr. Channing feared Emerson’s followers would “fall into a kind of ‘ego-theism.’” Dr. Channing’s nephew, William Henry Channing, and many of his generation would not be deterred by doctrinal fears. They heard in Transcendentalism the simple and irresistible call: “Trust, dare and be; infinite good is ready for your asking; seek and find. All that your fellows can claim or need is that you should become, in fact, your highest self; fulfill, then, your ideal.”2
Margaret Fuller, chilled by the family Unitarianism and yearning since childhood for release of an emotional nature repressed by intellectuality, must have felt that the logic of personal and of universal history met in the Transcendental faith. The transformation of “self-consciousness” from a painful social experience into an exalted and creative condition must have had overwhelming appeal. Within such a movement a young woman who could only cut an outlandish figure in conventional New England might escape into a free realm where her extravagant ambition to grow and feel was sanctioned philosophically and seemed to be genuinely welcomed. The limits of this welcome emerge after her death in the ambivalence of some of the Transcendentalists’ accounts of her unorthodox manner in New England and in their censorship of her unorthodox behavior in Italy. But, for the most part, Fuller saw simply that the Transcendentalists embraced more of her than others did and was for the time grateful.
As a social force, Transcendentalism was divided and ambiguous, and I can only point to some of the problems here. The movement originated in a class which until the Jacksonian era had so often combined broad culture with political and social power that intellectuality itself had come to be unconsciously identified with that class. Thus, as Frederickson notes, “In driving class privilege from the seat of authority, the Jacksonians seemed to have driven out intellect as well.” But beginning with his address, “The American Scholar,” Emerson seemed to construe his very detachment from traditions of the past and institutions of the present as a source of new power and meaning for American society.3 Though Emerson offered no program for social change, he offered an alternative set of values which some readers (notably Theodore Parker, W. H. Channing, and George Ripley) translated into such a program; seizing “the Newness” in this spirit, they joined the growing ranks of active reformers in the 1840s. But Emerson did not, and while he was feared in some quarters as a radical critic of the established order, he was at that time also an advocate of caution with men and organizations seeking to change that order.
Until the 1850s, Emerson was critical of the established social order only secondarily or implicitly. As with church authority, so with political or social authority: Emerson sought to strip it of historic specificity and to internalize it. “His method of self-renewal,” writes Sacvan Bercovitch, “consisted in arrogating the meaning of America to himself’—America, that is, as an idea which springs from no political or social institution, but from “the purest minds” only. To put it simply, he was more concerned to “represent” a mythic and potential America than to confront the actual one. Consequently, his ideology was hostile to both elements of social reform-organization and action. His refusal of political and social sectarianism was consistent with his rejection of sectarianism in religion. The truth in behavior could be measured only by its radical social isolation: “It is only as a man puts off all foreign support and stands alone that I see him to be strong and to prevail. He is weaker by every recruit to his banner.” Then to adopt a cause was to enter the marketplace. Taking up a cause compromised spiritual consciousness as an end in itself, tainting it with the material: “Each ‘cause’ as it is called say Abolition, Temperance, say Calvinism, or Unitarianism—becomes speedily a little shop, where the article, let it have been at first never so subtle and ethereal, is now made up into portable and convenient cakes, and retailed in small quantities to suit purchasers.” Only in detachment from society and its causes, he argued, can the self achieve harmonious unity with the higher Reality in which all contradictions are dissolved. Eventually and mysteriously, by scrupulously shunning “manipular attempts to realize the world of thought,” the “transformation of genius into practical power” will be effected.4
Fuller’s needs for self-development made her more receptive to Emerson’s deliberate distancing of social pressures, his action by spiritual example, than to those Transcendentalists who chose direct and sometimes organized action. His perspective on Transcendentalism seemed to offer her a broader synthesis of energies than friendship alone did. But when Emerson’s synthesis was most complete—that is to say, most independent of and detached from material and historical reality—it was actually most alien to her. Emerson’s perspective was in fact nearly as debilitating to her real strength as the dream of all-sufficing friendship had been; it tempted her to absolutize the inner self and to live as if she could elude entirely the limits of time and place and sex. Fuller never succumbed fully to the lure of such privatization, despite its glorious claims, partly because the roles the movement gave her—teacher, editor, and literary critic—required rigorous and semipublic work. More fundamentally, as we shall now see, her nurture, her nature, and her sex itself worked to keep her from as fully transcending material reality and reducing the complexity of experience as Emerson, especially in these early years of his career, strove to do.
Fuller’s self-nurture led her to Transcendentalism by a route which was primarily neither religious nor philosophical but literary. Though a youthful mystical experience drew her to a liberal Christianity, her faith was tentative and eclectic to the verge, for her time, of heresy. (Honesty obligated even her devoted Clarke to call her life goals only “almost Christian.”) Merely one of her resources, her faith was not her chief source of energy. And with philosophy she often had to struggle, confessing to failure to understand Fichte and Jacobi, and complaining that even a “feasting” with Plato was not new nourishment. (“Plato’s thoughts have, indeed, so passed into our intellectual life that I feel as if only returning to my native mountain air while with these philosophers and cannot be quite enough a disciple.”) She read Locke, de Stael on Locke, Kant and the post-Kantians largely as a means of better understanding romantic literature, especially from Germany. She wrote that, at twenty-one, oppressed by emotional disappointments, family cares, and social obligations, “I took up the study of German, and my progress was like the rebound of a string pressed almost to bursting.”5 In German she read Lessing, Novalis, Tieck, Schiller, Körner, Richter, and, above all, Goethe.
Goethe expressed her desire for knowledge gained through passionate, broad, and subtle experience; and the wisdom and high influence of his female characters sustained and inspired her. At the age of twenty-two, she felt that Goethe perfectly comprehended every feeling she had ever had. By a reflex equally self-centered and generous, then, she began dreaming of writing a life of Goethe. Ironically, she thought she would have to go to Europe to learn the details of the private life of the writer who had so liberated her spirit, for no American scholar would share them with a lady. Most enlightened men she knew refused even to read Goethe on grounds of moral reprobation. Although she never transformed her voluminous notes into a biography, she was in her essays and letters for a great part of the next decade an avid publicist of the literature of Goethe and other Germans, and published her translation of Eckermann’s Conversations with Goethe. She also offered classes in the language, read and discussed the literature for months with Dr. Channing, and forced Emerson to examine and largely overcome his prejudices against Goethe. Her commitment to Goethe was the basis for her largest single contribution to Transcendental intellectual life and gave her a staunch support for her resistance to Emersonian detachment.
In addition to her learning, her volatile nature played its role in this resistance. Her appetite for the clash and color of participation made her confess to Emerson on reading “Nature” again that she delighted “more in thought-living than in living thought.”6 And her sex was a third factor, though she was included in the Transcendentalist circle more in spite than because of it. Her sex gave her a primary and inescapable sense of otherness; the ensuing habit of perceiving duality would work against a desire or capacity for absorption into mystic unity. These influences would finally move her to a position and way of life not only dramatically different from Emerson’s but implicitly critical of his. Even during her years of closest involvement with the Transcendentalists, differences from them emerged.
What was perhaps most alien and striking even to these lovers of art was the “passionate love for the beautiful” that Hedge remarked in Fuller, the sensual vitality which in New England earned her the labels “pagan,” “exotic,” and “Bacchante.” The training of her father, despite his own austerity, had its influence here. Having drunk in the classics first, she found the Christian teachings made her cry out “for her dear old Greek gods”; by contrast, Christian “spirituality seemed nakedness.”7 (Indeed, her matured spiritual longing was for a life “more complete and various” than Christ’s; in 1842 she imagined a second Messiah with “the calm beauty and physical fulness of a Greek God, with the deep consciousness of a Moses, with the holy love and purity of Jesus.”8) We understand better what Fuller found so reinforcing in Goethe when we learn that Emerson early complained that the German poet’s work failed to “transport” him out of the “dominion of the senses.” Objecting to “the velvet life he led,” and finding in his writing “luxuriously” a “new and worse offence,” Emerson leveled his verdict: “the Puritan in me accepts no apology for bad morals in such as he.” A further mark of the kinship between Fuller and Goethe is that both, chilled in northern Protestant cultures, were to be warmed by the same Rome and to feel reborn there-and both divined it in advance. Fuller wrote in the winter of 1841, “Once I was almost all intellect; now I am almost all feeling. Nature vindicates her rights, and I feel all Italy glowing beneath the Saxon crust.” This penchant for physical happiness informed even her criticism. Although she never, in New England, praised sensuality as such, although she ranked the “priestly vocation” in art second to none, she was too alive to beauty to let these standards interfere with aesthetic pleasure. And she missed this sensual vitality when it was absent in others. Thus, in her otherwise adulatory review of Emerson’s second volume of essays, she voices this mild criticism of him, who worked so deliberately against the flat horizontal of his world: “We doubt this friend raised himself too early to the perpendicular and did not lie along the ground long enough to hear the secret whispers of our parent life. We could wish he might be thrown by conflicts on the lap of mother earth, to see if he would not rise again with added powers.”9
Apparently opposing this sensuousness is her Puritan impulse to unblinkingly acknowledge pain, limitation, and even evil. (Actually both qualities are rooted in the same refusal to turn from material reality, a refusal which often set her at odds with friends seeking precisely to transcend it.) Sometimes this impulse took the form of hardheaded practicality, born of the limits imposed on her as a woman, especially after she began to struggle to help support her family. Even earlier, when James Clarke professed the Transcendentalist faith in the power of human will which Emerson shared, Fuller maintained passionately that circumstances had incalculable power over character. Elsewhere she wrote that she wanted “to know and feel my pain, to investigate its nature and its source” (III:5). Fuller forces us to re-examine the classic assumption that women’s appreciation of pain is masochistic. She shows that it can also spring from realism, a desire to know life as fiercely as one can, and, when its breadth is denied, to make the most of its depth and height.
Her more philosophical acceptance of evil as “a growth of nature, and one condition of the development of good” (V:8) is related to this tendency. Her definition of evil as an obstruction which forces us to creative accomplishment owes much to her intimate bodily experience, to her physical frailty, her chronic bouts of migraine, and her brushes with death. “Our Father, let not the heaviest shower be spared,” she prayed, “let not the gardener forbear his knife till the fair hopeful tree of existence be brought to its fullest blossom and fruit!”10 But since Emerson, in his theory of compensation, also saw the uses for growth of limitation and loss, it is important to note the subtle difference in emphasis. While Emerson stresses the precious instant of mystic unity when man “parts with his individuality, leaves all thought of private stake, personal feeling, and in compensation . . . has in some sort the strength of the whole,” Fuller’s attention was rather to the cause and the effect on the self of religious crisis; “I have lived to know that the secret of all things is pain, and that nature travaileth most painfully with her noblest product.”11 Here we have a second distinction. For Emerson, mystic harmony was the end; his mode was timeless and relatively static. For Fuller, religious crisis and vision was part of a process involving pain and change; her mode was relatively dynamic.
This difference influences a third, which concerns the response to risk, challenge, and conflict. In Summer on the Lakes, Fuller constructed a dialogue in which Emerson, thinly disguised as “Self-Poise,” argues, “No leaps, no starts will avail us, by patient crystallization alone the equal temper of wisdom is attainable . . . . The better part of wisdom is a sublime prudence, a pure and patient truth that will receive nothing it is not sure it can permanently lay to heart. Of our study there should be in proportion two-thirds of rejection to one of acceptance.” To this Fuller’s persona, “Free Hope,” retorts, “To me it seems that it is madder never to abandon oneself, than often to be infatuated; better to be wounded, a captive, and a slave, than always to walk in armor.” Her conviction, as un-Emersonian as it was unladylike, that conflict and confrontation are more productive of truth than serenity, figured in a letter to Clarke written before she was twenty. Here she sketched a man of genius (a typical incognito) who, adoring “the bright phantoms of his mind’s creation,” grew to intellectual manhood. Then “I wished this being might be launched into the world of realities, his heart glowing with the ardor of an immortal toward perfection, his eyes searching everywhere to behold it; I wished he might collect into one burning point those withering, palsying convictions, which, in the ordinary routine of things so gradually pervade the soul; that he might suffer, in brief space, agonies of disappointment commensurate with his unpreparedness and confidence.” Out of this accelerated and dialectical clash of idealism and reality, she felt sure, “such a man would suddenly dilate in a form of Pride, Power, and Glory—a centre round which asking, aimless hearts might rally.”12
All these forces in Fuller—her fidelity to material actuality (whether in the form of sensual beauty or of pain and limitation), her preference for dynamic process, and her attraction to conflict and confrontation-worked to lead her away from the lure inherent in Emersonian Transcendentalism of pure transparent unity with the eternal. This is not to say that she ever wholly abandoned the love of spirit that drew her to Transcendentalism. Rather, especially after she left New England, she was increasingly stimulated by the need to imbed her values in material and social reality—and the more intransigent the reality, the better.
Teaching, the first vocation the Transcendentalist movement provided for Fuller, was a traditional one for women. But Fuller characteristically stretched traditional roles, and her first position was in a school soon to be dogged by scandal. This was Bronson Alcott’s Temple School, where the Transcendentalist activist Elizabeth Peabody was also teaching. All of Alcott’s convictions now look innocent enough. Believing with Wordsworth that children were nearer than adults to their celestial origins, he thought that education should be directed toward their knowledge of their inner natures. His chief method toward this end was Socratic conversation, in which he pursued the children’s understanding of themselves and of the Gospels. Basing his pedagogy on friendship, not authority, and valuing more than most Transcendentalists the individual’s relation to the group, Alcott submitted all questions of discipline to the assembled children. Punishment was customarily the brief exclusion of the child from the conversations, though once Alcott required a recreant child to strike him. But when the two volumes of his Conversations with Children on the Gospels were published in late 1836 and early 1837, tempers grew so hot in Boston that a mob threatened to attack Alcott’s Friday meeting of Sunday-school teachers. He was charged with heresy for treating the children as spiritual authorities, blasphemy for stripping Jesus of any special divinity, and obscenity for discussing, however indirectly, the physical aspects of birth. Coupled with the financial panic of 1837, this public hysteria resulted in the loss of many pupils and eventually the closing of the school.13
Fuller, however, was pleased by the contrast between Alcott’s pedagogy and her father’s, especially Alcott’s preference for the development of character, confidence, and self-understanding over the mastery of mechanical details and for free-ranging thought over discipline. She defended him against all detractors. But privately she noted that Alcott’s spirituality lacked robust vitality and excluded the material and the complex.
Given Alcott’s dwindling resources, and the meagerness of supplements earned by her teaching German, French, and Italian to women, Fuller accepted the handsome offer of one thousand dollars a year to teach for the man Alcott considered-hastily, it emerged-his chief disciple, Hiram Fuller. (No relation to Margaret Fuller, he was a disciple of Alcott’s only insofar as he could make that lucrative.) There, at the Greene Street School in Providence, the boys were said to be overawed by Fuller or undone by her sarcasm, but her success was great with the girls in their late teens, many of whom left the school when she did. Adapting Alcott’s goals, her main object in teaching moral philosophy was to upset their received notions and stimulate fresh thought. As Anna Gale noted in her journal on January 5, 1838, “Miss Fuller said that Dr. Wayland’s thoughts would lay upon our minds, like dry husk, unless they take root sufficiently deep to produce one little thought of our own.”14 Introducing controversial subjects, such as evil, reincarnation, militant reform, and the millennium, Fuller shared her own uncertainties as well as her convictions while carefully “calling out” her pupils’ independent views.
Despite the gratifications of her teaching years, Fuller continually regretted the loss of concentrated leisure for thought and the necessary abandonment of her Goethe biography. From Boston, in 1837, she wrote Hedge with fretful wit, “I faint with desire to think and surely shall, the first opportunity, but some outward requisition is ever knocking at the door of my mind and I am as ill placed as regards a chance to think as a haberdasher’s prentice or the President of Harvard University.” In Providence the next year, the “suppression and accommodation” required of her made it worse. Emerson’s attempts to pacify her made her burst out, “I hate everything that is reasonable just now, ‘wise limitations’ and all. I have behaved much too well for some time past; it has spoiled my peace . . . . Isolation is necessary to me, as to others. Yet I keep on ‘fulfilling all my duties,’ as the technical phrase is, except to myself.”15
Exhausted and frustrated, she resigned her post in December 1838, writing Channing, “I do not wish to teach again at all.” In the same letter she added, “But I foresee circumstances that may make it wrong for me to obey my wishes,” and asked Channing, then in Cincinnati-”an excellent starting point for my brothers,” she thought-to “investigate the possibility of setting up school for sixty girls.”16 Although she later found a location in Illinois where her brother Arthur established a school, she never taught again in a formal institution.
But her feeling for education as a process of opening the self to meaningful life remained with her, evolving as her sense of meaningful life changed. In Boston education would next mean helping women of her own class to find new resources and self-respect, in New York providing tools of survival to the poor and orphaned and a new start to prisoners and prostitutes, and in France and England uniting workers as a class. Finally, in Italy education meant nothing less than a people preparing itself for unremitting struggle. But all this lay ahead; first she had to learn better what she meant by fulfilling her duty to herself.
On the list of enlightened acts toward women in the nineteenth century, the Transcendentalists’ making a woman the editor of their literary organ ranks low. Long before they were meeting regularly in 1836 as the “Symposium Club” according to Alcott, “Hedge’s Club” according to the rest of them, or the “Transcendental Club” according to the world, Frederic Hedge had proposed that his friends create a literary periodical. Late in 1839, the Club agreed on the need for a journal to compete with the conservative or theological or stridently partisan ones in New England which failed either to publish or to appeal to them. Theodore Parker proposed that Emerson be editor, with Fuller and Hedge as assistants. Because this duty conflicted with his freedom, Emerson transferred it to Fuller, and Ripley agreed to handle the business end. As Fuller’s enthusiasm for the literature of Europe had sharpened her interest in the evolution of an authentic American literature, she consented. No sooner was the journal a reality than Hedge retreated, confessing candidly his fear that public identification with Transcendentalism would open him to charges of atheism. “I believe we all feel much alike in regard to this Journal,” Emerson wrote Fuller; “we all wish it to be but do not wish to be in any way personally responsible for it.”17
Nevertheless, Emerson helped—largely redrafting, for example, her introductory address to the first issue of The Dial in July 1840. The “conductors of this work,” he said, joined with those in New England who determine to “make new demands on literature, and to reprobate that rigor of our conventions of religion and education which is turning us to stone, which renounces hope, which looks only backward, which asks only such a future as the past, which suspects improvement, and holds nothing so much in horror as new views and the dreams of youth.” Proposing “not to multiply books, but to report life,” they would draw less on professional writers than on “the discourse of the living, and the portfolios which friendship has opened to us.”18
Thus put to the test, friendship was often found wanting. Since contributors were unpaid, Fuller was obliged to use all her arts of stimulation and entreaty to get them, and for 136 pages of one issue had hastily to provide 85 pages from her own notebooks. Then, when she was able to secure such spontaneous and heartfelt work as Emerson had solicited, it often fell short of her critical standards. Unwilling to accept writing she judged slipshod, she tried to summon the tact to reject some pieces by young Thoreau—too contrived, in her estimation—without discouraging him. And she risked what she called “impertinence” by criticizing a passage of Emerson’s she felt had “rather l’air bourgeois”; “I think when you look again you will think you have not said what you meant to say.” Under Fuller, The Dial published more quasi-mystical fiction, criticism of the arts, and discussion of German romanticism than it did subsequently. But she tried to be impartial, and later defended her practice of publishing representative pieces even when she did not like them against Emerson’s preference for satisfying his own taste: “I wish my tastes and sympathies still more expansive than they are, instead of more severe. Here we differ.”19
Apparently, her tolerance was nowhere shared, and the extreme divergences between members of the circle gaped even wider in print. Despite Fuller’s hope of conducting The Dial in “a spirit neither of dogmatism nor of compromise,” outside critics often found the first and contributors complained of the second. After the first issue, Emerson wrote, “I hope our Dial will get to be a little bad.”20 Alcott judged the journal timid and conventional for not publishing in every issue his widely satirized “Orphic Sayings,” while feisty Parker was not abashed to say The Dial needed a beard. These rivaling calls for virile boldness seemed to drive Fuller into an uncharacteristically “feminine” neutrality and made the Dial she produced less challenging than any of her later work. Though Higginson wrote in 1884 that the cumulative effect of the journal on his generation was liberating, the magazine was too eclectic to galvanize a community, let alone to win a circulation over three hundred.
For Fuller, the recalcitrance of writers, the steady overwork, and the controversial response were exhausting. As a last indignity, the journal’s financial instability resulted in her earning two free copies of each issue but never the promised annual salary of two hundred dollars. Although The Dial kept Margaret Fuller busy, it was not the action she craved. In spring 1842, she resigned. Partly out of respect for the sacrifice she had made, Emerson wrote that there should be “rotation in martyrdom” and took over the chief editing task.21
Fuller’s poems, stories, and art and music criticism are too subjective or diffuse to provide much interest now. But her essays—literary, feminist, and political—though lacking in the structural firmness that might have come with a regular education, are historically important and well worth our attention. Her literary criticism both for The Dial and later for the New York Tribune is widely regarded as the best-with the possible exception of Poe’s—produced in this country before 1850. Thus it is disturbing that, in the Memoirs, Clarke, Emerson, and Channing all but ignore her work for The Dial and give hardly more attention to her critical writing than to the opinion of friends who found it inferior to her conversation. Moreover, even Channing, the one of the three who seems to have struggled hardest against his sexual prejudices, attributes her literary powers to her lack of womanly fulfillment. (“The very glow of her poetic enthusiasm was but an outflush of trustful affection; the very restlessness of her intellect was the confession that her heart had found no home . . . . her absorption in study [was] the natural vent of emotions, which had met no object worthy of life-long attachment.”) One can hardly disprove such contentions, but the argument from sex could as well run that in literary study and writing, the limitations of woman’s status are apparently baffled and eluded, for thought transcends gender. That Fuller saw literary endeavor as a way of escaping female shackles is borne out in her “Short Essay on Critics,” in which she names the candor she wants “manliness”—by which she meant forthright humanness-and calls the habit of respect speaking “man to man.”22
Moreover, she found in the romantic school of criticism which she absorbed through Goethe and Carlyle a natural arena for the blend of abilities she regarded as “masculine” and “feminine.” In her “Short Essay on Critics,” she distinguished between the “subjective class” of critics, whose impressionistic pieces, eschewing reflection and analysis, only “characterize the critic,” and the “apprehensive class who can go out of themselves and enter fully into a foreign existence.” As a third and superior class, the “comprehensive” critics, like the apprehensive, judge a work “by its own law” but also by a broader law (which she never defines explicitly) because they perceive “the analogies of the universe, and how they are regulated by an absolute, invariable principle . . . .” This ideal critic, then, is “not merely a poet, not merely a philosopher, not merely an observer, but tempered of all three.”23 Paralleling her pattern for friendships, such criticism coupled the capacities for warm empathy and for coolheaded, informed evaluation. And, as with friendship, the literature she studied enlarged her experience. Hence she was as widely curious in her critical role as she was eclectic in her editorial role. Distinguishing between literature for the ages, which she compared critically with the best in its field, and literature for the day, which she chose usually simply to describe, she welcomed both.
The values she brought to criticism were romantic and Transcendentalist. Most conspicuous are her requirement—which Longfellow failed to meet—that imagination, a gift of nature, be spontaneous, not contrived or derivative, and her preference for authors who exhibit “resolute will” or “earnestness of soul” or penetrating vision-what Matthew Arnold would call “high seriousness.” Though spiritual and moral, these biases were not moralistic; and indeed she deplored the public need for “a moral” and for the depiction of conventional mores in literary productions.
Her enduring love for complex reality, coupled with her high moral idealism, made her an incomparable mediator between timid Americans and the variously threatening Goethe, Byron, and Sand. She saw that Goethe’s worldliness, his daring (especially in Elective Affinities, which centers on marital infidelity), Byron’s morbidity, and Sand’s free passion, if scrutinized in the context of their age and their options, could enlighten and liberate the understanding. Her concern for the development of an inherently American literature, expressing the peculiar genius of American life, was equally great, and related. Richly acquainted through books with continental culture and afflicted neither with the Anglophilism nor continental xenophobia of many New Englanders, Fuller expected immigrants to enhance, not detract from, this country’s cultural life. From the eventual fusion of the races she expected a unique culture, free from the prejudices that fettered European culture.
Finally, this critic sought personal synthesis by turning her “manly” attention to female characters, women writers, and that rare male novelist of feminist persuasion, Charles Brockden Brown. Significantly, she wrote more such pieces for the New York Tribune than for New England’s Dial. The explanation for these pieces requires a section of its own (V). For the editor who began her career by apologizing for being a woman could never have written them had she been confined to the experiences described in this part. While Transcendentalism was adventurous enough to make room for her talent, it was not itself capable of increasing her esteem and understanding of her sex. What she needed, as we shall see, was to generate experiments of her own in talking and working with women.
Notes
1. Memoirs, II, 36.
2. David P. Edgell, William Ellery Channing: An Intellectual Portrait (Boston: Beacon Press, 1955), p. 122; Memoirs, II, 13.
3. George M. Frederickson, The Inner Civil War: Northern Intellectuals and the Crisis of the Union (New York: Harper & Row, 1965), pp. 9-10.
4. Bercovitch, The Puritan Origins of the American Self (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975), p. 173; Complete Essays and Other Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Brooks Atkinson (New York: Random House, 1950), pp. 169 (“ Self-Reliance”), 98 (“The Transcendentalist”), 364 (“Experience”). I am indebted to Myra Jehlen for calling to my attention some of these aspects of Emerson.
5. Memoirs, I, 133; January 27, 1839, to Caroline Sturgis, Tappan Papers, Houghton; Kindred Papers, p. 359.
6. April 12, 1840, Higginson, p. 310.
7. Memoirs, I, 93; Barbara M. Cross, The Educated Woman in America Selected Writings of Catharine Beecher, Margaret Fuller, and M Carey Thomas (New York: Teachers College Press, 1965), p. 122.
8. Frederick Augustus Braun, Margaret Fuller and Goethe (New York: Henry Holt, 1910), p. 255. The version in Memoirs (II, 92) tellingly omits the phrase “physical fulness.”
9. Braun, p. 151; Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson (Boston: James R. Osgood, 1883), I, 30-31; Memoirs, II, 58; The Writings of Margaret Fuller, ed. Mason Wade (New York: The Viking Press, 1941), p. 393.
Fuller’s Concord journal of 1842 provides a striking example of her difference from Emerson on the sufficiency of physical beauty. Noting that Emerson’s response to a moonlit night was to remark that “each twinkling light breaking there summons to demand the whole secret,” Fuller disagreed: “the beauty does not stimulate me to ask why?, and press to the centre, I was satisfied for the moment, full as if my existence was filled out, for nature had said the very word that was lying in my heart” (“Margaret Fuller’s 1842 journal,” ed. Joel Myerson, Harvard Library Bulletin, 21 [1973], 324).
10. Kindred Papers, p. 360.
11. “The Genuine Man,” Young Emerson Speaks: Unpublished Discourses on Many Subjects, ed. Arthur C. McGiffert, Jr. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1938), p. 186; Kindred Papers, p. 359.
12. Summer on the Lakes, in 1843 (1844); rpt. Nieuwkoop: B. De Graaf, 1972), 130-31; Memoirs, I, 69-70.
13. Dorothy McCuskey, Bronson Alcott, Teacher (New York: Macmillan, 1940), pp. 82-113.
14. E. A. Hoyt and L. S. Brigham, “Glimpses of Margaret Fuller: The Greene Street School and Florence,” New England Quarterly, 29 (1956), 88.
15. Writings, ed. Wade, p. 548; Providence, March 1, 1838, Higginson, p. 90.
16. Providence, December 9, 1838, BPL MS.
17. Ralph L. Rusk, The Life of Ralph Waldo Emerson (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1949), pp. 275-76.
18. The Dial, I (July 1840), 1-4.
19. Higginson, pp. 157, 167; see Bernard Rosenthal, “The Dial, Transcendentalism, and Margaret Fuller,” English Language Notes, 8 (September 1970), 28-36.
20. Memoirs, II, 25; Rusk, Letters, II, 316.
21. Arthur Brown, Margaret Fuller (New York: Twayne, 1964), p. 62.
22. Memoirs, II, 37; Writings, ed. Wade, p. 228.
23. “A Short Essay on Critics,” Writings, ed. Wade, pp. 223-29.
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