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 eighth Conversation [December 1839]
This letter from an unidentified woman who visited Fuller’s eighth Conversation in December 1839 conveys the atmosphere of festivity and solemnity, seriousness and childlike spontaneity that emerges from many accounts. Whether Fuller actually dressed elegantly for the Conversations, as this writer suggests, or whether this was “simply an effect of a general impression of magnificence made by her genius,” as Emerson insisted, has been much debated. Here Fuller’s appearance is taken as part of the general celebration and mutual desire to give pleasure.
Christmas made a holiday for Miss Fuller’s class, but it met on Saturday, at noon. As I sat there, my heart overflowed with joy at the sight of the bright circle, and I longed to have you by my side, for I know not where to look for so much character, culture, and so much love of truth and beauty, in any other circle of women and girls. The names and faces would not mean so much to you as to me, who have seen more of the lives, of which they are the sign. Margaret, beautifully dressed, (don’t despise that, for it made a fine picture,) presided with more dignity and grace than I had thought possible. The subject was Beauty. Each had written her definition, and Margaret began with reading her own. This called forth questions, comments, and illustrations, on all sides. The style and manner, of course, in this age, are different, but the question, the high point from which it was considered, and the earnestness and simplicity of the discussion, as well as the gifts and graces of the speakers, gave it the charm of a Platonic dialogue. There was no pretension or pedantry in a wo1d that was said. The tone of remark and question was simple as that of children in a school class; and, I believe, every one was gratified. [Memoirs, I, 332-33]
2. Record of Conversation on March 22, 1841, Elizabeth Peabody
Elizabeth Peabody’s notes on the Conversations from the second winter preserve something of the tone and method of these gatherings and show the depth of Fuller’s immersion at this time in Transcendentalist philosophy. The participants at the March 22 meeting were probably Anna Shaw, Caroline Sturgis, Elizabeth Peabody, Lidian Emerson, Almira Barlow, and Ellen Hooper.
The question of the day was, What is life?
Let us define, each in turn, our idea of living. Margaret did not believe we had, any of us, a distinct idea of life.
A. S. thought so great a question ought to be given for a written definition. “No,” said Margaret, “that is of no use. When we go away to think of anything, we never do think. We all talk of life. We all have some thought now. Let us tell it. C—, what is life?”
C— replied,—“It is to laugh, or cry, according to our organization.”
“Good,” said Margaret, “but not grave enough. Come, what is life? I know what I think; I want you to find out what you think.”
Miss P. replied,—“Life is division from one’s principle of life in order to a conscious reorganization. We are cut up by time and circumstance, in order to feel our reproduction of the eternal law.”
Mrs. E.,—“We live by the will of God, and the object of life is to submit,” and went on into Calvinism.
Then came up all the antagonisms of Fate and Freedom.
Mrs. H. said,—“God created us in order to have a perfect sympathy from us as free beings.”
Mrs. A. B. said she thought the object of life was to attain absolute freedom. At this Margaret immediately and visibly kindled.
C. S. said,—“God creates from the fulness of life, and cannot but create; he created us to overflow, without being exhausted, because what he created, necessitated new creation. It is not to make us happy, but creation is his happiness and ours.”
Margaret was then pressed to say what she considered life to be.
Her answer was so full, clear, and concise, at once, that it cannot but be marred by being drawn through the scattering medium of my memory. But here are some fragments of her satisfying statement.
She began with God as Spirit, Life, so full as to create and love eternally, yet capable of pause. Love and creativeness are dynamic forces, out of which we, individually, as creatures, go forth bearing his image, that is, having within our being the same dynamic forces, by which we also add constantly to the total sum of existence, and shaking off ignorance, and its effects, and by becoming more ourselves, i e., more divine;—destroying sin in its principle, we attain to absolute freedom, we return to God, conscious like himself, and, as his friends, giving, as well as receiving, felicity forevermore. In short, we become gods, and able to give the life which we now feel ourselves able to receive.
On Saturday morning, Mrs. L. E. and Mrs. E. H. were present, and begged Margaret to repeat the statement concerning life, with which she closed the last conversation. Margaret said she had forgotten every word she said. She must have been inspired by a good genius, to have so satisfied everybody,—but the good genius had left her. She would try, however, to say what she thought, and trusted it would resemble what she had said already. She then went into the matter, and, true enough, she did not use a single word she used before. [Memoirs, I, 345-47]
3. Conversations for men and women, Elizabeth Peabody [April 1841]
The women attending the Conversations prevailed upon Fuller to invite men to an additional series of Conversations on Greek mythology in March and April 1841. Though she hoped their superior education would enrich the discussion and “prevent the wandering and keep us from prejudice,” it seems to have been the least successful of her series. In the stark record she kept at nineteen, Caroline Healey described a quarrel about the necessity of sin for the salvation of human beings. Emerson argued that man should never recognize evil and that “Good was always present to the soul;—and was all the true soul took note of. It was a duty not to look!” According to Healey, Fuller countered that “she believed evil to be a good in the grand scheme of things . . . . In one word, she would not accept the world—for she felt within herself the power to reject it—did she not believe evil working in it for good! Man had gained more than he lost by his fall.” Emerson’s stiff last word in this account was “that to imagine it possible to fall was to begin to fall” (Healey, Margaret and Her Friends, pp. 113-18). In her summary of the series and of that debate, Elizabeth Peabody discerns some of the basic differences which led Fuller from Emersonian thought to a more active and political viewpoint.
Margaret’s plan, in these conversations, was a very noble one, and, had it been seconded, as she expected, they would have been splendid. She thought, that, by admitting gentlemen, who had access, by their classical education, to the whole historical part of the mythology, her own comparative deficiency, as she felt it, in this part of learning, would be made up; and that taking her stand on the works of art, which were the final development in Greece of these multifarious fables, the whole subject might be swept from zenith to nadir. But all that depended on others entirely failed. Mr. W. contributed some isolated facts,—told the etymology of names, and cited a few fables not so commonly known as most; but, even in the point of erudition; which Margaret did not profess, on the subject, she proved the best informed of the party, while no one brought an idea, except herself.
Her general idea was, that, upon the Earth-worship and Sabaeanism of earlier ages, the Grecian genius acted to humanize and idealize, but, still, with some regard to the original principle. What was a seed, or a root, merely, in the Egyptian mind, became a flower in Greece,—Isis, and Osiris, for instance, are reproduced in Ceres and Proserpine, with some loss of generality, but with great gain of beauty; Hermes, in Mercury, with only more grace of form, though with great loss of grandeur; but the loss of grandeur was also an advance in philosophy, in this instance, the brain in the hand being the natural consequence of the application of Idea to practice,—the Hermes of the Egyptians.
I do not feel that the class, by their apprehension of Margaret, do any justice to the scope and depth of her views. They come,—myself among the number,—I confess,—to be entertained; but she has a higher purpose. She, amid all her infirmities, studies and thinks with the seriousness of one upon oath, and there has not been a single conversation this winter, in either class, that had not in it the spirit which giveth life. Just in proportion to the importance of the subject, does she tax her mind, and say what is most important; while, of necessity, nothing is reported from the conversations but her brilliant sallies, her occasional paradoxes of form, and, sometimes, her impatient reacting upon dulness and frivolity. In particular points, I know, some excel her; in particular departments I sympathize more with some other persons; but, take her as a whole, she has the most to bestow on others by conversation of any person I have ever known. I cannot conceive of any species of vanity living in her presence. She distances all who talk with her.
Mr. E. only served to display her powers. With his sturdy reiteration of his uncompromising idealism, his absolute denial of the fact of human nature, he gave her opportunity and excitement to unfold and illustrate her realism and acceptance of conditions. What is so noble is, that her realism is transparent with idea.—her human nature is the germ of a divine life. She proceeds in her search after the unity of things, the divine harmony, not by exclusion, as Mr. E. does, but by comprehension,—and so, no poorest, saddest spirit, but she will lead to hope and faith. [Memoirs, I, 348-50]
4. “Gorgeous Pedants,” Harriet Martineau [1877]
Though Martineau never attended Fuller’s Conversations, she probably influenced the way they are remembered more than anyone who did. The vehemence of this criticism, from Harriet Martineau’s Autobiography, of Fuller’s life during the period of the Conversations was doubtless prompted by Fuller’s devasting remarks on Society in America, which had been published in the Memoirs (II: 19). (Martineau wrote in her diary in November 1839, “I suffered a great deal from her letter,” though she also found its spirit “very noble” [Harriet Martineau ‘s Autobiography, ed. Maria Weston Chapman, II, 319].) Preoccupied with Fuller’s esoteric themes and her reputedly opulent dress, Martineau found no social purpose served by the Conversations. The two groups of “elect”—abolitionists and Conversationalists—actually had largely overlapping membership, but Martineau’s charge that Fuller willfully neglected abolition is certainly justified.
. . . The difference between us was that while she was living and moving in an ideal world, talking in private and discoursing in public about the most fanciful and shallow conceits which the transcendentalists of Boston took for philosophy, she looked down upon persons who acted instead of talking finely, and devoted their fortunes, their peace, their repose, and their very lives to the preservation of the principles of the republic. While Margaret Fuller and her adult pupils sat “gorgeously dressed,” talking about Mars and Venus, Plato and Gothe, and fancying themselves the elect of the earth in intellect and refinement, the liberties of the republic were running out as fast as they could go, at a breach which another sort of elect persons were devoting themselves to repair: and my complaint against the “gorgeous” pedants was that they regarded their preservers as hewers of wood and drawers of water, and their work as a less vital one than the pedantic orations which were spoiling a set of well-meaning women in a pitiable way. All that is settled now. It was over years before Margaret died. I mention it now to show, by an example already made public by Margaret herself, what the difference was between me and her, and those who followed her lead. This difference grew up mainly after my return from America. We were there intimate friends; and I am disposed to consider that period the best of her life, except the short one which intervened between her finding her real self and her death. She told me what danger she had been in from the training her father had given her, and the encouragement to pedantry and rudeness which she derived from the circumstances of her youth. She told me that she was at nineteen the most intolerable girl that ever took a seat in a drawing-room. Her admirable candour, the philosophical way in which she took herself in hand, her genuine heart, her practical insight, and, no doubt, the natural influence of her attachment to myself, endeared her to me, while her powers, and her confidence in the use of them, led me to expect great things from her . . . .
How it might have been with her if she had come to Europe in 1836, I have often speculated. As it was, her life in Boston was little short of destructive. I need but refer to the memoir of her. In the most pedantic age of society in her own country, and in its most pedantic city, she who was just beginning to rise out of pedantic habits of thought and speech relapsed most grievously. She was not only completely spoiled in conversation and manners: she made false estimates of the objects and interests of human life. She was not content with pursuing, and inducing others to pursue, a metaphysical idealism destructive of all genuine feeling and sound activity: she mocked at objects and efforts of a higher order than her own, and despised those who, like myself, could not adopt her scale of valuation. All this might have been spared, a world of mischief saved, and a world of good effected, if she had found her heart a dozen years sooner, and in America instead of Italy. It is the most grievous loss I have almost ever known in private history—the deferring of Margaret Fuller’s married life so long. [Harriet Martineau’s Autobiography, ed. Maria Weston Chapman (Boston: James R. Osgood & Co., 1877), II, 381-83]
5. Her influence on young women, Ednah Dow Cheney [1902]
The career of Ednah Cheney (1824-1904) represents a partial rebuttal of Martineau. She went on from the Conversations to become involved in reforms ranging from “free religion” to Freedman’s Aid. After the Civil War her optimism and idealism centered on women’s rights; she played an active, though moderate, role in the struggles for suffrage and education. In 1902, she wrote of Fuller: “To this day, I am astonished to find how large a part of what I am when I am most myself I have derived from her” (Reminiscences, p. 101).
I was eager enough for any intellectual advantage, but I had imbibed with the unthinking eagerness of a schoolgirl the common prejudices against Miss Fuller, and although I believed that I should learn from her, I had no idea that I should esteem, and, much more, love her. I found myself in a new world of thought; a flood of light irradiated all that I had seen in nature, observed in life, or read in books. Whatever she spoke of revealed a hidden meaning, and everything seemed to be put into true relation. Perhaps I could best express it by saying that I was no longer the limitation of myself, but I felt that whole wealth of the universe was open to me. It was this consciousness of the illimitable ego, the divinity in the soul, which was so real to Margaret herself, and what she meant in her great saying “I accept the universe,” which gave her that air of regal superiority which was misinterpreted as conceit.
Perhaps I can best give you an idea of what she was to me by an answer which I made to her. One day when she was alone with me, and I feel as if I could now feel her touch and hear her voice, she said, “Is life rich to you?” and I replied, “It is since I have known you.” Such was the response of many a youthful heart to her, and herein was her wonderful influence. She did not make us her disciples, her blind followers. She opened the book of life to us and helped us to read it for ourselves . . . .
. . . The first mistake that the world has made in its effort to comprehend this large nature is in considering her, not as a typical woman, but as an exceptional one, whose powers were masculine, and who wielded some magic sword which she alone had strength to grasp . . . . With all the force of her intellect, all the strength of her will, all her self-denial and power of thought, she was essentially and thoroughly a woman, and she won her victories not by borrowing the peculiar weapons of man, but by using her own with courage and skill. [Reminiscences of Ednah Dow Cheney (Boston: Lee & Shepard, 1902), pp. 205, 193-94)]
6. “The Great Lawsuit,” Sophia Peabody Hawthorne [July 1843]
The difference between the awe Sophia Hawthorne felt for Fuller’s Conversations and the distaste she evinces below for Fuller’s Dial essay, “The Great Lawsuit: Man versus Men; Woman versus Women,” suggests that marriage had softened Sophia as feminism sharpened Fuller. The letter below was to Sophia’s mother, whose earlier independence as a schoolmistress in Salem did not prevent her from finding Fuller’s language in Woman “ offensive to delicacy” (Julian Hawthorne, Nathaniel Hawthorne and His Wife, I, 258).
. . . What do you think of the speech which Queen Margaret Fuller has made from the throne? It seems to me that if she were married truly, she would no longer be puzzled about the rights of woman. This is the revelation of woman’s true destiny and place, which never can be imagined by those who do not experience the relation. In perfect, high union there is no question of supremacy. Souls are equal in love and intelligent communion, and all things take their proper places as inevitably as the stars their orbits. Had there never been false and profane marriages, there would not only be no commotion about woman’s rights, but it would be Heaven here at once. Even before I was married, however, I could never feel the slightest interest in this movement. It then seemed to me that each woman could make her own sphere quietly, and also it was always a shock to me to have women mount the rostrum. Home, I think, is the great arena for women, and there, I am sure, she can wield a power which no king or conqueror can cope with. I do not believe any man who ever knew one noble woman would ever speak as if she were an inferior in any sense: it is the fault of ignoble women that there is any such opinion in the world. [Julian Hawthorne, Nathaniel Hawthorne and his Wife (Boston: James R. Osgood & Co. 1855), I, 257]
7. Woman in the Nineteenth Century, Edgar Allan Poe, August 1846
A reviewer of Woman in the Nineteenth Century protested in the Broadway Journal: “Her most direct writing is on a subject no virtuous woman can treat justly. No woman is a true woman who is not wife and mother.” Poe, later writing an essay on Fuller for the same journal, disavowed his colleague’s remarks. In the passage below, Poe differs from Cheney’s later view (IV:5) that Fuller was a representative woman.
Woman in the Nineteenth Century is a book which few women in the country could have written, and no woman in the country would have published, with the exception of Miss Fuller. In the way of independence, of unmitigated radicalism, it is one of the “Curiosities of American Literature,” and Doctor Griswold should include it in his book. I need scarcely say that the essay is nervous, forcible, thoughtful, suggestive, brilliant, and to a certain extent scholarlike—for all that Miss Fuller produces is entitled to these epithets—but I must say that the conclusions reached are only in part my own. Not that they are too bold, by any means—too novel, too startling, or too dangerous in their consequences, but that in their attainment too many premises have been distorted, and too many analogical inferences left altogether out of sight. I mean to say that the intention of the Deity as regards sexual differences—an intention which can be distinctly comprehended only by throwing the exterior (more sensitive) portions of the mental retina casually over the wide field of universal analogy—I mean to say that this intention has not been sufficiently considered. Miss Fuller has erred, too, through her own excessive subjectiveness. She judges woman by the heart and intellect of Miss Fuller, but there are not more than one or two dozen Miss Fullers on the whole face of the earth. [Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1902), IX, 7-8]
8. Woman in the Nineteenth Century, Caroline Sturgis, March 4, 1845
One indication of the degree of mutual respect between Fuller and her friends is the freedom with which some of them criticized her writing. Thus Lydia Maria Child wrote her on August 23, 1844, thanking her for Summer in the Lakes; “Shall I tell you what always, more or less, mars my pleasure? . . . The stream is abundant and beautiful; but it always seems to be pumped, rather than to flow . . . . your house is too full; there is too much furniture for your rooms. This is the result of a higher education than popular writers usually have; but it stands much in the way of extensive popularity (Houghton MS). And Caroline Sturgis criticized Woman in the Nineteenth Century in the letter below. Fuller responded on March 13, 1845, that she found her remarks “very true”; but she added that the need for the book was proved “by the ardent interest it excites in those who have never known me. Those, you know, are the persons to whom it is addressed, and they do feel their wounds probed, and healing promised by it. The opposition and the sympathy it excites are both great, and you will laugh to hear that it is placarded here as ‘Great Book of the Age’” (Tappan Papers, Houghton).
Thank you for the pamphlet, dear Margaret. I have read it through but the style troubles me very much. I cannot free myself from a feeling of great consciousness in all you write. There is a recurrence of comparisons, illustrations, & words, which is not pleasing. There seems to be a want of vital powers as if you had gathered flowers and planted them in a garden but had left the roots in their own soil. It is full of suggestions like everything else in this age, but one living child is worth a whole series of tableaux. It is not a book to take to heart and that is what a book upon woman should be. It makes me sad that it is necessary such an one should be written but since it is so it cannot but do good to lift the veil as you have done—how hard a thing to do! The book is good for me in giving me a glimpse of many things, and I am like a child peeping into a confectioner’s store & wishing to go & taste all the sugar swans and frosted cakes . . . . [Houghton MS]
9. Woman in the Nineteenth Century, John Neal, March 4, 1845
When Fuller invited John Neal (1793-1876) to address her students in Providence on the destiny and vocation of women, her feminist thought was greatly stimulated. A flamboyant intellectual from Maine, Neal was a teacher of drawing and fencing, an editor, a lawyer, a poet and historical romancer famous for composition at breakneck speed, and an ardent Benthamite polemicist. “I knew none who was so truly a man,” Fuller wrote; but he also made her uneasy: “I should not like to have my motives scrutinized as he should scrutinize them” (BPL MS). Though he wrote her from Portland that a quick skimming assured him that Woman was “a most desirable companion for life,” his utilitarian approach made him essentially impatient with it.
My dear Miss Fuller
You go for thought—I for action. You find action in your path at every step Instead of making faces at him and bullying him off the field, you sit down by the wayside and begin magnetizing him. Now I dont believe in anything upon earth of a tranquilizing nature, where men and women are at stake—I go for the whip and spur—the lash of the cartman’s whip and bark of the sheperds [sic] dog: in other words I go for making people get up and take care of themselves. Women are fools—beyond all question. But who made them so? Their fathers-husbands-brothers—and all the lawgivers and mighty of earth—persuading them to believe, the simpletons, while they are held in the most degrading thraldom, as mere instruments of pleasure and show, that they are not slaves in the worst sense of the term, & calling upon them to teach what they have never been allowed to learn (politics and law and history for example—or the definition of liberty, secondly the Constitution of the U.S.) and to be satisfied with unqualified, hopeless and perpetual dependence upon Man—
10. Her feminism, Horace Greeley [1852]
“Margaret’s book is going to sell,” exulted Horace Greeley (1811-1872) to a friend, “I tell you it has the real stuff in it” (Arthur W. Brown, Margaret Fuller, pp. 76-77). The sale in one week of a first edition of one thousand copies proved him right.
Mary Cheney Greeley, greatly impressed by Fuller during visits to Boston, had urged her husband to offer Fuller a job on the New York Daily Tribune and a room in their ramshackle mansion on the East River. He was at first a maladroit host. He scolded her for her addiction to strong tea and resolved to “ escape the fascination which she seemed to exert over the eminent and cultivated persons, mainly women, who came to our out-of-the-way dwelling to visit her, and who seemed generally to regard her with a strangely Oriental adoration” (Memoirs, II, 156). His private view of the women’s-rights struggle shows in the classic judgment he makes in Recollections of a Busy Life (p. 178): “Noble and great as she was, a good husband and two or three bouncing babies would have emancipated her from a good deal of cant and nonsense.” Though they later became warm friends, in the early phase he noted with satisfaction the inconsistency in her feminism.
. . . One other point of tacit antagonism between us may as well be noted. Margaret was always a most earnest, devoted champion on the Emancipation of Women, from their past and present condition of inferiority, to an independence on Men. She demanded for them the fullest recognition of Social and Political Equality with the rougher sex; the freest access to all stations, professions, employments, which are open to any. To this demand I heartily acceded. It seemed to me, however, that her clear perceptions of abstract right were often overborne, in practice, by the influence of education and habit; that while she demanded absolute equality for Woman, she exacted a deference and courtesy from men to women, as women, which was entirely inconsistent with that requirement. In my view, the equalizing theory can be enforced only by ignoring the habitual discrimination of men and women, as forming separate classes, and regarding all alike as simply persons,—as human beings. So long as a lady shall deem herself in need of some gentleman’s arm to conduct her properly out of a dining or ball-room,—so long as she shall consider it dangerous or unbecoming to walk half a mile alone by night,—I cannot see how the “Woman’s Rights” theory is ever to be anything more than a logically defensible abstraction. In this view Margaret did not at all concur, and the diversity was the incitement to much perfectly good-natured, but nevertheless sharpish sparring between us. Whenever she said or did anything implying the usual demand of Woman on the courtesy and protection of Manhood, I was apt, before complying, to look her in the face and exclaim with marked emphasis,—quoting from her “Woman in the Nineteenth Century,”—“Let them be sea-captains if they will!” Of course, this was given and received as raillery, but it did not tend to ripen our intimacy or quicken my esteem into admiration . . . . [Memoirs, II, 155-56]
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