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 IV
The Feminist
So lectured Caroline Healey Dall, a veteran feminist, at the end of the century; in her youth, she had been Fuller’s disciple. But though Fuller’s life and work had made possible such a feminist interpretation of Transcendentalism, for herself feminism emerged slowly and initially as a part of her engagement with Transcendentalism.
In a sense, it is remarkable that Fuller became a feminist at all. Certainly identification with other women did not come easily to her. In the absence of a movement, criticism of other women was the natural recourse of a woman seeking to break out of the limited world her sisters seemed to accept, and this was accentuated in Fuller’s case by her goals of unlimited self-development. To defend herself from discouragement, Fuller cultivated in private her sense of exceptionality and presented herself publicly as a woman of singular destiny. Her feminism never eradicated these habits. On the other hand, beginning in girlhood, her interest in herself had made her genuinely curious about other women and intensely attracted to some of them. Gradually, a sense of women as a group and a desire to work for them emerged. The first expression of her concern was an enterprise motivated partly by financial need: the offering of a series of “Conversations” for women, beginning in November 1839, a few months before she began to work on The Dial. Very likely inspired by heady sessions with the Transcendental Club, the Conversations nourished a sense of herself and of possible vocations which eventually led her far beyond the Concord circle and its aims.
In a letter to Sophia Ripley, Fuller proposed to assemble a circle of “well-educated and thinking women”; her object was to help them “systematize thought and give a precision and clearness in which our sex are so deficient, chiefly, I think, because they have so few inducements.” Thus employing Timothy Fuller’s standards, she aimed to answer the questions he could not. The women were to ask, “What were we born to do: and how shall we do it?” and, more specifically, to ascertain “how we may make best use of our means of building up the life of thought upon the life of action.” She felt confident of success if the women would participate, would abjure “coterie criticism” and “that sort of vanity in them which wears the garb of modesty.” At the first meeting she explained further that the extensive but superficial education currently granted women of her class deprived them of the abilities and the “mother wisdom and wit” their less schooled but more genuinely productive grandmothers had; and unlike men, who “reproduce all that they learn” in college and worldly careers, “women learn without any attempt to reproduce.” Her choice of the word “reproduce” for the intellectual achievement she sought was not casual. She had thought long and painfully before preferring the quick “children of the muse” to the “lovely children of a human birth,” who brought to their mothers “slow and neutralyzing cares.”2
Paying a small fee, about twenty-five women-eventually more than forty would appear—gathered at noon once a week for two hours in the shabby parlor of Elizabeth Peabody. (After leaving Alcott’s school, that tireless handmaiden of the movement had set up a Transcendentalist townhouse, a cultural oasis on West Street in Boston, from which she sold or loaned foreign literature and published native works on a small scale.) These participants were almost all from eminent families or were accomplished in their own right or prominent then or later in the abolitionist and feminist struggles: women like Elizabeth Bliss Bancroft, Eliza Farrar, Lydia Cabot Parker, Lidian Emerson, Mary, Sophia, and Elizabeth Peabody, Lydia Maria Child, and Maria White. In the first series, Fuller chose Greek mythology to discuss, seeing it as “playful as well as deep,” although even here some “Christian ladies,” unhappy that “heathen Greeks should be envied,” had to be persuaded that the Greeks had achieved a more mature civilization than the Christians.3 The Conversations continued for five winters and also treated fine arts, ethics, education, and women, especially their influence on family, school, church, society, and literature.
Her method in the Conversations, adapted from her teaching experiments, was first to offer a short introduction to the subject, suggesting ideas they might pursue, then to invite responses, definitions, criticisms. There were no reading assignments, no regular written ones. Some issues intriguing to us now are blurred in the records women kept of these conversations, where the actual exchanges are rendered telegraphically or smothered in enthusiastic generality. If one account suggests it was an open exchange of ideas, teaching intellectual self-reliance, another hints that it was Fuller’s dazzling solo, inspiring a trancelike worship. It seems likely that both interpretations were valid at one time or another in the course of five winters and that they were not felt to be contradictory. In a gathering of this sort (with virtually no precedent save Anne Hutchinson’s much bolder group) led by such an unusually well-educated and articulate woman, the question of equality between her and the other women was not as pressing as it would become later. No Transcendentalist brooded over this sort of dilemma. And Fuller was offering the women liberation as she had come to know it—the Transcendentalist brew of enthusiasm for self and others and ideas. Thus, in all likelihood, neither Fuller nor her students would see irony in her way of describing their harmonious communication: “Our relation is now perfectly true, and I do not think they will ever interrupt me” (IV:11).
For the women the experience was plainly instructive as well as exhilarating. Whether in the final analysis it worked to liberate them or subtly to gild their cages depends on our perspective. From a short-range feminist point of view or a radical political one, we might agree with Harriet Martineau’s strictures (IV:4) and find that this Yankee version of the salon both overindulged the women and mystified the real issues of their lives. If any records of her later Conversation series—especially those on women and education—had survived, we might gain an altogether different impression. But the existing records suggest that nothing Fuller said directly perjured True Womanhood; on the contrary, she clearly endorsed women’s “special” capacity for love and morality. In her treatment of the fine arts, she also affirmed women’s sense of duty, though, of course, in her own idiom. Describing self-knowledge, “the path of the true soul,” as “enacted poesy,” she pointed out that “the disturbing influence of other wills,” which had “as much right to their own action as we to ours,” prevented its complete attainment. As in her friendships, she urged living in terms of the ideal, but, if the record is faithful, she was more conservative about the possibility; the fine arts—“one compensation for the necessary prose of life”—should console women for life’s limitations. Not only did Fuller soft-pedal open emancipation, but she preferred—at least at first—to discuss topics “quite separated from all exciting local subjects.”4 She consciously avoided controversial social questions and refused outright to discuss abolition (IV:12). Contrasted with Angelina Grimké’s speaking tour, which culminated in 1838 with an antislavery appeal before the Massachusetts State Legislature, Fuller’s “parlatorio,” as Emerson styled it, was mild amusement indeed.
But if we take a liberal or a long-range feminist view, Martineau’s criticism seems to miss the point. Fuller’s very premise that women should nurture their serious responses to each other as well as their obligations to family and society was trail-blazing. The “vindication of woman’s right to think” which Elizabeth Cady Stanton later found in the Conversations,5 was subtly subversive; for thinking women the precincts of love stretched beyond the hearth and morality was reinformed with free choice and personal responsibility. Even in her treatment of Greek mythology, Fuller taught by analogy the importance of free will, the enlightened mind, and moral awakening.6
In Fuller’s own development the Conversations played a similarly ambiguous role. While their content delayed her acquisition of sophisticated political attitudes and understanding, their form initiated a break from the Transcendentalists. The Conversations formally reflected her intellect and character. They satisfied some of her needs and they gave her clearer authority than her previous activities had done and a foretaste of social involvement. At first, Fuller expected little for herself from the experience. After the first weeks, she reported that, while she was relieved not to have had the feeling she dreaded “of display, of a paid Corinne,” she was “never driven home for ammunition, never put to any expense, never truly called out.” As the women in the group could not challenge her intellectually, the relation between them and Fuller must have been marked more by gratitude and generosity than by mutuality or solidarity. After her last Conversation, Fuller virtually confessed to her diary that such altruism—however flattering its reception—could not satisfy her: “It was the last time, and they were pleasant. They love me and fancy I am good and wise. Oh that it gave me more pleasure to do a little good, and give a little happiness. But there is no modesty or moderation in me.”7
The letter she wrote to Elizabeth Hoar after the same meeting was much more positive, however: “How noble has been my experience of such relations now for six years, and with so many and so various minds! Life is worth living, is it not?” And there are indications that Fuller began to draw on more of her resources for this group than elsewhere. For Elizabeth Peabody, who had seen Fuller perform also at the Transcendental Club, wrote, in refutation of the general axiom that men best draw out women, “Certain it is that Margaret never appears, when I see her, either so brilliant and deep in thought, or so desirous to please, or so heart-touching, as in this very party.”8
Peabody’s observation was made after the first Conversation in the second winter, which took place November 5, 1840, less than two weeks after Emerson begged off from their tormented debate on friendship. The juxtaposition of Fuller’s failure with Emerson and her success with the women is dramatically revealing. The point is not that Emerson was cold and the women warm, though this is true. The point is rather that what she had asked of Emerson, comprehension and acceptance of all her faculties, was inappropriate and necessarily obscure; driving her demand were the masked urges to power and submission. With the women she was simply making use of her diverse energies—intellectual and erotic, poetic and moral. She was engaged in an activity in which her enthusiastic emotionality was fused with disciplined thought. Triggered as it was by her intimate experience of unused and directionless energy, her sympathetic work with the women began to show her the way to wholeness, the free exercise of her power. She would become whole and power would become real in her intelligent and committed action for those who lacked it.
At the same time, her experience in the Conversations led her to esteem women more. In February 1841, she dashed off an angry note to Channing in which pride in her sex was still outweighed by resentment of man’s power. “I wish I were a man, and then there would be one,” she flashed. “There are women much less unworthy to live than you, Men; the best are so unripe, the wisest so ignoble, the truest so cold!”9
By 1843, however, in a long essay for the July issue of The Dial, her ideas had ·ripened to the point where she could argue that to restrain women’s self-development was to inhibit that of the whole human race. This essay, “The Great Lawsuit: Man versus Men: Woman versus Women,” was her most Transcendentalist work, applying that system to herself and her sex, and it was also a summary of the views she held in New England on self and society. A year later she expanded the essay into the book Woman in the Nineteenth Century, which represented two sorts of advances in her development: a quickened sense of independence and of psychological integrity and a new attention to the claims of society and politics. Her experiences between the writing of essay and book greatly influenced these changes. At the time the essay was published, she was traveling in the Great Lakes region, a venture which did much to wean her from dependence on the thought of New England. The trip also had the long-overdue effect of moving Margaret Fuller permanently into the larger world, as her book Summer on the Lakes, in 1843 prompted Horace Greeley to offer her a job with the New York Tribune. In autumn 1844, before undertaking her new job, she gave herself a holiday with Caroline Sturgis, her favorite companion for New England fortnights, in handsome Fishkill, on the Hudson not far from New York. There she expanded the Dial essay, which Greeley had agreed to publish as a book.
Although her old enemies, loneliness and migraine, the “great vulture” with “iron talons,” tormented her as she wrote, she saw them clearly now as the price paid for independence as a woman and for the fusion of qualities she was effecting at last. “I think the black jailer laughs now, hoping that while I want to show that Woman can have the free, full action of intellect, he will prove in my own self that she has not physical force to bear it,” she wrote in her journal. Autonomy becomes the weapon by which she might prevail.
Action from feeling should heal the breach and prevent tears or bafflement.10
The experience of revising Woman in the Nineteenth Century approximated such ideal action . Fuller knew well that with this work she was repudiating an earlier otherworldly and ultra “ feminine” dream of action and choosing one bound up with mundane circumstance, a relatively “ virile” form, perhaps, except that she embraced it as a woman and on woman’s behalf. “Formerly,” she wrote at this time, “the pen did not seem to me an instrument capable of expressing the spirit of a life like mine.” The alternatives she had sought belong to the myth of Fuller as sibyl or Corinne, of Fuller at her most breathless in the Conversations:
Resolutely and without regret, she breaks the spell: “But the golden lyre was not given to my hand . . . . Let me use, then, the slow pen.” The tone, even the rhythm, of her intentions changes dramatically. “I will make no formal vow to the long-scorned Muse . . . . but I will court excellence, so far as an humble heart and open eye can merit it, and, if I may gradually grow to some degree of worthiness in this mode of expression, I shall be grateful.” Though the humility may have been in some measure a pose too, the commitment to a new métier was not, and Fuller kept this vow to herself the rest of her life. Her pen, of course, was never slow, and she wrote to Channing in mid-November, “I have finished the pamphlet, though the last day it kept spinning out beneath my hand . . . . I felt a delightful glow, as if I had put a good deal of my true life in it, and as if, should I go away now, the measure of my foot-print would be left on the earth.”11
Fuller’s feeling of psychic wholeness is reflected in her treatment in this book of the vexed question whether female nature is distinct from male. As always, she left it open, but now from intuitive fidelity to freedom and an unwillingness to be restrictive, not from tormented indecision.12 On the one hand, she concurs with the cultural conviction that woman’s nature was distinct—or, in her own idiom, “electrical in movement, intuitive in function, spiritual in tendency”—that it is “more native to inspire and receive the poem, than it is to create it.” But she insists, on the other hand, that this female essence never appears unmixed: “two sides of the great radical dualism,” male and female, “are perpetually passing into one another,” and “there is no wholly masculine man, no purely feminine woman.” Moreover, distinguishing “Muse,” the woman in whom the “ feminine” qualities preponderate, from “Minerva,” in whom the “masculine” prevails, Fuller argues that in the present state of society, Minerva should be encouraged more than Muse (IV: 13).
The eloquent portrait of Fuller’s “friend” Miranda in this work triumphantly mirrors Fuller’s Minerva. This is also an idealized self-portrait which contrasts sharply with that in the 1840 autobiographical fragment (I:5). Timothy’s training, earlier characterized as his “one great mistake,” is now seen as stemming not from a “sentimental reverence for Woman but a firm belief in the equality of the sexes.” Where previously she argued that he trained her as a boy at the expense of her girlhood, now she sees that he addressed her “as a living mind,” not a plaything. Where the effect earlier was a life “devoured in the bud,” now it is ability to take “her place easily, not only in the world of organized being, but in the world of mind. A dignified sense of self-dependence was given as all her portion, and she found it a sure anchor.” No doubt both the ease and unity of youth projected in this version and the difficulty and division in the 1840 account are polemical strategies dictated by perceptions available to her at different times. But why, after three years, do pride and courage supplant despair in her memory of her extraordinary youth? Surely the intervening experience of wholeness in conducting the Conversations goes far to explain the change. And again the act of engaging all her thought and feeling in writing the book represented a healing of the breach.
The structure of the Conversations—women seeking by themselves to find and develop their own powers—also informs the fervent and reiterated theme of independence in the book. By “independence” she means a combination of the Transcendentalist virtue of self-reliance and the activist one of “self-impulse.” She means that, believing woman made for man, man disqualifies himself from representing woman, and that, until she represents herself, woman is “only an overgrown child.” She means that celibacy and solidarity among women are honorable and essential.
In its attitudes toward society—the effects society has on women, the role women should take in society—the argument of Woman in the Nineteenth Century is a curiously hybrid affair. Here, calls for various social reforms and even for militant action sound through the old music of pure Transcendentalist asocial individualism. This dissonance comes partly from Fuller’s perennial uneasiness with pure Transcendentalism and partly from the growing social concern which was drawing her to New York. Thus she begins by applying to women the Transcendentalist tenet that “the highest ideal Man can form of his own powers is that which he is destined to attain.” In this phase of her thought, “What Woman needs is not as a woman to act or rule, but as a nature to grow, as an intellect to discern, as a soul to live freely and unimpeded, to unfold such powers as were given her when we left our common home.” But grafted onto this lofty philosophizing is the homely democratic faith of the Declaration of Independence: “All men are born free and equal.” The latter notion leads her to praise the abolitionist movement she had chosen to ignore in her Conversations and to admire its activists, Angelina Grimké and Abby Kelley. In her revision she also calls upon women to respond en masse to the threatened annexation of Texas; and she heralds public speaking and petition carrying by women, widely censored as immodest and offensive, as the exercise of “moral power” men have abjured. Fuller allows that she adopts contradictory systems of analysis of the cause and cure of human ill, veering from the internal and individual to the social and institutional and back. But she believes at this stage that neither system alone is adequate; we should blend the wisdom of Fourier, the critic of society, with that of Goethe, the critic of the soul.
Such eclecticism frees her to write with flexibility and with a candor remarkable for the time on marriage and, in the revision, on sexuality and prostitution. Marriage, in her view, is honorable in linking individuals who cherish mutual freedom, but is debased by possessiveness and the motive of security. It becomes odious when used as a standard by which to cast out the brilliant George Sand or Mary Wollstonecraft, whose very gifts may make conventional liaisons unacceptable. She does not openly argue for women’s sexual needs, but the claim for equality in passion begins to emerge from her high-minded appeal for equality in purity, purity that is a proud choice, not a matter of restraint or ignorance. On the forbidden topic of prostitution, she urges her middle-class readers to think about how their own idleness and vain love of display pressure poor women into desperate competition.
In the context of feminist thought, Woman presented a broader but much less single-minded attack on the question of woman than its chief predecessors had done. Mary Wollstonecraft, for example, steeped in the republican and rationalist thought of the Enlightenment and fired by the revolutionary atmosphere of fifty years earlier, had called for full equality in a consistent, rationalist fashion. Fuller’s comparatively romantic and unsystematic treatment represented an advance past Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Woman chiefly in its insistence that woman must take responsibility for her own liberation.
In America, Catharine Beecher and the Grimké sisters, like Wollstonecraft, had very recently written out of a political urgency which Fuller was only beginning to feel. But the political difference between the Grimkés and Beecher was polar. Stirred by an abhorrence of slavery and a partial identification with the slaves, the Grimké sisters freed and fulfilled themselves by moving from their slaveholding family, through a strong religious commitment, to the abolitionist movement. The censure of these women for speaking in the 1830s provided a major impetus to the women’s-rights movement, and the sisters dedicated their lives to fighting the double oppression. Enemies of the clergy and the vested interests of the nation, the Grimkés argued for absolute equality and were the first so clearly to give the lie to Tocqueville’s fancy of the woman whose mature freedom lies in self-repression.
By contrast, Catharine Beecher explicitly endorsed and even extended Tocqueville’s reasoning. For her the emergency was the nation’s imminent dissolution—the consequence of expansion, heightening competition, and growing sectional conflict—witnessed daily in the microcosm of the family. Only hierarchy, a firmly differentiated character in women, and the discipline of deference, could save the day; for such willed submission was the mark of superior moral sensibility whose influence, if genuinely and uniformly based in the home, would, according to Beecher, spread irresistibly beyond it to the nation at large. (Fuller’s drives toward power and dependency in her relation to Emerson would, in Beecher’s terms, be sanctioned by marriage and made grandiose by patriotism.) The nature of a woman who saved America was radically different from the nature of one who liberated herself and slaves. As conservatism bound Beecher to sexual stereotypes, political radicalism freed the Grimkés from them. Thus while Sarah Grimké argued in Letters on the Equality of the Sexes that only “the forgetfulness of sex” will enable us to fulfill the Creator’s design, Catharine Beecher insisted that only women’s cultivation of a character “refined in intellect . . . benevolent in feeling . . . unassuming and unambitious, ‘gentle and easy to be entreated’” would work to influence men, and through them, the nation.13
While I can find no concrete evidence that Fuller had yet read the work of either the Grimkés or Beecher,14 she echoes at moments the thought of both. Beneath her glamorous veil, Muse is simply the wife in Catharine Beecher’s vision, and insofar as Fuller assumes sexual difference and awards superiority to women, she is bound to that conservative tradition. But Minerva and the Miranda portrait are granted greater vividness than Muse. And Fuller has acid scorn for those who feel woman must be sheltered in the inner circle: “Those who think the physical circumstances of Woman would make a part in the affairs of national government unsuitable, are by no means those who think it impossible for negresses to endure field-work, even during pregnancy, or for sempstresses to go through their killing labors.” At such moments, and with the calls to action, Fuller moves for the first time toward the Grimkes’ radicalism, though she appears not yet aware of its cost. Transcendentalist idealism separates her from both traditions, and is at once radical in its independence and heroic iconoclasm and conservative in its obliviousness to social conditions.
Fuller’s combination of commitment to women and lack of systematic analysis made her book widely influential at the same time that it failed to contribute markedly to any school of thought. Men friendly to Fuller, especially Theodore Parker, W. H. Channing, and James Clarke, and students of the Conversations, especially Caroline Healey Dall, Elizabeth Peabody, and Ednah Dow Cheney, all gave the feminist movement active support; Cheney noted that after her death women’s clubs named for Fuller sprang up all over the West. In 1848, the drafters of the Seneca Falls Declaration of Sentiments may have taken their cue from Fuller’s use of the Declaration of Independence; certainly they systematically bodied forth most of Fuller’s points. In 1852, Sarah Grimké urged the first Women’s Rights Convention in Pennsylvania to adopt as their watchword Fuller’s prayer, “Give me truth; cheat me by no illusion.” And Paulina Wright Davis, at the Worcester Convention in 1850, lamented her death at the moment when so many were hoping this “leader of thought” would come home to lead the movement.15
It is unlikely that Fuller would have taken such a public role. Active feminism had taught her that a quietist, apolitical Transcendentalist idealism could not serve her; it showed her that there were vocations which drew on all her qualities and initiated her career of activist journalism; it was leading her into fuller engagements with the world. She never lost her feminist perspective, but it triggered a process of political analysis and action which carried her beyond struggle for women alone. She never ceased caring for women, but the distancing, altruistic mode disappeared. At the same time, in her own life she at last recognized and claimed the freedom she needed for herself. In a sense, only by ceasing to be a leader of women could Margaret Fuller become—for those women who could see the meaning of her life in its last years-a model.
Notes
1. “Transcendentalism in New England, A Lecture delivered before the Society for Philosophical Enquiry” (Boston: Roberts Bros., 1897) p. 6. Ednah Dow Cheney had made a very similar point in a lecture on Fuller given at the Congress of American Advancement of Women in New Orleans, in November 1895.
2. Memoirs, I, 324-29; Mason Wade, Margaret Fuller: Whetstone of Genius (New York: The Viking Press, 1940), p. 81; Although Oberlin had begun in 1833 to offer women a college education and Mount Holyoke opened in 1837, very few women and apparently none in Fuller’s acquaintance availed themselves of these controversial opportunities. And Elizabeth Peabody’s “Historical School” for women seemed to have lacked Fuller’s inspiring emphasis on self-development.
3. Memoirs, I, 329-30.
4. Memoirs, I, 341, 329.
5. History of Woman Suffrage, eds. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage, (1881; rpt. New York: Arno and The New York Times, l, 1969), 801.
6. I am indebted to Barbara Welter for this last observation.
7. Memoirs, I, 332; Higginson, p. 303. A curious fact, which may support my notion of the group’s incomplete solidarity, is that both women who kept the most extensive records known of the Conversations-Elizabeth Peabody and Caroline Healey Dall-believed that Fuller did not like them (see II:30 and Houghton MS).
8. Memoirs, l, 351, 340.
9. Higginson, p. 112.
10. Memoirs, II, 135, 136.
11. Memoirs, II, 138; Higginson, p. 201.
12. For many readers, including George Eliot, this was wisdom: “Some of the best things she says are on the folly of absolute definitions of woman’s nature and absolute demarcations of woman’s mission” (“Margaret Fuller and Mary Wollstonecraft,” Leader, VI (1855), 988-89; rpt. in Essays of George Eliot, ed. Thomas Pinney [New York: Columbia University Press, 1963), p. 203).
13. Letters on the Equality of the Sexes, and the Condition of Woman, quoted in The Roots of American Feminist Thought, eds. James L. and Sheila M. Cooper (Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1973), p. 71 Essay on Slavery and Abolitionism with Reference to the Duty of American Females (1843), quoted by Kathryn Kish Sklar, Catharine Beecher: A Study in American Domesticity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1973), p. 136.
14. For the Tribune of October 30, 1845, Fuller reviewed Catharine Beecher’s Duty of American Women to Their Country; she was interested particularly in Beecher’s projected training of teachers.
15. Reminiscences of Ednah Dow Cheney (Boston: Lee & Shepard, 1902,) p. 193; History of Woman Suffrage, I, 355, 217.
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