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Margaret Fuller and the Transcendental Ethos: Woman in the Nineteenth Century

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

David M. Robinson
David M. Robinson*
Affiliation:
Oregon State University, Corvallis
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Extract

Margaret Fuller, despite her personal association with transcendentalism, has increasingly come to be seen apart from that movement, as a rebel whose rejection of Romantic Boston was essential to her development. Yet Fuller is best understood as an embodiment of the value most central to transcendentalism, “self-culture.” The doctrine of the cultivation of the self preached by Channing and others profoundly influenced all the transcendentalists, including Fuller. But her concentration on its implications for feminist concerns led to her important work on women's culture, Woman in the Nineteenth Century. This long essay—which evolved through an intense study of Goethean criticism and a series of discussions, or “Conversations,” that Fuller organized for women—is best seen as the application of transcendental philosophy to the concerns of women and as an instructive example of the connections between idealist philosophy and social reform.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 97 , Issue 1 , January 1982 , pp. 83 - 98
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1982

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References

Note 1 Vernon L. Parrington, The Romantic Revolution in America, 1800–1860, Vol. II of Main Currents in American Thought (New York: Harcourt, 1927), p. 426.

Note 2 [R. W. Emerson, W. H. Channing, and J. F. Clarke], Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli (Boston: Phillips, Sampson, 1852), I, 232; hereafter cited parenthetically in the text as Memoirs.

Note 3 The quotation is from Barbara Welter, Dimity Convictions: The American Woman in the Nineteenth Century (Athens: Ohio Univ. Press, 1976), p. 180. See also Vivian C. Hopkins, “Margaret Fuller: Pioneer Women's Liberationist,” American Transcendental Quarterly, No. 18 (1973), 29–35; Susan Phinney Conrad, Perish the Thought: Intellectual Women in Romantic America, 1830–1860 (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1976), pp. 45–92; and Bell Gale Chevigny, “Growing Out of New England: The Emergence of Margaret Fuller's Radicalism,” Women's Studies, 5 (1978), 65–100 (hereafter cited as “Growing”). On the reception of the book, see Joel Myerson, Margaret Fuller: An Annotated Secondary Bibliography (New York: Burt Franklin, 1977), which lists contemporary reviews, and Myerson's discussion of early reviews in Myerson, ed., Margaret Fuller: Essays on American Life and Letters (New Haven: College and University Press, 1978), pp. 16–23 (hereafter cited as Margaret Fuller: Essays) and by Margaret Vanderhaar Allen, The Achievement of Margaret Fuller (University Park: Pennsylvania State Univ. Press, 1979), pp. 146–48.

Note 4 On Fuller and the transcendentalists, see Bell Gale Chevigny, The Woman and the Myth: Margaret Fuller's Life and Writings (Old Westbury, N.Y. : Feminist Press, 1976), pp. 31–32; Chevigny, “Growing,” passim; and Allen, pp. 25–44. On the importance of Fuller's life compared with her work, see Chevigny, Woman and Myth, pp. 7–10; Allen, pp. 13–24; Paula Blanchard, Margaret Fuller: From Transcendentalism to Revolution (New York: Delacorte Press, 1978), p. 2; and, for a good example of the position that Fuller's life and example outweigh her work, Welter's concluding statements on Fuller (p. 198).

Note 5 See Chevigny, Woman and Myth, pp. 10–11.

Note 6 The Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. William H. Gilman et al. (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1960- ), vii, 109; hereafter cited as JMN. For discussions of the Fuller-Emerson relation see Allen, pp. 25–44; Chevigny, “Growing,” pp. 76–82; Ann Douglas, The Feminization of American Culture (New York: Knopf, 1977), pp. 274–79; Joel Myerson, “Margaret Fuller's 1842 Journal: At Concord with the Emersons,” Harvard Library Bulletin, 21 (1973), 320–40; and Carl F. Strauch, “Hatred's Swift Repulsions: Emerson, Margaret Fuller, and Others,” Studies in Romanticism, 7 (1968), 65–103.

Note 7 Paul John Eakin has ably discussed Fuller's influence, as “an Emersonian seeker after self-culture,” on the fiction of Hawthorne and James; he argues that self-culture was “the most important model for the conception of the inner life in nineteenth-century America” (pp. 50–51). Although I have some differences with Eakin's interpretation of self-culture (see Sec. 2), his discussion of Fuller's pursuit of it is excellent. See The New England Girl: Cultural Ideals in Hawthorne, Stowe, Howells, and James (Athens: Univ. of Georgia Press, 1976).

Note 8 Conrad Wright, “William Ellery Channing,” in The American Renaissance in New England, ed. Joel Myerson, Vol. I of Dictionary of Literary Biography (Detroit: Gale Research, 1978), p. 21; Channing, The Works of William Ellery Channing, D.D. (Boston: American Unitarian Assn., 1875), p. 15. Quotation is from “Self-Culture” (1838).

Note 9 See “Self-Culture,” in Emerson, Young Emerson Speaks: Unpublished Discourses on Many Subjects, ed. Arthur C. McGiffert (Boston: Houghton, 1938), pp. 99–104, hereafter cited as YES; and “Human Culture,” in Emerson, The Early Lectures of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Stephen E. Whicher, Robert E. Spiller, and Wallace E. Williams (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1959–72), Vol. ii of 3 vols., 205–364; hereafter cited as EL.

Note 10 Alcott, The Doctrine and Discipline of Human Culture (Boston: James Munroe, 1836), pp. 3–4. See the facsimile reprint of this essay in Alcott, Essays on Education (1830–1862), ed. Walter Harding (Gainesville, Fla.: Scholars' Facsimiles and Reprints, 1960).

Note 11 See Lawrence Buell, Literary Transcendentalism: Style and Vision in the American Renaissance (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1973), pp. 269–71; Emerson, The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Joseph Slater, Alfred R. Ferguson, and Jean Ferguson Carr (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1979), Vol. II of 2 vols, to date, 37 (hereafter cited parenthetically in the text as CW); and Edwin Gittleman, Jones Very: The Effective Years, 1833–1840 (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1967), pp. 188–95.

Note 12 For the early development of the idea see “The Genuine Man,” YES, pp. 180–90; the lecture series “Biography,” EL, i, 91–201; and “The Philosophy of History,” EL, ii, 1–188. See also Merton M. Sealts, Jr., “Emerson on the Scholar, 1833–1837,” PMLA, 85 (1970), 185–95, esp. 189–93.

Note 13 For the critique of self-culture, see Orestes A. Brownson, “The Laboring Classes,” Boston Quarterly Review, 3 (1840), 358–95, and Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., The Age of Jackson (Boston: Little, 1950), pp. 272–73.

Note 14 Fuller, Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845), in Myerson, Margaret Fuller: Essays, p. 207. (See Myerson's “Textual Note,” pp. 43–48.)

Note 15 Emerson intended his term “Man” to be inclusive of both sexes, and Fuller also uses it in that sense (see Preface, Woman in the Nineteenth Century, p. 83). Emerson himself was groping toward a redefinition of the sexual principles of the self, as an 1842 journal entry suggests: “A highly endowed man with good intellect and good conscience is a Man-woman and does not so much need the complement of woman i to his being, (of woman) as another” (JMN, viii, 175). But see also Chevigny's comments on his “paternalistic” views of women, in “Growing,” pp. 79–80.

Note 16 Henry A. Pochmann, German Culture in America: Philosophical and Literary Influences 1600–1900 (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1961), p. 440.

Note 17 Pochmann, p. 444. According to Russell E. Durning, “Goethe … conditioned [Fuller's] own modes of thinking and behavior more fully than did any other single author.” Durning calls the conflict between the transcendentalists and Goethe a struggle between “Puritan and pagan.” See Margaret Fuller: Citizen of the World (Heidelberg: Carl Winter Universitâtsverlag, 1969), pp. 89, 90.

Note 18 After working with Alcott at Temple School, Fuller criticized him for not understanding “the nature of Genius or creative power” and “the reaction of matter on spirit” and for becoming “lost in abstractions” (Memoirs, I, 172). His “Orphic Sayings” were printed in the Dial without Fuller's enthusiasm. See Joel Myerson, The New England Transcendentalists and the Dial (Rutherford, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson Univ. Press, 1980), p. 47.

Note 19 Allen comments, “The likenesses between Margaret Fuller and Tasso are readily apparent” (p. 65). See also Durning, p. 102; [Margaret Fuller], rev. of Conjectures and Researches concerning the Love, Madness, and Imprisonment of Torquato Tasso, by R. H. Wilde, Dial, 2 (1842), 400; and Miller, Margaret Fuller: American Romantic (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1963), pp. 27–28.

Note 20 See Eakin's discussion of this head-heart problem, p. 54.

Note 21 Fuller, The Writings of Margaret Fuller, ed. Mason Wade (New York: Viking Press, 1941), p. 235 (hereafter cited parenthetically in the text as Writings).

Note 22 Cornelius Conway Felton, trans., German Literature, Translated from the German of Wolfgang Menzel (Boston: Hilliard, Gray, 1840). A reprint of this work is forthcoming under the general editorship of Walter Harding as part of a reprint of the Specimens of Foreign Standard Literature series. George Ripley was the editor of the original series, designed to make available to American readers important foreign books, especially German ones. Menzel is associated in literary history with the “Young Germany” movement, which he at first inspired but in a later and more reactionary mood tried to discredit and even persecute. On Menzel, see E. M. Butler, “The Persecution of the Young Germans,” Modern Language Review, 19 (1924), 6383; Walter Dietze, Junges Deutschland und Deutsche Klassik: Zur Ästhetik und Literaturtheorie des Vor-märz (Berlin: Rütten & Loening, 1957); and Eda Sagarra, Tradition and Revolution: German Literature and Society, 1830–1860 (New York: Basic Books, 1971). Theodore Parker reviewed the Menzel volume for the Dial, and Fuller's defense of Goethe was also a direct response to Parker. See Theodore Parker, “German Literature,” Dial, 1 (1841), 315–39; also see “Menzel's View of Goethe,” Dial, 1 (1841), 340–47.

Note 23 “Bettine [sic] Brentano and Her Friend Günde-rode,” Dial, 2 (1842), 315. Eakin has commented that the power of Goethe's influence was dangerous to Fuller's intellectual self-reliance (p. 315). “Goethe,” Dial, 2 (1841), 2.

Note 24 For Emerson's distinction between the “Reason” and the “Understanding” see The Letters of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Ralph L. Rusk (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1939), i, 412–13.

Note 23 After her rapturous discussion of Elective Affinities in “Goethe,” Fuller writes of lphigenia with great approval, attracted particularly to Iphigenia's “religiously educated mind” (p. 39). She finds Goethe, in his depiction of this female character, to have “unfolded a part of the life of this being, unknown elsewhere in the records of literature” (p. 41).

Note 26 See Nancy F. Cott, The Bonds of Womanhood: “Woman's Sphere” in New England, 1780–1835 (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1977), p. 8, for a discussion of early nineteenth-century theories of the female role. Mason Wade, Margaret Fuller: Whetstone of Genius (New York: Viking, 1940), p. 43, discusses the influence on Fuller and others of John Neal's lecture on women. For further background on the “Conversations,” see Joel Myerson, “Mrs. Dall Edits Miss Fuller: The Story of Margaret and Her Friends,” Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, 72 (1978), 187200, and Chevigny, “Growing,” pp. 82–87.

Note 27 The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. E. W. Emerson (Boston: Houghton, 1903), iii, 5.

Note 28 See Myerson's discussion of the publication and reception of the book in Margaret Fuller: Essays, pp. 14–24.

Note 29 See Buell's discussion of the role of autobiography in transcendentalist literature, pp. 265–83.

Note 30 Thoreau, Walden, Vol. I of The Writings of Henry D. Thoreau, ed. J. Lyndon Shanley (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1971), p. 98. On the historical consciousness of the transcendentalists, see in particular Richard Francis' recent essay, “The Ideology of Brook Farm,” Studies in the American Renaissance 1977, ed. Joel Myerson (Boston: Twayne, 1978), pp. 1–48.

Note 31 Fuller, “Fourth of July,” New-York Daily Tribune, 4 July 1845, p. 2, in Myerson, Margaret Fuller: Essays, p. 297; Sacvan Bercovitch, The American Jeremiad (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1978).

Note 32 I would like to acknowledge support from the Humanities Development Program and the General Research Program, Oregon State University, and the National Endowment for the Humanities.