What About The Body, Judy?

*What About the Body, Judy?*

Early on in my graduate career here at Indiana University, I had the pleasure of taking Susan Gubar's survey course on feminist theory. A few moments from that course stand out to me, including one time when Susan claimed that she "couldn't speak to squirrel subjectivity" in response to a discussion of love that drifted on to the romping spring time grey squirrels outside the window. But this morning I'm remembering the discussion we had after reading Judith Butler. Susan told us about a time when she was on a conference panel with Butler after the publication of Gender Trouble: "And I said to her, I said, 'What about the Body, Judy?'"

That is a provocative criticism of Butler's work in Gender Trouble (1990), and, even after Bodies That Matter (1993), it seems to me still somewhat valid of her larger oeuvre (insofar as Bodies That Matter is more about "the discursive limits of sex" than it is about the bodies that participate in sex and discourse). But it is also a good reminder to those of us who spend our time working with words and books: bodies do matter, and the matter of bodies is that they are more than simply matter, and that they, after all do, forgive the pun, matter.

So, What about the body?

I heard Susan's voice in my head this morning as I sat down to read and (I hoped) to write, but I couldn't get physically comfortable. I've been struggling with the height of my desks and some mild tingling in my elbows after a while spent typing. This mild tingling has become more pronounced, and has started to locate itself securely in my right-hand pinky finger. Once that started twinge-ing instead of just tingling, I switched over to reading. I turned to a couple of passages in Fuller's letters and journals that made me hear Susan's voice in my head: "What about the body?"

In 1843, Fuller wrote to Emerson about a day very much like my own: "I am trying to write as hard as these odious east winds will let me. I rise in the morning and feel as happy as the birds and then about eleven comes one of these tormentors, and makes my head ache and spoils the day." I may not be having a headache, but my arms did tingle by 11, and there are lots of bodies that matter living with me. And I do think that many of us struggling with the life of the mind can sympathize with Fuller: we rise and the day is full of hope and thought, and by 11 or so the struggle to think and work leads to something that "spoils the day."

In a lot of her letters and journals Fuller is pretty clear about how her body matters: "My body is a burden, not an instrument," she wrote. She was clearly thinking of her health, which was never great, in this explicit statement, but she was also speaking to the ways in which her woman's body prevented her from being the kind of instrument that she wished to be. Her body denied her access to things important and instrumental in her education and in her work as an intellectual. While we take for granted many of the prejudices of the past, I think it worth remembering how fundamentally sexist the world of the nineteenth century really was. I expect that we all know that Fuller could not have gone to college--indeed, could not have gotten an equivalent education as even the poorest male student of her class. But, take as an illuminating example, something as simple as access to the library. Nothing could be more important for a developing intellectual than to encounter and confront books, but even the simple act of checking out a book or of sitting and reading in a library was controlled by gender norms and sexist policies: Fuller was forbidden even to enter the Harvard library.

Contrast this to Thoreau, who in 1849 asked for borrowing privileges at the Harvard library by stating, "I have chosen letters as my profession" (Richardson 197). He was entitled to lifetime borrowing rights at the library as a result of his degree from Harvard, and Thoreau would go on to read, borrow, and use countless volumes from the shelves. Fuller's experience with Harvard's library was quite different and it took extraordinary measures for her to secure what was given to Thoreau and Emerson by easy right.

First, as I noted, her body prevented her from enrolling as a student at Harvard, which prevented more than just an equal education with her male peers. She could not have borrowing privileges conferred on her upon graduation, and sexist policies denied her access at all to the resources and texts of the library. As a younger woman, Fuller depended on borrowed texts from friends (often from Emerson and Henry Hedge), but after returning from her Midwestern travels, she somehow became the first woman with access to the Harvard College Library's "reading room and book collection" (Mattheson 234). What Thoreau and Emerson gained by simple right of gender and education, Fuller managed to obtain, though we can assume that it took more than a declarative sentence about her chosen profession in "letters."

Access was not the end of the different burdens imposed by her body. Unlike Emerson and Thoreau, her body's presence in the library made a spectacle of her studying. She was unable to simply study without being an anomaly: a woman in a man's library. Those of us who have worked in libraries, reading difficult texts, can only sympathize with how different it must have been to be the first, and the only, woman working in the library, gawked at by the boys and men of Harvard. Thomas Wentworth Higginson, in his 1885 biography of Fuller (which was, interestingly, written as part of the series "American **Men** of Letters" edited by Charles Dudley Warner), was impressed by how Fuller overcame the bodily difficulty of access and gained entry to a place no woman's body had before penetrated. Higginson remembered how her female body's presence astonished "the undergraduates who had never before looked upon a woman reading within these sacred precincts" (194). Higginson goes on to note that "twenty of that sex are now employed as assistants," though he could also say, in 1885 when he was writing, that it would be almost 80 years before the first woman would receive a diploma from Harvard (194). Fuller's body denied her access, and then it conditioned the terms (as a spectacle and anomaly) under which she was received in the library.

I do not wish to run through a long list of the ways in which women were discriminated against in the long nineteenth century--but if the task at hand is to consider how differently Fuller's body affected her chosen profession as a writer an intellectual, I hope the reader will indulge me with one last illuminating contrast. When Emerson's first wife, Ellen Tucker Emerson, died in 1831, he inherited her estate. Emerson received two payments of around $11,000 each in 1834 and 1837. According to one economist, Emerson's inheritance would amount to around $600,000 dollars (in 2010). The law conferred on his male body the right of inheritance, and with that financial security, Emerson was able to retreat from the ministry, recover from his loss, tour Europe, and embark on a new and successful career as a lecturer and writer (Nature was published in 1836, and his first lecture series began in 1835).

Contrast the way that Emerson was able to utilize his inheritance to embark on his intellectual studies and his career as a writer with Fuller's experiences after her father Timothy's death in 1835. Like Emerson, Fuller wished to recover and learn through a trip to Europe following this devastating loss. Counting on this trip to help launch her career as a writer, Fuller was instead frustrated by her Uncle Abraham Fuller's refusal to use her father's estate to pay for Margaret's trip. When Timothy died, neither Margaret nor her mother (Margarett) were legally entitled to Timothy's estate. Instead, it passed into Abraham's hands, and, whether for herself, her mother or her brothers, Fuller was forced throughout her life to beg Abraham for money from her father's estate. Abraham was not an understanding or generous trustee, and when her wealthy uncle died in 1847, he left Fuller the sum total of $1,000 (367).

At the time of his death, Timothy Fuller's estate was estimated to be worth around $18,000, and while the estate had more survivors (Fuller, her mother, and her brothers and sister) and more responsibilities than Ellen Tucker Emerson's, the difference between the uses to which the two were put is striking (Von Mehren 75). As a man, Emerson was able to invest his inheritance into his intellectual development, and his investment paid off in a successful career, both intellectually and financially. Fuller was denied that same investment, and her successful career as a writer and journalist was delayed by decades relative to Emerson's.

*The Body And Emersonian Democratic Friendship*

These boundaries and differences were certainly part of what Fuller considered her body's "burdens." I want to argue that her awareness of the body is the source of one of her criticisms of Emersonian friendship. One of my arguments about Emersonian friendship is that Emerson abstracts friendship from the body so as to save it from the limitations implicit in Western friendship--limitations that are often imposed by the presence of actual bodies. I argue that Emerson creates the conditions under which a theory of friendship can cross bodily boundaries; Emersonian friendship can exist between men and women, blacks and whites, children and adults. Emerson, who mentored and befriended both Fuller and Thoreau, developed a theory of friendship perfectly at east with the idea that men and women can sit and study and write together without this becoming a spectacle at which the undergraduates will gawk. But in order to do so, in order to make possible friendships that cross boundaries of sameness, Emerson abstracts friendship from the actual bodies of friends, and thus ignores many of the limitations and burdens that Fuller lived with that Emerson did not. His theory, to someone like Fuller, seems naive and limited.

But this potentially naive and limited theory is still a radical position for Emerson to advance. And part of his radicalism is his disregard for the body. Previously, Western theories of friendship had centered around the body. Aristotle argued that the body was intimately involved in friendship because friends had to be "alike" in bodily ways. The greek noun for friendship, "philia," even though it has a wider expression than our word "friendship" does, is related to the verb "philein" which means "to like" or "to love." One *likes* those whom one *is like* because at the heart of friendship, for Aristotle, is goodwill (eunoia) and one can only will the good for someone whom one can know, and one can only know those whom one is alike. Thus friendships based on advantage or use, and friendships based on pleasure or enjoyment of the other's company are of a lower kind than friendships based on pure good will. And friendships based on good will can only exist between people who can see each other as "another self," as alike their own self as possible.

There is more to be said about this, of course, but the conclusion that Aristotle comes to is that friends must be alike in order to be true friends. He concludes that differences between friends cannot be great and he reads those differences bodily--in terms of age, class, gender, and race. So men and women cannot be friends; neither masters and slaves, nor the young and the old, nor the foreigner and the native, nor members of one "race" and those of another. Similarly, Cicero argued that only "good men" could be friends, thus limiting friendship to adult male bodies like Laelius and Scipio. The Bible famously pairs up like bodies as friends: David and Jonathan, Ruth and Naomi, Barnabus and Paul.

But Emerson, as I hope to show in Chapter 1, wanted to liberate the creative potential of human relationships, of friendship in particular, from the limitations of past conceptions of friendship. He wanted, I argue, to make friendship **democratic** by allowing it to cross these boundaries of "likeness:" race, gender, class, age, and region. There's a lot more to say about this, of course, but the point that I want to make today is that Emerson's philosophy of friendship removed friendship from the body and placed it squarely in the kind of relationship that is possible for a self-reliant individual to form with another self-reliant individual. In order to save what was good in past conceptions of friendship, Emerson had to argue that friendship is not a matter of bodies but of minds.

But I am coming to see that Margaret Fuller's critique of Emersonian friendship depends on a key insight that *Emerson's construction of a theory of disembodied friendship depends on his own embodied position.* The argument is pretty simple, really: Fuller, as a woman, is limited in more ways by her body than is Emerson, and so her feminist (avant le lettre) conception of friendship tries to wrestle with the body in ways that Emerson's democratic construction of friendship did not. Fuller asks, "What about the body, Waldo?"

The disembodied nature of Emersonian friendship allows him to conceive of a more progressive friendship. He can imagine cross-gender friendships and cross-racial friendships (among others) in ways that Aristotle, Cicero, and other philosophers of friendship could not. But Fuller's embodied experience led her to see how Emerson's theory is limited all the same to those bodies that are most like Emerson's: white, male, somewhat rich. The reason for this is that by removing those feature of sameness that held friends together, Emerson is forced to come up with another means of connection between friends. As I will argue in more detail in another chapter, Emerson's answer is self-reliance. Implicit in Aristotle's argument that "true friendship" is only possible for the well-off free man (and thus also in Montaigne and Cicero) is the reason for this: because only those sorts of people can be the kinds of people for whom friendship is possible as a relationship among equals. Equality was limited to those few men who could be truly equals.

Emerson's American or democratic insight is that there are many different ways to be equal, and his theory of self-reliance was his effort to make equality spread more broadly. It isn't necessary to be rich, or white, or even terribly well educated to be equal. You just need to be self-reliant. Thus, Emersonian friendship spreads more broadly and becomes more democratic. There is, of course, more to say about this (thus an entire chapter to come), but for now we just need to see that Emersonian self-reliance, as the key to Emersonian friendship, is, as Emerson constructs it, disembodied. It doesn't depend on one's class, or race, or gender. Instead, it depends on one's relationship to one's self and one's relationships to others.

Fuller's great challenge to Emerson is that of pointing out how self-reliance is itself dependent on Emerson's own embodied position and the privileges conferred on him by his body. His theory is all well and good, says Fuller, but in practice, Emerson may have simply reinvented the wheel. It may be that only those with access to an embodied life like Emerson's can become self-reliant enough to be friends with dissimilar people.

Fuller, differently embodied than Emerson, was thus differently limited and differently enabled. She was unable to embark on her career in the same manner as Emerson due to her woman's body and her culture's sexist institutions of education and law. But she was thus able to see something that Emerson was not, at least not without her help. Her own theory of friendship would come to rely not on Emerson's word "self-reliance" but on a slightly different construction: "self-dependence." Fuller would also look to the reformation not just of individuals but of the institutions that constructed and controlled both the individuals and their bodies.

Next I want to elucidate the difference between self-reliance and self-dependence and discuss Fuller's effort to reform what she saw as the crucial institution of her time: marriage.

An Ethical Lesson on Friendship: Emerson, Levinas, and the Obligation That Remains

On Monday evening of February 3rd, 1851, “quite a large party" gathered at Bronson Alcott's home on West Street in Boston (139). There was little to separate this gathering from many others. Those present were the regular broad range of transcendentalist and Bostonian literati. Some of the luminaries of the American Bloomsbury were there: Alcott, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Caroline Healey Dall. Less well-known but still notable figures like Thomas Wentworth Higginson joined the gathering along with some of those on the periphery of the scene, like Anna Parsons and a “Mr List” (139).[find out who List is.] This evening was memorable to Caroline Healey Dall, who recorded her impressions of the night and its conversation in her diary. Dall inscribed the conversation of that particular night because even though the evening’s colloquy drifted rapidly from subject to subject, it eventually centered itself around the group’s memories and opinions “of 'Margaret Fuller' [and] of ‘Woman’” (139). And yet it seems to me that this night distinguished itself not simply for the fact of the assembly and not entirely for the subject of the evening’s discussion: Fuller had been and continued to be a source of intrigue and discussion. Instead, the evening seems most remarkable for a small but important gesture on the part of Ralph Waldo Emerson, a gesture that carried with it the results of a deep theorization and articulation of friendship.

Fuller was certainly worthy of a conversation in early 1851 and not just because of her untimely death in July of 1850. Fuller first caused scandal in 1849 when news of the out-of-wedlock birth of her son, Angelo Eugene Philip Ossoli, whom she called Angelino, reached American shores and ears from Italy. Fuller, traveling Europe as a correspondent for The New York Tribune, had been covering and had come to participate in the Italian Revolution, where she met and fell in love with an Italian revolutionary. Angelino’s birth and Fuller’s continuing relationship with Angelino’s father, Giovanni Angelo Ossoli, perplexed her friends and followers, and their confusion had not yet settled down when the unusual family boarded the ship Elizabeth, leaving Italy and the collapse of the revolution for New York City in 1850. But Fuller would not get the chance in 1850 or 1851 to talk with her friends about her new child and the man she would not take as a husband. On July 19th, the Elizabeth, steered by its first mate after the death of the Captain, crashed into a sandbar near shore and was lost: Fuller, Ossoli, and Angelino all died just 60 yards off of Fire Island, New York in sight of the shore.

So less than seven months later, when many of "Margaret's Friends," as Dall described them, gathered in the home of her former co-worker, collaborator, and constant correspondent, Bronson Alcott, they were drawn together into a searching consideration of her character and her life. In an apt manner, they did so thorough a conversation. While Dall would later call this conversation “entirely a failure,” since it did not, in her opinion, either clarify sufficiently the “character” of Margaret Fuller or provide an compelling answer to the question of “Woman,” I want to suggest that there is something worth learning in the “failure” of this evening’s conversation, and particularly in what Dall saw as the chief failing of the evening’s discussion, but which I will suggest was an outgrowth of the success of Emerson and Fuller’s joint theorization of friendship: the silence of Fuller’s “dear friend,” perhaps her dearest male friend, Ralph Waldo Emerson. Dall told her diary that Emerson refused to make his opinion of Margaret heard: they could not make him speak about his friend. Even when Fuller was characterized in a manner that forced Dall herself to speak up, Emerson said nothing. His silence was the chief reason that Dall described the conversation as a failure, for she felt that without Emerson’s input, they could not know who Sarah Margaret Fuller really had been.

It could be that Dall was confused by this silence purely because it was out of character for Emerson, particularly in Dall’s recollections, where he often appears unable to stop speaking (see Dall’s transcriptions of Fullers conversations in “Margaret and Her Friends”). But there was more to Dall’s confusion that evening. For one, she believed that Emerson, either because he was such a leading light in their circle or because he was known to be Fuller’s close friend, had some secret knowledge about Fuller’s character that could explain the perplexing woman. That is, she was upset by his silence because she felt that he had the answer to who Margaret Fuller really was. Dall was so intent upon hearing Emerson’s words on this matter that she missed how much his silence communicated both about Fuller’s character and about her friends’ discussion. Dall was unable to hear what he had to say because she was so determined to hear what he had to say. She didn’t hear Emerson partly because he spoke with silence, but also because he spoke that evening through gesture. His single, telling gesture during the conversation was to produce, without comment, a daguerrotype of Fuller that he passed around the circle of friends, sharing with each her image in static form. In that simple gesture, I would argue, Emerson said more about his friend and his friendship with Margaret Fuller than an entire library’s worth of words. The question for us today is what did he say?

The conversation of 3 February, 1851 began where many of Fuller’s later biographers have begun—with the demanding educational system imposed on her by her father, Timothy Fuller. Dall writes, “There were some facts stated about the severity of her early training, the wonderful character of her mind. Mr. Alcott said she was no New England woman—she might as well have been born in Greece or Rome…” (139). Fuller was often described as a woman out of place, both by her friends and rivals during her life and by later critics. This is why it seems so poetical, as she might have said, that she died within sight but unable to reach the often inhospitable shores of the United States. It seems entirely fitting then, that so early after her death, her friends would begin where her later readers would still begin: with her unusual childhood and the way that her education created a woman who seemed altogether unexpected—well-educated, with a sharp mind, and a sharp tongue.

Later, Dall recollects, Alcott “spoke of the great ability of the letters to the Tribune,” presaging the recent critical turn towards considering and appreciating Fuller’s rather radical journalism (139). And “Anna Parsons spoke of the great power of love in [Fuller],” but the conversation turned critical at last. “Mr List objected the cutting severity of remark to which those who attended her conversations were exposed. He attributed this to her self-love" (139). As the conversation shifted from Fuller’s early education to her “severity of remark,” Dall “objected to this expression” (139). Dall did not object simply to Mr. List’s conjecture that Fuller was too severe in her communication because of an excess of self-love, though she clearly does think that Mr. List’s attribution was altogether unwarranted. Dall rather argued that it was unfair to speculate about what led Fuller to be “cutting severe” in remark: “I did not think it right to assume a reason for it. I had heard her speak to others when the tears came to my eyes, and my throat swelled at the bitterness of her words. But she had long been an invalid, suffered intensely, and it seemed to me that half of her irritation was physical whenever it occurred…” (139).

And yet, while attempting to save Fuller from a criticism of callousness and narcissism, Dall writes Fuller into something of a nineteenth century caricature: the over-educated and sickly woman. Still, Dall’s larger point seems to be that Fuller was maturing away from her youthful harshness, both in body and in interpersonal interactions: “Ednah said that she had attended her last three winters' conversations, that in them all, but one instance of such severity, and for that she [Fuller] immediately and amply apologized” (139). The back-and-forth of this conversation about Fuller’s character must have presented more sides of Fuller than any one person present there had known. It stands out today as a rather unique moment in which Fuller’s male and female friends frankly discussed her character together, even if they could not come to a consensus.

The conversation continued in turns: “Higginson spoke of Margaret's great intellectual activity. I [Dall] spoke of her want of serenity, said what I had hoped from the influence of marriage and motherhood on her—Mr Alcott believed that she became noble after it." At some point during this back-and-forth exchange, with many voices echoing around Mr. Alcott's house, Emerson, who had made no contribution to either the harsh and honest criticisms or the flattering and spirited defenses of Fuller, produced, according to Dall,“a daguerreotype taken from a picture, made after her marriage." Presumably, Emerson dated the picture in some brief comment, but he remained silent as he passed around this image, of which we currently have no copy (the editors of her diary speculate that Dall is mis-remembering the image and that it must be an earlier picture but that seems to me wrong, since Dall is very clear in her placement of the image in time, and she would have been familiar with most of the earlier images that we still possess. I like to think that it was an image somehow lost to us)). Writing later in her diary Dall curiously says that the picture "answered all [her] questions about the influence of marriage and motherhood on [Fuller].” Dall continues, “the love and serenity in it were—beautiful. It is an admirable likeness."

Into that image, Dall read the answer to her hope that Fuller had found serenity, despite the revolutionary and personal chaos surrounding Fuller in Italy at the time of the picture’s taking. Perhaps Fuller had found peace, but even Dall was not fully committed to believing that the image passed around by Emerson that evening was, in fact, the final answer. Instead, Dall longed for a knowledge that she could not have about Fuller, but which, provocatively, she believed both that Emerson had and that Emerson was keeping from “Margaret’s friends:” “I wish that Mr Emerson had said what he thought of Margaret,” writes Dall. “I want to know that she had warmth and geniality. Perhaps however he though our (frivolous conversation) filagree hardly fit to set a jewel in. The gentle men seemed unwilling to talk about Margaret." Dall wished to “know,” and she expected that Emerson held that truth secret from her, but Emerson remained, typically, stoic and silent.

I find Dall’s decision to describe this conversation as a “failure” because of Emerson’s silence provocative. It seems to me that Emerson’s silence and his subsequent sharing of Fuller’s daguerrotype were efforts to communicate the incommunicable—which is precisely the truth of Margaret Fuller, even if only told negatively or sideways. What, after all, could Emerson have said to convince Dall that she would “know” the truth of Margaret Fuller? Hadn’t Emerson taught them in his great essay “Friendship” that we cannot truly know each other? That we are all simply “beautiful enemies,” fascinating enigmas who, even when once found out, when understood clearly for a moment, just disappear again beneath the many questions that come between any two people, much less two friends who do in fact know somewhat of each other? This picture, which first answered all the questions about Margaret that Dall had and then answered none of her questions, was carried by Emerson on his person, and his only comment on the character or quality of Margaret Fuller, his dear friend dead only six months, was made by sharing her image with her other friends and declaring that he did in fact carry her with him. This is all that Emerson offered Margaret’s friends that night, and, if I am reading his gesture right, he was also telling them that it was all that he could offer them.

Emerson’s gesture is provocative in a number of ways, not the least is the way that a static image makes clear that what Margaret’s friends were wanting—the truth of her character—was impossible for them to have without her presence. The image here cannot speak, cannot respond: its truth is a mute truth and it testifies to the truth that mute truths are without the quality of understanding that Margaret’s friends were wanting. Without Fuller’s voice and response, all of their speculation can not come near the absolute truth of who Fuller was. By showing this unresponsive “face” to her friends, Emerson was reminding those present that, in Levinas’ words, death is “the disappearance in beings of those moments that made them appear as living, those moments that are always responses. Death will touch, above all, that autonomy or that expressiveness of movement that can go to the point of masking someone within his face. Death is the no-response” (God, Death, and Time, emphasis added 9). Death turns a face into a mask, and prevents us from seeing the other respond in the same way that a daguerrotype takes a living person and turns them into a still representation. Death is fundamentally the negation of our usual way of relating to any other person as the being that responds to us. We can continue to speak to them and about them, but their faces are frozen into a mask. Like Fuller in the daguerrotype, they cannot respond back.

This is part of what Emerson’s gesture seems to signify—an awareness that death is the no-response, the event that will forever cheat Margaret’s friends of their desire to know her character. And yet, Levinas proposes that there is more to death than simply the hardening of a face into a mask. There is, he says, something that does not die, some remainder that is not exhausted in death. This “remainder” is the obligation of the living to the other who has died. According to Levinas, the other expresses herself to me through the “face,” which is the combination of all the ways in which the other can respond (and ask for my response): a smile, a word, a gesture, a kiss, a letter. In Fuller’s death her face seems to have been turned into a mask, but this is not the entire truth, Levinas says, since the other’s response was only ever a request for yet another response—for my response to her response, and so on. Since the living can still respond, and can still react to the dead’s no-responses, death produces a profound obligation on the part of the still-living. As Levinas says, “Henceforth, I have to respond for him. All the gestures of the other were signs addressed to me. To continue the progression,” I have to respond for the dead other (13). The “signs addressed to me,” Levinas argues, have confirmed in the living their obligation to the dead. “In every death,” he says, “is shown the nearness of the neighbor, and the responsibility of the survivor” (17). We are our br-other’s and sister’s keepers, more so in death than in life because in death we are their only source of expression.

And in Emerson’s case his silence, his refusal to respond, was a refusal to participate in a conversation about Margaret without Margaret. When Fuller’s friends had their free-wheeling discussion of her character—whether she was kind or severe, serene or troubled—he saw that they were engaged in turning her firmly into a mask, hardening first this characteristic and then that characteristic into her character. I read his gesture of showing her picture as an effort to show those present how they were discussing not the being that was and is Margaret Fuller but rather a series of separate daguerrotypes: different masks, but masks nonetheless, and none of them true. Emerson’s gesture in passing around the picture seems to have been aimed at forcing her “friends” to see how they were treating Margaret as if she had no voice, as if she could not help them see why she had been so stern, or whether she was ever at peace. But Emerson knew different: Fuller could still speak because she had spoken, or, more precisely, because she had written. During 1851 and 1852, Emerson was engaged in editing Fuller’s writing, which was eventually compiled into the two volume Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli (1852). However flawed a publication, and however damaging to a clear understanding of Fuller the Memoirs are (footnote criticism of them), they still represent an attempt on the part of Emerson and the other editors to find some way for Fuller to respond for herself. They are certainly flawed, but they spring from an ethical desire to give Fuller a chance to respond for herself.

I am reading Emerson’s gesture that February evening and his work editing the Memoirs as efforts to fulfill the obligation that the living have to the dead: to respond for the dead other, as Levinas says we must. Emerson’s gesture and his work as editor, therefore, indicate a deep struggle over a private grief. And while I have been reading his gesture of passing around the picture as a refusal to participate in a conversation that was demeaning to Fuller in the way that it did not give her a voice (in contradistinction from Emerson’s work as Fuller’s editor, attempting to give her a voice), we still need to make sense of the fact that Emerson carried with him a picture of Fuller constantly (which I think we can reasonably infer since he would have had no way of knowing that that evening’s conversation would turn to such a searching examination of Fuller).

He kept with him at all times the literal “face” of his dead friend, which indicates a powerful and private grief. It was a grief that Dall felt as well. As she was leaving for the evening, Dall exchanged a word with Mrs. Alcott about Fuller: “My eyes filled with tears—for in truth Margaret’s death was a private grief to me,” writes Dall. “[T]here is no American woman that stands near her.” Emerson’s melancholic gesture to carry with him Fuller’s daguerrotype (cite Edmundson on Emerson’s melancholia?) shows just how deeply he felt her loss. “I have lost in her my audience,” he wrote in his journal following news of her death, striking an almost stereotypically selfish Emersonian chord. But he also lost in her a being whose responses he cherished precisely because he could never seem to “know” what she would say. If he thought of her as an audience, she was an audience unpredictable and responsive—a very alive audience.

In 1843 Emerson wrote in his journal that Fuller “has great sincerity, force, & fluency as a writer, yet her powers of speech throw her writing into the shade. What method, what exquisite judgment, as well as energy, in the selection of her words, what character & wisdom they convey!” (JMN VIII, 368). While Emerson was trying to preserve as much of Fuller’s “face” as he could in her Memoirs, there was no way to capture her voice, her conversation, or her friendship. While trying to live up to his obligation to his departed friend, Emerson could let her speak through her writing, could insist on letting her have her own voice, but he cannot recreate her unpredictability and her speech. This is what Levinas means when he says that we are haunted by the possibility of the Other’s death for it imposes on us a responsibility that we cannot completely fulfill. We can try to respond for the dead other, but we will always fail. And that failure will constantly remind us of what we have lost, or will lose, and what we might even be currently losing. In many ways, this is the lesson of Emerson’s gesture: we can try to prevent our dead friends from becoming daguerrotypes, but our efforts will be tentative, fraught, and often the best gesture is the silent gesture.

Eros: When Harry Met Sally Met Margaret and Caroline

One of my key contentions about the role of gender in friendship is that classical, Western conceptions of friendship rule out friendship between men and women. Or, as Billy Crystal puts it in When Harry Met Sally:

“What I’m saying is, and this is not a come-on in any way, shape, or form, is that men and women can’t be friends because the sex part always gets in the way.” --Harry

Harry later amends his theory, but even the amendment ends with his belief that men and women can’t be friends. As I’ve said in this space before, this belief is shared by Aristotle, as a fact of friendship, and critiqued by Derrida, who works in The Politics of Friendship to clear away Aristotle’s notion and make possible friendship by another name between men and women.

Fuller and Emerson’s friendship, then, becomes an interesting case of a new kind of friendship between a man and a woman, but that doesn’t mean that the erotic potential of cross-gender relationships is easy to negotiate. It isn’t, and furthermore, Fuller is aware of this. In 1840, during the height of the playful and teasing letters between Fuller and Emerson, Fuller writes to Caroline Sturgis, declaring that their female-female friendship is of a particularly “rational” sort of intimacy because there isn’t between them the same play of the erotic as between her and her male friends:

“I think the intimacy [of our friendship] one of a life-long promise even to me; I know none at present of which I feel so rational a hope. For this [their relationship] has been redeemed from the search after Eros.” (LMF II, 105).

Of course, as queer studies has worked to show us, the erotic is not so easily dismissed. Case in point is Fuller’s description of their relationship as finding its intimacy in a “life-long promise,” which evokes the sacral marriage vow. Earlier in the letter, Fuller claims a position of superiority over Sturgis, and the purpose of the letter is to effect some change in Sturgis’s character: “As eldest and most experienced, I out to be wiling to wait [for your nature to change]” (105).

Fuller then sends along to Sturgis a volume of Plato that she has borrowed from Emerson. That is, in a few important ways, even in a letter dismissing the lure of eros between the two female correspondents, Fuller plays a somewhat masculine role, mimicking Emerson’s role in their relationship in her relationship with Sturgis.

I think this is pointing me towards the need to think more broadly about Fuller’s critique of eros in all friendships, and not just in the male-female dyad. Still, I think we can agree, with Harry, Aristotle, Derrida, and Fuller, that there is something distinctively inhibiting of friendship between men and women in the 19th and 20th centuries in America. And this something is known to Fuller, and considered in her letters, as this letter to Sturgis indicates.

Brothers, revisited

The biggest sort of controversy about Fuller and Emerson’s letters is the missing letter from Fuller in October of 1840. I don’t want to give a full reading of that controversy just now (because I’m not ready to do so), but rather dwell for a moment on a Emerson’s response to Fuller’s missing letter.

First, an overview. The letters between the two are playful, rather seductive, at times even sexy. Emerson gets carried away playing with his enthusiasm for Fuller, and Fuller gets carried away too. One of my favorite lines is from Emerson. He wishes to be “pommelled black and blue with sincerest words”. So, anyway, during all of this flirting in letter form, Fuller takes things too far (apparently) in October of 1840. Often this is read biographically because Fuller had been rejected by a lover also in 1840. Typically, the argument is made that she is rejected by one lover and then turns to Emerson, who then rejects her as well. I doubt that this is entirely true, but I am willing to believe that other events made it more likely that Fuller overstepped some boundary of flirtation in her letter to Emerson. Altho, honestly, when he’s asking you to beat him black and blue with words, well, what boundary should you worry about crossing?

Anyway, at some point in October of 1840, Fuller sends Emerson a letter that he tells her he wished were “unwritten”. We have no idea what was in this letter, since it is lost. We don’t know who destroyed it either, though I’d assume that Emerson did (he often shared Fuller’s letters with his wife, so destroying it would have been prudent if it really was so objectionable).

In his response to the missing letter Emerson told Fuller that they had a “robust & total understanding” between each other. He compared their relationship to the “relation of brothers who are intimate & perfect friends without having ever spoken of the fact” (Letters 2: 352).

What I find interesting about this is the way that Emerson uses the notion of “brothers” to retreat from the sexually charged energy of their correspondence into the safe terrain of the consanguineous and genderless territory of the classical, Western friendship. We’ve been over this before in this blog--the way that friendship exists in the imaginary as a relationship between men of an equivalent social position because friendship cannot have in its structure any sort of dependence of one friend on the other. Thus, for Aristotle, women (and children) cannot be friends because they are always dependent on a man, and men of differing social classes cannot be friends because they are not independent of each other. And we’ve all felt these tensions in our own friendships, I’m sure.

I want to think some more about this, and get my head fully around it, but a few thoughts

1) This is something of a failure on Emerson’s part. The gender difference is what makes the play of their earlier letters so compelling and, well, sexy. Here he insists that there is no gender difference--he hides in classical notions of friendship and hides then all that made their friendship intriguing. As the text of a male-female friendship, the letters between them are unique and compelling and terribly important. But Emerson hides and erases that importance in his metaphor.

2) Could this be an insistence that friendship is in effect genderless? Could Emerson be arguing that their friendship has stripped them of their gender, making them “as brothers” because they are in a relationship that has no gendered component? If so, then he hasn’t learned much from Fuller, who constantly is insisting in the letters and in her work that gender is a fundamental issue of life and culture. True, friendship can erase gender differences, and friendship, once entered into, can break down Aristotle’s claim that men and women cannot be “friends.” thus changing what it is that “friendship” means. So in some sense, friendship is genderless. But, as this case shows, gender is not just something one can shuffle off.

3) I wonder if this failure prompted Fuller’s focus in Woman on marriage instead of friendship, or really on marriage as friendship. I mean, I’ve always wondered why she didn’t put forward the unassociated woman as something to celebrate--why, that is, George Sand or someone else, didn’t become her preeminent example. Instead, she focuses on marriage. Perhaps, marriage is able, as a focus of her thinking, to avoid the pitfalls of friendship, since eros is already channeled and contained within the socially and personally acceptable bonds of marriage. This makes her own decision to not marry very interesting.

4) I’ve fallen into that pitfall that I need to avoid: placing Emerson at the front and working on a quotation of his instead of on Fuller’s writing. In this case it seems inevitable, but still. I need to resist this.

5) I also think I need to connect this controversy with my earlier discussion of George Sand. Perhaps I could structure it so that I talk about Sand, then go into the missing letter, end up with Emerson’s comment on “brothers” (bringing us full-circle to the line about “mon frere”), and then into a reading of marriage within Woman. Might work.

Freedom and Fate, Revisited

Long have I felt that part of what I wanted to do in my engagement with Emerson is to move us past the debilitating focus on reading him as a writer who oscillates between poles: Freedom, Fate. Spontaneity, Fate. Society, solitude. Action, passivity. Individual, Social. Of course, Emerson’s work does bounce between these differing poles; he is a dialectical thinker and writer, but our job as readers is to notice not just the poles, but the movement between. We shouldn’t stop or freeze in place, writing that is constantly putting itself in motion and depending on its movement for its argument and sense.

Thus, I don’t think you can read Emerson like Stephen Whicher does, as a writer who moved from a youthful embrace of Freedom to an older acquiescence to the demands of fate. Nor do I think you can read him, like Bloom does, as a writer moving between the tree poles of freedom, fate, and power. What is missing from all of these readings is the key fact that for Emerson, such movements are always motivated by something. That something is often personal, frequently social, and often political.

For example, readers that follow Whicher’s thesis of freedom leading to fate (and, frankly, these readers are almost all of Emerson’s readers since Whicher’s book came out in the 50s) have had a hard time explaining how Emerson’s movement towards a quiet acquiescence to fate pairs with his more frequent social activism on issues of race, abolition, and such. And, frankly, they can’t explain it without acting as if his activism was muted or part of a larger trend or somehow just not that important and not that active, which is ludicrous as the scholarship of the last 25 years has shown. What I would like to think through is how external and internal motives propelled him from pole to pole, so that even in a period in which he was mostly thinking “Fate”, he would move towards reform, towards “freedom,” because he was responding to social situations and pressures. Thus the Civil War and the debates of the 1850s must be read in his work, and vice versa.

What I am proposing is that we view Emerson not as a thinker or writer in stasis, but as a fluid force of expression. Certainly, large shifts will make themselves known, but we should not attribute stasis to what is not static.

What I am coming to see, however, is that Fuller is a powerfully motive force behind what I have long seen as Emerson’s method of writing and living. Fuller is the one who teaches him this “style”--this ability to “skate well on the surfaces”. For Fuller, this style is intimately connected to her identity as an independent woman writer, and to her view of her vocation as not simply writing, but acting in the world.

What I want to do in the chapter is to find some sort of origin or struggle with this new style in her letters to Emerson, then to explain how that style shows itself in her mature work in Woman in the Nineteenth Century, and then to view it in practice in her work during the Italian Revolution.

Fuller's Letters

In April of 1837, Margaret Fuller wrote a rather searching letter to Frederick H. Hedge. She opens with a phrase that I could have said myself: “I have been wishing and wishing, trying and trying to write...” (265). In an effort to actually write, let me turn, for a moment, to a couple of passages in Fuller’s letters from the late 1830s that have been impressing, perplexing, and intriguing me.

A Theory of Friendship in Letters

I am interested in thinking of Fuller’s letters as sort of training documents that teach her friends how to be friends not just to a woman like her, but to her. As much as she is performing her own friendship, being a friend, she is, in these letters, creating and enacting a sophisticated theory of friendship as conversation. At times she is less successful than others, of course. And at times, she wavers in her focus on this doubled-task, but in the letters that interest me particularly, Fuller is both being a friend and teaching her friends--male and female--how to be friends in a new way. The same letter to Hedge, and I like beginning with this letter because Fuller has just met Emerson and Alcott but knew Hedge before them both, includes Fuller chiding Hedge for “writing a piece to ‘cut up’ Mr Alcott” (265). Of course, Fuller hopes that he will not do so, but there are two things about her argument that interest me.

The first is that she firmly places Hedge within their friendship, refusing to let him think of his writing, his ideas, his own arguments without thinking of hers. She writes, “I should be charmed if I thought you were writing a long, beautiful, wise like article showing the elevated aim and at the same time the practical defects of his system. You would do a great service to him as well as the publick” (265). Here Fuller forcefully and gently indicates her opinion on Hedge’s “cut-up” piece, but her criticism is not, necessarily, against his argument, but against his manner of presentation. Hedge had been engaged by James Walker, the editor of the Christian Examiner to review Alcott’s Conversations, but Walker wanted a slash-job done on the book. Hedge agreed to write a severe review, but before he did, he received Fuller’s letter. After reading her concerns, Hedge decides not to write the review at all. There is more to say about that matter, and it might be that Fuller’s letter had no effect, but that’s not my point. I don’t really care if she was able to have the effect that she wanted, what I find fascinating is her desire to place her friend within their friendship at all times. Hedge is not allowed, in Fuller’s logic, to write something without thinking of how his friend, Sarah Margaret Fuller, will react.

Second, Fuller herself performs this manner of being a friend: “If you were here I am sure that you would feel as I do and that your wit would never lend its patronage to the ugly blinking owls who are now hooting from their snug tenements, overgrown rather with nettles than with ivy, at this star of purest ray serene. But you are not here, more’s the pity, and perhaps do not know exactly what you are doing, do write to me and reassure me” (265). Fuller begins this wandering pair of sentences with an effort to imagine how her friend would react to what she is experiencing, demonstrating to Hedge what he should have done before agreeing to write such a negative review about a friend (Alcott) of his friend (Fuller). This seems rather clearly a teachable moment: friends care what their friends think. But Fuller goes one better when she ends the sentence asking for Hedge to write back. See, Fuller understands that fundamentally friends cannot exactly understand each other. She teaches Hedge the necessity, for friendship, of imagining how the other will feel and react, but she also teaches him the necessary uncertainty of that imagining. One cannot wholly understand one’s friends, but one must try. And, the best way to try is to remain in conversation--to do more than to wish and try to write, but to actually write. Hedge is not there (“more’s the pity”), so Fuller begs him to write back and correct her imagination.

I’ll write more on this later--on Fuller’s letters’ pedagogical effects on her correspondents. I hope to write about the letter where she tells Emerson that she likes his study best when he is not in it because then they can really talk. I take her lesson here to be an effort to teach Emerson how to talk to her without condescending, something that he is struggling with when he is in his own home and office.

Oh, My Friends

For now, though, I want to end with something that really surprised me in these early letters. One of my insights has been that Emerson’s theories of friendship prefigure in interesting and important ways, those of Levinas and Derrida (this is not an uncommon position, I’m coming to learn). Derrida centers The Politics of Friendship on Aristotle’s invocation, “Oh my friends, there is no friend.” I want to write about the history of that line at some point (it isn’t actually in Aristotle, but was attributed to him by Diogenes Laertius and then by Montaigne), but for now it’s enough to note that Emerson copied it into his journal and showed that journal to Fuller sometime in 1837.

In August of 1837, Fuller writes to Emerson, “I bear constantly in heart that text of yours ‘O my friends, there are no friends’ but to me it is a paralyzing conviction” (294). Fuller goes on to say that she cannot play the skeptical game like Emerson--she cannot act as if he is her friend, while holding back the belief that there are no friends per se: “Surely we are very unlike the Gods in ‘their seats of eternal tranquility’ that we need illusions so much to keep us in action” (294). She seems to be responding to some position that Emerson took on friendship, some argument about how one must pretend to be a friend in order to perform friendship because, at the root, one is never really a friend. Fuller refuses this possibility and accepts a world with a lot less tranquility.

And yet, her world is rather playful. In the next paragraph, she writes, “However, I must say I feel a desire...to see my dear no friends, Mr and Mrs Emerson” (294-5). Her playfulness, however, has a point--“Mr and Mrs Emerson” are, in fact, her friends, even if Aristotle did say there were no friends.

Teaching is Distracting

Finally, let me end with this comment from Fuller to Hedge:
“As to study, my attention has been concentrated on the subjects about which I teach” (266).

Sadly, me too, SMF. Me too.

Fuller George Sand

“George Sand smokes, wears male attire, wishes to be addressed as “Mon frère,”--perhaps, if she found those who were as brothers, indeed, she would not care whether she were brother or sister” (284).

I have always read Fuller’s description of George Sand in Woman in the Nineteenth Century (and I have always seen it read) as a completely positive depiction of the kind of performed androgyny for which Fuller is arguing. Additionally, I’ve always considered that, in Fuller’s mind, Sand’s performance of masculinity goes hand in glove with Sand’s profession as a writer. That, in some way, to write was to be masculinized in a positive way--to break out of the strictures of being feminine. But after my latest reading of Woman, I am not so sure. I mean, I still think this is a positive depiction--Fuller speaks of Sand with approbation, but I find myself intrigued by mood of her verbs and by the possibility that Fuller is here critiquing the structure of the gender system, one that forces someone like Sand to perform a masculinity that might be as un-authentic as performing femininity would be. The crux of this issue, it seems to me, is when Fuller keys in on Sand’s “wish” to be “adddressed as ‘Mon frère’”. In a minute, I want to think about the word “brother” (frère) and its connection to friendship and citizenship through Derrida’s critique of fraternité, and then in a later post, I’ll think about the position of this passage about Sand within the structure of Woman in the Nineteenth Century.

It seems to me now that Fuller is instead criticizing Sand, in some way, for being too “masculine” because to agree, as Sand’s performance of masculinity does, that masculinity is needed for equality between the sexes (or for being a writer) seems, to Fuller, to be acquiescing to a fundamental problem in the establishment of any relationship between the sexes (and I’m using “sexes” deliberately since it is Fuller’s term of choice more so than “gender”. I hope, at some point, to ponder that some, too). In the new reading that I’m toying with, the key phrase is “mon frere,” and the key theoretical issue is the question of how much friendship is dependent upon a classical model of friends as brothers. Women, Fuller seems to be arguing in this passage, can be equal partners, equal friends with men, only insofar as they become “brothers” to those men. This leads men to act inappropriately (to always act as brothers) and limits the ability of men and women to have full relationships. Likewise, it leads women to act inappropriately, and either to speak with too much anger (Fuller’s word is “heat”), or to take on roles that are inappropriate to them (which does not mean what it seems to mean because Fuller is not interested in carving out separate spheres so much as she wants to be true to each person’s nature, and therefore each person’s as a gendered person: as she puts it a few pages earlier: a man and a woman in a relationship should work to have a “harmony of mind, and the difference of nature: one thought, but two ways of treating it” 283).

OK, I’ll try to work that out, but for now the insight is that I do not think that Fuller is praising George Sand, but critiquing Sand for acquiescing to a notion of equality that allows room only for brothers.

BROTHERS and FRIENDS

I’ll get to Fuller, but Derrida’s The Politics of Friendship is why I’m keying in on the notion of brotherhood. Derrida’s reading of friendship is argues that women have never been able to be “friends” either to men or to each other because friendship has been limited, as a category of relationship, to consanguineous brothers. Fraternité. “The figure of the friend,” Derrida writes, so regularly com[es] back on stage with the features of the brother....[and] seems spontaneously to belong to a familial, fraternalist, and thus androcentric configuration of politics” (viii). Later on he claims that the “model of friendship that will have dominated, in all its canonical authority, the Greek or Christian discourses” is “the figure of the brother” (103).

And yet, Derrida claims that “there has never been anything natural in the brother figure on whose features has so often been drawn the face of the friend” (159). To simplify, Derrida’s argument is that classical (Greek, Christian, Western) conceptions of friendship have depended on the easy equation of friend for/as brother. This conception of friendship as brotherhood, friendship as consanguineous fraternity, has limited the ability of “friends” as a social category to include those many others who cannot be brothers either with each other or with the standard Western/Christian/Greek subject, who is always already male, white, fairly bourgeois (think who can be a speaker, an “I,” or who can be the narrator of a good standard English novel). Friendship, in this way, becomes in part a form of narcissism, as we limit who our friends are to those who could be our brothers. But it goes somewhat deeper than that as the “we” is also limited to those whom “we” can imagine as fitting into the ideal of the friend.

To be a friend, then, according to this tradition that Derrida is criticizing, is both to be a certain type of person, and to allow only other people like you to be friends. Thus, friendship, which should be the most open and inclusive sort of relationship, because the most exclusive and exclusionary. But, says Derrida, this need not be so: “The brother is not a fact” (159). What Derrida is drawing our attention to here is the “fact” that the way we understand friendship, as consanguineous fraternity, is able to be changed because it is a metaphor, and because that metaphor carries a trace of a new sort of friendship, a new style of being friendly to others as well as to brothers.

Approaching Fuller’s comments on George Sand from this point of view, from a point of view that is suspicious of franternité, one notices the criticism implicit in Fuller’s comments about Sand through Fuller’s use of the concept of brotherhood.

Next up: some thoughts on the structure of Woman in the Nineteenth Century