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.
Monday, April 11, 2011
Monday, March 7, 2011
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.
“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.
Tuesday, March 1, 2011
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.
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.
Sunday, February 27, 2011
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.
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.
Thursday, February 17, 2011
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.
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.
Tuesday, February 8, 2011
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
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
Monday, January 31, 2011
Margaret Fuller Perplexes Me
Margaret Fuller perplexes me.
She perplexes me because I never know how much she is playing with me as a reader, how much she is herself working deliberately to make an argument that I cannot quite follow, or how much she might, possibly, be trapped in some sort of bad consciousness. This problem first came to mind when I was reading Summer on the Lakes and thinking about Fuller’s critique of America’s continental imperialism, specifically of the treatment of Indians. Mostly I saw, and see, Fuller as far ahead of her day in objecting to the war on Native Americans, but I was also impressed with how she connected that continental imperialism with issues of trans-atlantic capitalism, slavery, and gender. At one point, she moved from discussing the callous disregard for women’s needs on the frontier with an awareness of the ethnic and regional backgrounds of those “white” people around her—Irish, Scottish, Welsh, French, and Russian. It seemed to me a bold move to impress upon the reader the insistence of gender’s obligations in this situation across cultures and nations. Similarly, I find her impressive when she says that the traveler must leave behind old prejudices when coming into the company of Indians. Instead, the traveler must “come sufficiently armed with patience to learn the new spells which the new dragons require, (and this can only be done on the spot,)….” If the traveler is so able, then “he will not finally be disappointed of the promised treasure; the mob [of Indians] will resolve itself into men,yet crude, but of good dispositions, and capable of good character; the solitude will become sufficiently enlivened and home grow up at last from the rich sod” (142). I find the parenthetical telling—the experience of learning how to see Indians as men “can only be done on the spot,” and while Fuller is able to convey some of what she sees, her argument that experience will lead to more awareness of the humanity of all peoples hinges on the fact of experience. While resting comfortably far from the frontier, her reader cannot truly come to see these Indians as men. Likewise, the traveler who experiences them must do so without bias or prejudice, which will color and control his or her perceptions. When seeing new cultures and peoples, one must be patient and willing to transgress one’s level of comfort.
Given these rather telling bits of provocative social critique, I am constantly perplexed when she does something seemingly out of character. I want to get at an example of this from Woman in the 19th Century where it seems that her progressive gender critique is undercut by her choice of metaphor, but this is also a problem in Summer on the Lakes, or at least a problem for me for now. Chapter 3 opens with a rather powerful critique of, as Fuller puts it, “the latest romance of Indian warfare” (94). The romance is of the beauty of the country, of the “beautiful stream” of the Rock river, but it is undercut in her account by the presence of history, of the abuses of White conquest and continental imperialism written into her reference to “Black Hawk” the Sac Indian chieftan, who “returned with his band ‘to pass the summer’” in this very area before surrendering to the American army in 1832. Later on, however, Fuller, while on an extended “short cut,” saw that they were “following an Indian trail,—Black Hawk’s!” She remarks, “How fair the scene through which it led! How could they let themselves be conquered, with such a country to fight for!” (98).
Yes, how could they “let” themselves surrender. Here we are back in the romance of the dying Indian. The Indian who couldn’t “adapt” and so died out, but did so heroically holding on to his traditions and his land. But does Fuller returns right back into that “romance of Indian warfare”? Only it isn’t last of the Mohicans but last of the Sac Indians. How could they let themselves be conquered. Facing a superior force in numbers and weapons, with no stable base of supply and no possible offensive action against the enemy’s base of supply or population centers, Black Hawk fought a guerilla war. It was unsustainable, and after two devastating losses in July and August, Black Hawk had few warriors left to surrender.
Here’s my problem, however: I cannot believe that Fuller is oblivious to the history now when she so deliberately invoked it earlier. In fact, she quoted Black Hawk’s autobiography (1833) a few pages previous, showing a real investment in his experiences. Her consistent and persistent point in Summer on the Lakes has been to argue against the over romanticization of the frontier and of the Indian. So it is either a moment of bad conscience where the sublime landscape overwhelms her understanding and reason, or Fuller is screwing with the reader. (It’s my post, so I’m saying “screwing” instead of “toying” or “playing”, but I also have a good reason. I wanted to say “fucking”—it’s more direct and assaultative than “playing” allows for and it is less ambiguous than “screwing”. Of course, this will be changed to something else in the formal dissertation. I will accept suggestions for better words in the comments).
It’s like she’s asking whether you’ve really learned the lessons that she has been teaching. If you have, then you notice her bad faith with her own argument. If you haven’t, then you get caught up in the Indian romance, which then, in the next paragraph, becomes a romance of an Irish peddler, and then another stereotypical romance, and another, until eventually she’ll hit on one that you can’t stand. Maybe. In the meantime, if you have learned her lesson, you sit there, as a reader, uncomfortable with her authority as a writer and doing what she actually wants you to do: testing her claims against your own experience (altho, in this case, the experience is of her writing).
I think she does something similar in Woman in the 19th Century, only with a different artistry. In Woman it seems that Fuller is less likely to engage in outright contradiction but more likely to trick the reader into thinking that she is when in fact she’s simply holding true to a position that the reader is only learning to see. Here’s a case in point:
This point is brought home at the end when she says, provocatively, that “it is with women as with the slave.” Here Fuller echoes the master-slave dialectic in her awareness that freedom to a slave does not necessarily mean that the slave wishes to become a master of other slaves. It would be callous and cruel to assume that freedom, to a slave, means only the ability to be a master; and so it is equally foolish to assume that freedom for woman means the freedom to be men. Likewise, men should not wish to be masters, because the ability to be a master, which is only the “freedom” to own a slave, is no freedom at all but a morally revolting requirement of a particularly objectionable notion of “freedom.”
But here’s what perplexes me: the metaphor in the middle: “The well-instructed moon flies not from her orbit to seize on the glories of her partner. No; for she knows that one law rules, one heaven contains, one universe replies to them alike.” I find this metaphor—woman as moon, man as earth—curious because it seems to imply a hierarchy, the superiority of the earth to the moon as the moon revolves around the earth. I wondered, Why does Fuller cast woman as the moon? As the smaller body? The body that owes its existence to the masculinized earth? In a paragraph about a new sort of equality that doesn’t depend on old notions of gender, why does Fuller return to idea of man as the center of the relationship? And woman his smaller revolving partner, dancing around him?
Can you see my problem? And it is my problem, is it not? And not, after all, Fuller’s.
For what is the reason that I ascribe superiority to the earth in the binary relationship between the moon and the earth? Is it size? My perspective as a resident of earth? No, it must be my lingering adherence to the old system of gender and its codes, codes that lead me rather easily to think of man as the center of the relationship, and woman as his revolving subordinate. But, what is the frame of reference in which the moon revolves around the earth? Is it not more true to say that they revolve one with the other? From the perspective of the universe they are caught up in a dance in which neither is center and neither is peripheral. Both are equally central. Both are governed by the law of gravity and both are contained in the same heaven, and replied to by the same universe. They are actual partners, for all that we are (I guess I should say, I am or was) conditioned to think of one as more important than the other.
In fact, however, Fuller does make one side of this partnership a touch better than the other, and it is, of course, the moon. She calls the moon “the well-instructed moon” and says that she does not “fly” from “her orbit.” In other words, woman has been continually and constantly educated by her dependence on man—as husband, protector, etc—in the system of gender that Fuller sees changing before her (slowly, yes, as we can attest, but changing still). And through her education woman has been well-instructed in the very real need for a partner and in the fact that both partners both depend on each other and are governed not one by the other but by a greater law than either. Woman, that is, can see “gravity’s” role in her partnership with man, while men keep thinking themselves the center of the dance.
I guess I was being a touch too much of a “man” to really read this very womanly passage. Luckily, I was reading a writer concerned with her reader’s education, and who can, with a deft touch, effect that education in stages of readings.
She perplexes me because I never know how much she is playing with me as a reader, how much she is herself working deliberately to make an argument that I cannot quite follow, or how much she might, possibly, be trapped in some sort of bad consciousness. This problem first came to mind when I was reading Summer on the Lakes and thinking about Fuller’s critique of America’s continental imperialism, specifically of the treatment of Indians. Mostly I saw, and see, Fuller as far ahead of her day in objecting to the war on Native Americans, but I was also impressed with how she connected that continental imperialism with issues of trans-atlantic capitalism, slavery, and gender. At one point, she moved from discussing the callous disregard for women’s needs on the frontier with an awareness of the ethnic and regional backgrounds of those “white” people around her—Irish, Scottish, Welsh, French, and Russian. It seemed to me a bold move to impress upon the reader the insistence of gender’s obligations in this situation across cultures and nations. Similarly, I find her impressive when she says that the traveler must leave behind old prejudices when coming into the company of Indians. Instead, the traveler must “come sufficiently armed with patience to learn the new spells which the new dragons require, (and this can only be done on the spot,)….” If the traveler is so able, then “he will not finally be disappointed of the promised treasure; the mob [of Indians] will resolve itself into men,yet crude, but of good dispositions, and capable of good character; the solitude will become sufficiently enlivened and home grow up at last from the rich sod” (142). I find the parenthetical telling—the experience of learning how to see Indians as men “can only be done on the spot,” and while Fuller is able to convey some of what she sees, her argument that experience will lead to more awareness of the humanity of all peoples hinges on the fact of experience. While resting comfortably far from the frontier, her reader cannot truly come to see these Indians as men. Likewise, the traveler who experiences them must do so without bias or prejudice, which will color and control his or her perceptions. When seeing new cultures and peoples, one must be patient and willing to transgress one’s level of comfort.
Given these rather telling bits of provocative social critique, I am constantly perplexed when she does something seemingly out of character. I want to get at an example of this from Woman in the 19th Century where it seems that her progressive gender critique is undercut by her choice of metaphor, but this is also a problem in Summer on the Lakes, or at least a problem for me for now. Chapter 3 opens with a rather powerful critique of, as Fuller puts it, “the latest romance of Indian warfare” (94). The romance is of the beauty of the country, of the “beautiful stream” of the Rock river, but it is undercut in her account by the presence of history, of the abuses of White conquest and continental imperialism written into her reference to “Black Hawk” the Sac Indian chieftan, who “returned with his band ‘to pass the summer’” in this very area before surrendering to the American army in 1832. Later on, however, Fuller, while on an extended “short cut,” saw that they were “following an Indian trail,—Black Hawk’s!” She remarks, “How fair the scene through which it led! How could they let themselves be conquered, with such a country to fight for!” (98).
Yes, how could they “let” themselves surrender. Here we are back in the romance of the dying Indian. The Indian who couldn’t “adapt” and so died out, but did so heroically holding on to his traditions and his land. But does Fuller returns right back into that “romance of Indian warfare”? Only it isn’t last of the Mohicans but last of the Sac Indians. How could they let themselves be conquered. Facing a superior force in numbers and weapons, with no stable base of supply and no possible offensive action against the enemy’s base of supply or population centers, Black Hawk fought a guerilla war. It was unsustainable, and after two devastating losses in July and August, Black Hawk had few warriors left to surrender.
Here’s my problem, however: I cannot believe that Fuller is oblivious to the history now when she so deliberately invoked it earlier. In fact, she quoted Black Hawk’s autobiography (1833) a few pages previous, showing a real investment in his experiences. Her consistent and persistent point in Summer on the Lakes has been to argue against the over romanticization of the frontier and of the Indian. So it is either a moment of bad conscience where the sublime landscape overwhelms her understanding and reason, or Fuller is screwing with the reader. (It’s my post, so I’m saying “screwing” instead of “toying” or “playing”, but I also have a good reason. I wanted to say “fucking”—it’s more direct and assaultative than “playing” allows for and it is less ambiguous than “screwing”. Of course, this will be changed to something else in the formal dissertation. I will accept suggestions for better words in the comments).
It’s like she’s asking whether you’ve really learned the lessons that she has been teaching. If you have, then you notice her bad faith with her own argument. If you haven’t, then you get caught up in the Indian romance, which then, in the next paragraph, becomes a romance of an Irish peddler, and then another stereotypical romance, and another, until eventually she’ll hit on one that you can’t stand. Maybe. In the meantime, if you have learned her lesson, you sit there, as a reader, uncomfortable with her authority as a writer and doing what she actually wants you to do: testing her claims against your own experience (altho, in this case, the experience is of her writing).
I think she does something similar in Woman in the 19th Century, only with a different artistry. In Woman it seems that Fuller is less likely to engage in outright contradiction but more likely to trick the reader into thinking that she is when in fact she’s simply holding true to a position that the reader is only learning to see. Here’s a case in point:
“Ye cannot believe it, men; but the only reason why women ever assume what is more appropriate to you, is because you prevent them from finding out what is fit for themselves. Were they free, were they wise fully to develop the strength and beauty of woman; they would never wish to be men, or manlike. The well-instructed moon flies not from her orbit to seize on the glories of her partner. No; for she knows that one law rules, one heaven contains, one universe replies to them alike. It is with women as with the slave.I have struggled with this passage for a number of years because it seemed to me that Fuller was making two very good arguments, bracketing a metaphor that seemed ill-chosen. She opens by saying that men are foolish to think that if women were given complete equality of choice, they would chose to be “manlike.” The fear of men is that equality would lead to no separation between the genders, but would lead, naturally, to everyone being like men. Thus, because men cannot understand why anyone with freedom would not choose to be a man, they deny women the ability “fully to develop the strength and beauty of woman” by denying women freedom. If you can understand that Fuller does not think that even men would chose to be “men” or “manlike” then you can understand her point fully: in this screwed up system of gender where half the world is denied freedom and the other half forced to deny freedoms, the best option is to not play the game at all but to call for a completely different game entirely.
‘The slave breaking his chain
Not the free man, makes them tremble’
Tremble not before the free man, but before the slave who has chains to break” (276-277).
This point is brought home at the end when she says, provocatively, that “it is with women as with the slave.” Here Fuller echoes the master-slave dialectic in her awareness that freedom to a slave does not necessarily mean that the slave wishes to become a master of other slaves. It would be callous and cruel to assume that freedom, to a slave, means only the ability to be a master; and so it is equally foolish to assume that freedom for woman means the freedom to be men. Likewise, men should not wish to be masters, because the ability to be a master, which is only the “freedom” to own a slave, is no freedom at all but a morally revolting requirement of a particularly objectionable notion of “freedom.”
But here’s what perplexes me: the metaphor in the middle: “The well-instructed moon flies not from her orbit to seize on the glories of her partner. No; for she knows that one law rules, one heaven contains, one universe replies to them alike.” I find this metaphor—woman as moon, man as earth—curious because it seems to imply a hierarchy, the superiority of the earth to the moon as the moon revolves around the earth. I wondered, Why does Fuller cast woman as the moon? As the smaller body? The body that owes its existence to the masculinized earth? In a paragraph about a new sort of equality that doesn’t depend on old notions of gender, why does Fuller return to idea of man as the center of the relationship? And woman his smaller revolving partner, dancing around him?
Can you see my problem? And it is my problem, is it not? And not, after all, Fuller’s.
For what is the reason that I ascribe superiority to the earth in the binary relationship between the moon and the earth? Is it size? My perspective as a resident of earth? No, it must be my lingering adherence to the old system of gender and its codes, codes that lead me rather easily to think of man as the center of the relationship, and woman as his revolving subordinate. But, what is the frame of reference in which the moon revolves around the earth? Is it not more true to say that they revolve one with the other? From the perspective of the universe they are caught up in a dance in which neither is center and neither is peripheral. Both are equally central. Both are governed by the law of gravity and both are contained in the same heaven, and replied to by the same universe. They are actual partners, for all that we are (I guess I should say, I am or was) conditioned to think of one as more important than the other.
In fact, however, Fuller does make one side of this partnership a touch better than the other, and it is, of course, the moon. She calls the moon “the well-instructed moon” and says that she does not “fly” from “her orbit.” In other words, woman has been continually and constantly educated by her dependence on man—as husband, protector, etc—in the system of gender that Fuller sees changing before her (slowly, yes, as we can attest, but changing still). And through her education woman has been well-instructed in the very real need for a partner and in the fact that both partners both depend on each other and are governed not one by the other but by a greater law than either. Woman, that is, can see “gravity’s” role in her partnership with man, while men keep thinking themselves the center of the dance.
I guess I was being a touch too much of a “man” to really read this very womanly passage. Luckily, I was reading a writer concerned with her reader’s education, and who can, with a deft touch, effect that education in stages of readings.
Wednesday, January 19, 2011
Chapter Two: Marriage, Friendship, Margaret Fuller
So I turned in a draft of the chapter on Charles Loring Brace, and I’m now turning my attention to Margaret Fuller. The chapter will look at the issues involved with combing a concern with friendship with a focus on gender. I hope to compare and contrast Emerson and Fuller’s understandings of marriage. Unlike Brace, who was not on Emerson’s level as a theorist and writer, Fuller is more than capable of holding her own and, I will argue, better theorizes friendship as a truly inter-personal construct. Thus, Fuller emphasizes conversation as a model of interaction and of writing. Emerson, while an apparently good conversationalist, in his writing and public interactions prefered the lecture, the essay, and the book. Fuller wrote dispatches, journalism, and even in her longer essays and books worked to fold into the text a model of writing that was interactive and conversational. More on that later when I start to think about style more deliberately.
As a topic for this chapter, marriage seems interesting. I thought about looking, as I did in the last chapter at the figure of the orphan, at the figure of the mother, but decided that I do not want to delve into the emotional and psychological dramas of thinking about Emerson and Fuller’s relationships with their parents. A lot has been done there already, and not much of it good, honestly. Also, I’m just uninterested in that sort of biography. I mean, I love delving into the texture of someone’s life and living, but when one starts speculating on Freudian investments and how patriarchy as embodied in Fuller’s father then led her to generate a new theory of the maternal and also that’s why she liked flowers so much, well....1) I am so very touched emotionally by Fuller’s writing about mothers and mothering, particularly her letters about her son from Italy (maybe I’ll write about that at some point...) where she is herself surprised by how taken she has become by motherhood. I am, however, not sure what to say. 2) I am more interested in the political and public outcomes of Fuller’s experiences. That is, while I find it interesting to read about how she adapted her life and her art to expose and express her own struggles, I am really interested and compelled to think about how she developed a theory about marriage that came out of her life-long struggle with her parents and her culture (and her bodily and spiritual struggles with love and desire).
Thus, I want to look at “marriage” as a friendship (and more, of course) that crosses genders and is complicated by its nature as a social institutions and by the way in which it interacts with eros and desire. Fuller calls the “marriage of friendship” one of the better sorts of marriage, only surpassed by the “spiritual” marriage (in Woman in the Nineteenth Century). I’m still working out what I think about all of that. More below.
What follows are a series of preliminary and tentative thoughts.
Writing, Journals, Letters, and Publicity
What a weird world there used to be, and what a similar world. I’m sitting here writing what is essentially an open journal, a semi-private and yet wholly public bit of writing and I’m finding myself intrigued by how that status--somewhere between public and private--, the status essentially of a blog applied to much of the writing that went on within Fuller and Emerson’s circle of friends.
Emerson shared his journals with his friends, including Fuller. Fuller also read Bronson Alcott’s journals. Emerson read Fuller’s journals, too. This is, of course, fairly common--Charles Brockden Brown kept a diary for his friends and they for him, too. And many people wrote letters assuming that they’d circulate widely (Jefferson and Adams’s letters come to mind). In discussing the public nature of Emerson’s letters, Myerson claims that Emerson wrote letters to Lidian Jackson Emerson (his wife) while traveling in order to share his experiences with his extended circle of family and friends. Myerson points out that while Emerson wanted his letters shared, he did not wish them published: Emerson wrote to Lidian, for “letters, do as you will with them, only not print them” (5).
1) Emerson and Fuller’s willingness to share their journals and to read other’s journals indicates an interesting difference between their notions of public and private and ours as they relate to, say, reading another person’s mail--but not so much when one thinks about the various private texts we read in public, like my cousin’s blog about being a mom, or the series of baby pictures I see of my friend’s kid on their private photo-sharing account. In fact, one could think of the difference between a blog and a diary as the difference, somewhat, between these journals and, say, a diary, couldn’t one?
2) Emerson’s desire to not have his letters published illuminates a difference between him and Fuller. Fuller, after all, was a correspondent for the New York Tribune while traveling and acting in Italy in 1848 and her “dispatches” back to the Tribune were intended for publication. Sure, she wrote letters, too, and they occupied that same public-but-only-to-you-all space as Emerson’s letters, but Emerson never wrote much journalism. His travel observations ended up in book form in English Traits (1856) and some in other essays. I’m not sure what all to make of this yet, but it seems telling that they interact so differently with their audiences in print. Perhaps Fuller’s model of writing as conversation lends itself better to less-well-formed bits of writing like journalism and her dispatches. In part, at least, writing thusly lets her keep the conversation going over time, whereas Emerson’s essay, lectures, and books turn communication into a singular “event” that isn’t interactive in the same way.
3) I do believe, however, that Emerson’s style is also “interactive”. I do think he invites the reader to participate in the essays, and that his swirling arguments and contradictory claims in a single essay, and his twisting prose and series of metaphors are efforts to turn the essay into a “conversation.” Fuller just seems to me more radical in the genres that she chooses to write in, and more compact in the short durations of her writings. Also, the oral component of her ouevre--the actual conversations--seems relevant, too.
4) Lots of reading ahead of me, huh?
Preliminary Thoughts on Marriage
I wrote most of the following in an email the other day when I was thinking about Fuller and Emerson. Specifically, I was ruminating on Fuller's different descriptions of marriage. In “Woman,” she dismisses the "marriage de convenance" and the "marriage of convention" but she then begins to praise, first, the "marriage of friendship," where the two parties approach each other more or less with desires for mutual benefit. Then, even better is "marriage as intellectual companionship," where "the pen and the writing-desk furnish forth as naturally the retirement of woman as of man." Or other common interests could unite the couple, such as other arts or business or work. And of course, intellectual companionship can also mean difference and tension as well as similarities. It’s interesting that friendship is where she starts with--of course, FUller thinks that desire (erotic desire) is a sort of handicap for women. It encourages them to get married and then traps them in a social institution that isn’t all that kind to them. It’s telling that she never marries Ossoli, but she does seem rather smitten with him in her letters. My favorite letter has her describing him, basically, as, y’know, not all that bright at least not as bright as her, but still morally he is on the right side of issues and he’s got this active force about him that I read as her saying that he’s quite the “actor” both politically in the revolution and the fighting and personally with her.
But, finally, the "highest grade of marriage union is the religious, which may be expressed as pilgrimage towards a common shrine. This includes the others [ie the other types of marriage, which she now goes through in order], home sympathies and household wisdom, for these pilgrims must know how to assist each other along the dusty way; intellectual communion, for how sad it would be on such a journey to have a companion to whom you could not communicate thoughts and aspirations as they sprang to life; who would have no feeling for the prospects that open, more and more glorious as we advance; who would never see the flowers that may be gathered by the most industrious traveller. It must include all these." {aside: the flowers stuff is starting to annoy me. Margaret, don’t make me quote Hawthorne at you. Second aside: this line about “towards a common shrine” makes me think of Thoreau’s “Walking”--going sauntering to the holy land...)
In Fuller's mind, there are very few women or men able to live in a religious marriage. So instead of describing or defining it, she starts quoting from texts from around the world that give to her mind descriptions of the kinds of men and women that would be able to be in a religious marriage. So this marriage isn’t really a form of marriage after all, but rather the form that marriage takes when entered into by the right kinds of men and women. This echoes my argument in the Brace chapter that using friendship to help the orphans, for Brace, depended on producing self-reliant individuals from those orphans. Fuller comes back to her own thought like 30 pages later:
"Mariage is the natural means of forming a sphere, of taking root on the earth; it requires more strength to do this without such an opening [ie onto another person, so it's harder to do it alone or to do it with the degraded men and women around in the nineteenth century where both sexes development has been hindered and compromised by patriarchy/misogyny/etc]; very many have failed and their imperfections have been in every one's way... We must have units before we can have union, says one of the ripe thinkers of the times [ie Emersonian self-reliance]."
Problem is that she describes the "religious marriage" mostly negatively--it is not like all of these things. That's going to be tricky to think and write through. Also, what are the qualities of these “units”? Since she’s mostly arguing against certain types of men and women, what, other than the necessity of androgyny, is she calling for in these new men and new women?
...for now, back to reading. More soon, I hope.
As a topic for this chapter, marriage seems interesting. I thought about looking, as I did in the last chapter at the figure of the orphan, at the figure of the mother, but decided that I do not want to delve into the emotional and psychological dramas of thinking about Emerson and Fuller’s relationships with their parents. A lot has been done there already, and not much of it good, honestly. Also, I’m just uninterested in that sort of biography. I mean, I love delving into the texture of someone’s life and living, but when one starts speculating on Freudian investments and how patriarchy as embodied in Fuller’s father then led her to generate a new theory of the maternal and also that’s why she liked flowers so much, well....1) I am so very touched emotionally by Fuller’s writing about mothers and mothering, particularly her letters about her son from Italy (maybe I’ll write about that at some point...) where she is herself surprised by how taken she has become by motherhood. I am, however, not sure what to say. 2) I am more interested in the political and public outcomes of Fuller’s experiences. That is, while I find it interesting to read about how she adapted her life and her art to expose and express her own struggles, I am really interested and compelled to think about how she developed a theory about marriage that came out of her life-long struggle with her parents and her culture (and her bodily and spiritual struggles with love and desire).
Thus, I want to look at “marriage” as a friendship (and more, of course) that crosses genders and is complicated by its nature as a social institutions and by the way in which it interacts with eros and desire. Fuller calls the “marriage of friendship” one of the better sorts of marriage, only surpassed by the “spiritual” marriage (in Woman in the Nineteenth Century). I’m still working out what I think about all of that. More below.
What follows are a series of preliminary and tentative thoughts.
Writing, Journals, Letters, and Publicity
What a weird world there used to be, and what a similar world. I’m sitting here writing what is essentially an open journal, a semi-private and yet wholly public bit of writing and I’m finding myself intrigued by how that status--somewhere between public and private--, the status essentially of a blog applied to much of the writing that went on within Fuller and Emerson’s circle of friends.
Emerson shared his journals with his friends, including Fuller. Fuller also read Bronson Alcott’s journals. Emerson read Fuller’s journals, too. This is, of course, fairly common--Charles Brockden Brown kept a diary for his friends and they for him, too. And many people wrote letters assuming that they’d circulate widely (Jefferson and Adams’s letters come to mind). In discussing the public nature of Emerson’s letters, Myerson claims that Emerson wrote letters to Lidian Jackson Emerson (his wife) while traveling in order to share his experiences with his extended circle of family and friends. Myerson points out that while Emerson wanted his letters shared, he did not wish them published: Emerson wrote to Lidian, for “letters, do as you will with them, only not print them” (5).
1) Emerson and Fuller’s willingness to share their journals and to read other’s journals indicates an interesting difference between their notions of public and private and ours as they relate to, say, reading another person’s mail--but not so much when one thinks about the various private texts we read in public, like my cousin’s blog about being a mom, or the series of baby pictures I see of my friend’s kid on their private photo-sharing account. In fact, one could think of the difference between a blog and a diary as the difference, somewhat, between these journals and, say, a diary, couldn’t one?
2) Emerson’s desire to not have his letters published illuminates a difference between him and Fuller. Fuller, after all, was a correspondent for the New York Tribune while traveling and acting in Italy in 1848 and her “dispatches” back to the Tribune were intended for publication. Sure, she wrote letters, too, and they occupied that same public-but-only-to-you-all space as Emerson’s letters, but Emerson never wrote much journalism. His travel observations ended up in book form in English Traits (1856) and some in other essays. I’m not sure what all to make of this yet, but it seems telling that they interact so differently with their audiences in print. Perhaps Fuller’s model of writing as conversation lends itself better to less-well-formed bits of writing like journalism and her dispatches. In part, at least, writing thusly lets her keep the conversation going over time, whereas Emerson’s essay, lectures, and books turn communication into a singular “event” that isn’t interactive in the same way.
3) I do believe, however, that Emerson’s style is also “interactive”. I do think he invites the reader to participate in the essays, and that his swirling arguments and contradictory claims in a single essay, and his twisting prose and series of metaphors are efforts to turn the essay into a “conversation.” Fuller just seems to me more radical in the genres that she chooses to write in, and more compact in the short durations of her writings. Also, the oral component of her ouevre--the actual conversations--seems relevant, too.
4) Lots of reading ahead of me, huh?
Preliminary Thoughts on Marriage
I wrote most of the following in an email the other day when I was thinking about Fuller and Emerson. Specifically, I was ruminating on Fuller's different descriptions of marriage. In “Woman,” she dismisses the "marriage de convenance" and the "marriage of convention" but she then begins to praise, first, the "marriage of friendship," where the two parties approach each other more or less with desires for mutual benefit. Then, even better is "marriage as intellectual companionship," where "the pen and the writing-desk furnish forth as naturally the retirement of woman as of man." Or other common interests could unite the couple, such as other arts or business or work. And of course, intellectual companionship can also mean difference and tension as well as similarities. It’s interesting that friendship is where she starts with--of course, FUller thinks that desire (erotic desire) is a sort of handicap for women. It encourages them to get married and then traps them in a social institution that isn’t all that kind to them. It’s telling that she never marries Ossoli, but she does seem rather smitten with him in her letters. My favorite letter has her describing him, basically, as, y’know, not all that bright at least not as bright as her, but still morally he is on the right side of issues and he’s got this active force about him that I read as her saying that he’s quite the “actor” both politically in the revolution and the fighting and personally with her.
But, finally, the "highest grade of marriage union is the religious, which may be expressed as pilgrimage towards a common shrine. This includes the others [ie the other types of marriage, which she now goes through in order], home sympathies and household wisdom, for these pilgrims must know how to assist each other along the dusty way; intellectual communion, for how sad it would be on such a journey to have a companion to whom you could not communicate thoughts and aspirations as they sprang to life; who would have no feeling for the prospects that open, more and more glorious as we advance; who would never see the flowers that may be gathered by the most industrious traveller. It must include all these." {aside: the flowers stuff is starting to annoy me. Margaret, don’t make me quote Hawthorne at you. Second aside: this line about “towards a common shrine” makes me think of Thoreau’s “Walking”--going sauntering to the holy land...)
In Fuller's mind, there are very few women or men able to live in a religious marriage. So instead of describing or defining it, she starts quoting from texts from around the world that give to her mind descriptions of the kinds of men and women that would be able to be in a religious marriage. So this marriage isn’t really a form of marriage after all, but rather the form that marriage takes when entered into by the right kinds of men and women. This echoes my argument in the Brace chapter that using friendship to help the orphans, for Brace, depended on producing self-reliant individuals from those orphans. Fuller comes back to her own thought like 30 pages later:
"Mariage is the natural means of forming a sphere, of taking root on the earth; it requires more strength to do this without such an opening [ie onto another person, so it's harder to do it alone or to do it with the degraded men and women around in the nineteenth century where both sexes development has been hindered and compromised by patriarchy/misogyny/etc]; very many have failed and their imperfections have been in every one's way... We must have units before we can have union, says one of the ripe thinkers of the times [ie Emersonian self-reliance]."
Problem is that she describes the "religious marriage" mostly negatively--it is not like all of these things. That's going to be tricky to think and write through. Also, what are the qualities of these “units”? Since she’s mostly arguing against certain types of men and women, what, other than the necessity of androgyny, is she calling for in these new men and new women?
...for now, back to reading. More soon, I hope.
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)