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:

“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.
        ‘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).

        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.

        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.

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.