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.