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.
Sunday, February 27, 2011
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
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