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.
Monday, March 7, 2011
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.
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