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.
Did you ever look at Martha Vicinus, Intimate Friends? About the eros in female relationships? I think this might help you clarify some issues inherent in your discussion here. Among some of the other friendships between men and women worth thinking about are Henry James and Isabella Stewart Gardner (his letters to her have just been published) or, perhaps the oddest example, the triangular one involving Annie Fields, Sarah Orne Jewett and John Greenleaf Whittier. With Fuller/Emerson, the problem is of course compounded by Fuller's being a single woman--and delighting in singleness and singularity, as the reinvents herself as a kind of virginal mother to future generations of liberated souls (the comparison with Whitman would be interesting), who, having spiritualized her passions, is able to take the long view.
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