On Monday evening of February 3rd, 1851, “quite a large party" gathered at Bronson Alcott's home on West Street in Boston (139). There was little to separate this gathering from many others. Those present were the regular broad range of transcendentalist and Bostonian literati. Some of the luminaries of the American Bloomsbury were there: Alcott, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Caroline Healey Dall. Less well-known but still notable figures like Thomas Wentworth Higginson joined the gathering along with some of those on the periphery of the scene, like Anna Parsons and a “Mr List” (139).[find out who List is.] This evening was memorable to Caroline Healey Dall, who recorded her impressions of the night and its conversation in her diary. Dall inscribed the conversation of that particular night because even though the evening’s colloquy drifted rapidly from subject to subject, it eventually centered itself around the group’s memories and opinions “of 'Margaret Fuller' [and] of ‘Woman’” (139). And yet it seems to me that this night distinguished itself not simply for the fact of the assembly and not entirely for the subject of the evening’s discussion: Fuller had been and continued to be a source of intrigue and discussion. Instead, the evening seems most remarkable for a small but important gesture on the part of Ralph Waldo Emerson, a gesture that carried with it the results of a deep theorization and articulation of friendship.
Fuller was certainly worthy of a conversation in early 1851 and not just because of her untimely death in July of 1850. Fuller first caused scandal in 1849 when news of the out-of-wedlock birth of her son, Angelo Eugene Philip Ossoli, whom she called Angelino, reached American shores and ears from Italy. Fuller, traveling Europe as a correspondent for The New York Tribune, had been covering and had come to participate in the Italian Revolution, where she met and fell in love with an Italian revolutionary. Angelino’s birth and Fuller’s continuing relationship with Angelino’s father, Giovanni Angelo Ossoli, perplexed her friends and followers, and their confusion had not yet settled down when the unusual family boarded the ship Elizabeth, leaving Italy and the collapse of the revolution for New York City in 1850. But Fuller would not get the chance in 1850 or 1851 to talk with her friends about her new child and the man she would not take as a husband. On July 19th, the Elizabeth, steered by its first mate after the death of the Captain, crashed into a sandbar near shore and was lost: Fuller, Ossoli, and Angelino all died just 60 yards off of Fire Island, New York in sight of the shore.
So less than seven months later, when many of "Margaret's Friends," as Dall described them, gathered in the home of her former co-worker, collaborator, and constant correspondent, Bronson Alcott, they were drawn together into a searching consideration of her character and her life. In an apt manner, they did so thorough a conversation. While Dall would later call this conversation “entirely a failure,” since it did not, in her opinion, either clarify sufficiently the “character” of Margaret Fuller or provide an compelling answer to the question of “Woman,” I want to suggest that there is something worth learning in the “failure” of this evening’s conversation, and particularly in what Dall saw as the chief failing of the evening’s discussion, but which I will suggest was an outgrowth of the success of Emerson and Fuller’s joint theorization of friendship: the silence of Fuller’s “dear friend,” perhaps her dearest male friend, Ralph Waldo Emerson. Dall told her diary that Emerson refused to make his opinion of Margaret heard: they could not make him speak about his friend. Even when Fuller was characterized in a manner that forced Dall herself to speak up, Emerson said nothing. His silence was the chief reason that Dall described the conversation as a failure, for she felt that without Emerson’s input, they could not know who Sarah Margaret Fuller really had been.
It could be that Dall was confused by this silence purely because it was out of character for Emerson, particularly in Dall’s recollections, where he often appears unable to stop speaking (see Dall’s transcriptions of Fullers conversations in “Margaret and Her Friends”). But there was more to Dall’s confusion that evening. For one, she believed that Emerson, either because he was such a leading light in their circle or because he was known to be Fuller’s close friend, had some secret knowledge about Fuller’s character that could explain the perplexing woman. That is, she was upset by his silence because she felt that he had the answer to who Margaret Fuller really was. Dall was so intent upon hearing Emerson’s words on this matter that she missed how much his silence communicated both about Fuller’s character and about her friends’ discussion. Dall was unable to hear what he had to say because she was so determined to hear what he had to say. She didn’t hear Emerson partly because he spoke with silence, but also because he spoke that evening through gesture. His single, telling gesture during the conversation was to produce, without comment, a daguerrotype of Fuller that he passed around the circle of friends, sharing with each her image in static form. In that simple gesture, I would argue, Emerson said more about his friend and his friendship with Margaret Fuller than an entire library’s worth of words. The question for us today is what did he say?
The conversation of 3 February, 1851 began where many of Fuller’s later biographers have begun—with the demanding educational system imposed on her by her father, Timothy Fuller. Dall writes, “There were some facts stated about the severity of her early training, the wonderful character of her mind. Mr. Alcott said she was no New England woman—she might as well have been born in Greece or Rome…” (139). Fuller was often described as a woman out of place, both by her friends and rivals during her life and by later critics. This is why it seems so poetical, as she might have said, that she died within sight but unable to reach the often inhospitable shores of the United States. It seems entirely fitting then, that so early after her death, her friends would begin where her later readers would still begin: with her unusual childhood and the way that her education created a woman who seemed altogether unexpected—well-educated, with a sharp mind, and a sharp tongue.
Later, Dall recollects, Alcott “spoke of the great ability of the letters to the Tribune,” presaging the recent critical turn towards considering and appreciating Fuller’s rather radical journalism (139). And “Anna Parsons spoke of the great power of love in [Fuller],” but the conversation turned critical at last. “Mr List objected the cutting severity of remark to which those who attended her conversations were exposed. He attributed this to her self-love" (139). As the conversation shifted from Fuller’s early education to her “severity of remark,” Dall “objected to this expression” (139). Dall did not object simply to Mr. List’s conjecture that Fuller was too severe in her communication because of an excess of self-love, though she clearly does think that Mr. List’s attribution was altogether unwarranted. Dall rather argued that it was unfair to speculate about what led Fuller to be “cutting severe” in remark: “I did not think it right to assume a reason for it. I had heard her speak to others when the tears came to my eyes, and my throat swelled at the bitterness of her words. But she had long been an invalid, suffered intensely, and it seemed to me that half of her irritation was physical whenever it occurred…” (139).
And yet, while attempting to save Fuller from a criticism of callousness and narcissism, Dall writes Fuller into something of a nineteenth century caricature: the over-educated and sickly woman. Still, Dall’s larger point seems to be that Fuller was maturing away from her youthful harshness, both in body and in interpersonal interactions: “Ednah said that she had attended her last three winters' conversations, that in them all, but one instance of such severity, and for that she [Fuller] immediately and amply apologized” (139). The back-and-forth of this conversation about Fuller’s character must have presented more sides of Fuller than any one person present there had known. It stands out today as a rather unique moment in which Fuller’s male and female friends frankly discussed her character together, even if they could not come to a consensus.
The conversation continued in turns: “Higginson spoke of Margaret's great intellectual activity. I [Dall] spoke of her want of serenity, said what I had hoped from the influence of marriage and motherhood on her—Mr Alcott believed that she became noble after it." At some point during this back-and-forth exchange, with many voices echoing around Mr. Alcott's house, Emerson, who had made no contribution to either the harsh and honest criticisms or the flattering and spirited defenses of Fuller, produced, according to Dall,“a daguerreotype taken from a picture, made after her marriage." Presumably, Emerson dated the picture in some brief comment, but he remained silent as he passed around this image, of which we currently have no copy (the editors of her diary speculate that Dall is mis-remembering the image and that it must be an earlier picture but that seems to me wrong, since Dall is very clear in her placement of the image in time, and she would have been familiar with most of the earlier images that we still possess. I like to think that it was an image somehow lost to us)). Writing later in her diary Dall curiously says that the picture "answered all [her] questions about the influence of marriage and motherhood on [Fuller].” Dall continues, “the love and serenity in it were—beautiful. It is an admirable likeness."
Into that image, Dall read the answer to her hope that Fuller had found serenity, despite the revolutionary and personal chaos surrounding Fuller in Italy at the time of the picture’s taking. Perhaps Fuller had found peace, but even Dall was not fully committed to believing that the image passed around by Emerson that evening was, in fact, the final answer. Instead, Dall longed for a knowledge that she could not have about Fuller, but which, provocatively, she believed both that Emerson had and that Emerson was keeping from “Margaret’s friends:” “I wish that Mr Emerson had said what he thought of Margaret,” writes Dall. “I want to know that she had warmth and geniality. Perhaps however he though our (frivolous conversation) filagree hardly fit to set a jewel in. The gentle men seemed unwilling to talk about Margaret." Dall wished to “know,” and she expected that Emerson held that truth secret from her, but Emerson remained, typically, stoic and silent.
I find Dall’s decision to describe this conversation as a “failure” because of Emerson’s silence provocative. It seems to me that Emerson’s silence and his subsequent sharing of Fuller’s daguerrotype were efforts to communicate the incommunicable—which is precisely the truth of Margaret Fuller, even if only told negatively or sideways. What, after all, could Emerson have said to convince Dall that she would “know” the truth of Margaret Fuller? Hadn’t Emerson taught them in his great essay “Friendship” that we cannot truly know each other? That we are all simply “beautiful enemies,” fascinating enigmas who, even when once found out, when understood clearly for a moment, just disappear again beneath the many questions that come between any two people, much less two friends who do in fact know somewhat of each other? This picture, which first answered all the questions about Margaret that Dall had and then answered none of her questions, was carried by Emerson on his person, and his only comment on the character or quality of Margaret Fuller, his dear friend dead only six months, was made by sharing her image with her other friends and declaring that he did in fact carry her with him. This is all that Emerson offered Margaret’s friends that night, and, if I am reading his gesture right, he was also telling them that it was all that he could offer them.
Emerson’s gesture is provocative in a number of ways, not the least is the way that a static image makes clear that what Margaret’s friends were wanting—the truth of her character—was impossible for them to have without her presence. The image here cannot speak, cannot respond: its truth is a mute truth and it testifies to the truth that mute truths are without the quality of understanding that Margaret’s friends were wanting. Without Fuller’s voice and response, all of their speculation can not come near the absolute truth of who Fuller was. By showing this unresponsive “face” to her friends, Emerson was reminding those present that, in Levinas’ words, death is “the disappearance in beings of those moments that made them appear as living, those moments that are always responses. Death will touch, above all, that autonomy or that expressiveness of movement that can go to the point of masking someone within his face. Death is the no-response” (God, Death, and Time, emphasis added 9). Death turns a face into a mask, and prevents us from seeing the other respond in the same way that a daguerrotype takes a living person and turns them into a still representation. Death is fundamentally the negation of our usual way of relating to any other person as the being that responds to us. We can continue to speak to them and about them, but their faces are frozen into a mask. Like Fuller in the daguerrotype, they cannot respond back.
This is part of what Emerson’s gesture seems to signify—an awareness that death is the no-response, the event that will forever cheat Margaret’s friends of their desire to know her character. And yet, Levinas proposes that there is more to death than simply the hardening of a face into a mask. There is, he says, something that does not die, some remainder that is not exhausted in death. This “remainder” is the obligation of the living to the other who has died. According to Levinas, the other expresses herself to me through the “face,” which is the combination of all the ways in which the other can respond (and ask for my response): a smile, a word, a gesture, a kiss, a letter. In Fuller’s death her face seems to have been turned into a mask, but this is not the entire truth, Levinas says, since the other’s response was only ever a request for yet another response—for my response to her response, and so on. Since the living can still respond, and can still react to the dead’s no-responses, death produces a profound obligation on the part of the still-living. As Levinas says, “Henceforth, I have to respond for him. All the gestures of the other were signs addressed to me. To continue the progression,” I have to respond for the dead other (13). The “signs addressed to me,” Levinas argues, have confirmed in the living their obligation to the dead. “In every death,” he says, “is shown the nearness of the neighbor, and the responsibility of the survivor” (17). We are our br-other’s and sister’s keepers, more so in death than in life because in death we are their only source of expression.
And in Emerson’s case his silence, his refusal to respond, was a refusal to participate in a conversation about Margaret without Margaret. When Fuller’s friends had their free-wheeling discussion of her character—whether she was kind or severe, serene or troubled—he saw that they were engaged in turning her firmly into a mask, hardening first this characteristic and then that characteristic into her character. I read his gesture of showing her picture as an effort to show those present how they were discussing not the being that was and is Margaret Fuller but rather a series of separate daguerrotypes: different masks, but masks nonetheless, and none of them true. Emerson’s gesture in passing around the picture seems to have been aimed at forcing her “friends” to see how they were treating Margaret as if she had no voice, as if she could not help them see why she had been so stern, or whether she was ever at peace. But Emerson knew different: Fuller could still speak because she had spoken, or, more precisely, because she had written. During 1851 and 1852, Emerson was engaged in editing Fuller’s writing, which was eventually compiled into the two volume Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli (1852). However flawed a publication, and however damaging to a clear understanding of Fuller the Memoirs are (footnote criticism of them), they still represent an attempt on the part of Emerson and the other editors to find some way for Fuller to respond for herself. They are certainly flawed, but they spring from an ethical desire to give Fuller a chance to respond for herself.
I am reading Emerson’s gesture that February evening and his work editing the Memoirs as efforts to fulfill the obligation that the living have to the dead: to respond for the dead other, as Levinas says we must. Emerson’s gesture and his work as editor, therefore, indicate a deep struggle over a private grief. And while I have been reading his gesture of passing around the picture as a refusal to participate in a conversation that was demeaning to Fuller in the way that it did not give her a voice (in contradistinction from Emerson’s work as Fuller’s editor, attempting to give her a voice), we still need to make sense of the fact that Emerson carried with him a picture of Fuller constantly (which I think we can reasonably infer since he would have had no way of knowing that that evening’s conversation would turn to such a searching examination of Fuller).
He kept with him at all times the literal “face” of his dead friend, which indicates a powerful and private grief. It was a grief that Dall felt as well. As she was leaving for the evening, Dall exchanged a word with Mrs. Alcott about Fuller: “My eyes filled with tears—for in truth Margaret’s death was a private grief to me,” writes Dall. “[T]here is no American woman that stands near her.” Emerson’s melancholic gesture to carry with him Fuller’s daguerrotype (cite Edmundson on Emerson’s melancholia?) shows just how deeply he felt her loss. “I have lost in her my audience,” he wrote in his journal following news of her death, striking an almost stereotypically selfish Emersonian chord. But he also lost in her a being whose responses he cherished precisely because he could never seem to “know” what she would say. If he thought of her as an audience, she was an audience unpredictable and responsive—a very alive audience.
In 1843 Emerson wrote in his journal that Fuller “has great sincerity, force, & fluency as a writer, yet her powers of speech throw her writing into the shade. What method, what exquisite judgment, as well as energy, in the selection of her words, what character & wisdom they convey!” (JMN VIII, 368). While Emerson was trying to preserve as much of Fuller’s “face” as he could in her Memoirs, there was no way to capture her voice, her conversation, or her friendship. While trying to live up to his obligation to his departed friend, Emerson could let her speak through her writing, could insist on letting her have her own voice, but he cannot recreate her unpredictability and her speech. This is what Levinas means when he says that we are haunted by the possibility of the Other’s death for it imposes on us a responsibility that we cannot completely fulfill. We can try to respond for the dead other, but we will always fail. And that failure will constantly remind us of what we have lost, or will lose, and what we might even be currently losing. In many ways, this is the lesson of Emerson’s gesture: we can try to prevent our dead friends from becoming daguerrotypes, but our efforts will be tentative, fraught, and often the best gesture is the silent gesture.
