*What About the Body, Judy?*
Early on in my graduate career here at Indiana University, I had the pleasure of taking Susan Gubar's survey course on feminist theory. A few moments from that course stand out to me, including one time when Susan claimed that she "couldn't speak to squirrel subjectivity" in response to a discussion of love that drifted on to the romping spring time grey squirrels outside the window. But this morning I'm remembering the discussion we had after reading Judith Butler. Susan told us about a time when she was on a conference panel with Butler after the publication of Gender Trouble: "And I said to her, I said, 'What about the Body, Judy?'"
That is a provocative criticism of Butler's work in Gender Trouble (1990), and, even after Bodies That Matter (1993), it seems to me still somewhat valid of her larger oeuvre (insofar as Bodies That Matter is more about "the discursive limits of sex" than it is about the bodies that participate in sex and discourse). But it is also a good reminder to those of us who spend our time working with words and books: bodies do matter, and the matter of bodies is that they are more than simply matter, and that they, after all do, forgive the pun, matter.
So, What about the body?
I heard Susan's voice in my head this morning as I sat down to read and (I hoped) to write, but I couldn't get physically comfortable. I've been struggling with the height of my desks and some mild tingling in my elbows after a while spent typing. This mild tingling has become more pronounced, and has started to locate itself securely in my right-hand pinky finger. Once that started twinge-ing instead of just tingling, I switched over to reading. I turned to a couple of passages in Fuller's letters and journals that made me hear Susan's voice in my head: "What about the body?"
In 1843, Fuller wrote to Emerson about a day very much like my own: "I am trying to write as hard as these odious east winds will let me. I rise in the morning and feel as happy as the birds and then about eleven comes one of these tormentors, and makes my head ache and spoils the day." I may not be having a headache, but my arms did tingle by 11, and there are lots of bodies that matter living with me. And I do think that many of us struggling with the life of the mind can sympathize with Fuller: we rise and the day is full of hope and thought, and by 11 or so the struggle to think and work leads to something that "spoils the day."
In a lot of her letters and journals Fuller is pretty clear about how her body matters: "My body is a burden, not an instrument," she wrote. She was clearly thinking of her health, which was never great, in this explicit statement, but she was also speaking to the ways in which her woman's body prevented her from being the kind of instrument that she wished to be. Her body denied her access to things important and instrumental in her education and in her work as an intellectual. While we take for granted many of the prejudices of the past, I think it worth remembering how fundamentally sexist the world of the nineteenth century really was. I expect that we all know that Fuller could not have gone to college--indeed, could not have gotten an equivalent education as even the poorest male student of her class. But, take as an illuminating example, something as simple as access to the library. Nothing could be more important for a developing intellectual than to encounter and confront books, but even the simple act of checking out a book or of sitting and reading in a library was controlled by gender norms and sexist policies: Fuller was forbidden even to enter the Harvard library.
Contrast this to Thoreau, who in 1849 asked for borrowing privileges at the Harvard library by stating, "I have chosen letters as my profession" (Richardson 197). He was entitled to lifetime borrowing rights at the library as a result of his degree from Harvard, and Thoreau would go on to read, borrow, and use countless volumes from the shelves. Fuller's experience with Harvard's library was quite different and it took extraordinary measures for her to secure what was given to Thoreau and Emerson by easy right.
First, as I noted, her body prevented her from enrolling as a student at Harvard, which prevented more than just an equal education with her male peers. She could not have borrowing privileges conferred on her upon graduation, and sexist policies denied her access at all to the resources and texts of the library. As a younger woman, Fuller depended on borrowed texts from friends (often from Emerson and Henry Hedge), but after returning from her Midwestern travels, she somehow became the first woman with access to the Harvard College Library's "reading room and book collection" (Mattheson 234). What Thoreau and Emerson gained by simple right of gender and education, Fuller managed to obtain, though we can assume that it took more than a declarative sentence about her chosen profession in "letters."
Access was not the end of the different burdens imposed by her body. Unlike Emerson and Thoreau, her body's presence in the library made a spectacle of her studying. She was unable to simply study without being an anomaly: a woman in a man's library. Those of us who have worked in libraries, reading difficult texts, can only sympathize with how different it must have been to be the first, and the only, woman working in the library, gawked at by the boys and men of Harvard. Thomas Wentworth Higginson, in his 1885 biography of Fuller (which was, interestingly, written as part of the series "American **Men** of Letters" edited by Charles Dudley Warner), was impressed by how Fuller overcame the bodily difficulty of access and gained entry to a place no woman's body had before penetrated. Higginson remembered how her female body's presence astonished "the undergraduates who had never before looked upon a woman reading within these sacred precincts" (194). Higginson goes on to note that "twenty of that sex are now employed as assistants," though he could also say, in 1885 when he was writing, that it would be almost 80 years before the first woman would receive a diploma from Harvard (194). Fuller's body denied her access, and then it conditioned the terms (as a spectacle and anomaly) under which she was received in the library.
I do not wish to run through a long list of the ways in which women were discriminated against in the long nineteenth century--but if the task at hand is to consider how differently Fuller's body affected her chosen profession as a writer an intellectual, I hope the reader will indulge me with one last illuminating contrast. When Emerson's first wife, Ellen Tucker Emerson, died in 1831, he inherited her estate. Emerson received two payments of around $11,000 each in 1834 and 1837. According to one economist, Emerson's inheritance would amount to around $600,000 dollars (in 2010). The law conferred on his male body the right of inheritance, and with that financial security, Emerson was able to retreat from the ministry, recover from his loss, tour Europe, and embark on a new and successful career as a lecturer and writer (Nature was published in 1836, and his first lecture series began in 1835).
Contrast the way that Emerson was able to utilize his inheritance to embark on his intellectual studies and his career as a writer with Fuller's experiences after her father Timothy's death in 1835. Like Emerson, Fuller wished to recover and learn through a trip to Europe following this devastating loss. Counting on this trip to help launch her career as a writer, Fuller was instead frustrated by her Uncle Abraham Fuller's refusal to use her father's estate to pay for Margaret's trip. When Timothy died, neither Margaret nor her mother (Margarett) were legally entitled to Timothy's estate. Instead, it passed into Abraham's hands, and, whether for herself, her mother or her brothers, Fuller was forced throughout her life to beg Abraham for money from her father's estate. Abraham was not an understanding or generous trustee, and when her wealthy uncle died in 1847, he left Fuller the sum total of $1,000 (367).
At the time of his death, Timothy Fuller's estate was estimated to be worth around $18,000, and while the estate had more survivors (Fuller, her mother, and her brothers and sister) and more responsibilities than Ellen Tucker Emerson's, the difference between the uses to which the two were put is striking (Von Mehren 75). As a man, Emerson was able to invest his inheritance into his intellectual development, and his investment paid off in a successful career, both intellectually and financially. Fuller was denied that same investment, and her successful career as a writer and journalist was delayed by decades relative to Emerson's.
*The Body And Emersonian Democratic Friendship*
These boundaries and differences were certainly part of what Fuller considered her body's "burdens." I want to argue that her awareness of the body is the source of one of her criticisms of Emersonian friendship. One of my arguments about Emersonian friendship is that Emerson abstracts friendship from the body so as to save it from the limitations implicit in Western friendship--limitations that are often imposed by the presence of actual bodies. I argue that Emerson creates the conditions under which a theory of friendship can cross bodily boundaries; Emersonian friendship can exist between men and women, blacks and whites, children and adults. Emerson, who mentored and befriended both Fuller and Thoreau, developed a theory of friendship perfectly at east with the idea that men and women can sit and study and write together without this becoming a spectacle at which the undergraduates will gawk. But in order to do so, in order to make possible friendships that cross boundaries of sameness, Emerson abstracts friendship from the actual bodies of friends, and thus ignores many of the limitations and burdens that Fuller lived with that Emerson did not. His theory, to someone like Fuller, seems naive and limited.
But this potentially naive and limited theory is still a radical position for Emerson to advance. And part of his radicalism is his disregard for the body. Previously, Western theories of friendship had centered around the body. Aristotle argued that the body was intimately involved in friendship because friends had to be "alike" in bodily ways. The greek noun for friendship, "philia," even though it has a wider expression than our word "friendship" does, is related to the verb "philein" which means "to like" or "to love." One *likes* those whom one *is like* because at the heart of friendship, for Aristotle, is goodwill (eunoia) and one can only will the good for someone whom one can know, and one can only know those whom one is alike. Thus friendships based on advantage or use, and friendships based on pleasure or enjoyment of the other's company are of a lower kind than friendships based on pure good will. And friendships based on good will can only exist between people who can see each other as "another self," as alike their own self as possible.
There is more to be said about this, of course, but the conclusion that Aristotle comes to is that friends must be alike in order to be true friends. He concludes that differences between friends cannot be great and he reads those differences bodily--in terms of age, class, gender, and race. So men and women cannot be friends; neither masters and slaves, nor the young and the old, nor the foreigner and the native, nor members of one "race" and those of another. Similarly, Cicero argued that only "good men" could be friends, thus limiting friendship to adult male bodies like Laelius and Scipio. The Bible famously pairs up like bodies as friends: David and Jonathan, Ruth and Naomi, Barnabus and Paul.
But Emerson, as I hope to show in Chapter 1, wanted to liberate the creative potential of human relationships, of friendship in particular, from the limitations of past conceptions of friendship. He wanted, I argue, to make friendship **democratic** by allowing it to cross these boundaries of "likeness:" race, gender, class, age, and region. There's a lot more to say about this, of course, but the point that I want to make today is that Emerson's philosophy of friendship removed friendship from the body and placed it squarely in the kind of relationship that is possible for a self-reliant individual to form with another self-reliant individual. In order to save what was good in past conceptions of friendship, Emerson had to argue that friendship is not a matter of bodies but of minds.
But I am coming to see that Margaret Fuller's critique of Emersonian friendship depends on a key insight that *Emerson's construction of a theory of disembodied friendship depends on his own embodied position.* The argument is pretty simple, really: Fuller, as a woman, is limited in more ways by her body than is Emerson, and so her feminist (avant le lettre) conception of friendship tries to wrestle with the body in ways that Emerson's democratic construction of friendship did not. Fuller asks, "What about the body, Waldo?"
The disembodied nature of Emersonian friendship allows him to conceive of a more progressive friendship. He can imagine cross-gender friendships and cross-racial friendships (among others) in ways that Aristotle, Cicero, and other philosophers of friendship could not. But Fuller's embodied experience led her to see how Emerson's theory is limited all the same to those bodies that are most like Emerson's: white, male, somewhat rich. The reason for this is that by removing those feature of sameness that held friends together, Emerson is forced to come up with another means of connection between friends. As I will argue in more detail in another chapter, Emerson's answer is self-reliance. Implicit in Aristotle's argument that "true friendship" is only possible for the well-off free man (and thus also in Montaigne and Cicero) is the reason for this: because only those sorts of people can be the kinds of people for whom friendship is possible as a relationship among equals. Equality was limited to those few men who could be truly equals.
Emerson's American or democratic insight is that there are many different ways to be equal, and his theory of self-reliance was his effort to make equality spread more broadly. It isn't necessary to be rich, or white, or even terribly well educated to be equal. You just need to be self-reliant. Thus, Emersonian friendship spreads more broadly and becomes more democratic. There is, of course, more to say about this (thus an entire chapter to come), but for now we just need to see that Emersonian self-reliance, as the key to Emersonian friendship, is, as Emerson constructs it, disembodied. It doesn't depend on one's class, or race, or gender. Instead, it depends on one's relationship to one's self and one's relationships to others.
Fuller's great challenge to Emerson is that of pointing out how self-reliance is itself dependent on Emerson's own embodied position and the privileges conferred on him by his body. His theory is all well and good, says Fuller, but in practice, Emerson may have simply reinvented the wheel. It may be that only those with access to an embodied life like Emerson's can become self-reliant enough to be friends with dissimilar people.
Fuller, differently embodied than Emerson, was thus differently limited and differently enabled. She was unable to embark on her career in the same manner as Emerson due to her woman's body and her culture's sexist institutions of education and law. But she was thus able to see something that Emerson was not, at least not without her help. Her own theory of friendship would come to rely not on Emerson's word "self-reliance" but on a slightly different construction: "self-dependence." Fuller would also look to the reformation not just of individuals but of the institutions that constructed and controlled both the individuals and their bodies.
Next I want to elucidate the difference between self-reliance and self-dependence and discuss Fuller's effort to reform what she saw as the crucial institution of her time: marriage.
