HUU – July 3, 2022
By Robin McNallie
I recall Forrest Church once asserting that Unitarian Universalism is the denomination that, in its principles, is the most representative of American democracy, and we can look retrospectively to find earlier evidence of this freedom tendency in our denomination, specifically at the era of Transcendentalism, extending roughly from the 1830s to 1850. The great guru of that avant garde Unitarian movement was, of course Ralph Waldo Emerson, who in a reminiscence published posthumously in the Atlantic Monthly in 1883, the year after his death, comments on the generation just coming of age in the 1830s decade. He characterizes that cohort in a memorably pungent sentence: “The young men were born with knives in their brains.” Pungent as it is, the sentence leaves out the young women of the time, predominantly Unitarian, who were also carrying inside their brains concealed cutlery – women all known in their own time if not ours: Lydia Maria Child, Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, Caroline Sturgis, Sophia Ripley, Julia Ward Howe, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lydian M. Emerson (Waldo’s wife), and Margaret Fuller.
In her rather short lifetime, Fuller was a much talked-about figure whose 1845 book, Woman in the 19th Century, was a pioneering tract in describing women’s subordination to men and the benefits to both sexes of ending it. Here, she was reiterating what the English writer, Mary Woolstonecraft, Mary Shelley’s mother, was saying in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792). After her death in 1850, Fuller’s reputation faded. In a college course survey of American literature that I took as an undergraduate in the 1950s, she didn’t warrant the standard biographical sketch and sampling of her writings in the assigned text, nor was she better represented in the survey text I taught at JMU in the mid-‘60s. Only with the rising tide of the women’s movement in the ‘70s and ‘80s did she begin to acquire more standing. Finally, in 1994, the Viking Portable Margaret Fuller was published with the entire text of Woman included. It was, incidentally, the Viking Portable edition of William Faulkner in 1946 which brought him his late recognition and the Nobel Prize in 1949, and indeed, in 1995, the year after the Viking publication, Fuller was inducted into the Women’s Hall of Fame. Now, with Fuller’s place in the canon secure, we can see her forward-looking accomplishments more clearly.
Sarah Margaret Fuller was born in 1810 in Cambridgeport, Mass. Her father, a successful lawyer and political figure, had a complex role in her early formation, training her to read at an early age Latin and Greek and the literature of those societies plus the study of Shakespeare, Cervantes, Moliere. She was also induced by him to master French, Italian and German. No wonder when she reached adulthood, people in New England said of her that she was the best-read woman in that region. They might have added that she was probably better read than those Harvard boys next door. But Timothy Fuller’s method of martinet instruction, the force-feeding old school of grind, grind, grind, hour after hour, produced some psychological stress for the young girl. The result, Margaret noted later, was a “premature development of the brain that made me a youthful prodigy by day and by night, a victim of spectral illusions.” She also suffered from bouts of sleepwalking, and her eyesight was affected by the late-night hours of poring over books. Timothy Fuller can be said to have contributed to his daughter’s formidable intellect, but it might also have led to personal traits that put off some people who later met her. She could evidently, at times, be overbearing and arrogant. According to Emerson, she once remarked to him, “ I now know all the people worth knowing in the world, and I find no intellect comparable to my own.” Others complained about her “mountainous me.” Nathaniel Hawthorne proclaimed her a “great humbug” with “a strong, heavy, unpliable and in many respects defective and evil nature.” He even darkly portrayed her in the character of Zenobia in his novel, The Blithesdale Romance. But the Puritan-tinted or perhaps tainted Hawthorne, on the whole, didn’t much like Emerson or the whole Transcendentalist tribe either. My sense is that some men felt threatened by Fuller’s female assertiveness and therefore responded negatively to her. Edgar Allan Poe, however, was the exception. After having met her, he proclaimed that there were 3 types of people in the world: men, women and Margaret Fuller. Taken out of context, this statement could be seen as a dismissive slur; however, Poe himself made it clear that he was seeing her as a law unto herself, sui generis, for he also clearly stated that it was her “way of independence, of unmitigated radicalism” that drew his praise. Interestingly, students in the field of American literature cite Poe and Fuller as the two best literary critics in America in the first half of the 19th Century. Anyway, others who dealt with her, especially in the Unitarian Transcendentalist orbit, formed close bonds with Fuller. Two examples were James Freeman Clarke and W.H. Channing, both of whom became Unitarian ministers who went on to establish a Unitarian presence in the West. Channing was a nephew of William Ellery Channing, generally acknowledged as the founding father of American Unitarianism for his 1819 sermon on Unitarian Christianity delivered in Baltimore. William Ellery Channing also tutored her in German.
In 1835, Timothy died, after which Margaret, in her mid-20s launched herself into life and career. The career at first was in teaching. Settling in Boston, she began in 1836, instructing students in Latin, French and Italian at the coeducational Temple School, a school designed and led by Bronson Alcott, father of Louisa May Alcott. A Platonist in his philosophy, Alcott naturally employed the Socratic method with his young wards, posing questions to actively draw out responses from them. Fuller must have found this method a liberating contrast to the drill-sergeant regimen her father had employed with her. Sadly, Bronson’s school folded in 1839 because some parents of the students were disturbed by Alcott’s practice of urging students to give their own interpretations of Scriptures he had them read. These parents evidently were afraid the students would develop their own ideas of Scripture.
However, by this time, Margaret had other options open. In 1836, she had been welcomed into the Emerson household, and soon they were engaged in long and intense dialog on lofty and philosophical matters, some likely pertaining to Emerson’s “Nature” essay, called by many the manifesto of Transcendentalism. She immediately joined the circle of the Transcendentalist Club, sometimes called “Hedge’s Club” since it would meet whenever Frederic Henry Hedge could free himself from his pastorate in Maine to get back to Boston. Members of the group, in spite of individual differences, were in general agreement in their commitment to the philosophic school of idealism, a school that elevated spirit over matter, and favored intuition over logically discursive reasoning. Emerson’s “a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds” expresses this view in a nutshell.
Fuller, evidently looking outside of the male-dominated club, started a series of forums for educated women. She called this series simply, “Conversations,” the conversations we might today call “consciousness raising.” Emerson himself once referred to Transcendentalism as the “new consciousness.” Fuller wanted women to expand their awareness of things beyond home and hearth. The conversations occurred regularly each week and lasted from 1839-1844. The subjects covered ranged from mythology to philosophy to theology and the arts. Enrollees were charged $10 for an individual series on a specific topic, a considerable sum for that time. Attendees met usually at Elizabeth Peabody’s residence, where Fuller would lead off with an introduction to establish a basis for an open back and forth. Among students in these conversations were Sophia Hawthorne and Lydia Parker (wives of Hawthorne and Parker), and Mary Channing, the daughter of William Ellery, that afore-mentioned “Unitarian pope.” Fuller stressed particularly that students contemplate the definitions of masculinity and femininity, and the societal-prescribed roles of gender. Her frequent focus on feminist issues caused Harriet Martineau, a visiting British author/reformer (and caustic commenter on America) to scold her for not introducing other areas in need of reform. Martineau’s admonition made Fuller broaden her social concern to include the slavery issue. One writer has commented “the conversations, though she intended to stimulate the thinking of others, stimulated her own.” Elizabeth Cady Stanton later concluded that “Conversations” was “a vindication of a woman’s right to think.”
“Conversations” obviously stimulated Fuller herself, in 1842, to write in The Dial, the Transcendentalist journal she edited, “The Great Lawsuit.” This long essay she three years later expanded and published as Woman in the 19th Century. Although Woman did not explicitly reference suffrage, it definitely did prepare the ground for the Women’s Rights Convention in Seneca Falls, NY in 1848. Fuller did not attend the convention, due only to the fact that by 1848 she was residing in Europe. Woman was interested not only in changing how women viewed themselves, but how men, too, needed to change their views of women. Fuller believed that change would benefit both sexes. She states, “Now the time has come when a clearer vision and better action are possible, when man and woman may regard one another as brother and sister, the pillars of one porch, the priests of one worship. I have believed and intimated that this hope would receive an ampler fruition than ever before in our own land, and it will do so if the land carry out the principles from which sprang our national life.” Note the clear reference in that last sentence to the Declaration of Independence.
It’s in every way fitting, I think, to close here on the 1845 date of the publication of Woman in the 19th Century. That book represents her most lasting achievement, and reminds us of just how far she had come, with some help from her progressive Unitarian friends, in the ten years since her father’s death. She was fated to live only five more years, all in Europe. In Rome, she lived with and perhaps married an Italian marquis, Giovanni Angelo Ossoli, 10 years younger than her, and gave birth to a son, Angelo. She and her husband joined in the Roman Republic’s war for independence.
In 1850, the family debarked for America. Encountering a hurricane, the vessel, the Elizabeth, foundered 200 yards from the shore of Fire Island. Unable to swim, Margaret Fuller tragically drowned, as did her husband and child. Emerson dispatched Thoreau to the scene; however, Fuller’s body and possessions were never recovered. She was only 40.