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MARGARET FULLER'S SUMMER ON THE LAKES, IN 1843
IT IS NOT GOOD ENOUGH MERELY T0 B_E HERE

presented by

Pamela Cheetwood Sellers

has been accepted towards fulfillment
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MARGARET FULLER'S W
IT IS NOT GOOD ENOUGH MERELY TO BE HERE

By

Pamela Cheetwood Sellers

A DISSERTATION

Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of '

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

Department of English

1992

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ABSTRACT

MARGARET FULLER'SW
IT IS NOT GOOD ENOUGH MERELY TO BE HERE

By

Pamela Cheetwood Sellers

W is the record of Margaret Fuller's

self-discovery and development during a pivotal summer vacation to
the Midwest in 1843. By all early critical acounts W
Lake; was an unusual travel journal which differed from typical
travel books of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. As a
direct result of this journey, Fuller was able to make major life
changes following the writing of the book during the winter of 1844.
Consequently, W is no mere travel journal but the
record of an inner life in transition.

The so-called 'digressions' lambasted by critics have relevance
and purpose in revealing Fuller's state of mind at the time of the
trip. She came to terms with herself, her disappointments and

aspirations, her failed relationships, and her goals in life and was

able to move on with her life in a positive direction after this
summer, becoming a reporter for Horace Greeley's newspaper and
ultimately becoming radically involved in the Italian revolution of
the late 1840's. Her growing determination to ameliorate
conditions of the misunderstood and oppressed of the world is
another aspect of her personality developed through her writing of
this book. Writing about the downtrodden was one way to raise
social consciousness about them, and this she did in her travel book.
During this summer she comprehended the design of things
through her enhanced spiritual vision of a universe in which loving
actions arise from the inner personal depths of contemplated truth.
The summer of 1843 enabled Fuller to turn from the passivity of
devotion to art and literature to the activity of political revolution.
She knew without a doubt after-the writing of this book that she
must move on into a “full, free life,” and she realized that she could
not do that in Concord. Because her decisions and critical
perspective following this trip exhibit a divergence from her earlier
path (her alliance with Emerson and Concord), this book is an
account of the important spiritual journey Margaret Fuller took

during the summer of 1843.

Copyright by
PAMELA CHEETWOOD SELLERS
1 9 9 2

In loving memory of my mother and father,
John Edward Samuel Cheetwood
and
Donna Therese Simmons Cheetwood,
who started me on my own life journey.

ACKNOlMEDGMENTS

l gratefully acknowledge the patient mentorship of my
brilliant dissertation director, Dr. Michael Lopez, who was also my
teacher in seVeral wonderful American Literature seminars that led
to my study of Margaret Fuller. Dr. Lopez was never too busy to
share his wealth of knowledge on the American Renaissance with
me. His guidance has been invaluable.

Dr. Victor Paananen also provided me with many helpful
suggestions. I thank him for his kindness and support in expediting
the completion of this project. Thanks also go to Dr. A.C. Goodson
and Dr. James Seaton for taking the time to read the evolving drafts,
and to Dr. Linda Wagner-Martin, who was part of my original
dissertation committee. I will always remember the special
independent tutorials with Dr. Richard Benvenuto, who encouraged
me in my research in nineteenth-century English literature and who
was also part of my committee before his untimely death. Without
the guidance of the cheerful, efficient Lorraine Hart, I would have
been lost. I thank her.

Special thanks go to my dear friend and colleague, Dr. Gregory
Shaltz, who has freely given so many hours of his time and energy to
read and critique my drafts, who has astounded me with his
computer expertise, and who has encouraged me during moments of
despair. Without his encouragement I might never have completed
this project. Thanks also are due all of those friends who with
somewhat glazed eyes for so many years patiently endured my
Margaret Fuller monologues. Gratitude is also due computer experts
Betsy Atchison and Mary Jo Smith for their help.

I would like to thank my son Matthew Bennett Sellers for his
computer knowledge and for his willingness to share so much time
with Countess Ossoli. He has grown up during this project, and I
almost didn't notice. Thanks also go to my older sons Mark Ashley
Sellers,lll, and John Abbott Sellers, who were always interested in
my progress.

vi

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction ................................................. 1
Chapter One: Typical Travel Books ............................ 15
Chapter Two: Not A Typical Travel Book ...................... 45
Chapter Three: Misunderstood and Oppressed .................. 79
Chapter Four: Not Just A Spiritual Vision .................... 116
Chapter Five: Conclusion --

It Is Not Good Enough Merely To Be Here ...... 151
Notes .................................................... 174
Bibliography .............................................. 196

vii

INTRODUCTION

Margaret Fuller (1810-1850) is usually remembered today as
the arrogant editor of the Transcendentalist publication M or
as the overbearing feminist who wrote WW
Century. Aside from a handful of scholars who know of her real
accomplishments, not many Americans realize that Fuller was also
one of the best nineteenth-century literary critics, the first foreign
correspondent for any American newspaper, and an impassioned and
active participant in the Italian Revolution. Her accomplishments

and talents have been eclipsed by the verbal caricature painted of

her by her mentor Emerson in the W
stgljfl published after her death by drowning. Hawthorne, Poe, and
Lowell also denigrated her.2 Her work itself has largely been
ignored while her personality, the “mountainous ME,“ has loomed
large. For many years the portrait of the woman who supposedly

announced to her friends, 'I now know all the people worth knowing

 

in America, and I find no intellect comparable to my own” (Mam,
l:234), has been the one remembered.

Happily, recent criticism has begun to concentrate on inter-
preting her texts rather than than prolonging this caricature of her
personality. One of the texts often neglected, however, has been

W843, a travel book of Fuller's vacation in

the Midwest which led to her employment as a writer for Horace

Greeley's Wfi When the book appeared in 1844,

it was a source of confusion for critics, who did not know what to
make of it. Since that time most critics have considered the book a
hodgepodge and have dismissed it as unimportant.

When one ignores the Emersonian caricature of Fuller and
examines her works, a completely different picture begins to
emerge. Thanks to Robert Hudspeth's recent publication of Fuller's
letters and because of new editions of W
mainland W343, new interest in Fuller

has developed, and critical focus is beginning to be placed where it
should be - on Fuller's unexpurgated texts as evidence of her
intelligence, perception, and abiding humanism and love. According

to Margaret Allen in 1979, Fuller ”achieved greater balance as a

thinker and human being'4 than either Emerson or Thoreau, yet they
are read and honored while she is ignored and caricatured. Because

few know her writings, Allen says, she is denied the "power to

change lives, to shape minds, to destroy and create the world."5

Only recently has this ”problem of Margaret Fuller" been recog-
nized and dealt with somewhat. Scholars are beginning to examine
Fuller's work as well as her biography to discern her contribution as
American writer and literary critic. Most have concentrated on
Fuller's WW“ her foreign correspon-
dence, or her articles on literature and art in the Irinung, as
evidence of her excellence as a writer and as a thinker. Almost no
one, however, has focused at length on was
as a work of merit.

While modern critics are beginning to read W,
a critical examination of the book still needs to be undertaken in
order to attempt to understand Fuller's mind during the decisive
summer and fall of this trip and the literary composition of the
book. W is a record of Fuller's interior journey
with major intellectual milestones that marked her growing

dissatisfaction with the New England Transcendentalists and

:‘L
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Emerson's mentorship and her veering in a direction which
ultimately culminated in radical political involvement in Italy.
After her summer in the West and the publication during the next
year of her two major books, W and W

W, Fuller left New England for New York and Europe,

never to return.6 A firmer understanding of herself and a concomi-
tant ability to make decisions about the direction she wanted her
life to take were the result of this summer vacation and are
discernable in her writing and in her critical approach to art and
literature.

The passage of Margaret Fuller from Transcendentalist editor
hovering in the shadow of Emerson to female activist and critic
second only to Poe is symbolically accomplished in the critically
neglected W. The activity of her later life for
which she is now remembered is foreshadowed in this major
transitional work. The argument in this dissertation is precisely
that the activity of her later life evolved from the internal changes
made during Fuller's summer on the lakes in 1843.

As a diverse work of many voices, Wm reveals

Fuller’s search for meaning, her social and literary critical stances,

her attitudes about women, education, nature, and spiritualism. Her
style is varied, ranging from dramatic dialogues, description,
poetry, and narrative anecdotes to autobiographical sketches. The

result of her writing is a record of her interior journey in a travel

book that Horace Greeley was to call 'unequalled.'7 The intent of
this paper is to show Fuller's thought migration during the summer
and fall of l843 as mirrored in W. Careful
attention must be paid to the text so that it will no longer seem
confused or irrelevant but will reveal Fuller's thinking through of
her role in the scheme of things. Because she made major changes in
her life after writing this book, Fuller scholarship needs to focus on
Wises as an early promise of the changes to come.
Fuller's journey had begun by train on May 25, 1843. Her
companions on the trip west were James Freeman Clarke, a
Unitarian minister who had founded the Church of the Disciples in
Boston; his sister Sarah Ann, an artist who had studied for a time
with the renowned Washington Allston; and Caroline Sturgis
("Cary“), one of Fuller's devoted followers and closest friends.

Sturgis was to accompany the trio only as far as Buffalo on the train

and would then return to Boston.8

After viewing Niagara Falls, the Clarkes and Fuller set out by
steamboat through the Great Lakes for Chicago, where William and
Sam Clarke, brothers of James and Sarah, had established a drug
store. Passing Cleveland, Detroit, Mackinac Island, and stopping
briefly at the Manitou Islands for fuel (wood), the group finally
arrived in Chicago on June 20, after the five-and-a-half-day voyage.

At this point James, having conveyed his sister and her friend
safely into the care of his brothers, returned east. The women set
out with William by covered wagon for a journey of several weeks to
view the Illinois prairies. Returning to Chicago on July 6 and after a
few days' rest, Fuller and Sarah Clarke traveled alone to the Wiscon-
sin territory by boat. After two weeks there, they returned to
Chicago. In August, Fuller journeyed alone back to Mackinac Island
in order to study the Indian tribes there. Soon Sarah joined her, and
the two set out from here for home.

This, in brief, was the itinerary. Fuller added to her notes and
memories remarks on the reading she had done while on the trip,
namely the story of the Seeress of Prevorst, a book about a misun-

derstood clairvoyant. A large portion of W is

also devoted to her account of Mariana, a young woman many readers

later took to be Fuller herself. lnterspersed into the travel account
are also poems and letters she received or wrote while she was
traveling. The book was published by Little, Brown, and Co. of
Boston in 1844.

Early criticism of the book was varied. It received some
hearty praise and some vicious criticism, but it was the consensus
of the critics that Fuller's book was not a typical travel journal.
With its many asides and personal digressions, it was considered a
curiosity. Caleb Stetson, a reviewer for the W,
remarked in 1844 that he found it ”difficult to account for the
introduction of so many allusions to classic antiquity, to Europe and
its arts, manners, and literature. . . . Tales also unexpectedly appear
. . . which have no connexion with the scenes she visited, except the
accidental fact that they occurred in the course of her reading or

were called up from the depths of her memory by some mysterious

association.'9 Indeed, Fuller's brother Arthur, in his edition of

W, published in 1856 along with her account of

the European trip upon which she finally did embark, took the liberty

of omitting several passages which he felt were “not connected in

any regard with Western life.'10

However, Edgar Allan Poe remarked in 1846 in 5mm
Magazlnmanuadfljmk that W gave evidence of
Fuller's "high genius” for precisely the reason that she introduced

"touches which other artists would be sure to omit as irrelevant to

the subject."11 He believed that her descriptions were unrivaled for

'graphicality, for the force with which they convey the true by the

novel or unexpected."12 Poe felt that the very charm of Fuller's
style lay in the fact that it was conversational: "her personal
character and her printed book are merely one and the same thing.
We get access to her soul as directly from the one as from the other
-- no more readily from this than from that -- easily from either.

Her acts are bookish, and her books are less thoughts than acts. Her

literary and conversational manner are identical."13 His summation
was that Wakes was a "remarkable assemblage of
sketches.'14 He believed that "the style of Miss Fuller is one of the
very best with which I am acquainted. In general effect, I know no
style which surpasses it. It is singularly piquant, vivid, terse, bold,

luminous. . . it is everything that a style need be."15

Other contemporary reviewers gave favorable reviews to the

new book, but with reservations. Rufus Wilmot Griswold felt that

W showed “considerable descriptive power, and

. . some good verses,“ but felt that Fuller's remarks on Indians were

“very superficial“ and that her criticism of Schoolcraft was

unfounded and 'ignorant."16 Two years later he retracted his earlier

criticism: “I confess some change of opinion in her favor since

writing the article upon her in Wm)" His
new opinion was that Fuller was "undoubtedly to be ranked among
the first authors of her sex."18

Orestes Brownson wrote a scathing review of W
Lake; in his W following the publication of the book.

He felt that she was “wholly deficient in a pure, correct taste, and

especially in that tidiness we always look for in woman."19
Although he admitted that the book is “marked by flashes of a rare
genius, by uncommon and versatile powers, by sentiments at times

almost devout,‘ he was not able to recommend it because of her
'infidelity.'20 She was, to him, a “heathen priestess“ who had

corrupted the minds and hearts of the Boston community?1

Fuller's friend James Freeman Clarke praised the book after its

10

publication. ”We should do great injustice to this book in repre-
senting it merely as a pleasant book of travels. It belongs to a class
of which we can rarely find a specimen. It is full of suggestion, rich
in matter, to be read and read again, and to appear new with each
new reading. It comes to us with the stores of a mind which has
thought much and seen much and experienced much, and which can,

therefore, touch no subject without conveying a thousand sugges-

tions and incitements to thought by every word."22

Twentieth-century critic Lawrence Buell, on the other hand,
found Wakes to be a ”concoction of gossip, preach-

ment, Platonic dialogue, and Indian lore' which Fuller dashed off to

finance her summer vacation.23 Perry Miller has also found this
book “tedious,“ a typical nineteenth-century “potpourri" in which
"reports on scenes alternate with random associations or with
insertions of brazenly extraneous matter, especially with ad hoc
poetic flights. Thus the real theme of the narrative -- the trip

itself -- becomes miserably confused; the effect on a modern reader

is that of an intolerable monstrosity.'24 Miller remarks later,

during his discussion of WW that he

11

finds her feminist book, “like Summer, . . . full of wearisome

digressions and excursions into fantasy and murky dreams, and the

thread of the discourse is frequently lost."25 He, like Arthur Fuller,
believes that his own abridgement of W gives a
better picture of the substance of her book, which he believes should
be seen strictly as a travel book. Miller adds, however, that any

abridgement of Fuller's texts is “hazardous, although motivated by

the best of scholarly intentions."26
Both Richard V. Carpenter in 1910 and Madeleine B. Stern in

1949 wrote interesting and detailed summaries of Fuller's sojourn

in Illinois and Michigan respectively for state historical journals,27
but neither attempted to analyze her inner journey. Like Miller, they
saw the book as essentially travel literature by a gifted writer and
well-known historical figure. Recent criticism has become more
sophisticated and complex, but critics are still divided. Larry J.
Reynolds declares that "prior to writing her law letters from

Italy, Fuller seldom achieved coherence in her writings, a common

problem for the Transcendentalists as a group. . . .‘28 He adds that

'thm and fancy played a great part“ in the shaping of W

12

W29 Ann Douglas comments that the book is not

“journalism in the best sense" because it is 'romanticized."30
Fuller's best writing, Douglas maintains, was about current events.
While most modern critics realize that there is more than

superficial meaning in W they disagree as to
what precisely that meaning is. Although Margaret Allen finds the
book “self-consciously literary, episodic, and rambling,"31 she sees
an “underlying unity” in the theme of the interaction between nature

and civilization that ties the “seemingly random anecdotes and
descriptions" together.32 Annette Kolodny finds an underlying theme

of the captivity narrative in the voices of the wives of prairie

settlers forced to move west with their husbands.33 Albert von
Frank focuses on the faults of Fuller's education, which had made

her unfit for a 'normal' life in America just as the education of

prairie wives made them unfit for their new lives.34 While Stephen

Adams argues that W is “more coherent and

controlled than most readers have contended,“ he agrees with

Brownson in assessing the book as 'sad" because of its over-

whelming sense .of loss and 'disjunction."35

13

Bell Gale Chevigny sees both WW and Woman
W as a working through of a transition

between reliance on Emerson as a father figure and her own

independence and action, though she believes flamaanJne

Wm has “fewer jarring elements and is better
proportioned'36 than the earlier book. Chevigny chooses to focus on
the relationship between Fuller and Emerson and on Mam
WW and does not go into detail about the meaning and
structure of W. However, her collection of works
by and about Fuller. W
W, is helpful in assessing Fuller's development as a
writer and thinker.

Julie Ellison concentrates on Fuller's Conversations and Woman
inJllLNineteentLQentm rather than on W
However, she raises the interesting idea that Fuller did not leave
her romantic subjectivity behind when she left America, as
Reynolds, Douglas, and Chevigny have suggested. She argues that

“the whole range of Fuller's cultural and political commitments

throughout her life operates within the dynamics of romanticism."37

She also disputes the assumption that Emerson was as much of an

14

influence on Fuller's thinking as many assume. “Fuller would have

been Fuller without Emerson."38 Susan Belasco Smith, who
introduces the new edition of W, suggests that
the book may be seen as an interior journey, but her introduction
does not give a close reading of the text.

This dissertation will demonstrate that W is
no more travel journal but the record of an inner life in transition.
The so-called ”digressions” actually have relevance and purpose in
the precise spots where they are placed in the book and reveal
Fuller's state of mind at the time. Fuller's essential spiritual
condition shows her to be anything but a “heathen priestess." Her
concern for the oppressed is one aspect of her essential humanity
which would ultimately surface in her active participation in the
human rights movement here and abroad. Win
1143, is an important book, one that has been strangely and sadly
neglected as a working out of Fuller's philosophy. It is often
amusing, beautifully descriptive, enthusiastic, positive, mysterious,
and honest - anything but “tedious" - and it deserves to be
examined more thoroughly as a pivotal text in the life journey of

Margaret Fuller.

CHAPTER ONE

TYPICAL TRAVEL BOOKS

Like Washington Irving, who wrote in his W that

he had always been fond of ”visiting new scenes, and observing

strange characters and manners,"1 Margaret Fuller as a child had

delighted in stories of exotic and distant lands, though she did not
have the opportunity to travel herself. Her father, Timothy Fuller, a
United States congressman from Massachusetts, was often in
Washington for extended periods, and she yearned for his letters
which told her of the experiences he was having there. After
Adams was elected President in 1824, Congressman Fuller expected
an ambassadorship as a reward for his campaign work, and he told
his daughter to prepare for a trip to Europe. She was elated. But the
ambassadorship was never offered, and Mr. Fuller soon retired from

Congress, weary of being away from his growing family.

15

16

Because her father was absent six months of the year and her
mother busy caring for the younger children, Fuller spent a great
deal of time alone, living in a world of books, most of them by
foreign authors whose countries she longed to see. "There is no
frigate like a book,” Emily Dickinson would soon be writing. Fuller

found such a concept to be true. ”The romances of Goethe and

Schiller had caught her up in the vague notion of 'seeking."'2

In 1835 she was offered an invitation to accompany Harvard
mathematician John Farrar and his wife Eliza on a trip to Europe,
but her father died of cholera suddenly on Sept. 30, 1835, and her
European trip was out of the question. “All hopes of travelling I
have dismissed -- all youthful hopes of every kind I have pushed
from my thoughts,“ she wrote in 1836 (LME 1:241). Not having the
means to travel from that point on, Fuller found a substitute in
traveling through her reading. When she finally had the opportunity
to make an extended journey to the American West, she wished to
share impressions of her trip with a public that, like Fuller herself,
eagerly awaited new tales of adventure.

Margaret Fuller was not by any means the only traveler to add

to the swelling market of travel books in the 1840's. Travel

17

literature during the nineteenth century was widely disseminated
and immensely popular. Through travel books, readers were exposed
to brave new worlds and sometimes exotic, even bizarre ways of
life and in a real sense broadened by the reading, particularly if the
writer were especially intuitive and observant, as Fuller was.
Consequently, there was a great demand for travel literature, and
anyone who wrote a travel book could reasonably expect it to sell.
The travel narrative had always been popular as a genre,
although the form and style of travel narratives had changed from
one century to another. From ancient biblical accounts of the
journey of Abraham and the Sumerian epic recounting the wander-
ings of Gilgamesh to eighteenth-century epistles of the peregrine-
tions of Smollett and Johnson, the travel book had found a ready
audience. For those who could not afford to travel, travel literature
provided a vicarious pleasure as well as a learning experience.
Travel literature was produced for several reasons: to
capitalize on the public‘s interest in faraway places, of course, but
also to convey religious or political philosophies. No doubt one of
Margaret Fuller's purposes in writing W

was to provide additional income for her family, for she did not

18

wish to teach school any longer, and writing would be a more
lucrative occupation as well as a way to reach a larger public. To
communicate the “spirit" of the West to her reading public was
another, perhaps more important reason for writing the book, but
there were perhaps hidden psychological reasons for writing
Wises of which she may not have been consciously
aware, namely her “writing out” of certain problems that had been in
the back of her mind for years. There were effects of the book as
well that she could not have anticipated: she was able to work
through her frustrating relationship with Ralph Waldo Emerson, to
reaffirm her aims and goals in life, and to gain the attention of an
important editor, Horace Greeley, attention which would result in a
new career for her.

Aside from purpose, travel literature may be divided into
categories according to several different classification systems.
Travel literature is as much a topic as a form, and there are so many
types of travel literature, both fiction and nonfiction, and so many
primary works to be read that generalizations about the genre tend
to be rather superficial. Consequently, no comprehensive history of

travel literature has yet been written for precisely this reason,

 

19

although Percy G. Adams has categorized some of the many
subdivisions of travel literature. Adams notes that the guidebook
and itinerary were two early sub-categories of travel literature,
but there are also novels about travel as well as poems, articles,
journals, and diaries, collections of letters, and essays. Fuller's
W, for example, is a composite of
original poetry, excerpts from letters and books, and her own
observations and reflections. But travel literature as a topical
genre is quite an unwieldy structure, for if interior or spiritual
journeys as well as journeys into space and time are included, what
literature could not be called travel literature?

Everyone was writing travel books. As travel increased in
England and on the European continent, so did the travel literature.
Adams provides an impressive account of the number and types of
travel books the public had become accustomed to reading over the
centuries, though he remarks that travel literature is very difficult

to separate from other genres. "It is not even sui generis since it

includes so many types both by form and content.”3
If one classifies travel literature by content, one could list

guidebooks and narrative accounts of journeys by land or sea, either

20

in first or third person. Guidebooks included everything from maps
to itineraries to lists of antiquities to routes for the Grand Tour.
There were guidebooks for travelers to the holy land, such as the

W31 in the 1300's and Wm
mm in the 1400's; guidebooks for England such as

Hgflnshedflhmnjgje (1577), which had a chapter entitled "Of Our
Inns and Thorowfares"; guidebooks for the Continent such as James
Howell's WWII (1642) and de Varehne's

W (1639); guidebooks for the sea, such as those by

Hakluyt or the essays published by the Royal Society in 1665,

“Directions to Seaman.“
Narrative accounts of journeys by land and sea were written in

either first or third person and gave personal anecdotes in letters,

journals, or essays about their travel experiences.5 Adams cites
the examples of the Anahasjs, Xenophon's story of his leading

10,000 mercenary soldiers to the Black Sea in 401 8.0.; the
wonderful journals of the Chinese Hsuan-Tang, who wandered all
over Asia in early seventh century; and the travel books of sixteenth

century Italian Lodovico di Varthema which went through so many

21

editions in Europe. Accounts of sea voyages written by
eyewitnesses to history were also popular, such as Antonio
Pigafetta's account of Magellan's voyage or William Dampier‘s Am
W in the late seventeenth century. "And in the
eighteenth century so much in demand were manuscripts of any long
voyage that the British Admiralty followed the practice of confis-
cating all journals written on government-sponsored sailing expedi-
tions so that an official version could be produced by careful
editing.'6

If one classifies travel literature by form, the three most
predominant forms are letters, diaries and journals, and the simple

narrative that provides dates, locations, and frequently includes an

essay on the benefits of travel. Many famous explorers wrote

letters home describing the rigors of their voyage and their
discoveries in foreign lands. Columbus wrote letters to the Spanish
monarch who had sent him to the New World. Mme de Sevigne wrote
literary masterpieces to her daughter about her travels and sojourns
in France in the seventeenth century. “In fact, the written works of

almost any important person after 1550 - Ascham, Fox, Boyle,

22

Locke, Buffon, Voltaire, Franklin -- may contain any number of

travel letters.'7

The second most popular form of travel literature, according

to Adams, was the diary or journal.8 He cites Montaigne's journal
about his trip to Italy in 1580-81. Some diaries focus more on one
day and skip others, depending on the adventures the traveler had.
Such a diary was published in 1721 by Robert Challe about his
trip to the Orient in 1691.

The third most typical form of the travel book was the
"simple“ narrative, often in the third person, like the first part of

Montaigne's accounts, which Adams suggests might have been

written by the secretary who accompanied Montaigne to Italy.9
Great editors of travel collections rewrote journals, filling in the

9395-

As "atypical" travel literature, Adams cites travel accounts in

dialogue form such as a good part of Lahontan's book about Canada;
the autobiography or biography which contains summaries of
journeys, such as Rousseau's stories of his walking and carriage

journeys in the Confessions of 1766; and travel accounts in poetry

23

(including prose that contains poetry). such as John Smith's or

Chapelle and Bachaumont (1656).10
Adams also categorizes travel literature, particularly in the

seventeenth and eighteenth centuries by kinds of writers and their

motives for travel.“ Using this classification system, he includes
the writings of traders and other businessmen (such as the account
of the eighth business voyage of Captain John Saris, who sailed in
1611-13 to Japan, where he established a factory, also giving in his
journal important information about weather patterns in the Far

East); pirates (about whom Daniel Defoe wrote) and buccaneers

(such as W published in 1685 and written

by Alexandre Exquemelin and Captain Basil Ringrose); missionaries
(accounts by Jesuit priests, Capuchin monks, and Franciscan friars,
such as pere Louis Hennepin, whom Fuller mentions in Summn
Makes); pilgrims (especially those traveling through the Holy

Land, like George Sandys, who published his Relation in the

seventeenth century): explorers (like Champlain and LaSalle) and
colonists (such as John Smith and John Winthrop).

The list continues with warriors (such as the account of

24

Francis Moore's mm, which tells of the war against

the Spanish in Florida), ambassadors and diplomats (9.9., the book by
Adam Olearius, who went as secretary of a diplomatic embassy to
Moscow and Persia in the 1630's from Germany, and the equally

interesting journal of Everard Ysbrantz Ides, who led a diplomatic

mission from Russia to China in 1692); doctors (such as Engelbrecht
Kaempfer, who went as physician with a Swedish embassy to Persia,
Batavia, India, and Japan and published two books on his travels in
the late seventeenth century): engineers and geologists (such as
J.W.G. de Brahm, a German who constructed Fort Loudoun on the
Little Tennessee River in 1756 and who wrote of the Indians in the
South).

Other occupations represented by travelers are cartographers
(such as John Smith, who had made and published maps of Virginia);
spies or secret agents (such as Daniel Defoe, who worked as an
undercover man for Robert Harley while collecting information for a
travel book about Britain): tutors who accompanied students on the
Grand Tour (such as John Locke or Richard Lassels, who wrote Inn

Wham published in 1670). Representatives of many other

 

25

occupations also wrote travel books.

The list of travel writers could include visitors of spouses,
relatives, and friends; those who were escaping litigation, imprison-
ment, religious persecution, or unhealthy climates (or those
traveling for their health in general). The list should also include

those who traveled purely for adventure, “lovers of travel for the

sake of travel,“ those affected by “the Ulysses Factor,“12 Adams'
term for the wandering impulse. The list is by no means exhaustive,
but only an attempt to put kinds of travelers into order.

Adams includes in his account of travel literature the books and
articles that were fabricated but which managed to convince the
public of the authenticity of the travel accounts. These books range
from “little white lies“ about facts to completely imaginary jour-
neys. “The number of these fictitious, or partly fictitious, travel

books is so great that one can merely suggest a few significant

variations.“13 Condemned by Robert Burton and Sir Thomas Browne
but praised by Richard Steele in the lane; was the infamous 51:
W (c.1356), a book about the travels of a man which

“for three hundred years fooled most [people who read it] and was

 

26

even considered genuine when Marco Polo's story was not.“14

As the purpose of Adams' book is to show the influence of
travel literature on the development of the novel, one must also
include novels of the eighteenth century that were travel accounts:
Lawrence Sterne's W, Jonathan Swift's m
hauls, Defoe's MW, Voltaire's Candide, Smollett's
flumnnLeLQJjnkgL to name a few. In the early nineteenth century

authors such as Byron WW, Shelley (“Ozyman

dias“), Keats (“On Chapman's Homer“), and Wordsworth (1113
Emma) were influenced by the desire to travel. John Livingston
Lowes has illustrated in Wu that Coleridge's
imagination was fired by the reading of countless travel journals.

It is important to note that the style of a travel book reflected
the accepted literary conventions of a particular period. Charles L.
Batten, Jr., notes the often-overlooked truism that literary
conventions very often govern not only the way a writer describes
but often what he will describe as well. By the eighteenth century,

the century whose literary style most influenced Fuller and her

contemporaries,” it was considered necessary for a travel writer

27

to strike a balance between the useful instruction given in a travel
book and the subjective or entertaining elements. The purpose of
(travel) literature was understood to be a fulfillment of Horace's
dictum: “Omne fulit punctum qui miscuit utile dulci/ Lectorem
delectando pariterque monendo“ Mina, 343-44). Neoclassical
criticism thus demanded instruction as well as pleasure, though the
vague term “utile dulce“ (“useful sweetness“) could be interpreted in

several ways. “Pleasure“ could mean happiness resulting from learn-

ing, and “instruction“ could mean learning in many different areas.16
Another convention limiting eighteenth-century travel
literature was veracity. Reviewers castigated writers like George
Psalmanazar. who in W
m (1795) managed to convince London society that he was
from the island of Formosa, when he. had really been born in France.
Writers could fool the public with fantastic stories, so readers
began to doubt incredible tales, though some were indeed true.
Batten cites the example of James Bruce, who wrote of his travels
in Abyssinia, where he beheld men eating raw meat. Few people
believed his accounts, which were later verified. Some writers

never left home, yet wrote amazing adventure stories that were

 

28

complete fabrications. “Duped by such fireside travelers, readers

often suspected the accounts of genuine travelers.“17 Whereas in
earlier centuries tall tales, exaggerations, and fantastic stories,
such as those alluded to in W (”that there are unicorns;
that in Arabia/T here is one tree, the phoenix'throne“ -- llI,iii,22-
23) had crept into travel books with little public outcry, in the
eighteenth century such fabrications were frowned upon in non-
fiction. Devotion to fact was imperative. If descriptions of scenes
were made pleasurable, it was only to draw attention to the useful
information that would “improve the understanding.“ The reading of
travel literature was to encourage readers to study and enjoy
learning. “For these reasons, reviewers and editors - together with

clergyman -- frequently recommended travel accounts, especially

for the youthful or inexperienced or female reader.“18

According to Batten, one essential generic convention of the
travel book which effected this “pleasurable instruction“ was a
narrative organization of details. For this reason, in the eighteenth
century travel guidebooks were not considered a true sub-class of
travel literature, for the travel guide's divisions and classifications

of subject matter were too disjointed and provided no pleasant

29

(utile dulcl) chronological narrative. Such narrative organization
could take the form of journals or letters, but because one clearly

defined convention of eighteenth-century travel writing was that “a

travel writer must not talk about himself,“19 travel books that were
too autobiographical were censured; thus, if the travel narrative had
the form of a diary or personal letters, then it had to avoid too many
references to self.

According to the MM, any travel account that was
too much like a real journal (i.e., personal) would be “long and

fatiguing“ to the reader and would thus work against pleasureable

instruction.20 Some writers thus dropped the use of “I“ in favor of
the more inclusive “we“ or generic “you.“ Samuel Derrick and Samuel
Ireland used the pronoun “you,“ while Ann Radcliffe so frequently
used the pronoun “we“ in her Journey (1795) that she felt the

necessity of including an explanatory note to identify the “we“

(herself and her husband).21 Use of the third-person singular was
another way of avoiding subjectivity. Thomas Pennant‘s IouLnt

Scotland (1771) does not use the first person pronoun, for example,

even though he is describing the trip that he took himself.22 Such

30

avoidance of the first-person pronoun could only be seen today as
awkwmd.

Conversational style was avoided as too ”vulgar“ and

“loose.“23 Care had to be taken to pay only enough attention to
detail to give an accurate picture. Too much insignificant detail
was considered trivial and uninteresting, according to critical
mavens. A proper balance would have to be maintained between too
little autobiographical information (which would make the writer
seem forgetful or vague) and too much (which would make the
writer seem egotistical), between too little factual detail about the
countries visited and too much fabulous material:
Thus, the eighteenth-century travel writer tried to
achieve a 'golden mean': he had to include a sufficiently
detailed record of his experiences to prove that he had
actually visited the countries he described, but he could
not tell too much about himself and his adventures. If
his narrative appeared too circumstantial, he would
usually be attacked as an egotist: if it seemed to

contrived, he would frequently be criticised as a writer
of fiction, primarily interested in entertaining readers

at the expense of their instruction.“
Toward the end of the century, however, conventions began
to change. Emphasis began to shift from instruction to pleasure,

though “veracity“ was still an important characteristic to be

 

 

31

expected in a travel book.25 Now much more autobiographical
information became acceptable in the travel book, probably because
the incredible volume of travel literature being produced and read
demanded a unique, personal approach to gain an audience.
According to Ahmed M. Metwalli, “almost every individual who left
home - even for a hike in the mountains -- committed his

impressions and exper-iences to paper and inflicted them on the

reading public.“26 Jared Sparks, nineteenth-century writer for The
W remarked wryly that anyone who “happens
once in his life to wander from the precincts of his own native

village, thinks it his duty to enligyhten the public with a narrative

of his adventures.“27 With so much competition, writers were
forced to be either extremely detailed or highly subjective if they
wished to sell their books. Emerson remarked wryly that one of the

interesting oddities about his time was that it was “said to be the

age of the first person singular.“28 This new subjectivity was to
emerge in the travel writing of the period.

No nation in the world seemed to have as many travelers as

America.” Travel abroad was a fashionable undertaking, surely

32

meant to convey the impression that the traveler was well-to-do

and interested in culture.30 Travel to Europe was a necessary part
of the educational and cultural experience of American travelers.
“Eager young men for the most part, they were serious, well-
educated, and equipped with the then all-important letters of

introduction from prominent American achievers to their British

counterparts.“31

Travel to England and the Continent was also undertaken
because of a search for a “past“ which was lacking in America and
which could be partially satisfied by visiting the old European
cultural shrines. Washington Irving explained his reasons for

foreign travel in the first chapter of W:

Europe held forth the charms of storied and poetical
association. There were to be seen the masterpieces
of art, the refinements of highly-cultivated society,
the quaint peculiarities of ancient and local custom.
My native country was full of youthful promise; Europe
was rich in the accumulated treasures of age. Her very
ruins told the history of the times gone by, and

every mouldering stone was a chronicle.32
Emerson had remarked in his journal, “The young men complain that

here in America is no past, no traditions: only shopkeeping, no ghost,

no god in the landscape, no stimulus.“33 Henry James, whose

33

cosmopolitan father was friend of the Fullers, was in agreement
with the “young men“ of Emerson's journal. James was later to
remark in his essay on Hawthorne that there mono, no such cultural
artifacts in America at that time:

In the United States, in those days, there were

no great things to look out at (save forests and

rivers); life was not in the least spectacular;

society was not brilliant; the country was given

up to a great material prosperity, a homely bour-

geois activity, a diffusion of primary education

and common luxuries. There was, therefore,

among the cultivated classes, much relish for the

utterances of a writer who would help one to take

a picturesque view of one's internal possibilities,
and to find in the landscape of the Soul all sorts of

fine sunrise and moonlight effects.34

In addition to a desire for the past, many well-known
American writers went abroad with the intention of meeting
influential living European authors such as Wordsworth or visiting
the graves and homes of other authors, acquiring souvenirs or
“relics“ of their “pilgrimages.“ Allison Lockwood recounts the story
of Sophia Hawthome's visit to Newstead Abbey, Lord Byron's
ancestral home. There Mrs. Hawthorne and her son Julian tore up
violets to take home and requested leaves from the oak that Byron

had planted - all this while the current owner, Colonel Wildman,

34

watched from an upstairs window. Aware that she and her son were
being watched, Mrs. Hawthorne believed it was because of her

husband‘s fame as an American writer and not because she was

tearing up private property.35
Emerson himself had traveled to Europe in 1832-33 “for the

purpose of regathering the scattered fragments of his personal-

ity,“36 although he did not realize this until he was ready to return-

While there, he had the opportunity to meet many illustrious people,

such as Carlyle, Wordsworth, and Coleridge.37 Yet he came home

firm in the conclusion that it was not necessary to travel in order
to learn about human nature.38 “His trip to the 'schoolroom' of

Europe had in fact mainly served to center him in his own beliefs."39
As he waited in Liverpool for the voyage home, he mused that he was

glad he had not been born in England. “I am thankful that I am an

American as I am thankful that I am a man.“40

' Those who could not afford such a ”passionate pigrimage“ to
Europe as Emerson and others of means could were still able to
satisfy their need for a sense of the past by reading the travel

literature of those who had been fortunate enough to go abroad.

 

35

Sales of books which told of overseas adventures were healthy.

Thoreau, who had neither the means nor the inclination to travel

abroad, is known to have read at least 146 travel books.“ He
himself wrote several domestic travel books: W, Main
Woods. HEW and WW
MerrimaoLBjxers - and even Walden can be read as an interior
travelogue.

Books about travel within America could bring about the sense
of national pride and self-reliance Emerson encouraged. In the early
1800's pride in America was growing, especially after the War of
I 1812. One did not need to go to Europe to experience beauty and
grandeur. Irving noted that if he had been merely a lover of fine
scenery alone, he would never have gone to Europe:

For on no country had the charms of nature been more
prodigally lavished. Her mighty lakes, like oceans of
liquid silver; her mountains, with their bright, aerial
tints; her valleys, teeming with wild fertility; her
tremendous cataracts, thundering in their solitudes;
her boundless plains, waving with spontaneous verdure;
her broad, deep rivers, rolling in solemn silence to the
ocean; her trackless forests, where vegetation puts
forth all its magnificence; her skies, kindling with the
magic of summer clouds and glorious sunshine; - no,
never need an American look beyond his own country for

sublime and beautiful of natural scenery.42

36

Although travel within the United States, particularly to the
unsettled West, was in the early 1800's less fashionable among the
socially elite, it was nevertheless appealing to those who had the
wanderlust or to those who wished to have a unique experience.
Even those who lacked the temerity, energy, or financial resources
were interested in seeing the American West through the eyes of
those who wrote about their travels. Those who made the journey
west began to discover, as Fuller did, that the United States had
much beauty of its own to offer, even though the famous landmarks
and cathedrals were absent.

The passion for travel in America did not take hold until the
1820's and 30's, according to John F. Sears. Before that time the
colonists had been busy struggling for their independence, and the
frontier towns were just being established. But in the early
nineteenth century conditions were changing so that a new tourism
was possible. “Tourism requires a population with the money and
the leisure to travel, an adequate means of transportation, and
conditions of reasonable safety and comfort at the places people go
to visit. It also demands a body of images and descriptions of those

places -- a mythology of unusual things to see -- to excite people's

37

imaginations and induce them to travel.“43

The revolution in modern transportation which was taking
place in America in the early nineteenth century made travel and
“tourism“ possible. In 1825 construction on the Erie Canal in New
York had been completed, providing easier access to the West.
Fulton's steamboats provided faster transportation on rivers and

lakes. Railroads were fanning in all directions, opening the West to

the growing middle class of the East.“ Macadamized turnpikes led

to more comfortable stage-coach travel. Cost of travel was rela-

tively low at this time as well.45

All over America, homes were being turned into inns and
taverns to accommodate the many travelers along the way and to
capitalize on the growing tourism, although such places could be
rather crowded and primitive, as Fuller recounts in Wine
Lakes:

That night we rested, or rather tarried at a grove
some miles beyond, and there partook of the miser-
ies so often jocosely portrayed, of bedchambers for
twelve, a milk dish for a universal handbasin, and
expectations that you would use and lend your
“handkercher“ for a towel. But this was the only
night, thanks to the hospitality of privatefamilies,
that we passed thus, and it was well that we had

38

this bit of experience, else might we have pronounced
all Trollopian records of the kind to be inventions of

pure malice.46
. . . We ladies were to sleep in the bar-room,
from which its drinking visiters[sic] could be ejected
only at a late hour. The outer door had no fastening to
prevent their return. . . . We had also rather hard
couches; (mine was the supper table.) but we yankees,
born to rave, were altogether too much fatigued to
stand upon trifles, and slept as sweetly as we would
in the “bigly bower“ of any baroness. (S.L25-26)
Conditions were thus right for extensive travel by those who
had moderate incomes. In the early nineteenth century, middle class
tourists looked to the American landscape to provide diversion and a
fulfillment of the emotional experience of the sublime that Edmund
Burke had written of in his important treatise LEhfleseonieal
In. I. I3 Op. 0 O 0:. o l3 on: 3.0 3:- .I
(1757). Natural wonders like Niagara Falls would supposedly evoke
a sense of awe, terror, and mystery in the beholder which would

lead to a recognition of God's presence and power. Consequently,

throngs of tourists began to swarm to Niagara Falls, which

Elizabeth McKinsey calls “the Icon of the American Sublime.“47
Many of the best artists and writers in America joined the
touring public to see the splendor of Niagara. The great artist

Thomas Cole had written poems about Niagara as well as providing a

39

record in paintings of the beauty of the falls. Emerson had not yet
visited Niagara in1843, though he was to go there many times: in
1850, 1851, 1854, 1863, 1871, and 1878. Nevertheless, he had read
so much about the effects of Niagara that he wrote to Fuller before
her journey that he was envious of her “escape“ into nature:
I rejoice in the approach of your escape into green
champaign, the tunnels of mountains, the passage of
streams as by cannonshot, and all the glad varieties of
Western railroads with the solid joy of Niagara at the
farther end. May the sun & moon & stars be on your side

when you leave the East winds behind, and Niagara famed
through the world for one thing,-- that it never

disappoints. (LBWE III:174)48

Cole's good friend James Fenimore Cooper had also written of
Niagara Falls in W (1840) and would write again of the
sublimity of the locale in Ine_Qak_Qoeninge (1848). Hawthorne had
published “My Visit to Niagara“ (1835), in which he (as Fuller was to
do) shares his initial disappointment at the Falls and then his
growing recognition of its spiritual power, a change in perception
which Sears calls a “conversion experience.“49

The first-person point-of-view used in many of these early
nineteenth-century travel books gave a note of authenticity to

the writing and added a unique personal charm. The influence of

40

Byron's anLdLHaLold, most of Wordsworth's poetry, and Coleridge's
Wanner brought about a more “poetic“
approach to travel writing. As the century progressed, the
imaginative approach to travel-writing continued, impelled by the
romantic movement, which “encouraged an expressivist approach to

writing and an idealized view of exotic locations and the life of

adventure.“50

Many of Fuller's contemporaries had written or were to write
interesting travel books, both fiction and nonfiction, about real or
imaginary journeys at home and abroad. Poe's W
was the macabre tale of cannibalism and terror on the high seas.
Melville's Iyoee and Qmee satisfied the public craving for tales of
the south seas. Fuller's childhood friend Richard Henry Dana was to
write the critically acclaimed Wat, which
gave an accurate portrayal of the life of the American sailor.
Fuller's fellow traveler on the western trip, James Freeman Clarke,
[was later to write mm. It was almost expected
that Fuller, too, would make her contribution to the library of travel
books being amassed in America.

Other transcendentalists had emphasized in their travel

41

writing the importance of the individual impression and discovery
of self. The experience of the mind was more important than the

external journey. “Writing is worthless except as a record of a

life,“ wrote Fuller.51 The inward journey, into what Henry James
had termed “the landscape of the Soul,“ was the only one that really
mattered. Consequently, Thoreau could write honestly, “Much have I

traveled - in Concord“) There was uncharted territory (the

Unbetretene of Goethe's Faust)52 which never ended. True travel

was “spiritual travel, an exploration of one's own higher

latitudes.“53 This is the basic idea of “Self-Reliance“ and the
conclusion to Walden.

In addition, transcendental travelers felt the importance of
relating to their readers not only what had happened to them

personally on a journey, but how the travel experience “happened to

the universe.“54 Fuller advised writers to “tell the world at large

what you please, if you make it of universal importance by trans-

porting it into the field of general human interest.“55 Buell finds
this interest in both self and self-transcendence paradoxical. The

travel writing of the transcendentalists took on both “an abstract

42

and subjective dimension“56 that made it simultaneously personal
and global. In transcendentalist travel writing, then, “ . . . one

becomes conscious of an interplay between the sequence of actual
lobservations and the interests of a subjectively imposed mood or

design. Neither dominates to the exclusion of the other: rather, the

works oscillate between the two structural principles.“57
Caleb Stetson praised W393 for its attempt to
express the inner journey. Fuller was, he felt, “much more occupied

with what is passing in her own soul, than with the objective

realities which present themselves to the senses.“58 If Stetson had

any complaint at all about Fuller's book, it was that “she does not

let her thought or emotion write itself out.“59 However, Fuller's
interest in self-revelation did not extend to outright confession.
Like the eighteenth-century writers, Fuller felt strongly that a
writer's personal life was not appropriate material for a travel
book. A writer's personal reactions to a scene were relevant, but
his personal relationships and private feelings were not to be

mentioned. “. . . your private griefs. merely as yours, belong to

yourself, your nearest friends, to Heaven and to nature.“60

43

Whereas she is not hesitant in W to give her
impressions of the landscape she visited, she does not feel it
appropriate to reveal directly the personal impact of the trip or to
be anything but oblique about what was transpiring in her own soul
that summer. (Personal references and familiarities she occasion-
ally includes in letters to close friends.) Yet her western journey
as recorded in Summer_on__me_Lakes was a milestone in her personal
development as one can see from major life-changes made
immediately following the trip. Consequently, one needs to read
between the lines of W as well as reading her
letters to determine what was transpiring in Fuller's mind during
this important time.

Although her immediate purpose in writing W
Lakes, may have been to increase her income or to make a name for
herself, and although she deliberately hid the names of friends she
referred to in the book or disguised herself as one or more
characters she wrote about in earnest, she nonetheless revealed
more of herself and her own feelings than she perhaps realized. A

careful reader can perceive Fuller's inner journey and development

in W. What emerges is the record of a self in

44

transition.

Fuller's travel book is not like other nineteenth-century travel
books, for no one had the same impressions and insights as Margaret
Fuller. A key to her personality lies buried in the pages of Summer

on_tne_Lakee. Although it may be true that Fuller was a “typical

restless American,“61 her travel account is anything but typical.
Peering beneath the surface for the hidden meaning in her book,
discovering a connection or a purpose for Fuller's so-called
“episodic“ or “random digressions“ is like digging for buried

treasure.

CHAPTER TWO

NOT A TYPICAL TRAVEL BOOK

By all early critical accounts, SummeLonJhLLakea was an

unusual travel journal. Fuller so intended. “I trust by reverent faith
to woo the mighty meaning of the scene“ ($1.28), she wrote. The
book was to be no mere itinerary but a subjective account of her
impressions in order to convey what she saw as the truth to her
readers. Therefore, she does not give a moment-by-moment account
of the trip with descriptions of every tourist attraction along the
way. In fact, she admits that she kept no daily records of the
journey. “I had no guidebook, kept no diary, do not know how many
miles we traveled each day, nor how many in all. What I got from
the journey was the poetic impression of the country at large; it is
all I have aimed to communicate“ ($1.67).

Fuller's friend and fellow traveler James Freeman Clarke felt
that her communication of this impression was effective. “The West

is our American Romance, our unwritten Poetry, our Eldorado, our

45

46

Utopia, our Atlantis,“ he wrote in a review of W335.

10.48531 Clarke, certainly not an unbiased critic since he had
known and admired Fuller since youth, recommended the book
because it was not simply a “guide book“ but “a portfolio of

sketches“ created by a mind that possessed “faculties of keen

perception, profound reflection and constructive imagination.“2 It
was Fuller's intent to impart to her readers this Romance of
America, this Poetry of western experience.

She wrote few notes about her journey and very few letters, in
spite of the fact that her correspondence was usually extremely
important to her. Apparently the journey gave little time for
writing. She wrote in January 1844 to her “Aunt“ Mary Rotch: “I did
not feel like writing letters, while travelling; it took all my
strength and mind to keep moving, and receive so many new
impressions“ (LME Ill:169). In a letter to Aunt Mary's niece Maria
Rotch, written Sept. 20, 1843, Fuller notes, “I have made scarce any
record of it [the journey] with my instrument, the pen, for the days
were so full of new impressions that there was not time left to tell
of them but all that was seen is fresh in memory“ (LME Ill:147).

Fresh in memory, these details of her journey were the subject of

47

her study in the Harvard College library the entire fall and winter of

that year.3 There she found the tranquillity she needed to let the
summer's events and “mighty meaning“ coalesce. She felt she must
do extensive reading before writing her own book. As she wrote to
Emerson that fall, "I am reading the books in the College library
about the West, the old travellers I am reading. I like now to go over
the ground with them and shall not continue my own little experi-
ences till I have done with theirs“ (LME lll:160).

In a Wordsworthian act of recall, Fuller, recollecting in the
tranquillity of the Harvard library that winter, wrote W
Lakee._ln_1_&43 from her own memory, from the notes she had made
of the journey, and from her summer reading and the subsequent
research she did after the trip. During this time she slept little and

had many of her infamous headaches. “I begin to be so tired of my

book!“ she complained in her autumn diary! And to Aunt Mary she
wrote, “. . . much writing does not agree with me“ (LME Ill:169).
She worried that her book would not please Emerson. “Dont
expect any thing from the book about the West. I cant bear to be
thus disappointing you all the time“ (LME lll:159-60). She suffered

from headaches and insomnia during this time just as she had

48

suffered from headaches as a child when she worried that her

rigidly exacting father might not thoroughly approve of a Latin

translation she had attempted.5 It is clear that In some respects
Fuller had come to see Emerson as a father figure with many of the
characteristics of her real father: “My soul,“ she wrote to Emerson,
“in its childish agony of prayer, stretched out its arms to you as a
father“ (LME, ll:160). One might make the connection that her
headaches were associated with the possibility that Emerson might
not approve of her book, though they could as easily have been
attributed to bad eyesight. Nonetheless, she was at this time
totally focused on her book, and her perfectionism was a constant
stress.

But what she wrote was not a typical travel journal. Although
this was Fuller's first and only trip to the West, she knew that her
reading public had already been exposed to many books about the
West. Several prominent American writers had already done their
part to promote an interest in the American West. James Fenimore
Cooper's W (1827) and Washington Irving's A_I.o_ur_on_tne
flames (1835) had preceded Fuller's W95. and
Caroline Kirkland's A_Nenl_tleme_-;Whol|L_EolloW2 (1839) had given a

49

woman's point of view about life on the frontier. Thoreau's essay
“Walking,“ which encourage “wildness“ and exploration within and
without, had not yet been written.

Foreign travelers had also written about the American West,
sometimes arousing strong patriotic response against negative
portrayals of Americans as vulgar and uneducated boors. Charles
Dickens, in his 1842 Amedean_b|etea, painted a picture of Americans
as naive, uncouth, and barbarous. Fuller's British acquaintance Mrs.
Martineau had also written her somewhat condescending Sneielen
Amen'ea (1837) after her extensive trip to the United States. Mrs.
Trollope had scandalized Americans with her tales of her travels in
America. Such books evoked the American patriotism which grew
after the War of 1812 and put a further wedge between the British
and the Americans, encouraging the development of an American
literature not imitative of the English. Emerson in his controversial
address of 1837 entitled “The American Scholar“ (“our Intellectual
Declaration of Independence,“ as Oliver Wendell Holmes had called
it), had encouraged the young men of the United States to develop a
“self-trust“ and no longer to “forgo the living for the dead.“ He urged

the young men of America to develop a literature of their own.

50

Emerson, of course, was not speaking merely of travel literature but
of developing an essentially American literature, not dependent on
European traditions. But many writers saw the travel book as one
way to express the growing national pride they felt in the air.

Fuller would later write an essay on American literature which

voiced the same sentiments.6 She expresses this pride in Summer
en_tne_Lakes when she gazes on the prairie: “it was [the morning] of
the fourth of July, and certainly I think I had never felt so happy
that I was born in America“ (51,33).

An American travel book in the nineteenth century was not
only nationalistic. It was also more subjective than travel books of
the previous generation and included many personal reactions to the
landscape or monuments observed by the traveler. It was just this
type of travel book that Arthur Fuller praised when he came to
publish the account of his sister's travels after her death. “There are
at least three classes of persons who travel in our own land and
abroad,“ he wrote in his Preface to Al_l:l_ome_and_AnLo_ad. “The first

and largest in number consist of those who, 'having eyes, see not,

and ears, hear not,‘ anything which is profitable to be remembered.“7

51

Such travelers, he added, speak of no more than what they ate and
drank and where they slept.

The second class travel “more intelligently,“ visiting noted
landmarks and abodes of art, remembering many details, and from
these people much useful information can be learned.

But there is a third class of those who journey,

who see indeed the outward, and observe it well. . . But
they do much more than this. There is . . . a genius or
guardian spirit of each scene, each stream and lake and
country, and this spirit is ever speaking, but in a tone
which only the attent ear of the noble and gifted can
hear, and in a language which such minds and hearts only
can understand. With vision which needs no miracle to
make it prophetic, they . . . note the deep meaning of
passing events which only make others wonder. Beneath
the mask of mere externals, their eyes discern the
character of those whom they meet. . . . When such
narrate their journeyings, we have what is valuable not
for a few years only, but, because of its philosophic and

suggestive spirit, what must always be useful.8
It is ironic that Arthur Fuller could make such an astute
delineation of travelers. Yet not entirely perceive in his own
sister's work the third sort of traveler. He observed that his sister
was of the third kind of traveler, yet he nonetheless took the liberty
of omitting several important passages from W
for the sake of “reasonable size.“ He noted that he felt the unity of

her book even gained after his omissions. He added that he omitted

‘ I

52

portions of W “with much reluctance,“ but felt

that it would be better to omit passages from this work, since it
had already been published in its entirety, than to omit any passages
from her letters of her travels in Europe which had not been
published. One can see the logic in this decision, yet it is ironic
that the omissions he made for the sake of “unity“ in W
Lake: are often passages which reveal the insight or deeper meaning
that he had praised in the third sort of traveler.

Fuller's declaration that she sought to give “the poetic impres-
sion“ of her journey, “to woo the mighty meaning of the scene“
shows that she had decided to pursue the subjective course. Caleb
Stetson's review in the WW indicated that her
objective had been accomplished. Stetson found the book pleasing

because she looked upon “all things with the eye of a poet and artist"

and recorded “what is passing in her own soul.“9 He praised her
work because “she writes not from without, but from within.“ These
expressions of her mind and heart were interesting to readers, he
added, because they resulted in a “sincere and earnest“ book. Fuller,
especially, as a woman of “extraordinary endowments,“ was able to

convey her “reflective tendency“ to her readers:

 

53

We notice this subjective tendency of the writer
as a peculiar excellence. It gives to her work its
most remarkable characteristic. We can never
anticipate what she will say, from knowing her
point of view and the objects which surround her.
She throws her own being into the outward world
and gives it a new character. Niagara, Superior,
the log cabin, the savage chief, are not to her what
they are to another person. Forest, lake, prairie,
the beauty and fragrance of flowers, the music of
birds, have all a significance and a language to
which the mood of her own mind gives a particular

interpretation.10
In this respect, Fuller's travel book was following the new
imaginative standards of literature of the times. But she went one
step beyond the typical nineteenth-century travel book, and this
extra step confused and mystified most reviewers, including
Stetson. For Fuller was not only subjective and reflective but often
inscrutable -- at least to Stetson:

This reflective tendency often draws into her journal
things quite unlocked for and most remote from her
field of observation -- things connected by no apparent
link of association with the objects which seem to fill
her eye and mind. These underground associations,
unintelligible to those who are not in the secret of her
thoughts sometimes give an air of pedantry to her
remarks. We are persuaded that she has a mind too noble
to wish to display her rich stores of knowledge for the
sake of display, and therefore we find it difficult to
account for the introduction of so many allusions to
classic antiquity, to Europe and its arts, manners and

literature."

54

W has confused other readers besides this

reviewer because of its occasionally inscrutable references and
allusions. In fact, Buell finds it incredible that Fuller could receive

this favorable review in the QnLietIaLExamjneL simply by “dashing

off a concoction of gossip, preachment, platonic dialogue, and Indian

lore.“12 But it is precisely these “underground associations“ that
we must examine in order to understand what Fuller was about in
her travel book.

What was Fuller's intent in including in Summeranheiakee so
many references to classical antiquity and to European culture as
well as so many seeming nonsequiturs and digressions, some
intensely personal? Part of her motivation for the inclusion of
classical allusions may have lain in her circumstances at the time
of the journey. Because of her father Timothy's death in September
1835, her family had been forced to appeal for financial assistance
to strict Uncle Abraham, who had taken control of the family's purse

strings after Timothy died intestate. Although Mr. Fuller had left

about $20,000 behind, it was “tied up,“13 and as the oldest of nine
children, Margaret felt obligated to work to support her family,

giving up any hope she had of going abroad, which had for her been a

55

lifelong dream. She wrote in her journal of May 23, 1836: “Circum-
stances have decided that I must not go to Europe and shut upon me
the door, as I think, forever, to the scenes I could have loved. Let me

now try to forget myself and act for others' sakes. What I can do

with my pen, I know not. At present I feel no confidence or hope.“14

She had lost at least one opportunity to go to Europe, where she
believed she would find a cultural “home.“ As an unmarried woman
of thirty-three with no prospect of matrimony, burdened with

financial responsibilities, she leapt at the chance to go west with

her friends the Clarkes, who also gave her $50 toward the trip.15
She believed, in fact, that this was to be the last journey of any sort
she would take for a good while. She wrote to Albert H. Tracy in
September 1843: “For eight years I have not been able to stray far,
being too much wanted in one place, and too probably this may be the
case for the coming eight years“ (LME lll:149). She had to be content
with this western excursion, for her financial situation promised to
remain as precarious as ever. It is likely that she saw in this
venture an opportunity to discover in the American landscape what
she had heard and read existed in the European. Having never been to

Europe, and likely never to go there, she idealized its culture and

56

sought to find in her own country the same sort of cultural
artifacts.

Fuller had been offered a teaching position in Cincinnati in
1836, and she had considered taking the post. Yet there was always
the nagging question of whether the West was her “spiritual home.“
“I have always had some desire to be meddling with the West, and
have only been checked in my tendencies thitherward by the mode[s]t
fancy that the East was not at a sufficiently advanced step of
culture for my plans, how then should her younger sister bell!“ (LME,
l:354-55).

As a romantic, Fuller strongly believed in the power of
intuition and personal reflection. As she made her way west she not
only noted the outward landscape, which had been painted in so many
travel journals before hers as to be almost commonplace; she also
gave her personal response to the sights she took in, as well as
sharing with her reading public what was transpiring in the “land-
scape of the Soul.“ During this trip she was able to balance exterior
and interior landscapes, and the content of her book demonstrates
what was occurring in her mind.

Repeatedly Fuller places the American landscape against a

57

pattern of the European, comparing and contrasting the attributes of
her own country with the older civilization, as if to give it a kind of
validity that it lacked on its own, as if in order to praise her own
country at all she must measure its worth and beauty by the ideal
standard she had equated mentally with European culture. Her
tenacious clinging to the classical artifacts of Europe was an
expression of what Albert von Frank calls “provincialism,“ a love of

the old ways and forms one's European forebears had experienced and

enjoyed.16 To Henry James, such clinging to past forms and
traditions that had never been an integral part of one's experience
except by imitation was pathetic and naive. Such imitation was
bound to involve deterioration and delusion.

Fuller's source of culture had been largely the books she had
read, books which gave her a knowledge of classical antiquity and
art and left her unsatisfied with the actual American environment in
which she lived. She felt she had been born “not in the right soil“
(LME lll:315). She wrote to William H. Charming during her trip, “My
friend, I am deeply homesick, yet where is that home?“ (LME lll:142).
Von Frank suggests that Fuller's sense of dislocation stemmed from

her recognition that “her finest pleasures in life were all acts of art

58

and imagination“17 and that her environment did not support these
acts. Yet during the summer of 1843 she began to synthesize the
classical standards of the past and the intrinsic standards of the
objects themselves. W is a record of that
important synthesis.

Although she began to realize on this trip and during her library
time afterward that the United States, especially frontier nature,
had an intrinsic worth of its own and need not suffer by comparison
with the cultural beauties she had apotheosized unseen, she
nevertheless used classical allusions in her book. Although she
could probably say with Emerson, “. . . why go to Europe?“, some-
thing Emerson had written in his journal of that May, she still was
not convinced that she should “swallow this pill of America which
Fate brings you & sing a land unsung. Here stars, here birds, here

trees, here hills abound and the vast tendencies concur of a new

Order.“18 If one so swallowed that pill, perhaps the effect was
medicinal and soothing, but it only removed the symptoms. In other

words, her real desire was for Europe, yet she knew she could not go

there.19 Thus, she would accept and try to make the best of her trip

59

in America. She would see in America what she had hoped to see
abroad.

Consequently, classical allusions appear throughout SummeLon
meLakee. References to Shakespeare, Plotinus, Sophocles,
Socrates, characters from Greek mythology -- all demonstrate her
learning and her attempt to apply her classical knowledge to the
western experience. “Every Caesar should be able to write his own
commentary“ (SL147). “As with the Greeks, beautiful legends grow
up which express the aspects of various localities“ (SL127). The
Great Turtle of the Indians [Mackinac Island] is the “Apollo of the
Indian Delphos“ (51.107). “The whole scene suggested to me a Greek
splendor, a Greek sweetness, and I can believe that an Indian brave,
accustomed to ramble in such paths, and be bathed by such
sunbeams, might be mistaken for Apollo“ (SL33).

Yet Fuller sees that such references may be out of place in this
new wilderness. The Illinois farm wives (like herself), she writes,
“have a great deal to war with in the habits of thought acquired by
their mothers from their own early life. Everywhere the fatal spirit
of imitation, of reference to European standards, penetrates, and

threatens to blight whatever of original growth might adorn the

60

soil“ ($1.39). She was later to write in her critical essay “American
Literature“:
What suits Great Britain, with her insular position
and consequent need to concentrate and intensify her
life, her limited monarchy, and spirit of trade, does
not suit a mixed race, continually enriched with new
blood from other stocks the most unlike that of our
first descent, with ample field and verge enough to
range in and leave every impulse free, and abundant
opportunity to develops [sic] a genius, wide and full

as our rivers, flowery, luxuriant and impassioned as
our vast prairies, rooted in strength as the rocks on

which the Puritan fathers landed.20

Although she realizes that a new expression must be given to this
new land, she finds herself limited in this new wilderness by her
own classical education. While she uses classical imagery with
which she is familiar to describe the new and unfamiliar, she
realizes that it is somehow inadequate to deal with the unusual
situation of prairie life.

This contradiction between the classical and romantic
critical approach to both literature and experience had troubled her

for several years, as evidenced by her first Dial essay of 1840,

which considered critical standards for judging art.21 In this essay
she gives no indication which approach she leans toward. But on the

Illinois prairie in 1843 she sees firsthand the pitfalls of a classical

61

education which has rendered many of the settlers, particularly the
women, unfit to deal with the new life they have:
They can dance, but not draw; talk French, but know
nothing of the language of flowers; neither in child-
hood were allowed to cultivate them, lest they should
tan their complexions. Accustomed to the pavement of
Broadway, they dare not tread the wildwood paths for
fear of rattlesnakesl (.51.. 39)
She sees that educational methods “copied from the education of
some English Lady Augusta, are as ill suited to the daughter of an
Illinois farmer, as satin shoes to climb the Indian mounds“(S_L 39).
The pioneers carry with them pianos from the east “because it is the
fashionable instrument in the eastern cities,“ but even there it is
fashionable “merely from the habit of imitating Europe“ (5.]. 40).
Fuller sees that guitar and voice would be much more appropriate to
prairie life, but the pioneers are bound to “European standards“
instead of accepting original standards growing out of the new soil.
Fuller hoped that a synthesis of the two polar approaches
could be reached, according to an essay she developed after her
journey west. “In the golden age to which we are ever looking

forward, these two [critical] tendencies will be harmonized. The

highest sense of fulfilled excellence will be found to consist with

62

the largest appreciation of every sign of life.“22 For her, the ideal
life was one in which art and life could be united. That time lay in
the future. In the present was still a disjunction between the two.
In her own life there was a disjunction between her life in
America and the European culture she desired. She expressed this
feeling to Sam Ward:
It is now ten years, since I was forced to abandon
the hope of going [to Europe]. . . . At every step I have
missed the culture I sought in going, for with me it
[was] no scheme of pleasure but the means of needed

development. It was what I wanted after my painful
youth, and what I was ready to use and be nourished by.

(LME IV:192).

Fuller had always been aware of what she called an “incongeniality
with my time and place“ (Mem. l:149). She felt that European culture
-- British, Italian, German -- was her proper milieu but was
frustrated because she knew that she would likely never be able to
go to the place of her “heart's desire.“ Her onerous familial
obligations conflicted with her zeal for learning and travel. She felt
locked in. There seemed to be no escape from the loneliness, the
overwork, the failed relationships. To her best friend Cary Sturgis
she wrote, “What a poor first sketch this life is, -- all torn and

thrown aside too. Were it not for the muse who peeps in, now and

63

then, at the window, how lonely here at home!“ (LME ll:241). And to
Cary she also confided her depression: “I begin to be really depressed
and feel as I would not have my foe feel. The price of our grains of
ambrosia is here so painfully coined, so slowly doled out. And how
much, how much of this sort of pain I must look fonlvard to in the
future“ (LME "211). She had wished for love and felt that she might
never know it. “Can no soul know me wholly? Shall I never know the
deep delight of gratitude to any but the All-Knowing?“ (LME ll:171).
“I have not lived my own life, neither loved my own love, my
strength, my sympathies have been given to others, their lives are
my aims,“ she wrote to George T. Davis, her distant cousin, with
whom she had been in love in her late twenties (LME Ill:104).

She had sacrificed her own desires to care for her family. To
her younger brother Richard she wrote, “It will be many years yet,
before you can appreciate the conflicts of my mind, as I doubted
whether to give up all which my heart desired for a path for which I
had no skill, and no call, except that eome_one must tread it, and
none else was ready“ (LME, lll:86). But while most ordinary people
might have buckled under the responsibilities and what seemed to be

a depressing future because of such high hopes dashed, Fuller was

64

remarkably resilient. “The last leaves of October, dull, faded,
drenched with black rain, yet scorn them not, for on the bank where
they are strewed forlorn, the violet shall peep forth in a more genial
season!“ (LME ll:176), she wrote to William Charming. She was ever

willing to see the promise of spring. Such optimism in the face of

difficulty was characteristic of Fuller.23
Her invitation to travel in the West was an enticement she
could not resist; it would provide a needed opportunity to see the
world from a different perspective and to examine and alter her life.
“A change of air and scene I surely need,“ she wrote to Sarah Clarke
a few weeks before embarking on the trip (LME lll:123). Her
descriptions in W reflect her joy, at times even
rapture-at being released from the burdens that plagued her in the
East and set free in this new landscape.
Add to this the finest weather, and such country as
I had never seen, even in my dreams, although these
dreams had been haunted by wishes for just such a one,
and you may judge whether years of dullness might not,
by these bright days, be redeemed, and a sweetness be
shed over all thoughts of the West“ (SL23).
She had gone to the West, she wrote, “prepared for the distaste“ she

would feel at its “mushroom growth“ ($1.18) and its desecration of

65

the natural landscape. Some parts of the West indeed bore out her
fears. But for the most part, particularly on the Illinois prairies,
she felt a rebirth and a growing understanding that any new form of
life, however unnatural it first might seem, must be looked at “by
its own standard“ (SL22) and not measured against any other. She
learned on this trip to accept and adapt to that which actually
exists. Thus, when she cites classical allusions to compare a new

sight with an old, she is not merely attempting to “display [her] rich

stores of knowledge“ and give off an “air of pedantry.“24 She is
synthesizing the images in her mind and realizing that for her both
the past and the present, the actual and the ideal can be compatible.
She had come to that realization in the months before the trip
when she had composed “The Great Lawsuit: Man versus Men; Woman
versus Women,“ her well-known' Dial essay, published while she was
on her western journey. Her unusual title had expressed the same
dichotomy: ideal (Man and Woman as two necessary halves of a
whole) versus actual (men and women). While men and women must
always strive for the ideal, they must see how their actions have
caused them to fall short of perfection. Then they must seek to

remedy their imperfections. “Whatever the soul knows how to seek,

66

it must attain.“25

With this attitude fresh in her mind, she began her journey to
the West, describing with what Poe called “unrivaled . . . omen];
231111“ the sights she took in. If she introduced into her descrip-
tions touches that seemed irrelevant, it was because “her

subjectiveness“ led her “to paint a scene less by its features than by

its effects“26 or, as Emerson would say, to paint on the natural
landscape what really existed in her own soul. Fuller admits early
in the book that her own account is as valid as anyone else's. ”For
all greatness affects different minds, each in 'its own particular
kind,‘ and the variations of testimony mark the truth of feeling“
(SL7).

During this summer, a mixture of external stimuli, thoughts,
and literature worked within her mind to create a deeper under-
standing of her self. Fuller was seeking self-actualization,
wholeness, and integration of the disparate elements of her
personality. The fact that she had separated herself from the
familiar environment of the East and had gone into the natural
wildness of the West, spending much time alone, allowed her to

become aware of her deepest needs and feelings. The solitude of the

67

Harvard library the next year afforded her additional time to reflect
on what had transpired during her journey. It was a time of self-
discovery and self-realization leading to decisions about her career,
her personal relationships, and her political beliefs. It affected her
writing and her focus thereafter.

Such soul searching is necessarily lonely. “I have felt the want
of companionship“ (LME Ill:140), she wrote from Chicago in August.
The quest for self-knowledge, which Harold Bloom sees as the chief
goal of the romantic journey, had to be experienced alone. As
Thoreau was to have the solitude of Walden, so Fuller had her time
of solitude and reflection away from the pressures that had been
plaguing her. She grew physically healthier, as she announced in
several letters that fall, but she was mentally and spiritually
refreshed as well from the experience. It was completely unlike the
later hectic journey she would take to Europe, where she complained
of getting little sleep in the whirlwind of social activity. Here on
the Great Lakes in 1843, Fuller at last had the opportunity to get to
know herself and to bridge the gap between her inner and outer
worlds. Those who have the imagination to make this leap “invest

the external world with meaning because they disown neither the

68

world's objectivity nor their own subjectivity.“27

Fuller's change of attitude after the trip had been facilitated by
the change in scenery and by the solitude she allowed herself the
following fall and winter. It had been a retreat preparing her for
subsequent action, allowing her to review her accomplishments and
failures and to consider her possibilities. When such a retreat is
experienced, “some kind of rearrangement or sorting-out process
often occurs within the mind which brings with it a sense of peace;

a sense that the depths of the well of truth have really been

reached.“28 After her trip she wrote, “I am much better able to meet
out ward perplexities without violation of inner peace“ (LME lll:150).
Her thoughts were now crystallized; she had developed the self-
integrity and self-reliance Emerson had preached. Ironically, her
newfound psychological integrity was to lead her away from
Emerson and into a new world of ideas and action.

Evidence that such an awareness was changing her can be found
in a dialogue Fuller imagines in SummeLoanLLakea occurring
between herself (whom she calls “Free Hope“) and a thinly-disguised
Emerson (whom she calls “Self-Poise“). Fuller had become

increasingly dissatisfied with Emerson's inability to respond to her

69

passion for living, as Chevigny has demonstrated. Fuller parodies
Emerson in her dialogue. Self-Poise exclaims: “all is in each“ and
“the ordinary contains the extraordinary.“ He advises benignly, “Sit
at home and the spirit-world will look in at your window with
moonlit eyes; run out to find it, and rainbow and golden cup will
have vanished and left you the beggarly child you were“ (SL81). It is
wiser, he advises, to be prudent, to reject more than we accept, to
hold oneself upright and do one's chores. “I think, indeed, it is part
of our lesson to give a formal consent to what is farcical, and to
pick up our living and our virtue amid what is so ridiculous, hardly
deigning a smile, and certainly not vexed“ (SL81). In Fuller's
portrait of Emerson, he appears to be a moral and righteous man but
certainly no risk taker. He prefers to “sit at home“ in the midst of
what is often ridiculous, yet he has little sense of the humor
involved.

Free Hope Fuller responds that she respects his point of view
but does not find in his theory or his scope “room enough for the
lyric inspirations, or the mysterious whispers of life. To me it
seems that it is madder never to abandon oneself, than often to be

infatuated, better to be wounded, a captive, and a slave, than always

70

to walk in armor“ (SL81). One should allow himself the freedom to
“wander vagrant“ and use one's fancy. Fuller indicates that Emerson
wears protective emotional armor. To the man who wrote, “Write
Whim on every doorpost,“ she was conveying the message that he
needed to write the word himself and indulge in fancy. She was
judging her mentor now by standards which she was developing for
herself, perhaps more Goethean than Transcendentalist.
It is clear that Self-Poise is intended to be Emerson, although
Fuller never identifies him as such, for this interchange between
Free Hope and Self-Poise is mirrored in a letter which Fuller wrote
to Emerson in July of 1844, shortly before she left New England.
The letter expresses once again Fuller's frustration with Emerson's
lack of involvement, his constant substitution of rhetoric for action,
of exhortation for experience:
Heaven help thee, my Druid! if this blessed, brooding
rainy day do not. It is a fine day for composition were it
not in Concord. But I trow the fates which gave this
place Concord took away the animating influences of
Discord. Life here slumbers and steals on like the river.
A very good place for a sage, but not for the lyrist or the
orator. . . But, Waldo, how can you expect the Muse to
come to you. She hovers near. I have seen her several
times, especially near night. Sometimes she looks in at

your study windows when she can get the chance, for
they are almost always shut. . . . (LME Ill:213-14).

71

Fuller has obviously decided that Emerson does not have the
wish to become as involved with life (or her) as she wishes to be.
He has inspired her in the past, but he cannot live out his own
theories as dynamically as she feels she must, and she is now ready
to move on. Her poem of July 1844, included in her letter to him,
bitterly mocks his sedate and cold attitude toward her and others.
Perhaps. she is attempting to jar him out of his complacency; in any
case, in this verse she is venting some of her disappointment that he
has not responded to her as she wished. The muse asks:

. . . “has my song,
My most creative, poised and long
Genius-unfolding song
No existence of its own?-
Have I no eternal throne
Deeper based than Fate?
I thought mine a state
Permanent as Truth,
Self-renewing Youth!“
“It seemed so,“ quoth he
“But there's no Eternity
Except Identity.“
“I dont knowwhat you mean,“ she cries
“But this I feel
At your cool replies
On my just now so clear eyes
Sad films steal;
And in my dry throat
Rises no clear note;
And each wing
To my cold side begins to cling;

72

I must away
Where the day
With many-colored ray
But now an aspect gave
To the worlds, more fair
Than they show in this cave,
Shut from the living air;
Dont lure me here again with your
sweet smile
As the sweet herbs that on the mountain
grow
Allure the chamois to the path of toll
And to the clefts beguile
Through which he falls into the caves below
Where in age-treasured snow buried!—
He yields his breath,
Quite unconvinced that life no better is than
Death“ (LME Ill:215-16)

Although this letter and poem were written in July 1844, two
months after the publication of W325. they echo the
sentiments that Fuller was expressing in the Self-Poise/Free Hope
debate she had been writing that winter. The July letter is a final
farewell to the frustration that had been building in her for several
years over this relationship. She indicates in this poem that she is
like the natural creature the chamois, who might be lured to her
death in frozen snow by Emerson's “sweet smile.“ She finds Concord
stifling, not a good place for a poet. In 1844 she was to move on to
New York, being resigned to the knowledge that Emerson's natural

reticence and contemplative life-style were not what her soul was

73

craving after all. She needed more opportunity to express her
natural energy and creativity than could be found in Concord. “You
are intellect, I am life!“ was her comment to him.
In the W dialogue she announces that
experience is the great teacher. One must take risks. She contrasts
the lofty position of Self-Poise, who stands on the snowy peaks,
“where the atmosphere is rare, where you can see the sky nearer,
from which you can get a commanding view of the landscape“ (SL81).
such a view as Emerson had propounded in Malena, with her own
view:
I had rather walk myself through all kinds of places,
even at the risk of being robbed in the forest, half
drowned at the ford, and covered with dust in the street.
. . . I would beat with the living heart of the world, and
understand all the moods, even the fancies or
fantasies, of nature. I dare to trust to the interpreting
spirit to bring me out all right at last - to establish
truth through error. . . . Let me stand in my age with all
its waters flowing round me. If they sometimes subdue,
they must finally upbear me, for I seek the universal --
and that must be the best“ (SL82).

This is Margaret Fuller's manifesto, one she is deciding upon to

determine the course of her life during this transitional summer.

This is an astonishingly optimistic and courageous passage, “heroic“

in the romantic tradition. She wishes to “beat with the living heart

74

of the world“; this metaphor, used in many variations in this book,
indicates her energy, vitality, power, and determination. She wishes
to take risks, not just to stand on a mountaintop observing, as she
perceives Emerson as doing. She wants to expose herself to danger
“if need be“ in order to experience nature in all its moods -- even its
fancies and whims. She is confident that the life spirit will bear
her up, that the truth will prevail, to bring her “out all right at last.“
Such a positive, impassioned declaration of purpose in the wake of
disappointment was characteristic of Fuller. This is the general
mood and spirit of the book and it leads one away from the
conclusion that the book is “sad,“ as Brownson maintained. There is
melancholy in SummeLoanelakes, as there is in most romantic
writing, but overcoming that melancholy is a resolution and
momentum that can only be seen as triumphant.

She is not bitter toward Emerson. He is “greatly wise“ and “ever
respected by me.“ Nonetheless, she must leave him behind when she
ventures into the world. She is resolved to do this and declares her
reasons: he stands in the way of the freedom of his followers. She
believes he needs a broader understanding of others' vocations and

that he needs to be more sympathetic of individual differences. She

75

announces in this dialogue that she would hold Self-Poise (Emerson)
in complete reverence if he had “more of love, or more of apprehen-
sive genius“ (SL82). But as it is, she says, she must oppose him
because he tends, by his influence, to stand in the way and exclude
others from the “full, free life“ (SL82). Her closing words in the
dialogue with Self-Poise indicate her frustration with his aloofness
and judgmental nature: “We must be content when you censure, and
rejoiced when you approve; always admonished to good by your
whole being, and sometimes by your judgment“ (SL82-83). She is
not going to be so admonished again, for she feels capable of making
her own decisions independent of his censure or approval, although
he will always stand for her as an example of goodness. But during
this summer and the writing of the book, she has become less
dependent on Emerson's reactions and influence and has decided to
move on, perhaps because she knows that he cannot be what she
wants him to be, that he cannot respond to her in the way she
wishes him to respond. He is the good man he has always been to
her, but she has come to realize that he is not as passionate or
demonstrative as she is. She is petulant about this realization at

times, but the important thing is that she has realized the truth of

76

their relationship and knows that it is time to move on. Changing
Emerson was a useless cause and an unrealistic one. The dialogue in
Wakes indicates this change in attitude.

Other asides and observations Fuller makes in the course of her
book also underscore the spiritual journey that underlay her decision
to make a break with Emerson and Concord. Much of what she
observes on this trip relates to this life-decision. What appear to
be digressions, then, are actually meaningful revelations of Fuller's
resolution to get on with her life, to enter a new phase, to take
risks.

Another passage that reveals this new resolve can be found in
Fuller's description of her visit to Milwaukee with Sarah Clarke.
During her stay in Milwaukee, Fuller delights in the beautiful red
roses that grow wild in this area. The redness of the roses reminds
her of the story of Venus flying to the assistance of Adonis and
being wounded. The story of Venus and Adonis reminds her of
Titian's painting of the scene, which she remembers for its “perfect
balance.“ She gives a description of the painting: Adonis is leaving
Venus for a moment, giving “an unmeaning promise“ (SL69) to return,

while Venus is trying to hold on to Adonis. Fuller comments that it

77

is difficult to see this picture without indignation because it is “so
true.“
Why must women always try to detain and restrain
what they love? . . . let him go; it is thy tenderness
that has spoiled him. Be less lovely -- less feminine;
abandon thy fancy for giving thyself wholly. . . But let
him go this time; thou canst not keep him. Sit there,
by thyself, on that bank, and, instead of thinking how

soon he will come back, think how thou may'st love him
no better than he does thee, for the time has come

(SL70).
While on the surface the insertion of this story of Venus and Adonis
appears to be an utter, though interesting, digression from Fuller's
description of Milwaukee, it reveals her frame of mind at this time.
When one is preoccupied with a thought, it surfaces easily. Fuller is
at this time mulling over her relationship with Emerson and Concord.
The time of decision has come: Fuller must also go ahead with her
life. She describes herself as sitting alone on the banks of Lake
Michigan, “to dream my dreams and watch the colors of the lake,
changing hourly, till the sun sank. These hours yielded impulses,
wove webs, such as life will not again afford“ (SL103). Was she
thinking through the advice she had given to Venus, also sitting on a
bank: “think how thou may'st love him no better than he does thee,

for the time has come“ (SL70)? As to the meaning of the digression,

78

she had given her readers a suggestion: “It . . . tells its story at the
first glance, though, like all beautiful works, it gains by study“
(SL69I-

Fuller's poetic impression of the West does provide colorful
information about her external journey, and to that extent it is a
“typical“ travel guide. But, more significantly, Summer_on_the
Lakee._in_l_8§3 gives careful readers her interior itinerary as well,
and her impressions were like no one else's. for, as Poe believed,

“there are not more than one or two dozen Miss Fullers on the whole

face of the earth.“29 Because her decisions and critical perspective
following this trip exhibit a divergence from her earlier path (that
is, her alliance with Emerson and Concord), this book is an account
of the important spiritual journey Margaret Fuller took during the

summer of 1843.

CHAPTER THREE
MISUNDERSTOOD AND OPPRESSED

Fuller's growing determination to ameliorate conditions of the
misunderstood and oppressed of the world is another aspect of her
personality developed through her writing W-
Writing about the downtrodden was one way to raise social
consciousness about them. According to Arthur Fuller, Summer_on
me_Lakee is additional evidence that his sister's sympathies lay in
that direction. “The friends of Madame Ossoli will be glad to make
permanent this additional proof of her sympathy with all the

oppressed, no matter whether that oppression find embodiment in

the Indian or the African, the American or the European." Because
she drowned before returning to America, one can only speculate
what her involvement might have been in the women's rights and
abolition movements, but it is clear in W that
she was making decisions about easing the pain of others.

Eventually she became involved in the Italian political

79

 

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revolution as a means of alleviating the oppression of a people she
had come to love. Although several critics have suggested that in
order to become politically involved Fuller first had to “outgrow“
her transcendentalism, Julie Ellison maintains, correctly I believe,

that “the whole range of Fuller's cultural and poltical commitments

throughout her life operates within the dynamics of romanticism.“2
She argues that Fuller's eventual radicalism is romantic: her roman-
tic subjectivity “organized“ her perspective on history. In other
words, in her Italian political activity she was changing the focus
of her romanticism from a personal to a collective enactment of her
own aspirations, but she was still decidedly romantic. She had not

made an uncharacteristic and sudden departure into radical

socialism, as Reynolds seems to suggest;3 she had changed

direction and was focusing less on art and literature, which she

found increasingly to be “abstractions,“4 and more on national
character and historical involvement as a means of working toward
the ideal of brotherhood and equality. Hudspeth agrees that while
Fuller's focus had changed, her philosophy of life was essentially

the same. “Though it is convenient to talk of a 'progression' in

81

Fuller's career, in fact she made modifications of a point of view
that remained remarkably constant,“ he notes in his Preface (LME
I246).

From an early age she had felt compassion for creatures
abused by society, considered odd, or shunned for some reason.
When she was nine she wrote to her father, “We have had a dreadful
snowstorm today. I never look around the room and behold all the
comforts with which Heaven has blessed me without thinking of
those wretched creatures who are wandering in all the snow
without food or shelter“ (LME l:94). She added that she knew of a
poor woman in Boston to whom she would like to give the dollar she
earned for reading Ine_D_esened_lLlllage. “I . . . desire nothing but
the pleasure of giving it to her“ (LME l:95). One year before her trip
west she reminisced about her lonely adolescent years in Groton:

There the heart was awakened to sympathize with the
ignorant, to pity the vulgar, and hope for the seemingly
worthless, for a need was felt of realizing the only
reality, the divine soul of this visible creation, which
cannot err and will not sleep, which cannot permit evil
to be permanent or its aim of beauty to be eventually
frustrated in the smallest particular. (LME lll:86).

She had felt loneliness, unhappiness, and frustration and thus identi-

fied with any oppressed creature. The only reality was the “divine

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soul,“ restlessly vigilant on behalf of goodness and beauty. She
needed to be part of this process.

One of Fuller's first lengthy “digressions“ in SW
Lakes, appears to be irrelevant without an understanding of her
profound interest in the oppressed. She remarks in Chapter II that
her thoughts had been dwelling on a story she heard from a fellow
passenger on the boat off Detroit. The story told of one Captain P.,
a man of “fine manners and dignified character“ (SL15) who had
married a vulgar woman much beneath his station, probably because
he was doing penance for “an hour of passion“ (SL17). The man was
ashamed of his wife's alcoholism and insulting behavior but did not
attempt to check her. “P. sat, . . . his head bowed down and perfectly
silent all through, whatever might be done or whoever be present,
and always his aspect has inspired such sympathy that no person
has questioned him or resented her insults“ (SL17). This noble man
endured his sadness with dignity and silence. Fuller's taking time
to tell this story in the midst of her itinerary shows how
profoundly moved she was by the silent endurance of suffering

nobility. Not to complain or protest in the face of hardship or abuse

was to Fuller worthy of respect.5

83

A similar story appears in the first chapter of Wine
Lakee, where she notes her anger upon seeing an eagle chained as a
pet. The bird reminds her of a tortured eagle she had seen in a
museum during her childhood.

The people used to poke at it with sticks, and my

childish heart would swell with indignation as I

saw their insults, and the mien with which they

were borne by the monarch-bird. Its eye was dull,

and its plumage soiled and shabby, yet, in its form

and attitude, all the king was visible, though

sorrowful and dethroned. (SL6)
She remembers that upon seeing this silent, dignified bird so
degraded she had been filled with “the Byronic 'silent rages' of
misanthropy“ (SL6). Her sympathetic comments about the abused
bird and her admiration for his silence and dignity in suffering are
to most readers perhaps an interesting though insignificant aside
unless one sees that they reveal her tender heart, her anger at men
for their cruelty, and her admiration for long-suffering and silent
dignity.

' Her own identification with a wounded eagle can be seen in a

letter she wrote to Jane Tuckerman in 1838. Describing to

Tuckerman a particularly sad time of her life when she had felt “the

weight of deceived friendship, domestic discontent, and bootless

84

love“ (LME l:347) and foresaw only “as painful a future“ (LMF l:347),
she compared herself with an eagle:

At this time I never had any consolation, except

in long, solitary walks, and my meditations then

were so far aloof from common life that on my

return, my fall was like that of the eagle which

the sportsman's hand calls bleeding from his lofty

flight to stain the earth with his blood. (LME l:347)

Her fascination with the eagle as a symbol of nobility
continued in Summer_on_tne_Lakes. The poem she had composed on
the Fourth of July atop “The Eagle's Nest,“ a high bluff on the
Illinois prairie, was entitled “Ganymede to His Eagle.“ It expressed
the fervent prayer of Ganymede the Youth for a visitation from the
noble bird of Jove, the eagle. Here the suffering narrator is
Ganymede, ‘whom the eagle seems to have forgotten. The narrator
declares that he and the eagle have both been chosen as servants of
Jove: the bird as the messenger of Jove and he as the servant who
tends the spring “Which slakes the thirst of bards to whom 'tis
given“ (SL35). He bemoans the fact that the eagle has been gone too
long while he has waited faithfully for its return. He prays that the

eagle will bear him up to the “serene heights“ where he will find

“the highest ministry“ and achieve rapture as a reward for his

85

fidelity. lf Fuller is identifying with Ganymede in this poem, she
then appears to be expressing her desire to be caught up into the
ideal, yet she clearly sees herself as fulfilling a high office along
with the eagle: as an attendant and faithful servant of God. The
eagle motif touched a chord in Fuller that was often sounded: that
of a noble, faithful character wounded but suffering in silence.
This same theme appears in Fuller's story of Mariana, one her

brother Arthur deleted in his edition for the sake of “unity.“ Even

Fuller's earliest biographers took this story to be autobiographical.6
Fuller inserts the Mariana story in SummeLeanLLakes after her
account of an excursion on the prairie with William and Sarah
Clarke. She had just returned to the hotel in Chicago, where she
claims she happened to see the aunt of an old boarding school
acquaintance, Mariana, who, Fuller is sad to learn, is now deceased.
Weaving together fact and fiction, Fuller describes Mariana as a
“strange bird. . . , a young swallow that could not make for itself a
summer“(SL81).

In boarding school Mariana, like “the spinning dervishes of the
East,“ was always wishing to be the center of attention. Best able

to express her personality in theatrical productions at the school,

86

Mariana often won the principal part. She found the custom of
wearing stage make-up delightful and after a performance would
continue to wear it. Irritated at her eccentricity and attention-
getting tactics, the other girls played a practical joke on Mariana
one evening: at dinner every girl at the table wore a bright circle of
rouge on each cheek in mockery of the histrionic Mariana. Though
during the meal Mariana pretended indifference, after dinner she
went to her room and threw herself on the floor in strong
convulsions.

She had ruled, like a queen, in the midst of her

companions; she had shed her animation through

their lives, and loaded them with prodigal favors,

nor once suspected that a powerful favorite might

not be loved. Now, she felt that she had been but a

dangerous plaything in the hands of those whose hearts

she never had doubted“ (SL54).

After this incident, Mariana was a changed creature. She could
not understand why all of the girls had been against her. “What, not
one, not a single one, in the hour of trial, to take my part?“ she
wondered (SL54). In retaliation, she became a “genius of discord“
among her fellow students. Eventually the girls complained to the

headmistress about Mariana's calumny and falsehood, charges “alas,

too well-founded“ (SL56). Confronted, Mariana shut herself in her

87

room, unable to eat or sleep. In her soul she had begun to realize
the baseness and cruelty of her lies and the loveliness of truth, but
she felt that it was too late to change her ways until a compas-
sionate teacher told her a personal experience she had never shared
with anyone. The commiseration of her favorite young teacher
changed Mariana's life profoundly. She was “as one who has passed
through the valley of death“ (SL57). She asked the forgiveness of
her schoolmates and vowed never to betray the truth or resent
injury again in her life.

Phraseology such as “the valley of death“ may seem excessive
to a modern reader and may indicate to some Fuller's overblown
sense of her own worth, but it may rather indicate the spiritual
change in the young woman that she could only express in
traditional religious language. She had truly died to her old ways;
in that sense she had been in the “valley of death“ and had re-
emerged a new person. If indeed such a conversion experience did
occur, and it seems to have been a real turning point in Fuller's life,
such language is not overdone or merely for the sake of drama.
While it is true that Fuller took herself seriously, she also had a

fine sense of humor and an ability to poke fun at herself if the

88

occasion arose. (The sober Emerson once complained, “I remember
that she made me laugh more than I liked.“)
The story of Mariana continues with an account of Mariana's

unhappy marriage to a man who loved business more than he loved

his wife.7 Ultimately she died from a fever brought on by loneliness
and despair. Fuller includes a sentimental poem of Mariana's about
the heartache of unrequited love and remarks that a man in similar
circumstances would never have written such a poem:

He would not have needed to seek, he would
have been called by life, and not permitted
to be quite wrecked through the affections
only. But such women as Mariana are often
lost, unless they meet some men of suffici-
ently great soul to prize them“ (SL64).

That this story is autobiographical is indicated in a letter
Fuller wrote in January 1830 at the age of nineteen to Miss
Prescott, the young headmistress of the Prescott school for girls

which Fuller had attended for two years during adolescence:

You need not fear to revive painful recollections.

I often think of those sad experiences. True, they
agitate me deeply. But it was best so. They have
had a powerful effect on my character. I tremble
at whatever looks like dissimulation. The
remembrance of that evening subdues a very proud,
passionate impulse. My beloved supporter in

89

those sorrowful hours, your image shines as fair to
my mind's eye as it did in 1825, when I left you
with my heart overflowing with gratitude for your
singular and judicious tenderness. Can I ever
forget that to your treatment in that crisis of
youth I owe the true life, -- the love of Truth

and Honor? (LME l:160).

It is interesting to speculate about why Fuller includes this
obviously autobiographical tale in her travel book, one passage cut
by brother Arthur in his AleemLandJnmad edition of Summer_on
lbe_Lakea. The story of Mariana reveals Fuller's concern for truth.
She feels it necessary at this point in Summer_on_me_Lakes to
explain the development of her personality as well as her
motivation for a lifetime of dedication to the truth. Never
afterward false to anyone, she told the truth, even though it might

offend. After her death many friends gave moving testimony of her

dedication to truth, though she also had a reputation for being

somewhat blunt and occasionally tactlessfi Sarah Clarke, artistic
companion of the 1843 summer trip, commented upon her friend's
devotion to the truth:

In looking for the causes of the great influence
possessed by Margaret Fuller over her pupils,
companions, and friends, I find something in the
fact of her unusual truth-speaking power. She not
only did not speak lies after our foolish social
customs, but she met you fairly. She broke her

90

lance upon your shield. . . . Her eye pierced
through your disguises. . . . And then began the
delight of true intercourse. Though she spoke
rudely searching words, and told you startling
truths, though she broke down your little shams
and defenses, you felt exhilarated by the compli-
ment of being found out, and even that she had

cared to find you out.9
William Henry Channing, one of Fuller's friends and biographers
in the Memeire along with Emerson and James Freeman Clarke,
wrote that Fuller at first appeared too intense to him but that soon
he was charmed by her qualities:

. . . soon I was charmed, unaware, with the sagacity

of her sallies, the profound thoughts carelessly

dropped by her on transient topics, the breadth and
richness of culture manifested in her allusions or
quotations, her easy comprehension of new views,

her just discrimination, and, above all, her truthfulness.
“Truth at all cost,“ was plainly her ruling maxim. This
it was that made her criticism so trenchant, her con-
tempt of pretence [sic] so quick and stern, her speech so
naked in frankness, her gaze so searching, her whole
attitude so alert. Her estimates of men, books, manners,
events, art, duty, destiny, were moulded after a grand
ideal; and she was a severe judge from the very

loftiness of her standard. (Mam. ll:7)

The Mariana story was a thinly disguised confessional
narrative which helped Fuller make sense of her youthful experience
from the vantage point of time. Rather than admitting the story

was about herself, Fuller constructed a narrative about a “friend“

91

she once knew. Such narratives help us to “assess cause and effect
in a pattern of significance, to relate ourselves to a sense of

purpose, to claim a shared reality with other people, and to identify
a specificity and a continuity of self through memory. In short, we

use the process of creating narrative shape to identify our place in

the world.“10
It is significant that during her summer of self-appraisal this
particular story would occur to her. If as Joanne Frye suggests,

one redefines the past “in order to find in it a different path to the

present and hence the future,“11 the Mariana story is more
important than her brother or other critics and editors have
realized. By narrating the Mariana incident, Fuller was assessing
the importance of the event and defining herself in the process. The
event was in her memory a powerful and significant one which had
formed her character. Stressing once again the value of the inner
journey, Fuller reached within for an appraisal of her own
experience, coyly calling herself “Mariana“ but fooling few.

Fuller's recollections and replayings of epiphanies are
extremely important if one intends to learn the inner landscape of

Fuller. Memory functions “both to shape the personal paradigms by

92

which she orders and organizes present experience and to supply

different information when she restructures her temporal

paradigms for examining past experience.“12 For the Mariana story
to be placed in the middle of SummeLonJhLLakes seemed odd to
many readers, but its inclusion in the book was important to Fuller.
It reveals Fuller's focus on self-discovery during this pivotal period
of her life and is a promise to her public that she focused on the
truth and meant to tell it always. Such an obviously unfeigned
devotion to truth underscores the sincerity and veracity of Semme;
thLLakfis.

Fuller's addition of the fictitious outcome of Mariana's life is
primarily an empathetic comment on the oppression of women. The
character of Sylvain, Mariana's unattentive husband, was “only a
suggested picture,“ she wrote to William Channing (LME lll:199).
The name she had taken from dancer James Sylvain, who had
performed with the famous Austrian dancer Fanny Elssler in Boston
in 1840 and 1841. Fuller wrote of seeing the two perform:

In the bridal dance, after movements of a birdlike
joy, and overflowing sweetness, when he comes
forward, she retires with a proud, timid grace, so

beautiful; it said 'see what a man I am happy
enough to love'. And then came forward this Well-

93

laugmdaneen springing and pirouetting without

one tint of genius, one ray of soul; it was very

painful and symbolized much, far more than I

have expressed with Sylvain and Mariana“ (LME lll:199).

The pain of watching an exquisite female performer defer to a

less-talented male simply because of his gender was excruciating
to Fuller. In the story of Mariana, she takes the situation out of the
realm of dance and puts it into the sphere of marriage. At the end of
the story of Mariana and Sylvain, Mariana dies of a broken heart. It
is difficult to understand why a woman with the spirit and fire of a
Mariana would pine away. On the other hand, this may have been the
only outcome for a woman of feeling and talent during the nine-

teenth century, for subordination of one's personality is a kind of

living death. According to Carolyn Heilbrun, a woman's decision to

die may be “the ultimate room of one's own.“13 Death is the
“quintessential privacy“; it was in the nineteenth century perhaps

the only part of a woman's life she could control. She could “at least

choose to die.“14 This would seem a somewhat negative assertion
of personality, the ultimate self-defeating behavior done under the
guise of self-assertion. One thing is certain: Fuller was reminding
herself and her audience of what might happen to the intelligent

woman who builds her life around an independent man and subordi-

94

nates her will and abilities to his. It would lead to the death of the

spirit if not the body.

In both W395 and W

99.01011. Fuller continued to be troubled by this problem of the
subordination and oppression of women, an oppression which she
had felt herself. One change made in her “Great Lawsuit“ essay
following her trip west was the addition of a quotation by Madame
Necker, cousin of the woman to whom Fuller was often compared,
Madame de Stael:

The lot of Woman is sad. She is constituted to
expect and need a happiness that cannot exist on
earth. She must stifle such aspirations within her
secret heart. and fit herself, as well as she can,

for a life of resignations and consolations.

She will be very lonely while living with her
husband. She must not expect to open her heart to
him fully, or that, after marriage, he will be

capable of the refined service of love. The man is
not born for the woman, only the woman for the man.
“Men cannot understand the hearts of women.“ The
life of Woman must be outwardly a well-intentioned,
cheerful dissimulation of her real life (WELL 159).

Observations she had made on her journey about the lot of the
oppressed prairie wives focused on the inequity between male and
female and underscored the feeling of oppression Fuller herself had

always felt. She notes that the male settlers had made the decision

95

to move to Illinois, not their wives, “and the women follow, as
women will, doing their best for affection's sake, but too often in
heartsickness and weariness“ (SL38). The strength of the male
settlers was greater. In addition, the men could find assistance in
the fields and recreation in hunting and fishing. The lot of the
women was harder. They were not fit for this difficult life. The
work load was overwhelming.
The women can rarely find any aid in domestic labor.
All its various and careful tasks must often be per-
formed, sick or well, by the mother and daughters, to
whom a city education has imparted neither the strength
nor skill now demanded. (SL38)

When they could leave their housework, they had not learned
any recreational sports. “The culture has too generally been that
given to women to make them 'the ornaments of society'“ (SL39).
In Wisconsin Fuller made the same observations about women. She
noted that while the men went off hunting and fishing, the women
had to stay behind to do the “dull work“ (SL72). The women “found
their labors disproportioned to their strength, if not to their
patience; and, while their husbands and brothers enjoyed the

country in hunting or fishing, they found themselves confined to a

comfortless and laborious indoor life“ (SL72). She expressed the

96

same idea in a letter to Emerson in August:
These foreign women, however, I rejoice to see do not
suffer as our Eastern women do; they have, for the most
part, been brought up to work in the open air and have
better constitutions, but all the Eastern women say
“oh it is well for the men, who enjoy their hunting and
fishing, but for us, we have every thing to bear and no
time or health to enjoy or learn“ (LME Ill:138).
She found only one woman, an English settler, who was contented,
“the only one I heard of out there“ (SL72). But this woman admitted
that “she had seen so much suffering in her own country that the
hardships of this seemed as nothing to her“ (SL72).
Annette Kolodny sees in this portion of Fuller's book a
“captivity narrative“ of a different sort. No longer was the Indian
the captor, no longer was the wilderness landscape the symbol of

captivity. Now “the frontier home. . . stood as the place of

imprisonment, with the small, dark, often windowless cabins

isolating women from the fields without.“15 These female settlers
had more than likely been taken to the prairie against their own
wishes to satisfy the wishes of the male. They were captives of
their husbands and had no independent life or respite from their
rigorous chores.

Although at this point in her life Fuller was not married and did

97

not expect to be, she identified with the oppression and discrimina-
tion experienced by these frontier wives, oppression she had felt
during her lifetime for other reasons. Clearly a brilliant woman and
far more knowledgeable than many of her male contemporaries, she
nevertheless had suffered the slings and arrows directed toward
women who did not follow the “normal“ path in the nineteenth
century. Whether she was completely aware of it or not, she was
often the object of male scorn, as Marie Urbanski has noted. Since
the death of her father she had spent her youth serving her family:
mother, sister, and brothers were all dependent on her for financial
support, encouragement, and advice. The sadness and loneliness
brought about by these heavy burdens are evident in a letter to her
cousin George T. Davis:

My father would often try to check my pride, or

as he deemed it my arrogance of youthful hope

and pride by a picture of the ills that might come

on me, - and all have come of which he spoke,

sickness, poverty, the failure of ties and all my

cherished plans. . . . I have not lived my own life,

neither loved my own love, my strength, my

sympathies have been given to others, their

lives are my aims.“ (LME lll:105)

She too had been the suffering servant of others. Conse-

quently, she could and did sympathize with any other being who was

 

98

in misery. In SummeLoanLLakee she reveals her compassion and

understanding for women who were overworked and taken advantage
of simply because of their fidelity and devotion to their husbands.
Her observations that women were often unwilling captives of their

husbands led her to exclaim in W.

l have urged on Woman independence of Man,
not that I do not think the sexes mutually
needed by one another, but because in Woman
this fact has led to an excessive devotion,
which has cooled love, degraded marriage,
and prevented either sex from being what

it should be to itself or the other (WhLQl 75).

Much of Fuller's attention in Summer_on_tne_Lakee is focused
on the Oppression of the American Indians, females as well as
males, as a minority group. She notes that the Indian women in
particular are a sad lot. Not only are they as a native population
subject to colonization and harsh treatment by an alien culture, but
the women additionally, according to native custom, are taught to
be completely submissive. They “accommodate themselves more or
less to any posture“ (SL111). Their lot is even more oppressive than
that of the white prairie women, for they have little hope or

education. “Perhaps they suffer less than their white sisters, who

have more aspiration and refinement, with little power of self-

99

sustenance. But their place is certainly lower, and their share of
the human inheritance less“ (SL111).

Fuller quotes a British aristocrat, Lord Edward Fitzgerald, who
had said about Indian maidens, “Notwithstanding the life they lead,
which would make most women rough and masculine, they are as
soft, meek and modest, as the best brought up girls in England“
(SL112). But despite her delicacy and her influence in the Indian
domestic situation, the Indian woman occupied an inferior position
to that of her husband. Fuller believed that the same held true for
white women, who may have had moments of great power and
influence in the home, but for the most part were not confident
enough to assert their power on a daily basis except in very subtle
ways.

Has the Indian, has the white woman, as noble
a feeling of life and its uses, as religious a
self-respect, as worthy a field of thought

and action, as man? If not, the white woman,
the Indian woman, occupies an inferior position
to that of man. It is not so much a question of
power, as of privilege. (SL113)

Madeleine 8. Stem, an important biographer of Fuller, sees

Fuller's interest in the American Indian as the primary focus of

SummeLon_tne_Lakee.16 Although Fuller's interest in Indians had

100

indeed been longstanding, I do not see it as the “primary focus“ of
her book. It is rather another example of the oppression that she
sees around her on her travels, and her sympathetic attitude
foreshadows her later social action on behalf of the downtrodden.
In order to make a reliable statement about the plight of the

Indian, Fuller did a great deal of reading before and after the trip.
She includes in SummeLoanLLakes critiques of the various
accounts of Indians she has read, incurring the wrath of at least one
contemporary critic, Rufus Griswold, who took offense at Fuller's
preference for the stories of Mrs. Jameson over those of Mrs.
Schoolcraft:

The wife of the amiable and learned author

[Schoolcraft] who is thus assailed, herself of the

aboriginal race. . . wrote down and translated many

of these myths and traditions, and it is amusing to

see even her part of the work ranked on the score

of fidelity below the few stories written out by

Mrs. Jameson, who, however excellent as a critic of

art, was here quite out of her depth - almost as

ignorant as Miss Fuller herself, who when this was

composed had been about one week west of Buffalo,
and had seen perhaps a dozen vagabond Indians

across the streets of Detroit and Chicago.”
For many years Fuller had seen the Indian as a noble, long-

suffering creature, much like the abused eagle she had admired for

101

his dignity and silence. Six years earlier, in November 1837, she
had written a poem about the treatment of Indians. The occasion
was Massachusetts governor Everett's welcome address to a
deputation of Sauk (Sac) and Fox Indians from the Midwest. Fuller's
poem, which she includes in W. praises Governor
Everett's “dignified and courteous manner“ (SL114) in receiving
these “forest princes.“ She notes that although the Uncas were
“idealized with skill“ (by Cooper), people were beginning to weary
of stories of “stoics of the wood“ and “men without a tear“ because
of the many scribbling “poetasters“ who had beaten the subject into
the ground.

Fuller laments the fact that the Indian, once the “Samson“ of
the forests, had been shorn of his strength and must now beg for
what was once his. She feels that the Indian is a dying breed: “His
stately form shall soon be seen no more! Through all his father's
land, th' Atlantic shore“ (SL115). In his “untouched grandeur“ he
silently stalks into the “busy cities,“ past “the marvels we have
wrought“ but is unimpressed, for he “knows the models from whence
all was brought“ since he had lived among the trees, “God's first

temples.“

102

Perhaps he sees that all this luxury

Brings less food to the mind than to the eye;
Perhaps a simple sentiment has brought

More to him than your arts had ever taught.

What are the petty triumphs Art has given,

To eyes familiar with the naked heaven? (SL116)

She reports that a “well-dressed mob“ turned out to see these
Indians in Boston. The Indians were “majestical and calm through
all“ despite being a “raree show“ for a “gaping crowd.“ The crowd
could not deny their “noble forms and blameless symmetry.“
Condescendingly she remarks that even “If the Great Spirit their

[the Indians] morale has slighted,/ And wigwam smoke their mental

culture blighted! Yet the physique, at least, perfection reaches“

($1.117).

She seems resigned to the fact that the Indian is doomed:

An unimproving race, with all their graces

And all their vices, must resign their places;

And Human Culture rolls its onward flood

Over the broad plains steeped in Indian blood.

Such thoughts steady our faith; yet there will rise
Some natural tears into the calmest eyes -- (SL117)

She seems at this point interested in the Indian as a “picturesque“
artifact that “Shows us the fount of Romance is not wasted“

(SL115).

For Fuller, the Indian was a noble savage, a romantic ruin, a

103

pitiful but enduring spectacle, such as the tortured eagle she had
seen at Niagara. He was a creature of nature abused by a population
that did not recognize his grandeur. By showing that she does
recognize his nobility, she is setting herself apart from the “well-
dressed mob.“ At this point she is aware of the Indians' loss of
power but appears to be resigned to that loss and even somewhat in
agreement with the government's stance. She does, however,
believe in humane treatment of the Indian. Though the white man
should divest the red man of his power, such divestment should be
done with dignity and courtesy. It is Everett's manner that she is
most proud of in this poem. The sound of his voice “would charm the
ear,/ And lap in its Elysium all who hear“ (SL117). His words were
so well chosen that “we deem them spoken pearls, or radiant
diamond dew“ (SL117). She never until this event had admired
oratorical skill so much, for Everett moved many to tears with his
simple, “courtly“ welcome to the Indians. She feels it was “the
happiest attempt ever made to meet the Indian in his own way, and
catch the tone of his mind“ (SL118). “'T was a fair scene -- and
acted well by all“ (SL118), she concludes.

In recalling this poem written six years earlier, Fuller notes

104

in SummeLoanLLakee that she has not “found reason to change the

sentiments expressed“ therein (SL114). She copies the “admirable
speech“ of Governor Everett, a simply put welcome recognizing the
brotherhood of all men. She feels that most white men do not have
the capacity to put themselves into the Indians' place and under-
stand that the lndians too had a meaningful culture. Whereas Gov.
Everett was able to approach the Indians “with intelligence and
tact,“ most white men approached them “with sordid rapacity,“ and
the few missionaries who looked at them as “souls to be redeemed“
were usually “intellectually too narrow, too straightly bound in
sects or opinions“ (SL119) to perceive how the Christian religion
must appear to the Indian. “The Christ shown them by these
missionaries, is to them but a new and more powerful Manito“ [the
Great Spirit of the Indians] (SL119).

Her purpose in focusing on the red man is not to plead his
cause or change opinion. “I have no hope of Iiberalizing the
missionary, of humanizing the sharks of trade, of infusing the
conscientious drop into the flinty bosom of policy, of saving the

Indian from immediate degradation, and speedy death,“ she writes

(snaps

105

Yet, ere they depart, I wish there might be some

masterly attempt to reproduce, in art or literature,

what is proper to them, a kind of beauty and grandeur,

which few of the every-day crowd have hearts to feel,

yet which ought to leave in the world its monuments, to

inspire the thought of genius through all ages. (SL121)
She is obviously not ready to campaign for Indian rights but is
already building a memorial which can “inspire.“ A historian
interested in the Indians should turn his eyes “to the greatness of
the past, rather than the scanty promise of the future“ (SL142). To
that end, she hopes there will be a national institute “containing all
the remains of the Indians“ (SL143) so that one might have a
collection of “genuine fragments, that will indicate as clearly their
life, as a horse's head from the Parthenon thegenius of Greece“
(SL142).

Fuller's attitude toward the Indian is typical of the American
romantic of the nineteenth century, who, according to Richard
Slotkin, saw the Indian as a dispossessed frontier hero, the Ameri-
can version of Rousseau's noble savage. The American response to
the Indian had undergone a change since the 1600's, when the Indian

was seen as a devil-worshipping, cannibalistic destroyer. By the

nineteenth century, the Indian was viewed by many as long-

106

suffering, noble, and in touch with nature. Slotkin notes that the
plight of the Indian came to the attention of the American public
only alien he had been divested of most of his land and his rights,
that is, when the Indian was no longer a threat to the white man's
way of life. Then he could be treated with sympathy and
compassion and elevated to a kind of heroic status among New
England romantics. Since the Indian appeared to be “doomed,“ those
who had read about him (but had neither had contact with him nor
been threatened by him) imagined an appealingly “tragic“ aura
surrounding the Indian nations. Indian virtues were exaggerated,
Indian vices downplayed. The red man was seen as a tragic victim of
white man's greed, a symbol of a passing era, evidence that America

had a “past.“ Speculation about the Indian “cast a charm of antiquity

over a landscape bare of spectacular Roman ruins.“19

The Indian thus became something of a literary device for the
romantics. Whereas in ordinary life (outside fiction) writers
expressed the same kind of disdain that Fuller's “female acquain-
tance“ (probably her traveling companion Sarah Clarke) on Mackinac
Island had expressed (i.e., How could Fuller “endure the dirt, the

peculiar smell of the Indians, and their dwellings“? she wondered),

107

in their literature these writers elevated the Indian into an ideal
representative of all virtues that Americans were seeking in the
New World. It is clear that Fuller is doing just this in Summer_on
me_Lakee. Though she herself expressed a repugnance for some of
the habits of the Indians during her trip, she nevertheless exalts the
Indian to the lofty position of wounded, silent noble throughout her
book. For her the Indian became the Americanized version of the
European heroic figure she had read about so often in German
literature.

One of the important lessons that can be learned from the
Indian, according to Fuller, is their sympathy with their natural
landscape, a sympathy which she believed the white settlers filling
the West did not have. Fuller compliments the Indians' selections of
the proper environment for locating their settlements. They not only
chose “the most beautiful sites“ (SL29) but also made certain not to
destroy the natural environment or change the character of the
landscape. Fuller laments that most of the white settlers do not
have this same sympathy with the natural landscape and foresees a
day when the “natural expression“ of the country will consequently

be obliterated. She prophesies that anyone who does not feel the

108

greatness of the Indian “will never duly appreciate the majesty of
nature in this American continent“ (SL153). Fuller thinks of the
comment of one settler who begrudged a nostalgic lndian's longing
look at his former home: “They ought not to be permitted to drive
away our game“ (SL72). She responds with indignation, “OUR game --
just heavens!“ What filled her with compassion had not touched the
usurping settler. It was this “rapacity' and hardness of heart that
had led to what Fuller saw as the inevitable doom of the red man.

In order to study the Indian, Fuller had determined to go alone
to Mackinac Island, where Sarah Clarke would join her for the trip
home to Boston. She was at Mackinac nine days before Clarke
arrived. Each day she rose early and went to the beach to be among
the Indians and study their customs. She felt that it was necessary
to walk among the pe0ple, whom she calls “my Indian neighbors“

(SL105), and observe them firsthand instead of merely reading

about them in books.20

Fuller speaks of the hatred still felt toward the Indian. White
men considered Indians abhorrent because of “their dirt, their tawny
skins, and the vices the whites have taught them“ (SL113). It was

the feeling of white men that “the savage cannot be washed out of

 

 

109

them“ (SL113). Fuller will not venture an opinion about this.
“Whether the Indian could, by any efforts of love and Intelligence
from the white man, have been civilized and made a valuable
ingredient in the new state, I will not say“ (SL113). But she does
note that the French, whom the Indians loved, had never attempted
“to disturb their minds merely to corrupt them“ (SL114). On the
other hand, the “stern Presbyterian, with his dogmas and his task-
work, the city circle and the college, with their niggard concessions
and unfeeling stare, have never tried the experiment“ (SL114).
Fuller firmly believes that the United States government and

the people of the United States “have sinned alike against the first-
born of the soil“ (SL114). She says bitterly that if it is the fate of
the white man to be the new leaders, they have not prayed to any
god to keep them sinless while they go about their destined course
of leadership. Worst of all, she says, are the hypocrites who invoke
the name of God to mask their own sinfulness and decry the Indians'
so-called impurity.

When the felon trader, who all the week, has been

besotting and degrading the Indian with rum mixed

with red pepper, and damaged tobacco, kneels with

him on Sunday before a common altar, to tell the
rosary which recalls the thought of him crucified for

110

love of suffering men, and to listen to sermons in
praise of “purity“! (SL114).

Fuller feels that such religious practices are a “mockery.“ Better,
she feels, are the honest “dog-feasts and bloody rites“ of the
Indians, for “the white man sacrifices his own brother, and to
Mammon, yet he turns in loathing from the dog-feast“ (SL114). She
lashes out bitterly at the inhumane treatment afforded the Indian by
the so-called “Christian“ white man. “Yes! slave-drivers and Indian
traders are called Christians, and the Indian is to be deemed less
like the Son of Mary than they! Wonderful is the deceit of man's
heart!“ (SL114).

She points out the futility of the missionaries' trying to teach
Indians that “a heavenly mandate“ is taking their land away from
them. Missionaries cannot hope to make Indians understand what
even for educated white peooleis an abstruse theology. The Indian
submits to what the white man wants, but “does not at heart
acquiesce“ (SL120) because what he is asked to believe does not
accord with what he already knows.

The only way to “civilize' the Indian, according to Fuller, is
“amalgamation“ (SL120), though she believes that those of mixed

blood “are not generally a fine race“ and “fade early“ (SL120)

111

because they lose what is best in both races. Slotkin notes that
this is the theory behind the policy of removal of the Indians to the
land beyond the Mississippi. Even Indian advocate James Hall

believed that removal was necessary. “According to Hall, the

lndian's virtues were his only while he remained pure.“21 Racial
hostility between the whites and Indians would always be present,
standing in the way of equality. Fuller feels that the recent
Chippewa petition for United States citizenship is thus vain unless
the Chippewa can also “be admitted, as brothers, to the heart of the
white man“ (SL121). That, she believes, is impossible.

All that is left, then, given the inevitable doom of the red man
in America, is to memorialize them by relating their stories. This
is exactly what Fuller attempts to do in her book. She tells many
formerly untold stories of the Indians and repeats some that she
has read in other travel books. Her first story deals with the
“superiority“ of the white man to the red man, as told by McKenney
in his Io_ur_to_tne_Lakes. Fuller herself had heard an Indian orator
who perhaps put his finger on the reason for white supremacy: the
difference between the white man and the red man, he said, was

that “the white man looks to the future and paves the way for

112

posterity“ (SL123), whereas the Indian cares only for the present.
Fuller feels that this statement is “uncommonly refined for an
Indian“ (italics mine). She believes that the Indian, even if he
understands something, “cannot make use of his intelligence“
(SL123) and thus he, like Pontiac and Philip, is doomed to

extinction. And the very faculties that made it possible for Indians

T‘s-:35]

to live only in the present and not to think of the future made it
unlikely that they would keep good records of their life for
posterity. “Men, whose life is full and instinctive, care little for the
pen“ (SL124). Thus, although Fuller had said she believed the
historian of the Indians should be an Indian, she actually believes
that it was not probable that Indians would keep records, given
their focus on the present moment; it was up to the white man to do
write chronicles of the Indians, and in particular those whites who
had lived and traveled among the Indians, such as Mrs. Grant, Mrs.
Jameson, and Mrs. Schoolcraft. Because Mrs. Schoolcraft's father
was a white man who taught his children the white man's ways,
they had “enough European culture to have a standard, by which to
judge their native habits and inherited lore“ (SL124). Here again

Fuller is measuring one culture against another and holding up the

 

 

113

European culture as “the standard.“

Fuller avers that she did not wish “to write sentimentally
about the Indians, however moved by the thought of their wrongs
and speedy extinction“ (SL143). She regrets the fact that those who
conquered the Indians in this country “felt themselves justified by
their superior civilization and religious ideas“ in taking possession
of Indian lands. She feels that the conflicts of the two races might
have been avoided, “but this cannot be expected in movements made
by masses of men“ (SL143). Many whites saw Indians as fiends
instead of men acting in self-defense. The white man, “if he be
really the superior in enlargement of thought“ (SL144), ought to see
that the Indian was simply trying to protect his land and his family.
She hopes that the white man will be able to cast aside his
prejudices enough to look on the Indian “in pity and brotherly
goodwill, and do all he can to mitigate the doom of those who
survive his past injuries“ (SL144). She asks every American to avoid
sinning still more deeply against the red man.

Let the missionary, instead of preaching to the
Indian, preach to the trader who ruins him. . . .
Let every legislator take the subject to heart. . . .

And let every man and every woman . . . avoid all
share in embittering, by insult or unfeeling prejudice,

114

the captivity of Israel. (SL144)
Fuller's attitude toward the Indians in SummeLeanLLakee
reveals her sensitivity to the plight of the oppressed. Although
other authors such as Cooper had expressed the same view, Fuller

shows more sympathy toward the Indians than the average man or

woman on the street-22 She felt that she had learned much of the
soul of the Indian during her summer's travels and subsequent
reading. “There is a language of eye and motion which cannot be put
into words, and which teaches what words never can“ (SL153), she
wrote. She believed that her understanding of the Indians could not
have learned from books alone. She had to experience the “language
of eye and motion“ in order to read between the lines. “The Indian
cannot be looked at truly except by a poetic eye“ (SL20).

Her desire to improve the lot of the Indians foreshadows her
later social action on behalf of the down-trodden. The Indian, like
the white woman, the abused eagle, and all creatures not treated
with equality and humanity, deserved a spokesperson. Here in
Margaret Fuller, whose empathy for the misery and suffering of
others was abundant because she had experienced misery and

suffering herself, the oppressed of the world had found a champion.

115

Part of her journey into herself during the summer of 1843 was the
discovery on every side of other sad and lonely creatures besides
herself. The result of her observations and empathy was a
determination to do something important for these people as well
as for herself. For herself she would leave New England and make
something positive of her life; for them she would write and
perhaps at last have the opportunity to act in society on behalf of

others to right the wrongs and injustices she deplored.

CHAPTER FClJR

NOT JUST A SPIRITUAL VISION

Margaret Fuller's spiritual growth during the summer of 1843
is evident In W. though this fact was not
recognized by several of her critics. After he read Summe:_on_tne
Lakes, Orestes Brownson, a recent convert to Catholicism, labeled
Fuller “a heathen priestess.“ He felt that no one had done more to
corrupt the Boston community than Fuller: “For religion she

substitutes Art; for the Divinity who made us, and whom we should

worship she would give us merely the Beautiful.“1

Brownson's assessment of Fuller's spiritual status is anything
but correct. Arthur Fuller, her brother, a minister who edited the
1855 Woman_in_1he_Nlneteenm_Cemllnr, wrote as if in rebuttal that
“God seemed nearer to her than to any person I have ever known“ and
that “Jesus, the friend of man, can never have been more truly loved

and honored than she loved and honored him. I am aware that this is

116

117

strong language, but strength of language cannot equal the strength

of my conviction on a point where l have had the best opportunities

of judgment.“2

The summer of 1843 was particularly spiritual for Fuller. Her
experience of nature in the wilderness, her observations of the
Indians, and her summer reading and meditation were healing factors
that allowed her to put into perspective her past relationships and
get a clearer picture of her goals and aspirations. After this sum-
mer she was able to let go of the past and, spiritually matured, move
into a new professional realm. It was the spiritual and psycho-
logical healing of this summer's sojourn that allowed her to make
these decisive changes in her life.

Before the vacation she had been burdened with overwork. She
had conducted her famous Conversations in Boston in order to earn
money. She had tutored. She had continued her writing and study in
addition to caring for the large family of which she was in effect
head of household. She had agreed to edit the Dial for $200 but had
given up the editorship in March 1842 because, after all her work,
there had not been enough money to pay her. She was seriously

concerned about her health. She had written to Emerson:

118

There is a perceptible diminution of my strength, and
this winter which has been one of so severe labor I shall
not recover fully from for two or three months. Then if I
must take up a similar course next winter and have this
tie upon me for the summer I think I should sink under it
entirely.

l grieve to disappoint you after all the trouble you
have taken. I am also sorry myself, for if I could have
received a maintenance from this Dial, I could have done
my duties to it well, which I never have all this time,
and my time might have been given to my pen, while now
for more than three months I have been able to write no
line except letters. (LME lll:54)

She wrote to Elizabeth Hoar in January 1843, that she had paid
up the first quarter's household bills out of her mother's “quota“ but
still had “nine months' bread, fire light and shelter to provide“ for
her family. “I could not but congratulate myself that l persisted
against all the people's persuasion, in doing all I could the winter
previous, though it did hurt me“ (LME Ill:118). She longed for a brief
respite from responsibility: “I am tired now of books and pens and
thought no less,“ she wrote to Emerson, “and shall be glad when I
take wing for an idle outdoors life, mere sight and emotion“

(LME Ill:124).

By July her trip was already having a beneficial effect,

according to a letter to her brother Richard:

119

You will be glad to hear that I feel overpaid for

coming here. Much is my life enriched by the images of
the great Niagara, of the vast lakes, the heavenly
sweetness of the prairie scenes, and above all by the
lovely region where I would so gladly have lived. My
health too is materially benefitted. I hope to come back
better fitted for toil and care, as well as with the
beauteous memories to sustain me in them. (LME
Hkl33)

To Sam and Anna Ward she wrote early in August, “I am wonderfully
the gainer in strength and spirit for my summer“ (LME lll:136). To
Mary Rotch she wrote, “When in the country I have enjoyed myself
highly and my health has improved day by day“ (LME Ill:140)

Fuller's spirit was beginning to heal as well as her body. She
was in her frequent solitude able to assess her life. She had written
in January to Mary Rotch,

The winter has been to me a very happy one in

mine own mind, giving new clues and showing

many passages already partially trod of the great
labyrinth lined like the others with the accumulated

crystals of ages reflecting the purest light in blazes
of glory. (LME lll:120)

During the summer vacation she was able to examine these “new
clues“ and “partially trod“ passages in order to find her way out of
the labyrinth she felt she was in.

Two metaphors Fuller uses often to indicate her plumbing of

her spiritual depths are mining for either gold or carbuncle and

120

digging in order to plant. Throughout SummeLeanLLakes, Fuller

refers to delving for underground resources that most people are too
“shallow“ to perceive and too timid to accept. In her January letter
to Mary Rotch, she puns lightly with the pronoun mine and the gerund
mining. In the mini-drama of Chapter II, she uses additional mining

metaphors. Three travelers, J., S., and M., are discussing the “water,

water everywhere“ near Niagara.3 J. (surely James Freeman Clarke)
announces that he prefers water to the other elements and would be
able to bear confinement in it. He jokes that M. (Margaret) would
probably like to be a salamander. “No!“ she answers, “that is too
equivocal a position.“ She would choose to be a gnome living in the
depths of the earth, her favorite element:

My people work in the secret, and their works praise
them in the open light; they remain in the dark because
only there such marvels could be bred. You call them
mean. They do not spend their energies on their own
growth, or their own play, but to feed the veins of
mother earth with permanent splendors, very different
from what she shows on the earth.

Think of passing a life, not merely in heaping to-
gether, but making gold. Of all dreams, that of the
alchemist is the most poetical, for he looked at the
finest symbol. Gold, says one of our friends, the hidden
light of the earth, it crowns the mineral, as wine the
vegetable order, being the last expression of vital

energy. (SL10-1 1)

121

When J. protests that “no really wise gnome would scoff at the
water,“ M. responds that “the earth is spirit made fruitful, -- life.
And its heart-beats are told in gold and wine“ (SL11). Fuller
identifies with the gnome rather than the sea spirit because she
looks deep in solid substance for hidden treasure, both organic and
inorganic: gold mined in the earth and the fruit of the vine which
grows in the earth. What is mined “in the secret“ is “very different“
from what is displayed “on the surface.“ On the surface “all things
glitter“; they are “all show and no substance.“

J. fails to comprehend her interest in earth. She chastises
him: “You talk as if you had always lived in that wild unprofitable
element you are so fond of, where all things glitter, and nothing is
gold; all show and no substance“ (SL10). For Fuller the real
“substance“ lies beneath the surface; it is an expression of the “vital
energy“ which produces gold and wine. She knows that her own
spirit is also full of unmined wealth.

In a letter from Fuller to Emerson that February, the same
metaphor had surfaced in her writing. Depth is equated with

individuality, which needs to “ferment“:

122

The daemons are not busy enough at the births of most
men. They do not give them individuality deep enough
for truth to take root in. Such shallow natures cannot
resist a strong head; its influence goes right through
them. It is not stopped and fermented long enough.

(LME Ill:121)

Vegetation that takes deep root represents to her solidity, truth, and
strength of character. Yet it may be, she writes in SummeLeLme
Lakes, that even “rude or greedy miners“ will unearth “some good
ore“ (SL79). If the new settlers, for example, have patience “to
learn the new spells which the new dragons require,“ they “will not
finally be disappointed of the promised treasure“ (SL75), and a home
will “grow up at last from the rich sod“ (SL75). Ever hopeful in the
face of disappointment and shallowness, Fuller is optimistic for
America as well as for herself. Yet she realizes that most people
will be satisfied with surface glitter and not “spend their energies
on their own growth“ - or even on “their own play.“ They have no
inclination to delve within and they have no sense of fantasy or
adventure.

Fuller's mixing of organic and inorganic images focuses less on
the surface features of the resulting treasure or plant than on the
underground mine or roots that produced them. Such a concentration

of interest on the hidden depths, the substance that most “shallow“

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individuals cannot see, reveals Fuller's concern with her own
interior development and her desire to perceive the truth by looking
beneath the surface and not being satisfied with a facade. Her trip
to the West opened new doors for her, for as she wrote to Caroline
Sturgis a year after her trip and the publication of the book that led

Horace Greeley to hire her, “Life opens again before me, longer

avenues, darker caves, adorned with richer crystals!“ (LME lll:219).4

In light-hearted fashion this conversation reveals Fuller's
earnest desire to mine her own inner life for the hidden gems it held.
“I would now steal away over golden sands, through silent flowery
meadows farther still through darkest forest 'full of heavenly vows'
into the very heart of the untrodden mountain where the carbuncle
has lit the way to veins of yet undreamed of diamond,“ she had
written to Cary Sturgis in 1840 (LME ll:168). “Frail [is man] indeed.
-- how frail! how impure! Yet often has the vein of gold displayed
itself amid the baser ores,“ she was to write in W
W5 The image of gold ( representing the ideal)
springing from amid the baser ores (the actual) was an important
one for her. It suggested an alchemy of the spirit which was

possible, a serendipitous discovery within. One had only to search

 

124

for the hidden gems and precious metals: carbuncle, gold, diamonds.
“Knock and it shall be opened: seek and ye shall find. It is
demonstrated; it is a maxim“ (WNS19).

Fuller's empathy and identification are with the earth. Fire,
wind, and water are not solid. Only the earth is firm and filled with
all of the riches of life beneath the surface. Nonetheless, she
admits, she has “learned to mix water with [the wine], and stamp
upon [her] gold the heads of kings, or the hieroglyphics of worship“
(SL11). i.e., although her primary empathy is with one element, she
has conditioned herself to accept the others in order to live in
society. J. calls her sentiments “shocking.“ “I thought that Bacchic
energy of yours was long since repressed“ (SL11). Fuller's
speculations about “Bacchic“ energy and alchemy were enough to
incur the wrath of Orestes Brownson, who wrote in response to
Summe;_on_tne_Lakes that “her notions are crude, and the materials

she has collected lie fermenting in her intellectual stomach, and

generate all manner of strange and diseased fantasies.“6
However, Fuller's spiritual vision is clear. She sees the earth
as God's temple. The veil of the temple must be penetrated gradually

by perceptive eyes. Then the seer may mine the depths of life for

 

125

hidden treasure: truth, fidelity, courage, and nobility. But her new
spiritual vision goes beyond Emerson's contemplation of spiritual
truth. Although in NatuLe he had paraphrased as a worthy precept

Francis Bacon's maxim that “good thoughts are no better than good

dreams, unless they be executed“? Emerson seemed to have no
stratagem for action. For Fuller, who had a more passionate nature,
the spirit absolutely had to be made concrete: “What is done
interests me more than what is thought and supposed. Every fact is
impure, but every fact contains in it the juices of life. Every fact is
a clod, from which may grow an amaranth or a palm“ (SL81).

Fuller's focus on wine, the fruit of the vine, as well as gold,
the loot of the vein, indicates her interior wish to mature, to ripen,
during this summer. Her interest in the fruit of the earth on this
western trip is especially significant in that the West is arche-
typically associated with fertility. Thoreau was to develop the

same idea in his essay “Walking“: Ex Oriente qu, ex Occidente FRUX.

From the East light; from the West fruit.“8 To Thoreau, as to

Emerson, the future lay in the West, “and the earth seems more

unexhausted and richer on that side.“9

126

The West was a garden, a paradise, a new Eden, laden with
nourishing fruit in abundance. Here were few restrictions, few
boundaries. “There was neither wall nor road in Eden,“ Fuller
writes. In the West, vast prairies stretch on endlessly. “What is
limitless is alone divine“ (SL40), she notes. She describes one place
of “singular beauty“ in Illinois, “a beauty of soft, luxuriant wildness“
(SL28). Her description of “a peaceful herd“ (SL27), “velvet lawns,“
and “frequent deer“ suggests a prelapsarian wild abundance and
innocence. For her the journey west was an excursion into Eden, a
last refreshing return to innocence and peace where she could
examine her inner life. “. . . it seemed not necessary to have any
better heaven, or fuller expression of love and freedom than in the
mood of nature here“ (SL28).

Another image Fuller uses to suggest hidden spiritual depth
that must be discovered appears early in W when
she is at Niagara. She observed the whirlpool beneath the falls: “the
slight circles that mark the hidden vortex, seem to whisper myster-
ies the thundering voice above could not proclaim, - a meaning as
untold as ever“ (SL5). Here again the focus is on the hidden mystery

of life. She notes that from the British side the Falls are seen “in

127

their veils“ (SL4), a much-used transcendental trope to which

Emerson had also alluded in his 1836 Naluxe: “behind nature,

throughout nature, spirit is present.“10 Hawthorne, too, was to use
the image of the veil that hides spirit from the naked eye in his Ine
Slllhedale_fiomange, which has as its center the Fuller-like Zenobia.

Although nature wears a veil, one can penetrate that veil and
find the richness within. “All places like all persons I know have
beauty which may be discovered by a thoughtful and observing mind,“
Fuller had written a year before her journey (LME lll:81). On her
journey she managed to look beneath the veil of nature, for after her
trip she wrote, “Surely I never had so clear an idea before of the
capacity to bless of mere Earth, merely the beautiful Earth, when
fresh from the original breath of the creative spirit“ (LME, Ill:169).
In the West she had had an opportunity to experience nature in its
freshness, as though it had just been created.

Fuller's interest in the natural world as God's revelation is
apparent in Wakes. She confesses her love and
reverence for God at Niagara. “Then arose in my breast a genuine
admiration, and a humble adoration of the Being who was the

architect of this and of all“ (SL9). Her procrastination about going

128

directly to the falls as soon as she arrived stemmed from “a feeling
of my unworthiness to enter this temple which nature has erected to
its God“ (SL8). Yet she felt worthy enough to enter the natural
“temple“ of Ross's Grove in Illinois, a gathering of large trees she
had entered at sunset. The tree trunks formed “pillars for grand
cathedral aisles. There was space enough for crimson light to
stream through upon the floor of water which the shower had left.
As we slowly plashed through, I thought I was never in a better

place for vespers' (SLZS).

With Emerson she could say that “all things . . . preach to us.“11
God is present in nature and can be perceived by one who has a true
eye. He who has true vision must first look within, for “each
phenomenon has its roots in the faculties and affections of the mind.

Whilst the abstract question occupies your intellect, nature brings

it in the concrete.“12 As one who had the true “poetic eye,“ Fuller
discerned the spiritual meaning in nature. “That Power which daily
makes me understand the value of the little wheat amid the field of
tares, and shows me how the kingdom of heaven is sown on earth
like a grain of mustard seed is good enough to me“ (LME III: 114).

Fuller had first heard Emerson's stirring and controversial

129

essay ualum, in 1836, the year of its publication, when Emerson
himself read it to her during her first visit to his home. She did not
read it herself until 1840, when she took it to the woods to consider
again, but she was very familiar with its contents, for the essay
expressed the essence of Emerson's thoughts. The essay encouraged
the development of one's “inward and outward senses“ in order to
establish an “original relation to the universe,“ to create one's own
world by purifying one's soul. “The ruin or the blank that we see
when we look at nature, is in our own eye,“ Emerson argued. If

anything in the world seems awry, it is because “man is disunited

with himself.“13 One goes to nature to seek oneself, but one cannot
see all that nature has to offer unless he makes himself whole.
Nature is medicinal. It puts problems in perspective. Fuller
wrote about the healing potential of the West from Chicago: “There
seems to be room enough, for labor to pause, and man to fold his
arms and gaze, forgetting poverty and care. . . .“ (LME lll:140). After
the trip she wrote, “I feel much refreshed even by this brief
intimacy with nature in an aspect of large and unbroken lineaments“

(LMF. Ill:169).

Nature is friendly, a mother. She “stretcheth out her arms to

130

embrace man,“ wrote Emerson.“ In W. Fuller,

too, uses the image of a kindly mother nature who would accept all
kinds of children. “To me . . . it was delightful to look upon a scene
where nature still wore her motherly smile and seemed to promise
room . . . for the delicate, the thoughtful, even the indolent or
eccentric“ (SL38). Like a good mother, nature would comfort and
heal, but one must come to an understanding of nature gradually, “for
nature always refuses to be seen by being stared at“ (SL17).
But he who has gone to sleep in childish ease on her lap,

or leaned an aching brow upon her breast, seeking there

comfort with full trust as from a mother, will see all a

mother's beauty in the look she bends upon him. (SL17)

Only the person who lived in harmony with nature could comprehend

nature. Emerson had said, “A life in harmony with Nature, the love of

truth and of virtue, will purge the eyes to understand her text.“15
Fuller believed that she had “really seen these regions“ (SL17), but
only after “a daily and careless familiarity“ did she enter into
nature's beauty.

She was concerned about the environment, lamenting that so
many trees had been cut down already by the settlers, but recon-

ciling herself to the fact. “Thus, I will not grieve that all the noble

131

trees are gone already from this island“ (SL18), she says of Manitou.
She consoled herself with believing that a sort of “Medea's virtue“
would reproduce them in the form of “new intellectual growths,
since centuries cannot again adorn the land with such“ (SL18).
Fuller accepted what she could not change, the destruction of the
environment, and attempted to extract a positive lesson from the
scene. She could hope that at least there would be a “new order“
from this “chaos.“ She is celebrating the new order to come rather
than merely reconciling herself stoically to something she cannot
correct.

Both Fuller and Emerson are in agreement about the spiritual
value of nature, but Fuller goes beyond Emerson into the realm of the
supernatural in W. Whereas he expressed
reservations about mesmerism and spiritualism, Fuller had always
had an interest in these matters. Mesmerism was, in Emerson's
cpinion, “mumbo-jumbo“ (.lMlll 9:197) or like “peeping through the
keyhole.“ And yet, to Fuller, who was attempting during this summer
to establish her own “original relationship to the universe,“ it was
important to be open to anything that could lead her toward truth

and self-knowledge.

132

Beneath the material surface of nature lies God's masterpiece,
the spiritual core of the universe, the “mighty meaning“ Fuller
sought to woo. Consequently, she would leave no stone unturned in
her search for meaning. God's perfect creation lay beneath a veil of
materialism; one needed only to perceive rightly and one could be in
tune with creation. A new way of looking at things must be found,
and one could not demur at perceiving reality from angles that
others might consider obscure. Thus, in Fuller's vision as in
Emerson's and Thoreau's, the West, not the East, becomes the new
Eden; Indians become human, not savages; angels appear unawares,
and Fuller is ready to receive them. “If I sometimes entertain
guests who cannot pay with gold coin,“ she writes, “. . . that is better
than to lose the chance of entertaining angels unawares“ (SL82).

The story of the Seeress of Prevorst, the lengthiest
“digression“ in Wakes, has great spiritual import for
Fuller. However, because she knew that many men of her day had a
strong aversion to the idea of mesmerism, she felt the need to
justify her insertion of the story in SummeLon_lne_Lakes.
Spiritualism and women's rights were often linked by men who

wished to show how irrational women's rights advocates and other

133

intellectual women actually were. If these supposedly intelligent
women could be interested in something as inane and ungrounded as

spiritualism, how could one take seriously their demands for

equality?
In1855Luchstchman18bblund§elfltualism
.le .: e: .n 0: 0| 0 t: LI33SII :I l was

published in New York. It was a rather vicious satire on the ten-
dency of women's rights advocates to be mixed up in the area of
spiritualism. According to the author, one “Fred Folio,“ a woman is
powerful “in her own sphere,“ which, of course, is the home; she
should not get involved in areas which call for logic or rationality.
Women were, after all, emotional creatures who could not be
underStood but must be merely tolerated. Men could only humor
women when they went off on tangents:

You see these fits are apart of the female

constitution -- a kind of chronic, periodical

neuralgic spasm, and when they come on,
the only way is to keep still and let 'em

have 'em out.16
The attitude of the author toward spiritualism and women's rights

was expressed in his closing remarks:

134

SPIRITUALISM
AND
WOMAN'S RIGHTS!

Twins in their birth and ill begot;
Twins in their grave--there let 'em rot.17

Although this satire was written more than ten years after
SummeLeanLLakes, it is fairly clear that men in 1843 felt the
same disdain for spiritualism and women's rights. Otherwise Fuller
would not have felt defenSive about including the story of the
Seeress in her summer travel journal. In the face of such an
attitude, Fuller was probably not doing herself and her eventual
women's rights manifesto of 1845 (WomaLlnMneleeanzen;
lury) any favor by going into so much detail about the Seeress of
Prevorst in Wakes. Indeed, Emerson was disdainful
about this aspect of Fuller's personality:

I observed that, with her literary riches, her invention
and wit, her boundless fun and drollery, her light sa-
tire, and the most entertaining conversation in America,
consisted a certain pathos of sentiment, and a march of

character, threatening to arrive presently at the shores
and plunge into the sea of Buddhism and mystical tran-

ces. (Mem. l:308)

Fuller's fascination with the tale of the Seeress of Prevorst reveals

a side of her that is often missed or purposely ignored. It is

135

interesting to focus on this fanciful, supernatural side of Sarah

Margaret Fuller, considered by her male friends to be a very rational

bluestocking with a “masculine mind.“18 In her delving into the
supernatural realm Fuller reveals the intensity of her unrelenting
spiritual search. Her decision to enter a realm considered illogical
and ridiculous by those who honored her “with a portion of friendly
confidence“ (SL78) reveals her courage and risk-taking capacity as
well.

She expresses her own fascination with mesmerism in Summer
on_tl1e_Lakes and feels that she must justify her interest, probably
to counter the skepticism and scorn that Emerson would express
over her mining the realm of the supernatural. Consequently, she
prefaces her discussion of InLSeeressmLErenocst, a book she was
reading on her trip, with an imaginary discussion with Good Sense,
Old Church, and Self-Poise. These voices represent various views of
mankind toward the question of spiritualism and prophecy. Fuller
calls herself “Free Hope“ in this exchange of ideas.

Good Sense cannot believe that Free Hope would take any
interest in spiritualism at all. He advises her to focus her attention

on the natural world and leave the supernatural alone. Free Hope

136

concedes the point that the natural world is indeed of monumental
importance. She underscores the point by citing the romantic creed
that every day is a miracle for the human mind to observe and
admire. “But how,“ asks Free Hope, “are our faculties sharpened to
do it? Precisely by apprehending the infinite results of every day“
(SL79). It is not, after all, the farmer who looks into the signifi-
cance of an event, says Free Hope, but the poet and the dreamer, and
there were poets and dreamers questioning the “flux and influx“ of
life long before any attempts were made to declare animal magne-
tism (mesmerism) a science.

Fuller/Free Hope announces that all her days “are touched by
the supernatural,“ for she feels “the pressure of hidden causes, and
the presence, sometimes the communion of unseen powers“ (SL79).
Thus, she believes she should at least give the idea of spiritualism a
hearing, since “in the eyes of pure intelligence, an ill-grounded hasty
reaction“ (SL80) might be a “greater sign of weakness than an ill-
grounded and hasty faith“ (SL80). One should keep an open mind.

Old Church counters that Free Hope is “always so quick-witted
and voluble“ that she falls to see how often she might err “and even,

perhaps, sin and blaspheme“ (SL80). God did not mean us to know

137

everything; we violate his will by trying to speculate on the
unknown. “We waste our powers“ and, “becoming morbid and vision-
ary, are unfitted to obey positive precepts, and perform positive
duties“ (SL80).

She responds that theologians themselves deal with the super-
natural and inexplicable: the origin and nature of sin, the destiny of
the soul, and the whole plan of the spirit who made mankind - are
these not in fact matters that go beyond what can be experienced by
the senses? She feels that man's inquisitive spirit is good. Let man
aspire as the trees aspire toward heaven. “Only let it be a vigorous,
not a partial or sickly aspiration. Let not the tree forget its root“
(SL80).

She feels that no inquiry into the meaning of things should be
disallowed.

As to magnetism, that is only a matter of fancy. You
sometimes need just such a field in which to wander
vagrant, and if it bear a higher name, yet it may be
that, in last result, the trance of Pythagoras might be
classed with the more infantine transports of the
Seeress of Prevorst. (SL81)

“I know of no inquiry which the impulse of man suggests that is

forbidden to the resolution of man to pursue“ (SL80). And thus she

138

passes into the longest “digression“ in her book, the story of
Frederica Hauffe, the Seeress of Prevorst. Arthur Fuller eventually
deleted this entire story from his edition of SummeLon_tne_Lakes,
and other critics have condemned it as “irrelevant.“

Prior to the trip Fuller had announced in a letter to Emerson
that she intended to read W a “really good
book“ (LME lll:124) by Justinius Kerner. It had not yet been
translated into English, but of course Fuller had translated works of
Goethe and other Germans for publication and was entirely fluent in
German. When she finally had the opportunity to read it, she had just
returned from Milwaukee, “much fatigued.“ Reading would be
relaxing and a change from her peripatetic schedule. She points out
that the book was in “strong contrast“ with the life around her. Her
need to balance her physical journey with a mental excursion is
clear; a trip into the natural world is balanced with a trip into the
supernatural world. The story she chose to read was of another
realm. “Very strange was this vision of an exalted and sensitive
existence, which seemed to invade the next sphere, in contrast with
the spontaneous, instinctive life, so healthy and so near the ground I

had been surveying“ (SL77-78).

139

The book had been published in Germany twelve years earlier.
Fuller had only seen reference to the book two years before her trip.
Her curiosity had been aroused by a sarcastic article about it in the
Dublin_Magazlne, so she had purchased it for the first “leisure days“
she would have. The author of the book, Dr. Justinius Kerner, was a
physician and a mystic who had written a biography of Franz Mesmer.

Ann Douglas's suggestion that Fuller was only interested in
reporting about history and politics does not take into account
Fuller's sense of the fantastic and her delight in romance. Fuller
herself freely admits that she has this side to her personality and is
proud of it. Even Socrates hada sense of romance on his deathbed,
Fuller notes, “when he bade his disciples 'sacrifice a cock to
Aesculapius'“ (SL80). Although her father had forbidden her to read
novels when she was a child, thinking them too frivolous for a
serious student, Fuller nonetheless read as many as she could,
sometimes making “deals“ with her father if he would allow her this
privilege. “You will let me read Zeluco? will you not and no
conditions“ (LME l:94). Even on this summer vacation her interest in
novels was evident. She admits that she and Sarah Clarke retired to

their staterooms aboard ship “to forget the wet, the chill and

140

steamboat smell in their just bought new world of novels“ (SL12).
She had a vivid imagination and a delight in fancy.

Although the story of the Seeress of Prevorst is supposedly a
true account, it has all the earmarks of a novel. Its opening
sentence has an almost fairy-tale quality, not unlike the stories of
Irving: “Aside from Lowenstein, a town of Wirtemberg, on mountains
whose highest summit is more than eighteen hundred feet above the
level of the sea, lies in romantic seclusion, surrounded on all sides
by woods and hills, the hamlet of Prevorst“ (SL83). This long
periodic sentence sets the scene for the story of mystery and the
supernatural which follows.

That Fuller identifies with this young Seeress must be obvious
to anyone who knows Fuller's biography. Like the Seeress, Fuller
suffered from eye strain, myopia, and severe headaches. Like the
Seeress, she had a “more intellectual nature“ (SL84) which
distinguished her from other girls of her circle. Like the Seeress,
Fuller was known to have somnambulated and may also have
displayed some of the “high nervous excitement“ that was charac-
teristic of the German girl (SL78). The book must have appealed to

her because she recognized much of herself in the Seeress.

141

Fuller recounts the Seeress's life history. After the young
woman's marriage to a laboring man, “she was obliged to forsake her
inner home, to provide for an outer, which did not correspond with
it“ (SL86). Fuller, too, had often sacrificed or postponed an
examination of her own spiritual needs because of the necessity to
provide a home for her family. There is a sense of anomaly in this
story: the outer shell does not correspond with the inner core.

The Seeress began falling into trances from which she would
shout orders to those around her. She had strange revelations and
the power of discerning spirits, thoughFuller believes that “the
ghosts she saw were projections of herself into objective reality“
(SL94), just as man projects himself into nature. One amazing
power of the Seeress, whom Fuller calls a “half enfranchised angel,“
was her ability to see different sights in each eye. In her left eye
she saw the body of the person she observed; in her right, his “real
or destined“ self. She saw the future in mirrors and cups of water
-- even in soap bubbles.

Here in a nutshell is Fuller's own interest in seeing the world
in a new way - by means of a new spiritual vision -- and then

communicating the vision to others. Michael Lopez has suggested

142

that there is a certain “double vision“ in the works of

Transcendentalist authors” - in this case, double vision is
literally true. The Seeress's ability to “see“ the “real“ person
beneath the facade parallels Fuller's own interest in what lies
beneath the surface. But the ability to communicate the experience
of correct vision is also important. Fuller comments that we all
live in life-circles, such as the ones the Seeress drew:

. . . all who observe themselves have the same sense of

exactness and harmony in the revolutions of their

destiny. But few attend to/ what is simple and

invariable in the motions of their minds, and still

fewer seek out means clearly to express them

to others“ (SL95-96).

The “fashioning spirit“ of the universe did not intend to
destroy man's fitness for this world by introducing into conscious-
ness the condition of the next world. Rather people were meant to
develop all aspects of their personality, even their supernatural
capabilities: “[Man] was meant to be the historian, the philosopher,
the poet, the kind of this world, no less than the prophet of the next“
(.SL 98). All aspects of the personality are part of life and none

should be discounted, even the more mystical side.

on who can say
Where lies the boundary? What solid things

143

That daily mock our senses, shall dissolve
Before the might within, while shadowy forms
Freeze into stark reality, defying

The force and will of man. (SL49)20

Fuller's awareness of the vacillations between spirit world
and physical world presented no problems for her. Both poles
provided learning experiences, and she was determined to take
advantage of all learning opportunities to clarify her spiritual vision
and so improve the condition of her own psyche. As a truth-seeking
romantic writer interested in sharing her personal experiences with
her readers, she was determined to tell others of these vacillations
-- not only between spirit and physical worlds, but all vacillations
the human mind experienced. She knew that disparities and
disappointments as well as joys were part of the human condition.
Disparities may be dealt with in a variety of ways: one can become a
skeptic and discount the ideal; one can ignore the existence of evil,
as many have erroneously accused Emerson of doing; or one can
acknowledge the disparity and express both the ideal and the actual
in one's writing.

Modern criticism of the romantics is focusing more on this
internal vacillation between poles as a kind of honest “writing out“

of the problems of the human condition. Julie Ellison has pointed out

 

144

that “romantic texts are now regarded as philosophically unstable,

psychologically ambivalent, and ideologically mixed,“21 precisely
because of the vacillation in the texts of romantic writers. Yet it is
just such tension between opposites that the astute modern critic
must take into account. The contrasting voices of affirmation and
doubt, each necessary to the existence of the other, are important to
recognize as aspects of self. “Romantic literature is better seen as

a literature involved in the restless process of self-examination,“

according to T. Rajan.22 Self-examination necessitates searching
all facets of the personality ranging from despair to happiness. It
commands an acceptance of self as divided nature. As Lopez notes,
“the skeptical and integrative impulses are both deeply human and

only a criticism sufficiently attentive to both impulses can be fully

humanized.“23

In SummeLgn_tne_Lakes, Fuller recognizes the conflict
between ideal and actual and is quick to assure the reader that she
will not be one who sugars over the actual in order to present a rosy
picture of the world she visited. “I will not . . . laud and be

contented with all I meet, when it conflicts with my best desires

145

and tastes“ (SL18). Neither will she have the “stupid narrowness to
distrust or defame“ (SL18) what she sees. Rather she will “woo the
mighty meaning“ of each scene and try to discover how a “new order“
can come from any chaos she observes. This seems to me to be a
very positive and healthy response. Consequently, those who, like
Stephen Adams, see SummeLoanLLakes as a “sad“ book because it
deals with “disjuncture“ fail to grasp Fuller's positive and active
response to the disparities she observes and experiences in life.
Fuller's attention to both poles of experience is an honest recog-
nition of the human condition in her new spiritual vision. Yet her
preference appears to be redemption: in her writing she poses a
situation of despair and then makes an affirmative statement, not to
be simplistically contented with all she sees, but to recognize a
purpose or a “new order“ in creation.

Such searching after the true meaning of existence can be seen
in every aspect of W. Fuller learns from
experience, both temporal and spiritual; she learns from her own
observations and the testimonials of other's observations; and she

Ieams from her reading. In SummeLeanLLakes she tells what she

has learned, hoping perhaps to have an influence on others or to

146

change viewpoints. In that sense, the book has a didactic edge,
reflecting the belief that writing about a subject will raise social
consciousness and lead to social change. However, the book also has
a self-reflective quality that demonstrates her concern with
understanding her own life, her fluctuations, and her goals for the
future. In this respect, the act of writing SummeLon_the_Lakes was
primarily redemptive and affirmative, not disjunctive.

Fuller's interest in “flux,“ as Emerson called this vacillation,
stemmed from her own experience of fluctuation. She wrote about
homelessness and despair in her personal letters, but she also
experienced great joy in the realms of nature and the arts, which for
her were closest to the ideal. She focuses on both despair and joy in
her travel book: the loneliness and solitude of the prairies and
Mackinac Island and the joy of various natural scenes she takes in
and memories she has of various paintings, musical compositions,
and books.

i For her the human spirit has within it powers of regeneration
or resurrection, resilient powers that allow one to be defeated and
then to rise again renewed. “The good knight may come forth scarred

and maimed from the unequal contest, shorn of his strength and

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unsightly to the careless eye, but the same fire burns within and
deeper ever, he may be conquered but never subdued“ (LME lll:86). She
saw the same restoring powers reflected in nature. At Niagara,
“there is no escape from the weight of a perpetual creation; all other
forms and motions come and go, the tide rises and recedes . . . an
indefatigable motion . . . it is in this way I have most felt the
grandeur -- somewhat eternal, if not infinite“ (SL1).

Her own vacillation is rhetorically reflected in We
Lakes in metaphors of “flux.“ For example, Fuller compares Chicago
to a cardiovascular valve. Both Chicago and Buffalo open and shut
“as the life-blood rushes from east to west, and back again from
west to east“ (SL19). Earlier near Cleveland on Lake Erie, she noted
that land and water “meet to mingle, are always rushing together,
and changing places; a new creation takes place beneath the eye“ (SL
12). She had felt the same way at Niagara Falls, where she saw that
“mutability and unchangeableness were united“ (SL 9). There the
echoes of the thundering falls give the effect of a “spiritual repeti-
tion throughout all the spheres“ (SL4).

Margaret Fuller's spiritual renewal during the summer of 1843

enabled her to make major decisions about her life when she

148

returned to New England that fall. Because of the summer's healing
solitude in a different environment, she had been able to examine her
life and her goals. Her spiritual vision included nature and nature's
God as well as supernatural elements together in a healing role for
those perceptive enough not only to seek the depths of truth but also
to act upon them.

After writing Summemrubelalses and llllcman.in.tbe

Njneteenlniemunr in quick succession, she left New England to

work for Horace Greeley as a critic for the New York mm.
She became increasingly interested in social issues. She visited a
women's prison in New York during the summer of 1844. She wrote
sympathetically of the Indians in her Idlmne articles. And in
Europe, where she went in 1846 as a foreign correspondent for the
paper, she became increasingly involved in political issues,
ultimately committing herself to the revolution for Italian
independence from Austria.

The summer of 1843 had enabled Fuller to make this pivot
from the passivity of devotion to art and literature to the activity
of political revolution. She had pierced the veil of nature with her

steady and truth-seeking eye and seen into the core of her own life.

149

She had mined the labyrinths of gold within and found her own
wealth and treasure. But she realized this summer that she could no
longer be content to stay in Concord with Emerson and her other
Transcendentalist friends. She must move on into a “full, free life“
(SL82) to stand in her own age “with all its waters flowing round“
and “beat with the living heart of the world.“ She had come to
realize that she could not do that in Concord.

Many people might ask about Margaret Fuller: “Were her moral

qualities, her beneficent life, the results of a renewed heart?“24

Arthur Fuller answers the question in this way:

Surely, if the Saviour's test, “By their fruits ye shall
know them,“ be the true one, Margaret Ossoli was
preeminently a Christian. If a life of constant self-
sacrifice, -- if devotion to the welfare of kindred and
the race, - if conformity to what she believed God's
law, so that her life seeemed ever the truest form of
prayer, active obedience to the Deity, - in fine, if
carrying Christianity into all the departments of action,
so far as human infirmity allows, then . . . [we] must feel

her to have been a Christian.“25
Both before and after this summer's journey, Fuller did devote

herself to the betterment of mankind. She was “the angel of the sick

chamber“26 to her brothers as a child and a ministering angel to the

dying in Italy, a devoted friend, daughter, wife, and mother.

150

However, during the summer of 1843 she moved ahead spiritually,
turned her back on Concord in order to “beat with the living heart of
the world“ (SL82), trusting in “the interpreting spirit“ to bring her
out all right at last. “Whether this be the best way is of no
consequence, if it be the one individual character points out.“

For one, like me, it would be vain

From glittering heights the eyes to strain;

l the truth can only know,

Tested by life's most fiery glow.

Seeds of thought will never thrive

Till dews of love shall bid them live. (SL 82)
Her life was a testimony to this commitment to the law of love.
“Whatever is, is right, if only men are steadily bent to make it so, by
comprehending and fulfilling its design“ (SL82). During this summer
she had comprehended the design of things through her enhanced
spiritual vision of a universe in which loving actions arise from the

inner personal depths of contemplated truth. Now she was to move

on to implement that design through her writing and her life.

CHAPTER FIVE

CONCLUSION - IT IS NOT GOOD ENOUGH MERELY TO BE HERE

SummeLon__the_Lakes,_ln_1aea is a record of Margaret Fuller's

self-creation. As she wrote down the highlights of her summer's
journey, both interior and exterior, she came to know herself better
and shared this knowledge with her readers. “Since you are to share
with me such footnotes as may be made on the pages of my life
during this summer's wanderings, I should not be quite silent as to
this magnificent prologue to the, as yet, unknown drama“ (SL1). The
drama of her life was still to unfold; if this summer were but a
“magnificent prologue“ to the rest of her life, what a grand life that
was to be.

Here is no “sad“ book, as critics like Brownson were to suggest,
but a tale of great expectations, for what happened on that journey
to herself during the summer of 1843 led her toward a brilliant
future. She came to terms with herself, her disappointments and

aspirations, and was able to move on with her life in a very positive

151

152

direction.

She announces in the first paragraph that the only comment
she feels capable of making about the “spectacle“ of Niagara Falls is
“It is good to be here.“ This seemingly modest statement, which is
most likely a reference to Luke 9:33, recalls St. Peter's remark
following the Transfiguration of Jesus on the mountaintop. Although
the Transfiguration, a profound spiritual change impossible to
explain, is always associated with Christ, it is nonetheless neither
presumptuous nor blasphemous to use the term to refer to Fuller's
self-discovery during the summer of 1843, for her transformation
that summer was profoundly spiritual. To her, and to any careful
reader, the record of her journey is not an ordinary travel book but a

spiritual itinerary writ loud and clear.
According to Bell Gale Chevigny, both SummeLoanLLakas
and WomaanJheflmoteenszenmm must be seen in the context of

Fuller's ultimate revolutionary action in Italy. “Without this frame-

work they sometimes seem either self-indulgent or padded with

material of little relevance.“ Chevigny believes that W

mLLakes “reveals the insights of a swiftly maturing social

realism.“2 It must be noted, however, that Fuller's ultimate

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revolutionary activity in Italy was a natural outgrowth of her early
character and transcendental belief system rather than a completely
new turn for her. It was a step in a more concrete direction but
nonetheless a direct manifestation of her lifelong interest in
assisting suffering humanity.

It had been Ralph Waldo Emerson who had encouraged Fuller to

 

examine her own spiritual life, but she was during the summer of r
1843 to grow beyond his influence, although she would always be
grateful for his mentorship.

His influence has been more beneficial to me than
that of any American, and from him I first learned
what is meant by an inward life. Many other springs
have since fed the stream of living waters, but he
first opened the fountain. That the “mind is its own
place,“ was a dead phrase to me, till he cast light "
upon my mind. Several of his sermons stand apart
in memory, like landmarks of my spiritual history.
It would take a volume to tell what this one
influence did for me. But perhaps I shall some

time see that it was best for me to be forced to help

myself. (Mem. l,195)

Fuller was indeed forced to mine within herself for a spiritual
vision all her own during the summer of 1843. Although by 1841
Fuller had realized that Emerson and she were temperamentally ill-

matched, she had not entirely given up hope that there could be a

154

special bond between them. Her resolution early in their relation-

ship had been to be “his only friend.“3 She believed that a close
friendship with Emerson would both ennoble her and comfort him.
“There is enough of me would I but reveal it. Enough of woman to
sympathize with all his feelings, enough of man to appreciate all

thoughts I could be a perfect friend and it would make me a nobler

person.“4

However, by 1840, four years after she had met Emerson,
Fuller was evidently frustrated with what Chevigny calls Emerson's
“ambiguous signals“ which were “alternately inviting her to

approach with her vision and her society and withdrawing with

chill, lofty complacency.“5 In 1843, the summer of her western
journey, she came to grips with the fact that however much she
admired and respected Emerson, he was far too abstract and
apparently passive for her. She realized once and for all that she
must live a life of action well grounded on earth while he existed in
the rarifled atmosphere of the “snowy peaks“ (SL81) of abstraction.
Emerson himself had already decided that Margaret Fuller had too

much “force of blood,“ too much vitality. “She lived at a rate so

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much faster than mine, and which was violent compared with mine“
(Mem.l:228). He had been bewildered by her vivacity and sometimes
“shocking familiarity.“ In his response to an apparently frank letter
from Fuller which he later destroyed, he wrote on October 24, 1840:

. . . but ask me what I think of you and me, and I am put
to confusion. . . . There is a difference in our constitu-
tion. We use a different rhetoric. It seems as if we had
been born and bred in different nations. You say you
understand me wholly. You cannot communicate yourself
to me. I hear the words sometimes, but remain a
stranger to your state of mind. (LBWE, ll: 352-53)

And he wrote in his Journal in 1841:

I would that I could, I know afar off I cannot,

give the lights and shades, the hopes and outlooks

that come to me in these strange, cold-warm,

attractive repelling conversations with Margaret,

whom I always admire, most revere when l

nearest see, and sometimes love--yet whom I freeze,

and who freezes me to silence, when we seem to come

nearest. (,lMfl VI: 87).
Although he said sadly after her death, “I have lost in her my
audience,“ he nonetheless never was a sympathetic audience for her
because, as he wrote, “she remained inscrutable to me“ (Mem. l:228).
Consequently, the two seemed destined to a parting of the ways.

She finally realized that he was not as compatible a friend as

she had earlier believed he would be, for he would not leave his

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lofty mountaintop to walk as she wished to walk: “through all kinds
of places, even at the risk of being robbed in the forest, half
drowned at the ford, and covered with dust in the street“ (SL 81-
82). He walked “where I shall never take a step“ (LME Ill:209), she
wrote to him during the summer after the completion of her book.

“You are intellect,l am life“ (LME Ill:209), she wrote with resigna-

‘ y“-

tion. Emerson wished to remain in Concord, where“life . . . slumbers ‘
and steals on like the river,“ and she needed “the animating influ-
ences of Discord“ (LME Ill:213). He, like the Greeks, “polished . . .
marbles,“ but Fuller would only be content to be “In a state of
unimpeded energy“ and express herself in a way he could not. She
had learned much from him, but his “excellence“ was “wholly
unattainable“(LM,E Ill:209) to her.

It will be eight years next week since I first came

to stay in your house. How much of that influence

have I there received! Disappointments have come

but from a youthful ignorance in me which asked of

you what was not in your nature to give. (LME Ill:209)
“Ultimately,“ writes Chevigny, “his [Emerson's] refusal to

comprehend her 'wholly, mentally and morally' enabled her to

understand herself in a more meaningful way, with her mental and

emotional gifts joined in real historical action.“6 Fuller had not

157

been understood or read correctly by one whom she had sought to
call her dearest friend, and her sense of isolation had increased.
Nor had she read Emerson entirely correctly. She had idealized the
relationship and by 1844 realized the error of this perception

She had come to see during this summer and the writing time
aftenrvard that she must leave Emerson and Concord behind to pursue
her own desire to become actively involved in social reform. One
sees that Fuller was thinking out this imminent parting of the ways
as she journeyed in the West and aftenrvard while she was writing
W335. What Emerson had misunderstood or
misperceived in her was a passion for life that few could equal.
Another friend of Fuller's summed up this zeal: “Every deep observer
of character would have found the explanation of what seemed
vehement or too high-strung, in the longing of a spirited woman to
break every trammel that checked her growth or fettered her
movement“ (Mam. ll:21).

It is clear from her letters that she made her final and
somewhat bittersweet farewell to Emerson during the summer of
1844, right after the completion of her travel book. Chevigny

maintains that Fuller's realizations about Emerson were made

158

several years earlier and that in l844 she was “blithe“ and “calm“ in
regard to the relationship with Emerson. I believe that her final
emotional break with him was in the summer of 1844, after the
previous summer's trip and after a winter of solitude and writing.

Her summer's transformation was the realization that it was
not, to paraphrase St. Peter, good enough merely to be here. One
must be doing something; one must be in the process of becoming.
During this summer she focused on her own spiritual renewal and
committed herself to a future of active involvement, although at
this point she was not yet aware of what that involvement would
entail.

Chevigny observes that W.
which Fuller wrote immediately after Wakes, shows
“two sorts of advances“ in Fuller's development: “a quickened sense

of independence and of psychological integrity and a new attention

to the claims of society and politics.“7 She had gained her indepen-

dence from Emerson, detaching herself from his influence during

her writing of Wises, and with this detachment came

a certain psychological integrity. She had only herself to count on,

and she knew who she was. With the confidence inspired by her new

159

spiritual vision, she was able to turn her attention, then, to the
oppressed and downtrodden of the world, people she saw as needy,
peOpIe who needed her to help right (write) the wrongs she observed.
Such oppressed people included American Indians, lonely and
over-worked wives of white settlers, abused and wounded animals,
and others wounded in body or spirit. Her empathy with the
oppressed stemmed from her own sense of homelessness and
isolation, perhaps underscored this summer by her being alone in a
new environment away from all she knew. There she had met nature
face to face, reading all its lineaments; there she had delved deep
into the veins of her own spiritual richness and made decisions that
would affect the rest of her life.
After her trip she was much refreshed both physically and

spiritually:

Now my health is almost restored, if not to its

native tone, yet to one that enables me to walk

forward with some energy. Some objects have

been attained, others willingly given up, and I am

much better able to meet outward perplexities

without violation of inner peace. (LME lll:150)

There was a calm that had not existed before the trip, and yet there

was a new energy to “walk forward“ and meet difficulty.

160

On May 23, 1844, her thirty-fourth birthday, she wrote the last
line of her book “just before dinner time“ (LME Ill:197). It is
significant that after her first major creative endeavor she chose to
walk among the dead in the stillness of Mt. Auburn cemetery. “Then
I went to Mount Auburn, and walked gently among the graves“ (LME
Ill:202). It may have been that she knew that her life in New
England was drawing to a close. It is clear from a letter to Emerson
that fall that she had been thinking about her own death, for she had
begun to send Emerson all of her poems for safekeeping:

I enclose a little poem written here which I wish

you would have put with the Fourth July ones: you
will then have a complete inventory of my emblems
and trappings “in case of death.“ Have you safe those
I gave you of the All Saints Day etc? I cannot find my
copy and though I presume it is only mislaid, feel
uneasy lest they should pass out of existence, for to

me they are the keys of dear homes, in the past. (LME
Hk244)

Her Fourth of July poem from Wakes, the
Ganymede poem, and other poems from her travel book she
considered “keys“ and “emblems.“ Emerson was the keeper of the
keys. Clearly they were representative to her of her spiritual
growth and development which she did not want lost.

Such focus on death might appear to be morbid, but it reveals

161

several rather interesting features about Fuller's interior
development. First of all, she was able to plan for the future, for a
time when she would not be around. It reveals a desire for control
of her own created works. It reveals the trust she has in Emerson
(which was unfortunately unfounded, for after her death he did not
print the things she had entrusted him with and thus defied her
wishes). It also reveals the same sort of idealism and experience of
perfection that Keats must have had when he wrote “for many a
time/I have been half in love with easeful Death.“ On her journey she
must have felt moments of such rare joy that she deplored the
thought of returning to the tensions and cares of her New England
life.

Several of the poems she wrote for Wakes were

good enough to win the praise of Poe, who commented after reading

her book that her poetry was “brimful of the poetic sentiment.“8 If

one examines her poems in Wises, one can find that
they do reflect her state of mind during the trip. Several have

already been examined in this paper: her Ganymede poem and her

Indian poem. But Wakes is full of the original poetry

of Margaret Fuller, and it is interesting to see how the poems

162

reflect her summer's spiritual growth.

Although her poem “To Edith, On Her Birthday“ is perhaps
dedicated to Emerson's child Edith, who had been born in November,
the poem seemsto be to Emerson himself.

If the same star our fates together bind,
Why are we thus divided, mind from mind?

Emerson's birthday was two days after Fuller's; they had been born
under “the same star,“ and yet their minds were divided.

Our aspiration seeks a common aim,

Why were we tempered of such differing frame?

«But 'tis too late to turn this wrong to right;

Too cold, too damp, too deep, has fallen the night.
There was no hope for reconciliation of differences. Too much had
happened; there was no going back. And yet Fuller seems to have
some hope for the future:

And yet, the angel of my life replies,

Upon that night a Morning Star shall rise,

Fairer than that which ruled the temporal birth,

Undimmed by vapors of the dreamy earth;

It says, that, where a heart thy claim denies,

Genius shall read its secret ere it flies:

The earthly form may vanish from thy side,

Pure love will make thee still the spirit's bride.
Love that transcends the earthly will be hers. She wishes for her

friends, she says, that they may “see, and do, and be more“ (SL148),

163

especially those friends “who have before them a greater number of
birthdays,“ and especially those “of a more healthy and unfettered
existence.“ Although this poem is dedicated to “Edith,“ Fuller has
also just said that August 30 is “the birth-day of a near friend“
(SL148). One could think that she means anyone, yet several verses
in the poem indicate that she was thinking about her relationship
with Emerson.
Immediately following this poem to Edith, Fuller inserts

another poem about parting lovers:

When no gentle eyebeam charms;

No fond hope the bosom warms;

Of thinking the lone mind is tired--

Nought seems bright to be desired;

Music, be thy sails unfurled,

Bear me to thy better world;

O'er a cold and weltering sea,

Blow thy breezes warm and free;

By sad sighs they ne'er were chilled,

By sceptic spell were never stilled:

Take me to that far-off shore,

Where lovers meet to part no more:

There doubt, and fear and sin are o'er,
The star of love shall set no more.

She reveals a great deal about herself and her longing for love and

companionship in these poems. She was thinking of parting with

164

Emerson and with much that she had loved in her past, and in a
romantic way she was wishing for “that far-off shore“ where there
would be no goodbyes and no sadness. As she sat alone near Lake
Superior at Mackinac Island “by the faint moonshine“ (SL149), she
felt melancholy and lonely. “It was a thoughtful hour“ (SL148), she
writes.

Wakes contains at least ten poems by Margaret
Fuller, some utterly lovely, such as the ballad “of love and sorrow“
that Poe praised, very Coleridgean in its simplicity. A lonely
maiden dreams of a hunter striding out of the woods to offer her
love:

He takes her hand, and leads her on;

She should have waited there alone,

For he was not her chosen one.

He leans her head upon his breast,

She knew 'twas not her home of rest,

But ah! she had been sore distrest.
She wakes from the dream realizing that she has been disloyal to the
knight for whom she was waiting. If one cannot endure suffering and
loneliness, one should not expect a royal reward:

Yet though of day makes dream of night:
She is not worthy of the knight,

165

The inmost altar burns not bright.

If loneliness thou canst not bear,

Cannot the dragon's venom dare,

Of the pure meed thou shouldst despair.
Clearly Fuller was admonishing herself in this poem to endure her
loneliness and be true to her inner dream of “the knight in shining
armor“ who would be her soulmate if she but waited for him. Her
romantic expectation of some good future for herself as a reward
for her loneliness rings out in this poem. The poem reveals her
fanicful nature, her love of ballad and romance, and her hope that
true love will come her way if she is faithful to her inner nature, to
the voice within.

As many of these poems and some of the autobiographical
prose of M were intensely personal, one can
understand why Fuller was somewhat hesitant about publishing the
book:

The printing is begun, and all looks auspicious, except
that I feel a little cold at the idea of walking forth
alone to meet that staring sneering Pit critic, the
Public at large, when l have always been accustomed

to confront it from amid a group of “liberally educated
and respectable gentlemen.“ (LME lll:196)

As she had written in her poetic epigraph to W

“those to whom a hint suffices“ might be able to read between the

166

lines and see the real Margaret Fuller, one whom she had intended to
keep hidden somewhat from the public eye. Consequently she places
over her deepest feelings a thin veil that only an astute reader may
lift. Beneath this veil can be seen the lonely, fanciful Sarah
Margaret Fuller, a woman full of love to give with no one man as yet
to whom she might give it, no one who would receive it as freely as
she gave. And so she sublimated: her love would go to others who
were misunderstood and oppressed, and she would bolster this love
of others with action so that it was not a vague romantic dream but
a life of energetic, passionate commitment.

W315. may thus be read not as a typical travel
journal but as a journal of Margaret Fuller's search for her self.
According to Janis P. Stout, the journey in literature often involves
a quest for self-knowledge:

The quester moves through an unfamiliar landscape
toward a guessed-at but still astounding token; the
introspective venturer finds new awarenesses at

every turn of thought and may at last reach the
hidden treasure of full self-knowledge, an integrated

personality.9
In the unfamiliar territory of the Midwest in 1843, Fuller found

what she was looking for: the hidden gems of her own wonderful

167

personality and the courage to act upon the things she saw there.
She awakened to the new possibilities in her and decided that if she
were not to go to Europe as she had dreamed, she would make this
life in America worthwhile; if she were not to marry, as she had
hoped, she would nonetheless live a life of love and devotion to
others. Criticism and misunderstanding she had to bear when she
decided to break with New England, but she understood her motiva-
tion for the change. “In an environment like mine,“ she wrote, “what
seemed too lofty or ambitious in my character was absolutely
needed to keep the heart from breaking and enthusiasm from
extinction“ (Mm.ll:111-112). In order to maintain her zest and
passion for life, she knew that a change was necessary. A new
sense of power came from her ability to give up the script she had
written for herself (or that society had written for her) and begin to
look at new options for herself.

A year following her journey on the lakes, Fuller made a profes
sional decision to leave behind all that was familiar to move to New
York City and work for Horace Greeley's newspaper as a literary
critic. This decision took tremendous courage and affirmative

power on Fuller's part. She left behind her entire family and all of

168

the friends of her young adulthood. Although she had worked in

Providence, R.l., for two years in the Greene Street School in her

late twenties,10 Providence is not far from Boston. That had not

been a major change of environment or career. New York City, on the

other hand, was a completely alien way of life to a New Englander.“
In New York she visited female inmates at Sing Sing prison,
encouraging them to read good literature to improve their minds;
she wrote articles about Indians, abolition, prostitution, and
women's rights and abilities for ,her m column, believing that

“her readers had only to be told of injustice and suffering and

inevitably these ills would be eradicated.“12 In 1846 she at long
last had the opportunity to go to Europe, and in 1848 she became a
wife and mother also passionately committed to the Italian
revolution for independence from Austria, risking her life and her
son's in order to help the Italian resistance movement.

Larry J. Reynolds contemplates Fuller's socialism in Europe:
“Exactly when and where Fuller acquired the socialism that became

such a firm and intense part of her thought have never been

determined.“12 He suggests that it may have been in Paris in 1846-

 

169

47, where she made the acquaintance of a number of socialists, who
may have “converted“ her to socialism.13 She did not simply become

a socialist overnight, however, as Reynolds seems to suggest.“
Fuller's natural sympathy for the oppressed was responsible for her
involvement in social movements. As we have seen, she had been
empathetic from childhood. But it was during the winter of 1843-
44 after her trip west that Fuller came to grips with her desire to
help others in a more concrete manner than she had ever done before.
She had grown tired of rhetoric. that existed merely for itself; she
was restless for a life of action on behalf of the poor, the abused,
the misunderstood. After her travel book, in which she reveals to
the astute reader all aspects of her personality, she wrote her

women's manifesto, which was used as an important document at

the first Women's Rights Convention at Seneca Falls, New York.15
But writing on behalf of the poor and miserable of the world was not
even enough in the long run; she eventually became involved in
revolution herself, keeping careful records of the event that she
would have published in her account of the Italian fight for

independence had she not drowned on her way back to America in

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1850.

Who: becomes, then, a very valuable document,
not only in the life history of Margaret Fuller, American romantic,
but also in the intellectual history of humanity. It reveals the
importance of solitude and environment in effecting growth and
development of the personality. On both the trip and the year
following the trip, Fuller was essentially alone: during the trip she
was able to be alone in the company of one friend in a completely
new environment; after the trip she needed the solitude of her study
and the Harvard library to “let the mighty meaning coalesce“ so that
she could write her travel book.

Her book is a record of her development. In Summamuhg
Lakishe was able to get in touch with her deepest feelings, to come
to terms with the loss of relationships she had not allowed herself
adequate time to grieve about. She-was able to mine the past for its
influence in autobiographical stories such as the Mariana tale.
Through imaginary dialogues with significant people in her life,
such as the Self-Poise/Free Hope dialogue, she was able to sort out
her ideas about the direction she wanted her own life to take.

During the year following the journey we know that she was able to

171

contemplate her own death and, in so doing, recognize the
significance of her life. In a story such as The Seeress of Prevorst
she was able to bridge the gap between supernatural fantasy and
external reality, using her imagination to enable her to accept both
objectivity and her own unique subjectivity. Her solitude enabled

creative imaginative juices to flow: she wrote at least ten poems

 

during the journey and the year following the journey as well as the
two books for which she is best known. And ultimately, after a
year's gestation period during which the ideas she had mulled over
on the trip had time to incubate and combine, she was able to leave
New England and in her late thirties change her profession, her
marital status, and her political commitment. Such changes were
all precipitated by her annus mirabilis beginning with the summer
of 1843.

“That solitude promotes insight as well as change has been
recognized by great religious leaders, who have usually retreated

from the world before returning to it to share what has been

revealed to them.“16 Fuller gained insight into herself during her
time alone. Her solitude was not complete any more than Thoreau's

was at Walden Pond; there were others with whom she interacted.

172

But the solitude she experienced on her journey and in the year
following enabled her to fuse all of the influences of her life and
make sense of the pattern.

Consequently, what appears to be a disjointed narrative turns
out to be a revealing study of the development of the mind and soul
of Margaret Fuller. Every element of W has
meaning if it is viewed in the light of Fuller's interior development
during this important period in her life. In her final poem, “The Book
to the Reader,“ she admits that while a journey to the wilderness is
impossible to experience vicariously, she will in this book attempt
to convey this “dish of homely sweets“ for the reader to sample.

Bring a good needle for the spool of thread;

Take fact with fiction, silver with the lead,

And at the mint, you can get gold instead;

In fine, read me, even as you would be read. (SL156)
Metaphors of alchemy again reveal the alchemy that was taking
place in her own soul during this period. She had delved into her
own spirit in search of meaning and coherence, and what she had
found would surprise her. “I dare to trust to the interpreting spirit

to bring me out all right at last,“ she had written in W

Lakes. Her journey of 1843 had led her to herself, and her quest had

173

been fulfilled through the writing of the travel book. She had been
transformed -- even transfigured -- by the experience. It was
important to be in the process of becoming and acting; she had

learned that it was not good enough merely to be here.

 

NOTES

Frequently used works are cited in the text using the following
abbreviations:

INTRODUCTION

1. See Bell Gale Chevigny's account of the desecration of Fuller's
manuscripts: “The manuscripts are literally mutilated by scissors
or, with the scrawled laconic explanation 'Private,' by a purple
crayon which, according to a librarian at the Boston Public Library,
resists penetration by ultra-violet light.“ See “Growing out of New
England: The emergence of Margaret Fuller's radicalism,“ Man},
Stugjaa, V(1977), 9899, note 3.

Marie Urbanski analyzes the rationale for the mutilation of
Fuller's texts in W
Westport, Conn: Greenwood Press, 1980. One reason for the
bowdlerization may have been to cover up and mollify Fuller's
belated revelation to her friends in America that she was married
and had a son, news that caused some calumnious speculation and
gossip. In addition, one Emerson scholar admits that Emerson was
reluctant to edit the Mm because he at first believed that
“Margaret had not been an important enough figure to require a

174

175

detailed memoir“ (Rusk. WM. 378)-

Urbanski believes that Emerson was masking an ambivalence of feel-
ing for Fuller that he found uncomfortable. It is interesting to note
that “the meticulous Emerson, who carefully preserved his letters,
did not keep Fuller's letters written to him during the climactic
period of their relationship in the fall of 1840“ (Urbanski 10).

2. Nathaniel Hawthorne seems to have disliked Fuller intensely,
if one judges from his private journals and letters to his wife
Sophia, whereas in letters to and conversations with Fuller herself
he is most tactful and polite. Fuller must never have known how
Hawthorne felt about her.

To Sophia on one occasion he wrote, “Would that Miss Margaret
Fuller might lose her tongue!“ (Sophia was about to attend one of
Fuller's famous Conversation sessions at Sophia's sister Elizabeth
Peabody's that evening.) And in 1841 writing to Sophia (then his
fiancee) about Brook Farm, where both he and Fuller had sojourned
briefly, Hawthorne is disturbed that Fuller's “transcendental heifer“
has invaded the placidity of the eight Brook Farm cows, seeming ,
“very fractious“ and “apt to kick over the milk pail.“ In these traits,
he added, “she resembles her mistress.“ See NathanjaLtlammna;
W, ed. Thomas Woodson, et al. (Columbus: Ohio
State University Press, 1984), 527. The Brook Farm cow problem
really nettled Hawthorne, for in several other letters to Sophia he
persists with this bovine saga and adds the important news that
Miss Fuller's cow has actually “made herself ruler of the herd, and
behaves in a very tyrannical manner.“ Eventually, he is proud to
announce, the herd rebels against “the usurpation of Miss Fuller's
cow.“ Amusing as it is to note that Hawthorne pays exaggerated
attention to these bovine herd dynamics, it is also revealing that he
makes a point of singling out the one “tyrannical“ cow as “Miss
Fuller's,“ as if the cow absorbed its personality by osmosis from its
owner. One may thus take “Miss Fuller's cow“ in these letters to be a
metaphor for Fuller herself, and one may also assume that
Hawthorne wished to see Fuller subdued or suppressed in much the
same way that her heifer had been.

Despite his obvious animosity toward Fuller, Hawthorne
continued to be fascinated by this woman, using her as a model for
his dark ladies in W WW and
IhaMaLblLEaun. And yet the journal published posthumously by his
son Julian sets forth a particularly vicious attack on Fuller, uncalled

176

for and “malign,“ according to Fuller's biographer Mason Wade in
W (New York The Viking Press
1940). The “complete falsity of Hawthome's attack on a dead friend“
(Wade, 282) stunned all of her American friends and family. One
wonders what it was that set Hawthorne so against Fuller, since
she had always been cordial to him. Her request at the beginning of
Hawthome's marriage to Sophia that Fuller's sister and brother-in-
law Ellery Channing be invited to reside temporarily at the
Hawthornes' has been given as a reason for Hawthome's rancor,
although he was able to refuse the request in a very gracious letter
to Fuller, revealing no annoyance.

Edgar Allan Poe was only acquainted with Fuller as a fellow
critic with whom he occasionally conversed in literary salons after
she had moved to New York. He admired her work in mm
Lakes and believed that her literary criticism in the manna was
courageous and candid. However, after he had written his favorable
review of Wake: in 1846, Fuller interfered in one of
Poe's personal relationships, when at the request of Frances Osgood
she and Anne Lynch went to Poe's cottage in Fordham to ask him to
return Mrs. Osgood's love letters. Interestingly enough, Fuller
herself had a problem in this regard. She had made a request of
James Nathan, with whom she had become involved in New York City
in 1845, for the return of her love letters. He never sent them, much
to her dismay and disgust, though he ungallantly offered to return
them for money. Later the letters were sold by his son, who learned
that he could capitalize on Fuller's fame after her death. The
Prefatory Note to this book, written in the summer of 1873, is by
none other than one sixty-two-year-old James Nathan, who at this
point in his life calls the letters the “motherless offspring of our
spiritual intercourse“ and claims to have “deeply loved“ Fuller. See
WW. ed. Julia Ward Howe
(New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1903). Consequently, by
January 1848 Poe was referring to Fuller as “an ill-tempered and
very inconsistent old maid“ and advising a friend to “avoid her.“ See
WW ed. John Ward Ostrom (Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1948), 538.

James Russell Lowell satirized Fuller (in her acknowledged
persona “Miranda“) in his well-known W. Poe alluded
to the diatribe in a‘letter to Frederick W. Thomas in February 1849:

177

I suppose you have seen that affair - the “Fable for
Critics“ I mean. Miss Fuller, that detestable old maid -
told him, once, that he was “so wretched a poet as to be
disgusting even to his best friends“. This set him off at
a tangent and he has never been quite right since: - so
he took to writing satire against mankind in general,
with Margaret Fuller and her protege, Cornelius Matthews

[sic], in particular (W 602).

Fuller had written in her “American Literature“ essay in the manna
that Lowell's verse was “wanting in the true spirit and tone of
poesy,“ and had added that “posterity will not remember him.“

3. Greeley was careful to add in the Mamajns, that it had been
Mrs. Greeley who had suggested offering Fuller a position in the
literary department of her husband's newspaper. Fuller was invited
to live at the Greeleys' home near the East River in Manhattan, where
she became very closely attached to the Greeleys' little boy “Pickie. “

An interesting hypothesis is developed in Helene G. Baer's 1113,
W (Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 1964), 181- 186, concerning the
relationship between Horace Greeley and Margaret Fuller. According
to Baer, Mrs. Greeley suspected that her husband had fallen in love
with Fuller. Baer maintains that Mrs. Greeley was jealous of Fuller
because “Margaret had captured the heart of the Greeleys' son Pickie,
as well as his father's“ (186).

4 Margaret Allen MW
(University Park, Pa.: The Pennsylvania State University Press,
1979), 179.

5. M. Allen, Aahjayamam, 179.

6. As she was returning to America with her husband and son
Fuller drowned within sight of shore off Fire Island, New York, on
July 19,1850, thus never touching American soil again. Her husband,
Count Ossoli, and their son Angelo also drowned, and Fuller's
manuscript account of the Italian revolution was lost. Emerson sent
Thoreau to search for the manuscript, but there were no remains.
Angelo's body was washed ashore, but Fuller's and Ossoli's were not
recovered. Today a monument to Fuller may be found in the Mt.
Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, although, according to Laurie James,
Margaret Fuller's name is not on the Mt. Auburn Cemetery List of
Noted Persons nor is the monument easy to find. Susan B. Anthony

178

searched but could not find it. See Laurie James, W
W (New York: Golden Heritage Press, Inc.,
1988), 26-27.

7. Greeley remarked that W was “one of the
clearest and most graphic delineations, ever given, of the Great
Lakes, of the Prairies, and of the receding barbarism, and the rapidly
advancing, but rude, repulsive semi-civilization, which were
contending with most unequal forces for the possession of those
rich lands. I still consider 'Summer on the Lakes' unequalled,
especially in its pictures of the Prairies and of the sunnier aspects
of Pioneer life.“ See BMW (New York: J. B.
Ford and Co.,1869), 175. It was Greeley's reading of W
Lakes, that led to Fuller's employment the following year on
Greeley's m, so although she made very little money from the
book, she gained a new career with its publication.

8. Caroline Sturgis's father apparently had reservations about
his daughter's traveling with two other women, although James
Freeman Clarke was to accompany them to Chicago. Fuller wrote to
Sarah Clarke in early May 1843, ’“I fear Cary will not go, if she is to
have no guardianship, but ours. Mr. S, perhaps, may not prize that as
it deserves“ (LME Ill:123).

9. Quoted in Joel Myerson, ed., WW
(Boston: G.K. Hall & Co., 1980), 4.

10. Arthur Fuller, “Preface,“ ALHamLandAbmad, ed. Arthur
Fuller (Boston: Crosby, Nichols, 1856), x.

11. Quoted in Myerson, ed., mm, 36.

12. Myerson, ed., thicaljssaxs 36.

13. Myerson, ed., mm, 39.

14. Myerson, ed., W 35.

15. Myerson, ed., W, 37.

16. Quoted in Myerson, ed., W, 32.

17. Griswold, W (Philadelphia: Carey
and Hart, 1848), 251.

18. Griswold, 251.

19. Quoted in Myerson, ed., Ways, 5.
20. Myerson, ed., Sflflaaljasaxa, 5.

21. Brownson does not make clear exactly what he means by
“heathen priestess.“ He may have been referring to Fuller's well-
known interest in Goethe and German culture. “She has no faith, no
hope. She now reminds us of the old Euripides, now of the modern

 

179

skeptic, Byron, and finally, of the cold indifferentism of Goethe. . . .
All she needs, to be the ornament of her sex, and a crown of blessing
to her country, to be at peace with herself and the world, is the
firm, old-fashioned Catholic faith in the Gospel“ (5). Brownson had
recently converted to Roman Catholicism and had become more pious
and critical of the religious beliefs of others.

22. Quoted in Myerson, ed., SmigaLjssaya, 2.

23 Buell. WW
AmaflaaLBanajsaama (Ithaca, N. Y. Cornell University Press ,1,973)
204.

24. Miller, “Introduction,“ WWW
(Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1963), 116.

25. Miller, 134.

26. Miller, 136.

27. See Richard V. Carpenter, “Margaret Fuller in Northern

Illinois“ WWW. ll (Jan
1910), 7-22 and Madeleine Stern, “Margaret Fuller's Summer in the

West (1843)}M1gnigan_fli§mm_Magaz1na. XXV (Autumn 1941), 300—
330.

28. Larry J. Reynolds, “The 'Cause' and Fuller's Tribune Letters“

00::I ::0 II :I0 I: .'.II:.I :.| :3I-O-3l01(N9W
Haven: Yale University Press, 1988), 63.

29. Reynolds, 63.

30. Ann Douglas, “Margaret Fuller and the Disavowal of Fiction,“
W (New York: Alfred A Knoof
1977), 281.

31.Allen, Aahiexamam, 118.

32. Allen, Agnjmmam, 118.

33. Annette Kolodny, “Margaret Fuller: Recovering Our Mother's
Garden“ Who
W (Chapel Hill: The University of North
Carolina Press, 1984).

34 Albert J von Frank. Wad

0|; II o I: I AII3-.I I- 3..
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985).

35. Stephen Adams, “'That Tidiness We Always Look for in
Woman': Fuller's Summer on the Lakes and Romantic Aesthetics,“

WWW. ed. Joel Myerson
(Charlottesville: The University Press of Virginia, 1987), 248.

1'80

36. Bell Gale Chevigny, “Growing out of New England: The
emergence of Margaret Fuller's Radicalism,“ W33, 5
(1977), 91.

37 Julie Ellison. W
W (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990) 222

Robert Richardson echoes this stance. “The increasingly active side
of the last ten years of her [Fuller's] short life was not so much a
reaction aginast her earlier beliefs as it was in important ways a
natural outgrowth of them.“ See “Margaret Fuller and Myth,“
Emmi}; 4(1979), 169-84.

38. Ellison, W, 220.

CHAPTER ONE

1. Washington Irving, IhaSkatglLSQQk, Rev. ed. (New York: G. P.
Putnam's Sons, 1848), 1.

2. Robert N. Hudspeth, “Introduction,“ Wm
Eula: (Ithaca, NY. Cornell University Press, 1983-88),

3 Percy G AdamS.ILa1eLLiteLatuLe_aad_the_E1dlutic|Ia_aLthe
Nani (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 1983), 282.
P.G. Adams, 3940.

PG. Adams, 4042.
PG. Adams, 42.
PG. Adams, 43.
PG. Adams, 44.
PG. Adams, 44.

10. PG. Adams, 44-45.

11. PG. Adams, 57-60.

12. PG. Adams, 70.

13. PG. Adams, 73.

14. PG. Adams, 73.

15. “The Romantic experience was based to a much greater extent
than is generally realized on the content of the eighteenth-century
experience, to which it added a new brand of enthusiasm, vehemence,
and style.“ Herbert Barrows, “Convention and Novelty in the Romantic

Generation's Experience of ltaly,“thaLa1uLe_a§_a_M_g_da_gt_'[La1al
(New York: The New York Public Library, 1963), 70.

16 M H Abrams IDLMILLQLaadJaLLamaLBdmaatianedmaad
W (New York: Oxford University Press, 1953),14.

599$???

181

17 Charles L Batten. Jr W

Wm (Berkeley.
University of California Press, 1978), 61.

18. Batten, 28.

19. Batten, 13.

20. Batten, 40.

21. Batten, 40.

22. Batten, 40.

23. “Dr. Moore's View of Society and Manners in France used a
style that was in many parts loose and careless, sometimes even
vulgar.“ Batten, 45.

24. Batten, 63.

25. Jared Sparks, W, 5(1817), 391 quoted in
Lawrence Buell. WW
AmeflgaLBanaissanga (Ithaca, N..:Y Cornell University Press, 1973),
193.

26. Ahmed M. Metwalli, “Americans Abroad: The Popular Art of
Travel Writing in the Nineteenth Century,“ W
halal (Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green State University Popular
Press, 1979), 59.

27. Jared Sparks, “Riley's Narrative,“ Wan, 5
(1817), 390, quoted in Buell, 189.

28. Ralph Waldo Emerson, WM ed. Joel Porte
(Cambridge, Mass.:The Belknap Press of Harvard University,1982),90.

29. Adams discusses the claims of many countries to have
produced the most travelers. See P.G. Adams, 59-70.

30. The round trip fare to England by ship in 1818 was
approximately $318, according to Allison Lockwood, Eaasjanate
Eilgflma (New York: Cornwall Books, 1981), 32. Consequently,
usually only those who had means went to Europe.

31. Lockwood, 27.

32. Irving, 3.

33. EmersonJaJdisJaumals. 307.

34. Quoted in Wanna, ed. Edmund Wilson (New
York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1955), 7.

35. Lockwood, 65.

36. Porte makes this psychological assessment in his chapter
introduction of W13, 90.

37. He wrote that Wordsworth and Coleridge were disappointing.
But he began a friendship with Carlyle which would last for nearly

182

fifty years. See WWW. ed.
Joseph Slater (New York: Columbia University Press, 1964).

38. “If I have had a good indignation and a good complacency with
my brother, if I have had reverence 8 compassion, had fine weather
& good luck in my fishing excursion 8. profound thought in my studies
at home, seen a disaster well through: and wrought well in my
garden, nor failed my part at a banquet, then I have travelled, though
all was within the limits of a mile from my house.“ (.LMfl VIII: 18).

39 Porte in EmetsanLHiLJaucuals. 90

40. Quoted in Wale, 116.

41. Buell, 190. Perry Miller has suggested that W
Lakaa influenced the writing of W
mm, but Buell disputes this suggestion as “conjecture“

42. Irving, 2- 3.

43 John F Sears. W

W (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 3.
44. By 1840 track had been laid in all but four states, though

train travel was still uncomfortable. As one traveler complained,
“If one . . . were not locked up in a box with 50 or 60 tobacco-
chewers; and the engine and fire did not burn holes in one's clothes

. and [one] were not in danger of being blown sky-high or knocked
off the rails - it would be the perfection of traveling.“ Donald W.
Oliver and Fred M. Newmann, W (Middletown, Conn.:
Xerox Corporation, 1977), 12.

45. F. J. Turner cited the costs of a trip of 300 miles in 15 days
in 1835 as 33 cents per person. See Francis S. Philbrick, 109.813.0411
W839 (New York: Harper and Row, 1965), 312.

46. Frances Trollope visited the United States from 1827-31,
writing upon her return to England her infamous DamefliLMannaLng
mLAmaflgana, which appeared in print in 1832. She became at once
well-known and hated all over America for her unflattering
anecdotes which infuriated Americans. “She was Iampooned in prose
and poetry and on the stage; she was travestied in cartoons. She
became a folk character,“ according to Donald Smalley, “Intro-
duction: Mrs. Trollope in America,“ WW
Amadgana (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1949), ix.

47 Elizabeth McKinsey. Win80
Sublime, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985).

48. Emerson goes on to say that if we knew where, to look for the
Spirit, “we should never need to go to the high places, crags,

183

cataracts, & seas . . . “ (LBMLE Ill:174). He is confident that she will
tell him all about the Falls, and he wishes the weather were better
for “so rare spectators“ as she and Sarah. “Whatever they [the Falls]
gave you, you will on day give me, O most bountiful of friends“ (LBMLE
Hk179)

49. Sears, 16.

50. Buell, 196. Buell adds that “all the Transcendentalist authors

. were well aware that they were going over ground already
covered many times before, and that their own contribution, such as
it was, would consist in suplying new points of view -- in deploying
the resources of their wit, descriptive ability, capacity for original
reflection, and eye for the out-of-the—way detail“ (191).

51. Margaret Fuller, WW (Boston: Brown,
Taggard and Chase, 1860), 26.

52. John Livingston Lowes used this epigraph for his remarkable
book on Coleridge: “Eagat. Wohin der Weg? MW. Kein Weg!
Ins Unbetretene.“ Emerson noted that “nowhere did Goethe find a
braver, more intelligent, or more sympathetic reader“ than in
Margaret Fuller (Mam.l:243). Frederick A. Braun calls Goethe's
influence on Fuller more important than Emerson's. See Braun,
Margaret Fuller and Goethe (New York: Henry Holt and Company,
1910).

53. Buell, 197.

54 Henry David ThoreaII. IhemuiaaLuLtleaaLQavidldeeau
(Boston. Houghton Mifflin Company, 1982), l:348.

55. Fuller. MW 69
56. Buell, 198.

57. Buell, 198.

58. Quoted in Myerson, ed., W 3.
59. Quoted in Myerson, ed., W, 4.

60. Fuller. WM. 69
61. Hudspeth, “Preface,“ LME I :.40

CHAPTER TWO

1. Quoted in Myerson, ed., My; 2.
2. Myerson, ed,SLi1igal_Es§ay§, 2.

3. Thomas Wentworth Higginson, a contemporary and family
friend and one of Fuller's best biographers, recalls: “I can well

 

184

remember to have seen Miss Fuller sitting, day after day, under the
covert gaze of the undergraduates who had never before looked upon
a woman reading within those sacred precincts, where twenty of
that sex are now employed as assistants.“ See Higginson, Mamam
W (New York: Haskell House Publishers, 1884), 194.

4. Higginson, 194.

5. Fuller's father had been a strict taskmaster, requiring that
his oldest daughter stay up late studying until he came home to
check her assignments, correcting her letters sent to him in
Washington, and forbidding her to read certain novels that he felt
were too fanciful. As a teenager she kept up the grueling work: “The
stoic work schedule followed by the fifteen-year-old Margaret
Fuller included in the mornings before Cambridgeport Private
Grammar School and in the afternoons after school: Walking 5—6;
Pianoforte Practice 6- 7, Breakfast 7-7: 30; Readings in Sismondi's

WW 7 :-30 8: Readings in Brown's
Ehjlasnnhx 8- 9; Pianoforte 1-2; Dinner 23; Italian 3- 5.“

“Introduction,“ W (facsimile edition) (Boston:
Nieuwkoop, 1972), ix, note 3. She developed terrible headaches and
nightmares, even at times somnambulating. Later in life she felt
that her health had been forever ruined by the academic stress of
her childhood.

6. Her essay, “American Literature,“ which appeared in Greeley's
Image, expressed the Emersonian belief in the importance of
developing an indigenous American literature not dependent on
European for form or content. Before such a literature can exist, she
says, an “original idea“ must “animate this nation.“

7. Arthur Fuller, “Preface,“ W (Cambridge,
Mass.: John Wilson and Son, 1856), iii.

8. A. Fuller, “Preface, iv-v.

9. Quoted in Myerson, ed., SfltjgaLEsaaya, 3.

10. Myerson, ed., Ways, 3-4.

11. Myerson, ed., M, 4.

12. Buell, 204.

13. Mason Wade. Mamaret.Eulleu_llllaetstaae_a.f_Gea1us (New York:
The Viking Press, 1940), 25.

14. Wade, 26. Her letter to Eliza Farrar of April 17, 1836,
expresses her desolation: “If I am not to go with you I shall be
obliged to tear my heart, by a violent effort, from its present
objects and natural desires. But I shall feel the necessity, and will

 

185

do it if the life-blood follows through the rent. Probably, I shall not
even think it best to correspond with you at all while you are in
Europe.“ (LME l:247).

15. James Freeman Clarke had written her July 10,1843: “When I
asked you how long you proposed staying in Illinois, you said, 'till
my money is gone.‘ Now I should be very sorry to have you miss the
Lake Superior expedition or abridge your visit in Chicago for the
want of a few dollars, and I therefore write to request that you
would gratify me by accepting fifty dollars, so that you may not be
hurried by want of means. I wish it were fifty thousand. . . . I have

. requested my brother Sam. to hand you the money with this

letter.“ John Wesley Thomas,ed., W
W (Hamburg: Cram, de Gruyter,1957),142ff.

Fuller's friend and student Sarah Shaw had also sent her some
money for the trip. “The inclosure [sic] you sent me before I went
was three times what I should have thought of. . . . I thought best to
appropriate the small fortune you sent, and you will be glad to know
that it puts me entirely at my ease about my journey. I shall not be
obliged to hurry home or trouble myself too much about details to
keep within a certain sum“ (LME Ill:127).

16. Albert J. von Frank, “Life as Art in America: The Case of
Margaret Fuller“ W092. ed Joel
Myerson (Boston: Twayne, 1981),1-26.

17. von Frank maintains that “of all the circumstances that
contributed to the shaping of Margaret Fuller's mind and career,
perhaps none was more fatally decisive than the provinciality of her
environment“ (1).

18. Emerson in Porte, 307.

19. Ultimately, when Fuller did arrive in Europe, she realized that
it was indeed all she had dreamed of: “I find how true was the lure
that always drew me towards Europe. It was no false instinct that
said I might here find an atmosphere to develop me in ways I need,“
she wrote to Emerson in 1847 (LME IV:315). She called Italy the
“dream of my life“ (LME IV:275) and wrote to thank the Springs from
Italy for their enabling her “to satisfy that long abandoned but
secretly fervent desire to see Europe, especially Italy“ (LME IV:311).

20. Reprinted in W ed. A. Fuller
(Boston: Brown, Taggard and Chase, 1860), 299-300.

21. See von Frank, 1516.

22. Quoted in von Frank, 20.

186

23. Higginson writes, “The complaint is constantly made that all
her attainments and her self-culture did not bring her happiness. It
is asking a great deal of any single woman to be positively happy in
the presence of tormenting ill-health, poverty, and a self-
sacrificing habit that keeps her always on the strain. It is even
something to ask of a person, under such circumstances, that she
should be habitually cheerful and hopeful. That this last was the
predominant tone of Margaret Fuller's daily life is proved by all her
more familiar letters and by the general testimony of those who
knew her best. No doubt, in her diaries, there are passages which
record depression and sometimes almost morbid periods of self-
inspection and self-reproach. That is what diaries are made for;
they exist in order that imaginative and passionate natures may
relieve themselves by expressing these moods, and may then forget
them and proceed. The trouble comes when sympathethic
biographers elevate these heights and depths into too great
importance and find the table-lands uninteresting. There never was
a year of Margaret Fuller's life, after her precocious maturity, when
the greater part of it was not given to daily, practical, common-
sense labor, and this usually for other peOpIe“ (304).

24. Caleb Stetson quoted in Myerson, ed., W, 4.

25. “The Great Lawsuit,“ Mal, IV (July 1843), 4. Thoreau
called Fuller's essay “a noble piece, rich extempore writing, talking
with pen in hand“ (matings, VI ,.94)

26. Quoted in Myerson, ed..Qfl1]gal_Es_s_ays,36.

27. Anthony Storr, W (New York: The
Free Press,1988), 69.

28. Storr, 22.

29. Quoted in Myerson, ed., W, 36.

CHAPTER THREE

1. Arthur Fuller, “Preface,“ W, v.

2. Ellison. DelicaILSubjeats, 222.
3. Larry J. Reynolds maintains that Fuller acquired “the

socialism that became such a firm and intense part of her thought“
during the winter of 1846-47 when she was in Paris. “It was in
Paris . . . that intellectual discussion of Associationism was
flourishing, and it was there that the Fourierists apparently made a

187

convert of her“ (60). Fuller had rejected Fourierism in America, not
joining the Brook Farm experiment, although she agreed with his
views on women, but Reynolds believes that the “timing“ of Fuller's
visit to Europe changed her views on socialism. See Chapter Five
notes for a further discussion of Fuller's socialism.

4. She wrote to Emerson from Europe, “Had I only come ten years
earlier! Now my life must be a failure, so much strength has been
wasted on abstractions, which only came because I grew not in the
right soil“ (LME IV:315).

5. This attitude may appear to contradict Fuller's later
commitment to civil activism in the Italian revolution. Yet one can
understand her admiration for patient suffering. She had patiently
suffered with few complaints. Gradually, however, she would begin
to speak out on behalf of others, if not for herself.

6. Higginson,198-99.

7. Although the story of Mariana appears in the Mnmnjfi, the
Sylvain conclusion is omitted.

8. While she was visiting Harriet Martineau and her aged mother
in England, Fuller is supposed to have “discoursed at length on 'the
unloveliness of old age.‘ 'Alas!' the old woman exclaimed, astonished.
'The poor creature is stark madl'“ In Lockwood, 64. Higginson also
writes that Fuller “wanted tact“ (305).

9- Bell Gale Chevigny. WWW
LifLandJmmns (Old Westbury, New York: The Feminist Press,
1976L 87.

10- Joanne 3- Frye. LMad_S.tuLies._Ielliud_Lixes (ArIrI Arbor:
University of Michigan Press, 1986), 19.

11. Frye, 57. .

12. Frye, 57.

13. Carolyn Heilbrun, W (New York: Norton
Press,1979),183.

14. Heilbrun, 183.

15. Kolodny, 123.

16. See Stern's Introduction to the facsimile edition of Snmmn[
W.

17. Quoted in Myerson, ed., M, 33.

18. One assumes based on her devotion to truth that Fuller is
sincere in this lack of hope and not attempting with conscious irony
to suggest the solution to the problem, as Swift had done in “A
Modest Proposal.“

188

19. Richard Slotkin, Wm (Middletown,
Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 1973), 361.

20. Sarah Clarke joined Fuller after nine days and made some
sketches of the island (included only in the second printing of
SumannnJhLLakes) before the two women departed for home. On
the island Fuller stayed at a boarding house owned by the Indian
widow of a French trader. She had expected her own room but found
that she had to sleep in the common parlor and eating room of the
boarding house, accommodations which guaranteed her early rising
each day. From the boarding house she could see the beach, where
the Indian lodges were clustered like honey combs. More than two
thousand Indians were encamped on the island, ready “to make a long
holiday out of the occasion“ (SL 105).

“The occasion“ was one that Fuller had known about in advance.
Her sojourn on Mackinac had been timed for the last week in August,
when representatives from both the Chippewa and Ottawa tribes
came to the island to receive their annual payments from the
American government. These annuities had been established after
the War of 1812, in which the Ottawa and Chippewa had fought under
the great Indian leader Tecumseh on the side of the British, whom .
the Indians did not perceive as a threat to their lands. The British
had lost the war, and the Indians in the Northwest Territory were
now under American, not British jurisdiction. According to an
arrangement with the Americans, the Indians were to be given cash
and various goods and services In return for their land. Indians, who
were accustomed to sharing with their neighbors, were duped into
believing that these goods and services (without which they had
done for centuries quite well) were a fair trade for the land on
which they had lived.

Because Michigan was interested in statehood in the early 1800's
and because there was a land dispute between Michigan and Ohio that
needed to be resolved before statehood was granted, in 1835
pressure was put on the Ottawa Indians in Michigan to cede their
Michigan lands and move west of the Mississippi. One of the Indian
experts Fuller had consulted in preparing for her trip to the West,
Henry Schoolcraft, a good friend of Secretary of War Louis Cass, was
in favor of this relocation of Indians. In the negotiations for the
Treaty of Washington, a final arrangment between the Indians and
the federal government established that the Indians would cede
their land to the government but retain hunting and fishing rights

 

189

and the right to live on any unsold government lands. Major portions
of land near the Grand Traverse Bay were reserved for these Indians,
who naively believed it would be many years before American
settlers came north to buy land, though even in the early 1800's the
Erie Canal had made possible a major westward movement and the
white man's civilization was rapidly encroaching on the Indians'
territorial rights.

Assured by Schoolcraft that they would not be forced to relocate,
the Indians ratified the Treaty of Washington. Michigan could then
become a state (1837). But United States promises to the Indians
were short-lived. Motivated by the desire to gain control over the
rich timber and mineral resources in the northern Michigan area, the
U. 8. government did not wait long to move Indians onto reservations.

See James A. Clifton. et al.. WW1

Widen (Grand Rapids. Mich: West
Michigan Printing, 1986) and James McClurken, “Strangers in Their

Own Land." WW. VI (1985) 2«'25

Probably most of the preparatory reading Fuller did before her
trip involved books about the Indians. Following her trip she spent
many weeks in the Harvard library reading books by the great Indian
explorers.

21. Slotkin, 355.

22. Fuller's attitude toward the Indians parallels that of
Emerson, who saw in the Indian the noble savage close to nature.
See his lecture on “Manners“ in W
EmaLsnn, ed. Stephen E. Whicher et al. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 1966-72), II. In April 1838 Emerson had been
asked by the citizens of Concord to write a letter to President Van
Buren to protest Cherokee removal from Georgia. Gay Wilson Allen
describes the letter as “nearly two thousand words of moral
outrage“ full of “invective, sarcasm, and satire one would hardly
have expected of him. . . .“ in W (New York:
Viking Press, 1981), 314. Nevertheless, after writing the letter
Emerson felt a “private agony“ over having to make a public stand.
See Floyce Alexander, “Emerson and the Cherokee Removal,“ ESQ
2(1983), 127-37.

 

190

CHAPTER FOUR

1. Quoted in Myerson, ed., SfitinaLEsnaxs, 5.
2. Arthur Fuller, “Preface,“ MW, 9. However,

Fuller's Christianity was hardly conventional, to judge from her own
religious creed of 1842, donated to the Boston Public Library by
Thomas Higginson. She believed, she wrote, that Jesus was “a
messenger and son of God“; she believed in the story of Christ's life
on earth and in the miracles. “But when I say to you, also, that
though I think all this really happened, it is of no consequence to me
whether it did or not, that the ideal truth such illustrations present
to me, is enough, and that if the mind of St. John, for instance, had
conceived the whole and offered it to us as a poem, to me, as far as I
know, it would be just as real. You see how wide the gulf that
separates me from the Christian Church.“ Quoted in Braun, 253-54.

Christ, like Apollo, was another “modification of the same
harmony. . . , a part of the All. . . . I will not loathe sects,
persuasions, systems, though I cannot abide in them one moment. I
see most men are still in need of them. To them their banners, their
tents; let them .be Platonists, Fire-worshippers, Christians; let them
live in the shadow of the past revelations“ (Braun, 256). She
believed that another manifestation of the Word would come on
earth. Christianity was only one form -- an important one -- of the
spiritual truth she worshipped.

Thus, while Fuller could be called a Christian because of her
Christian deeds, there might be orthodox Christians who would call
her a “heathen,“ as Brownson did. Arthur Fuller, a minister, was
undoubtedly in his edition of his sister's book smoothing over the
reputation of his deceased sister, painting a picture of her as a
pious Christian.

3. It is interesting to note that Dickens had included a similar
dramatized conversation in his AmnflnaLNman, which Fuller had
read.

4. Fuller would eventually visit a mine when she traveled to
England. Although she expressed much pity for the horses below
ground who “see the light of day no more once they have been let
down into these gloomy recesses,“ she was unable to see the men at
their mine work, since “it meant a walk of a mile and a half
underground“ (Lockwood, 55).

5. INNS. 15. Fuller continued to use mining imagery in her later

 

191

life. From Europe she wrote to Marcus Spring: “What would I not give
that my other two brothers, R.W.E.[Emerson] and W.H.C.[Channing],
could see him [Mazzini, leader of the Italian revolution]! All have in
different ways the celestial fire, all have pure natures. They may
have faults, but no base alloy“ (LMF. V:201).

6. Quoted in Myerson, ed., Snitinaljsnaya, 5.

7. From Emerson's Nature in IbeQafleetedJMQLkuLBalauflalde
Eansnn, Vol. I (Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard

University Press, 1971), 24. See also the note on p. 250 which
identifies the source of Emerson's quotation from Bacon.

8. Henry David Thoreau, “Walking,“ W13
(Salt Lake City: Peregrine Smith, lnc.,1980), 109.

9. Thoreau, “Walking,“ 105. Emerson wrote Fuller on June 7,
1843, “I would gladly be your companion in much of the way. I envy
you this large dose of America: You will know how to dispose of it
all. We have all been East too long. Now for the West“ (LEM
Hk180)

10. Emerson, Manna, 38.

11. Emerson, flatnrn, 26.

12. Emerson, Name, 44.

13. Emerson, manna, 43.

14. Emerson, ”MIG.

15. Emerson, Name, 23.

16. Fred FoIiO. WW

.10 I: I = to l: on I: LI3==II s: a (New
York:.J C. Derby, 1855), 29.

17. Folio, 406. It is only fair to add that many of the men of this
era were also interested in spiritualism and mesmerism. Horace
Greeley, Albert Brisbane, George Ripley, George Bancroft, James
Fenimore Cooper, William Cullen Bryant, Rufus Griswold, and
William Henry Channing all participated in seances. See Guarneri,
349-53.

18. Fuller remarks on this tendency of men: “When they admired
any woman, they were inclined to speak of her as 'above her sex'“
(mun 41). “Let it not be said, wherever there is energy or creative
genius, 'She has a masculine mind'“ (ENS 43). “There is no wholly
masculine man, no purely feminine woman“ mun 116).

19. Michael Lopez, “De-Transcendentalizing Emerson,“ ESQ
34(1988), 86.

20. Fuller kept up her interest in mesmerism after this summer,

 

192

and in fact when she moved to New York had some relief from the
famous Dr. Leger, whom she consulted regarding her frequent
backaches and headaches. According to Georgiana Bruce, who
described Leger's methods in treating Fuller, after two months under
Dr. Leger's care, Fuller could walk the four miles from Horace
Greeley's house, where she was living in New York City, to Dr.
Leger's office. After five months Fuller reportedly grew three
inches taller and was able to discard the horsehair pad she wore on
one shoulder to give the impression of equality (LME IV:61). It is
interesting to speculate about what actual physical ailment Fuller
had suffered since childhood that would that would make her
shoulders so unequal, that precipitated headaches and spinal
discomfort. Could it be that Fuller's habit of craning her neck, so
often alluded to in biographical sketches, was the result of this
ailment rather than an affectation, as has often been suggested?
She may have been an early victim of scoliosis .

She wrote that Dr. Leger entertained her a great deal during her
consultations: “l have a very entertaining time with this. Nothing
wonderful happens to me. I have no sleep, no trance, but seem to
receive daily accessions of strength from this insouciant robust
Frenchman, and his local action on the distended bones is obvious.
During this part, which occupies abaout twenty minutes, he talks to
me, and as his life has been various, full of experience and
adventure, entertains me much. He has lived ten years in Mexico, and
if I wanted to write dramatic novels, I should get materials enough
from what he tells me. Going to him takes a great part of my
morning . . . but my passage too [sic] and fro and what I meet at the
Mesmeric apartments affords a new view of life“ (LME 111:59).

It is interesting to note that Edgar Allan Poe had read the book
by 1845, the year he wrote “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar,“
the horrifying ending of which was based on Kerner's ending of 10.6
W. The book was translated into English in 1845
by Catherine Crowe, though Fuller had said in 1843-44, during the
writing of W that “it may not be translated into
other languages.“ For that reason among others, she had gone into
such detail about the book. We know that Poe had read SummaLnn
mm by the time he wrote his review of W
W in August 1846, for he alludes to W
Lakes in this review, calling it a mark of Fuller's “genius.“ It is
possible that Poe's first awareness of the book IhnSenLaaLnt

 

193

ELQJLQLSI came from his reading of Fuller's account of It in her travel
book, and that consequently W was a major
influence on the writing of “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar.“

21. Ellison, “The Edge of Urbanity: Emerson's English Traits,“ ESQ
32(1986),107. Ellison adds in W. “Surely we have
gone beyond the point where romantic discourse generally and
Fuller's curiously structured and multiple voices in particular can be
dismissed as simply incoherent“ (222, note).

22. Quoted in Lopez, 93.

23. Lopez, 109.

24. Arthur Fuller, “Preface,“ MS. 8.

25. Arthur Fuller, “Preface,“ MLNQ, 8.

26. Arthur Fuller, “Preface,“ MS, 7.

CHAPTER FIVE

1. Chevigny, “Growing Out of New England: The emergence of
Margaret Fuller's Radicalism,“ W 5(1977), 87.
Chevigny, “Growing,“ 88.

Chevigny, “Growing,“ 77.

Chevigny, “Growing,“ 77.

Chevigny, “Growing,“ 77.

Chevigny, “Growing,“ 81.

Chevigny. WM 215
Quoted in Myerson, ed., M. 37.

.,Stout WWW:
W (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1983), 16.

10. See the account of Fullers experiences as a teacher in Rhode
Island in Laraine R. Fergenson, “Margaret Fuller in the Classroom. The
Providence Period," WW, ed. Joel
Myerson (Charlottesville: The University Press of Virginia, 1987),
131-42. Fuller had also taught in Bronson Alcott's school in Boston
but ultimately decided that teaching was too exhausting because it
did not allow her time to devote to her first love, writing, which
would reach a larger audience.

11. “I like being here; the streams of life flow free,“ she wrote to
Aunt Mary from New York on Jan. 15, 1845 (Quoted in Higginson,
212).

12. Margaret Allen, “The Political and Social Criticism of

oosooeaw

194

Margaret Fuller,“ WHY. 72 (Autumn 1973), 564.

13. Karl Marx had been expelled from Paris in January 1845, about
the time that Fuller moved to New York City to work for Greeley. By
the time she arrived in Paris during the autumn of 1846, Paris was
“a unique cauldron of novel ideas, feelings, and activities. The French
capital was a magnet for a whole galaxy of European intellectuals,
poets, writers, painters, and musicians, as well as an endless
number of theoretical reformers. . . ,“ according to Joel Carmichael,
KaLLMarx (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1967), 89. It was in
New York that Fuller began to be more interested in social reform in
addition to literary matters, but it was not until she went to Italy
that she became a socialist. There she wrote to Marcus and Rebecca
Spring, with whom she had traveled to Italy and who had returned to
America: “I have become an enthusiastic Socialist; elsewhere is no
comfort, no solution for the problems of the times“ (LME V:295). The
Springs would eventually establish their own Fourierist community
at Raritan Bay, New Jersey.

14. Fuller had had several opportunities in America to join social
movements. She, Emerson, and Hawthorne had all declined
invitations to join the Brook Farm Fourierist phalanx, although
several of their friends, including George Ripley and William Henry
Channing, were members. Fuller's brother Lloyd also lived at Brook
Farm for a time, and Margaret visited him there often. She, like
Emerson, however, felt that social change would come from self-
culture and self-reliance. She wrote in her journal during this time,
“My hopes might lead to Association, too, -- an association, if not of
efforts, yet of destinies. In such an one I live with several already,
feeling that each one, by acting out his own,casts light upon a
mutual destiny, and illustrates the thought of a master mind. It is a
constellation, not a phalanx, to which I would belong.“ (Quoted in
Urbanski, anan, 58).

But in 1848 she wrote to Aunt Mary Rotch from Italy that she
had become “as great an Associationist as W. Channing himself, . . .
as firm a believer that the next form society will take in remedy of
the dreadful ills that now consume it will be voluntary association
in small communities“ (LME V:71).

15. According to Marie Urbanski, WWW
“generated the impulse to feminists to call the first woman's rights
convention“ (146). Several months after Fuller's death in 1850, at
the national women's rights convention of Oct. 23-24 in Worcester,

195

Mass., President Paulina Wright Davis wrote: “One great disappoint-

ment fell upon us. Margaret Fuller, toward whom many eyes were

turned as the future leader in this movement, was not with us. The

'hungry ravening sea,‘ had swallowed her up, and we were left to

mourn her guiding hand--her royal presence. To her, I at least had

hoped to confide the leadership of this movement.“ (Urbanski, 159).
16. Storr, 33-34.

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