An Athletic Soul

...A year later fuller s father suddenly died, and she was both freed from subordination to him and given the new task of maintaining a nearly insolvent family Having "often had reason to regret being of the softer sex," she could now try to act a man's part, first by earning a living The remaining six years of letters in these volumes negotiate with increasing confidence the worlds of masculinity and femininity, money-making enterprise and literary culture...

...Hudspeth's first two volumes take Fuller from her childhood through 1841 to the establishment of her intellectual credentials as leader of the "Conversations' and editor of the Dial, not to her feminist polemics or departure from New England Since her last nine years offer the heady stuff of political radicalism and sexual liberation, it has been tempting to consider the New England years, with hindsight, as simply a time of contrast between young Margaret's idealism and her environment's repressiveness Now, viewing...

...An Athletic Soul The Letters of Margaret Fuller Volume I: 1818-38 Volume II: 1839-41 Edited by Robert N Hudspeth Cornell Volume I, 374 pp $25 00 Volume II, 264 pp $25 00 Reviewed by Phyllis Cole Visiting Scholar, Wellesley College Center for Research on Women She is an essential voice of 19th-century America and also one that evades our usual categories for understanding it Amid the masculine visions of American romantic literature, the domain of Ralph Waldo Emerson's self-reliance and Ahab's pursuit of the whale, Margaret Fuller essayed an equally splendid vision of women's potential Before America saw its first demand for women's political rights at Seneca Falls in 1848, Fuller had come by her own route to a significantly different feminism, one of inner direction She published this call for psychological privacy and power as Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845) Her exploration of the female self is matched only by Emily Dickinson's outpouring of poems 20 years later Yet where Dickinson retreated from the world to craft her tight and slanted poems, Fuller launched out, wrote successfully as a literary and social critic rather than an artist, and found her last work in European radical politics instead of American literature If Dickinson's strategy won her complete obscurity until the 20th century, Fuller's fate was notoriety both in her lifetime and after death The legend of her life has always won more attention than her actual writing, usually attention from men who remembered her for what seemed undue grandiosity Emerson, her partner in editing the Transcendentalists' Dial,observed with mixed admiration and judgment that Margaret caused her friends "some uneasiness, as if this athletic soul craved an atmosphere larger than it found ' Carlyle's brasher line has more often been recalled Hearing her say that she had decided to "accept the universe," he commented, "By Gad, she'd better ". An athletic woman who could still accept the universe is worth hearing about, and Fuller's life is dramatic in both sorts of gesture The outlines are familiar Early unfitted for a conventional existence through the education forced upon her by her father, Cambridge's Congressman in Washington, she became a "bright and ugly" bluestocking The quality of her mental powers, though, were much more her own doing than her father's As a child she read all the Latin he assigned her and found Greek mythology and Shakespeare for herself, by young womanhood in the early 1830s she was the most learned interpreter of German Romanticism in America and a central figure in the group soon to be known as Transcendentalists Excluded from the marriage market and the customary male professions, she found her way to remarkable accomplishment, teaching at experimental schools in Boston and Providence, interpreting modern European literature to Dial readers, running a series of "Conversations" for the social and intellectual awakening of Boston women, publishing her subsequent insights in Woman in the Nineteenth Century...

...Hudspeth's edition is a meticulous piece of scholarship, equally as faithful in its representation of the original as is the recently completed edition of Emerson's journals, and far more inviting to the eye because the visually intrusive textual markings are relegated to footnotes under the body of each letter The clean lines are a real boon, for these letters deserve to be read by a larger audience than will put up with the discouraging clutter of brackets and elisions embedded in the Emerson text The letters may prove to be Fuller's most successful and revealing essays, closer than any of her other efforts to that arresting life as it was being lived Here we have authentic and complex autobiography rather than legend...

...Only in the last decade have scholars begun seriously to explore Fuller's life and world as it is expressed in her own words Two rationales have met in this undertaking-the feminist need to recover women's past and the dedication of American scholars to producing complete texts for our whole literary tradition The late 1970s saw a valuable anthology of Fuller's prose by Bell Gale Chevigny (The Woman and the Myth Margaret Fuller's Life and Writing), and a biography by Paula Blanchard (Margaret Fuller) that was well informed by its subject's output Robert N Hudspeth's collection of Fuller's letters, begun 14 years ago and eventually to include six volumes, goes much beyond even these works...

...While contact with Emerson and his friends clearly helped, opening up intellectual work that offered both stimulation and a modest income, it was as leader of the "Conversations" she designed in 1839 that Fuller fulfilled all the needs building through the decade This was a professional and lucrative job, an alternative to drilling children in someone else's school Furthermore, it felt like an act of potency and prophecy on behalf of women The weekly meetings, Fuller hoped, would offer women a place to "state their doubts and difficulties" and "to systematize thought and give a precision in which our sex are so deficient " It would aim at "the great questions, What were we born to do...

...universe, taking part, finally, in a political rather than spiritual revolution If in 1830 she speculated about "such a person of genius as the 19th century can afford," by 1845 she wrote for and about more representative female humanity in Woman in the Nineteenth Century Robert Hudspeth's edition of The Letters of Margaret Fuller illuminates all the steps in this remarkable passage...

...How shall we do if which so few ever propose to themselves 'till their best years are over ." The most personally revealing letters of these years are addressed to a woman, Fuller's friend Caroline Sturgis Where Fuller's letters to Emerson have been known ever since they appeared in his posthumous Memoir, three-quarters of the letters to Sturgis have never been published before Here Fuller allows herself the intellectual expansiveness she had earlier saved for male friends and the play and passion of her lines to women In 1839 she is apologetic and self-censoring to Emerson, declaring that she is in one of her "naughtiest moods," unable to write because she is inwardly lingering "on the Drachentels' (a Gothic ruin over the Rhine) But the same year she writes at length to Sturgis about that mood and its implications "I love the stern Titanic pan, 1 love the crag, even the Diactenfels of life Who can know these and other my riad children of Chaos and old night, who can know the aw c the horror the majesty of earth, yet be content with the blue sky alone " It is Emerson and company, and those overidealizing Transcendentalists, who are content with blue sky Fuller arrives at this comment by way of telling Sturgis her responses to Plato's erotically charged Phaedrus She continues with a caustic rundown of the soulful, covertly erotic men and women of Boston's counterculture This letter comes across as both a critique of Emerson and a love letter to Sturgis, Fuller is addressing Emerson's "Nature," and implicitly her friend as well, when she suggests, "Let us know one another before we part Tell me your secret, tell me mine To be human is also something...

...To be human, Fuller decided, was very much something It meant acknowledging sexuality, knowing the possibilities and boundaries of the real...

...By implication the letters show how difficult it was for Fuller to envision herself in relationships with either Harvard's young men or Germany's Reflecting her love of Goethe, she tells Claike, "I have greatly wished to see among us such a person of genius as the 19th century can afford, a man [who,after retirement and suffering] would suddenly dilate into a form of Pride, Power, and Glory a center, round which asking, aimless hearts might rally ". A person of that kind she herself plainly is not Only a few months later she writes to Almira Barlow, "Yet some things have I achieved in my own soft feminine style I have given advice 20 times-I have taken it once, I have gained two friends, and recovered two, I have felt admiration four times-horror once, and disgust twice ' The self-mockery of this letter reveals her deep discontent with playing the lady of sensibility, despite her occasional enjoyment of the role Over the long run her aim instead is to transform a "feminine style" into a centered and authoritative "genius" a rare experiment and a brave one...

...If Fuller depended on intimacy with women, she also had the mental vigor usually associated with men and, through shared intellectual pursuits, valuable companionships with men "I have not anybody to speak to that does not talk commonplace," she complains to James Freeman Clarke at the age of 20, "and I wish to talk about such an uncommon person-about Novalis " It was with Clarke, then a student at Harvard Divinity School, that Fuller shared the foray into German literature that most lastingly formed her mind Yet their association was clearly strained, full of elaborate explanation of why "limitless confidence" must not be expected between them...

...This new wealth of letters from Fuller's youth makes sense, too, of her agreeing to "accept the universe " For Fuller, acceptance was strategic, not acquiescent, an effort to cope with a constricted feminine reality so as to resist and change it When she was 23 and at the height of her German study, for example, her father Timothy decided to retire from Cambridge and politics to become a farmer 40 miles inland in Groton Failing to imagine the needs of the intellectual daughter he himself had nurtured, Timothy expected Margaret now to devote herself to teaching her younger siblings at home in Groton And she did so In her letters, however, she attempted to understand this thwarting of ambition m the lofty terms of male European romanticism Like Goethe she sought advantage in rural retirement, echoing Carlyle she found work for genius in the "nearest duty," although this was a daughter's duty, "the education of little brothers and sister," rather than the world-shaping work that Carlyle imagined in Sartor Resartus "My parents are both perfectly satisfied with me,' she reports At the same time she was pushing her-sell, planning in this Goethean seclusion a biography of Goethe himself...

...Nevertheless, Emerson was right, Fuller needed a larger space than New England could offer She moved first to New York to literary and political writing for Horace Greeley's Tribune Then she went to Europe, where her reporting on the Italian revolution of 1848 turned to partisanship, and where she also became the lover of a radical nobleman and bore their child After the revolution was squelched, Fuller seems to have felt her opportunities closing down Without much hope for the future, she was bringing her nearly completed book on Europe and her unorthodox family back to America in 1850 when their ship wrecked off Fire Island, perhaps declining rescue, they were all drowned within 50 yards of shore, Fuller at the age of 40...

...In introducing Fuller's childhood letters to her father, Hudspeth rightly comments that they reveal a healthier bond than Fuller told in previously known documents But the letters that leap of f the page as early revelations of Fuller's character are a pair to young adult women written when Margaret was about 10, one commiserating woman-to-woman about lost love, the other wittily claiming respect because "as you know I am a queen " Elsewhere she writes "I shall not put any miss to your name unless you bid me to do it It does not look half so friendly and it conveys an idea of respect with it that I do not like at all ' Whether playing queen or democratic equal, Fuller always sought intensity in friendship-especially with women, often over troubles with men The personal motifs she brought to her "Conversations" with Boston women clearly began far back and deep within her own development...

...the period in greater detail, we can see that Fuller's particular romanticism, born and bred in New England, quarreled with repressed behavior and idealist philosophy from the start...