But how to speak of “woman”? Three sessions barely opened the subject. The conversation itself exposed a seemingly intractable conflict. Some class members tried to articulate the essential qualities of an “ideal” woman; others argued that woman could be known only by comparison to man—either superior or inferior, depending on the quality under examination. Margaret raised the question “what was the distinction of feminine & masculine when applied to character & mind”?
Ellen Hooper thought “women were instinctive—they had spontaneously what men have by study reflection & induction.” Margaret took this as the cue to state her own views. Man and woman, she asserted, “had each every faculty & element of mind—but . . . they were combined in different proportions.” Ellen pressed harder, asking if “there was any quality in the masculine or in the feminine mind that did not belong to the other.” Margaret said no: there were no capabilities belonging exclusively to either man or woman. Perhaps Margaret herself was not aware of how bold her statement was. Had she been present at the first meeting of the Transcendental Club three years before, when Waldo Emerson complained to the six males present that even the best thinkers of the day were hobbled by a “feminine or receptive” frame of mind rather than a “masculine or creative” one, what might she have said? But of course she had not been invited.
Within her own circle she grew passionate: she wished to hear no more talk of “repressing or subduing faculties because they were not fit for women to cultivate. She desired that whatever faculty we felt to be moving within us, that we should consider a principle of our perfection, & cultivate it accordingly.—& not excuse ourselves from any duty on the ground that we had not the intellectual powers for it; that it was not for women to do.” Margaret returned to the topic of wisdom, a capacity that women and men shared equally, she argued—“something higher than prudence” and “combining always” with “the idea of execution.” Wisdom enabled action, for both women and men.
But what of woman’s “want of isolation,” someone asked, her duties to family that kept her in a daily crush of people, always answering to their demands—and what of the “physical inconveniences” that prevented her from taking up certain occupations? Margaret was firm: “Nothing I hate to hear of so much as woman’s lot.” She wished never to hear the word “lot” again. Why was there this “universal lamentation”? A woman’s “youth”—even when occupied with children and household duties—“ought not to be mourned.” Another way must be found. Still, Margaret allowed for differences in style, if not in quality or caliber, of intelligence in men and women: “Is not man’s intellect the fire caught from heaven—woman’s the flower called forth from earth by the ray?” She assigned more papers, this time “upon the intellectual differences between men & women.”
The results were striking: carefully composed, well-reasoned arguments that showed the progress the women had made since their earlier “poems” to beauty. Margaret read aloud a paper by Sally Gardner, a friend of Elizabeth Peabody’s who traveled from suburban Newton on Wednesdays for the class:
Let men & women be gentle & firm; brave & tender; instinctive but confirming their instincts by reason . . . Scattered up & down in the world’s history there are women who have set aside the accidents of position, & left their mark on the ages . . . They prove that reflection & the power of concentration which predominate in men exist in women, and only require a more earnest culture . . . How do we know that in the possible future woman’s intellect may not manifest itself in forms beautiful as poetry & art, permanent as empires, all emanating from her home—created out of it, from her relations as daughter, sister, wife, & mother? Out of these relations may yet rise a beauty & a power which shall bless & heal the nations. Then the progress of the race will be harmonious & universal . . . [and] “Men shall learn war no more.”
The possible future: a changed world, with women as powerful as men, resulting in peace among nations. This was the sort of vision Margaret had hoped her class might contemplate, before it was too late for them to reach for it. And there was something more. Waldo Emerson guessed that it was Margaret’s “passionate wish for equal companions” that motivated her to begin the Conversations. She was finding them at last among these women. “There I have real society,” she wrote of “my class in Boston” to a friend in Providence, “which I have not before looked for out of the pale of intimacy.”
11
“The gospel of Transcendentalism”
JAMES CLARKE WAS MARRIED. HE HADN’T EVEN TOLD MARGARET about his engagement to Anna Huidekoper, the second daughter of a wealthy Dutch land agent, Harm Jan Huidekoper, who had helped to found a Unitarian church near his home in Meadville, Pennsylvania, a stopping-off point for Clarke on his travels between Louisville and Boston. “It is true I was hurt to hear the news of circumstances so important to you from a stranger,” Margaret admitted to James when she finally felt up to writing him again. She did not let him know just how much.
Maybe James had hoped to spare himself a direct reaction from the “cousin” in whom he had confided all his previous romantic involvements—in too great detail, and not always to good result. Whatever his reasons, Margaret felt cast aside, at the very least as the confessor to her age mate, the openhearted friend who had always seemed so much the younger of the two. During her months of writing and recovery at Groton in the early winter of 1839, after she’d left the Greene Street School and before she learned of James’s wedding plans, she’d written asking him to send his journals or “any other record you may have kept of you[r] life” for her perusal; she “would like to live with you” for a time. As Margaret worked on her biography of Goethe, searching out the important influences on his life, she may have featured herself as the duchess of Weimar to Clarke’s Goethe: in Duchess Amelia’s “wise mind,” Margaret wrote, her literary hero “found that practical sagacity, large knowledge of things as they are, active force, and genial feeling, which he had never before seen combined” in a woman.
But Margaret had no court to which she could lure James, and he had moved ahead and away from her, first in claiming a profession and now in establishing a domestic life. She promised James, equivocally, that “I shall love your Elect, if I can, and shall wish to win her regard”; she was more intent on preserving relations with James—“in no event need either of us be disturbed”—than on befriending his bride. She would not, this time, attempt to enter into his feelings for his beloved; the “finest qualities rarely display themselves except to the eye of love,” she snipped. But Margaret did not begrudge James his chance to “have in the truest sense a home, a home where the thoughts may rest, and the affections be called out, and the noblest aspirations be quickened. Such a home, and work suited to the capacity are all that the best human beings should claim.” When would Margaret herself achieve so happy a balance of love and work?
In truth, though, James felt he’d failed in his mission to the West. He was ready to give up his post at Louisville where his liberal message had won few converts, and that was one reason he’d married the younger dark-haired Anna, whose family fortune would ease him into a new way of life. Indeed, the Huidekopers held a kind of court in Meadville, presiding over one of the earliest Unitarian congregations to thrive outside New England. With the exception of Anna, the Huidekoper sons and daughters intermarried with other prosperous Meadville families, establishing an enclave of genteel enlightenment at the outer limits of the civilized Northeast, forty miles from the shores of Lake Erie. Soon the newlyweds were settled in Meadville themselves, awaiting the birth of a first child, with James poised for a return to Boston whenever the chance for a pulpit might arise.
James Clarke’s one clear success in the West had been his role in founding and editing the Western Messenger, which some argued was misnamed, considering that the bulk of the articles were penned by easterners, Margaret among them. The venture owed its easy acceptance by western readers to what James had recognized early on as his constituents’ openness
to “all sorts of religious supernaturalism”—Transcendentalism—“only not under that name,” as well as to their relative innocence of the turf wars that raged in the East over Trinitarianism, Unitarianism, and outright irreligion. There “is no public opinion here,” he’d written to Margaret: “You are throwing your ideas to help form one.” But his magazine had siphoned off energy that might have led to the creation of a similar publication based in Boston. Once the pet idea of Henry Hedge, who had hoped to “enlist all the Germano-philosophico-literary talent in the country” for his “journal of spirit, not philosophy,” it never saw the light of day. Now, with James Clarke’s return to the East and the Messenger’s demise imminent without his involvement, the Transcendental Club members renewed their discussions of beginning a quarterly journal that would “speak truth without fear or favor to all who desire to hear it.” The project had become more urgent with each of Waldo Emerson’s incendiary Harvard addresses—to the Phi Beta Kappa Society in 1837 and the Divinity School in 1838—as the former minister locked horns with the Unitarian “Pope,” Andrews Norton, over Transcendentalist notions that, no matter how eloquently expressed, struck not just Norton but many strait-laced Bostonians as “dreamy, mystical, crazy, and infideleterious to religion.”
The stakes were higher than the often bombastic war of words implied. Massachusetts law still provided for the imprisonment of criminal “blasphemers.” The same year Waldo Emerson exhorted the Divinity School graduating class to “obey thyself,” to trust “intuition” over “second hand” representations of God by worn-out churchmen, and argued that religion should become “one thing with Science, with Beauty, and with Joy,” the Universalist preacher Abner Kneeland had spent sixty days in a Boston jail for the crime of publishing a letter in his own newspaper, the Boston Investigator, declaring God to be “nature itself,” and any other deity to be “nothing more than a chimera.” Kneeland’s paper had frightened Boston with its promiscuous advocacy of controversial causes, from a woman’s right to keep her own bank account to interracial marriage, divorce, and birth control: he had been locked up for his politics as much as his pantheism. This was to be the last such incarceration in the state’s history, but no one knew that at the time. In scarcely over a decade there would be arrests of prominent Bostonians for their active opposition to the fugitive slave law; Boston would never resolve the contradiction on which it was founded, as both refuge for dissenters and new dominion for the righteous.
Waldo’s penalty for publicly denouncing “the famine of our churches” wasn’t prison but banishment from Harvard, where he would not be invited to speak again for thirty years. His friends watched as he coolly accepted the derision of Norton, who deemed his second speech an “incoherent rhapsody” and an “insult to religion,” and others who accused him of the “foulest atheism.” “As long as all that is said is said against me,” Waldo confided in his journal, “I feel a certain sublime assurance of success.” But success at what? Nothing less than preaching a new secular gospel, available to every man (Waldo still thought primarily in the masculine) by way of private inner communion with the divine: “They call it Christianity. I call it consciousness.”
Waldo Emerson didn’t need a platform or professorship at Harvard; he was an increasingly popular lecturer, and his second book, the collection of essays he worked over painstakingly when not on the lyceum circuit, was taking shape with every certainty of publication and brisk sales. But what of the others in the Transcendental Club who had pulpits to maintain—or resign, as some would choose to do, following Emerson’s example—and, more important, ideas of their own to express? “I begin to be proud of my contemporaries,” he had written to Margaret at the height of the Divinity School controversy, as their expressions of support reached him through the flurry of correspondence, “some of it emphatic & remarkable, love & wrath & catechism.”
“If utterance is denied, the thought lies like a burden on the man,” Waldo had told the assembled Divinity School graduates—and it was true. His partisans were restless to defend him and to articulate their own views. Yet there was no longer any place for their writings in the pages of Boston journals that fell under the purview of Norton and his cronies. Elizabeth Peabody, who in 1834 had been the first to experience Norton’s censorious wrath when he rejected an essay originally slated for publication in his Christian Examiner because of her use of the term “Transcendentalism,” had started a bimonthly publication in Salem after dissolving her teaching partnership with Alcott in 1836. The Family School, which aimed to bring a Transcendental spirituality into the home by way of children’s stories, advice to parents (“Never forget that you have the care of an intelligent soul”), book reviews, and poetry by James Clarke and the eminent painter Washington Allston, had lasted only two issues. Something more ambitious was needed, Transcendental Club members believed, along the lines of the North American Review, the only serious cultural journal of the day with a national distribution, but from which Waldo Emerson heard only “the snore of the muses.”
At two separate meetings of the Transcendental Club in September 1839, “the subject of a Journal designed as the organ of views more in accordance with the Soul” was raised. Theodore Parker, in attendance at the second, recorded afterward in his diary, “There will be a new journal I doubt not. Emerson Miss Fuller & Hedge alike are confident to the birth.” Bronson Alcott suggested a title, “The Dial,” taken from his daily register of the activities and sayings of his young daughters, Anna and Louisa. But Henry Hedge drew back from the enterprise, nervous about the extremism he sensed in Alcott, who argued that the new journal’s contributors must have “entire freedom” to express “the purest thoughts and tastes.” Alcott envisioned a “Dial” that would be unabashed in its promotion of the ethereal—it would be the oracle through which “we of the sublunary world are to be informed of the time of day in the transcendental regions.”
Although Margaret had her differences with Bronson Alcott, she took his side on the matter of absolute freedom for the journal: “A perfectly free organ is to be offered for the expression of individual thought and character,” she wrote to her friend William Henry Channing. Her tastes were not so otherworldly as her one-time teaching partner’s, and “purity”—Alcott’s increasingly peculiar asceticism—was not her concern. She simply argued that there should be neither a “spirit of dogmatism nor of compromise.” The Dial would not be so much an opinion leader as a means of “stimulating” readers “to think more deeply and more nobly by letting them see how some minds”—those of The Dial’s writers—“are kept alive by a wise self-trust.”
Waldo Emerson claimed to be too busy for the job of editor, and Bronson Alcott lacked the skills. At a hastily arranged meeting in Concord in late October—an “afternoon and evening of high talk” among Margaret, Waldo, and Bronson—the trio optimistically surveyed The Dial’s prospects. Subscribers would sign on; George Ripley, who agreed to handle the business side, had bargained with the publishers Weeks & Jordan to offer individual copies for sale in bookstores. Receipts would trickle, if not pour, in.
Margaret had the most to gain from the editorship. Emerson knew of her troubled finances and promised her a substantial portion of the proceeds. But when she volunteered that day in Concord and Emerson seconded her self-nomination, Margaret was looking for more than additional income, which she knew would not be immediately forthcoming. As she once complained to William Channing, commiserating with his own sense of “unemployed force”: “I never, never in life have had the happy feeling of really doing anything.” Here was her chance “really to feel the glow of action.” The job became hers the week of her first Boston Conversation, and soon after, she began soliciting contributions for a first issue to appear in the spring. Writing again to Channing on New Year’s Day, Margaret recalled a time when “you prophecied [sic] a new literature; shall it dawn on 1840.”
It was entirely fitting that the title of the new journal derived from a record of two you
ng girls’ daily lives—their “unfolding” souls. The Dial, under the editorship of the leader of the Conversations, was a different publication than it would have been under the direction of Henry Hedge, James Clarke, or Waldo Emerson, despite his readiness to welcome certain women into the Transcendental Club cohort. Margaret’s own soul would unfold in its pages.
She worried at first that The Dial’s chief supporters—those who “wish it to be, but do not wish to be in any way personally responsible for it,” as Waldo had quipped—would be “looking for the gospel of Transcendentalism” in the publication, an agenda she had little capability or interest to follow. As she admitted to William Channing, who had lately come to replace his Harvard Divinity School friend James Clarke as Margaret’s epistolary confidant, “My position as a woman, and the many private duties which have filled my life, have prevented my thinking deeply on several of the great subjects which these friends have at heart.” It wasn’t an excuse, it was an explanation: she had not been to divinity school, her gender had confined her to a more “private” life than theirs; absorbed as she was at times with matters of the spirit, Margaret simply didn’t care about the future of organized religion as much as George Ripley, Theodore Parker, and Henry Hedge did. William Channing, who’d spent several years after graduation from the Divinity School ranging from Boston to Rome to New York City and now was settled as a Unitarian minister in Cincinnati with his wife and young child, shared her indifference to doctrinal argument, if for a different reason. The lanky, dark-haired nephew of the great Reverend William Ellery Channing, fatherless since infancy and reared under the wing of his eminent uncle, also wished to take action in the world, to aid the urban poor.
Margaret Fuller Page 17
