Margaret Fuller Rev. Rod Richards Unitarian Universalist Church of Southeastern Arizona 05/23/10

Opening Words (Margaret Fuller, Responsive Reading #575) A new manifestation is at hand, a new hour is come. When Man and Woman may regard one another as brother and sister, able both to appreciate and to prophecy to one another. A new manifestation is at hand, a new hour is come. What Woman needs is not as a woman to act or rule, but as a nature to grow, as an intelligence to discern, as a soul to live freely and unimpeded, to unfold such powers as were given her. A new manifestation is at hand, a new hour is come. Man does not have his fair share either; his energies are repressed and distorted by the interposition of artificial obstacles. A new manifestation is at hand, a new hour is come. We would have every arbitrary barrier thrown down. We would have every path laid open to Woman as freely as to Man. Were this done, we believe a divine energy would pervade nature to a degree unknown in the history of former ages. A new manifestation is at hand, a new hour is come.

Lighting the Chalice Margaret Fuller (1810 – 1850), describing an experience she had at the age of 21: I went on and on till I came to where the trees were thick about a little pool, dark and silent. I sat down there. I did not think; all was dark, and cold, and still. Suddenly the sun shone out with that transparent sweetness, like the last smile of a dying lover, which it will use when it has been unkind all a cold autumn day. And, even then, passed into my thought a beam from its true sun, from its native sphere, which has never since departed from me. I remembered how, a little child, I had stopped myself one day on the stairs and asked, how did I come to be here? What does it mean? What shall I do about it? I remembered all the times and ways in which the same thought had returned. I saw how long it must be before the soul can learn to act under these limitations of time and space, and human nature; but I saw, also, that it must do it,--that it must make all this false true,--and sow new and immortal plants in the garden of God.

Reading Margaret Fuller (1810 – 1850), inspired great admiration from some, like Ralph Waldo Emerson and Bronson Alcott and Henry David Thoreau…but quite the opposite from others of her time. Here are the words of a few of Fuller’s critics:

From Orestes Brownson in Brownson’s Quarterly Review, April 1845, review of Woman in the Nineteenth Century:

As we read along in the book, we keep constantly asking, What is the lady driving at? What does she want? But no answer comes. She does not know, herself, what she wants. Seriously, Miss Fuller does not know what she wants, any more than does many a fine lady, whom silks, laces, shawls, dogs, Margaret Fuller UUCSEA 05/23/10 Richards / 2 of 6 parrots, balls, routs, jams, watering-places, and despair of lover or husband and friends have ceased to satisfy. She even confesses her inability to formulate her complaint. . .

We have yet to be convinced that woman’s lot, compared with that of man’s, is one of particular hardship. She is not always the victim, and examples of suffering virtue may be found amongst men as well as amongst women. No doubt there are evils enough to redress, but we do not think the insane clamor for “woman’s rights,” for “woman’s equality,” “woman’s liberation,” and all this, will do much to redress them. Woman is no more deprived of her rights than man is of his, and no more enslaved…

She says man is not the head of woman. We, on the authority of the Holy Ghost, say he is. The dominion was not given to woman, nor to man and woman conjointly, but to the man. Therefore, the inspired apostle, while he commands husbands to love and cherish their wives, commands wives to love and obey their husbands; and even setting aside all considerations of divine inspiration St. Paul’s authority is, to say the least, equal to that of Ms. Fuller.

The influential editor, Rufus Wilmot Griswold who believed Fuller went against his notion of feminine modesty, referred to ''Woman in the Nineteenth Century'' as "an eloquent expression of her discontent at having been created female.”

New York writer, Charles Frederick Briggs said that she was "wasting the time of her readers,” especially because she was an unmarried woman and therefore could not "truly represent the female character.”

Sophia Hawthorne, wife of writer Nathaniel Hawthorne, who had previously been a supporter of Fuller, was critical of her after ''Woman of the Nineteenth Century'' was published: “The impression it left was disagreeable. I did not like the tone of it—& did not agree with her at all about the change in woman's outward circumstances...Neither do I believe in such a character of man as she gives. It is altogether too ignoble... I think Margaret speaks of many things that should not be spoken of.”

Years later, Hawthorne's son, Julian wrote, "The majority of readers will, I think, not be inconsolable that poor Margaret Fuller has at last taken her place with the numberless other dismal frauds who fill the limbo of human pretension and failure."

Sermon “Margaret Fuller has at last taken her place with the numberless other dismal frauds who fill the limbo of human pretension and failure.” No pulled punches there! Julian Hawthorne, among the many other people that Molly just read from, did not much like Margaret Fuller…and these folks spent no small amount of energy and skill in expressing their dislike. But what was it that inspired such extreme elaborations of displeasure? If Julian Hawthorne was predicting that Margaret Fuller would, after her death, be swept under the oceans of obscurity along with all the “other dismal frauds who fill the limbo of human pretensions and failure”…well, he got it wrong. Not only are we still talking about Margaret Fuller, but she may well be experiencing something of a revival on this, the 200th anniversary of her birth. The legacy of Margaret Fuller has managed to survive and lives on to inspire, to frustrate, to puzzle, to challenge, to irritate, to delight, to intrigue…Whatever we end up thinking of her or about her work, the fact is that she is still thought about.

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Why is that? And why is it that, on the one hand, we still talk about her and on the other hand don’t really quite know what to say? Why can’t we seem to find a specific place where we can place her bust in the Hall of Famous Unitarians, or Famous Feminists, or Famous Transcendentalists, or Famous Journalists, or Famous Revolutionaries. “One reason she’s a little confusing to people is that she can’t really be pegged,” says Megan Marshall, who is now at work on a book called The Passion of Margaret Fuller. “She had so many activities; it’s hard to say what she was. You can say Emerson was a philosopher. Thoreau was a naturalist. Fuller really was the first female public intellectual.”

She lived from 1810 – 1850 and was indeed friends with Emerson and Thoreau. Some scholars see these three (Emerson, Thoreau, and Fuller) as the major figures of the Transcendentalist movement, which has so informed and influenced present-day Unitarian Universalism, expressed in our sources when we say our tradition draws from “direct experience of [a] transcending mystery and wonder” and expressed by Fuller when she said that a beam from the true sun entered her thoughts and she realized that the soul … must sow new and immortal plants in the garden of God. Many scholars see her as central to the movement. Emerson himself writes in his journal, “Margaret with her radiant genius and fiery heart was perhaps the real center that drew so many and so various individuals into a seeming union.” But if she was the real center, she was also a moving center and history likes people who stay put. If she was one of the Transcendental Trinity, she may have been its Holy Ghost, ambiguously defined and least talked about.

“She had so many activities, it’s hard to say what she was,” writes biographer, Megan Marshall, and indeed the list of activities is impressive and unique for her time. As editor of the Dial, she was the first woman editor of an important intellectual magazine. She was the first woman to write a book about the West and such experiences as sleeping in a barroom, shooting rapids in an Indian canoe, and witnessing mistreatment of Native Americans. She was the first woman to break the taboo against women in the Harvard College Library. Her book, Woman in the Nineteenth Century--which became a bestseller; it sold out its first edition of 1,000 copies in one week--was the first uncompromising plea by an American woman for equal rights. As columnist for Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune, she was the first American woman journalist and also became the first American woman foreign correspondent when Greeley encouraged her to go to Europe. While covering the bloody Roman Revolution of 1849, she became the first American woman underground revolutionary.

She continually overturned expectations.

It began with her father, educating her as he would have a son. “Until Margaret was sent away to boarding school, in adolescence, [her father] assigned her lessons and heard her recitations. At the age of four and a half she could read, and by six was reading Latin with the fluency of English. From Latin she went on to Italian, French, German, a smattering of Greek—studying the masters in each language. She became so versatile,” writes Joseph Jay Diess in American Heritage magazine, “that schoolmates invented the legend that she could simultaneously eat an apple, rock a cradle, knit a stocking, and read a book. They were not far wrong.”

The fruits of this education tended to isolate her, however. Such intelligence was intimidating to many in and of itself, and all the more so because it was held by a woman. Such an education prepared her to ask the questions that she asked in the articles that led up to her groundbreaking work, Woman in the Nineteenth Century. She must have thought: “I am as intelligent as a man—indeed, more intelligent than most—yet my opportunities are not at all the same; my choices are severely restricted based on the arbitrary distinction of my gender.” Margaret Fuller UUCSEA 05/23/10 Richards / 4 of 6

And some were willing to grant that Margaret Fuller was a special case, while rejecting her plea on behalf of women as a whole. Edgar Allan Poe, in his review of her book, wrote, “She judges woman by the heart and intellect of Miss Fuller, but there are not more than one or two dozen Miss Fullers on the whole face of the earth.” This was a back-handed compliment that he later expanded upon, saying: “Humanity is divided into men, women and Margaret Fuller.”

But, while circling a realization in these comments, Poe missed Fuller’s points completely. Humanity is divided into men and women, and Margaret Fuller is precisely challenging our definitions of these divisions.

As arrogant as she was portrayed to be by some—she is quoted by Emerson as saying at one point: “I now know all the people worth knowing in America, and I find no intellect comparable to my own.”—as arrogant as she may have been, she was democratic in her vision. She followed the ramifications of her thoughts, hoping to realize them in action. She applied her message to institutions she saw as barriers to self-development: prisons, asylums, hospitals, slums, immigration policy, poorhouses. She treated her experience, not as a unique case, but as reflective of the experience of women throughout society. She challenged the way that gender was understood and by doing so sought to free women and men from the harmful aspects of societal assumptions:

“Let it not be said, wherever there is energy or creative genius, ‘She has a masculine mind.’ Were [women) free, were they able fully to develop the strength and beauty of Woman, they would never wish to be men or manlike. There is no wholly masculine man, no purely feminine woman.”

Humanity is divided, but the nature of those divisions must be examined, challenged, reconstructed to address an ever-widening understanding of humanity. Humanity is full of the divisions of individual natures on one hand and the commonalities that transcend individual differences and gender and culture and religion and perspective. If we shake up our notions of gender categories (and other such categories), we allow for new possibilities, new futures. A new manifestation is at hand!

But if you are brave enough to bear witness to a new manifestation, be ready for the consequences; be ready for a fight! Whether you are Jesus or Charles Darwin or Eugene Debs or Emma Goldman or Martin Luther King, Jr., declaring a new manifestation means that you are challenging the old manifestation, the current manifestation, the way things are, and things are the way they are because a majority of people have found them comfortable in being as they are. They will fight to keep things the way they are. And if you are a woman declaring a new manifestation, be ready not only for criticism and controversy, but for a particularly personal form of criticism that seems to be reserved for females in our society.

Thus we have Orestes Brownson--once a Transcendentalist, a Unitarian, a Universalist, and finally a convert to Catholicism—we have Orestes Brownson, newly converted, lashing out at Margaret Fuller as, well, a whiny woman.

What is the lady driving at? What does she want? But no answer comes. She does not know, herself, what she wants.

You can almost hear his sigh of frustration contemplating the irrationality of “the fairer sex.”

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You’ll notice that the critics that Molly read from were far less concerned with engaging the conversation that Margaret Fuller had initiated than dismissing it. And they felt more justified in dismissing it because it was initiated by a woman.

New York writer, Charles Frederick Briggs said that she was "wasting the time of her readers,” especially because she was an unmarried woman and therefore could not "truly represent the female character.”

In other words, not having assumed and accepted the only approved role that was open to women of her time, she had no right to criticize it; and, of course, the implication is that if she had assumed and accepted the only approved role that was open to women of her time, she would not have criticized it. This is known as Catch-22.

And if you think such considerations have been erased from present-day conversations, one need only listen to the hubbub surrounding the marital status (or lack thereof) of Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan.

And Fuller experienced, as a host of women in the news still do today, an undue amount of attention to her appearance. Oliver Wendell Holmes described her abnormally long neck as “ophidian” (which I had to look up; it refers to a group of reptiles that include the snakes, which seems strangely fitting to a woman that refused to obey the rules, not unlike Eve). Even her friends couldn’t resist taking part in these physical descriptions, with Emerson talking about her “trick of incessantly opening and shutting her eyelids” and “the nasal tone of her voice,” while William Henry Channing wrote of “the singular pliancy of the vertebrae and muscles of her neck, enabling her by a mere movement to denote her varying emotion.” Other, less descriptively-capable critics, simply described her as “homely.” None of which, however accurate or inaccurate, had anything to do with her work, and much of which would have been considered completely beside the point if Fuller had been male. It is irrelevant, but another way to dismiss the thoughts of women or to distract from the substance of their declarations.

And the challenge that Fuller set forth was not only frightening to men, but also to women. Sophia Hawthorne--formerly Sophia Peabody who took part in the Conversations that Fuller organized to educate women and allow them the opportunity to discuss important matters outside the realm of male influence—Sophia Hawthorne saysthat the impression left by Fuller’s book was “disagreeable,” that she paints a picture of men as being far “too ignoble,” and that—and this is most telling, I think—that “Margaret speaks of things that should not be spoken of.” It is almost as if Hawthorne has not quite convinced even herself that Fuller is wrong, but she is quite certain that the things that Fuller speaks of are best left unsaid so as not to upset the proverbial applecart.

But Margaret Fuller was born to upset the applecart; to overturn expectations from nearly any direction they came from. We’ve already mentioned her “firsts.” She also befuddled her friends when she left the Transcendentalist circle which celebrated her in Boston to become a reporter in New York, a city which was considered decidedly “uncultured” in her time; she spoke out for women’s rights and became an inspiration to the women’s movement, but chose, in her brother’s words, “to act independently…and never to merge her individuality in any existing organization.” She did not marry when American society deemed it fitting that she should marry, but she did take a lover in Rome--an Italian revolutionary nobleman nearly a decade younger than she, Giovanni Angelo Ossoli--whom she possibly married (the details are still somewhat in question) and with whom she had a child.

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After the fall of the short-lived democratically elected government in Italy, and with little means to support their family, Fuller and Ossoli decided to return to America on a merchant ship, to save money. Eerily prophetic, Fuller wrote this in a letter to her mother, “I have a vague expectation of some crisis. My life proceeds as regularly as the fates of a Greek tragedy, and I can but accept the pages as they turn.” Indeed, everything went wrong on the journey. Soon after departing, the captain contracted smallpox and died. The baby, Angelino, caught the disease but recovered.

At 4 a.m. on July 19, 1850, in the midst of a hurricane, the inexperienced mate ran the ship into a sandbar off Fire Island in New York. The 150 tons of marble it was carrying smashed out of the hold. Some of those onboard got to shore, but neither Fuller nor Ossoli could swim. The crew offered Margaret a place in a lifeboat, but she refused to leave her family. All three drowned.

It is the case, say present-day scholars, that Margaret Fuller’s image was distorted not only by her critics but also by her friends, like Emerson, who edited, revised, and in some cases re-wrote her memoirs in ways that ended up presenting her as arrogant, aloof, and dispassionate when new evidence is showing her to be a warm, rich, loving personality. Describing in her journal a day spent walking with Emerson, Fuller writes, “We agreed that my god was Love, his Truth.”

“One reason she’s a little confusing to people is that she can’t really be pegged,” says Megan Marshall, “She had so many activities; it’s hard to say what she was.” Let’s resist the urge to safely categorize and file her away. Let’s let her breathe through the pages of history and continue to confound our desire to sum up a human life. “Very early I knew that the only object in life was to grow,” she wrote in her memoirs. May her memory live on to inspire our own growth as individuals; as a community; as a movement.

Closing Words In one of her innumerable candid appraisals of herself, Margaret Fuller wrote, “I am ‘too fiery’…yet I wish to be seen as I am, and would lose all rather than soften away anything.” The great Polish poet Adam Mickiewicz wrote to her: “In you I met a real person; I need not give you any other praise.” Go in peace, being who you are and growing into what you will become.