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Birthing a Nation
Gender, Creativity, and the West in American Literature
By Susan J. Rosowski UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA PRESS
Copyright © 1999 University of Nebraska Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8032-9395-3
CHAPTER 1
Fuller and the West as Muse
Like a literary version of an American pop hero, Margaret Fuller is readily granted superlatives, then as readily dismissed. At the time of her death Fuller was acclaimed the most famous woman in America; a century later she was hailed as "the most distinguished advocate of the Feminist cause in America" (Wade 135) and later still described as "one of the greatest humanists of her century, one of the greatest America has ever produced" (M. Allen 178). Yet Woman in the Nineteenth Century, "the only one of her works which is generally remembered," is "little read today" (Wade 135); the single other book she wrote, Summer on the Lakes, has until recently been ignored or, at best, treated as an aside. Reinforcing the notion that Fuller is interesting primarily as a personality, early critics stressed biography, seeking to distinguish the woman from the myth. More recent critics, seeking to explain her place in intellectual movements of her day, have stressed her ties to the East and the Old World: transcendentalism, Emersonianism, Goethean self-culture, and behind that, Europe. Curiously, even while acknowledging that Fuller was above all dedicated to self-culture, critics have overlooked her most developed autobiographical account of personal change, Summer on the Lakes. Even while describing Fuller as the quintessential American, critics have given short shrift to her ties to the West, the region (and idea, for the two are intertwined) most distinctly American.
It seems inevitable that the West figured in Fuller's plans for self-culture, for it was a natural extension of two major influences upon her — the Jeffersonian thought she learned from her father and transcendentalism. There was the West's broad promise of individualism, free from restrictions imposed by society, and there were personal ties. With Unitarian settlements in Cincinnati, Louisville, and St. Louis came a need for clergy. Three of Fuller's friends — James Freeman Clarke, Christopher Pearse Cranch, and William Henry Channing — went to the Ohio Valley to serve. A rite of passage rather than a lifelong commitment, "this western branch of Transcendentalism did not long survive. Cranch returned east in 1839, Clarke followed in 1840, and Channing, despite his declaration that he should never go west at all unless it were for life, likewise retreated in 1841" (McKinsey, Western Experiment 7). Yet the fact of their going reaffirmed the West for Fuller as the wellspring of original American thought, as is evident in her correspondence with Clarke during his sojourn in St. Louis and Louisville (1833–40). Beginning with a letter written on the Ohio River, 31 July 1833, Clarke revealed to Fuller his aspirations and disappointments, a chronicle of one man putting self-reliance to the test. "I came here with the hope of being more free," Clarke wrote from Louisville 12 August, then went on to lament his inability to act. By December he was writing, "I like the West, but the West does not like me. I could be very happy, were it possible to be happy without the feeling of effectual action," for "my culture has been of a too universal kind to be a good preparation for action in any department" (70). Finally Clarke issued his own call:
You know why I came West. I thought that here was real freedom of thought and opinion, and that it was ... a more favourable scene for the development of a mind which wished to have the power to express individual convictions. I have so found it. We are free to speak here whatever we think — there is no doubt of it. Public opinion is not an intolerant despotism, for there is no such thing as Public Opinion. The most opposite and contradictory principles, notions, opinions are proclaimed every day. Every variety of human thought here finds its representatives. All is incongruous, shifting, amorphous. No spirit of order broods over this Chaos. The old Virginian chivalric sentiments are dying out, and a motley group of modern notions is rushing in. The conviction is gaining ground that as the knights are dust, and their good swords rust, that their ways and fashions may be buried with them. Here is the place for a bold and self-possessed mind to step in, and lay the foundations of a new and strong edifice of thought on the basis of sentiment and feeling. But for one who like myself has no mental self-possession there is a difficulty. (15 Dec. 1834; 86–87)
Fuller's apparent stance was the classically feminine one of confidante, from Massachusetts eagerly learning from Clarke as her surrogate on the frontier: "Is the promised freedom joyous or joyless? Which do you learn most from the book of Nature, Goethe or St. Paul — and are you going to stay in the West always?" Fuller wrote to Clarke on 1 February 1835. Yet throughout the correspondence runs the tension of Fuller's straining to leave the sidelines and participate. As if in counterpoint to Clarke's feeling unable to act, Fuller proposes involvement and is determinedly optimistic, declaring that her "desire to go to the West is revived by the doings at Lane Seminary," which "sounds from afar so like the conflict of keen life" (Fuller, Letters 2:221). Clarke never encouraged her impulse toward action, however: when she asked him to help her find a teaching position at Lane Seminary, he discouraged her by writing, "This western country is a wild country and I would advise no female friend of mine to come to it in any capacity which would bring her into collision with the natives as you would be as a teacher" (Clarke 73). When Clarke began editing the Western Messenger, Fuller contributed to it. Yet she continued to write of her own westering impulse, sometimes directly and sometimes in the playful tone of drawing-room conversation — as when she reminded Clarke she "always had some desire to be meddling with the West" (9 Dec. 1838; Fuller, Letters 1:354).
Inclination became reality when, a decade after suggesting the trip to Clarke, Fuller went west with him and his sister Sarah. Traveling from late May into mid-September, they went first to Niagara Falls and to Buffalo. There they took a steamboat to Chicago, where they were met by another Clarke brother, William, who accompanied Margaret and Sarah through northern Illinois. The women went on their own to Milwaukee and Wisconsin Territory, and Fuller traveled alone to Mackinaw Island, where Ottawa and Chippewa tribes were assembled to receive the government's annual payment. After nine days at Mackinaw, Fuller returned to Chicago, where she rejoined Sarah for the journey home.
What did she expect to find? Though acknowledging the chaos that Clarke had described, Fuller set for herself more far-reaching goals than his. She proposed "by reverent faith to woo the mighty meaning" of the West and "perhaps to foresee the law by which a new order, a new poetry, is to be evoked from this chaos" (Summer 22). Such is the tone of the opening passages of Summer on the Lakes, which rings with the high seriousness of the transcendentalist calling to the Muse. Niagara was nothing if not sublime, as Elizabeth McKinsey writes, and "for Fuller as for other Romantic artists, the effect of the sublime in nature or in great genius was always artistic inspiration" (Niagara Falls 226). The conventions are there, certainly: in Fuller's description of "the weight of a perpetual creation," her anticipation of "a new existence," and her rather self-conscious looking into a whirlpool as into a vortex of constant creation (Summer 7). Above all, there is her high seriousness. Like a novice taking religious vows, Fuller approaches the falls with "a solemn awe," knowing it was "the aspiration of my life's hopes" and feeling hesitation, perhaps from "a feeling of my unworthiness to enter this temple which nature has erected to its God" (11).
Fuller makes the conventions hers, however, in giving them not only an American but a gendered slant. The essential element for American rebirth is authentic (i.e., original) experience, and Fuller carefully distinguished between that which she got secondhand and that which was her own. She described her disappointment that paintings and descriptions had prepared her for the British waterfall, especially as seen from the Terrapin Bridge. She was reassured though that wilderness remained for her to discover for herself: "But from the foot of Biddle's Stairs and the middle of the river and from below the Table Rock, it was still 'barren, barren all'" (12). The pioneering impulse was as basic to the American writer as it was to the settler, and Fuller was laying claim to new experience. "The fountain beyond the Moss Islands I discovered for myself," she wrote (8; emphasis mine). Then she developed further the pioneering metaphor: "Happy were the first discoverers of Niagara, those who could come unawares upon this view and upon that, whose feelings were entirely their own" (12).
Seeking to embrace the new and to leave the past behind, Fuller used complementary scenes to contrast orders of things and ways of seeing: the transcendentalist's law of love and self-forgetfulness versus the age's "love of utility" (8) and "habits of calculation" (15). While at the falls, for example, Fuller described the experience she liked best. Carefully selecting her site, sitting "on Table Rock, close to the great fall," she gave herself up to nature until "all power of observing details, all separate consciousness, was quite lost" (8). She immediately followed the description with a contrasting one. While she was sitting there, "a man came to take his first look. He walked close up to the fall, and after looking at it a moment, with an air as if thinking how he would best appropriate it to his own use, he spat into it" (8). And she overhears immigrants on the boat with her, "talking not of what they should do, but of what they should get in the new scene" (16). Fuller suggests, though does not specify, gender distinctions in the contrast — her sympathy at odds with his utilitarianism.
As she approached Niagara Falls, so she approached the West. She was venturing into a country stripped of "the old landmarks" and awaiting new ones in the chaos between the past and the present. Early episodes are variations upon the idea of original creation, with Fuller casting herself as a creator. In a game of mythological identities, Fuller chooses to be a gnome who works in secret "to feed the veins of mother Earth with permanent splendors. ... passing a life, not merely in heaping together, but making gold. Of all dreams, that of the alchemist is the most poetical" (13–14). And when she describes the land and water meeting, she writes of their mingling so that "a new creation takes place" (15). Initial passages culminate in Fuller's dedication of herself to the West:
I come to the West prepared for the distaste I must experience at its mushroom growth. ... The march of peaceful is scarce less wanton than that of warlike invasion. The old landmarks are broken down, and the land for a season bears none, except of the rudeness of conquest and the needs of the day, whose bivouac-fires blacken the sweetest forest glades. I have come prepared to see all this, to dislike it, but not with stupid narrowness to distrust or defame. On the contrary, while I will not be so obliging as to confound ugliness with beauty, discord with harmony, and laud and be contented with all I meet, when it conflicts with my best desires and tastes, I trust by reverent faith to woo the mighty meaning of the scene, perhaps to foresee the law by which a new order, a new poetry, is to be evoked from this chaos, and with a curiosity as ardent but not so selfish as that of Macbeth, to call up the apparitions of future kings from the strange ingredients of the witch's caldron. Thus I will not grieve that all the noble trees are gone already from this island to feed this caldron, but believe it will have Medea's virtue and reproduce them in the form of new intellectual growths, since centuries cannot again adorn the land with such as have been removed. (22–23)
Here ideas from her correspondence with Clarke reappear, especially those of chaos and violence; yet Fuller changes the metaphor. Although he had used images of battle (knights' swords are rusting) and building (a bold mind could "lay the foundations of a new and strong edifice of thought"), she writes of courtship and reproduction (an ardent wooing that will yield new life) and thus redefines the West in female terms. By trusting that the West "will have Medea's virtue" of reproduction, Fuller describes it as a powerful woman using the magic she alone possesses to destroy the usurping king and to create something new.
Contrasts continue between utilitarianism and a law of love. As if in opposition to white settlers who were approaching nature in a warlike invasion, Fuller describes how she learned to love the prairies. While settlers leave wanton destruction behind them, she leaves poems. Gender distinctions are implicit in this contrast between barbarism, which is (closely associated with men), and love (closely associated with women). As Fuller advances into the West she focuses increasingly upon women's roles: "The great drawback upon the lives of these settlers at present is the unfitness of the women for their new lot," Fuller writes, for women frequently have followed their husbands' choices rather than moved independently, and on the frontier "their part is the hardest and they are least fitted for it" (44). They can rarely find help with domestic work, they have few resources for pleasure, and they have been educated as ornaments of society not suited for "wildwood paths" (45). Fuller would look to the little girls "and hope they would grow up with the strength of body, dexterity, simple tastes, and resources that would fit them to enjoy and refine the Western farmer's life" (45). Applying ideals of self-reliance to women, Fuller advocates casting off European standards of "fashionable delicacy" (45) and learning skills for the West — developing the "bodily strength to enjoy plenty of exercise," learning to play the guitar rather than the piano, and learning vocal rather than instrumental music. The result would be a new elegance for girls (46).
The gendering of the narrative is the most interesting and significant characteristic of Summer. It lies behind Fuller's increasingly explicit identification of women as the hope of the West and also her attitude toward her own role in this rebirth. Instead of experiencing the transcendental oneness with the West that she had envisioned, Fuller found herself an outsider. As she did so, her rhetorical stance became one of a reticent, even apologetic visitor, and her tone became ironic. After hearing an amusing account of a farmer's adventures among the Indians, Fuller demurred, "But I want talent to write it down, and I have not heard the slang of these people intimately enough"; "There were many sportsman stories told, too," but "I do not retain any of these well enough ... to write them down" (99). The word "pleasant" recurs through the final scenes as an ironic reminder that Fuller's experience did not result in the ecstatic loss of self she had anticipated: "How pleasant it was to sit and hear rough men tell pieces out of their own common lives," she remarks (99). In the letters she wrote during her tour, Fuller openly described the loneliness she was feeling, for the erasure of personality she experienced meant uselessness and invisibility, not rebirth. She wrote to Channing from Chicago:
Always it has been that I should hear from them [the people she has met] accounts of the state of the country, in politics or agriculture, or their domestic affairs, or hunting stories. Of me, none asked a question. Like Mr Es lonely poet
What she has, nobody wants
I have not been led to express one thought of my mind with warmth and freedom since I have been here, and all I have ever learnt or been is useless as regards others in the relations in which I meet them as a traveler or visitor. (16 August 1843; Letters 3:141–42)
Thus Fuller the creator gives way to Fuller the recorder as her belief in possibility gives way to awareness of limitations. The climax of Summer is Fuller's statement of impossibility. Establishing her situation as solitary and her mood as thoughtful, Fuller makes the reflection dramatic by a play of emotion — first acknowledging that the course along a new river is pleasant, then regretting that the experience of it is closed to her. She had hoped to glimpse the rapids by daylight, yet when they passed "the beautiful sunset was quite gone, and only a young moon trembling over the scene when we came within hearing of them" (96). In place of the original experience she had sought, she now hopes merely to hear the sound of the rapids; in place of a new birth, she had sought, she now hopes merely to hear the sound of the rapids; in place of a new birth, she remembers the birthday of a friend. The passage builds to her painfully direct acknowledgment that the West is forever closed to her:
I shall not enter into that truly wild and free region; shall not have the canoe voyage, whose daily adventure, with the camping out at night beneath the stars, would have given an interlude of such value to my existence. I shall not see the Pictured Rocks, their chapels and urns. It did not depend on me; it never has, whether such things shall be done or not.
My friends! May they see and do and be more; especially those who have before them a greater number of birthdays, and a more healthy and unfettered existence! (96)
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Birthing a Nation by Susan J. Rosowski. Copyright © 1999 University of Nebraska Press. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA PRESS.
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