Margaret Fuller's Epistolary and Literary Contributions

Margaret Fuller's Epistolary Vision and "Letter to Sophia Ripley" (1839). In a letter written to her friend Sophia Ripley, the wife of the social reformer and Brook Farm founder George Ripley, we can see the incredible range of Fuller’s thinking, as well as her command of personal correspondence. Though the letter is essentially a discussion of the Conversation Club Fuller would conduct in Boston, it is in many ways a proclamation of what she considers most important about being human. She tells Ripley she believes the idea of the discussion forum will be “noble” if it forces the participants to ask, “What were we born to do?” and “How shall we do it?” before “their best days are gone by” (Letters 2:86–89).

Throughout the letter, but especially at the beginning, Fuller enumerates the reasons that she feels her proposed Conversation Club will make a positive addition to the lives of women. Statements like the following point to Fuller’s belief that women in her day led isolated, dreary lives: “I have heard many [women], of mature age, wish for some such stimulus and cheer, and those younger, for a place where they could state their doubts and difficulties, with a hope of gaining aid from the experience or aspirations of others” (Letters 2:86–89). Sentiments like these suggest that even at this earliest stage of Fuller’s life as a public figure she was motivated by a desire to expand women’s awareness of their true potential. This same desire would emerge with far greater force five years later in Woman in the Nineteenth Century.

Knowing that the responsibility to make the enterprise work rested squarely on her shoulders, Fuller realistically assessed the task before her: “I look upon it with no blind enthusiasm, nor unlimited faith, but with confidence” (Letters 2:86–89). Finally, after some discussion about mundane issues like who should be invited and what topics covered, Fuller touches on an area central to her view of life: women’s active participation in the world around them. Here we see her sentiments expand from a meditation on pedagogy to a far more significant view of what it takes to grow as a human. She writes, “No one will be forced, but those who do not talk will not derive the same advantages with those who openly state their impressions and consent to learn by blundering as is the destiny of man here below” (2:86–89). Though this missive is a musing to Ripley on what Fuller would wish to see during her Conversation Club series, her words might have been the siren cry of a lifetime she would dedicate to getting all people, women especially, to engage intellectually in the world around them and actively speak their minds.

Pedagogical Discourse and Social Questions for Discussion or Writing. The personal correspondence of Margaret Fuller provides key insights into the emergence of her public voice and social critique.

· 1st question: Voicing deeply felt opinions is often easier when using figurative language or when addressing an audience that is familiar and wholly supportive. How do you see Fuller’s voice emerging in her personal correspondence with her good friend Sophia Ripley?

· 2nd question: In what ways does Fuller’s initial explanation of the need for the kind of communication she hopes to provide through her Conversation Club define the experience of women in Boston at the time she was writing? Locate language in the letter that you think defines Fuller’s view of the lives most women led.

· 3rd question: Identify the parallels that link the perceptions of New England women that Fuller presents in her letter to Sophia Ripley with the view Emily Dickinson promotes in “What Soft—Cherubic Creatures—”. Do you think that Dickinson, like Fuller, is aiming to improve the lot of the women about whom she writes?

Analysis of Summer on the Lakes, in 1843 (1844). Fuller may justly be thought of as a surprisingly prolific writer if one considers that she began to view herself as an author relatively late in her sadly shortened life of 40 years. Though she had written many articles for The Dial that had gained her fame, it was the publication of Summer on the Lakes that introduced her work to a wider audience and ultimately opened the door for the reworking of a previous Dial article into the book Woman in the Nineteenth Century. Summer on the Lakes was Fuller’s first original book, and in many ways it was a novice effort. It neither adheres to an established travelogue format, nor is it fully realized. As she acknowledges near the end, “What I got from the journey was the poetic impression of the country at large; it is all I have aimed to communicate” (Summer 47). Nonetheless, it certainly gave notice that Fuller saw the world differently than the vast majority of published writers of the day and gave her a forum to discuss topics that she would explore in print for the remainder of her life.

One of those topics was the role of women in the formation of any newly emerging society. What she observed about the West was “the unfitness of the women for their new role” (Summer 16). Though she appreciated the hard work the women put forth, she thought their “city education had imparted neither the strength nor skill now demanded”. Still, she hoped that over time the European traditions adhered to by their mothers would give way to a new, liberating perspective for younger women so that “a girl really skilled to make home beautiful and comfortable, with bodily strength to enjoy plenty of exercise, the woods, the streams, a few studies, music and the sincere and familiar intercourse . . . would afford happiness enough” (Summer 28).

Another of the topics she discusses in Summer on the Lakes that would resurface in her later writings are the different effects nature produces in individuals. Niagara Falls, one of the great natural wonders that provoked awe and wonder in the hearts of many 19th-century Americans, provides the first encounter with nature that she discusses in the book. Oddly, she writes that she is not especially moved by the grandeur of the famous natural wonder because of her previous knowledge of it through etchings and myriad written accounts. Still, she recounts that as she sits on a bench close enough to feel the mist of the thundering waterfall, a man “walked close to the fall, and, after looking at it a moment, with an air as if thinking how he could best appropriate it to his own use, he spat into it” (Summer 17). This incident would prove pivotal in the tone and direction of her narrative. After seeing the man’s action as contemptuous of nature and as an effort to seek dominion over it, her work became far more a meditation than a travelogue. Indeed, by her own admission, she was a poor judge of distance and topography and thus was not “particularly anxious to give the geography of the scene” so much as to communicate “the poetic impression of the country at large” (Summer 29).

In the end, however, it was neither the descriptions of natural wonders nor observations of rugged individualism embodied by settlers on the American frontier that made Fuller’s work noteworthy. Her achievement emerges through troubled musings about the plight of the women who seemed to have become enslaved by codes of domesticity so rigid that they could never gain inspiration from the majesty of their surroundings. Fuller saw white female settlers as so completely preoccupied with the unrelieved drudgery of rural existence that the poor become “slatterns” and the better off “struggle under every disadvantage to keep up the necessary routine of small arrangements” (Summer 31). She became one of the first writers to chronicle not just the wearisome conditions of white women in the West but of Native American women as well.

She refused to accept the degradation of the Indians as a consequence of their “lack of civilization,” the widely held opinion. By placing a quasi-autobiographical fictional character she calls Mariana in the middle of her book, she provides a means to analyze the gender constructions that in her view entrapped all women. Whether it was the institution of marriage, the male exclusivity of higher education, or the secondary roles in terms of decision making assigned to females in every society she examined, it raised her ire, and she focused upon these perceived inequities. In so doing, she asks her readership the revolutionary question “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?” (Summer 46). For Fuller this almost Socratic method of rhetorical questioning was central to a much-needed American debate. Shortly following the release of Summer on the Lakes came the widespread publication of her second, and most influential, book, Woman in the Nineteenth Century, and just such a national examination of values was joined.

Critical Exploration and Questions for Discussion or Writing. The textual features of Margaret Fuller's travel writing provide avenues for critical inquiry into gender, nature, and 19th-century American society.

1st question: In what ways did Fuller’s “travel book” Summer on the Lakes, in 1843 differ from other such narratives?

2nd question: Clearly Fuller was dismayed by what she encountered in the West regarding the role of women and the Native American. What conditions did she find? Might she have anticipated better? Do you feel there are “territories” in our current world that would be especially eye-opening to similar first-person investigation? Explain.