First Parish Sermon Archive

“IN CELEBRATION OF MARGARET FULLER”

 

The Sermon at the First Parish in Wayland, Mass.

By the Rev. Ken Sawyer

On May 16, 2010

 

Over the years I have tried to include, in each year’s slate of sermon subjects, at least one biography of a prominent Unitarian or Universalist from the past. I give these only in part because I love history and I know that many of you do, too – albeit, not all. But I have a broader sense of purpose, too, perhaps a rabbinic sense of responsibility to teach the heritage, grounded in a sense of the church as a family of sorts.

 

These biographies are the stories we tell about our ancestors, the generations that preceded us, whose struggles with life and its meaning affect who we are as a church family today.

 

A lot of the biographies that UUs tell are especially fun for us in this area because they took place close at hand, often in Boston, Cambridge, or Concord.

 

And while most of them are about men, not all are, and the story of one of the more important women in the movement took place right here in Wayland, where Lydia Maria Child lived for the last twenty-five years of her life, until 1880.

 

I may have mentioned her before. [This was a joke – I have preached on her many times – Ken]. I probably will again. But to the movement and the country at large, her fame was — and still is, only the more so — overshadowed by a contemporary and friend, eight years her junior, Margaret Fuller.

    

In many ways their lives coincided. Both were from eastern Massachusetts, Child from Medford, Fuller from Cambridgeport, where she was born two hundred years ago this month. Both were involved in encouraging social change; both served as journalists in New York City in the ‘40s; both broke new ground for women, Child as an author and editor, Fuller as an editor,  journalist, and  critic; both edited journals; both wrote books on the status of women; both struggled mightily to get by financially.

 

But for all that Child overcame and accomplished, Fuller’s place in history is larger, maybe because of her more dramatic personality, or her extraordinary intellect, or her central role in the most intellectual group of her time, the Transcendentalists, or her friendship with Ralph Waldo Emerson, or as a symbol of a woman who challenged traditional boundaries, regarded for a long time as a “bogeywoman,” and then more recently as an exemplar.

 

The occasion of the 200^th anniversary of her birth gives me a chance to return to Fuller and to one of my favorite biographies, Margaret Fuller: From Transcendentalism to Revolution by Paula Blachard. For many years it was on the recommended reading list for prospective UU ministers, who were expected to learn about some of our Unitarian and Universalist predecessors in depth; it may still be.

 

One might quibble at whether she was a Unitarian, but she was raised as one, and certainly moved in Unitarian circles.  Her friends were Unitarians, as well as some of her detractors, as well as Nathaniel Hawthorne, who was both a friend and, ultimately, after her death, a major contributor to the negative mythology associated with her.

 

But even if one concedes a connection between her and our movement, one may still wonder what makes her important.  Blanchard begins the last page of the biography by acknowledging that people asked at the time, “what did she do?”

 

Blanchard says, “The question …is still often asked, and a mechanical recitation of the various hats she wore is unsatisfying.  She shares with Poe the distinction of being our first major literary critic; she was our first woman foreign correspondent; she contributed much to the feminist movement and to the rise of American Romanticism.  She went further than any other woman of her time in forcing an unwilling public to accept the idea of a woman as a major intellectual figure…

 

“But ultimately she should be remembered for what she was rather than what she did. Her achievement cannot be measured except in terms of the handicaps under which she gained it… In carving out a niche for herself on the enormous wall of resistance that faced her, she left a toehold for others.” (342)

 

Much has been written of Fuller’s upbringing and the early flowering of her intellect.  Her father Timothy reported that at five she could read in any book.  She started learning Latin at six, and discovered Shakespeare at 8. Her father was supportive, held her to high standards of accomplishment, and was probably not the tyrant that some have imagined.

 

She was not uniquely precocious in her time, but most others were men, who in their early teens could enter college. By sixteen Margaret’s formal education was over, after years at Dr. Park’s School in Boston and Miss Prescott’s school in Groton, which she liked much better, falling into the role of class rebel.

 

By sixteen she had also changed from using her first name, Sarah, which she disliked, to using Margaret, and insisted that others did too. (She was not unique in this. Emerson chose Waldo, not Ralph, Child chose Maria, not Lydia.  And David Henry ThoREAU decided he would rather be Henry David THOreau.)

 

By sixteen she had a disturbing skin condition that reddened her face, but faded soon after. As she later wrote, “I recovered, and made up my mind to be bright and ugly.” (40) Actually, she was not typically described as ugly, though the journals of others do refer to her plainness, in particular a habit of half-closing her eyes in conversation.  But she was definitely bright, and uninclined to hide the fact.

 

By sixteen she had decided how she planned to employ that intelligence, which was as a writer — in a life of letters, as it was called, a life from which few men found steady income, and no women.  Women of her social and educational status had three choices: to teach, to become a governess, or to marry.

 

Margaret chose a life of letters, and would harbor mixed feelings about the choice, especially since for the longest time she believed that it required celibacy of her.  But if she did not until much later take a partner, she always had friends.

 

Fuller as a child had been a surprisingly mature conversationalist, and although she turned sulky by ten, and developed a discomforting combination of haughtiness and candor, which she never lost, when at sixteen she returned from Groton to the social life of Cambridge and Boston, it turned out she had what Blanchard calls an extraordinary talent for friendship.

 

People would be put off by her at first, this rather large, still florid young woman, in “brilliantly colored, conspicuous clothes” (61), full of opinions and satirical wit.

 

But people, first repelled, would soon get to liking her, and end up the evening confiding in her their stories. “She would not make a journey,” wrote Emerson, “or go to an evening party, without meeting a new person, who wished presently to impart his history to her.” (54)

 

Among the many close friends she made in this time was Maria Child, “whose dry, no-nonsense, Yankee reserve complemented Margaret’s exuberance,” (55)  and James Freeman Clarke, later one of the leading Unitarian ministers, then her best friend.

 

Part of her skill at friendship rested on her greatest talent, that of conversationalist.  It was as a conversationalist that she was best known in her own time.  She was widely read and very bright, but as important, she drew out others, sensed how to involve them in the discussion.

 

The Cambridge she returned to at sixteen was in the early stages of a great cultural revolution, fast on the heels of one barely past that had largely swept away Calvinism from the churches of eastern Massachusetts in favor of Unitarianism. William Ellery  Channing, the leader of the earlier revolution, was still alive and well.

 

But already, among his young disciples there was a growing sense that the old revolution had settled into a new orthodoxy, and a wrong-headed one at that. American Transcendentalism was about to be born.  Most of the key players were already on hand: Theodore Parker, George Ripley, Fuller herself, Frederick Henry Hedge, and the man who would make it happen, Ralph Waldo Emerson.

 

It would be a few more years before Emerson’s lectures began to define the new thought, but the ideas were already germinating.  The young ministers and others, like Fuller and Clarke, were reading Coleridge and Wordsworth, the British spokespersons for romanticism.  German was being taught at Harvard now, and some people were traveling to Germany to study first-hand the writers whose romanticism had inspired the whole rolling wave of intellectual thought that was about to crash onto the shores of Massachusetts.  Fuller and Clarke met nightly to read Schiller and Goethe together.

 

What they all were finding in German and English Romanticism was an emphasis on the individual, on nature and intuition as sources of inspiration, and a “passion, mystery, and poetry” (67) that Boston Unitarianism seemed to them to lack.

 

Essentially, the movement internationally developed from the writing of Emanuel Kant, who said that people’s minds at birth are not blank slates upon which experience writes, as John Locke had proposed and as conservative Unitarians still believed.  No, said Kant, to quote from Blanchard, mind “is a free actively creative force born into each human being. It forms its own consciousness by selecting and arranging sense impressions available to it.  It cannot be explained by science or theology; like God, it simply exits.  Kant called the mysterious selective power of the mind ‘transcendental’ knowledge because it transcends all rational attempts to analyze it.” (67)    

 

Like the others, Fuller was entranced.  But life took a funny turn.  Her father, a lawyer, had become a member of the House of Representatives and then a Senator.  The family had moved from Cambridgeport to a mansion in Cambridge, and then to another.  Senator Fuller had hopes of an ambassadorship in an administration of John Quincy Adams, of whom he was a faithful supporter.  But after wins in ’28 and ’32 by Andrew Jackson, the Senator grew disillusioned and decided to become a gentleman farmer in Groton.

 

To Margaret Fuller, the banishment from society was total, compounded by the rigorous work of farm life as the oldest child.  She continued reading avoraciously, including the rest of Goethe — and the Bile, as she worked on her personal faith, coming to believe that everything must be part of some divine plan.

 

“This is my idea,” she wrote, “– the soul that, capable of the most delicate and strongest emotions, can yet look upon the world as it is with a free and eagle gaze, and, without any vain optimism or weak hope of a peculiar lot can…accept life.”   (87)

 

Her father died, and she had to take over management of the farm, a further burden.  But in 1836, at the age of 26, she had occasion to visit Emerson in Concord, and their remarkable relationship began.  They were a perfect complement to each other, he “a steadying influence, a source of motivation and encouragement” (101), she “possessed of a vitality and spontaneity which he lacked.”  (100)  She would not let him withdraw from society, he helped her to appreciate solitude and nature.  And they shared a passion for Transcendental thought.

 

Through Emerson, she met Bronson Alcott, who ran a very progressive school in Boston, and Margaret moved to Boston to become a recorder there, teaching languages in the mornings and recording Alcott’s conversations with the students in the afternoon, later to be published.  She also taught languages to women in the evening, and one evening a week translated aloud to Channing.

 

But after four months with Alcott, his school was under such attack for its liberality that enrollment declined and he could not afford to keep Margaret on. Two years later, he would admit a mulatto girl, and the ensuing uproar would cause the school to close.

 

Fuller next moved to Providence to teach for eighteen months, which she did not enjoy much.  But during this time, the Transcendentalists began to meet as a group, with Margaret as a member.  Moving back to Groton thereafter, but regularly moving back into Boston, she became part of the intellectual gatherings at Elizabeth Peabody’s bookshop.

 

Her skill as a conversationalist led to the suggestion that she form groups as a source of income, which she did, two a year for four years, attended by many of the prominent women of the day, including Maria Child.  Once she tried to include men, too, but it failed: the women went quiet, the men talked on and on.

 

What was the great success of the conversations otherwise had been exactly the opposite: Fuller managed to introduce important subjects and draw her group members into the discussion, giving women occasion, indeed, the expectation, to have opinions and to voice them in public.

 

“In her conversations and in her very life style,” writes Blanchard, “Margaret… permanently altered the image women had of themselves and passed on to their daughters, and it is this influence, no less real for its being impossible to measure, that her strongest contribution lay.”

 

But in UU circles, she is best remembered as the editor of the Dial, the literary journal published by the Transcendentalists as an alternative to the only other regular literary magazine of the day, the North American Review, which the Transcendentalists thought stuffy. (Emerson called it “the snore of the Muses.” [134])

 

Being editor, as she was for two years, meant hounding potential contributors down and pestering them to come through with their pieces, along with the editing. Plus, she had to write enough herself to fill the edition, which in one case meant over half. But the journal was a success. After two years, Emerson took over as editor. Two years later it died.

 

There is so much more of her life to recount, and so little time left to do so. She became a literary critic for Horace Greeley in New York. She wrote perhaps the earliest book of feminist thought in America, urging women to become self-reliant. Marriage and motherhood are fine choices, but not to be chosen except freely, after a woman has achieved a sense of independence.

         

Life being complicated, even though she was strong in her sense of the economic hardships women faced then, she was an ambivalent advocate of women’s suffrage. And I remember when her Emersonian emphasis on self-reliance and independence for women was challenged by those who saw these as masculine values that women should challenge in the name of community and interdependence.

 

Fuller would not have yielded on that point. For her, the goal of women and men alike was to develop a balance of features deemed male or female by society. A sense of worth and independence was as essential to all as were the friendships she herself found so crucial.

 

Likewise, Fuller looked for a balance between sensibility and discipline in the minds she encountered [111], and a balance of reason and emotion – balances that came naturally to her, but that she paid for in a society unable to accept such balance in a woman.

 

She was sent oversees by Greeley as a foreign correspondence and reported on events in Italy that led up to the Revolution of 1848. She was in Rome when the city was taken by French troops, after the republican nationalists had succeeded in gaining temporary freedom from Austria, and she volunteered to serve in the hospitals.

 

But by then something more dramatic still had happened of a personal sort: she had formed a romantic alliance with an Italian marquis who served in the papal guard, and had with him a son, initially in secret. The next year, living in Florence, they were probably married, and she began to tell family and friends of her situation, which elated some, but also led to some scorn, and support for the prejudice that women who act unnaturally by exercising their intelligence will misbehave in general.

 

Still, the family was prepared to return to the States to face the reaction and to resume Fuller’s writing career. They made it as far as a sand bar a few hundred feet off Fire Island, New York, where the merchant sailing vessel on which they were passengers ran aground in a storm.

 

Rescuers could not launch into the surf. The only hope of reaching shore was to ride in on a plank, as some succeeded in doing, but Fuller would not abandon her son to do so. After being battered for twelve hours, the ship broke up and the passengers were lost. Fuller was forty years old.

 

In her own time, she was much despised, as well as loved and admired. In the years after her death, the Margaret Myth grew up, the myth of an outrageously inappropriate, pompous, self-righteous libertine. Blanchard argues that much of that swaggering was defensive, an attempt to survive in a ferociously male world by a woman for whom there was barely a way of surviving, save her intelligence and wit.

 

And not only did she survive, as long as the fates would allow, she prospered: she vastly expanded what society could imagine women being and doing; she lived a full if shortened life of adventure, intellect, achievement, and love. The idiotic Margaret Myth is all but forgotten. Instead, the real Margaret Fuller is currently the subject of an admiring display in several rooms of the central Boston Public Library.

 

After all, her birthday is this month, two hundred years later, years that would have been so much less lively, progressive, liberating, and good if Middlesex County, the United States, and the world had missed out on Margaret Fuller.