Toward a Female Genealogy of Transcendentalism

Jana Argersinger, Phyllis Cole

• Publisher: University of Georgia Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780820346977
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Traditional histories of the American transcendentalist movement begin in Ralph Waldo Emerson's terms: describing a rejection of college books and church pulpits in favor of the individual power of "Man Thinking." This essay collection asks how women who lacked the privileges of both college and clergy rose to thought. For them, reading alone and conversing together were the primary means of growth, necessarily in private and informal spaces both overlapping with those of the men and apart from them. But these were means to achieving literary, aesthetic, and political authority— indeed, to claiming utopian possibility for women as a whole.

Toward a Female Genealogy of Transcendentalism is a project of both archaeology and reinterpretation. Many of its seventeen distinguished and rising scholars work from newly recovered archives, and all offer fresh readings of understudied topics and texts. First quickened by the 2010 bicentennial of Margaret Fuller's birth, the project reaches beyond Fuller to her female predecessors, contemporaries, and successors throughout the nineteenth century who contributed to or grew from the transcendentalist movement.

Geographic scope also widens—from the New England base to national and transatlantic spheres. A shared goal is to understand this "genealogy" within a larger history of American women writers; no absolute boundaries divide idealism from sentiment, romantics from realists, or white discourse from black. Primary-text interludes invite readers into the ongoing task of discovering and interpreting transcendentally affiliated women. This collection recognizes the vibrant contributions women made to a major literary movement and will appeal to both scholars and general readers.

SECTION 1
Early Voices,
Origins, Influences

“Let me do nothing smale”

Mary Moody Emerson and
Women’s “Talking” Manuscripts

NOELLE A. BAKER

I am not on the whole sure, that it would not be a very excellent mode
of keeping up correspondence, if friends would transmit to one another
the pages of their common place books … & thus give one another
faithful & unaffected representations of the intellectual life.… You
will see that a scrap from your day-book must always have the worth
& the effect of a letter; for it is as much like conversation, in the true
sense of the term, if it is not so much like How do you do &c.

—Edward Bliss Emerson to Mary Moody Emerson, 29 June 1830

A few single grand ideas, which become objects, pursuits, & all in all!!

—Mary Moody Emerson, 1830 Almanack

If not superficial chitchat, such as the polite “How do you do &c,” what was “conversation, in the true sense of the term,” for Mary Moody Emerson and her several literary circles? In June 1830 nephew Edward Emerson suggests that the circulating leaves from her commonplace books converse with their readers. For him, these “faithful & unaffected” “scraps” communicate more effectively than a letter, seemingly because they embody Mary Emerson’s intellectual endeavors with the authenticity of verbal discourse. Contemporaries such as Henry James Sr., Henry Thoreau, and Elizabeth Palmer Peabody similarly acknowledge Mary Emerson’s striking intellectual force and pursuit of a “few single grand ideas” as the “object” of life. It is Edward, however, who astutely finds a vital connection, characterizing his aunt’s “representations of the intellectual life” as “talk” nearly a decade before Margaret Fuller advocated vocational self-culture in her Boston Conversations.¹

Edward’s observation invites further inquiry into the “talking” manuscripts of Mary Moody Emerson and genre’s role in these conversations.² A brilliant single woman and intellectual mentor to nephew Ralph Waldo Emerson, Mary Moody Emerson (1774–1863) published epistolary and occasional essays early and late in life, but she dedicated her intellectual maturity to a series of unpublished fascicles that she called her “Almanacks” (ca. 1804–55), as well as her “pole star,” “home,” and “the only images” of self-existence.³ The product of fifty years and running to over one thousand pages, Emerson’s handmade booklets are constructed of letter paper bound with thread, and they combine the features of commonplace books, spiritual journals, letters, critical reviews, and original compositions. As Edward Emerson implies, the Almanacks are thoroughly dialogic; they display actual conversations with readers and include direct addresses to the authors of Emerson’s own reading. Moreover, in these manuscripts and in advance of Fuller’s practice of orchestrating “pacquet” writings as an “intertextual conversation” among intimates,⁴ Emerson actively juxtaposes genres, as when she begins a letter on a partially completed Almanack leaf. Begun as reflections on her eclectic reading, these material forms of discourse fostered self-cultivation for Emerson as well as for her fortunate interlocutors.⁵

Though Emerson was not a salonnière, an apt subject for a pious memoir, or a transcendentalist, she nonetheless eagerly surveyed these diverse conversational cultures in her Almanacks. Commenting on these wide-ranging intellectual investigations, Thoreau observes rightly in 1851 that “in spite of her own biases [Emerson] can entertain a large thought with hospitality.”⁶ This broad-minded desire to acquire and disperse knowledge uniquely enabled Emerson to influence different communities, connecting the cultures of eighteenth-century transatlantic women’s coteries, salons, and generic conventions with nineteenth-century feminist and transcendentalist pursuits. Acting as a bridge between generations and in advance of the more feminist Fuller, Emerson experimented with diverse conversational media in order to achieve mutual self-cultivation, enlightened truth, and even professional opportunity.⁷

In this essay, I first examine the flourishing manuscript culture of Emerson from the perspective of book history, focusing on the commonplace book. Next, I consider her commonplace writing within a circle of women in the early nineteenth century. The interaction between coterie writing, print publication, and conversation, standard to transatlantic eighteenth- and nineteenth-century women’s salons, was significant for these early American women writers. Finally, I explore the scope and variety of dialogic self-cultivation in the papers of Mary Emerson and investigate the ways in which her earlier focus on genre and coterie writing intersects with and differs from transcendentalist and feminist cultures of conversation. A pivotal figure between two generations and multiple conversational cultures, Emerson borrows from each as she chases her own evolving truth within the leaves of her commonplace books.

“I … get scraps & write them down,
as the buzzing fly sips from the rich floweret”:
Commonplace Book Writing

Such experimental salonnières as Germaine de Staël and Rahel Varnhagen offered first-generation transcendentalists stimulating examples of the mind-expanding potential of reading, writing, and talking in groups, but older traditions provided Mary Emerson with similar inspiration. Prized by Renaissance humanists and grounded in classical Greek and Roman “philosophical and rhetorical theories,” the commonplace book replicates the ancients’ practice of collecting “sententiae, or wise sayings,” to buttress arguments,⁸ a practice that Emerson also employed. She likewise experimented with another eighteenth-century intellectual convention, coterie writing, nearly a decade prior to the publication of de Staël’s provocative chapter on French and German styles of conversation in her groundbreaking romantic text Germany (1813). Notably, Ralph Waldo Emerson compares Fuller’s Conversations and Mary Emerson’s Almanacks to this formative work, where dialogue also figures as a “lively exercise, in which subjects are played with like a ball, which in its turn comes back to the hand of the thrower.”⁹ In their own commonplace books, eighteenth-century Americans transcribed, arranged, and commented upon extracts from their reading. As Susan Stabile notes, this “intertextual format resembles” the conversational “reciprocity” of eighteenth-century women’s salons as well as de Staël’s verbal sport.¹⁰ Assembling commonplace transcriptions in this way made it possible for Emerson and her fellow writers and readers to orchestrate conversations with the writings of poets, novelists, and divines in their journals. Emerson’s interest in manuscript and print forms of publication derived in part from her early engagement with such transatlantic genres as pious and secular memoirs in addition to commonplace books, each of which documents or facilitates self-culture through “social” or group authorship and the circulation of manuscripts. As Margaret Ezell reminds us, the culture of social authorship enabled early modern women readers to become writers and expand the scope of their audience.¹¹

Nineteenth-century women were encouraged to keep commonplace books for conventionally feminine purposes—in such forms as personalized versions of conduct books, collections of verse, and exercises to enhance memory. However, as Catherine Kerrison suggests, female commonplace book writers understood that writing enables “acquisitive self-development” and, moreover, that commonplace extracts represent “literary property” that can be “as revelatory of their thinking” as letters or diaries.¹² Much like the commonplace books of such eighteenth-century Philadelphia-area writers and salon leaders as Annis Boudinot Stockton and Milcah Martha Moore, Emerson’s Almanacks witness an ongoing participation in a “third sphere” of public discourse, a “social” realm that mediates “private” and “public” spheres for eighteenth-century coterie, commonplace book, and coffeehouse talkers, regardless of gender.¹³ Within this stimulating dialogic zone, Emerson engages in the scientific, theological, political, and philosophical debates that animated influential transatlantic periodicals such as the Edinburgh Review, the North American Review, and the Christian Examiner, whose male reviewers and essayists—Thomas Carlyle, Frederic Henry Hedge, Victor Cousin, Samuel Taylor Coleridge—Emerson read and to whom she responds, sometimes acerbically. Commenting on David Hume in an 1826 fascicle, for example, she grumbles resignedly, “I feel that I shall war with the old Sophist as long as I exist” (385:8).

Coincidentally, Emerson’s very next Almanack entry aptly summarizes the ambitious nature of this and her countless other spirited intellectual engagements. Claiming that her previous life has “consisted of noughts,” Emerson charts a new course, insisting, “I touch eternity—let me do nothing smale.” While piously asserting a need to hide an ostensibly zero-sum existence within the enveloping “omnipotence” of a Christian deity, Emerson nonetheless admits an aspiration to reflect divine power; her identity and its intellectual achievements must persist into a limitless future. “Oh Father of the universe!” she proposes, “Absorb me in thyself—let my consciousness remain—& it will!” As is typical of her flexible intellect, in this passage Emerson extends her religious framework for identity formulation to include Wordsworth’s romantic notion of a divinity “who didst wrap the cloak of infancy around us” (385:8). In The Excursion, the spiritual gifts of childhood uplift Wordsworth’s autobiographical speaker to a visionary intensity of perception. Emerson quibbles characteristically with Wordsworth’s idealism here, but both romantic and Protestant thinking inform her sense of the infinite range of her soul. This fascicle offers a glimpse into the ways in which the relationship between self-construction and the activity of literary “commonplacing”—transcribing, arranging, and commenting upon extracts from her reading—plays out in the Almanacks.

Emerson relates her excitement at this process in March 1835 with the explicit classical trope for commonplace pursuits:¹⁴ “This holiday of soul I beginn the 1^st vol. of Cousin: get scraps & write them down, as the buzzing fly sips from the rich floweret. The very preface disturbs with delight” (385:18; 1280H:149; 579:18). In gathering “scraps” of knowledge from French eclectic philosopher Victor Cousin and sharing them in an expansive third sphere, Emerson might seem to aspire to the actions of male public figures from Thomas Jefferson to Waldo Emerson, for whom commonplace books stored the extracted knowledge that would invigorate their published commentary. However, although the Almanacks occasionally yielded print publications and frequently circulated in manuscript, significantly, with this metaphor, Emerson underscores the festive leisure spirit of the emotions attendant upon her daily reading and writing. Her “holiday of soul” draws inspiration and pleasure not only from Cousin’s stimulating ideas but from commonplacing itself; her terms for the act of reading, transcribing, and sharing new ideas underscore the “disturbing” and almost sensuous enchantment of intellectual fertilization. Delighting in its generic liberty, in this fascicle Emerson culls the intellectual sweets of Cousin—along with Coleridge, Herder, Channing, Adam Smith, Harriet Martineau, Socrates, and Spinoza. As the classical trope for commonplacing proposes, in the manner of the honeybee Emerson sips from scented and varied blossoms. Reading and commentary enrich her soul and signal her artistry, and like the communal bee, she shares this self-cultivation with other members of her coterie by dispersing Almanack leaves for them to read and comment on in turn.

“We antisapate new powers in eternity …
but they will be in unison … to those we
exercise now”: Pious and Secular Memoirs

Although Emerson embarked upon her earliest coterie experiments with female collaborators and continued this tradition in the nineteenth century with Elizabeth Hoar, Peabody, Sarah Alden Bradford Ripley, and younger female kin, male voices dominate the Almanacks’ extracts. In the 1835 Almanack, for instance, Harriet Martineau is a lonely figure amid the primarily male authors that Emerson excerpts. In this respect, the Almanacks differ from Milcah Martha Moore’s unpublished commonplace books, whose pages are replete with women’s writings.¹⁵ Emerson also does not appear to reflect Fuller’s feminist self-consciousness about what it might mean to write for and about gender.

Because of their relative scarcity, however, Emerson’s transcriptions of and commentary about women are particularly noteworthy. Some of the most enthusiastic examples record her excitement at discovering the manuscript writings, eminent piety, and reformist actions of earlier and contemporary women, the most interesting of which do begin to approach Fuller’s feminist self-consciousness. Such memoirs as Mary Hays’s Female Biography (1803) and Elizabeth Smith’s Fragments in Prose and Verse (1810)—both of which Emerson read—highlight transatlantic women, from Sappho and Aspasia to Margaret Cavendish, Aphra Behn, and Marie-Jeanne Roland, who exert intellectual ambition and spiritual authority in glowing language. Further, since editors printed their subjects’ manuscript letters, commonplace books, and spiritual diaries with such memoirs, they fostered a culture of manuscript preservation and circulation as either a precursor or a viable alternative to print publication.¹⁶ As Joanna Bowen Gillespie suggests, pious memoirs proclaim “the right of an everyday human being to write, think, dream, and be published.”¹⁷

This inspirational promise suggests that eighteenth-century memoirs provide an important reference point for Emerson’s multigenerational discourse. Transcendentalists associated the spontaneous power of “talk” with Jesus o...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Primary Interludes
• Acknowledgments
• List of Abbreviations for Frequently Cited Texts
• Introduction
• SECTION 1 Early Voices, Origins, Influences
• SECTION 2 Transcendentalist Circles
• SECTION 3 Wider Circles of Vision and Action
• SECTION 4 Late Voices and Legacies
• Selected Bibliography
• Contributors
• Index