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1In the late 1830s Ralph Waldo Emerson and Margaret Fuller began to recognize that their publications, lectures, and public conversations had become something more than acts of personal expression. They sensed a “movement” in the broader culture, the scope of which was larger than a turn of theory or taste among a literary elite. In “The Present Age,” Emerson described a society polarized between “two parties… the party of the Past and the Party of the future,” or in more vivid terms, “the Movement Party” and “the Establishment” (EL 3:187). Margaret Fuller, who had befriended Emerson in 1836, was also recognizing, perhaps more acutely, that she was advancing a profound social transformation. Her inspiration had come principally through her immersion in modern German literature, where she found the doorway to new forms of philosophical analysis and imaginative expression. A passionate reader of Novalis and Goethe, Fuller established herself with remarkable quickness as one of the most knowledgeable Germanists in New England, and published a translation of Eckermann’s Conversations with Goethe in 1839. Recognizing the problematic position of women of letters in nineteenth-century America, she then began to address the social role of women through an innovative series of public Conversations for women in Boston. [1] These Conversations deepened Fuller’s recognition that her own vocational and spiritual struggles were shared by other women, and that a mood of unrest was developing with regard to women’s rights and opportunities.

2The complex alliance of Emerson and Fuller is one of the central narratives in the rise of Transcendentalism. Their work as individuals had both originality and social urgency; in dialogue with each other they seemed to generate a mutual empowerment that enabled them to articulate an incisive yet aspirational critique of American cultural values. Although they both advocated a version of individualistic self-construction, their lectures and public Conversations clarified the idea that self-culture and the reform of society were mutually dependent aspirations. Their collaboration in beginning and sustaining the Dial gave it a reformist character quite beyond a magazine of literature or religion alone. [2] This project, their greatest collaborative effort, engaged both of them deeply, and was transformative for Fuller.

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3Emerson’s transit from Nature’s mystic witness to a somewhat hesitant strategist of a cultural crusade —the place we find him in 1840 —can best be traced through his yearly series of winter lectures in the late 1830s. In them he found, or made, an audience for himself, and we should recognize the courage and savvy that it required for him to exchange a safe New England congregation for a risky lyceum schedule. His Harvard addresses, “The American Scholar” in 1837 and the Divinity School Address in 1838, were important advertising, stirring controversy and providing him with the invaluable reputation of being dangerous. [3]

4There was a notable surge in the originality and scope of his discourse in 1836, when he launched the first of five lecture series which attempted to formulate a systematic description of his era and its possibilities: “The Philosophy of History,” “Human Culture,” “Human Life,” “The Present Age,” and “The Times.” Emerson was influenced by such works as William Hazlitt’s 1825 The Spirit of the Age, and John Stuart Mill’s 1830 volume of the same title, which analyzed a period of change signaled by the French Revolution. Thomas Carlyle’s 1829 essay “Signs of the Times” also expressed the same effort to define the era as one of great transition. Emerson was familiar with Victor Cousin’s sweeping synthesis of modern philosophy published in the late 1820s, which offered another effort to define the modernity of the era. [4] While working out his personal break from tradition, Emerson was also articulating his sense of a shift in history, which made his own struggles representative. The age was characterized, he believed, by the emergence of a widely-held faith in the sacredness of the experience of the individual. These experiences were the basis for social reform as well as individual development. “The modern mind teaches that the nation exists for the Individual, —for the guardianship and education of every man. This idea writes itself out coarsely in all the revolutions and public movements” (EL 3:188). The full realization of the potential of the individual, Emerson believed, was inherently connected to the search for an egalitarian and progressive society. Applying this principle to the empowerment of women, Fuller believed that far-reaching social transformations were necessary and inevitable.

5Modernity was individualism, as Emerson saw it. But it was a qualified individualism, a shared individualism, a point often overlooked in the later reception of Emerson’s philosophy. He resisted the idea that a belief in “the new importance of the individual man” (EL 3:199) was an exclusive or egoistic philosophy. The central democratic principle, he argued, was that “no expediency, no laws, no numbers, no property, no state, no church are or can be equivalent to a man; much less that he is to be sacrificed to them.” This was, he insisted, “not a private but a universal interest” (EL 3:199). He had made this link between the sacredness of the individual and democracy as early as 1834, as a decisive journal entry suggests: “The root & seed of democracy is the doctrine Judge for yourself. Reverence thyself” (JMN 4:342). Self-respect was the grounding for the respect of other selves. True self-knowledge brought with it a reverence for other selves. It may seem paradoxical to find “universal interest” in the value of the individual, but Emerson’s commitment to a “democratic individuality” —a term that I take from the political theorist George Kateb —was the basis from which he could begin to imagine his new philosophy as part of a larger movement. The individual was to be valued only within a structure of many similarly valued individuals. Kateb provides an important analysis of how individualism can be the basis for a collective movement. His influential 1984 essay “Democratic Individuality and the Claims of Politics” was an effort to bring the thinking of Emerson, Thoreau and Whitman, three literary figures, to bear on the theoretical tension between individual rights and communal needs in the discourse of political theory. [5] Kateb described “democratic individuality” as the belief that “democracy’s highest justification lies in its encouragement of individuality,” and conversely, that “individuality’s meaning is not fully disclosed until it is indissociably connected to democracy” (Kateb 332). The terms individuality and democracy were, as he argued, in tension, and defined fully only through their dialectic. “Each moral idea needs the other,” Kateb noted, “both to bring out its most brilliant potentialities and to avoid the most sinister ones” (333). In his lectures in the late 1830s Emerson was moving toward a full recognition that, as Kateb wrote, “democracy radically transforms the doctrine of the individual” (334). The private revelation that he championed in Nature, memorably captured in the transparent eyeball passage, thus carried a latent politics. [6] Emerson’s changing focus from nature to the philosophy of history, and from visionary revelation to “Human Culture” and “Human Life,” should be recognized as an incipient political turn, in which he made increasingly explicit the pragmatic social implications of a fully realized theory of self-culture.

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6Margaret Fuller came to an understanding of her era by a route akin to Emerson’s —through the performance of public speaking in a venue that she had largely engineered herself. But her experiment in public Conversations for women seems now even more strikingly innovative than Emerson’s self-reinvention as an independent lecturer. The Conversations attempted to break through the deeply entrenched barrier between the male “public sphere” and the female “domestic sphere,” bringing women together for public discussion of literary and philosophical subjects, and enabling her to pursue what Christina Zwarg has termed “the association between conversation and feminist agency” (Zwarg 163). While Fuller’s Conversations drew from established forms of discourse such as the sermon and the increasingly popular lyceum lecture, they were also rooted in important women’s traditions —the European literary “salon” of Madame de Staël, and a New England tradition of women’s reading societies and female academies, which reached back to the mid-eighteenth century. [7] In her friend and mentor Eliza Farrar, Fuller had experienced at first hand a woman with many of the qualities of a De Staël, an accomplished author, but perhaps as crucial for Fuller, an intermediary and social catalyst among the talented and perceptive. [8] The model of the European salon overlaid another foundation for Fuller’s Conversations, the “hundreds of literary societies, reading circles, and mutual improvement associations” that, as Mary Kelley noted, had been formed in the new nation since the 1760s. Such groups were signs of “self-transformation” among women, a process that also prepared them “to transform civil society” (Kelley 117, 113, and 153). [9] While Fuller’s Conversations remain beyond our complete grasp, she told Sophia Ripley of her hope to create an interchange of ideas in a forum that stimulated serious thought and open expression. She planned to provide “a point of union to well-educated and thinking women in a city which, with great pretensions to mental refinement, boasts at present nothing of the kind” (Fuller, FL 2:86-87). Fuller was ready, she assured Ripley, simply to suggest topics and lead the resulting dialogue, but she hoped for something more rigorous and systematic, “to pass in review the departments of thought and knowledge and endeavor to place them in due relation to one another in our minds” (FL 2:86-87).

7Fuller’s hope that the Conversations might cultivate systematic and critical thinking was at the heart of the feminist energy driving the project. She hoped that gathering in open but focused discussion would help women “to ascertain what pursuits are best suited to us in our time and state of society, and how we may make best use of our means for building up the life of thought upon the life of action.” This was, ultimately, a call for the critical interrogation of the foundations of patriarchal society. Fuller believed that a call to converse about broad subjects such as “the departments of thought and knowledge” (FL 2:87) or “literature and the arts in endless profusion” (FL 2:89) would inevitably lead a roomful of educated and thoughtful women to consider “What were we born to do? How shall we do it?” (FL 2:87). Having repeatedly confronted the implicit axiom of patriarchal society —I think, therefore I am a man —Fuller was coming to see herself as a representative woman who had struggled directly and openly with a barrier that most thinking women had struggled with inwardly. “I can scarcely have felt the wants of others so much without feeling my own still more deeply,” she explained to Ripley (FL 2:87).

8To represent the aspirations of women did not, however, mean to think and to talk for them. In an era in which the evangelical preacher, the impassioned political orator and the lyceum lecturer embodied authoritative public speech, Fuller attempted to resist such a hierarchical role. “I am so sure that the success of the whole depends on conversation being general that I do not wish any one to join who does not intend, if possible, to take an active part,” she wrote (FL 2:88). Her emphasis on participation and self-expression draws from a reverence for Goethean creative activity as the sustaining purpose of the soul, a vitality that cannot be achieved or sustained in a state of reception only. “Miss Fuller guarded against the idea that she was to teach any thing,” Elizabeth Palmer Peabody wrote in her account of the introductory Conversation. “She merely meant to be the nucleus of conversation,” and “give her own best thoughts on any subject that was named, as a means of calling out the thoughts of others” (Simmons 203). As an intellectual catalyst, Fuller could bring her audience to the difficult task of public self-expression on intellectually challenging questions.

9Peabody recounted one exchange during the Conversations that makes Fuller’s awareness of the link between Transcendentalist self-culture and women’s rights clear. “Ellen [Hooper] asked if she thought that there was any quality in the masculine or in the feminine mind that did not belong to the other.” Fuller’s emphatic response confirmed her modern understanding of the centrality of this question to the concept of gender and the question of women’s rights: “Margaret said no —she did not —& therefore she wished to see if others fully admitted this. because if all admitted it, it would follow of course that we should hear no more of repressing or subduing faculties because they were not fit for women to cultivate.” Fuller’s “no” led directly to the theory that opportunities for study and work should be equally available for women. “She desired that whatever faculty we felt to be moving within us, that we should consider a principle of our perfection, & cultivate it accordingly. — & not excuse ourselves from any duty on the ground that we had not the intellectual powers for it; that it was not for women to do, on an intellectual ground” (Simmons 215). Fuller claimed full opportunity for women in this declaration, and also charged them with the responsibility for exercising their innate faculties and powers.

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10The establishment of the Dial in 1840 marks a significant cultural moment in America, even though the journal’s identity remains hard to specify. As Susan Belasco has written, the Dial was launched at a moment when “a host of other periodicals that appealed to a variety of both specific and general audiences were emerging,” an indication of a building reading public in America. [10] The Dial was not a political magazine, nor was it entirely theological or literary. Charles Capper offered a useful insight in suggesting that we refer to Transcendentalism via the broad label of “a cultural movement” (Capper 1987, 509), an approach that helps us appreciate the magazine’s array of discourse. Perusing the entire run of the Dial one finds primarily religious and quasi-religious writing, literary reviews, fiction, poetry, and a few essays on political themes. The Dial seems to stand beyond any easy descriptive category. It lasted four years, two under Fuller’s editorship and two under Emerson’s, before Emerson brought it to a close. Its “subscription would not pay its expenses,” he wrote to Carlyle, adding wryly that its contributors were “all writing for love” (Correspondence 343). One of Fuller’s, and Emerson’s, hopes was that the Dial would generate enough return for an adequate salary for Fuller. While she gained enormously from the Dial as a writer, those gains were not financial. Almost as disappointing was the difficulty that Fuller and Emerson had in getting material for the journal. Frederic Henry Hedge, upon whom they were depending because of his insightful 1833 essay on Coleridge and his knowledge of German literature, was initially reluctant to send anything, fearing that he might jeopardize his new pastorate in Maine by connections with Transcendental radicalism. [11] Eager contributors, on the other hand, provided some conspicuous literary failures, most notably Bronson Alcott. His “Orphic Sayings,” a long set of hazy idealist aphorisms published in the first two issues, became a target of ridicule, confirming the sense that Transcendentalism was a new synonym for nonsense. In his assessment of the early reviews of the Dial, a gem in the historiography of Transcendentalism, Joel Myerson turned up one wit who compared the “Orphic Sayings” to a “train of fifteen railroad cars with one passenger” (Myerson 1972, 36). The Dial was, nevertheless, able to publish some voices with stature, notably Theodore Parker, Henry David Thoreau, Jones Very, Christopher Pearse Cranch, Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, and of course Emerson and Fuller.

11These mixed results cannot, however, obscure the sense of building purpose from which the Dial sprang; our best access to that is Emerson’s preface to the journal, another surprisingly neglected Transcendentalist text. Emerson presented the Dial as a response to a deeply felt need, a project “eagerly desired” and discussed “often in many private circles” (“Editors” 1). The need for a venue of expression had been felt keenly among the Transcendentalists since the mid-1830s, and their situation became more pressing, as Kenneth Sacks astutely noted, when a change in editorship of the Christian Examiner, the Unitarian journal that had published Hedge, Ripley, and Clarke, threatened to exclude Transcendentalist contributions entirely. [12] Emerson made little direct reference to the Unitarian-Transcendentalist split, but in a coded language that was nevertheless clear to both sides, he described the Dial as a “Journal in a new spirit,” and added a call to arms almost as partisan as some of the provocative passages in the Divinity School Address. The Dial would convey, he wrote, “the strong current of thought and feeling, which, for few years past, has led many sincere persons in New England to make new demands on literature, and to reprobate that rigor of our conventions of religion and education which is turning us to stone” (“Editors” 1). His vision of the Dial made the insurgent potential of the times more explicit. “No one can converse much with different classes of society in New England,” he emphasized, “without remarking the progress of a revolution” (“Editors” 2). Language like this was exactly what the moderate Unitarians dreaded and condemned. For Emerson, however, “revolution” was not too strong a term for the moment. “Those who share” this revolutionary mindset “have no external organization, no badge, no creed, no name. They do not vote, or print, or even meet together. They do not know each other’s faces or names. They are united only in a common love of truth, and love of its work” (“Editors” 2). The Dial, he implied, could be an instrument through which these scattered individuals might unite.

12His description of the community that would support the journal is notable for its egalitarianism. The Dial was not to be seen, Emerson urged, as a coterie journal. Its potential devotees “are of all conditions and constitutions,” he wrote, describing a varied and by no means privileged Dial public. “If some are happily born and well bred, many are no doubt ill dressed, ill placed, ill made — with as many scars of hereditary vice as other men” (“Editors” 2). His catalog of the economic and class conditions of Transcendental souls is Whitmanesque in its inclusive embrace: “in lonely and obscure places, in solitude, in servitude, in compunctions and privations, trudging beside the team in the dusty road, or drudging a hireling in other men’s cornfields, schoolmasters, who teach a few children rudiments for a pittance, ministers of small parishes of the obscurer sects, lone women in dependent condition, matrons and young maidens, rich and poor, beautiful and hard-favored” (“Editors” 2). Emerson’s passage predates decades of dismissal of Transcendentalism as a caper of poetically inclined elites, irrelevant to the course of the American democracy in the antebellum age. At least in his stated intentions, in his hopes, Emerson challenged that characterization.

13Of equal importance is Emerson’s announced hope that the Dial could open the clogged channels of expression that characterized the New England intellectual culture at this juncture. Too much, he argued, was going unsaid and unpublished. Appropriate venues of publication seemed closed or non-existent, and too much of the “revolution” in thinking had remained pent-up or secretly uttered. The Dial’s greatest resources, he believed, lay in “portfolios” of friends, or “the secret confession of genius afraid to trust itself to aught but sympathy,” or “tear-stained diaries of sorrow and passion,” or “the records of youthful taste commenting on old works of art” (“Editors” 4). Opening these vaults was the Dial’s promise and purpose, a task both democratic in spirit and liberating in practice.

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14As we consider it now, however, the greatest achievement of the Dial was the opportunity for writing that it gave to Margaret Fuller. Without the Dial, in fact, Fuller’s career might have looked much different, and much less significant, than it now seems. The magazine gave her the opportunity, even the duty, of writing steadily for it. She had important things to say, and she also had the pressure of pages to fill. As a result Fuller broadened her repertoire as a writer, and pushed herself into new territory as a thinker. Scholars have long recognized that Fuller published significant work in the Dial, including her essay on “Goethe,” and “The Great Lawsuit,” the initial version of Woman in the Nineteenth Century. But the groundbreaking work of Jeffrey Steele underlined the importance of her experimental fiction narratives, pieces that moved beyond established literary genres and might be described as meditations, prose poems, or narrative performances of philosophical or psychological dilemmas. [13] Of particular interest are “The Magnolia of Lake Pontchartrain,” a narrative built on an extended conversation between a human narrator and a magnolia blossom, and “Leila,” a dream-like figure who represents Fuller’s alternative or aspirational identity. Both these surrealist narratives record Fuller’s emotional turmoil in the early 1840s, and illustrate her effort to redefine the female in new and empowering ways. The “Magnolia” narrative, ethereal and disembodied, is a dialogue of the spirits in which a human figure enters a transcendental realm in which blossoms with their fragrances articulate a consciousness that is divine and worldly simultaneously. Fuller seems to inhabit each partner of the dialogue; we see her in the roving and intensely curious narrator, who discovers and begins to interview the blossom, and in the blossom itself, whose spiritual history mirrors her own. The spirit of the magnolia “dwelt once in the orange tree” (“The Magnolia” 46), but her existence as a useful and nurturing fruit eventually exhausted and destroyed her. Now resurrected as a magnolia tree, she lives a life of seclusion, the beauty of which is expressed in the fragrance of her blossom. The magnolia embodies Fuller’s desire for sheltered isolation, and reveals her new resolve to concern herself only with creativity that is inner driven. Fuller had written of “the desire I feel for nun like dedication in these months to come” in an 1840 letter to Caroline Sturgis. “Shrouded in a white veil I would now kneel at the secretest shrines and pace the dimmest cloisters” (Fuller, FL 2:168). The “Magnolia” narrative is Fuller’s declaration that she has relinquished too much of herself to the demands of others, diminishing herself as a result. Notably, Fuller’s magnolia narrative was published in 1841, just before Emerson brought out his signature essay, “Self-Reliance.” Different as they seem in form and even in tone, these texts are closely akin thematically. While “Self-Reliance” is at times misunderstood as a declaration of a destructively asocial egotism, its real argument is that profoundly sustaining relationships, and the inner strength they bring, can only be grounded in acts that are not a response to the imperatives and expectations of others. In this sense, resistance to social pressure is the ultimate basis of ethical conduct. “Be it how it will, do right now. Always scorn appearances and you always may” (CW 2:34). Such advice tallies exactly with the tale of the magnolia, whose present seclusion is a rejection of her earlier life of seeking direction from others.

15“Leila,” which followed “The Magnolia” in the next issue of the Dial, is a narrative of a painful death and eventual rebirth, a fable which we can read autobiographically as Fuller’s witness to her own female emergence through loss and self-discovery. Its setting is opaque and enigmatic, and the action is a series of shifting frames of mood and disposition. But Fuller brings the energies of the piece to a climax when Leila seems to lose her angelic nature and “Godfilled eye” (“Leila” 56), recognizing that even her extraordinary powers are insufficient to generate a changed world. Leila’s sudden transformation from a triumphal prophetess into a tragic witness to the limitations of hope is a version of Fuller’s tragic self-analysis. Ironically, Fuller seems to argue that Leila’s failure (and thus her own) was in part self-inflicted. Her immense energy is in fact the source of her demise. “The condition of this ecstasy is, that it seems to die every moment, and even Leila has not force to die often.” Like a thunderstorm, Leila’s discharge of intellectual energy is awesome, but it comes at great cost. “The electricity accumulates many days before the wild one comes, which leads to these sylph nights of tearful sweetness” (55). Fuller’s metaphor of electrical discharge reflects the narrative’s pattern of Leila’s ecstatic illumination followed by exhausted and vulnerable retreat. Fuller concludes the narrative on a positive note, as Leila closes with the call, “Arise! Let us go forth!” (58). But this brave assurance seems thin in contrast with what we have seen of Leila’s defeat. While Fuller was creating an inspirational figure in Leila, she was also reminding her readers that the achievement of a moment’s mystical insight does not permanently alter the conditions of existence. Even the quasi-goddess Leila is bent by experience, and represents less the power of the visionary than its tragic failure. It is only through the strengthening of human bonds that Leila and her narrator can claim hope, and as Fuller’s narrative teaches, “the hour is come for still deeper trust” (58).

16Fuller’s experiments with these symbolic fictional forms signaled her deeper immersion in female self-expression, and her hope that the Dial could be the medium for a wider and more politicized readership of women. In these stories we can begin to see Fuller drawing from her public Conversations for women, and making initial steps toward her influential treatise on women’s rights, Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845). “Leila,” in particular, embodies and affirms desires and powers held forbidden in women’s experience, and Fuller’s sketch has mythical and occult dimensions that suggest her search for a new vocabulary for her developing feminist philosophy. This story is, as Steele argues, “a compendium of myths,” and stands as “one of the most important texts that Fuller wrote” (Steele 83). The culmination of her Dial writings, “The Great Lawsuit,” draws from both the high critical vocabulary of the Goethe criticism and the highly charged imaginative representation of women’s experience in her fiction. “The Great Lawsuit” is, as its title implies, a brief for women’s rights, but one soaked in literary history and allusion, calling for a renewed awareness of women in history and mythology as representations of a now forsaken vitality and self-realization. [14] Where else but the Dial might Fuller have published such stories and essays in America? No one can imagine them appearing in the Christian Examiner. Without the prospect of publication, how likely would even Margaret Fuller have been to attempt and complete such work? In providing her the opportunity for frank self-expression, the Dial prepared the ground for Woman in the Nineteenth Century, the book which reflected the building feminist energy of the 1840s, and ignited it further.