Feminist Conversations: Fuller, Emerson, and the Play of Reading. - book reviews

Criticism, Spring, 1997 by Walter Levy

By Christina Zwarg. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995. Pp. x 302. $39.95 cloth; $16.95 paper.

Margaret Fuller is best remembered for her influence on others and her conversation rather than for her writing. The tendency among feminists today is to resurrect Fuller's literary writings, but except for Woman in the Nineteenth Century, her writings are not memorable. Much of it, particularly Summer on the Lakes, is slow reading embellished with examples of her vast frame of reference and excellent education (which she liked to flaunt). Fuller's poetry is flat and her lines are apt to be stilted. Fuller does not really know how to tell a story, which is why her writing is most accessible in her journalism and literary reviews. Fuller said that as a Transcendentalist, "she had an active mind frequently busy with large topics" (Letter 1837 to Caroline Sturgis). This is aptly descriptive. For Fuller, conversation was a congenial means for self-expression; for Ralph Waldo Emerson, her most famous friend, conversation was an outgrowth of the sermon and the inherent style of the familiar essay at which he was adept. One could say that they both thought in conversation, but Emerson wrote his out, while Fuller spoke hers, and lost them in air. The loss is ours, and I especially wish that Fuller were available on video tape or CD Rom.

For twenty-five years, feminists and other readers of American literature have been carefully analyzing Fuller's literature and personal correspondence trying to place her in a context showing her importance as writer, theorist, and influence. Christina Zwarg finds fault with some literary critics who, she says, have not taken Fuller as seriously as she does, but her study Feminist Conversations hits the right chords and "seriously" examines Fuller's impact Her thesis is that Fuller's thought and writing was a determined attempt to gain power by embracing opportunities not open to women, to break from tradition, and to reduce the trappings of patriarchy: in short, to see, feel, and think like a woman. It is difficult to get at Fuller's genius without discussing her life, and because Zwarg's discussion of Fuller's life is scanty, Fuller's invigorating and often unpredictable personality is largely absent.

Fuller was the editor of Dial (1839-1842), the best and most effective conduit for American Transcendentalism. After leaving the editorship, she traveled and produced Summer on the Lakes (1844), which led to a job as literary critic at Horace Greeley's New York Tribune (1844-1846). Fuller opted for independence, and moved to New York, where she produced her best, if not most vivacious, writings--approximately 250 reviews and general social criticism. Additionally, she worked at recomposing Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845) and collected her reviews in Papers on Literature and Art (1846). Given her death at age 40, she was astonishingly productive, a dynamo of sorts. But her writing is often just not that good. Zwarg puts it rather clumsily when she says that Fuller tried to liberate "her genius from the artifice of artistic character by negotiating a new understanding of the relationship between public and private worlds, indeed by negotiating a shift away from the unsatisfactory categories of artist and genius together" (254).

Zwarg attempts to broaden our awareness of Fuller's achievement by devoting considerable space to Fuller's youthful works: her translation of J. W. Goethe's Torquato Tasso (completed in 1835) and Bettina von Arnim's Gunderode (1842). Zwarg thinks that these works are undervalued, for Fuller provides a "feminist component to translation" through which she set out to change the literary and cultural systems of her fume. This argument asks for too much leniency. Fuller's essay "Bettine Brentano [von Arnim] and her Friend Gunderode," published in Dial (1842) tells much about her relationship with Emerson and less about von Arnim's relationship with Goethe, whom she idolized. Fuller rejected the classic hierarchical male/female relationship. This was the signature of her feminism, and she used this argument in her "Conversations," the lecture series that she was conducting in Boston at this fume. Later, she developed this argument effectively in Woman in the Nineteenth Century. Zwarg tries hard to make a strong case for Fuller's feminist translations, but one can also argue that translation was a dead end for Fuller, since both the Tasso and the Gunderode were left unfinished and unpublished in her lifetime.

Zwarg deepens the linkage between Fuller and Emerson:

Fuller met Emerson as he was pulling away from the church, renouncing

the power of the clergy. At that point, she appeared to be moving

in the opposite direction, attempting to gain power by embracing opportunities

normally dosed to women. But this reading is a superficial

account of their difference. . . . Both were determined to break from

tradition and both tended to define the break in linguistic terms; Emerson