Soul Sisters and the Sister Arts: Margaret Fuller, Caroline Sturgis, and Their Private World of Love and Art

While Caroline Sturgis does appear in transcendental histories as a minor character, her story as a primary confidante and creative catalyst to Margaret Fuller has been buried along with her unpublished letters, poems, journals, sketchbooks, and paintings in various archives and private collections. ¹ Although scattered, the sources remain to reconstruct not only an unusual friendship but also a distinct strain of transcendentalism, what I term "aesthetic transcendentalism," devoted to art and intimately intertwined with Fuller's and Sturgis's intellectual, spiritual, and emotional growth. ² As Sturgis wrote to their mutual friend Emerson a few months after Fuller's tragic death by drowning: "Margaret's great mark was of a sense of Art. This I felt when we first looked at drawings together, although I did not understand it at the time. I see it now in her writings, her relations with persons, her whole life." ³ Reconstructing this private world both establishes Sturgis as a key figure and sharpens our understanding of Fuller, providing a missing thread that connects the two deeply and presages their respective sojourns in Italy, the locus of Renaissance art, at later periods of life.

The term "aesthetic transcendentalism" nods intentionally toward Lawrence Buell's now-canonical "literary transcendentalism" but recognizes the undersung interdisciplinary and female-driven aspects of this creative strand. While Buell in his focus on literature gives little notice to its fundamental and indissoluble ties with visual art, art historians in turn limit their study of the influence of transcendentalism on mid-nineteenth-century American art to crosscurrents among Emerson, Ruskin, and the Hudson River School and such individual artists as Washington Allston and Christopher Pearse Cranch, privileging male figures and finished canvases. ⁴ This narrow track ignores Fuller's parallel influence on a close circle of young Bostonians who attended her Conversations and religiously read her articles in the Dial as well as her translation of Goethe's Conversations with Eckermann (1839), mirroring Fuller's passion for works of European literature and art history. ⁵ In "A Record of Impressions," her July 1840 Dial review of Allston's 1839 retrospective exhibition, Fuller discloses her fear as to "whether the arts can ever be at home among us" and admits, "There is no poetical ground-work ready for the artist in our country and time." While repudiating any "servile imitation" based on "a few hasty visits to the galleries of Europe," she also affirms that we Americans should grow in ability to "appreciate those finer manifestations of nature, which slow growths of ages and peculiar aspects of society have occasionally brought out, to testify to us what we may and should be." ⁶ Fuller advocates American attention to Europe, thus foregrounding her own habitation there.

The parallel art culture initiated by Margaret Fuller was varied in form, ecstatic in nature, and expressive of American potential not only in poetry, essays, sermons, and hybrid genres but also in pencil, paint, and marble—whether formalized or ephemeral. Fuller and Sturgis's world of art was intricately tied to their emulation of powerful and prescient women, designated in Fuller's Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845) as the "Ecstatica." Unlike "Miranda," the intellectual woman who is Fuller's clear alter ego, the "Ecstatica" represents the woman of superior ability whose "intuitions are more rapid and more correct" and who possesses "the electrical, the magnetic element" that comes "direct from the spirit." ⁷ While Fuller confided in her 1844 journal, "I wrote of woman, and proudly painted myself as Miranda," ⁸ her numerous examples of sibyls, prophetesses, and goddesses, as well as intellectuals, register her preoccupation with these alternately revered or outcast women. They served as inspirational models for an ecstatic and mystical side of herself—and of Sturgis, too.

Renaissance iconography was closely tied to Fuller's and Sturgis's conception of such women, and thus of themselves. In Woman in the Nineteenth Century, Fuller specifically names Michelangelo's "Persican Sibyl" as one of the "Ecstaticas." This sibyl is the most mysterious of the five prognosticators who...