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Five Points in the late 1&;os. From thefrontispiece to The Gangs of New York: An Informal History of the Underworld, ?JiHerbertAsbury (New York: AlfredA. Knopf, 1929). Purifying America: Purity and Disability Margaret Fuller's New York Reform Writing JEFFREY STEELE Images of "purity" playa dominant role in Margaret Fuller's writing. Reflecting both her romantic and transcendentalist roots, the impulse toward purification lent itself easily to her idealizing rhetoric. But given Fuller's commitment to political reform, which involved addressing the material inequalities in the lives of women and other marginalized individuals, such images came to signal a potential impasse in her writing. For is it possible to achieve a ~~purity" of being, we must ask, without erasing the body, its appetites, and its fallibility? Sandra Gustafson , for example, equates the "purified" with the "sexless" body in Fuller's writing. I Is this an accurate equation? To pose this question is tantamount to a central contradiction in Fuller's the tension between idealism and and to ~A~~~~'L'::: it. In New York, found the impulse toward idealism \....l.l,CU.l!C.l.l.~C\ intractable bodies of recent and the disabled. As we shall see, her confrontation with the u ....... "'...'.....u ... conditions of these groups an added IJv ...<;::Jl...c:u......... Y of her own health and curvature of the her younger brother We can rneasure the ESQ I V. 52 14TH QUARTER I2006 301 JEFFREY STEELE Century. For example, the poems she wrote during the spring and summer of r844 reinforce a dualistic sense that spiritual purity is threatened by materiality. "Now wandering on a tangled way- I Is their lost child pure spirits say," one opens, as it articulates a prayer for spiritual guidance in a world ofllloral and elllotional snares. 2 "Make llle purer I Stronger, surer," Fuller petitions in another. 3 To becollle "wholly hUlllan, " she argues in "My Seal Ring," is to achieve a "spotless radiant ruby heart." In one of her 1ll0St accolllplished poellls, "Sub Rosa-Crux," she imagines a band of spiritual adepts, "Knights of the Rosy Cross," who might lllaintain their llloral purity in the face of the world's corruption. Finally, her finest poelll, "Raphael's Deposition frolll the Cross," prays for a process ofpsychological transforlllation in the following terlllS: "Purify the veins of Earth, I Telllper for a Phenix birth" (EMF, ~34, ~36-38, ~39). In all these texts, the illlpuise toward purity focuses itselfin illlages ofindividualllloral and spiritual perfection. To becollle pure is to lllove steadily toward a world of ideal being that transcends the physical vicissitudes of everyday life. But there are clear hints in 'Woman in the Nineteenth Century that Fuller's conception of purity had begun to shift by the end of r844, as a result ofher visits to New"York. Confronted with the ungovernable bodies and heterogeneity of the llletropolis, she displaced representations of purity from lTIodels of individual spiritual perfection toward illlages of social reform. This shift frolll a personal to a social ideal evinces a new political awareness , shaped by (among other things) Fuller's recent visits to such reforlll institutions as Sing Sing Prison. As she revised and expanded "The Great Lawsuit" into Woman, Fuller linked her new political awareness to the llloral righteousness of such Old Testalllent prophets as Ezekiel andJerellliah, contrasting purity with what she terllled "pollution" (the prophetic terlll associated with idol worship). In the process, she conceptualized the gender and racial divisions ofAmerican society as the effect ofwhat she called lllan's "lower nature," a polluting drive that had lllotivated the objectification and sexual exploitation of WOlllen (EMF, ~49). t'Yes!" she lalllented, "lllan, born to purifY . .. can, in his llladness, degrade and pollute" (EMF, ~53; elllphasis added). SOllle individuals, "stained" by "vice," she 302 PURIFYING AMERICA observed, obscure the clarity of their minds with "the mists of sensuality" and, in the process, lose sight of the "pure child" that should be born "in the heart" (EMF, 257, 258, 30I). The prevalence of this "low nlaterialist tendency" has a "tendency to repress" vital hu.man "impulses" and "instincts." It also leads to the ttdegradation" of numerous prostituted women, who become "the sold and polluted slaves of men" (EMF, 306, 3I9-20). Energized by a vision of t'pure love," women's moral power-she hoped-might diffuse an energy that would cleanse the impurities from the nation's soul (EMF, 344; emphasis added). This act ofspiritual cleansing, importantly, would lead to concrete changes in social practice. Mter Fuller moved to New York at the end of the year to take up her new position as front-page columnist for Horace Greeley's New- York Tribune, she transformed her vision of purity even further. For her urban essays elaborated Woman's suggestion that AInerica could be purified as a whole. Using powerful metaphors of purity and impurity, sickness and health, Fuller began imagining the reform of AInerica as the curing of a diseased body politic. In the process, her images of purity became troubled, as they came to signify disturbances both in Fuller's sense of the body politic and in her earlier tendency to erase physical details from models of change. The difficulty lies partly in the tendency of conceptions ofpurity to reinforce exclusionary social models. The social order, Mary Douglas argues, is often maintained by policing the boundary between the pure and the irnpure, the ritually clean and the defiling. In Leviticus, for example, defilement and pollution are contained through cleansing rituals that protect the borders of personal and cultural sanctity.4 Extending Douglas's arguments, Julia Kristeva examines both the ritual expulsion of the impure and abject in social structures and the way in which such dynamics are internalized within the psyche. Both society and self, she contends, are built upon the exclusion of the threatening and the defiling. But at the same time, the need for purification rituals demonstrates "the frailty of the symbolic order itself," which rests precariously upon the permeable divide between the pure and the unclean. 5 The presence of purity models in Fuller's writing, as well as in the texts of her contemporaries, 303 JEFFREY STEELE suggests the social and psychological instabilities of America in the 1840s-·a period that wrestled with, among other disquietudes , the political ambiguities of Hforeign" populations, cut off from the full rights of citizenship, ,Nithin the country's borders. In contrast to the sense among many that the social purity ofAmerica depended upon exclusive processes ofsocial definition ' Fuller began articulating an inclusive model of purity that folded members of many outcast groups into the body politic. Advocates of the exclusive model of purity enforced a paradigm of social separation and cleansing in which the containment or elimination of undesirable elements might maintain the integrity of the republic. Starting in the 1820s, for example, evangelical leaders denounced the accelerating influx of immigrant Catholic Irish, while white workers began insisting upon the segregation of worksites on racial lines. "When the condition of the poor was exacerbated by the economic hard times following the Panic of1837', evangelical and other leaders began blaming the poor for their Even the Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor, founded in 1844, argued that "poverty was not failures of the economic system ... but by dencie:ncies of the poor themselves. "6 Crammed into the notorious Five Points neighborhood in New York's sixth ward, freed blacks and Irish came to represent-in the mind-an enclave ofurban squalor that became increasingly isolated middle-class neighborhoods of New "'I(ork. advocates of in Texas as ........... 'c'--...........~ ......UL .......... and literacy In this vein, some of the authors I-' ....'U..l...I."...... \...'u. in the Democratic Review the elimination of racial others whose presence was seen as a threat. For \..."O"',"-..I..H.I-'J!. ..... , the author of the O'Sullivan 304 PURIFYING AMERICA Creating a potentially inclusive model of purity, Fuller attempted to counter such views by shifting the argument from questions of racial or ethnic contamination to those of public morality. Impersonating at times the messianic tones ofJeremiah and other Old Testament prophets, she envisioned a perfected society in which. all individuals might achieve moral purity-the precondition in the prophetic books for the appearance of the Messiah. But Fuller's inclusive paradigm contained its own inner tensions, as she attempted to connect her political ideals to the stigmatized bodies of society's outcasts. It was one thing to project before herself an ideal of personal moral perfection; but it was quite another to expand this ideal into a model of civic purity, especially during a period when a number of individuals--because of race, class, or sexual history -were subject to processes of social stigmatization. At the same time, it was difficult for Fuller to escape completely from the rhetoric of exclusion-a quality inherent in most models of purity. Addressing the social dilemma ofAmerica's burgeoning immigrant population, she seemed at times to echo the nativist views of her contemporaries, even as she struggled to move beyond them. The danger, in Fuller's view, was that an unassimilated foreign -born population might not be sufficiently inculcated with Anlerica's delnocratic ideals. "We must think there is a deep root," she wrote inJanuary I845, "for the late bitter expressions of prejudice ... against the foreign element in our population. We want all this new blood, but we want it purified, assimilated." Anticipating Israel Zangwill's early twentieth-century image of the United States as the world's ~~melting-pot," Fuller envisioned "the race that may grow up from this amalgamation of all races of the world."8 Fuller's vision of "assimilation"/tamalgamation" contrasted markedlywith the exclusionary politics ofher more conservative contemporaries, since her demand that assimilated elements be "purified" posited a different drive toward unity-one based on morality instead of race or ethnicity. Instead of excluding the impure from the body Fuller hoped to redeem it. But there was a danger: "Much diseased substance is offered to form this new body, and ifthere be not in ourselves a nucleus, a heart of force and purity to assimilate these strange and vari305 JEFFREY STEELE ous materials into a very high form of organic life; they must needs induce lOne distorted, corrupt and degraded beyond the example of other times and places."9 "We must believe," she commented in her column of I January 1846, "that the pure blood shown in the time of our Revoluti()n still glows in the heart, but the body of our nati()n is full of foreign elements. A large proportion of our citizens, or their parents, came here for worldly advantage, and have never raised their minds to any idea of destiny or duty. More money-more land! is all the watchword they know" (MFG, 328). In the last passage, competing meanings of the phrase "foreign elements" suggest the ambiguity of Fuller's rhetoric of purity. On a literal level, the phrase evokes images of a heterogeneous populace containing numerous immigrant groups. But on the metaphorical plane of political idealism, it also represents a process of moral disease in which political ideals are imagined as being contaminated by materialism and selfish interests. The problem, Fuller's New ){ork essays reveal, is that these literal and metaphorical levels exist in an uneasy and potentially unstable balance. "Our only hope," she wrote as she expanded the metaphorical vein, "lies in rousing, in our own community, a soul ofgoodness, a wise aspiration, that shall give us the strength to assimilate this unwholesome food to better substance, or cast off its contalninations. A mighty sea of life swells within our nation, and, if there be salt enough, foreign bodies shall not have power to breed infection there" (MFG, 5455 ). In such passages, Fuller irrlagined a potentially inclusive process of purification through assimilation-the absorption of ethnic and racial others who rnight be raised to a high moral tone animated by the nation's founding democratic ideals. At the same time, the resonating phrase, "foreign bodies," as well as the idea of "'cast[ing] off ... contaminations," continue to suggest an unassimilable alien presence-a rnaterial residue that can never be completely absorbed and sublimated. But such p()litical ambiguity could disappear on the macropolitical level, as Fuller linked images of purity and impurity to global diagnoses of the nation's moral ills. While "pure blood flows yet" within America's "veins," she cautioned, the high ideals upon which the nation was founded might become 306 PURIFYING AMERICA clouded (MFG, I7). The country, she feared, had been ~~pol­ luted with the lust of power, the lust of gain," that threatened the democratic principles of the founding fathers (MFG, I5I). Too many in the business community had been overwhelmed by "their selfish instincts," until they became "mere calculating , money-making machines. "IO In the political sphere, the annexation ofTexas, the continuation of slavery, the isolation and mistreatment IOf the pOlOr, and the spread of prostitution were all signs for FuHer of the nation's degradation. The body politic, she warned, might be overwhelmed by a "social malady ... beyond cure" unless the heart of the country could maintain the purity of its founding ideals (MFJ, 96). This vein of political rhetoric: cubminated in a powerful national myth-the image of the United States as a goddesslike figure, "the mother of a nobler race, perhaps, than the world has yet known." Although the purity of America, Fuller perceived, had been threatened, "disease" had not yet "taken deep hold of her"; but it had "bewildered her brain, made her steps totter, fevered, but not yet tainted, her blood." Signs of the country's disease were "false deeds and low thoughts-the devotion to interest -the forgetfulness of principle-the indifference to high and noble sentiments" (JlfIFG, I50, 252). The antidote to this moral ailment, Fuller diagnosed, must be "grandeur and purity of action"-what she described as a ..deeper religion at the heart of Society," individuals "acting from intelligent sympathy-from love" (MFG, 253; MFJ, 89)· I have lingered over Fuller's images of the impure, the foreign, and the alien because today many readers recognize the political danger of such models of purity, which can exclude even while they offer to include. Given the prevalence of images of purity and impurity, health and disease, in Fuller's NewYork reform writings, several important critical questions surface. While such paradigms function in Fuller's writing on a macro -political level as political ideals, do they carry over to the local level of what we might term micro-politics, the interaction with persons whose embodied difference threatened to make them impure objects of prejudice, indifference, or scorn? In asking this question, I echo the analysis of Rosemarie Garland Thomson, whose book Extraordinary Bodies argues that 307 JEFFREY STEELE a fundamental bad faith impeded nineteenth-century liberal reformers who attempted to occupy unmarked sites ofpolitical privilege while focusing political sympathy toward others with stigmatized bodies.II As Fuller argued for the purification and curing of America, one asks from the vantage point of disability studies, how did she represent individuals whose race, social status, moral liability, or disability threatened to isolate them within a stigmatizing difference? While this might seem to be an omnibus grouping of social outcasts, the crirninalized , racialized, and disabled were often lumped together in the 1840s, as they were geographically isolated, segregated, or institutionalized. Embodying a perceived social impurity, such marked individuals tested the limits of Fuller's political inclusiveness, since they manifested literal qualities ofphysical difference not easily reconciled to her ideals of purity. But the question of disability struck especially close to horne for Fuller, given her own poor health and the disability of her younger brother Unable to hold a permanent job, Lloyd (sixteen years younger than l\-1argaret) had presented a major for Fuller family. After their father Timothy Fuller died in October Fuller assull1_ed primary childcare resp

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