Margaret Fuller’s Medical Transcendentalism

“The especial genius of woman I believe to be electrical in movement, intuitive in function, and spiritual in tendency,” Margaret Fuller famously declares in her 1845 feminist treatise, Woman in the Nineteenth Century.¹ The significance of this oft-quoted passage expressing Fuller’s philosophy of feminine difference is one of the least understood in Fuller criticism today. At first glance it appears that Fuller risks returning “woman” to a primitive existence authorized by a patriarchal metaphysics that denies her the capacity for rationality. Consciousness and rationality belonging to the realm of masculinity, women were effectively relegated to intuition and spirituality in Cartesian modernity. Fuller, however, strongly believes in the yet-underdeveloped intellectual powers of women. She identifies this “electrical” power of women with a special kind of genius, citing male artistic prowess as the product of this “feminine principle.”² This formulation invites accusations of abstract essentialism. After all, the material contingencies of sexual difference appear, in Fuller’s cosmology, to dictate the quality of intellectual and aesthetic production. “Male and female represent the two sides of the radical dualism,” writes Fuller, cementing essential distinctions between the rational (men) and the intuitive (women), even as she melds them into a complementary union: “They are perpetually passing into one another. Fluid hardens to solid, solid rushes to fluid. There is no wholly masculine man, no purely feminine woman” (WNC, 116).

Paul Gilmore has shown how Fuller’s notion of gender fluidity is grounded in her combination of scientific metaphors of electricity with “sensuous experience,” an electricity-based model of “aesthetic materialism.”³ Gilmore argues that aesthetic experience in the nineteenth century was not just represented by metaphors of electricity but “was often imagined to be, in fact, electrical itself” (AM, 7). Identifying Fuller’s theory of gender fluidity as “electric,” and thus, primarily aesthetic in nature, Gilmore demonstrates how Fuller “link[s] questions of gender equality to questions of aesthetics,” in order to locate, he explains, “the realm of poetry, of aesthetics, as a place where the feminine element is already given voice.” However, Gilmore argues that Fuller’s theory of creative genius teleologically “transcends” the body and sexual difference altogether (AM, 162). Gilmore thus looks to Walt Whitman’s anti-Emersonian love of the body electric in “Song of Myself” for what he deems a more radically materialist paradigm of “gender fluidity.”⁴

In this essay I argue that Fuller grounds her feminism in an electrical, neurological materialism that avoids the trap of sexual essentialism, on the one hand, and the temptation to transcend sexual difference in transcendental unification on the other. Rather than essentializing or transcending sexual difference, Fuller connects nervous physiology with electrical mesmerism to imagine a materialist technology of feminine self-making. While women, in her view, are essentially more prone to nervous illness than men, this form of illness empowers rather than weakens the intellect. Thus what sometimes sounds like a regressive and essentialist view of gender in fact rests on a materialist philosophy of genius that constitutes female illness as culturally and intellectually enlivening. Fuller’s neuropsychological theory of female electricity—what I call Medical Transcendentalism—cultivates, rather than cures, sexual difference. Fuller thus offers a complex and critically unexplored account of the link between neuropsychology and animal magnetism that emerges from her revisionist theories of female nervous ailments, mesmerism, and American Transcendentalism.

My work follows in the footsteps of recent feminist scholarship that has sought to uncover the subversive, feminist potential contained in mesmeric practice. Kathleen Lawrence, David Greven, and Laura Saltz have interpreted Margaret Fuller’s interest in mesmerism as a semi-autobiographical investment in queer love and sexuality, particularly with regards to her close female friend, Caroline Sturgis.⁵ Mesmerism indeed enabled Fuller’s politics of female love. It also enabled her to conceive a materialist psychology that upended traditional, medicalized notions of gender by transvaluing the position of passivity imposed on the nervous female subject. My reading of Fuller aligns with feminist readings of mesmerism that aim to recover the paradoxical, productive capacities of the mesmerized female agent. For Justine Murison, nineteenth-century mesmeric practice...