Reinventing the Peabody Sisters

Elizabeth Palmer Peabody’s Problematic Feminism and the Feminization of Transcendentalism

To be great is to be misunderstood. —Emerson, “Self-Reliance” To be misunderstood is a great vexation. —Elizabeth Peabody, Letter to Elizabeth Davis Bliss, 8 July 1830 When I read Elizabeth Palmer Peabody’s formal writings,I secretly wish that she had found more of a voice there: these written works are derivative, often based upon her adulation of male thinkers. In Record of a School, she pays homage to Bronson Alcott, with whom she taught for several years at Temple School, and whose lessons with children she recorded in this book. Later, she would pen Lectures in the Training Schools for Kindergartners ,another tribute to a male educator and thinker,the German Friederich Froebel. In her collections of essays, she focuses on male achievements and fosters male creativity; in her Aesthetic Papers,a journal she tried to launch without much success (it lasted one issue, May 1849), she does include two of her own essays, but the focal points are essays by Ralph Waldo Emerson (“War”) and by Henry David Thoreau (“Resistance to Civil Government”) and a story by brother-in-law Nathaniel Hawthorne, “Main Street.” The point of departure for Last Evening with Allston, a collection of Peabody’s own reprinted essays, is the death of painter Washington Allston and a reminiscence of her last evening with him three weeks before he died. Many of the other essays are male-centered: a review of Hawthorne’s The Marble Faun, a plea for Froebel’s kindergarten, an essay about Charles Fourier’s merits and shortcomings. Only in one essay, “Memoir of Madame Kossuth Meszlenyi,”does she expound upon a representative woman: not the Emersonian type of representative man but, iron- • 199 • Elizabeth Palmer Peabody’s Problematic Feminism and the Feminization of Transcendentalism monika m. elbert 200 • transcendental reconfigurations ically, the Hungarian hero’s sister, whose support of the revolutionary cause came through her role as helpmate, or nurse. It is true that Peabody succeeds as a cultural historian, as Nina Baym has pointed out, and also as a student of linguistics, as Philip Gura discusses, but I perceive a strange emotional distance between those writings and her life as a woman.1 In this chapter I examine how Peabody modulated her written voice to negotiate between the public, formal rhetoric of the male writers whom she supported so vehemently and the stronger,more original expression of her personal correspondence. Assessing the discordant elements voiced in Peabody ’s formal and personal writing reveals her struggle to articulate the patriarchal elements of Transcendentalism, yet to make those ideas practicable in a woman’s life. As representative intellectual woman of her age, Peabody embodied the contradictions of mid-nineteenth-century womanhood. As sometime mentor to Hawthorne, who would become her brother-in-law, as recorder of William Ellery Channing’s life in her Reminiscences, as devotee of Emerson , as mentor to and promoter of Theodore Parker (even when his most fanatical sermons were not well received), as early defender of the crazy Transcendentalist poet Jones Very, and as quasi-sister, quasi soulmate of Horace Mann, who would become another brother-in-law, Peabody tried to define herself within the parameters of True Womanhood as a nurturer to males. Yet she attempted to go beyond those bounds as a single working woman, owner of a bookshop, linguist, editor, educator, and reformer.2 In her personal life and in her confrontational letters, Peabody’s voice sounded much louder than in her published work, where her voice is subdued and tentative. Sometimes ingratiating, her personal voice was more often aggressive, audacious, offensive, and meddlesome than her authorial voice. Though Peabody prided herself on her writing abilities, casting them as superior to her speaking, others commended her superior speaking talent. Like Margaret Fuller, Peabody was a brilliant conversationalist: “Elizabeth was indeed the talker that everybody said she was, but she was brilliant and full of originality” (Tharp, Victory, 102). Nevertheless, Peabody often brags in her letters that she is a far better writer than she is a speaker. In one letter to Elizabeth Hawthorne, she expresses her concern for Hawthorne’s depressed brother, Nathaniel, and apologizes for her own “loquaciousness”earlier that day, as she was only trying to take pressure off monika m. elbert • 201 Hawthorne; after praising him excessively, she again pardons her talkativeness and privileges her writing, “How my pen runs on,—but I can write better than I speak...