Margaret Fuller and Her Circles

8 | Sympathy and Prophecy: The Two Faces of Social Justice in Fuller’s New York Writing

161 161 8 Sympathy and Prophecy The Two Faces of Social Justice in Fuller’s New York Writing Jeffrey Steele When Margaret Fuller moved from Massachusetts to New York City at the end of 1844, this transition pushed her to a new stage of literary awareness. The deep fault lines of the city made her acutely aware of the ways in which earlier modes of Transcendentalist analysis, focused upon the reform of the self, were an inadequate vehicle to diagnose what seemed like a pervasive social injustice. Like her predecessor Lydia Maria Child, Fuller saw around her an acquiescence to slavery, a widespread materialism, and a general insensitivity to the poorer and weaker members of society. For many of Fuller’s middle-­ class contemporaries, the inmates and patients housed on Blackwell’s Island, the accelerating wave of European immigrants, and the poor were inconvenient intruders on the social scene—obstacles to be ignored or displaced into social invisibility, if need be. Addressing the blind spots of her contemporaries in her New York writing, she struggled to expand the field of public awareness to include those individuals who had fallen outside or below the threshold of respectability. A growing cadre of writers who considered sentiment, the transmission of affect, to be the most effective means of connecting readers with urban problems preceded Fuller in her expanded commitment to social reform. Like Child, however, Fuller recognized that sentiment alone was not sufficient to change urban conditions. The awakening of what she termed “public attention” demanded that perception be reshaped, a process that involved both emotional and cognitive components. At the same time Fuller, along with Child, understood that the descriptive mode of writing pioneered by urban “flaneurs,” who recorded the sights of the city, did little to lift readers beyond surface impressions. Following the footsteps of Child, Fuller realized 162 JEFFREY STEELE that urban complexity demanded multiple organs of perception: not just the eyes, but also the spirit, the heart, the imagination, and memory. Rather than addressing only the reform of the individual, Child and Fuller shifted attention to the collective existence of urban dwellers. It was necessary, they believed, to project luminous ideals of perfected being (a Transcendentalist ambition) but also to mobilize currents of public affect (a sentimentalist agenda) that might motivate social change. While one could often “see” through the heart, there were often moments when feeling became overloaded or blocked and the circuits of sympathy broke down. Visionary modes perfected in New England by Transcendentalist writers offered an effective way to move beyond such emotional blockages by projecting idealized zones of being that functioned as alternatives to the perceptible and emotionally felt world. This merger of vision with affect changed Fuller’s writing in important ways. It eventually led her to prophetic moments in which sympathy transformed into anger, and the visionary manifested itself as a call for radical social change. Fuller’s transforming sense of the function of her writing led to a radical shift in her focus and authorial stance. Rather than positioning herself as an “exemplary persona” modeling the intellectual and spiritual expansion of the self, she shifted her attention to the condition of society as a whole. In the process, Fuller turned from classical mythology to the Bible as a source of insight, especially the prophetic books of the Old Testament and the social gospel of Jesus. Denouncing the ideological and physical “pollution ” of society, she displaced the focus of her writing from the self-­ reliant individual to the image of a just society that might mesh social practice with public ideals. Given Fuller’s commitment to the equitable development of women, this emphasis had been a part of her writing since the publication of “The Great Lawsuit” in 1843. But Fuller’s revision and expansion of “The Great Lawsuit” into Woman in the Nineteenth Century revealed a dramatic shift of emphasis from the reformation of the self to the reform of society as a whole. A striking sign of Fuller’s evolving awareness was the emergence of a new myth in her writing: a prophetic vision of the collective “body” that had been contaminated by the toxin of corrupt social values and materialized aims. Rather than challenging her readers to become in­ dependent individuals , she urged them to work toward a more functional and just society founded on a vision of collective social action striving toward the common good. A sign of this focused action, Fuller suggested, would be a marked shift in...