Bodies in Transition: Transcendental Feminism in Margaret Fuller's Woman in the Nineteenth Century

To address man wisely, you must not forget that his life is partly animal, subject to the same laws with nature.

—Margaret Fuller, Woman in the Nineteenth Century

One of Margaret Fuller's earliest recorded meditations on embodiment is a meditation upon a corpse. In her Memoirs, Fuller recalls her feelings as she faced the death of her young sister, Julia Adelaide.¹ Although Fuller rejects the "sad parade" of the funerary rites as fundamentally disconnected from the "sweet playful child," she does not reject death itself; instead, noting that Julia Adelaide's "life and death were alike beautiful," Fuller finds a strange appeal in death. Perhaps the equanimity with which she views death stems from her belief that death offers lessons about life. Fuller's summative statement about the event—"Thus my first experience of life was one of death" (13)—evidences this belief, and underscores the didactic nature of her moment of mourning.

Like Fuller, Ralph Waldo Emerson learns from the death of a family member.² He famously uses the death of his son Waldo to sketch the limits of self-reliance in his essay "Experience." Emerson's horrible realization, his grief that grief can teach him nothing, springs from his startling discovery that even the closest interpersonal relations can only offer facades of intimacy and connection. Reflecting on this phantom closeness, Emerson registers his surprise that "something which I fancied was a part of me, which could not be torn away without tearing me nor enlarged without enriching me, falls off from me and leaves no scar" (309). The metaphor of scarlessness and the impossibility of a symbiotic relationship between father and son underscores the failure of the familial bond to root itself within what is finally the hermetic space of the self. Family members may inhabit a galaxy of shared daily life, but failing to exert any gravitational pull on one another, they remain locked in their own orbits. For Emerson, then, Waldo's death illuminates the radical discreteness of the individual, the absolute lack of interpenetrability between people.

By contrast, Fuller embraces the spiritual promise of interpersonal relationships. Inventorying the content of her loss, Fuller writes: "She who would have been the companion of my life was severed from me and I was left alone. This has made a vast difference in my lot. Her character, if that fair face promised right, would have been soft, graceful and lively: it would have tempered mine to a gentler and more gradual course" (Memoirs 13). For Fuller, the experience of death reaffirms the possibility of transformative interrelation. Whereas Emerson mourns the impossibility of connection, it is the preclusion of connection, blocked by death's untimeliness, that Fuller mourns. Indeed, it is precisely the loss of interconnective possibility, the absence of a tempering influence that should have shaped and molded her own character, that is the occasion of sadness. Far from falling off and leaving no scar, Julia Adelaide's death tears away a piece of a future Fuller that remains lost forever in unfulfilled potentiality.

This example dramatizes the starkly different roles played by relationality in Fullerian and Emersonian self-reliance. Emerson, despite a deep interest in friendship and love, tends to think about relationships in highly impersonal terms.³ The typical Emersonian relationship is between an individual and a set of ideals, which another individual represents. In this scenario, the subject remains stoically isolated because he or she is cut off from actual human interaction.⁴ In contrast, Fullerian self-reliance relies on a more dynamic and interpenetrating mode of interrelation. In this relational mode, the conditions of a given relationship impact the caliber of the participants' experience of life, not only in spiritual terms, but also in the material terms of the here-and-now.

This key difference notwithstanding, Fuller and Emerson are bound together by a shared set of philosophic problems that engage their attention and by their mutual commitment to Transcendental epistemology. Despite this common ground, Fuller has often been perceived as a mere satellite of Emerson's...