Exaltadas: A Female Genealogy of Transcendentalism ed. by Phyllis Cole and Jana Argersinger (review)

Prompted by the bicentennial of Margaret Fuller's birth, ESQ has published a special issue that reexamines the complex relationship between transcendentalism and gender.¹ This issue builds on the editors' previous contributions: Phyllis Cole's significant work on women and transcendentalism and Jana Argersinger's capable editing of ESQ.² The five essays collected in this issue use Fuller as a touchstone as they explore "a lineage of women readers and talkers" who "remade transcendentalism into a gendered discourse" from 1800 to 1900 (pp. 5, 8). The title comes from Fuller's comments in the New-York Tribune on the 1844 election and its proslavery implications. She defines women's mission to the nation as a utopian counterforce to the male electorate's investment in imperial power and economic self-interest, asking "Women of my country!—Exaltadas!"—"speak," reassert the nation's ideals (qtd. pp. 1-2). As Cole and Argersinger write in their introduction, this term, derived by Fuller from Spanish politics, fuses many of her and other women writers' central concerns: "cosmopolitan allusion" with "American application" (p. 2), "utopian imagination" with "the present political moment" (p. 2), and "transcendental 'spirit'" with women's sentimental culture (p. 9). Given women's restricted access to institutions that linked learning with authority, the editors call for greater attention to "an alternative community of literacy" where the "initiating . . . scene" is "a woman reading, responding, and taking part in conversation" (p. 5). Current research increasingly reveals the generative networks, the "conversations," among women writers and intellectuals in the long nineteenth century. This issue of ESQ contributes to that project and argues for the persistence of the transcendentalist language of human possibility in women's writings and for the difference that women made in this language.

Recent histories and biographies, such as Mary Kelley's Learning to Stand and Speak and Megan Marshall's biography of the Peabody sisters, show the ways that antebellum women's reading and writing evolved out of eighteenth-century women's practices.³ Drawing on studies by Susan Stabile and others in her meticulously researched essay, "'Let me do nothing smale': Mary Moody Emerson and Women's 'Talking' Manuscripts," Noelle A. Baker discusses Mary Moody Emerson as a "bridge" (p. 23) between eighteenth-century women's commonplace book writing, manuscript culture, and coterie writing, and nineteenth-century women's participation in similarly dialogic "transcendentalist conversation," "individual self-culture," and the "literature of the portfolio" (p. 30).⁴ Baker argues that Emerson's "circulating manuscripts represent actual talk" for male and female early transcendentalists, including other members of the Emerson family, while her conversations anticipated Fuller's performances (p. 31).

The difference gender makes in the discourse of transcendentalism shapes two essays on aesthetics and sexuality. Dorri Beam, in the insightful "Transcendental Erotics, Same-Sex Desire, and Ethel's Love-Life," builds on her recent book on women's experimental prose to read Margaret Jane Mussey Sweat's epistolary novel of a young woman's history of "spirituo-sexual" desire (p. 59).⁵ Beam explains that in Ethel's Love-Life (1859), Sweat draws on related transcendentalist and "mesmerist discourses" that define "spirit," respectively, as something that exceeds the body and, so, is "linked to a vast . . . ecology of spirit through streams of relation" and as a "palpable" presence, a "sensual fluidity," "through which to touch and relate to others" (pp. 56-57). Beam connects Sweat with a transatlantic field of writers and "social reform engineers," such as Fuller, François Marie Charles Fourier, and George Sand, in her use of transcendentalist and spiritualist language to imagine a self not limited by gender, social roles, or a "homo/hetero binary" (pp. 64, 61). Also exploring links among spiritualism, sexuality, and artistic expression, Kathleen Lawrence brings Fuller's journals together with Sturgis's writings and drawings in a persuasive argument for the significance of their "intense[ly] erotic" intimacy in...