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  • “So much soul here I do not need a book”: Idealization and the Aesthetics of Margaret Fuller’s Coterie, 1839–1842
  • Jason Hoppe (bio)

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Margaret Fuller. Courtesy of Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division. LC-USZ62-47039.

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Thankfully, the longstanding notion of Margaret Fuller as personally brilliant but lacking in literary distinction has been dispelled. No longer do readers issue backhanded compliments about the erratic quality of her genius or lament that her writing is hamstrung by the very passion and sensitivity that made her person so fascinating. Yet the critique of the “Margaret myth” over the last thirty years, essential as it has been, in our day also risks obscuring the degree to which contemporaries as well as Fuller herself embraced the identification of her personality as an artistic achievement.1 Edgar Allan Poe indexes the phenomenon most succinctly: “her personal character and her printed book are merely one and the same thing. We get access to her soul as directly from the one as from the other … Her acts are bookish, and her books are less thoughts than acts.”2 Famously—or infamously—Emerson enlarges this view, particularly in the flawed yet extraordinary volumes of letters and remembrances published in 1852, soon after Fuller’s death:

Margaret was one of the few persons who looked upon life as an art, and every person not merely as an artist, but as a work of art. She looked upon herself as a living statue, [End Page 363] which should always stand on a polished pedestal, with right accessories, and under the most fitting lights. She would have been glad to have everybody so live and act.3

Rather than discount such observations as failing to capture the whole of her personality (what could?), or peremptorily dismiss them as misogynist slights that only deny or diminish her oeuvre (where does this get us?), this essay reconnects this line of reception to Fuller’s own labors, making the case for the intrinsic relationship of her personality—and the personalities of her closest friends—to her aesthetic endeavors.

We tend to remember Margaret Fuller mainly as a writer who reconciled her literary and aesthetic interests to key political issues across the 1840s in the Conversations she organized among Boston-area women, the book reviews and social critiques she authored for the New York Tribune, and in major works such as Summer on the Lakes, Woman in the Nineteenth-Century, and her lost history of the Italian Revolution. Yet I would argue that there is a specific moment in the late 1830s and early 1840s that belies that reputation, a moment when Fuller framed an alternative view of literary endeavor as existing apart from macro-politics. At the same time she was undertaking the editorship of the Dial and its express mission to “report life” and “the discourse of the living” to the public, Fuller confesses, “It is very difficult to me to resolve on publishing any of my own writing; it never seems worth it … there are individuals to whom I can speak.”4 For the Fuller of this moment, I claim, the very possibility and purpose of her writing as well as her reading and tutelage lies mainly in the felicitous management of her coterie, that is, of a small number of privileged and interconnected personal relationships that fundamentally suppose a shared sense of aesthetic enterprise.5

This is not only to say that Fuller’s coterie relationships—especially to Waldo Emerson, Caroline Sturgis, and their mutual friends Anna Barker and Samuel Ward, all of whom she [End Page 364] loved intensely—amount to occasions for study and teaching. It is also to claim, more radically, that Fuller engages these four persons in particular as subjects in and of themselves for aesthetic composition and critique; every one of them is dealt with, in Emerson’s phrase, “not merely as an artist, but a work of art” (MMFO, 1:238). In the heterogeneous mix of letters, journal entries, essays, and memoirs I examine—texts bound together only sometimes by their audience and authorship but always by their common argument—Fuller thus addresses...

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