Civilizing Mob into Men: Race, Temporality, and the West in Margaret Fuller’s Summer on the Lakes, in 1843

Altogether, it looks as if a great time was coming, and that time one of Democracy. Our country will play a ruling part. Her Eagle will lead the van, but whether to soar upward to the sun or to stoop for helpless prey, who now dares promise?

—Margaret Fuller, “1st January, 1846”

I Start this essay on Margaret Fuller’s Summer on the Lakes, in 1843 with the above epigraph as it exemplifies the temporal logic of the imperialism that underwrites her first published book. Even when writing a newspaper piece to censure America’s imperial violence and “the deeds of darkness” done in 1845,¹ Fuller still manages to affirm its imperial destiny. Far from shaking the faith that “the glorious office [is] assigned [to] her [nation] by Fate of Herald of Freedom, Light, and Peace,”² the nation’s violent expansion and wrongdoings rather urge her to stress it even more. What she objects to is the unjust exercise of power that “stoop[s] for helpless prey” and not the power itself as she holds firm to the belief that her nation should and will be a benevolent empire and the leader of the world that exerts power justly. In other words, in indicting American imperialism, Fuller reveals her own imperialism—an imperialism inflected by the future tense. Seeing the American present as a moment in time that moves towards the destined imperial future, Fuller casts the present violence as an aberration that is to be reversed by the lofty-minded Americans who wish to see their country “soar upward to the sun.” Cast as an empire of future, the ideal America somehow lets Fuller turn her disappointment in the present America into the conviction about its future. If it is inevitable that her nation will be the leading empire of democracy, the challenge facing the nation would be enlightening American citizens. Fuller’s New-York Tribune articles are replete with passages in which she alternately chastises her nation for its imperial greed and celebrates its imperial future, ultimately seeking to elevate her fellow Americans so that they can live up to the national ideals.³ A similar pattern is at work, I’d argue, in Summer. That is, even when Fuller was disappointed by the “chaos”⁴ created by white settlers in the West, she still simultaneously resists and accepts the imperial progress of the nation by reference to its better future. The temporal reasoning in Summer forms the subject of this essay, which traces how the author works through her colonial guilt vis-à-vis the Indian by figuring time as the agent of manifest destiny.

The book’s sympathetic approach toward the plight of Native Americans led many critics to focus on the textual moments of “the Indian-white moving encounter” that could serve to correct white misconceptions of the other race.⁵ There is disagreement among critics about the ideological work performed by the text, however. As Victoria Brehm suggests, “imperialist voices” in the text betray its “complicity with, as well as resistance to, prevailing cultural practice.”⁶ Fuller’s sympathy for the Indians does not lead her to demand political actions from the readers, according to Lucy Maddox, as she ultimately aims to “resituate the Indians [. . .] in a thoroughly aestheticized, spiritualized, and exoticized past.”⁷ For Fuller, “the only Indian who can be saved from extinction is the one whose body can be represented by the Apollo Belvedere.”⁸ Recent studies on the text tend to shy away from drawing a definite conclusion about its political implications as most critics agree that the aesthetic design of the text itself resists being pinned down. Jeffrey Steele, for example, says that we shouldn’t “fall into a critical paradigm that attributes the insights of Summer on the Lakes to a stable and unified narrator named ‘Margaret Fuller’” as it employs “multiple literary personae” to “explor[e] the disharmonies inherent in available literary and social roles.”⁹ Steele suggests that the mode of writing employed in Summer is...