Fuller in Her Own Time: A Biographical Chronicle of Her Life, Drawn from Recollections, Interviews, and Memoirs by Family, Friends, and Associates

Epistolary Comments on Fuller in 1850, 1851, and 1852

[109] d [Epistolary Comments on Fuller in 1850, 1851, and 1852] Mary Moody Emerson Mary Moody Emerson (1774-1863) was Ralph Waldo Emerson’s paternal aunt. Her life spanned the eve of the American Revolution to the middle of the Civil War, and she never lost the Calvinist beliefs of her youth. After the death of Emerson’s father in 1811, she took it upon herself to help instill in each of the four Emerson boys a sense of their history, value, and duties as Emersons. After Waldo’s brother William decided against the ministry, Mary engaged in a correspondence with Waldo trying (unsuccessfully) to keep him from turning from her faith toward Unitarianism and, as the Transcendentalist period approached, worse. Fuller described an 1841 visit from Mary, during which “the best I have got from her is to understand as I suppose W[aldo] better,” this way: “Knowing such a person who so perpetually defaces the high by such strange mingling of the low, I can better conceive how the daily bread of life should seem to [Waldo] gossip, and the natural relations sheaths from which the flower must burst and never remember them. It is certainly not pleasant to hear of God and Miss Biddeford in a breath.” Still, Fuller continued, “some sparkles show where the gems might in better days be more easily disengaged from the rubbish. She is still valuable as a disturbing force to the lazy. But, to me, this hasty attempt at skimming from the deeps of theosophy, is as unpleasant as the rude vanity of reformers” ([ca. 20?] October 1841, Letters, 2:246). Waldo was more positive; he copied out four volumes full of extracts from her letters and diaries, often using them in his own writings, and wrote a memorial sketch, “Mary Moody Emerson” (Lectures and Biographical Sketches [1884]). Mary’s letters to her nephew are about his editing of Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli. Mary Moody Emerson to Ralph Waldo Emerson, 16 August 1850 I hope you will succeed in do[ing] justice to your lamented friend and give energy to its readers. I think if she had survived only her husband—and fuller in her own time [110] been impressed with that kind of grief which gives a zest of immortality to certain minds we read about, her expression etc. etc. I may as well confess —that in taking an interest in her fate I do not love to remember her want of beauty. She looked very sensible but as if contending with ill health and duties. Had I been favored with one sparkle of her fine wit—one argument for her dissent, from her fine mind, what a treasure to memory. She laid all the day and eve. on sofa and catechised me who told my literal “traditions ” like any old bobin woman. . . . Mary Moody Emerson to Lidian Jackson Emerson, 2 December 1851 . . . What was the mystery. No record of her faith in immortality! Had she been xian [that is, Christian]! What a spirit! And thro’ the future what a bright and burning one who could be so generous. And her truth. Oh what an eternity awaits. And we forget all if with her powers and influence as like the waves which so soon ceased the feeble agitations which interred her remains. . . . Mary Moody Emerson to Martha Bartlett, 25 February[?] 1852 . . . I have hastened to finish the painfull task of following so monsterous a temperment as Margaret’s that you might have it. You will find classical information to reward the reading undoubtedly. And when the hopefull sport of her best and real existence occurs it invites a hope. But the highest exstacies of imajanation [that is, imagination] reach not the xian demands, and and they did not save her from her natural feverishness. Her opinion of our divine Saviour prevented any advance to the Infinite but thro instinct, paganism and being unhappily steeped in Goetheism. RWE has done justly by her and the publick I believe. And every good disposition and xian taught person will rejoice in their comparitive ignorance and hermit obscurity. The last line of the 23d page begins a sentence which redeems many a sad sympathy with the noble minded deceased and honors the biographer.1 So somewhere in this first vol. the Editor and perhaps the extraordinary subject, allows that there “may lie fallow some of the best thoughts.” It were pitiable to our future hopes if every thing were to be expended on...