Gender & “Love” in the 19th Century: Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Chris Nealon and “Attachment Theory”
Chris Nealon’s “You Surround Me” (The Shore, 2020) weaves so many threads together to create a feeling of deeply thoughtful tenderness and wonder as he explores possible alternatives to traditional, say patriarchal, male gender roles for a 21st century readership justifiably skeptical of the rhetorical traditions of cis-het white male love poetry vows and declarations. At the same time, he does not want to do away with writing from love. Perhaps, these days, one has to use meta-poetic strategies to rescue the word “love” from its abusers in our brain. One of the threads in this multi-faceted poetic aria returns to me to bring refreshing light after being depressed by reading male “love” poetry of the 19th century in this learning community I’m called teacher of. In this passage, the ghost of cis-het 19th century Romantic poets Keats and Shelly are intercepted by the ghosts of 20th century poet objectivist poet George Oppen:
“Standing over the little bed where Keats died—thinking of that Oppen poem—
“A friend saw the rooms
Of Keats and Shelly
At the lake, and saw ‘they were just
Boys’ rooms’ and was moved
By that…” (30)
In a voice that seems part literary critic, Nealon comes back to this Oppen poem 7 pages later:
“The final stanza of that Oppen poem is interesting
He writes, “indeed a poet’s room/Is a boy’s room/ And I suppose
that women know it”
Then he concludes:[1]
“Perhaps the unbeautiful banker
Is exciting to a woman, a man
Not a boy gasping
For breath over a girl’s body”
So yeah poets are male
But also: boys are beautiful
And: women don’t like boys. They like men who make them feel like
girls
Also: fuck bankers
And the whole perfume of ashamed resentment, I get that
I remember reading a passage in The Book of Laughter and
Forgetting when I was like 16 where a woman turns to
Her lover and says, “You fuck like an intellectual”
And thinking yeah, that’s gonna be me
But maybe most interesting---breath
I’ve always had this feeling that maybe all my sexual fantasies are
Really just breathing exercises… (37-38)
As the poem winds to its Keatsian conclusion celebrating the ache of love, Nealon adds:
“I realize it’s preposterous to pit my tiny life against the tidal swells of/ the history of gender,…But ever day in graceful carriage I can see it undone so easily,/ If only we’d all undo it—"(40), and “I want my sexuality to be ‘courage.’” (41) While a fuller discussion of Nealon’s poem would take pages, these passages, like so many others in this book, makes me happy to live be living in the 21st century, for such empathetic frankness, and investigation into stereotypes of gender were rarely, if at all, available to many males (even if they define as cis-het) in the 19th (& 20th) century.
Since Oppen seems to be not only presumptuously speculating on women’s motivation in his passage, but also critiquing the boy gasping for breath over a girl’s body, one may ask whether Oppen, an avowed communist, in this instance is actually identifying more with the “unbeautiful banker”—rather than, say, a working class non educated (if not necessarily non-intellectual) laborer--than the overgrown refined girlie-man boy poet, as if those are the only two options for the cis-het man; part of Nealon’s point is that those aren’t the only two options.
In his essay “Love” (1841), Ralph Waldo Emerson also criticizes the limits of youthful male love, which at the time apparently dominated male love/desire poetry: “I know I incur the imputation of unnecessary hardness and stoicism from those who compose the Court and Parliament of Love. But from these formidable censors I shall appeal to my seniors” (1).[2] Like Oppen, the assumed gender of his reader appears to be “men in general” (as Emerson does not blatantly use himself as an example in this essay). Emerson is careful to anticipate the objections, as throughout the essay he seems to be imagining his reader, as a younger more sensual earlier self he, too, had partaken in but now has outgrown: “In the noon and the afternoon of life we still throb at the recollection of days when happiness was not happy enough, but must be drugged with the relish of pain and fear “(6), which reminds me a line from No Trend’s “Teen Love” (“they programmed arguments into their relationship to make their lives more meaningful.”)
Given the widespread disillusionment felt in today’s society, as surely it must’ve been in Emerson’s time, about the youthful promises of love that many older people, whether divorced, or trapped in unhappy and unfulfilling perfunctory relationships (no longer in love, or realizing they never really knew what love is, or thought they’d grower closer) feel, perhaps Emerson’s essay can be as medicinal as couples counseling?
Since he speaks with an authority that makes him seem like an expert in male psychology in general (is it descriptive or prescriptive?), he writes: “Each man sees over his own experience a certain stain of error, whilst that of other men looks fair and ideal. Let any man go back to those delicious relations which make the beauty of his life, which have given him sincerest instruction and nourishment, he will shrink and moan….Every thing is beautiful seen from the point of view of intellect, or as truth. But all is sour, if seen as experience.” (3)
Although the absolutism of his either/or binary seems a little extreme, this universalizing of guilt or shame is seductive in the sense that it can make me feel less alone, as does that the intellect (or hope) can rescue us from the retrospective gaze over our own mistakes and errors. By validating my experience and hunch that many people who seem more “well-adjusted” than us (rather than just me), some Jones-norm of the soul we’re failing to “keep up with,” once we get to know them more intimately, may really do as many screwed up things, or think of themselves as fuck-ups, as we do (albeit with different flavors). When he speaks of these universal flaws in terms of the soul, which for Emerson is a journey of infinite improvement of self and other towards greater connection with humanity, nature, and god, I feel Dickinson’s conclusion-rebuking “Tooth/ That nibbles at the soul—"
But though Emerson devotes much of his essay to this feeling of love in the individual mind of the young male lover, from the vantage of an older couple, “so variously and correlatively gifted,…in the nuptial society forty or fifty years” (18), such lover-ing must be supplemented with a shared, mutual desire to “seek virtue and wisdom everywhere, to the end of increasing virtue and wisdom” (19), and manifested in actions & behaviors both in and outside the relationship. Perhaps the most convincing description of his more noble and refined older person love occurs when he writes:
“in the particular society of his mate,… with mutual joy they are now able, without offence, to indicate blemishes and hindrances in each other, and give to each all help and comfort in curing the same”(15) and “to employ all the resources of each and acquaint each with the strength and weakness of the other. For it is the nature of this relation, that they should represent the world to each other.” (18)
Reading these vague contours, I get the sense that Emerson had a very harmonious relationship with a soul-mate who is presumably his wife, a fellow intellectual who needs solitude as much as a warm presence. Lovers can correct each other and also point out strengths in each other that they couldn’t see in themselves to comfort each other and heal their relationship (“What we feel that we love is not in your will…It is that which you know not in yourself and can never know,” 13).
Mutuality becomes important for Emerson, but a 21st century reader may wonder more specifically about the dynamics: for it’s true that many people may claim their relationship is mutual even if their partner may disagree, and surely this was the case in a 19th century context in which equality between a man and a woman was even more illegal and uncommon that it apparently is today. I feel I need to turn to his contemporary Margaret Fuller, considered by many to be the mother of American feminism and , in contrast to Emerson (who doesn’t really mention the role of gender in heterosexual love), primarily writes about love in context of gender relations:
“Much has been written about woman's keeping within her sphere, which is defined as the domestic sphere…. It is not generally proposed that she should be sufficiently instructed and developed to understand the pursuits or aims of her future husband; she is not to be a help-meet to him in the way of companionship and counsel, except in the care of his house and children…(2).
Were the destiny of Woman thus exactly marked out; did she invariably retain the shelter of a parent's or guardian's roof till she married; did marriage give her a sure home and protector; were she never liable to remain a widow, or, if so, sure of finding immediate protection from a brother or new husband, so that she might never be forced to stand alone one moment; and were her mind given for this world only, with no faculties capable of eternal growth and infinite improvement; we would still demand for her a far wider and more generous culture, than is proposed by those who so anxiously define her sphere.[3]We would demand it that she might not ignorantly or frivolously thwart the designs of her husband; that she might be the respected friend of her sons, not less than of her daughters; that she might give more refinement, elevation and attraction, to the society which is needed to give the characters of men polish and plasticity,—no less so than to save them from vicious and sensual habits. (“THE WRONGS OF AMERICAN WOMEN. THE DUTY OF AMERICAN WOMEN,” 3).
Fuller’s Women in the 19th Century, (originally titled “Man ‘verses’ Men, Woman ‘versus’ Women), in showing the horrific condition of most 19th century American women, for whom Emerson’s poetic and idealized description of love was simply not available, is motivated by a desire for social justice at least as much as it is what we call love (you could make the argument that part of what she’s trying to do is show that the two are one, over a hundred years before ‘the personal is the political’ became a feminist rallying cry).
Yet it also has many similarities with Emerson. Like Emerson, she adopts a detached, generalizing tone (not speaking of herself but of women, and men, in general) and shares a belief in an immortal soul, “capable of eternal growth and infinite improvement,” as a standard by which to criticize “vicious and sensual habits.” Like Emerson, her primary audience is males, but while Emerson is more interested in showing how love fits into his cosmic scheme, Fuller offers prescriptions for men’s actions, both in the “domestic sphere” of a relationship, and with women they will interact with outside a relationship, especially if they take seriously her public policy proposals (for instance, a government supported job’s program for women teachers).
“Man should prove his own freedom by making her free…. Let him trust her entirely, and give her every privilege already acquired for himself,—elective franchise, tenure of property, liberty to speak in public assemblies, &c. “EDUCATE MEN AND WOMEN AS SOULS (1)
In Fuller’s ideal love relationship, there would be “a wisdom, a mutual understanding and respect, unknown at present. Men will be no less gainers by this than women, finding in pure and more religious marriages the joys of friendship and love combined” (Wrongs, 6)
Aware that she was considered too radical by both men and even many prominent women of her time, she takes persuasive pains to appeal to man’s fears and wounded vanity to show that women’s gains will not be man’s loss. You don’t have to read her as accusing men of lacking “plasticity and polish,” or bragging that women are more polished, as much as genuinely offering help, healing and comfort. When she mentions that women should be discouraged from ignorantly or frivolously thwarting man’s design, she’s not promising that she won’t thwart men’s design, only that she will do it with what Emerson would call virtue and wisdom!
While Emerson makes it seem like it’s merely the love of a woman, as an abstract feeling, that can give the young affection-ruled male who presumes himself lover that plasticity and polish, Fuller suggests to her cis-het male readership that maybe the feeling of love that inspires you to such heights is actually in women.
At times, she may even seem to suggest that women are superior to men (which many contemporary feminists and gender theorists consider an essentialist viewpoint which also plays into the patriarchy in such statements a “the nature of woman is opposed to war,” (which certainly didn’t stop her from serving as a care-worker and chronicler during the Italian Revolution of 1849), [4]but the emotional core of such rhetoric is more a sense that men should learn to defer more to women in their relationships (for their own good):
“These exquisite forms were intended for the shrines of virtue. Neither need men fear to lose their domestic deities. Woman is born for love, and it is impossible to turn her from seeking it. Men should deserve her love as an inheritance, rather than seize and guard it like a prey. Were they noble, they would strive rather not to be loved too much, and to turn her from idolatry to the true, the only Love. Then, children of one Father, they could not err nor misconceive one another. (2)
In a similar vein, elsewhere she warns men and women not to become too dependent on one another: “I wish women to live, first for God’s sake. Then she will not make an imperfect man for her god and thus sink into idolatry. Then she will not take what is not fit for her from a sense of weakness and poverty.” She seems to be saying that as long as a couple doesn’t have a shared mutual belief in something like God (or what she calls the “Doctrine of the Soul”) couples will inevitably fall into such dysfunction.[5] Her sketch of the kind of woman a man’s demand for “idolatry” creates, too often, alas, is forced to make her choices based on a sense of weakness and poverty.
In this sense, her Doctrine of The Soul has some similarities to what, in the 21st century, could be called “couples’ counseling,” a profession that was not available to women at Fuller’s time, and didn’t yet exist[6]. The negative relationship of which she speaks doesn’t seem all that different from what attachment theory calls an insecurely attached relationship. Although attachment theory is careful not to make an any essential connection between gender (or even age, as in Emerson’s contrast between young and old) and attachment styles, and also either avoids or inverts the intellect/emotion hierarchy, their brief summary of the anxious-preoccupied individual is similar to this overly dependent woman caged in a role of idolatry:
“Anxious-preoccupied adults seek high levels of intimacy, approval and responsiveness from partners, becoming overly dependent. They tend to be less trusting, have less positive views about themselves and their partners, and may exhibit high levels of emotional expressiveness, worry and impulsiveness in their relationships. The anxiety that adults feel prevents the establishment of satisfactory defense exclusion…against separation anxiety. Because of their lack of preparation these individuals will then overreact to the anticipation of separation or the actual separation from their attachment figure….Adults with this attachment style tend to look way too far into things, whether that's a text message or a face-to-face conversation. Their thoughts and actions can lead to a painful cycle of self-fulfilling prophecies and even self-sabotage.” (Wikipedia)
Perhaps this relationship style is even a better characterization of the fearful man who demands idolatry than love than it is of the woman. Yet since attachment theory and emotion-focused therapy were not available for either Fuller or Emerson, one may wonder if this Doctrine of The Soul of which both Emerson and Fuller speak also has the power to transform such a relationship, and the individuals it makes, into what attachment theory calls a more Securely Attached relationship.
Near the end of “Educate Men and Women as Souls, she writes: “one hour of love would teach her more of her proper relations than all your formulas and conventions. Express your views, men, of what you seek in women; thus best do you give them laws. Learn, women, what you should demand of men; thus only can they become themselves. Turn both from the contemplation of what is merely phenomenal in your existence, to your permanent life as souls. Man, do not prescribe how the Divine shall display itself in Woman. Woman, do not expect to see all of God in Man. (4)
Here, she’s speaking as if a transcendent spirit looking at their gendered children. For Fuller, part of the usefulness of the Doctrine of the Soul is, in addition to making the “soul” less of a male privilege, its appeal to a higher authority than a clearly flawed man (and the women they create). By reversing the gender hierarchy in which men were usually the ones demanding, and women were forced to bargain from weakness and poverty (yes, actual economic poverty, in addition to emotional poverty), she also seems, to me, in terms of attachment theory, more clearly a securely-attached individual, exhibiting a “low level of personal distress and high levels of concern for others…. Securely attached adults believe that there are many potential partners that would be responsive to their needs, and if they come across an individual who is not meeting their needs, they will typically lose interest very quickly.” (Wikipedia)
Attachment theory also says a securely attached adult in a romantic relationship will exhibit “excellent conflict resolution, are mentally flexible, effective communicators, …comfortable with closeness without fearfulness of being enmeshed, quickly forgiving, believing they can positively impact their relationship, and caring for their partner how they want to be cared for.” Judging by Margaret Fuller’s essays these seem to be qualities she is deeply conversant with. Can we say the same of Emerson? Judging by his essay, we could say yes:
By all the virtues they are united….Their once flaming regard is sobered by time in either breast, and losing in violence what it gains in extent, it becomes a thorough good understanding…..(that allows them to) exchange the passion which once could not lose sight of its object, for a cheerful, disengaged furtherance, whether present or absent, of each other's designs.(18)
It sounds like both have gotten beyond both the clinginess that characterizes an anxious/preoccupied style, as well as the dismissive/avoidant type who will not comfort another in their feelings of insecurity when overcome by affections. But what to do when conflicts arise? Certainly you can’t talk about a long-term married love without mentioning that sometimes there can be arguments that may make you lose your cool, or as Antony scolds Cleopatra, “You’ll heat my blood!” when it’s possible that may be exactly what she’s trying to do (at least according the male author Shakespeare, whose Romeo Emerson quotes as the kind of youthful love he’s outgrown), conflicts that can become heated arguments if you’re not careful? Emerson seems to get into this in paragraph 17:
“The soul which is in the soul of each, craving a perfect beatitude, detects incongruities, defects and disproportion in the behavior of the other. Hence arise surprise, expostulation and pain. Yet that which drew them to each other was signs of loveliness, signs of virtue; and these virtues are there, however eclipsed. They appear and reappear and continue to attract; but the regard changes, quits the sign and attaches to the substance. This repairs the wounded affection.” (17)
It’s not exactly clear to me what exactly he means by “sign” and “substance,” but since he later writes that the lovers “represent the world to each other,” is it possible the “sign” is the representative value they had for each other, while the substance is something more like “the real you” in a positive way? Is this practical advice for conflict resolution? I’m not exactly sure how Emerson’s words symbolize a process of mutually healing the wounded affection yet…
Earlier, in commenting on “novels of passion…told with any spark of truth and nature,” he writes: “What fastens attention, in the intercourse of life, like any passage betraying affection between two parties?...We see them exchange a glace, or betray a deep emotion, and we are no longer strangers.” (4) Perhaps, then, if we want to feel Emerson less as a didactic stranger, we have to dig deeper into passages that “betray” (his word) or express his emotions and affections. There can be an intense emotional drama underlying, or signified by three little words: surprise, expostulation, pain.
Near the end of “Love,” Emerson also tries to minister or counsel feelings of over-dependency in the male (and perhaps female) psyche: “There are moments when the affections rule and absorb the man and make his happiness dependent on a person or persons. But in health the mind is presently seen again,--its overarching vault, bright with galaxies of immutable lights, and the warm loves and fears (emphasis added) that swept over us as clouds must lose their finite character and blend with God….we need not fear that we can lose anything by the progress of the soul” (19).
Losing myself in the accumulated effect of his rhetoric does excite me beyond mere critique, and I can see much inspiring and/or useful in Emerson’s sense of a higher love that may seem more like Agape than Eros, but I guess I crave something a little, er, warmer. Hell, even what Edith Wharton, in “The Dilettante,” calls “suspicious warmth” would be refreshing. but I must turn the question on myself and ask why do I cringe when I read lines like:
“the one beautiful soul is only the door through which he enters the society of all true and pure souls.” (15)
“the lover ascends to the highest beauty, to the love of knowledge of Divinity by steps on the ladder of created souls” (15)
“In the procession of soul from inward outward, it enlarges its circles after” (16)
Ideology critics could call this “the imperialist soul” or “the soul of capital.” Meanwhile, Natalie Wynn, in her 2020 Cringe Culture podcast[7] makes a distinction between the Contemptuous Cringe and the Compassionate Cringe, but though I very much appreciate, and somedays intensely feel, an injunction like Sufi mystic Rumi’s “You must marry your soul,” somehow Emerson’s rewrite of it as “the purification of the intellect and the heart is the real marriage” makes me cringe. Couldn’t we at least make it a threesome? The god of solitude as the marriage counselor, but also the goddess of the relationship as solitude counselor? I become curious about what his wife thought about that. A mere door? A stepping stone? It’s hard not to imagine a little dialogue: “Waldo, do you love me?” “Honey, you know I love everybody.” One may also wonder if Chris Nealon wonders if she told him he fucks like an intellectual, and that maybe that’s what started the argument/conflict that emotionally underlies this essay?
None of this proves to me that we lose nothing by this process, nor that heaven is a place without warmth (maybe Emerson would have been happier as an asexual agape monk or if he had more of Emily Dickinson’s courage in the solitary life), but even if these rapturous transcendental claims seem excessive, they become more convincing to Zeitgeist word-me if I feel his raptures of the higher love which “knows not sex, not partiality” betraying (in a non-pejorative sense) a need to work out his own shame at overdependence on the need for approval, or at least not the disapproval, of one particular person, a way of dealing with (or trying to arm himself against) the fear of abandonment that can make it worse.
Yet, in his journals he rages against his intellectually unfulfilling bond with a clingy wife, in a “Mezentian” marriage he felt as a dead weight: “Most of the persons whom I see in my own house I see across a gulf, I cannot go to them nor they come to me. Marriage is not ideal but empirical. It is not the plan or prospect of the soul, this fast union of one to one; the soul is alone… It is itself the universe & must realize its progress in ten thousand beloved forms & not in one.” (Popova)
This statement may confirm some of my skepticisms of the claims he makes in “Love.”[8] It does not seem one spoken by what attachment theory calls the healthy well-adjusted “securely attached individual,” nor even the “anxious preoccupied individual,” but seems to have much more in common with the Dismissive-avoidant type of people who:
desire a high level of independence, often appearing to avoid attachment altogether. They view themselves as self-sufficient, invulnerable to attachment feelings and not needing close relationships. They tend to suppress their feelings, dealing with conflict by distancing themselves from partners of whom they often have a poor opinion….They have a great amount of distrust in others but at the same time possess a positive model of self, they would prefer to invest in their own ego skills. Because of their distrust they cannot be convinced that other people have the ability to deliver emotional support. They try to create high levels of self-esteem by investing disproportionately in their abilities or accomplishments. These adults maintain their positive views of self, based on their personal achievements and competence rather than searching for and feeling acceptance from others. These adults will explicitly reject or minimize the importance of emotional attachment and passively avoid relationships when they feel as though they are becoming too close. They strive for self-reliance and independence… Dismissive avoidance can also be explained as the result of defensive deactivation of the attachment system to avoid potential rejection, or genuine disregard for interpersonal closeness (Wikipedia).
It's probably not fair to “shrink” Emerson thus, and whether he’s genuinely disregarding interpersonal closeness or defensively activating the attachment system will probably always be a mystery to us (and to him for that matter), but if we’re looking for an emotional crisis underlying or occasioning the writing of the essay, we can return to the bitter medicine of instruction he spoke of in universalizing terms earlier: “Let any man go back to those delicious relations which make the beauty of his life, which have given him sincerest instruction and nourishment, he will shrink and moan.” Interestingly, he uses the word “shrink,” more personally a little later: “I have been told that in some public discourses of mine my reverence for the intellect has made me unjustly cold to the personal relations. But now I almost shrink at the remembrance of such disparaging words.” (5)
When I first read that quote, I assumed his implied interlocuters were younger, more sensual (and less soulful) men, yet is it possible he was actually told this by a woman? And what difference does it make?
+++
Not only were Emerson and Fuller contemporaries, but respected colleagues who inspired each other in their writing and thought (though Emerson never did come through on his promise to pay her for her work as editor of The Dial and, after her death, published, but redacted passages from, her work). Fuller, 7 years younger than Emerson, wrote that she “first learned what is meant by an inward life” from him, and Richardson (1995) remarked that “Fuller took less from Emerson than either Thoreau or Whitman, and she probably gave him more than either of them.” She pushed him towards an “idealism that is concerned with ideas only as they can be lived […], with the spiritual only when it animates the material.”[9]
Yet their relationship goes clearly beyond ideas. When she died, he wrote “I have lost in her my audience… (Fuller) bound in the belt of her sympathy and friendship all whom I know and love…. Her heart, which few knew, was as great as her mind, which all knew.” Looking at his journals, it’s hard to resist a feeling that it was Margaret Fuller who, more than anybody, gave Emerson that “sincerest instruction” that made him “shrink and moan.”
In his journal he writes: “I would that I could, I know afar off that I cannot, give the lights and shades, the hopes and outlooks that come to me in these strange, cold-warm, attractive-repelling conversations with Margaret, whom I always admire, most revere when I nearest see, and sometimes love, — yet whom I freeze, and who freezes me to silence, when we seem to promise to come nearest.” (Popova)[10]
In a letter to her he writes: “But tell me that I am cold or unkind, and in my most flowing state I become a cake of ice. I feel the crystals shoot & drops solidify. It may do for others but it is not for me to bring the relation to speech… Ask me what I think of you & me, — & I am put to confusion.” (Popova)
According to Emerson, when she calls him cold it makes him colder. When he expressed his desire for a “foe” in his friend, for a large and formidable nature” and expressed his love for her (in rather stiff, formal, muse terms: “O divine mermaid or fisher of men, to whom all gods have given the witch-hazel-wand… I am yours & yours shall be”), Fuller wrote back expressing that she felt “so at home with him” that she couldn’t imagine finding another love as quenching: “I know not how again to wonder and grope, seeking my place in another Soul.” Such beautiful expression of vulnerability is not, however spoken from a “position of weakness and poverty” (as she put it in Women in the 19th Century), but she also demands change from Waldo: “the sense of the infinite exhausts and exalts; it cannot therefore possess me wholly.” (Popova)
More than anyone, she was Emerson’s “Beautiful foe,” but he responded to this with a cold letter in which he tries to reduce the connection they have to that of “brothers” (though he may have felt he was elevating it, or saving her from her pesky “affections”). Here, Emerson sounds very much like Thursdale in Edith Wharton’s later, “The Dilettante,” or Rendell (and by implication, Danyers) in “The Muse’s Tragedy” (1899)[11] who needs to make a clear rigid connection between intellectual soul connection with a “brother” (though not in a Whitmanian way), and his wife, with whom he had an intellectually unfulfilling bond. Perhaps the disconnect between Emerson and Fuller just comes down to different strategies of coping with painful emotional needs.
In relations, some people can soothe and be soothed better by transforming emotions with emotions (or as friend once put it, “You can’t change the feeling, but you can change the feeling about the feeling”), but others need to self-medicate more in solitude, need the emotion called intellect to do this. In this, perhaps Emerson’s essay, “Love,” did for him what he hoped it would do—transform the pain and shame he felt at the beginning of the essay into a calmer (which for Emerson often means enraptured) response, but I find myself shrinking and moaning at the reflection of myself, or my past love relationships, in Emerson here.
Since Emerson’s second wife, Lydia, was clearly jealous of the connection he had with Fuller, it would be unfair to judge Emerson too harshly for running away from the mutual attraction, but, still, reading how their correspondence “betrays” their affection “fastens my attention” more than Emerson’s essay would have by itself. I cannot help but feel that kind of tragic “if only” if judged by Fuller’s ideal that “combines friendship and love,” or say the intellect and the emotions rather than just a logos in service of a pathos-less ethos, and Emerson’s apparent need to separate them with what Chris Nealon might call “the troubadour amour of…eyes on the horizon.” (The Shore 20,, or a “mental recapitulation of the sensuous world like…”an ice hand that could freeze the top of every branch.” (ibid, 14).
Fuller did find a soul mate better suited to her, one who shared more a passion for social justice than Emerson for whom it, like domestic love, was secondary, and maybe this episode did in a long-term way bring him closer to his wife(he was, after all, only in his late 30s when this episode happened). In “Love,” Emerson writes “Meantime, as life wears on, it proves a game of permutation and combination of all possible positions of the parties, to employ all the resources of each and acquaint each with the strength and weakness of the other” (17). Maybe these permutations do not have to be seen in stern prescriptive terms of strengths and weaknesses, but rather as the dance of attraction and repulsion, the see saw oscillations of dependence and avoidance (oops, I mean “Self-reliance”) that perhaps can never be “solved once and for all” in any relationship between any two people with moods and needs. Despite the biographers, who really knows the complexities of his married relationship, which lasted for decades after Fuller’s tragic early death?
For me, however, I feel more soul and more love in both Fuller’s writing, and in Chris Nealon’s The Shore than in Emerson, and though I, too, have only “awkward ways of writing biographically” (Nealon, 78) I, too, especially after getting tangled up in Emerson’s knots, and “alpine terms for matters subterranean” (ibid, 22) aspire to a more graceful carriage and, though asexual cis-het male I be, “want my sexuality to be courage: (78)
courage like cool water. (20)
& I feel Dickinson’s “Tooth/That nibbles at the soul—
[1] In case this is confusing, this particular phrase is me writing about Nealon writing about Oppen
[2] The citations are used in discussing Emerson’s essay are paragraph numbers, not page numbers, since the former is not standardized in the on-line era
[3] Harriet Jacob’s (AKA “Linda Brent”) “Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl,” is perhaps the best description of the horrors of being a woman in the 19th Century, both the black slave woman but also the oppressive white slave-mistress to whom Jacobs’ wide empathy even extends, even though both inflicted their dehumanizing cruelty on men and women slaves.
[4] On the “essentialism” debate, see Jamie S. Crouse’s assertion, “The transcendentalists, despite radical theological revisions, were surprisingly traditional in their acceptance of essential gender differences of women, even their supposedly superior moral nature” (262). Crouse, Jamie S. “‘If They Have a Moral Power’: Margaret Fuller, Transcendentalism, and the Question of Women’s Moral Nature.” ATQ, vol. 19, no. 4, Dec. 2005, pp. 259–279. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=a9h&AN=19244176&site=ehost-live.
For a different perspective, see Christina Zwarg: “Fuller's work consistently adopted a double strategy...The individual, and with it the notion of the identity of each person, proved a useful political subvention of her concern for women and their development. Fuller was willing to take the "risk of essentialism" if it protected women from cultural oblivion. Yet...Fuller lost little time in observing to Emerson...how problematic ‘self-reliance’ could be when gender was brought to bear upon the concept” Zwarg, Christina. "Womanizing Margaret Fuller: Theorizing a Lover's Discourse." Nineteenth-Century Literature Criticism, edited by Kathy D. Darrow, vol. 211, Gale, 2009. Gale Literature Resource Center, link.gale.com/apps/doc/H1420090756/LitRC?u=oakl75399&sid=LitRC&xid=01b8045d. Accessed 6 Apr. 2021. Originally published in Cultural Critique, no. 16, Fall 1990, pp. 161-191.
[5] In her critique of men’s jealousy, possessiveness and control freak tendencies in what today we’d call a “dysfunctional relationship,” this last sentence, “Children of one Father,” may be jarring to 21st century secularist ears, but it could be similar to EMT’s sense that “the problem is not viewed as belonging to one partner, but rather to the cyclical reinforcing patters of (negative) interactions between partners” which therapy helps the couple become mutual allies against without blaming each other.
[6] Is it an accident that many of its founding therapist/theorists and practitioners are women?
[8] It raises a question of comparing a private journal entry (the domestic sphere of feeling?) with a public discourse (the sphere of thought?). Is it fair to subject a writer to such prurient interests 150 years after their death? Does the private angry rant trump the more detached public attempt at transcendence? Is it fair to put Waldo on the psychoanalyst’s couch as if that’s the best way to humanize the interior life to a 21st century reader who doesn’t necessarily believe the doctrine of the immortal soul can help us lead a wiser, wider, more virtuous life? Would it make a difference if the journal was written before or after he put the finishing touches on “Love?”
[9] http://www.historyisnowmagazine.com/blog/2015/9/12/when-a-poet-tragically-dies-the-story-of-margaret-fuller-and-ralph-waldo-emerson#.YFwqCC-z10s
[11] One need not assert that Wharton based these characters on Emerson in particular, to “shrink” these individual men into a “type” that she too had her heart broken by.
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