"I Want Agency!" (Essay Letter on the Women Transcendentalists)

This essay-letter was written and mailed to over 50 women from a week-long workshop I attended on utopians, feminists, and abolitionists in the age of Emerson and Thoreau.                       

                                                                       

                                                                                                Concord, Massachusetts

Dear Sisters, Daughters, Nieces,

            I have been on a pilgrimage this week, visiting some sites where American sight has been most clear and visionary and, among the relics of American Transcendentalism, I have continued my exploration of the fruitful and sometimes fraught relationship between thought and action, ideas and material reality. While of course I have been visiting the houses, haunts, and graves of great and beloved Men, my letter to you is about a number of remarkable Women whom I have come to know more intimately over the last two weeks. Being as blessed as we are with a consociate family of ethical, creative, engaged and ecstatic women makes me even more aware of some of the struggles fought by our ancestors to give us voice and allow us agency in the world. It is no accident that many of the most influential women of proto-feminism arose in the heart of transcendentalism, nor that transcendentalism’s  imperative of  introspection, imagination, utopianism has empowered the self-trust and self-reliance necessary to break out of paternalistic bounds. The transcendental union with the “Over-Soul,” implying a rejection of traditional religion and its authoritarian constraints, has liberated both men and women from external spiritual and moral authorities. And Transcendentalism’s inherent tensions between individual self-reliance and communal action were meaningful catchwords of a burgeoning women’s movement, which is still struggling today to map out the most fruitful relationship between individualism and social action (a room of one’s own or a rejection of the “male construct” of individual genius?). William Ellery Channing, the radical Unitarian minister of Boston affirmed the ideals of Knowledge, Love, and Action. Presumably for women too.

Mary Moody Emerson (b. 1774) is my current favorite, and, as she represents the older generation in this group, I will begin with her. Aunt Mary, as her nephew Waldo called her, was a badly-behaved firebrand who came out of the older and fiercely pietistic Calvinist tradition into a New Awakening of ecstasy, which prefigured her nephew’s meeting with the Over-Soul in nature. Although she couldn’t help but be concerned when Waldo left the ministry, she assured Charles, his older brother, that Waldo would seek redemption in his own way, and probably inwardly rejoiced at his pluck. She refused marriage because she could not deign to please and based her own conduct of life on whatever she could square with her own deeply religious, personally mystical conscience. As Phyllis Cole explained in a lecture I had the pleasure to attend, Mary believed in the heaven that her nephew and his fellow transcendentalists would largely reject, but imagined it as a place where she might, at last, sit at the table with male philosophers and discourse on equal terms.  A measure of her influence on her famous nephew can be gleaned from the following story, also told by Phyllis Cole in her book, Mary Moody Emerson and the Origins of Transcendentalism.  When Waldo began his career in the ministry, he wrote to Aunt Mary, asking to have what would later become a “legacy” beforehand—a  collection of her journals they called her “Almanack,” containing what he hoped would make up the “original” material he would need to write his sermons. Though Aunt Mary was a fervent supporter (even pusher) of Waldo’s work, hoping that he would be the poet she did not dare be, she demurred,  asking for the others back first and writing to him that her Almanacks were her “home—the only image of having existed”. Her nephew would have to content himself with the excerpts he had already transcribed into his notebooks from her letters and a few Almanacks she had lent him for his “original” material, despite the fact that an earlier letter from 1829 suggests that she had forbid the transcription (“I have read with somewhat more profit than you mt. approve, the Almanacs…Before you charged me not to transcribe I had copied off much that I send”). The passages from Aunt Mary’s notebooks and letters are followed in Waldo’s journals with the cryptic name Tnamurya, which is an anagram for . . . Aunt Mary!  In one passage from the Almanacks, Mary Moody confides, “I want influence, agency,” this “want” presumably meaning “lack” just as much as “desire,” although she certainly had influence, if largely unaccredited. She had been self-taught, growing up impoverished and “exiled,” to use her own word, from family, society, possibility; ravenous for books which she would glean from the libraries of homes of inconsistent patrons, employers, and distant neglectful relations. “Why,” she asks in another note, “can’t I gnaw a bone of metaphysics?” But perhaps this exile made of her a mystic by necessity, causing her to commune with the Divine Spark without the dubious benefit of interpreters or mediators.  Mary Moody Emerson’s Almanack for December 30^th, 1826 reads:

            I touch eternity—let me do nothing small. Yet my whole life has consisted of noughts.  Well a

Single figure at their head, put down by another, makes them immense. Been nothing? Done nothing?  Let me hide myself more completely in thy omnipresence oh father of the universe! Absorb me in thyself — let my consciousness remain — & I will!

While Mary Moody Emerson may hope in good transcendentalist fashion that her consciousness will remain and make up for missing agency and public voice, the next generation of transcendental women would break out more boldly into the fray. Mary Merrick Brooks, whose husband thought her a silly goose, was probably the most active and effective person in the Concord anti-slavery movement. As Sandra Petrulionos pointed out in a talk I attended, although the ministers and powerful men had long held that women should be moral authorities within their homes, they were not quite prepared for this authority to move into the public and political arena. One of the few men active in the Concord abolitionist movement, among so many agitating women, was William Lloyd Garrison, who in turn urged women, who were considered to be morally superior to men,  to act as moral authorities in the cause of “immediatism,” i.e., the immediate cessation of  slavery. Many women, like the Grimke sisters, left their “proper sphere” to speak publically and to mixed audiences on political subjects, a conduct that was considered by some ministers a dangerous precursor of un-sexing, whereby they would cease to bear fruit. To some women who knew the dangers of childbirth and the realities of raising numerous children in the period before birth control, this minister’s threat might even have sounded like a promise, but activism did not prove to work as a contraception, although it might deter suitors.

            While Waldo may have been willing to silently inherit his Aunt Mary’s legacy, the prophet of self-reliance was not entirely blind to the price women paid for their sacrifice to others in marriage and family. His own wife Lydian, by all accounts a brilliant and learned woman who could equal her husband in intellectual discourse, found herself unable to accompany her husband and his numerous male and female callers on their peripatetic philosophical rambles in the woods behind his house, because she simply had too much house work to do, and became withdrawn after the birth of their first child, and inconsolably depressed or “invalid” after Waldo junior’s death. Their first daughter, named after Waldo’s deceased first wife Ellen, must have had a hard time deciding whether to dutifully join her mother in domesticity or her father in intellectualism. On one of the walks Lydian did not indulge in, with the brilliant Elizabeth Peabody (who was not married but who nevertheless exerted enormous time and energy caring for her siblings and parents), Emerson counseled Miss Peabody not to blame herself if she felt “overpowered by [her] relations with others”. Whom then should she have blamed? Might a fiercely self-reliant individualist admit that society and nurture might create formidably challenging obstacles to even the most gifted and inspired woman’s nature? Or were women themselves indeed at fault for empathizing to the point of sacrifice with their children, parents, siblings and spouses? And yet women found—in anti-slavery— something larger than their families to sacrifice themselves and their time for. Like medieval mystics, in service to others or at the supposedly direct bidding of a paternalistic God, women justified their agency and the use of their voices and pens as sacrifice and obedience. It would be another decade at least before women would dare to agitate for themselves and not in service to some others in need or as mere vessels for some booming God.

            Mary Merrick Brook agitated constantly, using all her wiles and all her will, to, in her own words, “set this world right”. In association with Mary Moody, with Waldo’s wife Lydian (apparently abolition was the only thing, after Waldo junior’s death, that would get her out of bed), with Thoreau’s sister, mother, and aunts, to bring the men more actively into the fray, urging them to address the public and to lend the authority of their names to the cause. Thoreau was literally surrounded by abolitionist women in his family home during the hey-day of anti-slavery fervor and not only was this home the center of meetings and planning, but it also was a boarding house which hosted visiting lecturers and fugitive slaves and activists on a regular basis.  The women also had fairs where they sold hand-made lace and embroidery, tea and cakes to raise money for organizing; Thoreau called the ladies’ charity “chattery,” but he couldn’t help but be influenced by the constant ferment their “gossip” ignited. While Henry David was spending the night in the Concord jail which would inspire his Civil Disobedience essay, his sister and aunts were signing radical petitions in favor of disunion, writing their names without the standard preliminary Missus, in a bold gesture of independence.  While Henry was more ready to fight than Waldo (his words cried Murder to the state, while Ralph preached patience) the elder man’s reserve was tried by another feminine force in the formidable figure of Margaret Fuller.

 Emerson, who apparently expressed mirth with at most a wry smile and a glittering sweetness in his beautiful eyes, was challenged on his first unsettling meeting with Miss Fuller to find himself laughing loudly at the witty brilliant things this aggressive and erudite women said.  Her earthiness, her energy, her great learning and her embrace of the physical (she was a sensualist who loved both men and women), as well as the dark energies of Discord would both fascinate and disturb the sage of Concord throughout their long and intimate relationship. Few people today seem to know that Margaret Fuller wrote the first American book of feminism, Woman in the 19^th Century, in 1845. In it she declared that a woman might be anything she wanted to be. “Let them be sea captains!” she exclaimed, and she herself led the way to innovative careers by eschewing the usual job taken by overly-educated women of educating young men for university while they themselves could not attend. Instead, she educated and cultivated the voice of her fellow ladies, holding “Conversations” for women on the topics of history, philosophy, literature, theology, charging money and making a living from these meetings for some time. These “Conversations” did not just end in talk however, as most of the leading lights of the suffrage movement, including Elizabeth Cady Stanton,  attended these meetings, where Fuller encouraged woman to talk, think, and act (Phyllis Cole provided us with a list of the women who had attended Fuller’s Conversations). Fuller herself died before the National Women’s Conventions if the 1850’s in a tragic drowning accident off Fire Island.  While the reports are confused, it seems probable that she sacrificed her life (and that of her infant son and husband who also drowned) because she did not want to let the baby out of her arms into the hands of one of the rescuers. But her influence, her consciousness, like Mary Moody’s, lived on in others’ lives, words and deeds.

Another of my favorite transcendental women is Elizabeth Palmer Peabody who, like Margaret and Mary Moody,  was ravenous for learning, doing whatever she could, despite an uncertain and impoverished childhood and youth (her family was forced to move every year for decades, it seems), to learn Latin, Greek, French, German, and even Hebrew in her spare moments in between teaching boys and girls and young men, and taking care of her sisters, her wayward brothers,  her parents, and an extended brood of boarders and others in need. She was so successful in her precocious self-education that by the time she was a young teenager she was conversing regularly with William Ellery Channing, the revolutionary Unitarian minister, on questions of theology and metaphysics and Megan Marshall in The Peabody Sisters, says that Elizabeth was not dismayed to find that whatever topic she and Channing happened to discuss on a Saturday would appear, in words quite similar to hers, in his next day’s sermons. Being in a position slightly less desperate than Mary Moody’s with regard to possible voice and influence, she did not, perhaps, need to guard her ideas as jealously. Or perhaps she was still too young to be anything other than flattered at the great man’s attentions. Later, in an obituary of Mary Moody, Elizabeth reflected more gloomily on the appropriation of a woman’s ideas, writing: “[R.W.] Emerson derived much of his character from his aunt—he has improved the talent, hers was buried” (see Cole, 6). Elizabeth went on to found a foreign language bookstore in Boston, which carried the most exciting journals and books gleaned from Europe and England at the time, and which served as a hotbed for international discourse on questions of the New Criticism coming from Germany (which dared to look at the Bible historically and often questioned the divinity of Christ) and which spread and discussed the “newness,” the doctrines of the burgeoning ideas of transcendentalism in regard to aesthetics, ethics, and political life. It was a journal edited by Elizabeth Peabody, entitled Aesthetic Papers, which first published Thoreau’s “Resistance to Civil Government” (what we now know as “Civil Disobedience”). Peabody edited and contributed essays and translations to another important transcendentalist organ, The Dial for a while too, as did Margaret Fuller and Waldo Emerson, as well as a number of books under the imprint E. Peabody, Boston. She was an expert in ancient and modern history as well as in theology, philosophy and literature, and, even before Margaret Fuller, presided over conversational classes for women, hers called “historical conferences”. Harvard students (all male of course) came to her for advice on historical readings. She helped Bronson Alcott begin his revolutionary but ill-fated Temple School and wrote a book about her experience there (before breaking with him for what she deemed his increasingly narcissistic radicalism), entitled Record of School, which was praised by Emerson as “the only book of facts I ever read” that was as “engaging” as a Maria Edgeworth novel and as a “beautiful book…certain true & pleasant”.  Another book, a scholarly and radical analysis of the Hebrew scriptures which she had begun while practically a child, proved too challenging for Andrews Norton, the conservative editor who had published the first few parts; and the edition was discontinued.

Elizabeth’s sisters, Mary and Sophia, were also quite something, though we see Sophia, the youngest, struggling to be an artist amid neurasthenia and a host of real ailments, copying, copying, copying other painters beautifully, but usually succumbing to unbearable migraines whenever she becomes ecstatically inspired to paint something original. It was not always so easy for even these exceptional women to be “new,” but I was happy to note during my tour of the Old Manse that her painting studio was at least as large as her famous husband’s, Nathanial Hawthorne, even if her health (whether physical or psychological) did not, until being miraculously cured by the requited love and seemingly very happy marriage to Hawthorne, quite allowed her the time to create in a large way (remember Mary Moody’s “let me do nothing small”?!) Before her marriage, probably despairing of ever finding the sort of marriage of true minds she did indeed attain, Sophia seemed excited to be painting miniature scenes she invented upon crocheted baskets to sell at abolitionist fairs, because they were her own “creations”. “I have created!” she would exclaim, at the mere bold move of stepping outside of imitation. Mary Moody wanted, perhaps, something more, and, judging from her prose, probably did have the genius for it, if not the circumstances.  While Sophia seemed unable to produce more than a trickle of work in between her headaches during her single days, she went on to paint a bit more after her marriage and gained a reputation as portrait sculptor and illustrator (mostly of her husband’s early books). Other women artists were more prodigious still.

Louisa May Alcott became, after the publication of Little Women, fabulously rich. Her father, Bronson Alcott, had ensured that the Alcott family be desperately poor in material goods and very rich in spirit. His visionary educational methods and his celebration of the transcendental realms deserve attention, but here he stands along with a number of egregiously incompetent and self-indulgent fathers (the Peabody father is another) whose daughters struggled valiantly to support their neglected families and to make sure that the spiritual food was supplemented with bread. (Waldo Emerson was able to live the life of the mind due to an inheritance from his beloved first wife, Ellen; and the furniture in their beautifully appointed Concord house was mostly brought to the house by his second wife. We may thank them as we thank R.W. Emerson for providing H.D. Thoreau with the land at Walden Pond). Bronson, as I discovered upon visiting the house he christened “Orchard House” (Louisa called it “apple slump”—a sort of apple dessert—mockingly, due to its slanted floors and the rather inglorious circumstances of their daily lives), had conceived the ingenious idea of moving a separated portion of the house on rollers, to be attached to the main house, but neglected to have a foundation put under the new floor, creating extreme practical and financial problems. An apt metaphor. But Louisa, ever practical, built the foundation with her hard diligence.  She was, I learned at a talk by John Matteson, the first American woman to participate in an election when in 1860 women were given limited suffrage only on issues regarding the school board. The author of a best seller was required to take a literacy test before being granted approval and then was at first denied because she had never paid taxes. Not to be refused, Louisa asked to pay her taxes (presumably ones not paid by her father) right then and there, and did so immediately before being the first woman in America to cast a vote. While Louisa became rich enough to buy her father his own house and earned fame enough to spark a late life spurt in his popularity, enabling him to go on lecture tours (advertised as Louisa May’s father just as  much as he was a leading light of the last generation’s burgeoning transcendentalist movement), his late life poem in honor of Louisa doesn’t mention her writing career at all, preferring to praise her for the one act that earned her his respect: her near-fatal service to wounded soldiers as an army nurse during the civil war. This was a sacrifice that Bronson could support. The precepts of his ill-fated utopian community, Fruitlands, required that the inhabitants wear only linen and not cotton, wool or silk, so that the work of neither animals nor slaves would be exploited. They did not eat meat or dairy products and plowed the land (with one brief exception) without the help of oxen or horses. Perhaps it is not nice to mention that neither Bronson nor his principle associate John Lane deigned to work the land themselves, presumably because they were better occupied with thinking and proselytizing; but his wife, Abba, says it best, in answer to someone who inquired whether there were beasts of burden on the farm, she is reported to have said:  “Only one woman”.

So here we are, sisters, a consociate chosen family of voluntary association, some of us in love with men, some of us with families, some of us in love with women, with art, most of us in love with men, families, women, and art, in love with autonomous creation and with reform; cherishing our independence and self-reliance, taking responsibility for our place in the world and striving every day to break through real and imaginary boundaries constructed often as much by ourselves and our inherited assumptions as by the society around us.  We may be by nature more socially-oriented and less easily able to block out the world or our neighbors or our loved ones than the men we love; or we may find ourselves longing for and attaining a room of our own, away at least temporarily from the cries and cares of other individuals and of the world’s burning issues, even if this room be used as a breeding ground for ideas and art and schemes that will eventually re-enter and influence the world of action, support our families, make us fuller happier people who can love without resentment or restraint. We may find ourselves the moral or rather ethical authorities in our communities and beyond, and feel a pull to sacrifice our own genius for some desperate cause or other, or we may sacrifice our genius for lesser things even than good causes, which, after all these ancestor sisters have done for us, would seem a shame. As Megan Marshall tells us, Elizabeth Peabody, when a child listening to her mother teach her classroom about the pilgrims coming to America, heard the word “ancestors” as “Ann sisters,” and formed an image in her mind of a stream of ladies named Ann, coming to this country to start a new world. Only much later did she discover that most people did not imagine that women could start a world. It was too late for her though, as the image had already been imbedded as truth in her impressionable and fruitful mind.

At the Sleepy Hollow cemetery, where pilgrims leave notes, pebbles, feathers, and pens and pencils as offerings for the great men Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathanial Hawthorne, Henry David Thoreau, and the one exceptional woman Louisa May Alcott, Mary Moody Emerson’s grave, there merely because the families of these authors are buried about them, stood unadorned but for a few modest pebbles as I visited it with my new friend Brooke. We knelt to pay her homage and wrote her notes from the women of the future, honoring her passion and eloquence and her struggle to have agency and influence. Without meaning any disrespect, I stole a few pencils someone had placed on her nephew’s grave and put them before hers instead—for he had borrowed much from her in his time.  She needed the encouragement more than he had, not having had, herself, an aunt to cheer her on to speak and write. But we have now all of these aunts and uncles and much less excuse not to become and become. We owe it to them to foster our sparks of genius by creating circumstances and conducts of life which enable them to flourish and grow into dangerous, beautiful, consuming flames with the power to ignite ever new worlds. We owe it to our daughters and our sons, our nephews and our nieces, related by blood or through chosen kinship, that they may freely grow and create and be.

—Your Sister, Your Aunt, Your Friend