Margaret Fuller as Cultural Reformer: The Conversations in Boston

Abstract

THE HISTORIOGRAPHY OF NEW ENGLAND TRANSCENDENTALISM IS PARADOXICAL. For over a century it has been frequently pointed out that what most distinguished the American variety of Transcendentalism from its contemporary European variants was its character as a semipopular movement. 1 Yet despite the massive literature on Transcendentalism, very little of it has addressed itself to this facet. Nor has very much attention been paid to what was the central historically defining characteristic of this movement at is high-water mark, namely, its collective commitment to changing people's lives by changing their minds.2 One potentially fruitful way of approaching what one might call Transcendentalism as a cultural movement, and its relation to other ideas of change both within and without the movement, is through the career of Margaret Fuller.3 For more than Emerson or Alcott, or Parker or Ripley, or indeed far more than any other leading Transcendentalist, Fuller was associated with both the two seemingly most contradictory elements of cultural Transcendentalism: the literaryintellectual and the social reform. For this reason, and because Fuller's role as a cultural reformer has been so much overlooked or misunderstood, this essay examines one arena that gave Fuller her first opportunity of publically defining her position on these two elements-her conversations in Boston beginning in 1839. This was a significant year for Fuller's career. The previous Christmas she had completed nearly two years' teaching at the successful neo-Transcendentalist Greene Street School in Providence. She had said many times before she left Providence that she would never teach again. (You must not get ugly picture of me because am a schoolmistress, she had written apologetically to the English author Anna Jameson. I have not yet acquired that 'strong mental odour' that Coleridge speaks of. am only teaching for a little while. )4 Yet she continued to need money to support herself and her mother and younger siblings. Furthermore, through her teaching in Providence and earlier at Bronson Alcott's Temple School, she had gained not only a good deal of self-confidence, but also the idea preached by Alcott that teaching could be culturally important-perhaps as much as lecturing or writing-if it were only approached in a sufficiently idealistic way. Of these things she wrote to her friend William Henry Channing just before she left Providence, emphasizing her own dreams and hopes as to the education of women. She concluded with the hopeful thought that should this prove at last my vocation, she could at least be certain that she would be entering an occupation in which few persons of ability are at present engaged.5