“‘The Mighty Meaning of the Scene’” Feminine Landscapes and the Future of America in Margaret Fuller’s Summer on the Lakes, in 1843

Kathleen Healey

doi:10.3390/h8010031

Abstract

Like many of her contemporaries, Margaret Fuller had great hopes for the West. The Western lands, open for America’s future, held the promise of what America could become. In Summer on the Lakes, Fuller sketches what she hopes America will become. Using the landscape aesthetics of her age, such as the work of Andrew Jackson Downing and the Hudson River School of landscape painting, Fuller describes the ideal landscape as one that is more feminine and nurturing, one in which humankind lives in harmony with nature. Fuller’s landscape descriptions both point to a better future for America and critique the values of her contemporaries. Fuller contrasts America’s more male vision of conquest of the land with her feminine ideal of harmony with nature—a cultivated garden—to show what America’s future should be, as it builds westward.

Highlights

Like their contemporaries, American Transcendentalists viewed the West as a landscape full of possibility, symbolizing America’s destiny as a nation with a glorious future
While most Americans saw in the West possibility for economic growth and land development, the Transcendentalists envisioned a land where a new, vital religion would develop (McKinsey 1973, p. 16) and social reform would occur
Employs an iconology of landscape, invoking images of the American landscape popularized in paintings—including those by Hudson River School painters and later by the Luminists—as well as gift books in order to construct her ideals about the lands of the mid-west and America’s future

Summary

Introduction

American Transcendentalists viewed the West as a landscape full of possibility, symbolizing America’s destiny as a nation with a glorious future. Employs an iconology of landscape, invoking images of the American landscape popularized in paintings—including those by Hudson River School painters and later by the Luminists—as well as gift books in order to construct her ideals about the lands of the mid-west and America’s future Through her painterly landscape descriptions, Fuller conveys her political and social vision of America, and projects for her readers the kind of place she hopes the West, and America, will become—a kind of new Eden on earth, one that is more feminine in growth and development. Durand’s The Hudson River Looking Toward the Catskills (1847) (Figure 1) and Jasper Cropsey’s American Harvesting (1851) (Figure 2) are a few examples of paintings that represent America as a peaceful, pastoral paradise In paintings such as these, the landscape has a park-like appearance, in which green meadows are interspersed with groves of trees, suggesting the art of humankind in conjunction with nature. Images of landscape helped to legitimate America’s actions in the conquest of more territory and inspired progress, settlement, and development

Margaret Fuller and Nineteenth Century American Art

A Garden Utopia