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“‘Let Them Be Sea Captains’:
Remembering the Life of Margaret Fuller”
By the Rev. Dr. James Kubal-Komoto
Saltwater Unitarian Universalist Church
Des Moines, Washington
May 30, 2010
In our wider culture, there are two times
during the year when we remember those who have died, around the beginning of
November, near the time of Halloween, the Day of the Dead, All Saints Day, and
All Souls Day, and around the end of May, on Memorial Day.
One of these remembrances has its roots in the Christian liturgical
year, and perhaps the pagan liturgical year before that, and one of these
remembrances has its roots in U.S. history, more specifically, U.S. military
history.
In addition to having very different historical origins, these two
different times of remembrance - - more or less a half a year apart - - have
very different feels to me.
At the beginning of November, when the days are growing colder and
darker, we tend to remember those who have recently died, reflect on our own
experience of grief, and even reflect even on our own mortality.
At the end of May, however, we are not so somber. We tend to
remember how those who are no longer part of our lives as they once were
continue to be part of our lives and of our world, how all of those who have
come and gone before us continue to live on through their contributions to the
life of humanity in which all of us live and move and have our being.
In this spirit, on Memorial Day, I often choose to talk about a
figure from Unitarian Universalist history, some prominent figure important to
the tradition in which this church stands whose life continues to influence all
our of lives, and this morning I have chosen to speak about Margaret Fuller,
whose 200th birthday we celebrate this month.
If Margaret Fuller’s name is not a familiar one to you, you are not
alone. Though I believe her influence was significant, it is only now that many
scholars are beginning to recognize her influence as one of the most influential
women of her generation.
Who was Margaret Fuller? A religious radical. A public intellectual.
An avant-garde cultural critic. A feminist and social theorist. An investigative
journalist. A war correspondent. A woman whose full potential was never
realized, not only because of the society in which she lived, but also because
her life ended tragically when she was only 40.
But let me tell you her story from the beginning.
Margaret Fuller was born on May 23, 1810, in Cambridge,
Massachusetts - - that was 200 years and one week ago. Her parents were Margaret
Crane and Timothy Fuller, Jr.
Her father was an attorney who later would be elected to the U.S.
Congress, and both regularly attended their local Unitarian church, but the most
important thing to know about her father is that he decided to educate Margaret
as if she were a boy.
Margaret was a precocious child and had learned to read by the age
of three, and after that her father began tutoring her in Latin, Greek, modern
languages, grammar, mathematics, music, and history. Margaret soaked up this
learning from her father and more on her own, spending most of her free hours
with books rather than other children.
From her autobiography…I was taught Latin and English grammar at
the same time, and began to read Latin at six years old, after which, for some
years, I read it daily… I was trained to quite a high degree of precision. I was
expected to understand the mechanism of the language thoroughly and in
translating to give the thought in as few well-arranged words as possible, and
without breaks or hesitations, - - for with these my father had absolutely no
patience. His influence on me was great.
Eventually Margaret’s parents sent her off to school, but she
was socially awkward and quite miserable. She yearned to be accepted by the
other children as well as her teachers, but she was also a brilliant young girl
who loved to talk about ideas and was often accused of “showing off” - - which
was considered especially inappropriate for girls. This tension between her
desire to be true to her own nature and her desire to be liked and accepted by
others was one with which she would struggle for most of her life.
From her memoirs…From a very early age I have felt that I was not
born to the common womanly lot…This though, all whose bearings I did not indeed,
understand, affected me sometimes with sadness, sometimes with pride. I mourned
that I never should have a thorough experience of life, never know the full
riches of my being: I was proud that I was to test myself in the sternest way,
that I was always to return to myself, to be my own priest, pupil, parent,
child, husband and wife..
At the age of 15, Fuller became a reader and translator for the
Rev. William Ellery Channing, the most prominent Unitarian minister of the day.
She also became intimate friends with some of the young men who would, in a few
years, become some of the most prominent Unitarian ministers of their own
generation.
However, as these young men went off to Harvard University, Fuller
began to realize how limited her own options in life truly were. She was as
intelligent and well-educated as any of her male peers - - most likely more so -
- and yet because she was female, so many doors were closed to her. Even the one
door that was open - - that of marriage and motherhood - - seemed a remote
possibility since most men were utterly intimidated by her intellect.
After finishing her schooling, she became a full-time tutor to her
younger siblings, a task from which she did not derive much satisfaction.
From her writings…I pour ideas into the heads of the little
Fullers. Much runs out.
Fuller became more and more depressed and lonely, worrying that
that the life she would end up leading would be a much narrower one than the one
she hoped and dreamed of. Then at the age of 21, she had a transformative
religious experience.
It was Thanksgiving Day and she had attended church services in
order not to displease her father, but she was not in the mood for a
Thanksgiving Day service.
I almost always suffered much in church from a feeling of
disunion with the hearers and dissent from the preacher; but do-day, more than
ever before, the services jarred upon me from their grateful and joyful tone. I
was wearied out with mental conflicts, and in a mood of most childish,
child-like sadness. I felt within myself great power, and generosity, and
tenderness; but it seemed to me as if they were all unrecognized, and as if it
was impossible that they would be used in life. I was only one-and-twenty; the
past was worthless, the future hopeless; yet I could not remember ever
voluntarily to have done a wrong thing, and my aspiration seemed very high…
After the church service, Fuller took a walk of several hours
through fields and woods.
I paused beside a little stream, which I had envied in the merry
fullness of its spring life. It was shrunken, voiceless, choked with withered
leaves. I marveled that it did not quite lose itself in the earth.
As she continued walking, she was struck by a revelation.
I saw there was no self; that selfishness was all folly and the
result of circumstance; that it was only because I thought self real that I
suffered; that I had only to live in the idea of the ALL, and all was mine. This
truth came to me, and I received it unhesitatingly; so that I was for that hour
taken up into God. In that true ray most of the relations of the earth seemed
mere films, phenomena.
As a result of that experience, Fuller committed herself to
the goal of developing her potential as fully as possible in life - - to
developing the gifts of her own spirit - - no matter what obstacles life or
society might put in her way.
Fuller also, by the way, continued to attend Unitarian churches, at
least occasionally, but even the Unitarianism of the early 19th
century - - which was considered radical by more traditional Christians - - was
still too orthodox for her. She also found it overly rational.
From a letter of 1840…This Unitarianism has had its place. There
was a time for asserting “the dignity of human nature,” and for explaining total
depravity into temporary inadequacy, a time to say that the truths of Essence,
if simplified at all in statement from their infinite variety of existence,
should be spoken of as One rather than Three. Yet the time seems now to have
come for reinterpreting the old dogmas. I would now preach the Holy Ghost as
zealously as they have been preaching Man, and faith instead of understanding
and mysticism instead…
Instead, Fuller continued to have mystical experiences during
her life, from she drew inspiration, strength, and courage…
From “A Credo”… “The blue sky seen above the opposite roof
preaches better than any brother, [and is] at present a freer, simpler medium of
religion.”
From a letter of 1838… I touched secret of the universe, and by that
touch was invested with talismanic power which has never left me, though it
sometimes lies dormant for a long while.
From an undated letter…After much troubling of the waters of
my life, a radiant thought of the meaning and beauty of earthly existence will
descend like a healing angel. The stillness permits me to hear a pure tone from
the One in All.
Committed to fully developing her potential, Fuller soon
began to publish articles in a variety of publications. She wrote literary and
dramatic criticisms as well as short stories.
Then at the age of 25, two significant events occurred in her life.
The first significant event was the death of her father. He died
suddenly and unexpectedly of cholera, making her financially responsible for her
younger siblings. For the next several years, she taught school, first in Boston
and then in Rhode Island, using her earnings to send her three brothers through
Harvard University.
Even more significantly, she met and became friends with Ralph Waldo
Emerson, finding perhaps, for the first time in her life, somebody who was her
intellectual equal. Though he was only seven years her senior, to the best of my
knowledge, Emerson and Fuller’s relationship was only a platonic one, yet they
each contributed to each other’s intellectual development, pushing each other in
new directions. They often walked together for hours, deep in discussion.
[During our walk today] We agreed that my god was Love, his
Truth.
Emerson also introduced Fuller to many of his friends.
[Waldo] has a friend with of the name of Henry Thoreau who has
come to live with him and be his working-man this year. H.T. is three and
twenty, has been through college and kept a school, is very fond of classic
studies, and an earnest thinker yet intends being a farmer. He has a great deal
of practical sense, and as he has bodily strength to boot, he may look to be a
successful and happy man. He has a boat which he made himself, and he rows me
out on the pond.
By the time Emerson and Fuller met, Emerson had already left the
Unitarian ministry - - finding it too orthodox at the time himself - - and was
earning his living as a lecturer and writer. Though Fuller might have wished to
follow in his footsteps, women at this time were not allowed to give public
lectures.
Instead, beginning in 1839, when Fuller was 29, she began holding a
series of Conversations in Elizabeth Peabody’s bookshop in Boston. These were
strictly for women, and from 1839 until 1844, about 200 prominent, mostly
Unitarian women attended Fuller’s gatherings, paying $20 per series, about half
the cost of tuition for a course at Harvard University.
During these Conversations, Fuller led these other women in serious
discussions of literature as well as social and political issues, especially
regarding the role of women in society. More than a hundred years later, these
might have been called “consciousness raising” sessions.
From a letter of 1839…Could a circle [of women] be assembled in
earnest desirous to answer the great questions? What were we born to do? How
shall we do it? Which so few ever propose to themselves ‘till their best years
are gone by. I should think the undertaking a noble one, and if my resources
should prove sufficient to make me its moving spring, I should willing to give
it a large portion of those coming years which will as I hope be my best.
Fuller’s Conversations are considered to be a major contribution to
the development of organized American feminism, and many of the women who
attended these conversations would later play major roles in our country’s first
women’s movement.
In 1840, while Fuller was in the midst of leading these
conversations, Emerson asked her to become the first editor of The Dial,
a journal of religious, social, cultural, and political criticism, making her
the first female editor of a major intellectual journal in this country.
A series of essays that she wrote for The Dial would later
be published in 1845 in book form as Woman in the Nineteenth, one of
this country’s earliest feminist works and the book for which Fuller is still
probably best known. In part, because of this book, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and
Susan B. Anthony said that Fuller “possessed more influence upon the thought of
American women than any woman previous to her time.”
In the book, Fuller called for the full participation of women in
public life.
From Woman in the Nineteenth Century…But if you ask me
what offices they may fill; I reply - - any. I do not care what case you put;
let them be sea-captains, if you will I do not doubt there are women well fitted
for such an office, and, if so, I should be glad to see them in it…
I think women need, especially at this juncture, a much greater
range of occupation than they have, to rouse their latent powers. A party of
travellers lately visited a lonely hut on a mountain. There they found an old
woman that told them she and her husband had lived there forty years. “Why,”
they said, “did you choose so barren a spot?” She “did not know; it was the
man’s notion!”
Fuller believed that women’s equality was not only necessary for
women’s fulfillment, but for the full flowering of humanity.
From Woman in the Nineteenth Century…We would have every
barrier thrown down. We would have every path laid open to woman as freely as
man. Were this done and a slight temporary fermentation allowed to subside, we
should see crystallizations more pure and of more various beauty. We believe the
divine energy would pervade nature to a degree unknown in the history of former
ages, and that no discordant collision, but a ravishing harmony of the spheres
would ensue.
Many of her ideas were years, or even centuries, ahead of her
times. She criticized patriarchal norms for being harmful to men as well as
being harmful to women, and she thought of gender not as being a case of
either/or but as operating along a continuum, and believed that male and female
elements existed within each individual.
From her Memoirs…The Woman in me kneels and weeps in tender
rapture; the Man in me rushes forth, but only to be baffled. Ye the time will
come, when, from the union of this tragic king and queen, shall be born a
radiant, sovereign self.
As she grew older, Fuller began to turn her attention even more
from abstract ideas to the concrete realities of the world around her,
especially to the oppression and exploitation she witnessed everywhere she
looked.
In 1843, Fuller spent a summer travelling to the Great Lakes. She
had originally planned to write a typical travelogue, which were quite popular
at the time. Instead, Summer on the Lakes became mostly a critique of our
country’s treatment of Native Americans.
From Summer on the Lakes…Red Jacket’s face, too, is much
more intellectual than almost any other. But, in becoming so, it loses nothing
of the peculiar Indian stamp, but only carries these traits to their
perfection…He had steadily opposed the introduction of white religion, or
manners, among the Indians. He believed that for them to break down the barriers
was to perish. On many occasions he had expressed this with all the force of his
eloquence. He told the preachers, “if the Great Spirit had meant your religion
for the red man, he would have given it to them. What they (the missionaries)
tell us we do not understand; and the light they ask for us, makes the straight
and plain path trod by our fathers dark and dreary.”
After the publication of Summer or the Lakes, Horace Greeley,
the editor of The New York Tribune, the most influential newspaper of the
day, offered her a job as a correspondent, and her articles often ran on the
front page.
Many of the articles she wrote would now be considered investigative
journalism. She spent a night in Sing Sing prison, and she went into New York’s
hospitals, asylums, and slums. Her pieces brought up issues of sex and race and
class and often examined social issues from the perspective of a women.
From a letter in 1844 about her visit to women in Sing Sing
prison…They were among the so-called worst, but nothing could be more decorous
than their conduct and frank too. All passed much as in one of my Boston
Classes. I told them I was writing about Woman and as my path had been a
favoured one I wanted to ask some information of those who had tempted to
pollution and sorrow.
Fuller was one of the first to write about prostitution, the
crime for which many of these women were imprisoned, not as resulting from lack
of individual moral character but lack of educational and economic opportunities
for women.
In 1846, Fuller was given the opportunity to travel to Europe, and
by going, became the country’s first female foreign correspondent as she
continued to write for the New York Tribune. While in Europe, she met and
fell in love with Giovanni Angelo Ossoli, an Italian nobleman. They secretly wed
and had a son, Angelo.
From a letter to her brother…My love for Ossoli is most pure and
tender; nor has any one, except little children or mother, ever loved me as
genuinely as he does.
Fuller’s husband was a supporter of the Italian Revolution of
1848, in which Italians sought freedom from the Austrian Empire as well as from
papal control, and as Fuller wrote about the revolution for the New York
Tribune, her writing became more partisan, and she wondered if she herself
should not become a more active participant.
From a letter of 1848….Have I something to do here? Or am I only
to cheer on the warriors, and after write the history of their deeds? The first
is all I have done yet, but many have blessed me for my sympathy, and blest me
by the action it impelled.
Eventually, when the revolution went badly, it became unsafe for
Ossoli, Fuller, and their child to remain in Italy, and in 1850, they made the
decision to return to the United States. On the voyage back, the captain of the
ship contracted small pox and died. The inexperienced first mate ran the ship
into a sandbar off Fire Island in New York. Fuller, her husband, and infant
child all drowned.
Fuller’s body was never recovered - - though her friend Emerson sent
Thoreau to tramp through the wreckage looking for the remains of her last
manuscript. A monument was erected in her memory in the cemetery in Cambridge
with these words: “By birth a child of New England/ By adoption a citizen of
Rome/ By genius belonging to the world.”
What is Fuller’s legacy to us, 200 years now after her birth?
I find such inspiration in her efforts to live up to her full
potential in life, no matter what obstacles society might have placed in her
path. While perhaps still a particularly inspiring story to women, it is a story
in which I think all of us can find inspiration.
But there is this too.
It was William Ellery Channing, often called the father of
Unitarianism in this country and the man whom Fuller served as a reader and a
translator, who so strongly articulated the idea that the purpose our lives is
the unfolding of our own souls or what might be called the full development of
one’s potential.
It was Ralph Waldo Emerson, another Unitarian luminary and Fuller’s
good friend, who further developed this idea in his own writings.
But it was Fuller who took this idea that is so central not only to
our own religious tradition but to American culture as well and spoke of it
through a woman’s perspective, and by doing so added a political twist to it. It
was she who spoke and wrote about the institutional barriers having to do with
sex, class, and race that must be removed if women, minorities, and the poor are
too develop into their full selves and if humanity is to develop into its full
self.
It was also Fuller who broadened the idea of self development beyond
its sometimes overly individualistic focus. There is a story about somebody
coming to the door of Emerson’s home, collecting for the poor. Emerson is said
to have asked, “Are they my poor?” Fuller’s response would have been, “Yes,
Waldo, they are!” because she recognized the interdependence of all humanity.
From Woman in the 19th Century…We cannot expect
to see any one sample of completed being, when the mass of men still lie engaged
in the sod, or use the freedom of their limbs only with wolfish energy. The tree
cannot come to flower till its root be free from the cankering worm, and its
whole growth open to air and light. While any one is base, none can be entirely
free and noble.
This morning, as we remember those who have come and gone before
us, let us remember Margaret Fuller. Let us remember the example she set of
developing her own potential no matter what obstacles stood in her way. Like
her, let us recognize and commit ourselves to removing the obstacles of sex,
race, and class that still stand in the way of the self-development of so many.
Like her, let us remember, that while “any one is base, none can be entirely
free and noble.”
So may it be. Amen.
Sources for this sermon include the following:
“Radiant Genius & Fiery Heart” by Kimberly French (UU World, Summer
2010).
The Spirit Leads: Margaret Fuller in Her Own Words, edited by Barry
Andrews (Skinner House, 2010).
www.margaretfuller.org
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