Transcending the Glass Ceiling

Bright Circle: Five Remarkable Women in the Age of Transcendentalism by Randall Fuller; Oxford University Press, 416 pp., $27.99

 However much we steel ourselves against it, the arrogant and dismissive attitude of 19th-century men toward their female contemporaries can still sting. “What then shall the woman of genius do; what can she do, and be woman still?” asked a writer in the Christian Interior in 1851. “She finds herself in possession of riches for which she never sighed nor prayed … and what shall she do with it? Was it given to her to be a curse … to separate her from her kind merely to unsex her?”

Randall Fuller’s lively, uplifting new book, Bright Circle: Five Remarkable Women in the Age of Transcendentalism, considers this so-called curse through the lives of five women: Mary Moody Emerson, Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, Sophia Peabody Hawthorne, Lydia Jackson Emerson, and Margaret Fuller (a distant relative of the author’s). The book is framed by Margaret Fuller’s famous “Conversations”—weekly opportunities for dozens of women, age 13 to 60, who convened at Elizabeth Peabody’s Boston bookstore to debate life’s deepest questions. The surviving accounts of those meetings show not unsexed, isolated creatures, but participants in boisterous, brilliant discussions that “reshaped people’s worlds” and molded the budding nation’s thought.

Fuller assigns each woman a chapter. First is Mary Moody Emerson, whose belief that human excellence was better fostered through provocation than coddling earned her both skeptical admirers and vicious detractors. With her nephew, Ralph Waldo Emerson, she shared an exhilarating curiosity about the nature of the universe and the essence of the self that bristles from every page of their decades-long correspondence. Reading the sometimes-exact overlap between her letters and the essays that made her nephew famous risks triggering a kind of incredulous rage. “We do not have an adequate term for this generative process of imitation,” Fuller admits. “Appropriation, theft, influence, homage—the words fail to convey just how much Waldo internalized Mary’s enigmatic expression, her habits of consciousness, her mode of being.” However we characterize their collaboration, it set American philosophy on its course.

The literary prodigy Elizabeth Palmer Peabody also shaped American thought. She coined the word “transcendentalism”; her translation of the Bible into contemporary language anticipated Ralph Waldo Emerson’s theorizing about the divine in Nature by a decade. She was polylingual, an educational reformer, and a literary entrepreneur. She developed a philosophy of personhood that suggested that the self was best known through others. Like Mary Moody Emerson, Elizabeth watched her ideas find fame in the words of a man: this time in the Reverend William Ellery Channing’s celebrated sermons.

Elizabeth’s youngest sister, Sophia Peabody Hawthorne, achieved success as a painter before her marriage to Nathaniel Hawthorne became, as she claimed, her true work of art. But Fuller draws attention to Sophia’s writing as well: her 1,600 letters to her family, her journals from a restorative visit to Cuba, and her Notes in England and Italy published after her husband’s death. Readers at the time refused to believe that the book’s accomplished style, honed in Cuba decades earlier, was Sophia’s own. Her husband’s genius must have “lent a bright lustre to her own thought,” opined one newspaper writer.

For any woman of this period, marrying meant taking a new surname. But Ralph Waldo Emerson famously did not stop there, insisting that Lydia Jackson, his second wife, be rechristened “Lidian.” (Fuller, mercifully, restores her to her original name and simply calls her Lydia.) Before marrying Emerson, Jackson was a transcendentalist, “attracted to the movement’s idealism, its serious exploration of all that was spiritual, and its desire for social change.” Marrying the movement’s most famous representative soon cured her of this attraction. Jackson listened as the self-proclaimed great souls who flocked to her husband’s home “spoke of freedom and individualism while they waited for her to serve a second helping of pudding.” She came to believe that the “quest for personal freedom at all costs could become disfiguring, even debilitating.” She became, as Fuller puts it, one of transcendentalism’s most incisive, and certainly best-informed, critics.

And then there was Margaret Fuller. Her everyday conversations, Elizabeth Peabody wrote, were like “a little cluster of diamonds … every moment dropping such a gem of real thought as is rarely let fall in a casual conversation.” Margaret, too, helped to birth American philosophy, editing the transcendentalist manifesto The Dial in its earliest years. But her pioneering journalism, first in New York and then in revolutionary Rome, revealed realities about greed, exploitation, and poverty that eroded her faith in human progress and distanced her from the movement. When she drowned with her Italian husband and infant son just off of Fire Island in 1850, her friends’ palpable relief is sometimes jarring. Some worried that a brilliant woman, returning to the United States with a foreign husband of dubious origins, would never have succeeded. Just as well, perhaps, that she had died. This sounds, and no doubt sometimes was meant to be, cruel. But those who uttered it probably knew it to be true.

Every one of these women was, as Fuller says, “passionate about thought”; they speculated about human nature, art, God, sex, and the difference between reason and understanding. They also believed “that ideas could transform the world”; some of them agitated for abolition, education reform, and the rights of incarcerated women. Fuller also shows that the core five were embedded in a culture of female thought and action, including Caroline Healey Dall, Lydia Maria Child, Julia Ward Howe, and a whole tapestry of intellectual women around them. This brings Fuller to a crucial admonition: “We should be careful about overstating the strictures applied to women during this period,” he writes. Restricted they were, often painfully so. But to ignore their flourishing intellectual lives would be an injustice to them and a loss to us.

Their shared intellectual joys reveal a larger point as well. “We picture the life of the mind as solitary,” Fuller writes in Bright Women, but “thought and creativity are communal endeavors.” This community is powerfully depicted in his book as its protagonists collaborate and commiserate, encourage and assess, mentor and mourn. They emerge as vivid individuals but also as beautifully intertwined

No doubt they did, sometimes, experience their genius as a curse, thanks in no small part to the paradoxical combination of condescension and appropriation they suffered at the hands of their male contemporaries. But just as often, Fuller shows, they gloried in it. To be a thoughtful person is to be aware of how often the soaring potential of human thought is humbled by our vulnerable embodiment and our flawed social order. If this is a curse, it is a fully human curse, and Fuller’s book shows that these bright women were wholly, gloriously human.