The Pluralist

Margaret Fuller's name today often appears when the Transcendentalists in general are mentioned-we may hear of her in the course of writing on Emerson, or Bronson Alcott-but not nearly enough work about Margaret herself, her thought, and her remarkable childhood has been done in recent times.¹ Interestingly enough, her name surfaces in connection with some theorizing done about same-sex relationships, but the great import of Fuller's editing of "The Dial," a periodical of the time, her authoring of Woman in the Nineteenth Century, and her life of adventure and rebellion has seldom been articulated.²

A virtual child prodigy, Margaret Fuller was educated at home in a way reminiscent of the sort of education given to John Stuart Mill, and with much the same results. Fuller suffered greatly, and her later distant manner-commented upon by many-no doubt had its origins in her early life. Julia Ward Howe notes:

Even with the allowance which must be made for the notion of that time as to what a child should be able to accomplish, it must grieve and surprise us to find Margaret at the age of six years engaged in the study of Latin and of English grammar. . . . A certain . . . mode of enunciation in later life . . . had probably its origin in the decided way in which the little Margaret was taught to recite her lessons.

(6-7)

In adulthood, the same attention to detail, and the same giftedness, gave rise to much negative commentary, but the overall result was that Fuller was able to use her participation in the circle of the Transcendentalists, and her regular visits to Brook Farm, to compose a surprising amount of work, much of it forwarding notions of women's rights and the then current debate on suffragism. Fuller is the author of a great deal of material that, though [End Page 65] couched in terms that are not familiar to us today, certainly could be from a much later point in the century; her insistence on male and female equality, and her understanding that much that was deemed inferior and weak about women was the result of social forces, seems so prescient as to come from a later point in time. As Card notes, "Her ideal of marriage in Woman in the Nineteenth Century is of a multidimensioned partnership between friends, a mutual support system to which gender and roles seem basically unimportant" (61). Fuller's quintessentially Transcendentalist work repays study, and her Woman is a milestone in the juxtaposition of abolitionist and early suffragist thought. It can readily be argued that Fuller forwards notions of women's rights, and does so in an Emersonian or Transcendental way.