Each she and Lydia Emerson, who married Ralph Waldo, maintained their marriages by compromising their very own mental skills. Lydia—a staunch abolitionist dedicated to ladies’s and animal rights—got here to treat Transcendentalism’s doctrine of self-sufficiency as hypocritical, counting on home labor with out which these males’s lives of peaceable contemplation would collapse.
Males play secondary roles right here – maybe too secondary, as it’s typically obscure why these sensible ladies discover them so enticing. Emerson comes off significantly badly, virtually plagiarizing his Aunt Mary’s writings and displaying off his spouse’s way more progressive stance on slavery.
By the flip of the twentieth century, Fuller writes, the legacy of Transcendentalism had solidified round its male practitioners, whereas ladies had been “diminished to caricatures standing on the fringes.” Fuller’s overtly revisionist narrative assumes {that a} reader is extra acquainted with the work of males than of ladies.
However perhaps that is not the case anymore. For many years, feminist students have labored to claim the centrality of ladies within the motion: See Phyllis Cole’s pioneering work on Mary Moody Emerson and Megan Marshall’s fantastic biographies the Peabody Sisters and Margaret Fuller (whose writings in 2025 will obtain Library of America editionvirtually two centuries after her loss of life in shipwreck, along with the manuscript of her historical past of the Roman Revolution). Constructing the legacy was set in movement by Elizabeth Peabody herself, who diligently transcribed the group’s conversations when Fuller anxious that the conversations had been too ephemeral to have historic influence.
These edgy, provocative, eccentric, decided ladies can now not pretty be omitted of any account of this motion. Studying about their life collectively—and particularly the pleasure they present in one another’s examples—results in a scathing indictment of the society that stifles their self-expression.
LIGHT CIRCLE: 5 Exceptional Girls within the Age of Transcendentalism | By Randall Fuller | Oxford College Press | 405 p. | $27.99
